Driveblocks has completed a pre-Series A financing round of 3.5 million euros. The startup develops software for autonomous driving in off-road applications and relies on AI-based environmental perception. Forward One leads the round. Bayern Kapital, Rethink Ventures and angel investor Joachim Drees are investing again.
The new funds will flow into further product development, safety certification, and initial series deployments with OEMs and systems integrators. Driveblocks targets manufacturers and operators of agricultural machinery, construction equipment, and military vehicles.
Focus on robust environmental perception
Off-road vehicles play an important role in infrastructure, agriculture, and defense. At the same time, the sector presents special challenges: unstructured environments, difficult weather, vegetation, and missing maps complicate autonomous systems. Driveblocks closes this gap with an application-agnostic autonomy stack. The software combines camera and lidar data into a real-time 3D model and makes driving decisions based on it. The team uses AI-intensive and explainable algorithms for safety-critical applications.
“Reliable environmental perception, the deployment of AI functions on edge hardware, and the operation of software in safety-critical environments are the limiting factors for off-road autonomy. With this financing round, we can shape the transition from pilot projects to initial series deployments. Together with our customers, we are advancing autonomous solutions for applications with high safety requirements,”
explains Alexander Wischnewski, CEO and co-founder of Driveblocks.
Investors see market potential
Forward One emphasizes the industrial relevance of the technology. Cailin Greiner, investment manager at Forward One, comments:
“Driveblocks focuses on the central challenges in off-road autonomy: environmental perception, edge cases, and certification. The application-agnostic approach, trained on data from a wide variety of environments, delivers high robustness and is already functional on production-ready hardware. The commercial relevance of the technology is confirmed by the fact that first customers are already moving from integration to series application.”
“Autonomous vehicles are becoming increasingly important in all types of off-road applications. Driveblocks’ scalable software platform, unlike competitors, relies on map-free environmental perception, which enables more flexible deployment in unstructured environments and greater robustness in fog, rain, and other difficult weather conditions. This technological USP makes Driveblocks an exciting investment case in the field of physical AI for us,”
says Monika Steger, managing director of Bayern Kapital.
Driveblocks’ founding team closely combines research and application. During their doctoral studies at Technical University of Munich, they won an international research competition for autonomous racing vehicles. The vehicles completed realistic racing scenarios at speeds of up to 280 km/h at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and later in Las Vegas.
“For the future, we are focusing even more strongly on industrializing our technology. With this investment, we are expanding our industrialization and operations team and continuing to invest strategically in technology development. Munich is increasingly becoming a center for robotics and defense technology, and we want to actively contribute to advancing the European ecosystem,”
says Stephan Matz, COO and co-founder of Driveblocks.
