Frying them with microwaves, shooting them down with robo-machine guns, jamming them—counter-UAS companies keep rolling out a growing and creative array of ways to take down drones.
Askari has a different take on it. Rather than building vehicle-based or fixed-site air defense systems, the Atlanta-based startup wants to—quite literally—put interceptors into the hands of frontline operators.
And that bet’s paying off: In an exclusive release to Tectonic this morning, Askari announced that they’ve raised $9M in seed funding to ramp up production and deliver on a growing order book that’s quickly passed $2M.
- Builders VC led the round, with participation from Sovereign’s Capital, Swell VC, Rule 1 Ventures, WaterStone Impact Fund, and a team of defense CEOs, including Umbra’s Gabe Dominocielo, Firestorm’s Dan Magy, Aeon’s Naweed Tahmas, and others.
- The round brings the startup’s total funding to around $11M and, according to CEO Robbie Van Zyl, was “mega, mega oversubscribed,” with Askari turning away “about $4M to $6M in additional capital.”
Young guns: Askari, which emerged from stealth in April, is another one of those defense startups founded by preternaturally technical and ambitious kids.
The 25-year-old founders, Van Zyl and Ben Airdo, met as engineering students and drone building and racing teammates at Georgia Tech. After stints at Anduril, Skydio, Raytheon, and Hermeus, the pair saw a gap in the c-UAS market and decided to team up again, this time with Robbie’s brother Marc, to fill it.
That gap was “the dismounted operator, this forgotten-about area where everybody’s building for like base defense and vehicle-borne solutions,” Van Zyl told Tectonic. “Very few companies are building for the guy or the girl at the front lines, so we’ve gone after that.”
- “It’s also interesting because once you build for the dismounted operator—the atoms of warfare, like the smallest units that make up a lot of our warfare—it’s very easy to scale up to vehicle-borne solutions, then to point defense, and then to larger base defense in the future,” as opposed to doing it the other way around, he added.
Handheld hunters: So far, the company has two main hand-launched interceptors on offer, both fully autonomous (no controller or manual input “other than a stand-down functionality”), computer vision-guided, and hit-to-kill (though they’ve built in space for a small warhead).
- Rift Alpha, which is designed for Group 1 and 2 UAS and can be deployed from an operator’s hand, a tube, or a box. It has a range of about 2km and a top speed of around 60 meters per second (roughly 134mph), and Van Zyl says an individual operator can carry “around one or two in a standard military rucksack.”
- Rift Bravo, which has a much smaller and super-packable and foldable form factor (a dozen can fit in a rucksack), a range of about 1km, and can also fly “north of 100mph.” The Bravo is designed for Group 1 UAS and is still in the development phase, which is being supported by “non-dilutive R&D contracts,” he added.
Point and shoot: The goal with the two systems is to effectively create a kind of drone-downing “flashlight, which you can point in the direction [of the target], it launches from your hand, and it kinetically and fully autonomously engages these UAVs and makes them disappear,” Van Zyl said. “We were just on site with a Tier One customer in the middle of the California desert and were reaching damn near 90 percent intercept rates.”
That’s been a hit with those customers, who are “predominantly in the special operations community,” he added. Askari has racked up over $2M in “real procurement contracts with a lot of America’s elite operators,” and “customers are absolutely loving this—they’re finally able to, from their hand, kinetically intercept and destroy everything from FPVs to larger Group 2 UAVs.”
- Those orders are for the Alpha variant, but they’re seeing a ton of interest in the smaller Bravo one, too.
- Despite the demand from SOCOM components, the Department of Homeland Security was Askari’s first paying customer.
A big chunk of the $9M in fresh capital will be directed to ramping up production and bringing on new engineering and operations hires, but Askari has its eyes on bigger things down the line.
One path they’re exploring—and seeing a ton of demand for—is adapting their existing interceptors to take out ground vehicles. Another is “building a lot of the tooling that automates the future design of interceptors, such that we can build the Coca Cola freestyle machine of drone interceptors,” Van Zyl said. “In the future, customers can click a button for a new use case or a new threat, and we can deliver new hardware and software to address that threat within 72 hours.”
What are they feeding these kids?