Author: Techtime

Esh-Tech Unveils Laser System Capable of Intercepting Drones Within Seconds

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By Yohai Schwiger

Israeli defense technology company Esh-Tech Systems has unveiled DroneLight, a new laser-based counter-drone system that, according to the company, can neutralize aerial threats within just 1–2 seconds while consuming far less energy than conventional laser defense systems. If the performance claims hold up under operational conditions, the technology could attract significant attention in the rapidly growing counter-UAS market.

According to Esh-Tech, DroneLight was developed for both maneuvering and stationary forces facing threats from drones and loitering explosive UAVs. The system is built around a proprietary laser architecture that uses short, high-energy pulses rather than a continuous beam, enabling rapid target engagement. The company says the system can perform up to 30 interceptions per minute, provides 360-degree coverage at ranges of up to one kilometer, and can be operated by a single user.

One of the most notable aspects of the announcement is the system’s power consumption. Esh-Tech claims DroneLight requires less than 4 kilowatts of power, compared to the tens of kilowatts typically associated with many existing laser defense systems. If validated, such low power requirements could enable deployment on light tactical vehicles without the need for large power-generation infrastructure, significantly expanding the operational use of laser weapons on the battlefield.

The company was founded in 2023 in Israel’s Negev region by Erez Riahi and a team of engineers and developers focused on laser-based solutions for aerial threats. According to company statements, Esh-Tech has received grants from the Israel Innovation Authority and has been selected for defense-related R&D programs supported by Israel’s Ministry of Defense. The company currently employs several dozen people and operates from offices in Omer and Modiin.

Esh-Tech says one of the key challenges facing laser weapons is the transmission of energy through the atmosphere. Humidity, dust, smoke, and air turbulence can disperse part of the beam’s energy before it reaches its target, forcing many systems to rely on very high power levels. According to the company, its technology is based on the real-time identification of short “atmospheric windows”—brief intervals lasting only tens of milliseconds during which the path between the laser and the target becomes clearer and more stable.

“There are very brief windows in which the path between the laser and the target clears,” the company explains. According to Esh-Tech, DroneLight detects these moments and delivers a high-energy pulse precisely when transmission conditions are optimal.

“The system senses atmospheric windows in real time and fires a precisely timed high-energy pulse,” the company wrote in one of its public statements. Esh-Tech argues that this approach allows energy to be used more efficiently, delivering an effect comparable to much larger and more powerful systems while significantly reducing power consumption, system weight, and operating costs.

The sector in which Esh-Tech operates has become one of the fastest-growing areas of defense technology in recent years. For Israel, this is not merely a technological race but an immediate operational requirement. Systems of this type could help address one of the key vulnerabilities of maneuvering ground forces: the growing threat posed by FPV drones and explosive UAVs operating at short ranges. This challenge has become particularly evident in the ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon, where drones have emerged as one of the most significant operational threats facing troops in the field.

Founder and CEO Erez Riahi brings nearly two decades of experience in the defense and electro-optics industries. Prior to establishing Esh-Tech, he served as Head of Marketing and Business Development for the TAMAM division of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), which specializes in advanced electro-optical, navigation, and sensing systems. Earlier in his career, he held senior positions at Elbit Systems, ITL, and ESC BAZ, including responsibility for military laser rangefinder product lines.

In a LinkedIn post published last month as the company emerged from stealth mode, Riahi explained that the decision to establish Esh-Tech stemmed from what he saw as a growing gap between the evolving drone threat and the solutions available on the market.

“Three years ago, I left a comfortable career in the defense industry because I believed there was a problem that nobody was truly solving,” he wrote. According to Riahi, the company’s goal was to develop a new approach for countering drones and drone swarms through smaller, more mobile, and more efficient laser systems.

Despite the promise of the technology, Esh-Tech remains a relatively young company, and its claims have not yet been publicly validated on a large scale. The company says DroneLight is currently undergoing evaluation processes in several countries around the world. If its performance is confirmed through testing and operational deployments, the system could represent a compelling new approach to military laser defense—an area where the challenge is no longer simply generating more power, but delivering fast, affordable, and mobile protection against increasingly numerous aerial threats.

