The CET Brief

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...

GPS signals are inherently weak — and adversaries know it. From contested battlefields in the Middle East and Ukraine to civilian airspace over Europe, jamming and spoofing have become standard tools of disruption. In this episode, Omer Sharar, CEO of infiniDome, walks us through how his team built a modular anti-jamming system that protects platforms without replacing existing hardware — sitting...

ASIO has quietly become one of Israel's most operationally proven defense startups — with over 10,000 combat flight hours on its optical navigation systems and products deployed across multiple armed forces. In this conversation, co-founder and CEO Tomer Malchi walks us through how ASIO got started, the culture that drives a sub-50-person team to compete with defense giants, and the technology beh...