The company, which manufactures operationally proven autonomous vehicles for use on air, land, sea, and underwater, has closed the round with investment from NZVC, Outset Ventures, and Altered Capital, and undisclosed strategic funds.
It is the first institutional capital raised by SYOS and follows five years of growth fueled through customer contracts, including a £30 million agreement in 2025 with the UK’s Ministry of Defence.
The terms of the round—which took the form of a convertible note—have not been disclosed.
SYOS, which is jointly headquartered in the UK and New Zealand, was founded in 2021 in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand. It won its first contracts in 2023 through a series of competitive tenders to the UK Ministry of Defence and today operates across NATO and the Indo-Pacific region.
SYOS CEO and Founder Sam Vye said: “We’ve spent the last few years proving a startup can compete with some of the world’s largest defense and technology businesses. Through first-class engineering and operational delivery, we’ve built a global team, delivered systems into service, and earned the trust of customers across allied nations.
“This capital will accelerate our next phase of growth: to expand our global footprint, invest further in our already very strong R&D capacity, and increase production capacity to meet growing customer demand.”
SYOS employs almost 200 people, with R&D and manufacturing sites in Fareham in the UK and in New Zealand—where it secured a sovereign defense contract with the New Zealand Defence Force in February 2026 to provide a suite of uncrewed vehicles for experimentation, plus services and training. It also maintains a presence in Ukraine.
Every SYOS vehicle is uncrewed and can operate autonomously through the company’s proprietary AAIMS (Autonomy and Augmented Intelligence Mission System) software, which sits across all SYOS vehicles. A customer can buy and use a single vehicle or a portfolio of products that can operate in concert through AAIMS, providing a single autonomy layer across air, land, sea, and underwater.
SYOS has repeatedly won work against established primes and better-known players many times its size. Its vehicles are operationally proven in the conflicted environment of Ukraine, demonstrating rapid spiral development based on front-line user feedback.
It has proven serial production lines for different products across domains and has already delivered over 150 USVs (uncrewed surface vehicles) to allied nations.
Every system is engineered to deliver the lowest and best cost-to-capability, with the platform kept deliberately lean and the investment concentrated in the autonomy and sensing where operational advantage sits.
In March 2026 SYOS’s SA200 uncrewed heavy-lift helicopter completed fully autonomous mission trials, including take-off and landing from a moving platform, and is now ready for serial production. In May 2026, the company launched the SU10 uncrewed underwater vehicle, which is being paired with the company’s USV offering.
NZVC General Partner Mark Pavlyukovskyy said: “As we see every day, the rules-based order is falling apart, and allied democracies are realizing that to protect their values they need the actual capability to do it. SYOS builds that capability. Its uncrewed systems ship in months, at volume, financed by customer contracts alone. We will be beside Sam as SYOS scales production in the UK and New Zealand, and we will open doors for it in the US defense and technology industries.”
Outset Ventures Managing Partner Angus Blair, who joins the SYOS board, said: “Sam and the team built a defense manufacturer out of New Zealand and the UK, and paid for it with customer contracts on limited capital. That’s rare. Allied nations need capability they can field in months, and SYOS is already delivering it across NATO and the Indo-Pacific.”
