Mutable Tactics, which was incorporated in August 2024, has raised $2.1m in a pre-seed round, led by Seraphim Space alongside National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), Koro Capital, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose Platform.
The company, a deep defence-tech startup, specialises in the orchestration layer for defence autonomous robotics.
Its first project is to develop an AI‑powered decision layer to sit between the human operator and the robot. This layer orchestrates mixed fleets of drones to allow them to operate together as a coordinated team, rather than as individually piloted platforms.
Formed by ex-British Army officer Colin MacLeod and Cambridge-based robotics AI specialist Enrique Muñoz de Cote, Mutable Tactics has wind in its sails because the UK is engaged in a long-term reassessment of its defence needs following the impecunious state of the UK’s finances after troubled years of bitter in-fighting over Brexit, the battering the national economy subsequrently took during the Covid-19 years, and the new era of wars which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The development of drone warfare technology in the war in Ukraine – drones are used by both the Ukrainians and the Russians – has resulted in drone technology being a key battleground in a new type of warfare.
Maureen Haverty, principal at Seraphim Space, said: “As space investors, we like that the system is designed to keep working across satellite, alternative navigation, and manual modes without changing kit.”
The pre-seed funding will expand Mutable Tactics’ engineering team in Cambridge and help to develop and validate the technology in collaboration with two key European governments, supporting priority defence missions under real operational conditions. The funding will also support integration work with unmanned system partners and preparation for live demonstrations in demanding environments.
Colin MacLeod, CEO and co-founder of 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.”
Enrique Muñoz de Cote, CTO and co-founder of Mutable Tactics, said: “There is no single AI technique that solves autonomy. Deep learning allows systems to operate in uncertain, real-world environments, while deterministic AI ensures their behaviour remains explainable and aligned with a commander’s intent. Combining both enables autonomy that is resilient in contested environments while preserving meaningful human control – critical for military deployments. That fusion sits at the core of Mutable Tactics, and the UK’s leadership in probabilistic inference provides an essential foundation for this work.”
He added: “Most of the funding will be deployed to build a world-class physical AI team. We will build a neuro-symbolic reasoning engine – ie an engine that thinks in probabilities and uncertainty but outputs prescriptive actions that, above all, are explainable.
“I cannot think of a better place to build such a team than Cambridge.”
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