Shifters Raises $10.2 Million: “The Robot Should Enter Before the Soldier”

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Defense robotics startup Shifters, which develops AI-powered autonomous ground robotic systems, has announced a $10.2 million seed funding round led by Ace Capital Partners. The round brings the company’s total funding to $15 million since its founding in 2023 by CEO Ofer Balin and CTO Asaf Tzafrak. According to the company, it has already conducted demonstrations and pilot programs with defense organizations and is working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Directorate of Defense Research & Development (DDR&D). The new funding will support further AI development, commercial production readiness, and expansion into the U.S., European, and Middle Eastern markets.

Shifters emerges at a time when military robotics is gaining significant momentum. Unmanned systems have become an increasingly important component of modern warfare. In conflicts around the world—including the war in Gaza—ground robots are being deployed for reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, tunnel exploration, suspicious building inspections, and explosive ordnance disposal. The objective is straightforward: send machines into places where the risk to human life is highest.

Yet despite recent advances, ground robotics still faces major limitations. Unlike drones that operate in relatively open airspace, ground robots must navigate chaotic and unpredictable environments filled with rubble, stairs, debris, tunnels, obstacles, and structures that have never been mapped. In many cases, these systems still require close human supervision and, often, a dedicated operator for each platform.

According to Shifters’ founders, this is precisely the challenge they are addressing. While much of the robotics industry remains focused on hardware—motors, actuators, manipulators, and mobility systems—they believe the real bottleneck lies in robotic intelligence.

Four Layers of AI

At the heart of Shifters’ technology is a stack of AI models operating simultaneously. The goal is not merely to move a robot through terrain, but to enable it to understand its surroundings, interpret missions, and act autonomously in dynamic environments.

The first layer focuses on mobility and spatial understanding. Ground robots must constantly make decisions about how to move through stairs, rubble, trenches, obstacles, and narrow passages.

“One of the hardest problems in robotics is not movement itself, but determining how to move through an environment the robot has never seen before,” says Balin. “AI allows us to maximize the physical capabilities of the platform and adapt its movement to the terrain in real time.”

The company combines spatial perception, environmental understanding, and motion control. Rather than simply detecting obstacles, the robot attempts to reason about how to traverse them safely while maintaining stability and mission effectiveness.

A second layer focuses on mission understanding. Instead of executing isolated commands, the system is designed to receive a high-level objective and break it down into actionable steps.

“The technology enables the robot to receive a mission, decompose it into sub-tasks, and execute them until the objective is achieved,” says Tzafrak.

This approach draws heavily on Agentic AI, one of the fastest-growing areas in artificial intelligence. Similar to AI agents used in software environments, the system can plan, make decisions, run multiple models in parallel, and continuously adapt its actions throughout mission execution.

The same capability also simplifies operation. Rather than manually controlling every action, operators can define objectives in natural language while the AI translates intent into tactical actions in the field.

From a Single Robot to Autonomous Teams

The next layer of the technology stack focuses on coordinating multiple robots simultaneously.

“The challenge is not just building a robot that can move,” says Tzafrak. “The more complex problem is enabling multiple robots to understand the operator’s intent, coordinate with one another, and execute missions in unpredictable environments. That orchestration challenge is why Shifters was founded.”

The company’s vision is to deploy teams of autonomous platforms that function as a unified system. Rather than operating independently, robots share information, divide tasks dynamically, and respond collectively to changes in the environment.

These concepts align closely with the emerging field of Physical AI, which seeks to bridge advanced AI models and real-world physical systems. While recent AI breakthroughs have largely focused on generating digital content, the next wave is expected to move into autonomous machines operating in the physical world.

Why AI Must Run on the Robot

One of the most significant technical challenges is computing power. Unlike consumer AI applications, military robots cannot rely on cloud connectivity.

“The robot has to make decisions on its own,” says Tzafrak. “You cannot assume communications will always be available, or that computation can be offloaded to the cloud.”

