If you know anything about drones, you know that there are a whole lot of them and a whole lot of companies making them.
Integration startup Picogrid knows this better than anyone. The El Segundo-based company builds products that make these drones—and all of the other tech and software on the battlefield—work together. Like glue, but high-tech and lethal.
And now, the company is doing some teaming of its own. On Tuesday, Picogrid announced it’s entering into a long-distance relationship with French UAS software firm Alta Ares, which builds autonomous guidance systems for interceptor drones. Alta Ares will join Picogrid’s “partner ecosystem,” and its software will be integrated into Picogrid’s flagship Legion platform.
Making friends: Picogrid was founded in 2020 by Zane Mountcastle and Martin Slosarik with one goal: to make all sorts of autonomous systems work together. “We build both the hardware and software middleware—the infrastructure to connect and deploy these network systems at a large scale,” Mountcastle told Tectonic.
“Bridging them, taking that information, connecting it to the real world, and linking it back” creates a cohesive command-and-control function, he added, and “that’s where we come in for Alta Ares.”
Right on target: Alta Ares, meanwhile, develops autonomous guidance systems for low-cost and scalable interceptor drones.
- Their “computer vision” software takes images from drone feeds to spot and geolocate military targets in real time using AI.
- They won the NATO Innovation Challenge for successfully detecting, intercepting, and neutralizing a glide bomb earlier this year.
- They also claim dual citizenship in France and Ukraine, where their tech has been deployed for several years.
“Alta Ares is a French company,” CEO Hadrien Canter told Tectonic, “but we first started to work in Ukraine, where we developed computer vision algorithms for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
That battlefield validation was a big factor in why Picogrid partnered with them. “Alta Ares is really exceptional because the technology they built and are building on is derived from data collected from the battlefield in Ukraine,” Mountcastle said.
Better together: As partners, Picogrid’s Legion software, which can pull together data from dispersed air defense sensors, will integrate with Alta Ares’ Gamma, which autonomously guides interceptor drones toward threats, creating “a compact, modular sensor-to-shooter capability,” according to the company.
And the two companies already know it will work. At a NATO exercise in France last month, Picogrid and Alta Ares tested their tech integration. “That was where we first got in the dirt together,” Mountcastle said. “It worked better than we expected.”
They have a couple more exercises coming up, and Canter says their engineers are already working together to implement Picogrid’s C2 system on “numerous drones here in Ukraine.”
Teaming up also gives them access to each other’s customers. “We have some contracts with NATO, for example, that we try to plug Picogrid into, and the same for them,” Canter added.
Closing the loop: Picogrid already has a pretty impressive ecosystem of hardware and software partners, including drone-maker Skydio. Alta Ares could make that partnership into a throuple.
“Skydio is building the physical systems, the drones that actually fly around in the real world. We’re building an orchestration and integration layer between them. Alta Ares is able to actually access information and do something with it now,” Mountcastle told Tectonic.
It’s one thing to detect threats, “but now being able to take that detection, localize it, and then respond to it, both kinetically or non-kinetically—that loop is virtually impossible for any one of us to close independently,” he added. “By wiring these different capabilities together, we can assemble incredibly complex, sophisticated systems very, very quickly, and it makes all of us stronger in the process.”