Company Profile • Defense & Space • Washington, D.C.
Guardian RF
The palm-sized sensor that listens to the sky - and hears the drones radar can't see.
The palm-sized sensor that listens to the sky - and hears the drones radar can't see.
The intuitive way to stop a drone is to shoot it, jam it, or blast it with a missile that costs a great deal more than the drone did - which returns you to the same bad trade. Guardian RF's founders started somewhere quieter. Before you counter a drone, you have to know it's there, where it is, and ideally where the person flying it is standing. That turns out to be a signal-processing problem, and signal processing is what physics majors are good at.
Every drone talks to its operator over radio. That conversation is a signal, and a signal is a thing you can listen for without saying anything back. Guardian RF builds sensors that do exactly that: they sit there, passively, and trace the radio frequencies drones use. Put enough of them in a mesh and they can triangulate not just the drone but the human holding the controller. The sensors transmit nothing, which is the entire point - a device that emits nothing is very hard to detect and very hard to jam.
The company calls the flagship sensor Scout. It fits in your palm, is built substantially from off-the-shelf parts, and is cheap enough that you're meant to scatter a lot of them and not cry if one gets destroyed. In defense procurement this is called "attritable," which is a polite word for "we planned on losing some." It is a genuinely different philosophy from the traditional radar approach, where you buy one enormously expensive machine and pray nothing happens to it.
What makes this interesting - and what most drone-detection companies get wrong - is that the hardware is the easy part. A single detection is just noise on a screen. Guardian RF's real product is the layer on top: software that turns a detection into a structured digital event that persists, correlates with other sensors across other locations, and adds up to a shared picture of the airspace. That is the difference between an alarm and intelligence.
"We need to have a countermeasure and can't be treating this issue reactively. That's where the name Guardian came from - about protecting people and doing what's right." Lucas Raskin, Co-Founder & CEO
In February 2024, classmates invited Lucas Raskin, Eli Kerstein and John Andrzejewski - all Georgetown physics majors - to a defense-technology hackathon in El Segundo, California. In 24 hours they wrote software that used proprietary signal processing to detect drones and their operators. It worked well enough to reach the finals, and well enough that people from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and U.S. national security started paying attention.
Then they applied to Y Combinator, which told them the software was nice but they needed hardware. So the founders went back to Georgetown and, during finals week, pulled three consecutive all-nighters in Walsh Hall building a physical prototype. This is a very literal illustration of the gap between an idea and a company: it is usually about one uncomfortable week you are willing to spend while everyone else is studying for exams. They got into YC's Summer 2024 batch. Raskin, for what it's worth, also found time to design a new Georgetown course with the extremely on-brand title "A Guide to Thrive as a Physics Major."
Passive RF sensors observe the airspace without transmitting anything, tracing the control signals between a drone and its operator - including modified drones that ignore Remote ID rules.
Detections from a mesh of sensors are deduplicated across time and space, triangulating position and separating real patterns from noise in high-interference environments.
The platform converts it all into structured, persistent operational records that plug into systems operators already use, like TAK - a shared picture rather than a lone beep.
A palm-sized, low size-weight-power-and-cost sensor. Passive RF collection with no emissions, a real-time feed to the platform, and an attritable design meant for dense, persistent deployment where radar can't go.
A distributed mesh of Scouts for wide-area coverage in austere, contested conditions. Integrates with SpaceX Starlink for low-latency comms and keeps working when the environment is degraded or jammed.
The brain. Turns raw RF detections into structured digital events that persist and correlate across sites, forming a single operational picture and integrating with open command-and-control systems.
Most companies validate a product in a lab. Guardian RF validated its in Ukraine, where its systems spent six months on the front lines with ground troops, countering RF-emitting drones and giving warfighters the seconds they needed to react. Access came through the D3 - "Dare to Defend Democracy" - program.
Building for the hardest environment first is a useful discipline: everything downstream gets easier. The systems now field at home too, under an AFWERX SBIR contract with the 30th Security Forces Squadron at Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the company was named a finalist for Falcon Peak 25.2, a Department of Defense counter-UAS exercise. In February 2026, Guardian RF partnered with Picogrid to secure space-launch operations at Vandenberg - pairing Scout sensors with Picogrid's command-and-control nodes and automatic camera cueing.
"Integrating passive RF sensing into an open, operational command-and-control environment is critical for counter-UAS missions at sensitive installations." Lucas Raskin, CEO • on the Picogrid partnership, Feb 2026
The reason drone detection is suddenly a business and not a hobby is that the sky filled up while nobody was regulating the altitude just above your head. DJI alone accounts for over 75% of U.S. drone sales, and the interesting threats are precisely the ones that don't play by the rules - modified airframes, non-Remote-ID drones, the ones a compliance-based system waves right through. Guardian RF chose to chase the exception rather than the polite default, which is harder engineering and also where the actual danger lives.
There is a broader shift here too. Defense technology used to be the exclusive province of "primes" - giant contractors with decade-long programs and buildings full of lobbyists. Guardian RF went from a Georgetown dorm to a Space Force base in under two years, routed through YC and AFWERX SBIR contracts. That speed is the story. It suggests the barrier to guarding the sky just dropped, and dropped fast, which is good news if you like the idea of the defense being as cheap and nimble as the offense.
It also inverts the economics that started all this. If a $300 drone can threaten a $1M asset, the answer isn't a $2M interceptor - it's a swarm of cheap sensors that give you enough warning to respond intelligently. Guardian RF is a bet that in a world of cheap, plentiful threats, the winning move is cheap, plentiful awareness. Whether that bet pays out is still being decided at places like Vandenberg. But the logic is hard to argue with.
Interviews & product demos: search "Guardian RF" on YouTube for founder talks and Scout sensor demonstrations, or watch the Y Combinator company page for launch videos.