If you’ve learned one thing from this newsletter, we hope it’s that everyone and their mom wants to find a cheaper, better, faster way to shoot drones out of the sky. Some shoot them with mini-missiles, others hit them with jammers, and others still send counter-drones to pick them out of the sky.
But that all focuses on the drones themselves. This morning, electronic warfare company CX2 unveiled a different approach: They’ve built a little radio frequency (RF) seeker plug-in for FPV drones called Vadris that can ID where a drone is being flown from. The idea is pretty simple—rather than going for the drones themselves, target the pilot.
“Everybody [is] trying to shoot down the drone, not go after the ground control,” CX2 CEO Nathan Mintz told Tectonic. “We said, ‘Well, you know, you’re much better off shooting the archer than taking down the arrows.’ This is designed to allow us to go on offense.”
Sounds pretty good, unless you’re the pilot.
Ride the waves: First, a bit about CX2. The company was founded in 2024 in El Segundo by a flashy team including:
- Nathan Mintz, ex‐EW/radar engineer at Raytheon & Boeing and an Epirus co-founder, now CEO
- Mark Trefgarne, tech entrepreneur of LiveRail and Meta fame, now president
- Porter Smith, former a16z investor and DIU fellow, now head of warfare
- Lee Thompson, former head of RF engineering at SpaceX, now head of hardware
Pretty unsurprisingly, given those resumes, CX2 has been a hit with big-time investors. Back in May, the company raised a $31M Series A led by Point72 Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Pax Ventures.
Race to dominate: The main goal of CX2, per its site, is to “deliver spectrum dominance.” In real terms, that means controlling the electromagnetic (EM) and RF domain across land, sea, air, and space. The company says its products fall into three nifty categories:
- Find: capabilities that detect and track RF emitters over large areas, beefed up with edge-capable AI for denied environments.
- Fix: capabilities that locate and classify emitters even in jammed environments, capturing high-resolution “images” of who’s giving out RF signals, and where.
- Finish: RF targeting and disruption capabilities that enable a kinetic or EW response to whatever is giving off those signals.
Out for delivery: Vadris fits neatly into this approach. The takeout container-sized sensor suite can plug into pretty much any FPV—the picture-perfect quadcopter you think of when you think of drones—and turn it into a drone-pilot-seeker.
Here’s how it works:
- Vadris has four antennas that pick up RF signatures from other drones and ground controllers (a “very unique set of frequencies and waveforms,” Mintz said).
- Once the package picks something up, Vadris calculates the angle of arrival for those comms links, follows them down to the ground, and triangulates where the pilot is likely to be.
- The friendly FPV pilot can see this all overlaid on their control interface (goggles, etc.) and use it to find and target whatever or whoever is controlling swarms of drones.
- The company is already working on integrations for Vadris that would enable targeting, Mintz said. They’re developing a “software-defined” version that could be updated as adversaries play around with RF signatures.
- Mintz said that Vadris has worked at a range of “several” kilometers. The idea is that “if [one] could control a drone at [a certain] range, we can detect it,” he said.
Plus, the setup is cheap and, according to CX2, adaptable and easy to use: The whole thing costs less than $10,000 and is pretty much platform-agnostic.
“They’re actually being tested and evaluated by operators with about five minutes of training in about a four square kilometer like city type environment,” Mintz said. “They went seven for seven [in terms of] finding the ground controller in about three minutes. If you were to go block by block with your eyeballs and do it, [that] could take hours.”
So far, the kit has been tested on half a dozen exercises, Mintz added.
On the horizon: And don’t worry, the fun doesn’t stop here—from the sounds of it, it’s going to be a pretty exciting couple of weeks for CX2 and Vadris.
Mintz said that they’re working on partnerships with small drone companies that should be announced in the next few weeks, plus a few prime contracts and subcontracts that are “either definitized or being definitized right now.”
They’re also planning to secure combat validation early next year. Pew pew, indeed.