Autonomous systems are moving from concept to practice. Drones, ground vehicles, and maritime robots are increasingly deployed in disaster response, critical infrastructure monitoring, industrial applications, and defense. Hardware has advanced quickly, yet the underlying control and software infrastructure, the layer that ensures safe, reliable, and scalable operation, remains fragmented.

The status quo is brittle. Many stacks are “good enough” for demos or – particularly in defense – as scrappy stopgaps to urgent problems, but are not fit for SWaP-C-disciplined, certifiable, fleet-scale operations, limiting use cases and operational efficiency. We see the symptoms everywhere: From high-profile swarm failures at public drone light shows, where gusts and shaky control links cascade into mass failsafe events to high-stakes scenarios on the battlefield, where both armies in Ukraine resort to fibre-optic-tethered drones to bypass jamming for various use cases as the best available, but obviously not ideal solution.

Most existing solutions face clear limitations: consumer-grade systems are agile but uncertifiable and often unsuited to mission-critical environments, while aerospace-grade systems provide robustness but are costly, siloed, and slow to deploy. Open-source middleware, such as ROS2 or PX4, provides useful building blocks but requires significant customization and often reaches its limits under the demands of safety-critical missions. What emerges is a clear gap: industries and governments alike need a unified, secure, real-time orchestration framework that enables autonomous systems to collaborate across domains, even when links are contested or degraded.

Enter Hive Robotics. The company is developing a secure, robust, certifiable, and real-time swarm control and communications layer that integrates with existing middleware and orchestrates robotics hardware and software across multiple domains, with secure data links. This approach enables unmanned systems to collaborate and communicate safely and effectively, laying the foundation for scalable adoption across industries.

Having known the team for many years, we are excited to lead Hive Robotics’ EUR 2m pre-seed round.

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Experienced founding team with strong industry expertise: Hive Robotics was founded by Sebastian Mores and Dr. Burak Yüksel, who bring deep experience across aviation, robotics, and safety-critical certification. Their backgrounds span autonomy and control systems, paired with an operator’s bias to action and a track record leading skunk-works-style programs to real-world outcomes. Together with a close-knit founding team specializing in secure data links, embedded systems, and onboard AI, they combine technical excellence with the ability to execute in highly regulated markets. From our first conversations, we were impressed by their purposeful vision, depth of knowledge, and disciplined approach.

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A large and strategically important market: The robotics and autonomous systems market is projected to exceed EUR 70bn by 2029. Civil and defense applications are expanding rapidly, driven by technological progress and increasing geopolitical demands for secure and sovereign infrastructure, both in civilian and defense applications. Hive Robotics’ focus on an EU-developed, mission-critical operating system addresses both market demand and strategic necessity. Early discussions with potential partners and industry stakeholders already highlight the strong relevance of their approach. Potential applications range from various defense-related use cases to disaster response and industrial inspections to maritime security and even future space exploration.

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An architecture for safe and reliable collaboration: The platform combines control, perception, localization, and secure communication into compact, modular systems. This enables unmanned systems, from lightweight drones to heavy ground and maritime vehicles, to collaborate seamlessly and share data. Through distributed sensor fusion, a drone-mounted camera can act as a local satellite for a ground robot, providing enhanced situational awareness even in GNSS-denied environments. In large-scale deployments, swarms of drones can create shared situational maps that individual robots could not achieve alone.

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Building on this capability, Hive Robotics’ “command, control, connect” solutions simplify robotics complexity into one framework. By reducing the need for each system to carry a full set of sensors and subsystems, the architecture makes individual units more cost-effective while also improving SWaP-C and overall mission performance when operating collaboratively.

At the core sits a lightweight, certifiable Onboard AI that ensures stable, autonomous operation in safety-critical conditions. This hardware foundation supports Hive’s software platform, which enables secure, real-time command, control, and connectivity across domains. The modular design not only enhances safety and resilience but also creates a pathway for future extensions such as multi-domain teaming, swarming, and advanced autonomy modules.

Crucially, this approach provides a clear path to long-term adoption: as more systems integrate into the platform, its value to customers grows, because interoperability improves, shared data enhances autonomy, and the cost of deploying additional units decreases, ultimately democratizing access to multi-domain robotic teaming.

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At b2venture, we aim to support teams with the vision and expertise to build foundational technologies. Hive Robotics is well positioned to become a key enabler of the next generation of autonomous systems in Europe and beyond. We look forward to supporting Sebastian, Burak, and the Hive Robotics team as they build the secure and scalable infrastructure that will define the future of robotics.

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