According to the company, a significant portion of its intellectual property focuses on optimizing AI models to run directly on the platform itself. Shifters uses NVIDIA AI processors and develops edge AI technologies designed to operate within strict constraints involving weight, power consumption, thermal management, and physical size.

As robotic systems become more sophisticated, edge processing becomes increasingly critical. Unlike large AI models running in data centers with thousands of processors, a ground robot must make real-time decisions using limited onboard computing resources while moving through challenging terrain.

For Shifters, the ultimate goal extends beyond building another military robot. “The first entity entering a dangerous environment should be a robot, not a human,” says Balin. “If we can make that happen, we can extend operational reach while significantly reducing the exposure of soldiers to risk.”

If drones transformed how militaries observe and operate from the air over the past decade, Shifters believes that the combination of Physical AI, Agentic AI, and edge computing could drive a similar transformation on the ground. For the company, the future of military robotics will be defined not by stronger motors or more sophisticated actuators, but by the digital intelligence that enables machines to understand their world and act within it.

DriveNets Raises $410 Million, with AMD Joining the Round

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DriveNets today announced a $410 million Series D financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management, with participation from AMD, Red Dot Capital, and existing investors including Pitango and D1 Capital. According to industry estimates, the round values the company at approximately $8.5 billion, a sharp increase from its 2022 financing, which reportedly valued DriveNets at more than $2.5 billion.

Beyond the size of the round, one detail stands out. Unlike most software companies, DriveNets says a significant portion of the capital will be used to build readily available inventory of networking platforms for large-scale AI deployments. Such language is unusual for a software vendor and suggests that DriveNets is increasingly moving beyond supplying networking software alone. Instead, the company appears to be financing infrastructure components in advance to support major customer projects. DriveNets also reports a pipeline of orders and projects exceeding $1 billion.

Founded in 2015 by Ido Susan and Hillel Kobrinsky, DriveNets set out to disrupt the traditional networking equipment market. Rather than relying on expensive proprietary routers from vendors such as Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, and Nokia, the company developed software that allows clusters of standard switching hardware to operate as a single, large-scale carrier-grade router. The model has been adopted by major customers including KDDI, Comcast, and AT&T. According to DriveNets, AT&T now runs most of its core network on the company’s technology.

In recent years, DriveNets has extended the same architectural philosophy into AI data centers. Once known primarily as a telecom networking company, it now positions itself as a provider of a full-stack AI networking fabric, offering software, integration, workload orchestration, and networking management for large AI compute clusters.

That shift places DriveNets in more direct competition with NVIDIA. While NVIDIA has built much of its AI infrastructure strategy around InfiniBand technology acquired through its purchase of Mellanox Technologies, DriveNets is promoting an alternative based on open, multi-vendor Ethernet networking. The company argues that this approach enables customers to combine AI accelerators from different manufacturers within the same cluster, reducing dependence on a single vendor’s proprietary stack.

AMD’s participation in the funding round reflects that vision. Both companies are advocating for heterogeneous AI infrastructure, where different types of AI accelerators can operate together within the same data center environment. If DriveNets originally set out to transform how telecom operators build networks, this latest financing suggests a much broader ambition: becoming the networking layer that connects the next generation of AI infrastructure.

[Photo Credit: Shauli Lendner]

Elron and Rafael to Commit Up to $300 Million for Acquisitions of Defense and Dual-Use Technology Companies

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Elron Ventures, controlled by the Arieli Group, announced on Monday that its board of directors has approved, in principle, an investment program of up to $300 million through RDC, the joint venture owned by Elron and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The initiative is designed to support the mergers and acquisitions strategy that Elron introduced in March and will focus on acquiring controlling interests in technology companies serving both defense and commercial markets.

Under the plan, Elron and Rafael are expected to commit up to $300 million over approximately three years, with each party contributing an equal share. The initial allocation is expected to reach up to $100 million, with Elron and Rafael each providing up to $50 million. The program remains subject to approval by Rafael’s board of directors and the completion of the required financing arrangements.

