Drone startup born from the war and named after the fallen brother raises $41 million
AITAN, a developer of AI-based combat systems, has raised $41 million in a funding round. The startup's technology has been in intensive operational use by the IDF since the start of the Swords of Iron war.
The drone company AITAN (formerly eyesAtop) has raised $41 million in its first significant funding round. The round was co-led by Deep33 and Dell Technologies Capital, with the participation of Gokul Rajaram, a board member at tech giants Pinterest and Coinbase. Other investors include Benjamin Ling from Bling Capital and Kevin Weil from Scribble Ventures. Together with the company's previous funding, its total raised amount reaches $54 million.
AITAN develops AI-based combat systems, which have been in intensive operational use since October 7, 2023, in extremely challenging combat conditions. The goal of the systems is to enable robotic forces to perform complex combat missions while reducing the exposure of soldiers to risk.
The company was built on the foundation of a startup founded over a decade ago by Ido Yitzhak, Yinon Atzmon, Einav Harazi, and Ben Barka, called eyesAtop. In 2025, entrepreneurs Udi Oster and Daniel Almog acquired its technology to leverage the massive demand for drone technologies following the war in Israel. The two serve as co-CEOs of the company, which employs about 50 people in its offices in Ramat Gan. A few months ago, they changed its name to AITAN in memory of Oster's younger brother, Eitan, an officer in the Egoz unit who fell in Lebanon in September 2024.
Oster and Almog met during their joint service in Unit 8200, and after their discharge in 2014, they co-founded the startup Tapingo, which developed a platform for managing online food ordering and in 2018 was sold for $150 million to the American delivery giant GrubHub.
AITAN's central product is an operating system for drones that allows armies to deploy and operate robotic combat systems on a large scale and maintain operational continuity even when supply chains are disrupted. The lessons of the fighting in Israel and Ukraine in recent years have proven that large-scale operation of robotic combat systems poses operational and logistical challenges to armies that they have not encountered before.
Unlike traditional weapon systems, robotic systems change and evolve during the fighting itself, sometimes from week to week, depending on the needs that arise from the field. At the same time, there is a need for the ability to produce them in large volumes and make different systems work together as a coordinated force, rather than as a collection of separate platforms.
"With the outbreak of the Swords of Iron war, it was clear to us that the only goal before us was to help our friends and family members win and return safely from captivity and the battlefield. Three years later, when our technology already has a broad operational impact on the ground, this is the right time to expand the scope and bring these capabilities to Israel's allies around the world," says Oster.
AITAN's systems are in daily and large-scale use in the IDF and the Ministry of Defense, and have accumulated over half a million operational flight hours. Recently, AITAN won a joint tender to develop the IDF's command and control platform for the next generation of the attack drone array, as well as major design contracts for robotic weapon systems.
"Robotic warfare is becoming a central part of countries' ability to maintain their security independence, and more and more of them understand that they must develop and maintain these capabilities themselves," said Lior Proshaur, co-managing partner at Deep33. "Israel and Ukraine are among the few countries in the world that have accumulated significant operational experience in operating robotic systems. This experience gives AITAN a unique advantage."
"We believe that Physical AI will be one of the most significant technological fields in the coming decade," said Yair Snir, managing partner at Dell Technologies Capital. "AITAN identified early on that the future of the security world relies on the ability to connect different systems and smart networks and allow them to communicate, make decisions, and act together."
