Small drones are rewriting the rules of aerial warfare. What was once the exclusive domain of fighter jets and billion-dollar systems is now being contested by cheap First Person View (FPV) drones flying with extreme precision. Every $800 drone intercepted by a $2M missile erodes asymmetric force advantages and highlights the economic unsustainability of current defense postures. The widespread availability of autonomous, low-cost drones has exposed, in our view, a critical failure in existing air defense systems and revealed an urgent need for next-generation counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) capabilities.

A New Frontier for Air Defense

The proliferation of small drones on the battlefield is more than a tactical evolution; it’s a fundamental disruption of military power structures. Existing weapon systems were engineered for high-end threats like intercontinental ballistic missiles, not mass drone strikes. One drone is a nuisance, but a barrage of fifty can overwhelm decision cycles, sensor bandwidth, and, critically, magazines. Naval vessels may carry as many as one hundred interceptors, but that magazine can be drained in minutes against a dense, multi-vector drone swarm. Defense capabilities are even more limited for smaller platforms and tactical units. Current C-UAS solutions, like high-power microwave systems, promise coverage, but the wide-area energy emitted can’t distinguish between adversary and friendly assets.

On top of this, the speed of tactical innovation has accelerated dramatically. Drone and counter-drone systems now evolve in weeks, not years. Commercial tools are adapted overnight as warfighters, engineers, and builders incorporate daily battlefield lessons. Legacy acquisition systems, designed for decades-long procurement cycles, cannot keep pace.

Rethinking Counter-UAS Defense

At General Catalyst, we support innovators who are bold enough to challenge conventional wisdom to build the resilient systems of the future. This is precisely the case with founders Michael LaFramboise and John Marmaduke. They bring years of optical and photonics experience from leading U.S. laser manufacturers and share an unwillingness to accept that America lacks a mobile, fieldable non-kinetic solution for defense against small autonomous systems.

While others debate technical impossibilities and the power-hungry nature of directed energy systems, Aurelius is building low-size, low-weight, and low-power systems to defend tactical elements using commercial off-the-shelf batteries. Their velocity of innovation, knocking down technical hurdles one after another, has helped the team stand out to us. They were able to demonstrate a prototype in just days, and in less than 18 months they were in the field working with operators on their most urgent requirements. They are now building a talented team, with ex-DoD and ex-IC operators alongside top-tier engineers from autonomy, AI, and mission systems.

Our Conversation with Michael LaFramboise

We recently sat down with Michael to learn more about how Aurelius is challenging conventional wisdom to build the future of C-UAS defense. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Innovating in the defense industry is notoriously challenging, with founders needing to navigate complex technical challenges, legacy incumbents, and other barriers. How are you approaching building in the drone and counter-drone space?

If in a normal startup you need to be 100x better than existing solutions or methods, in our space you may need to be 10,000x better. The time and difficulty it takes to get through the acquisition cycle necessitates having a very clear path from the beginning about what you're going to build, who it's for, and why it matters. 

In our case, this all is very clear: we’re supporting the U.S. and our allies to protect critical personnel and infrastructure without needing to worry about small- and medium-size drones. We do so by providing a differentiated range and cost for targeting and destroying drones. Our marginal cost of shootdown is around $0.10 per drone, compared to the standard $200,000 for a single-use cUAS drone or $2M for a missile.

What is the future you’re seeking to create?

Whether it’s a fight with a near-peer adversary or a non-state actor, the reality is that drone swarms built with $1,000 worth of commercial off-the-shelf hardware can be used to threaten trillions of dollars of military and civilian infrastructure and put countless lives at risk. Ukraine offers a glimpse into this future: warfighters can’t move between lines, advance supplies, or evacuate the wounded because they’re attacked any time they try to leave their positions, and expensive materiel is destroyed by FPV drones that are produced at 0.001% the cost. This is a clear problem.

My end goal is to solve this problem. I see a future in which our military will be able to project force again without threat of constant harassment by drones and our infrastructure and citizens will be protected from these swarms.

Building relationships with Department of Defense stakeholders is crucial for defense tech companies. How are you approaching customer discovery at this stage?

One of the great things about this industry is how collaborative it is. For sure, it’s difficult to find and engage with all the stakeholders that matter, but when you do get in contact they want to help as much as they can. Congressional supporters, national labs, innovation cells, defense primes, other startups, and the Program Executive Offices themselves want us to succeed.

Customer discovery at the beginning seemed impossible, but at this point our message is out there. We're engaging many of the existing labs and PEOs, as well as exploring partnerships with existing companies. And we’ve been getting much more inbound interest and support from end-users than I could have expected when starting out.

Directed energy has been an active area of research for decades. What breakthrough insight are you building on that is obvious to you but not to others?

Directed energy has been an area of interest for roughly 40 years, starting with massive weapon systems developed to shoot down ballistic missiles. But for counter-small-unmanned aerial systems, you don’t need a massive system with specialized hardware. You need to leverage advances in software, compute, and photonics to get size, weight, and power down so you can deploy a system that works with existing operations and infrastructure.

‍That’s why we’re co-leading the seed round for Aurelius Systems, a modern defense tech company developing low-cost, low-power mobile laser systems capable of neutralizing drone threats. Aurelius' modular, software-defined C-UAS systems featuring near-bottomless magazines detect, prioritize, and defeat FPV and massed drone attacks in seconds at range, leveraging real-time targeting and scalable capabilities that grow with the threat.

My biggest challenges were initially related to getting in front of the right DoD stakeholders, which we've largely been able to do now. Currently, my biggest challenge is around hiring quickly enough and spreading the directed energy gospel.