Swarm Biotactics wires live cockroaches as battlefield sensors. The Bundeswehr is paying to test them.

A Kassel-registered, California-run startup has raised 13 million euros to turn Madagascar hissing cockroaches into ISR sensors, and the German military's Cyber Innovation Hub is funding a troop trial called AutoBugs.

A Kassel startup, run from San Diego

Swarm Biotactics fits a few-gram electronic backpack onto a living Madagascar hissing cockroach, steers it with mild electrical stimulation, and sells the result to militaries as a reconnaissance sensor that can enter tunnels and rubble a drone cannot. The company was registered as a GmbH in Kassel in October 2024 and is run day to day from a lab near San Diego. It has raised 13 million euros, a 3-million-euro pre-seed followed by a 10-million-euro seed announced in June 2025, with Vertex Ventures US, Possible Ventures and Cologne-based Capnamic named as investors. CEO Stefan Wilhelm says most of that capital is European.

Wilhelm, 54, spent years at Deutsche Telekom and its Detecon consultancy before a decade on the US West Coast. He puts the company at about 60 people, roughly 70 percent in Germany and 30 percent in the United States. Its chairman is Jörg Lamprecht, a co-founder of the counter-drone firm Dedrone, which Axon agreed to buy in 2024 for an undisclosed sum. Local reporting counted around 20 backers in all, among them Susanne Wiegand, a former chief executive of the German defense and gearbox maker Renk, and the Munich Security Conference listed Lamprecht as Swarm's executive chairman in early 2025.

In April 2026, the Bundeswehr's Cyber Innovation Hub published a video confirming a project called AutoBugs, in which Swarm's insects were tested with troops at the German army's reconnaissance school in Munster. Wilhelm says AutoBugs is a paid project funded through the Bundeswehr's BWI IT company.