Traysar surfaces from stealth with $25M to take defense tech underground

AUSTIN — Traysar, a defense-technology startup building autonomous systems for warfare beneath the earth's surface, has raised $25 million in seed funding and stepped out of stealth at the Reindustrialize summit. The round was led by Silent Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital, Ora Global, NeverLift Ventures, Mana Ventures, Impatient Ventures, New Vista Acquisition and Entrée Capital. The company calls itself the first startup dedicated to what it terms the 'subterra' domain — the tunnels, bunkers and underground networks that modern militaries increasingly depend on.

Traysar's engineering roster includes early employees from SpaceX and the Boring Company, and the company is developing two machines: an excavator-class platform built to breach and explore tunnels, and a faster burrowing system designed to create precise underground access points and deliver payloads below the surface. Co-founders Yadin Soffer, Asher Katz and Gilad Adin have framed the hardware as an answer to adversaries who have moved command posts, weapons stores and smuggling routes underground, where satellites and drones cannot easily see.

Why it matters

Austin has become one of the densest concentrations of defense-tech startups in the country, and Traysar pushes that cluster into a domain most Western militaries have long neglected. Subterranean operations are slow, dangerous and manpower-intensive; if Traysar's machines perform as described, they would let forces map and contest tunnels without sending people into them first. The seed round is unusually large for a company only now emerging from stealth, a sign of how aggressively investors are funding hard-tech built for national security.

For decades, we have allowed a massive capability gap to widen beneath our feet. Our message to adversaries is clear: there is no place to hide.— Yadin Soffer, co-founder and CEO, Traysar