The CET Brief

Detection of small drones has improved rapidly, but the gap between identifying a threat and defeating it affordably remains wide open; spending a hundred thousand dollars to stop a thousand-dollar drone is a losing equation at scale. David Yahid speaks with Aaron Prat, CEO of Tehiru Aerial Systems, who came out of IDF Unit 8200 and pivoted the company into counter-UAS after October 7 following di...

Every person, vehicle, and vessel emits radio signals, but most security operations treat the electromagnetic environment as invisible noise rather than a source of intelligence. David Yahid speaks with Dr. Jonathan Abir, CEO and Co-Founder of GuaRdF, who built the company from operational gaps his team identified in signal intelligence and frontline decision-making during Israeli military service...

Armored vehicles protect their crews by sealing them inside, but that same protection strips away awareness of threats outside, above, and at close range. David Yahid speaks with Ido Rozenberg, President and CTO of Axon Vision, who founded the company nine years ago with teammates from elite IDF technical units, long before edge AI in defense became a category. Axon Vision embeds AI into military...

Autonomous drones need to land on moving vehicles, refuel in midair, and coordinate across platforms, but camera-based tracking demands heavy compute and fails at the speeds contested operations require. David Yahid speaks with Mark Goldfarb, CEO and co-founder of Sixdof Space, whose core sensor originated in AR/VR head tracking before pivoting to defense after an encounter with ELTA at CES. The s...

The missing piece in autonomous marine defense is not the boat - it's the ability to get it back, refuel it, and keep it operating. Amitai Peleg, Co-Founder and CEO of Sealartec, reveals how his team is solving the logistics bottleneck that has kept unmanned surface vessels from scaling, and why that breakthrough could change naval operations worldwide. David Yahid of CET Sandbox sits down with Am...

Spectrum dominance is becoming a battlefield necessity, and Sensorz is building the stack that helps militaries detect, classify, and react to RF threats in subseconds. Meir Friedland explains why the old way of handling signals intelligence is breaking under the pressure of drones, GPS spoofing, software-defined radios, and an exploding number of waveforms. I sat down with Meir Friedland, Co-Foun...

Drone swarms are changing the math of modern air defense. A single interceptor going up against a single drone was always an economically strained equation — but when the threat is dozens or hundreds of coordinated drones arriving at once, traditional systems start to break down entirely. In this episode, David Yahid speaks with Ido Bar-On, Co-founder and CEO of Skapion, about building a purpose-b...

In Gaza, Elad Amar watched soldiers drop their rifles mid-contact to pick up a joystick, just to get eyes in the sky. That single tradeoff, weapon readiness for situational awareness, became the problem he built a company to solve. In this episode of The CET Brief, David Yahid talks with Elad Amar, CEO and founder of PYRRHUS Aeronautics, about LADRS, a weapon-mounted remote system that lets soldie...

Modern drones don't need to trust GPS, and they don't need to broadcast their intentions. They can spoof coordinates, hop between multiple links, and go dark whenever it suits them. For years, counter-drone detection assumed emitters would play by the rules. R2 Wireless was built on the realization that they won't. In this episode of The CET Brief, David Yahid sits down with Onn Fenig,...

Testing RF systems has always meant one of two things: expensive lab hardware or expensive field time. Neither scales, and neither works when the environment you're trying to replicate is a battlefield, not a bench. In this episode, I sit down with Daniel Ferber and Barr, founders of RFix AI, who set out to solve that problem with software instead of steel. Their platform simulates complex RF...

The modern battlefield has made GPS unreliable. Jamming, spoofing, and degraded signal environments are now standard operating conditions, and most drone systems weren't built for that reality. Yonatan Samet is the CTO of Sightec, an Israeli defense tech company that has spent years solving exactly that problem. Sightec builds vision-based autonomy software that allows drones and UAVs to navig...

Getting power to the front line has always been a logistics challenge. Getting clean, reliable, on-demand energy there, without a supply chain built around gaseous hydrogen or diesel generators, is a different problem entirely. Omer Hiram is the co-founder of IonFlux, an Israeli energy tech company building a system that generates hydrogen and electricity directly in the field, using solid aluminu...

