A Silicon Valley startup is taking direct aim at one of the most glaring gaps in America’s technology supply chain — and it just secured $15 million to do it.
Hyfix Spatial Intelligence, based in Santa Clara, California, has closed a $15 million seed round to develop what it describes as an American-made “brain” for drones and autonomous robots. The funding was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Catapult Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Finality Capital, and hard-tech investor Sky Dayton.
The raise arrives at a moment when the case for homegrown drone technology has never been more urgent — or more commercially compelling.
One Chip to Replace the Chaos
At the heart of Hyfix’s pitch is a single, US-manufactured system-on-a-chip designed to do what currently requires a messy collection of separate components. The chip folds flight control, high-precision positioning, secure communications, and onboard computing into one unified piece of silicon.
Most commercial drones today run on a patchwork of hardware sourced from multiple suppliers — a mix-and-match approach that creates inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and, critically, dependence on foreign-made components. Hyfix is betting that consolidating all of that into one domestically produced chip is both technically superior and strategically necessary.
“There is currently no end-to-end American supply chain for drones,” said Jeff Fluhr, partner at Craft Ventures. “Hyfix is tackling one of the most critical pieces — custom silicon — so US companies can build world-class autonomous systems without depending on foreign technology stacks.”
Craft Ventures, it is worth noting, was co-founded by David Sacks, who until recently served as President Trump’s AI and crypto advisor — a detail that underscores the increasingly close relationship between venture capital, national security interests, and drone technology policy.
The DJI Problem — and the Policy Tailwind
To understand why Hyfix exists, you have to understand just how thoroughly China’s DJI has come to dominate the global drone market. The company controls roughly 80% of the worldwide civilian drone market — and an even larger share within the United States specifically.
That dominance has become a serious national security concern. In late 2025, the FCC moved to block approvals and imports of certain Chinese-made drones and radio frequency equipment. DJI is contesting those restrictions in court, but the regulatory direction is clear — Washington wants American alternatives, and it wants them soon.
For startups like Hyfix, that policy environment is not just favourable — it is a core part of the business case. The commercial drone market itself is enormous, with global revenues expected to grow from roughly $30 billion in 2024 to around $55 billion by 2030. Global drone production has already reached tens of millions of units annually, and that number is climbing.
The opportunity is vast. The domestic supply to meet it is, currently, almost non-existent.
GPS-Proof Positioning — A Critical Differentiator
One of Hyfix’s most important technical claims is that its chip is designed to keep functioning even when GPS signals are being jammed or spoofed — a growing real-world problem in both military and commercial settings.
This is where CEO Mike Horton‘s other project becomes a significant asset. Horton also leads Geodnet — a decentralised network of approximately 21,000 ground-based reference stations that provides more accurate and more resilient positioning data than GPS alone.
“GPS is easily jammed and spoofed and doesn’t work very well for things like robotics,” Horton explained. “Geodnet uses reference stations that allow for more resilient and more accurate positioning.”
Hyfix’s chip is designed to integrate directly with the Geodnet infrastructure, as well as with newer low Earth orbit satellites, giving drones a positioning system that is both harder to fool and more precise than anything currently available in a single off-the-shelf package.
Horton’s co-founder, Udan Ercan, brings equally relevant expertise — a career built around global navigation satellite systems, including building high-precision positioning technology at Topcon. The founding team’s combined background in autonomous systems, from early self-driving agricultural machinery to commercial drones, feeds directly into what they are building.
What the Money Will Be Used For
The $15 million seed funding will go toward completing the chip design and tape-out — the critical final stage before a chip design is sent to a manufacturer for production. Hyfix plans to begin shipping production-ready chips to select partners before the end of this year.
Alongside the chip itself, the company is also building a sub-250-gram reference drone — a lightweight demonstration vehicle designed to showcase the platform’s capabilities in a real-world form factor. Keeping the drone under 250 grams is significant, as many regulatory frameworks treat that weight threshold as a meaningful boundary for commercial operations.
Beyond Drones — The Bigger Vision
Fluhr’s confidence in the company extends well beyond the immediate drone market. Within two years, he expects Hyfix to be supplying chips across multiple drone categories. But the longer-term ambition is broader still.
The same chip architecture, he believes, could power the next generation of autonomous machines — industrial systems, delivery robots, and eventually humanoid robots. If that vision proves correct, Hyfix is not just building a drone chip. It is laying the groundwork for the autonomous systems infrastructure of the coming decade.
For a country looking to reclaim technological ground in one of the most strategically important industries of the twenty-first century, that is a story worth watching closely.
