Brisbane autonomy company Emesent has raised $25 million to scale its drone mapping technology for mining and defence, made up of a $15 million equity round and $10 million in venture debt from the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation (NRFC), the company announced on 8 July 2026.
The deal is the NRFC’s first venture debt deployment to a deep technology company, according to Emesent. The $15 billion federal fund was set up to back Australian manufacturing and industrial capability, and venture debt gives Emesent growth capital without diluting its shareholders. It also points to rising demand for systems that work where satellite navigation is unavailable or deliberately jammed.
The product
Emesent’s Hovermap is a laser-scanning unit that lets drones fly themselves through underground mines, tunnels and collapsed spaces with no GPS signal, building detailed 3D maps of places that are unsafe for people to enter. The company says Hovermap is deployed at more than 200 mine sites globally, with Rio Tinto, BHP and Glencore among its mining customers, and clients in more than 40 countries.
Emesent was established in 2018 as a spinout from CSIRO’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems group by Dr Stefan Hrabar and Dr Farid Kendoul. It is led by chief executive Charles Miller and employs 109 people in Australia.
The defence angle
The same technology is moving into defence reconnaissance, where adversaries jam GPS on purpose. Emesent says the US Army selected Hovermap as one of six winners in its Soldier Readiness Enhancement program. Forbes Australia framed the raise as a push into the defence spending boom.
The raise
Returning investor Main Sequence, which backed Emesent’s seed and Series A rounds, joined QIC Ventures, New York’s Orion Resource Partners and superannuation funds Hostplus and NGS Super in the $15 million equity round, which SmartCompany reported was structured as a SAFE note.
The money will go towards scaling manufacturing at Emesent’s facility in Wacol, west of Brisbane, developing Cortex AI, its onboard autonomy software, and expanding Aura, its cloud platform for processing and analysing 3D data. “This investment accelerates everything we’re building at Emesent,” Miller said in the company’s announcement.
NRFC chief executive David Gall said Emesent’s “pioneering physical AI technology was spun out of the CSIRO in 2018”.
Jack’s take
Most of the money in tech is chasing software. Some of the hardest positions to compete with get built in places software alone cannot reach: underground, off grid and GPS denied. Australia keeps producing serious companies in that unglamorous physical frontier, and Emesent is a good example.