Perseus Defense

Perseus Defense is building a mass-manufactured Counter UAS solution for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Current solutions are one-to-one, too dangerous for use on U.S. soil, and orders of magntiude more expensive than the threats they defeat. Our self-guided missile platform is man-portable and multi-domain capable. It senses, engages, and eliminates threats with drastically reduced cost per engagement over existing kinetic solutions. Solving this critical national security problem requires understanding complex DoD needs along with actual rocket science including aerodynamics, guidance, navigation, control, and much more. Jason and Steve met at Penn State while they pursued their PhD and MS in aerospace engineering, respectively. Their past experiences designing space helicopters for NASA, making Boeing airliners land autonomously, controlling swarms of unmanned autonomous systems, teaching aerospace engineering at Stanford, winning multiple ONR and DOE engineering competitions, and founding an international drone competition makes them the perfect team to create transformative solutions protecting our service members. "If you build this, it will be mandatory equipment for every truck, boat, and convoy in the U.S. Military. We're talking thousands of units." - Former DoD Procurement Officer The White House just released Executive Order, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance" which adds billions of dollars, government support, and streamlined regulations to enable the development of our product. Traction: Jason and Steve used more than 100 end-user interviews across the DoD and DHS to shape the product to something of critical need to both boots on the ground and DoD purchasers. In 8 short weeks following a strict 2-week design-build-test cycle, the team has gone through 4 major guided missile iterations with over 30 live-fire flight tests. They were invited to Ft. Hood to present their platform to the 1st Cavalry Division, and also briefed the Pentagon and U.S. congressmen on current U.S. vulnerabilities to advanced drone technology. Perseus Defense is actively standing up cooperative research agreements with U.S. Army DEVCOM's Applied Research Laboratory, Aviation and Missile Center, Armaments Center, and High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

YC batch

S25 · Summer 2025

Status, per YC

Active

Category

Other

Team size

3

Location

Austin, TX, USA

Checked

1h ago