A war fought in frequencies, not trenches
Somewhere over a contested patch of sky, a $2 million missile streaks toward a drone that cost about as much as a used hatchback. Nathan Mintz finds this absurd, and he has built an entire company around the absurdity. His startup, CX2, headquartered in El Segundo, builds AI-enabled hardware and software that detect, disrupt, and destroy threats inside the electromagnetic spectrum - the band of radio frequencies that quietly carries every command, every signal, every drone's link back to its pilot. The pitch is simple to say and hard to do: stop trading expensive ordnance for cheap targets, and start winning the fight where it actually happens.
"We are in the position now of firing multimillion-dollar missiles at $20,000 drones and $10,000 jammers," Mintz told Axios when CX2 announced its funding. It is the kind of line that sounds like a complaint until you realize it is a business plan. CX2's purpose, in the company's own words, is to "illuminate the unseen battlefield, outmaneuver adversaries, and enable decisive action; anywhere, anytime." Translated: find the enemy by the signals they cannot help but emit, then jam, spoof, or fry those signals before they matter.
The fight in Ukraine has shown that warfare has reached consumer scale, and we must build unbundled capabilities that can survive and thrive on the EW battlefield of the 21st century.
That word - unbundled - is the tell. Mintz is an engineer by training and a contrarian by temperament, and he has little patience for the legacy giants of the defense world. "The existing big five prime contractors are long in the tooth and are sagging under their own weight," he has said. "They're having issues executing at the rate of what we've seen in Ukraine." His thesis is that the spectrum has become to this century what supply lines and logistics were to the last one, and that the incumbents are too slow to defend it. CX2 means to move at the speed of the threat.
The engineer before the founder
Before he was pitching venture capitalists, Mintz was writing requirements documents. He earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Stanford and spent roughly 14 years inside Raytheon and Boeing designing the sensors that fly on America's most recognizable hardware. His fingerprints are on the APG-79 AESA radar that rides in the nose of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, the VIIRS sensor that tracks weather and wildfires from orbit, sensors for the Global Hawk drone, and the Next Generation Jammer program now known as the ALQ-234. It is an unusually deep technical resume for a startup CEO, and it explains why he keeps founding companies that all orbit the same scientific sun: radio frequency.
It also explains a rule he repeats to anyone who will listen. "Fall in love with the problem, not your solution to the problem," he says - a discipline that lets an engineer kill his own favorite idea when the data turns against it.
A hat trick of hard tech
CX2 is the third act, not the first. Around 2018 Mintz co-founded Epirus, the company behind Leonidas, a software-defined high-power microwave system that can knock drones out of the sky with directed energy rather than bullets. Epirus grew into a defense unicorn and supplied directed-energy technology to the U.S. Marine Corps. Then, in 2020, came Spartan Radar, an automotive radar company built on super-resolution and compressive sensing - technology meant to give self-driving cars sharper eyes in rain and snow, where lidar tends to go blind. Spartan was later acquired by John Deere.
The personal stake in Spartan was, by his own account, close to home. "What gets me excited about the automation of vehicles is I am the father of four young children," he said - a reminder that the engineer designing battlefield jammers also worries about the school run. He has noted, with some amusement, that he drives a nine-year-old Camry.
Spartan's origin shows the same engineer's instinct that runs through everything Mintz touches. In mid-2020, while he was at the venture studio Dangerous Ventures, co-founder Dr. Theagenis Abatzoglou pitched him an automotive radar concept using super-resolution and compressive sensing - a way to wring roughly five times the resolution from a quarter of the transmit-and-receive hardware. Mintz's contrarian conviction was that the self-driving industry had been treating sensors like fixed 1960s aerospace parts rather than adaptive systems. He was blunt about lidar's limits, pointing out that its range "can fall off 50% or more in rain or snow" and that commercial truckers replacing lidar units every 10,000 miles made no economic sense. The lesson he kept circling back to was the same one he repeats today: study the problem until you stop being precious about your answer to it.
It no longer makes sense to fire a $2 million missile to take out a $2,000 drone.
The team he talked onto the bus
Mintz is, by every description, a relentless networker - and CX2's founding bench reads like the result of years of cultivated relationships. His co-founders include Porter Smith, a former Andreessen Horowitz investment partner who flew AH-64 Apaches for Army Special Operations; Lee Thompson, who led RF engineering at SpaceX and worked on Starship's communications platform; and Mark Trefgarne, who built LiveRail into the world's largest video ad exchange before selling it to Meta for a reported half-billion dollars. Mintz credits Jim Collins' management gospel for the assembly: "get the right people on the bus, then find them the right seat."
He is candid about where some of his best instincts come from. His wife is a former Raytheon radar systems engineer, and he has joked that he would "skip the Series B" if he were paid every time she solved one of his business problems.
The candidate who became a builder
There is a chapter that does not fit the standard founder arc. In his twenties, Mintz tried to fix California's government from the inside, running for the State Assembly twice. He lost both times. He also co-founded California Common Sense, a government-transparency nonprofit, alongside investor Joe Lonsdale, and served on local redistricting work - convinced, as he put it, that elected leaders should serve the people who put them in office rather than the special interests. The campaigns failed; the conviction that institutions can be rebuilt did not. He simply redirected it from ballots to companies.
That through-line - the belief that something large and slow can be out-built by something small and fast - now points at the Pentagon's procurement machine itself. CX2's $31 million Series A, led by Point72 Ventures with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Pax Ventures, is the capital behind the wager. Spectrum, in Mintz's framing, "is as important to the 21st century battlefield as supply lanes and logistics for the 20th." If he is right, the company hunting the unseen battlefield will not stay unseen for long.
What CX2 is actually selling is breadth. The company describes systems that work across land, air, sea, and space - hardware and software meant to sense the spectrum, adapt to it, and act on it autonomously, fast enough to matter in a fight where a drone's whole flight can last minutes. That autonomy is the point. In a contested environment, the side that needs a human in every loop loses the race to the side whose machines can detect, decide, and disrupt on their own. CX2's stated purpose - to "illuminate the unseen battlefield" - is, underneath the slogan, an argument about tempo.
For now, he keeps building at the intersection he has circled his whole career: the place where electrons meet intent. From a Stanford lab bench to the nose cone of a fighter jet to a startup floor in El Segundo, the signal has never changed - only the stakes around it.