London-based Occam Industries has raised a €3 million Pre-Seed round led by Czech Presto Tech Horizons, with participation from Antler, Freedom Fund, TYR.vc, and other international investors to accelerate deployment and product development. The funding follows the company’s approval for integration testing by Ukraine’s Brave1 defense tech cluster.
👯 Founders: Gui Wainwright
📅 Founding year: 2025
🏭 Industry: Defense Tech
💥 Problem: Despite the widespread availability of low-cost drones, most frontline deployments still rely on continuous human control. This creates a significant scalability bottleneck, increases operator workload, and leaves systems vulnerable to GPS interference and signal jamming, limiting their effectiveness in modern warfare environments.
📣 Solution: Occam develops software-only autonomy that enables unmanned systems to operate independently of GPS and external communications. Their autonomy stack allows drones to be deployed rapidly and function without being affected by signal interference or jamming, removing the need for continuous human piloting and significantly increasing operational scalability.
👥 Customers: Ukrainian defense ecosystem through Brave1, collaborates with Ukrainian unmanned system manufacturers, and is engaging with European defense primes and NATO-aligned partners.
🌱 Stage: Pre-Seed
💰 Investment amount: €3M (£2.6M)
🚀 Funded by: Presto Tech Horizons (lead), including Antler, Freedom Fund, TYR.vc, and a group of angel investors.
👁️🗨️ Investor’s perspective:
“Occam impressed us with their ability to turn ambition into operational reality at an incredible pace. They deploy, learn, and iterate under conditions dictated by the front line. Gui has an exceptional ability to rally people around a clear mission, and the team executes on it with urgency and discipline. Combined with a software-only autonomy stack that works without GPS or external connectivity, this is a solution that is not just novel, but fundamentally different.”
– Matej Luhovy, Partner at Presto Tech Horizons
💡 It will be spent on: The funding will be used to accelerate adoption across the Ukrainian front line, expand autonomous system capabilities, advance product development, and support paid deployment projects with European defense primes.
💬 In their own words:
“Ukraine is not a pilot or test market. It’s the most demanding operating environment for autonomous systems anywhere in the world right now. Every assumption is tested under pressure: latency, reliability, operator load, decision-making. What we build at Occam is shaped by that reality and then honed in combat conditions. Fundamentally, if a system cannot perform at the zero-line, we cannot trust troops or security to it, and it has no place in modern defense.”
– Gui Wainwright, Co-founder and CEO of Occam
💪 Their specialty: Building combat-proven, GPS-independent autonomy software for unmanned systems that can operate reliably in contested and high-pressure battlefield conditions.
🔑 Business model: The company operates a B2G and B2B model, licensing and integrating its autonomy software into unmanned platforms through partnerships with defense manufacturers and government-backed programs.
👩🏫 Market: Operates in the rapidly evolving defense and unmanned systems market, where AI-enabled autonomy is reshaping modern warfare. Ukraine serves as a real-world validation environment, with broader relevance for European defense modernization and NATO capability reinforcement.
📊 Traction: Occam has completed assessment as fit for integration testing by Brave1, conducted field tests via the TEST in Ukraine platform, initiated collaboration discussions with Ukrainian OEMs, and started paid adoption projects with European defense primes. The technology has also been observed and supported by senior Ukrainian defense stakeholders.
