Tagged: counter-drone
12 results
Allen Control Systems
Allen Control Systems (ACS) is an Austin-based defense technology company building Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous robotic weapon station designed to detect, track and shoot down hostile drones. Founded in 2022 by three engineer-entrepreneurs, ACS uses passive machine vision and custom fire-control software to turn standard machine guns into precision counter-drone turrets, aiming to cut the cost-per-kill of a drone from expensive missiles down to a few dollars of ammunition. The company raised a $200M Series B in 2026 at a $2.2B valuation to scale manufacturing for the U.S. military and allied forces.
Swarmer
Swarmer builds combat-proven, hardware-agnostic autonomy software that lets a single operator command hundreds of drones - across air, sea and ground - as one coordinated swarm. Born out of the war in Ukraine and founded in 2023, its STYX, MINAS and TRIDENT products translate human objectives into autonomous action while keeping people in control of life-or-death decisions. The company's software has supported more than 100,000 real-world combat missions, raised a record $15M Series A, and went public on the Nasdaq in 2026 under the ticker SWMR.
ZeroMark, Inc.
ZeroMark is a New York-based defense technology company building an AI targeting layer that turns ordinary infantry weapons into precision counter-drone systems. Its flagship Apex is a rifle-mounted, software-defined fire control system that uses electro-optical cameras, LiDAR and machine-vision ballistics to physically adjust a soldier's aim in real time, letting a dismounted operator hit small, fast-moving drones without specialist training. Founded in 2022 by former U.S. Navy servicemember and ex-MongoDB executive Joel Anderson, ZeroMark has raised roughly $7M in seed funding led by Ground Up Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, followed by a 2025 strategic round, and has demonstrated its system in a U.S. Marine Corps live-fire exercise.
Joel Anderson
Joel Anderson is the founder and CEO of ZeroMark, a New York defense-technology startup building an AI-and-robotics fire control system that turns ordinary infantry rifles into auto-aiming counter-drone weapons. A U.S. Navy veteran who went on to help scale MongoDB from a small team to a public company as a senior technical and security leader, Anderson founded ZeroMark in 2022 after an 'epiphany' driving his Tesla to a shooting range: consumer machines could aim and track better than a soldier could. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund and Ground Up Ventures, ZeroMark markets what it calls a 'handheld Iron Dome' - a motorized buttstock and sensor pod that make hitting a small drone at 200 yards, in Anderson's words, 'as easy as hitting a 60-foot-diameter circle.'
Airspace Defense
Airspace Defense (formerly Airspace Systems) is a Silicon Valley company that secures the low-altitude airspace where drones increasingly operate. Its patented Airspace Spatial platform fuses Remote ID, RF and electronic sensing, radar and AI analytics to detect, identify and track unauthorized drones and their operators at city scale. Founded in 2015 by a team from Apple, Google and Cisco, the company serves public safety agencies, national defense and major enterprises, and its autonomous Interceptor drone is held in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Mike Wior
Mike Wior is the CEO and co-founder of Allen Control Systems, an Austin-based defense company building Bullfrog, an autonomous AI-powered gun turret designed to shoot down small drones with rifle rounds instead of missiles. He previously founded Omnivore, a restaurant POS transaction network acquired by Olo in 2022, then took over the top job at ACS from co-founder Steve Simoni, and in mid-2026 closed a $200 million Series B at a $2.2 billion valuation.
Guardian RF
Guardian RF builds low-cost, passive radiofrequency sensors that make low-altitude airspace observable in real time. Founded in 2024 by three Georgetown physics majors, the company deploys palm-sized 'Scout' sensors that detect the control signals drones and their operators emit, triangulating both across a mesh network. Its systems have been battle-tested on the front lines in Ukraine and are now fielded at Vandenberg Space Force Base and across U.S. airports and event venues, turning drone detections into structured, shareable intelligence.
Thor Dynamics
Thor Dynamics is a Palo Alto-based defense-tech startup building Laser Armor, an AI-powered directed-energy system that detects, tracks, and neutralizes hostile drones and drone swarms with a high-energy laser. Founded in 2024 by a team of MIT- and Wharton-trained operators and former U.S. Navy leadership, the company pairs up-to-20-kilowatt laser output with reinforcement-learning targeting and NVIDIA edge compute to deliver affordable, scalable counter-drone defense for critical infrastructure and the military.
John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Michael LaFramboise
Michael LaFramboise is the CEO and co-founder of Aurelius Systems, a San Francisco defense startup building autonomous, AI-guided laser turrets that detect and destroy drones at the speed of light for roughly pennies per shot. A Case Western engineer, Navy veteran, and ex-Coherent and Amazon Devices operator, he dropped out of a Columbia PhD in nano optical systems to build Archimedes, a low-cost directed-energy weapon. Aurelius raised a $10 million seed co-led by General Catalyst and Draper Associates in September 2025 and opened a U.S. manufacturing line for high-power fiber lasers in 2026, aiming to become America's domestic one-stop laser shop.
General Radar Corp.
General Radar Corp. is a Menlo Park deep-tech company building high-resolution, software-defined phased-array (AESA) radar systems for aerospace, defense, wind energy, autonomy, and weather markets. Founded in 2016 by former NASA/JPL engineer Dmitry Turbiner, the company pairs a GaN AESA front-end with digital beam-forming and GPU supercomputing to deliver radars it says are dramatically higher resolution and roughly 20x cheaper than legacy aerospace radar - largely from commercial off-the-shelf parts. It raised a $22M Series A in 2022, bringing total funding to roughly $47.5M.
CHAOS Industries
CHAOS Industries is a Los Angeles defense technology company building Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN), software-defined sensing systems that detect aerial and missile threats faster and cheaper than traditional radar. Founded in 2022, it makes distributed radar products like Vanquish and Astria for counter-drone, border, and homeland defense. By late 2025 the company had raised over $1 billion and reached a roughly $4.5 billion valuation.