SWARM Biotactics Builds AI-Guided Cyborg Cockroaches

Funding and uses

The company was founded in 2024. In June 2025 it announced a 10 million euro funding round, bringing its total raised to 13 million euros. According to the announcement, the money was earmarked for launching operational pilots and scaling production of backpacks and neural interfaces.

SWARM offers the technology for defense and security applications, and also proposes it for finding survivors in collapsed structures, where the insects' small size and mobility could reach places other equipment cannot. The company says the system has been field-tested, though that does not reveal how long control could be maintained in a real mission.

Limits of control and animal welfare

One issue studied in such biorobots is habituation: repeated electrical stimulation can produce weaker responses in the insect. In a paper published in Soft Robotics, Rui Li and colleagues kept control for 3 hours using an algorithm that adapted the stimulation and inserted reactivation signals. That result comes from the authors' own experiments, does not measure SWARM's endurance and cannot be extended to a spying or rescue operation.

Animal welfare remains under debate. A scientific review by Matilda Gibbons and colleagues found strong evidence consistent with pain in adult cockroaches. Gaps remain in the research, so it cannot be said that the insects do not feel pain.