counter-uas
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Jaz Banga Drew a New Fence in the Sky
Before drones became ordinary, Jaz Banga saw the awkward question hiding above every fence: who belongs in the sky, and what happens when they do not? His answer has taken a decade, a hundred prototypes, and a career-long habit of connecting machines to identity.
Jason Cornelius Left Space Helicopters for a Two-Foot Answer to Drone Warfare
After helping design a rotorcraft for Titan, the Penn State engineer traded interplanetary patience for two-week build-test cycles. His new problem is brutally terrestrial: making drone defense cheap enough to use at scale.
Anshul Ahluwalia Wants Drone Defense to Speak One Language
After building aircraft autonomy at Shield AI, the Georgia Tech computer scientist found his startup idea in defense technology's least glamorous corner: getting incompatible machines to cooperate.
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.'
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.
Damon Henry
Damon Henry is the CEO and co-founder of Asylon Robotics, a Philadelphia-area company building an American-made robotic perimeter security platform that pairs autonomous aerial drones, robot dogs, and human-in-the-loop AI into a Robotics-as-a-Service offering. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who worked at GE, Boeing, and Johns Hopkins APL before founding the company in 2015 with two dorm roommates, Henry has grown Asylon into a company that has flown more than 100,000 security missions for Fortune 500 firms and the Department of Defense, and raised a $26M Series B led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Keith Brendley
Keith Brendley is the founder, president and CEO of Artis, LLC, a Herndon, Virginia defense-technology firm he started in 1999. A former RAND Corporation senior analyst and co-author of the influential military doctrine 'Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance,' Brendley is one of America's leading authorities on active protection systems. His signature invention, the Iron Curtain, uses radar, optical sensors and downward-firing countermeasures to neutralize incoming rocket-propelled grenades within centimeters of an armored vehicle. His newer Sentinel system extends that protection to drones and first-person-view loitering munitions.
Lucas Raskin
Lucas Raskin is the co-founder and CEO of Guardian RF, a defense technology company building passive radiofrequency sensors that detect and track drones. A Georgetown physics major, he turned a 24-hour hackathon project into a Y Combinator-backed company, spent six months embedded with Ukrainian ground troops refining the technology in real combat, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Transportation and Aerospace. Guardian RF's palm-sized Scout sensors and Mosaic mesh network now protect critical infrastructure, defense assets and frontline soldiers from cheap, lethal drones.
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.
Nathan Mintz
Nathan Mintz is the co-founder and CEO of CX2, an El Segundo defense-tech startup building AI-enabled hardware and software to detect, disrupt, and destroy threats in the electromagnetic spectrum. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent 14 years designing radar and electronic-warfare systems at Raytheon and Boeing, he went on to co-found directed-energy unicorn Epirus and automotive-radar company Spartan Radar before launching CX2 in 2024. He argues modern warfare has reached 'consumer scale,' where multimillion-dollar missiles are wasted on cheap drones, and that control of the spectrum now matters as much as supply lines did in the 20th century. CX2 raised a $31M Series A led by Point72 Ventures in May 2025, part of $46M total funding.