SkyfireAI raised $11M seed funding to build software enabling single operators to supervise coordinated drone fleets, targeting first responders and defense markets. The company's core thesis is that human operator bandwidth—not aircraft capability—is the primary constraint…
Don Mathis used to fly drones the hard way. One pilot, one aircraft, eyes locked on a screen. It worked fine when you had one drone. It did not scale.
SkyfireAI, the company Mathis co-founded and now runs as CEO, has raised $11 million in seed funding to prove a different model works: one operator, many drones. The company builds software that lets a single person supervise a coordinated fleet instead of flying each aircraft individually. It is the difference between being a pilot and being a mission commander.
The $11 million seed round was led by Mucker Capital, with participation from the AI Fund (the venture firm of Andrew Ng, who helped found the company), SaaS Ventures, Halogen, and several angel groups. SkyfireAI was founded in late 2022 by veterans of the U.S. Navy, the Intelligence Community, and DARPA, the Pentagon's advanced research arm.
The money is not large by defense standards. What it buys is a proof point for a bet that the company's founders have been making since they left government: that the real constraint on drone adoption is not the aircraft but the human being asked to watch the sky.
Current regulations still limit how far one-to-many drone operations can go without explicit waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration. One-to-many operations, meaning one operator managing multiple aircraft simultaneously, are only beginning to emerge through regulatory exceptions, and a broader framework called Part 108 that could formalize them is anticipated but not yet finalized. SkyfireAI's software is built for the world that Part 108 is meant to create, not the world that exists today.
Ohio launched the nation's first statewide Drone First Responder program under House Bill 96, making it the proving ground for exactly the kind of operations SkyfireAI is built to enable. Nine public safety agencies were selected for the Ohio pilot, with onboarding beginning in early 2026. A single operator supervising multiple drones in the field is the stated goal.
A small fire department in a mid-sized Ohio city cannot afford to hire and train a team of licensed drone pilots. But if one existing employee can manage a coordinated drone fleet with software handling the coordination work: keeping the aircraft from colliding, maintaining formation, coordinating takeoff and landing. Then the cost of entry drops to something a municipal budget can absorb. Surveillance becomes a line item, not a staffing crisis.
When the operator bottleneck disappears, drone surveillance stops being a resource only wealthy agencies can afford. That changes the civil liberties math as surely as it changes the budget spreadsheet.
Public safety agencies have long argued that drone surveillance helps. It can survey a wildfire perimeter faster than ground crews, give a SWAT team a building's roof topology before breaching, locate a missing person in rough terrain. Those capabilities are real. So is the tension that follows when every department in every town can afford the same view from above.
The shift is not lost on the Pentagon. According to a recent budget request, the department asked for $75 billion for autonomous platforms and drones, including $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Working Group, the entity coordinating autonomous systems procurement. The domestic public safety market is smaller but moves faster and with less oversight.
SkyfireAI's co-founders are betting that the regulatory future arrives on their schedule. If Part 108 comes through and one-to-many operations become standard rather than exceptional, they have the software ready. If it stalls, they are a waivers-dependent business with a narrow customer base and a hard ceiling. That is the bet. The $11 million buys time to find out which version of the future shows up.
What to watch: whether Ohio's pilot produces outcome data that other states can cite as a reason to follow, or whether the lack of published results becomes its own kind of evidence. The nine agencies onboarding in early 2026 will generate numbers: flight hours, response times, costs. SkyfireAI's competitors are watching too. If the Ohio data looks good, the Part 108 pathway gets easier to defend. If it does not, the waiver-by-waiver approach gets harder to abandon.