Autonomous drone intercept startup Mara raises $7M to combat FPV threats

Other backers include a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund, Indicator Fund, and several angel investors. Mara said the funding will support the shift from testing to operational use of Spike, which is designed to defend against small FPV drones that have become a dominant threat in modern conflicts.

The urgency stems from the changing nature of warfare highlighted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Small FPV drones, costing only a few hundred dollars to build, have become the single deadliest threat on the modern battlefield. These cheap, fast, and nimble unmanned aerial systems can destroy armored vehicles and disable multimillion-dollar infrastructure. They are also the leading cause of combat casualties globally, and are becoming more sophisticated, with fiber-optic links or onboard AI allowing them to bypass standard electronic jamming and strike targets thousands of kilometers behind front lines.

Traditional counter-UAS systems were designed for larger, high-altitude aircraft on predictable flight paths. Conventional weapons and human-operated interceptor drones struggle against massive swarms of low-altitude FPV drones launching coordinated attacks from multiple directions.

Mara’s Spike is an automated counter-swarm platform that provides 360-degree defense at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. It comprises two components: Spotter, a targeting unit with visual, acoustic, and optional radar sensors operated by onboard AI, and Seeker, a 250-gram kinetic interceptor drone launched from a tube reaching speeds of 200 km/h. Spotter identifies enemy drones, provides coordinates to Seeker, launches it, and Seeker’s AI can take over to ensure interception. The system keeps humans in the loop to abort launches and set rules of engagement.

Mara co-founder and CEO Daniel Kofman said small UASes changed the battlefield because they made precise attacks cheap and easy to launch, while existing defenses are ineffective. “Most defenses still concentrate on both replacement cost and line of fire,” he said. “Spike instead creates a distributed mesh of small, cheap nodes that can each aim and shoot in multiple directions at once.”

The startup has impressed in field testing with partners including the U.S. Army and Ukrainian armed forces. It completed intercept trials cued by Army software in Texas, operated hands-free on armored vehicles during a European exercise, and was tested by Ukrainian forces tracking multiple UAS threats from 40 kilometers behind front lines. Mara also joined NATO’s DIANA accelerator program and deployed Spike at a commercial port in South Korea as part of a pilot.

Nicole Fraenkel, a partner at Khosla Ventures, said Mara has moved rapidly from proof-of-concept to field testing. “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,” she said.

The next step for Mara is to build and deploy ground-mounted versions of Spike with initial defense customers by the end of the year, followed by vehicle-mounted and portable rucksack configurations in 2027.