Mara raises $7m to deploy autonomous counter-drone system Spike
Mara, a San Francisco-based defence hardware startup, has closed a $7 million funding round to accelerate deployment of Spike, its integrated counter-small-UAS platform. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund and Indicator Fund, alongside a group of angel investors. The company intends to reach ground-mounted deployment with key customers before the end of 2026.
Founded in October 2024 by Daniel Kofman and Sriram Raghu, Mara was built around the premise that the counter-drone industry had been designed for large, high-altitude threats flying predictable paths, not for the low-cost, swarming first-person-view drones that have become the dominant cause of combat casualties in recent conflicts. The two founders previously co-founded Optivolt, a solar-panel startup that supplied Anduril, the US Air Force and Ukraine, and began their drone work building FPV prototypes for a US Department of Homeland Security programme from their college dorm rooms.
How Spike works
Spike is built around two modular components. The Spotter unit combines electro-optical, acoustic and optional low-signature radar sensors with in-house AI to deliver all-weather, day-and-night detection and tracking. The Seeker is a 250-gram, tube-launched autonomous interceptor capable of speeds up to 200 km/h, with onboard guidance that allows it to close on a target without a human pilot. A human operator remains in the loop to set rules of engagement and can abort launches, but the system can otherwise pass targeting data and launch orders from Spotter to Seeker without manual input at each step.
The platform is designed to provide 360-degree hemispherical coverage from a configuration compact enough to carry in a rucksack, with the same architecture scaling to vehicle-mounted convoy protection or multi-kilometre perimeter defence for military bases and critical infrastructure. Mara says total system cost is intended to remain below the value of the asset being protected, and that each interceptor is cheap enough to be treated as fully expendable.
Field testing has progressed materially. Seeker completed live intercepts cued through US Army software during an exercise in Texas; Spotter operated autonomously on an armoured vehicle during a separate Army exercise in Europe. In July 2026, Ukrainian forces ran Spotter 40 kilometres from the front line, tracking multiple FPV drones in live conditions. Mara has also entered a civilian pilot at a South Korean port, holds cooperative research agreements with three US defence organisations, and was selected for NATO's DIANA innovation accelerator.
Market context and competitive landscape
The counter-UAS sector has attracted substantial capital over the past four years, with established players such as Dedrone, D-Fend Solutions and Epirus offering a range of electronic warfare, directed-energy and kinetic responses. Most existing solutions were architected for the threat environment of the early 2020s: individual drones operating on radio-frequency control links that could be jammed or spoofed. The widespread adoption of fibre-optic tethered FPVs and onboard inertial guidance has rendered electronic countermeasures increasingly ineffective against the latest generation of cheap attack drones, creating the gap Mara is targeting.
Nicole Fraenkel, partner at Khosla Ventures, said: "What caught my eye is that they're building counter-drone autonomy with a system cost that's orders of magnitude lower than anything else we've seen."
Autonomous lethal and near-lethal systems attract close regulatory scrutiny. US Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 requires a human to remain meaningfully in control of lethal force decisions; Mara's stated design, in which a human sets rules of engagement and retains abort authority, is positioned to satisfy that requirement, though exact compliance determinations depend on deployment context. NATO and UK Ministry of Defence partners will apply their own autonomous-weapons review frameworks as engagements mature. Vehicle-mounted and man-portable variants are planned to follow ground-mounted deployment in 2027, at which point production scale-up is expected to begin.