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(Overland AI Photo)
Seattle startup Overland AI raised $32 million in a new Series A round to help the U.S. military and other customers use ground vehicles in complex terrain without the need for a human driver.
Founded in 2022 out of the University of Washington, Overland develops technology that enables a human operator to control multiple robotic vehicles navigating off-road terrain, including in environments with no GPS.
Overland’s tech can be installed on any vehicle and is designed to navigate around various conditions at different speeds. It uses advanced machine learning capabilities to analyze surrounding terrain in real time with only onboard sensing (cameras, LIDAR, etc.) and compute.
Last year Overland won a two-year contract worth up to $18.6 million with the U.S. Army and Defense Innovation Unit to develop its OverDrive technology platform for the U.S. Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle. Other recipients included top defense tech companies Anduril and Palantir.
Overland also works with the U.S. Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a unit of the Department of Defense.
In November it announced a partnership with the XVIII Airborne Corps, a branch of the U.S. Army.
“Overland AI has developed capabilities that give the U.S. a decisive advantage in ground autonomy and protect soldiers’ lives,” Joe Lonsdale, managing partner at 8VC, said in a statement. “They’ve rallied the top talent in the domain around the mission to transform land operations, revolutionize this area of warfare, and build one of the most important new American defense companies.”
8VC led Overland’s latest round, which included Point72 Ventures, Overmatch Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Ascend, Osage University Partners, and Caprock.
The latest round comes on the heels of a $10 million seed raise last year.
In a press release, Overland noted that “modern warfare has created an urgent challenge for protecting ground forces. As demonstrated in Ukraine, aerial systems and distributed sensors, as well as large numbers of UGVs that are poised for deployment, leave these ground forces increasingly exposed.”
“We are in a race to save soldiers’ lives,” the company said. “The United States must accelerate its development of ground autonomy to operate in places that are more dangerous for humans.”
Overland is ranked No. 113 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups across the Pacific Northwest.
Overland competes with others companies developing off-road autonomous tech, including Forterra, Kodiak Robotics, Polymath Robotics, Potential Motors, and more startups.
The self-driving industry saw some momentum last year with consumer-focused efforts from Waymo and others picking up steam. TechCrunch reported that autonomous vehicles “had a moment” at the recent Consumer Electronics Show last week.
Overland CEO Byron Boots is a highly regarded robotics researcher who leads the University of Washington’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Speaking at the GeekWire Summit in 2023, Boots recounted how the roots of self-driving technology started with military-related applications.
“Defense was the original motivator for this technology,” he said.
The company’s CTO, Jonathan Fink, worked as a researcher for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for more than a decade.
Overland’s other two co-founders are Stephanie Bonk, president, and Greg Okopal, COO. Bonk previously worked at Apple and PROS. Okopal has more than a decade of experience working on lage defense research programs.
Previous backers include Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs and Voyager Capital.
