What led you to start Laelaps AI – what is the founding story?

The three of us actually met during our undergrad at King’s College London. Maria and I were doing Engineering, and Sophia was studying Physics. We’d see each other around all the time: joint lectures, events (and parties). After undergrad, Maria and I went to Imperial for our Master’s in Computer Science and Robotics, and Sophia went to Cambridge to study Biotechnology. We stayed really close, especially during COVID when it was hard to meet new people; we kind of became a support bubble. Eventually, Sophia stayed in Cambridge for her PhD in Applied Quantum Physics, and Maria and I started ours in Robotics and AI at UCL.

Around that time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and there were all these attacks on infrastructure, like the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea, and we started having really serious conversations about the future of Europe. We felt like many were looking at defence, like battlefield innovation in both hardware and software, but not so many were thinking about resilience of “everyday infrastructure" like our warehouses, rail lines, electricity substations. That’s where the idea for Laelaps really took shape.

Tell us more about the product and problem that you are solving?

We’re still in stealth, so we can’t say too much yet, but the core problem we’re tackling is pretty clear: internal security across Europe is being overlooked. The three of us are from different parts of the region (Lithuania, Germany, and Greece), and we all started noticing the same thing. While there’s been a lot of focus on defending borders, the stuff that keeps society running, like military warehouses, substations, rail lines, is wide open to attacks. And we’ve already seen this play out.

That’s the gap we’re addressing with Laelaps AI. We’re building autonomous robotic systems that can help protect critical infrastructure from emerging threats, things that are fast, unpredictable, and often hard to detect with purely static security solutions. We think internal resilience is just as important as frontline defence, and it needs smarter tools.

What's next for you in terms of fundraising, hiring, anything else?

We’ve just closed our pre-seed round and are proudly backed by Google Cloud, AWS, and the European Space Agency alongside our investors. In August, we’re opening our office and lab in Zürich (woohoo!) and are now looking for exceptional individuals to join us as our first founding team members on-site.

If our mission resonates with you and you’re the kind of person looking for the ride of a lifetime, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a message at talent@laelaps.ai or reach out directly on LinkedIn!