Aurelius Systems.

Aurelius Systems builds directed-energy weapons that shoot down drones. Its system, Archimedes, is an autonomous counter-UAS laser: optical sensors and machine learning detect and track a threat, and a laser neutralizes it in seconds. No operator sits in the loop, and no interceptor is expended.

The problem is arithmetic. Small drones are cheap and the missiles fired at them are expensive, so any defense that trades an expensive interceptor for every cheap drone loses on price before it loses on the battlefield. A laser engagement costs roughly the electricity behind it. Archimedes can draw that power from grid, generator, or battery, and switch between sources.

What they're building

A single Archimedes unit carries the complete kill chain, from detection and tracking through engagement. Optical sensing paired with machine learning handles detection and targeting in real time, and the system runs without an operator. The hardware is built on commercial off-the-shelf components, which keeps it compact and field-portable and makes it simple to maintain. Deployed in numbers, units network into a resilient defense grid.

Archimedes has run outside the lab. The company says it has been tested and operated in live field conditions, including adverse weather, and recently demonstrated autonomous directed energy at the T-REX 26-2 experimentation event. Aurelius also runs its own manufacturing arm, Aurelius Manufacturing, building the systems in America rather than outsourcing the part of the business that decides whether you can ship.

Why we backed the founders and team

Directed energy has been ten years away for fifty years. The physics worked; the packaging did not. Power, thermal management, beam control, and target acquisition kept lasers on test ranges instead of in the field. Aurelius's bet is that cheap optics and cheap compute, combined with modern machine learning, have turned those into engineering problems, and that the winner will be whoever does the unglamorous integration work fastest.

That is our kind of company. Drones made offense cheap, and Aurelius is making defense cheap again. Little of that shows up in announcements. The day-to-day is sensors that hold a track in bad weather, power systems that run off whatever is available, and a factory that can build the next hundred units.