Counter-Swarm Defense

Cheap drone swarms give attackers the cost advantage, and today's patchwork defenses aren't built for them. YC wants a counter-swarm stack that works like a real-time distributed system.

YC's request points to a recent drone attack on an AWS data center and warns that the next threat is coordinated swarms: cheap, autonomous and jam-resistant. A Patriot missile costs about $3 million; an FPV drone about $500. Today's defenses are a patchwork of radars, cameras, jammers and interceptors that don't talk to each other.

The ask: interceptors that stop many drones at once, software that fuses every sensor and defender into one real-time picture, new non-kinetic defenses, and attacks on the swarm's autonomy. YC expects the winners to look "more like Cloudflare than Raytheon."

Read the full request on YC →