WaiV Robotics emerges from stealth with €6.4 million to develop autonomous UAV landing infrastructure

WaiV Robotics, a British maritime autonomous infrastructure developer, has raised €6.4 million ($7.5 million) in Seed funding as it emerges from stealth in order to introduce their fully automatic landing and takeoff platform designed to enable reliable VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) drone operations even in high sea states.

“For drones to become a reliable part of offshore operations, the missing piece isn’t the aircraft, it’s the infrastructure around it,” says Johnny Carni, Founder and CEO of WaiV Robotics. 

WaiV Robotics’ Seed round sits within a 2026 dataset showing continued funding for European drone, robotics, autonomy and unmanned-systems companies, spanning maritime operations, drone coordination software, autonomous inspection, aerial intelligence and defence-adjacent infrastructure.

The most directly comparable maritime example is Italy’s Mirai Robotics, which raised €3.6 million to build autonomous systems for maritime operations, while UK-based Mutable Tactics, Occam Industries and Stanhope AI indicate domestic investor activity around autonomy software and physical AI.

Across the relevant 2026 rounds, we saw around €201 million flowing through the sector, although this figure is heavily influenced by Quantum Systems’ €150 million financing package; excluding that outlier, disclosed funding still totals about €51 million.

“Our system was designed to remove traditional deployment constraints, allowing fleets to operate as mobile launch and recovery hubs that ensure reliable UAV operations. Without a dependable way to launch and recover at sea, large-scale deployment simply doesn’t work. Our goal is to remove that constraint and make drone operations viable from virtually any vessel,” adds Johnny.