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HYFIX Spatial Intelligence, Inc., a U.S.-based semiconductor company, announced a $15 million seed round to build and manufacture a new class of American-made chips designed to power high-precision drones and autonomous robots. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Catapult Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Finality Capital, and Sky Dayton, a prominent hard-tech investor.
The hardware stack powering today's drones is fragmented, fragile, and heavily dependent on foreign suppliers. Modern systems rely on a patchwork of components including flight controllers, GPS modules, radios, and onboard compute, often sourced from outside the United States. This creates supply chain risk, slows innovation, and raises serious concerns around security, reliability, and long-term availability.
Regulatory pressure is accelerating the shift. Recent FCC actions, including restrictions on certain foreign-made drones and components, are pushing manufacturers serving the U.S. market to adopt trusted, domestic alternatives.
In response, HYFIX is building a new foundation for drones, robots, and autonomous systems starting with silicon. The company is developing a single, highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) that replaces the disconnected components used in today's drones with one secure, low-power platform, manufactured in the United States. This approach consolidates flight control, positioning, communications, and compute into a unified architecture.
By eliminating fragmented hardware stacks, HYFIX enables manufacturers to build smaller, lighter, more power-efficient, and more reliable systems while reducing development time and bill of materials (BOM) cost.
"There is currently no end-to-end American supply chain for drones," said Jeff Fluhr, Venture Partner at Craft Ventures. "HYFIX is tackling one of the most critical pieces, custom silicon, so U.S. companies can build world-class autonomous systems without depending on foreign technology stacks."
Enabling an Entire Generation of Autonomous Systems
The HYFIX chip supports a broad range of autonomous systems across consumer, public-sector, and commercial markets, including:
- Consumer drones such as sub-250g camera drones, racing drones, and hobbyist platforms
- Public-sector and security systems including ISR drones, autonomous ground robots, and GPS-resilient platforms designed for contested environments
- Commercial and industrial drones used for inspection, mapping, surveying, agriculture, construction, and drone delivery
"Whether you're building a palm-sized consumer drone or a heavy-lift autonomous system, the underlying problems are the same: power, precision, reliability, and security," said Mike Horton, CEO of HYFIX Spatial Intelligence. "We're giving builders a single silicon foundation that scales across use cases instead of forcing them to stitch together fragile systems from dozens of suppliers."
A Chip Built for Precision and Resilience
The HYFIX Autonomous Systems Chip integrates flight control, high-accuracy positioning, secure wireless communications, and onboard intelligence into a single low-power SoC. It is designed to operate reliably in GPS-degraded or denied environments and supports widely adopted open-source ecosystems including ROS 2, ArduPilot, and PX4.
The platform delivers centimeter-level positioning through native integration with the GEODNET Real-Time Kinematic network and emerging low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems. This enables drones and robots to operate with greater accuracy and resilience in real-world conditions.
What's Next
HYFIX plans to deliver production-ready autonomous systems chips to select customers this year. The company is also developing a sub-250g reference drone to demonstrate the platform, with shipments planned later in the year.
