DroneTector Builds Radars That Can See the $50 Drones Nobody Else Can Detect

The Macro: Drones Got Cheap Faster Than Detection Got Smart

The drone threat problem is real and getting worse on a timeline that should concern anyone who runs an airport, a power plant, or a military installation. Consumer drones now cost less than a nice dinner. They can be modified with minimal effort. They fly low, they are small, and they are invisible to most existing radar systems.

Traditional radar was designed to detect aircraft. Planes are big, they fly high, they move at predictable speeds, and they have large radar cross-sections. Drones are the opposite of all those things. They are small, they fly low, they hover, they change direction suddenly, and their radar signatures are often indistinguishable from birds. Existing military and aviation radar systems were never designed for this, and retrofitting them has proven difficult and expensive.

The counter-drone market is estimated to grow past $10 billion by 2030. Solutions range from radio-frequency jammers to directed energy weapons to net guns. But before you can counter a drone, you need to detect it. And detection is the hardest part of the problem.

Companies like Dedrone, DroneShield, and Blighter are working on detection from various angles, using RF sensors, acoustic detection, and radar. But DroneTector’s pitch is that existing radar systems are fundamentally limited because they were not designed from scratch for small drone targets.

The Micro: Physics PhDs Building Purpose-Built Radar

DroneTector builds high-frequency radar systems designed from the ground up to detect low-signature targets. This is not commercial radar repurposed for drone detection. It is purpose-built hardware optimized for the specific challenge of seeing small, slow, low-flying objects against noisy backgrounds.

The “designed from the ground up” part matters. Most counter-drone radar takes existing radar technology and tries to tune it for smaller targets. DroneTector started with the physics of what makes small drones hard to detect and built the radar architecture around that problem. The result, according to the company, is the ability to detect and track targets that existing systems miss entirely.

The target customers are airports, critical infrastructure operators, and defense organizations. The company has backing from NATO and the UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), which is a significant validation signal. Getting through NATO’s procurement and evaluation process is not easy, and DASA funding means the UK government considers the technology promising enough to invest in.

Dr. Matthew Moore (CEO), Dr. Thomas Doherty (CTO), and Dr. Jordina Frances de Mas (COO) are the founders. Moore has a PhD in Physics from St Andrews specializing in millimeter-wave radar. Doherty has a PhD in Atomic and Laser Physics from Oxford. Frances de Mas has a PhD in Computer Science from St Andrews focused on automated reasoning and machine learning. Three PhDs building radar hardware is the kind of founding team composition you almost never see in a startup, and it signals that the technical challenge is genuinely deep. The company went through Y Combinator’s W26 batch.

The airspace security framing, “made measurable,” suggests DroneTector is positioning not just as a detection tool but as a way to quantify drone activity in a given airspace. That data layer could be as valuable as the detection itself for compliance, risk assessment, and insurance purposes.

The Verdict

DroneTector is a hard-tech company solving a hard-tech problem, and the founding team has the academic credentials to back up the ambition. The NATO and DASA backing provides credibility that most early-stage defense startups lack.

At 30 days: field performance. Radar that works in a lab is not radar that works at an airport with ground clutter, weather, and birds. Real-world detection rates and false positive rates are the only metrics that matter.

At 60 days: regulatory integration. Airports and critical infrastructure have strict procurement processes. How smoothly does DroneTector fit into existing airspace management systems?

At 90 days: the international market. Drone threats are global but defense procurement is local. Can DroneTector navigate the regulatory and export control complexities of selling radar technology to multiple countries?

I think DroneTector is one of the most technically serious companies I have looked at recently. The problem is urgent, the team is credentialed, and the institutional backing is strong. The challenge is the long sales cycle inherent in defense and critical infrastructure markets. Building great radar is hard. Selling it to governments might be harder.