Modern warfare doesn't just see you with the naked eye. It sees you in thermal, in radar, in electro-optical. And most camouflage solutions were built for a different era. Arnon Kraemer is the CEO and founder of Invisig, an Israeli defense tech company building what he calls an electronic chameleon: a smart, multispectral signature management system that helps vehicles and critical assets evad...

True drone swarm autonomy doesn't come from software alone — it requires hardware that lets drones communicate directly with each other without relying on a central controller or vulnerable communication links. SpherePoint is building that hardware layer by repurposing off-the-shelf automotive radar chips into tactical transponders that enable peer-to-peer drone communication, jam-resistant co...

Autonomous drones, manned aircraft, sensors, and effectors are flooding the battlespace — but without a coordination layer, more platforms just means more chaos. Airwayz is building the operating system that synchronizes human and autonomous systems across air, ground, and maritime domains. In this episode, Yaron Rosen, Executive Chairman of Airwayz, draws on a career spanning military aviation, c...

Traditional threat detection systems depend on centralized infrastructure, GPS, and constant connectivity exactly the things that fail first in contested environments. Noxtar built a portable, AI-powered detection node that processes raw physics data at the edge, operates for up to six hours on battery, and networks with other nodes through a resilient mesh, all without calling home. In this episo...

After October 7, the Israeli defense establishment's timeline for unmanned ground vehicles compressed from years to weeks. Ottopia pivoted from civilian autonomous driving to military applications and was retrofitting large combat vehicles within days of the conflict. In this episode, Amit Rosenzweig, founder of Ottopia, explains how his team built a hybrid autonomy platform that blends AI, te...

Radar is expensive, optics need line of sight, and RF detection fails when drones switch to fiber optic control. Insignito is solving the drone detection problem with sound. In this episode, Itay Nourian, CEO of Insignito, explains how his team turned decades of acoustics expertise from a specialized Israeli military unit into a passive detection system that identifies drones at up to five kilomet...

Operating a single drone is a solved problem. Operating hundreds simultaneously across continents — with compliance, safety, and zero specialized pilots — is a fundamentally different challenge. In this episode, Shai Levy, CEO and co-founder of FlightOps, explains how his team built a software platform that has already powered over half a million drone missions across utilities, infrastructure, de...

In GPS-denied environments with no comms and no pre-loaded maps, soldiers and drones still need to know exactly where they are and what surrounds them. ReSight built a system that generates real-time 3D maps using nothing but visual data on low-power edge devices. In this episode, Omri Stein, founder and CEO of ReSight, explains how a company originally built around AR cloud technology pivoted to...

Building an autonomous vehicle from scratch takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Bluewhite skips that entirely — retrofitting existing vehicles with a kit-based autonomy system that can be installed in under a day. In this episode, Ben Alfi, co-founder of Bluewhite and former Israeli Air Force combat pilot, explains how his team built a modular autonomy stack with over 100,000 hours of...

When infrastructure is destroyed, jammed, or never existed in the first place, military forces still need to communicate. Commcrete is solving that problem with ultra-lightweight satcom devices that deliver voice, data, and blue force tracking with sub-quarter-second latency — even under active jamming. In this episode, Ofer Kotler, COO of Commcrete, draws on 30 years in special operations and tec...

Facial recognition fails in the dark, at distance, and when targets are masked. Motion Analytics is building a different approach — identifying individuals by the way they move. In this episode, Adi Natan, founder and CEO of Motion Analytics, explains how his team combined deep biomechanical research with physically informed neural networks to create a system that generates unique identity signatu...

Friendly fire remains one of the most persistent and devastating failures on the modern battlefield — and it's getting worse as drones, urban warfare, and multi-domain operations add layers of complexity to the identification problem. In this episode, Meir Rapaport, CEO of Intact, shares the deeply personal story behind the company's founding — friends lost to fratricide — and how that motivation...

Most military drones still rely on a human operator for every critical decision. Wonder Robotics is building the technology to change that. In this episode, Or Epstein, co-founder of Wonder Robotics, walks us through how his team developed an AI-powered pod that retrofits existing drones with full autonomy — including guidance, targeting, and navigation in GPS-denied environments — using off-the-s...