British defence tech outfit Mutable Tactics raises over $2M in pre-seed round

A British defence tech startup developing AI software which helps improve the deployment of drones when communication is lost in combat has raised over $2m in a seed funding round.  

Mutable Tactics has raised $2.1m in a funding round, led by spacetech investor Seraphim Space, with funding also from the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Koro, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose.   

Mutable Tactics is building AI software, in what it calls the “decision-layer”, that sits between the human operator and a drone, helping defence forces leverage multiple drones simultaneously.   

It says its software translates a commander’s instructions into actions, meaning that mixed fleets of drones can operate together as a coordinated team, rather than as individually piloted platforms.  

It says it’s solving the problem of drone deployment relying on one operator controlling one system, which limits how many drones can be used effectively at any given time.   

The startup said that in battle environments, where communications are disrupted, drone systems that depend on constant human control quickly reach their limits.  

Mutable Tactics was founded in 2024 by former British Army officer Colin MacLeod and robotics AI specialist Enrique Muñoz de Cote.  

The startup says it will use the funding to increase the size of its engineering team in Cambridge and speed up the development of its software.   

It also says the funding will be used to validate its tech in collaboration with two European governments.  

MacLeod, CEO and co‑founder, Mutable Tactics, said: “Increasingly, the constraint is no longer hardware but human attention. We can deploy more drones than ever before, yet we still ask operators to control them one by one, often in environments where communications are unreliable.   

"True autonomy breaks that one‑to‑one link, allowing humans to supervise and direct teams of systems rather than individual machines. That shift is essential for supporting modern military missions, where scale, speed and resilience matter, and where operators must remain focused on intent and outcomes rather than manual control.”