Mara Raises Seven Million Dollar for Counter-Drone Technology 

Modern warfare is increasingly being conducted by unmanned aerial systems (UAS, that is, drones), as can be seen in Ukraine and the Middle East. First person-view (FPV) drones, costing only a few hundred dollars, can disable a million-dollar vehicle or knock out power for millions of people. Most of the counter-drone industry, however, is focused on targeting large drones flying overhead in predictable courses.

Increasingly, small FPVs are launched from anywhere, attacking at any angle and in any formation. Fiber-optic control links and onboard guidance can help them bypass traditional electronic jamming. These drones are the leading cause of casualties in combat worldwide. Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb in June 2025 showed the world the capabilities of FPV drones to destroy strategic and civilian targets far from the battlefield.

Into this came Mara, a defense contractor start-up. Today, the company announced a seven-million-dollar pre-seed round to bring its integrated counter-UAS platform Spike from field-testing to actual deployment. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund and Indicator Fund, and others.

Unlike older counter-drone systems that rely on guns, lasers, or semi-piloted interceptors, which can only attach one target at a time, Mara created a distributed, omnidirectional defense

“Small drones changed the battlefield because they distributed the cost and capability of precise attack,” said Daniel Kofman, Co-Founder and CEO of Mara. “Most defenses still concentrate both replacement cost and line of fire. Spike instead creates a distributed mesh of small, cheap nodes that can each aim and shoot in multiple directions at once.”

Using stationary targeting sensors and a magazine of tiny interceptors, Spike's Spotter targeting system has a 360-degree hemispherical coverage, accounting for visuals, accoustics, and radar. Additionally, it is equipped with an advanced, in-house AI system for day, night, and weather detection. Its Seeker kinetic interceptor is small and deadly, weighing 250 grams (about nine ounces) and traveling 200 kilometers per hour (about 124 mph). Designed to be fully responsive to the sensors, Spike can fire at dozens of targets simultaneously at a system cost below the protected asset. Orders can be passed directly from the targeting system to the interception system, though a human remains in the loop to set rules of engagement and abort launches if necessary.

Mara intends to make Spike in different scales, including a portable configuration and vehicle mounted ones that can cover an convey. Even larger deployments could protect perimeters around military bases, power plants, or sporting events.

Mara was founded in October 2024 by Daniel Kofman and Sriram Raghu, who have been working together since they met in high school in 2013. Their first drone project was a tactical FPV prototype for a Department of Homeland Security program and was assembled in their college dorm rooms. The pair would be two of the founders of Optivolt, a solar panel company that shipped smart panels to Anduril, USAF, and Ukraine. They founded Mara out of the conviction that the industry had left the most important and lethal defense gap wide open.

Spike components have been moving into live field exercises over the last several months. Seeker completed intercepts through US Army software in an exercise in Texas. Spotter operated on an armored vehicle in an exercise in Europe autonomously, feeding detected data into Army command software. End-to-end engagement was demonstrated in a field test of a Special Operations unit, where Spotter detected a target and sent orders for Seeker to launch without operator input. Ukrainian forces operated Spotter forty kilometers from the front lines in July, where it tracked multiple drones. Mara has deployed Spiek in a civilian pilot at a South Korean port.

The company has cooperative research and testing agreements with three US defense organizations, was selected for NATO’s DIANA innovation accelerator and is in early-stage engagement with international military partners in the UK, Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

“Mara has moved rapidly from proof-of-concept to user testing for an autonomous system,” said Nicole Fraenkel, Partner at Khosla Ventures. “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.”

Mara hopes to deploy Spike for ground use by key customers by the end of the year. Vehicle-mounted and portable should come when production scales up in 2027. Then it will continue its mission to use machine autonomy to defend human autonomy by mass-producing an arsenal of cheap, tiny robots that dominate the line of contact in any battle: land, air, or sea.