The move marks a significant expansion of RDC’s activities. Until now, the partnership has primarily operated through venture capital investments, startup creation, and the commercialization of technologies developed within Rafael. Under the new strategy, Elron and Rafael intend to complement these activities by acquiring controlling stakes in established companies, with the goal of building a portfolio of growth-stage businesses in defense technology, cybersecurity, deep-tech, and artificial intelligence.

According to the company, rising defense budgets worldwide and shifting geopolitical dynamics have created growing demand for technologies that serve both military and civilian markets. Elron believes that combining Rafael’s technological and operational expertise with Elron’s experience in investing in and scaling technology companies could create a new growth engine for both partners.

In a separate announcement, Elron said it is exploring the possibility of issuing a public bond offering, and potentially warrants as well, to finance its share of the investment program. The size, structure, and timing of any such offering have not yet been determined.

[Photo credit: Shay Ben Efrayim]

Israeli High-Tech is Growing – and Moving Abroad

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Israel’s high-tech sector returned to a growth trajectory in 2025, delivering one of the strongest years in its history. At the same time, however, the industry is showing early signs of structural changes that could shape its future, according to the Israel Innovation Authority’s 2026 State of High-Tech Report.

According to the report, Israel’s high-tech GDP grew by 8.2% in 2025, reaching NIS 352 billion. The sector’s share of national GDP rose to 18.3%, and high-tech accounted for roughly half of Israel’s overall economic growth during the year. High-tech exports reached a record $85 billion, representing 58% of the country’s total exports.

The capital market also saw a strong recovery. Israeli technology companies raised $14.6 billion in 2025, up 30% from 2024, while total exit value reached $84 billion, driven in part by major transactions involving Wiz, Armis, and CyberArk. Israel ranked fourth globally in startup funding and remained the leading startup hub outside the United States.

One of the report’s most notable findings is a shift in the industry’s growth drivers. While software companies led the sector throughout much of the past decade, the main engine of growth in 2025 was hardware, electronics, and advanced manufacturing. The hardware industry contributed approximately NIS 16 billion in additional output within a single year — an unusually sharp increase compared to recent years. The Innovation Authority links this trend to rising investment in deep-tech sectors, AI infrastructure, semiconductors, space technologies, and defense technology.

The report also points to early signs of artificial intelligence reshaping the labor market. For the first time in a decade, the number of R&D employees in Israel declined, falling by approximately 3,500 workers. At the same time, the number of product-related roles increased by roughly 15,000. The Authority suggests this may represent the beginning of a structural shift driven by AI-powered productivity gains in software development.

Despite the industry’s strong business performance, the report highlights a concerning trend: the gradual relocation of activity outside Israel. The share of employees working in Israel for Israeli high-tech companies fell from 69% in 2019 to just 62% by March 2026. Most of the growth occurred in the United States, not only in sales and marketing functions but also in R&D positions and senior management roles.

The Innovation Authority warns that the key challenge for the coming years will not only be maintaining Israel’s capacity for innovation, but ensuring that this innovation continues to generate jobs, economic value, and long-term growth within Israel itself.

Smart Shooter Wants to Turn the Infantry Soldier Into an AI Platform

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Israeli defense-tech company Smart Shooter published its first quarterly report today since going public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, offering a deeper look into one of the Israeli firms seeking to capitalize on the dramatic transformation of the modern battlefield in the wake of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But beyond the financial figures, the report and accompanying investor presentation also reveal the company’s broader strategic vision: Smart Shooter no longer presents itself merely as a manufacturer of “smart sights,” but as a company aiming to “reinvent infantry” through AI-powered fire-control systems, counter-drone capabilities, and autonomous weapon stations.

The company, developer of the SMASH family of systems, reported first-quarter revenue of approximately $6.6 million, up 26% year-over-year. The standout figure, however, was the sharp increase in bookings: during the quarter, Smart Shooter signed new contracts totaling roughly $17.65 million, representing a 396% increase compared to the same quarter last year. As of May 20, the company’s order backlog had already reached approximately $49 million.

