Overland AI

Overland AI builds autonomy software for uncrewed ground vehicles, with a focus on off-road, GPS-denied terrain where conventional self-driving systems fail. The company spun out of the University of Washington’s Robot Learning Lab, where chief executive Byron Boots and his team worked for years on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s RACER programme, developing off-road autonomy for military vehicles. Founded in 2022 and based in Seattle, it positions ground autonomy as the next front in a field that has so far been dominated by aerial drones.

Its core products are OverDrive, a vehicle-agnostic autonomy stack that navigates without roads or a human at the controls, and OverWatch, a command interface that lets a single operator coordinate several robotic vehicles at once. In April 2025 the company unveiled ULTRA, a purpose-built autonomous tactical vehicle that runs OverDrive and can carry reconnaissance and counter-drone payloads. A SPARK hardware kit ports the same stack onto third-party platforms.

The defence relationship is central. Overland AI holds a prototype Other Transaction agreement, worth up to $18.6 million, with the US Army and the Defense Innovation Unit tied to the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle effort, and it has run soldier-led field demonstrations with frontline units including the 82nd Airborne and 1st Cavalry divisions. Its work also touches the Marine Corps’ NMESIS programme.

Investors have backed that trajectory heavily. A $10 million seed round led by Point72 Ventures in 2024 was followed by a $32 million Series A led by 8VC in early 2025, and in February 2026 the company raised $100 million in equity, again led by 8VC, plus $20 million in venture debt, bringing total funding past $140 million. By then it employed more than 100 people and framed military demand for ground autonomy as having moved from experimentation to operational integration. The bet places Overland AI alongside firms such as Anduril and Shield AI that build both the platform and the autonomy that drives it, but aimed squarely at land rather than air.