Theseus Space

Theseus is an American technology company that builds Cyclops, a software-only visual positioning system (VPS) that gives drones and unmanned aerial vehicles reliable position estimates when GPS is jammed, spoofed, or unavailable. The company started in February 2024 at a defense-tech hackathon, where its founders designed, 3D-printed, and built a drone for under $500 that calculated GPS coordinates without a signal, using only a camera and Google Maps imagery. The project went viral, and conversations with troops, drone manufacturers, and the Department of Defense confirmed that front-line environments are frequently GPS-denied and that existing GPS alternatives were bulky, heavy, and expensive. In March 2024, Theseus became the first defense company accepted into Y Combinator.

Cyclops compares live camera imagery against pre-generated reference/terrain maps to estimate a vehicle's global position in real time, and outputs that position to the flight controller over standard MAVLink interfaces (built for ArduPilot). It works with EO cameras for daytime flight and LWIR thermal cameras for night operations, and runs on commodity, NDAA-compliant compute such as Raspberry Pi 5 and NVIDIA Jetson rather than exotic or proprietary hardware. Theseus has demonstrated positioning accuracy below 50 m at altitudes up to 1.1 km and ranges up to 104 km in GPS-denied flight.

The company's early milestones include its first prototype test flight in May 2024, a first operator evaluation with members of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in July 2024, and its first unit shipped to a Department of Defense customer in August 2024. Theseus is led by CEO Ian Laffey and CTO Sacha Lévy, and it targets OEM integrators, program offices, and field operators who need resilient, low-SWaP-C visual navigation for contested and electronic-warfare environments.