This German Startup Straps AI Backpacks on Live Cockroaches for NATO

A cockroach can squeeze through a gap half its body height. It can climb vertical walls, survive underwater for 30 minutes, and withstand forces 900 times its body weight. Three hundred million years of evolution produced an organism that goes where nothing else can.

SWARM Biotactics, a startup based in Kassel, Germany, looked at that and asked a question nobody in defense had seriously pursued: what if you stopped trying to build robots that move like insects, and just used the insect?

The problem: reconnaissance in places machines can't reach

Modern military and disaster response teams face a consistent blind spot. Collapsed buildings, tunnel networks, underground infrastructure, urban rubble fields - these environments defeat every tool in the current arsenal.

Drones can't fly through pipes. Ground robots get stuck in debris. Sending humans is often too dangerous. And GPS doesn't work underground, which disables most autonomous navigation systems.

This isn't a niche problem. Urban warfare, earthquake response, infrastructure inspection, and mine rescue all share the same constraint: the places where you most need information are the places hardest to reach.

The defense industry has spent billions trying to solve this with smaller and smaller machines. DARPA's SHRIMP program funds insect-sized robots. The results, so far, have been incremental. Making a robot the size of an insect that moves like an insect turns out to be extraordinarily hard. The mechanical complexity alone - legs, joints, balance, power - remains unsolved at that scale.

What SWARM Biotactics actually built

Founded in 2024 by Stefan Wilhelm (former head of Nokia Bell Labs Consulting) and Moritz Strube (a neuroscientist who ran his own neural interfacing research lab), SWARM took a fundamentally different approach.

Instead of building an insect-sized robot, they start with a Madagascar hissing cockroach and add electronics.

Each cockroach gets fitted with a custom backpack weighing 3-15 grams (the company is working to get this under 10 grams). The backpack contains:

• Bioelectronic neural stimulation module - electrodes attached to the antennae that guide movement through low-voltage electrical impulses
• Sensor payloads - configurable per mission: optical cameras, microphones, Doppler radar, or environmental sensors for gas, heat, and radiation
• Edge AI processing - an onboard chip that processes sensor data locally, reducing latency and bandwidth requirements
• Secure communications - encrypted data transmission back to operators

The cockroach does what cockroaches do - navigate terrain, squeeze through gaps, climb walls. The backpack turns that movement into useful intelligence.

How swarm coordination works

A single cyborg cockroach is interesting. A coordinated swarm of dozens or hundreds is a reconnaissance system.

SWARM developed proprietary swarm autonomy software that assigns mission targets and operational zones to groups of insects. The system appoints a "leader" insect whose backpack coordinates with the others, guiding the swarm toward defined objectives.

Related academic research published in Nature Communications (from NTU Singapore and Osaka University) demonstrated that this swarm approach reduces required human control interventions by roughly 50% compared to steering each insect individually.

The operator doesn't need to drive each cockroach. They define the mission - "map this building" or "find heat signatures in this rubble field" - and the swarm figures out how to cover the space.

Why cockroaches and not another insect

SWARM uses Madagascar hissing cockroaches specifically, and the choice is deliberate.

Payload capacity: They can carry up to 3 grams on top of the backpack electronics - enough for meaningful sensor payloads.

Durability: Hard exoskeleton, resilient to impact, temperature extremes, and even radiation. They function in environments that would disable most electronics.

Terrain navigation: Vertical surfaces, pipes, rubble, gaps as narrow as a few millimeters. No wheeled or tracked robot matches this.

Zero acoustic signature: Unlike drones, cockroaches are silent. In a surveillance context, this matters enormously.

Biological power: The cockroach powers its own locomotion. The backpack only needs to power the electronics, not the movement - a massive advantage over fully robotic approaches.

Other research groups have explored beetles (UC Berkeley, University of Michigan under DARPA's HI-MEMS program) and dragonflies (Draper Laboratory's DragonflEye project using optogenetic stimulation). Each has tradeoffs. Flying insects cover more ground but carry less. Beetles are sturdy but less maneuverable in confined spaces. The cockroach hits the sweet spot for ground-based reconnaissance in denied terrain.

The numbers

• EUR 13 million raised - EUR 3M pre-seed, EUR 10M seed (oversubscribed). Investors include Vertex Ventures US, Possible Ventures, and Capnamic
• 40+ engineers and scientists hired within 12 months of founding
• Offices in Kassel, Germany and San Francisco
• Already deployed with paying NATO customers, including the German Bundeswehr
• CBS 60 Minutes feature in late 2025 brought the company to mainstream attention

For context, academic researchers at NTU Singapore have built an automated assembly line that can outfit a cockroach with a backpack in 68 seconds - down from over an hour of manual work. Separately, RIKEN in Japan achieved 17.2 milliwatts of power from an ultrathin solar cell (0.004mm) mounted on a cockroach - 50 times better than prior solar-powered insect interfaces. SWARM likely builds on these academic breakthroughs, though their proprietary specifications aren't public.

What doesn't work yet

Transparency matters here: there are real limitations that no press release mentions.

Battery life is the bottleneck. The cockroach provides locomotion, but the sensors and communications still need power. Operational duration per mission isn't publicly disclosed, which usually means it's not yet impressive. RIKEN's solar cell research suggests a path forward, but we're not there yet.

Communication range is unknown. Encrypted data transmission from underground, through rubble, in GPS-denied environments is a hard problem. SWARM hasn't disclosed their range specifications.

Scale of deployment is unclear. "Deployed with NATO customers" could mean full operational use or paid pilot programs. The company is 18 months old - full-scale production is almost certainly still ahead.

The insect is still a variable. Living organisms aren't circuit boards. Health, lifespan, behavioral consistency, and response to stress all introduce unpredictability that purely mechanical systems don't have.

The ethical question

It gets complicated here.

SWARM says the process is painless. CEO Stefan Wilhelm told CBS 60 Minutes that the cockroaches "need to be in very good condition, and have a good life, in order to perform well in their missions." The company frames animal welfare as a practical requirement, not just an ethical one - a stressed cockroach is a poorly performing asset.

Legally, insects don't fall under Germany's Animal Welfare Act. There is no regulatory framework anywhere in the world that specifically governs bio-robotic systems using living organisms. SWARM operates in a genuine legal gray zone - not because they're breaking rules, but because the rules don't exist yet.

The deeper question isn't about cockroaches specifically. It's about precedent. If insect cyborgs are acceptable, what about small mammals? What about the dual-use implications - defense technology that could be repurposed for unauthorized civilian surveillance? These aren't hypothetical concerns. They're questions that regulators will eventually have to answer, and the technology is advancing faster than the policy.

Where this is heading

SWARM Biotactics is the first company to commercially deploy bio-hybrid robotics for defense. But the academic foundation is accelerating.

Osaka University demonstrated a non-invasive approach in 2025: UV light "helmets" that steer cockroaches without any surgery or electrodes, achieving a 94% maze escape rate. If that scales, it eliminates the most ethically contentious part of the process.

NTU Singapore's automated assembly line (68 seconds per cockroach) points toward industrial-scale production. At that speed, deploying swarms of hundreds becomes logistically feasible.

And the sensor payloads are getting smaller, lighter, and more capable every year. What's a 15-gram backpack today could be 5 grams in three years - giving the cockroach more range and endurance.

Three hundred million years of R&D, plus a 15-gram backpack. That's the pitch.