Autonomy works on paper. Off-road, it still fails in reality. That gap is exactly why we invested in driveblocks,, leading the company’s €3.5M Pre-Series A round, alongside Bayern Kapital, rethink Ventures, and angel investor Joachim Drees.
driveblocks is building the perception layer that off-road autonomy has been missing, one that is robust enough for unstructured environments, efficient enough for production hardware, and designed with certification in mind from day one.
This is a bet on autonomy as infrastructure.
“driveblocks focuses on what actually limits off-road autonomy: perception, edge cases, and certification,” said Cailin Greiner, Investment Manager at FORWARD.one. “Their environment-agnostic approach, trained across industrial verticals, delivers robustness where others break down, and it runs on production-grade hardware. The fact that customers are moving from integration to production confirms the commercial relevance of the technology.”
Autonomous driving has made visible progress on public roads. That progress does not transfer off-road. Agriculture, construction, mining, and defense operate in environments defined by:
Most autonomy stacks struggle here because environment perception and safety validation are fundamentally harder. This bottleneck is well known across OEMs and system integrators. It is also where many vertically integrated autonomy programs stall.
driveblocks focuses on the hardest unsolved part of the stack: off-road perception.
The company develops a robust, application-agnostic autonomy layer centered on advanced perception modules. By fusing camera and LiDAR data, driveblocks creates a real-time 3D understanding of complex off-road environments, enabling reliable and reactive vehicle behavior where road-based systems fail.
Two design choices stood out to us:
The result is a perception platform that can be deployed standalone or integrated as a redundant path with existing GNSS-based autonomy stacks. This reduces integration friction and accelerates time to production.
Off-road vehicles are capital-intensive assets. They are also increasingly underutilized.
Across agriculture, construction, mining, and defense, operators face persistent labor shortages, rising safety requirements, and pressure to increase productivity. Autonomous operation offers a structural solution:
driveblocks is already working with multiple OEMs and system integrators in civilian and defense applications. These collaborations are progressing from development integrations toward defined production use cases and long-term contracts.
That transition, from pilot to production, is where value is created.
We invest where performance decides outcomes.
driveblocks stood out for three reasons:
This is an early-stage investment. But it is precisely the kind we like to make: where the technology is real, the problem is structural, and the path to commercial deployment is visible.
With this funding, driveblocks will:
That work takes time. Off-road autonomy will not flip overnight. But the direction is clear, and the bottleneck is now well defined.
“Reliable perception, deployment of AI functionalities on edge devices and the capability to operate software in safety critical environments are the limiting factors for off-road autonomy,” said Dr. Alexander Wischnewski, CEO and Co-founder of driveblocks. “This investment allows us to move from pilots to production deployments. We will collaborate closely with our customers and push towards autonomous solutions for applications requiring safety-certification.”
“Looking forward, we will increasingly focus on productionizing our technology. “, said Dr. Stephan Matz, COO of driveblocks, “With the Pre-Series A we will strengthen our commercial and operations team and keep investing in our R&D organization. With Munich taking center stage for the Robotics & Defense Tech, we are eager to play our part in taking the European technology ecosystem to the next level”.
Europe’s strength in industrial technology has always been depth, not speed. In autonomy, that advantage matters again.
The market is moving away from vertically integrated, hardware-heavy bets toward modular, certifiable software layers that OEMs can trust and integrate. Perception is emerging as the decisive layer. Especially off-road, where environments cannot be simplified, mapped, or predicted away.
driveblocks fits this shift because it enables OEMs to deploy autonomy incrementally, safely, and commercially. That is how off-road autonomy will scale, and how Europe can turn research excellence into industrial leadership.
We don’t fund comfort zones. We fund winners.
