Formations · Accelerating
Autonomous Drone
17 companies in the last four YC batches (Fall 2025 – Summer 2026), up from 4 in the four before (Fall 2024 – Summer 2025).
Companies per batch
How many companies in each YC batch belong to this group. Batches with none are left out.
About this formation
The real split inside this formation is between offense and defense, and defense is winning the batch by a wide margin: Earendil Robotics, Vernius Systems, Greypoint Industries, IMPACT Drones, Surtr Defense Systems, Arlo Industries, 9 Mothers, and Milliray are all building ways to detect, track, or kill other people's drones, while only a handful, like Isengard Industries and Seeing Systems, are building the strike drones themselves. That imbalance makes sense given cheap FPV drones have already proven themselves on battlefields, so the economic opportunity has shifted downstream to the problem of stopping a $500 threat with something that doesn't cost $500,000, which is exactly the pitch behind Milliray's radar and Arlo's passive tracking network. A few companies stretch the category's edges in ways worth noting too: Meteoric applies drone autonomy to weather modification over infrastructure, Ornadyne borrows bird biomechanics to beat acoustic and visual detection, and Tornyol takes the same swarm-sensing logic down to killing mosquitoes, showing how portable the underlying stack has become. Despite living inside drone formation, this cluster's growth trails its own parent category, Defense, at 4.41× versus 3.10×, suggesting capital is flowing into defense broadly even faster than into the specific airframes and interceptors built to fight drones. The timing tracks with events like the Ukraine war normalizing mass low-cost drone warfare and counter-drone budgets like the US Replicator initiative opening up starting in 2023, which created real procurement paths for exactly these small-unit, container-shippable systems only in the last two to three years.
Model-written summary (claude-sonnet-5, 2026-10-24), grounded in the companies below. Any sentence on why this is happening now comes from the model’s general knowledge, not from this dataset.
The companies behind the signal 17
Newest batch first.
- Summer 2026Earendil Robotics
Drone swarm defence at a small-unit level. Earendil Robotics builds cUAS solutions for the modern warfighter, enabling effective air defence at the small-unit level. We deliver spotting, engaging, and destroying capabilities through advanced sensors, autonomous interceptors, and integrated systems. Our product lineup covers every stage of the kill chain, complemented by the Drone Warfare Academy that trains soldiers to eliminate enemy drone threats in contested environments. Backed by worldwide frontline combat experience, we equip units with combat-proven tools to counter evolving aerial threats.
- Summer 2026Vernius Systems, Inc.
Mass-deployable radars for air defense. We make mass-deployable radars for unmanned systems. Our first product is Archimedes, a radar seeker that finds and locks onto targets, enabling autonomous intercept on any drone. We have over $580M in LOIs for Archimedes, across some of the largest defense primes in Ukraine, the EU, and the Middle East. Seekers are the most critical and costly component in every autonomous interceptor. Developing a radar seeker takes a 200+ person team at Raytheon and hundreds of millions of dollars. Archimedes is 100x cheaper than existing radar seekers on the market - and is the first product to make it feasible to deploy radars on every drone.
- Summer 2026Greypoint Industries
Building drone swarms that hunt drone operators. We build LEGION, a drone swarm that identifies, geolocates, and tracks every emitter on the battlefield using the enemy’s own radio signals. LEGION enables our warfighters to precisely track previously obscured targets like jammers, command posts, and drone operators so they can proactively respond to threats instead of reacting to them.
- Summer 2026IMPACT Drones
Air Defense as a Service for Civilian Infrastructure.. IMPACT builds autonomous interceptor drones that ship in sealed containers. The box sits at the site it protects, data centers, power grids, airports, bases, with no crew on the pad. When sensors cue a hostile drone, an interceptor pierces its own frangible lid, launches, and rams the target, guided by onboard vision that keeps working when GPS is jammed. Legacy effectors cost $1M+ per shot against $30k threats; ours cost less than the threat and scale with the swarm, the same class of interceptor already downing Shahed drones over Ukraine. Sites subscribe to protection instead of buying missiles, hardware, reloads and monitoring included: Air Defense as a Service. 180M+ USD in signed letters of intent.
- Summer 2026Isengard Industries Inc
Mass-produced AI strike systems and Counter-UAS. Isengard Industries is not another drone company. We build sovereign production: the means for allied nations to make precision-strike and counter-drone systems by the thousand, on their own soil, at a fraction of what the primes charge. We call it Weapons of Mass Production. The Arsenal of Democracy, rebuilt for the drone age. More to come, and only where it helps. You know how to reach us.
- Summer 2026Meteoric
Drones that clear clouds over solar farms and weaken hurricanes. Meteoric is building drones that clear clouds and weaken storms over critical infrastructure like solar farms, airports, defence assets, and ultimately weaken hurricanes.
- Spring 2026AICE
Submarine drones for defense. We are building the next generation of underwater defense systems: autonomous swarms of modular marine drones to secure naval assets and coastal infrastructure against evolving underwater threats.
- Spring 2026Surtr Defense Systems
The hardware-agnostic operating system for drone defense. Surtr builds ParallaxOS, the open operating system for counter-UAS. It takes sensor data from any radar, RF detector, camera, or acoustic array and fuses it into a single unified picture with AI-driven threat classification and engagement recommendations. One interface, any hardware, human in the loop.
- Spring 2026Arlo Industries
Track drones and missiles without radars - Accurate, Passive, Scalable. Arlo Industries is building a network of sensors that precisely tracks stealthy drones and aerial threats better than radars. This capability does not exist yet because traditional radars are built on past war doctrines designed to protect single, centralised assets. Modern warfare, however, demands wide-area, persistent coverage that is both passive and economically scalable. By utilising a mesh architecture, Arlo Industries unlocks unprecedented asymmetric economics. The network is fundamentally built to scale: the cost of adding sensors grows linearly, but the tracking accuracy increases exponentially, delivering highly resilient, persistent coverage for a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. Deo founded Arlo Industries after spending over 6 years in the Israeli defence ecosystem, where he lived through multipl
- Spring 20269 Mothers
Counter Drone Systems. $1.6m sales. We delivered for the DoW.. We have sold $1.6m of systems to the DoW. Multiple systems delivered to the DoW. Our first product - EDDA - is a counter drone system - small, low power, low cost fully autonomous-capable. It's designed to be used on vehicles, bases, or carried - to stop group 1 suicide drones. We have multiple contracts, sales, etc. We have 3 more products with demand in various stages of development. More details at https://9mothers.com
Related formations
Groups that share more companies with this one than chance would explain.