The results indicate that the company is transitioning from the pilot and trial phase into serial procurement programs with military and security customers. Key contracts announced this year include a $10.7 million order for the U.S. Army, additional SMASH 3000 deals in Europe and Asia, and an Israeli Ministry of Defense order for the Hopper Smash system.

In its investor presentation, Smart Shooter emphasized that its systems are already operational with “Tier-1 armies” worldwide, and that the company has been designated as an approved supplier under the U.S. Department of Defense’s I-40 JIATF framework — a status that could pave the way for broader procurement programs in the American market.

Rising Demand From Asia-Pacific

One of the most interesting aspects of the presentation is the way Smart Shooter positions itself within the defense market. The company highlights two primary product lines — soldier-portable systems and remotely operated weapon stations — both built around what it describes as “one technological core.”

In practice, this means an AI and computer-vision engine capable of target detection, tracking, ballistic calculations, and precision fire control for both individual soldiers and autonomous firing stations, ground robots, and border-defense systems.

The company is also attempting to position itself as a key beneficiary of the global surge in counter-drone spending. In the presentation, Smart Shooter points to the “growing need for kinetic defense systems against drone threats, including fiber-optic drones,” alongside rising global defense budgets.

While Europe still serves as the company’s primary revenue engine — accounting for 55% of actual sales in the first quarter — the presentation suggests that future growth is increasingly shifting toward Asia-Pacific and North America. According to the company, 45% of new bookings signed during the quarter came from Asia-Pacific, compared to 38% from Europe and 17% from North America. However, the broader order backlog remains more balanced: Europe accounts for 35% of the backlog, North America 33%, Asia-Pacific 20%, and Israel just 11%.

Although Smart Shooter still posted a GAAP net loss of approximately $6.6 million, most of it stemmed from one-time IPO-related expenses and commitments tied to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Excluding these items, the company nearly reached operational breakeven, reporting positive adjusted EBITDA of approximately $38,000.

The IPO itself significantly strengthened the company’s balance sheet. As of the end of the quarter, Smart Shooter held roughly $82 million in cash and short-term deposits. In the presentation, the company stated that it plans to expand its sales and maintenance operations in the U.S. and Europe, shorten delivery times, and deepen the integration of its systems with military command-and-control networks.

ThirdEye and High Lander Integrate Drone Detection Systems

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Israeli defense technology company ThirdEye Systems announced a strategic cooperation agreement with High Lander Aviation focused on unmanned traffic management (UTM) and drone detection technologies.

Under the partnership, ThirdEye’s MeduzaX optical drone detection system will be integrated into High Lander’s Vega platform, which is used to manage and monitor drone traffic in low-altitude airspace.

According to the companies, the technical integration phase has already been completed, and the joint platform is now moving toward commercialization and deployment. The combined system is designed to provide airports, ports, utilities, government agencies, and critical infrastructure operators with a unified operational picture of drone activity — including both compliant drones broadcasting identification signals and “non-cooperative” drones that do not transmit identification data.

High Lander’s Vega platform functions as a drone traffic management system that enables authorities and operators to coordinate, monitor, and authorize drone flights. In recent years, the company has participated in multiple UTM projects internationally and promotes a broader vision of a digital operating system for low-altitude airspace, including future support for autonomous aircraft and air taxis.

ThirdEye’s MeduzaX system, meanwhile, is an AI-powered electro-optical and thermal drone detection platform designed to identify and track small, hard-to-detect drones using cameras and computer vision algorithms. Unlike radar or RF-based systems, MeduzaX operates passively without emitting signals, making it suitable for environments where low-signature detection is required.

The collaboration reflects a broader trend in both the drone and counter-UAS markets: a shift away from standalone detection or traffic management systems toward integrated platforms combining sensors, analytics, command-and-control, threat assessment, and in some cases interception capabilities.

As drone activity continues to expand across both civilian and military sectors, governments and infrastructure operators are increasingly seeking systems capable of managing crowded low-altitude airspace while simultaneously detecting unauthorized or potentially hostile drones in real time.

[Lior Segal, founder and CEO of ThirdEye Systems]