San Francisco defense startup Mara has raised $7 million in a pre-seed round to produce Spike, a backpack-portable counter-drone system that uses 250 g (≈8.8 oz) autonomous interceptors called Seekers. The complete Spike system costs between $30,000 and $100,000 depending on the number of Seekers included, and Mara says each Seeker is designed to cost no more than the few-hundred-dollar FPV quadcopters they are intended to destroy. Those quadcopters, which can carry munitions capable of destroying armored vehicles worth millions, are reported to be a leading cause of Ukrainian combat casualties.
A single Spike launcher holds up to 48 Seekers and can reload in less than a minute. Per Mara’s published specifications, each Seeker can engage targets at roughly one mile. In an exclusive interview with Tectonic Defense, CEO Daniel Kofman described how FPV crews operate on the front line: “They launch from anywhere at anything, and they never attack one at a time. They always attack four to six at a time in waves, doing pincer strikes in rapid succession or simultaneously.”
Drone interceptor design and cost
Mara says the Seekers are built to trade at a “one-to-one” or, in a “worst case, two-to-one” cost ratio against the drones they intercept. The company claims its interceptor costs 20 times less than the next-cheapest alternative. Mara also states that the fully autonomous Seekers respond faster than a human can react to a 100 mph quadcopter, while a human operator remains in the loop to set rules of engagement and abort launches.
Detection, deployment and timeline
The system’s Spotter targeting unit fuses electro-optical and acoustic sensors with an optional low-emission W-band radar, and Mara says it detects and tracks fiber-optic and fully autonomous drones in all weather, day or night. According to the company, radio-frequency jammers and RF-based detectors are ineffective against those drone types because they emit no control signal to intercept or disrupt.
Mara positions Spike as substantially cheaper than systems such as Lockheed Martin’s reusable Morfius X-Rotor, which counters swarms with high-power microwaves, and similar in cost to the roughly $1,000 3D-printed interceptors Ukraine produces against larger, slower Shahed-type drones. The company joined NATO’s DIANA accelerator 2026 cohort, holds cooperative research agreements with three unnamed U.S. defense organizations, and is running a civilian pilot at a South Korean commercial port.
Mara says Ukrainian forces have operated Spotter near the front line, where the company tracked multiple FPV drones from 40 km (≈25 miles) away, and the startup has received its first paid order from a European NATO partner for an undisclosed exercise. Ground-mounted Spike units are expected to reach customers by the end of 2026, with vehicle-mounted and man-portable variants and scaled production planned for 2027.
