Michael
LaFramboise

Adrone the size of a pizza box costs a few hundred dollars. The missile most armies fire to shoot it down costs a few hundred thousand. Michael LaFramboise looked at that math and decided the missile was the problem. His answer, built at a San Francisco startup called Aurelius Systems, is a robotic turret named Archimedes. It spots a drone from more than two kilometers away, locks on with AI-guided optics, and burns it out of the sky with a high-power laser. The running cost is roughly ten cents of electricity per kill. The drone, in his words, "simply explodes."

That is the headline. The more interesting part is the design philosophy underneath it, which sounds like heresy in a field obsessed with sophistication. "We always choose the 70 IQ option," LaFramboise says. He means the most barebones, lowest-cost version of a thing that still does the job. While the big defense primes gold-plate, Aurelius strips. The bet is that in a war of cheap, swarming drones, the side that wins is the side that can afford to keep firing.

From selling laser parts to building the whole weapon

LaFramboise did not arrive here by accident, but he did arrive by a crooked road. He graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2018 with an engineering degree, served in the U.S. Navy, and put in time in the automotive industry in Detroit. Then came Coherent, the optical-materials company, where he worked in R&D and then technical sales. His job, more or less, was selling the components that go into laser weapons. He learned the supply chain from the inside, one part at a time.

From there the resume gets eclectic: a product manager seat at Amazon Devices working on consumer hardware, a software startup called Oxygen co-founded with a partner named John Marmaduke, and finally a PhD program at Columbia University in nano optical systems. He did not finish it. Drone proliferation was accelerating, the primes were not interested in cheap solutions, and the gap was too obvious to stay in a lab. He left to start Aurelius with Marmaduke, who became his co-founder for the second time.

That line is the whole worldview in one sentence. Selling software, a modest edge gets you customers. Selling a weapon to a government that already buys from century-old contractors, a modest edge gets you ignored. You have to be so much cheaper and so much faster that the comparison stops being a comparison. Ten cents versus a quarter-million dollars is that kind of gap.

Why the incumbents won't follow

LaFramboise has a clear theory of why he gets to exist. The established primes make their money selling expensive interceptors. A cheap laser that makes those interceptors unnecessary is, from their balance sheet, an act of self-sabotage. "Why would you invest R&D in a system that's going to obsolete your existing revenue stream?" he asks. The incumbents are not stupid. They are conflicted. Aurelius is not, because it has no legacy revenue to protect.

So he stays close to the metal. LaFramboise targets spending about a quarter of his time as CEO doing actual engineering. His reasoning is plain: "It takes a lot of time, but it's valuable. If you didn't build something yourself, it's very hard to know how it works." It is an unfashionable use of a founder's calendar and a deliberate one.

Proven in the dirt, not the slide deck

Aurelius did not build credibility with renderings. It ran nationwide field demonstrations in extreme conditions, the unglamorous proof that a laser works when it is hot, cold, dusty, and far from a clean lab. The company says it took a prototype from concept to a working demo in days and reached field operations within eighteen months. The system can ride on a truck, sit in a bunker, or mount on a large drone like an MQ-9 Reaper. Wherever it goes, the value proposition travels with it: detect far, identify fast, fire cheap.

The market noticed. Aurelius raised $2.1 million in mid-2024, then took an additional $1.25 million from angel investor Naval Ravikant that October, and won a Defense Innovation Unit award through the US-Singapore Joint Challenge. In September 2025 it closed a $10 million seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Draper Associates, with a long list of follow-on investors. The money is going where LaFramboise points everything: more engineers, more in-house manufacturing, more field testing.

The bigger ambition: reshore the photons

In April 2026, Aurelius did something a pure software company never has to think about. It opened a U.S. manufacturing line for high-power fiber laser source modules and precision optical assemblies - the guts LaFramboise once sold for someone else. The goal is to become America's domestic one-stop laser shop, building the components at home rather than importing them. For a company whose entire thesis is cost and control, owning the supply chain is not a side quest. It is the point.

LaFramboise frames the mission in protective terms: helping the U.S. and its allies guard critical people and infrastructure "without needing to worry about small- and medium-size drones." His stated biggest challenge is almost charmingly mundane for a man who builds laser weapons - hiring fast enough, and what he calls "spreading the directed energy gospel." The flagship is named Archimedes, after the ancient inventor said to have set ships ablaze with focused sunlight. Twenty-three centuries later, a Navy veteran in San Francisco is finishing the job with fiber optics and AI, one ten-cent shot at a time.