Aelius is building portable laser weapon turrets to shoot down drones for 25 cents per engagement

Summary

Aelius is building portable, lightweight laser weapon turrets designed to shoot down drones for roughly 25 cents per engagement — the electricity cost of a 3-second laser burst. That cost structure is the entire commercial thesis. Shooting down a drone with a missile runs into the millions; even a counter-drone system costs $100,000 to $250,000 per kill. Laser weapons eliminate the cost asymmetry that makes drone warfare so attractive to adversaries.

Founder Michael (last name not given in transcript) spent his career in electro-optic systems, working at what he describes as the largest U.S. laser company on directed energy weapons in an R&D capacity before moving into sales, where he sold components into major defense primes.

Why drones, why now

Existing large-scale laser systems — multi-hundred-kilowatt turrets built into Navy warships by Lockheed and Northrop — can cut the wing off a plane from 10 miles away, but they are bespoke, expensive, and ship-integrated. The primes have no business model for anything smaller. Aelius is coming from the opposite direction: minimum size, minimum weight, minimum cost, edge-deployable.

The physics also favor lasers against drones specifically. A bullet fired from an M249 travels at roughly 700 meters per second; at 700 meters, it takes a full second to land, and the shooter has to lead a moving target with arc compensation. A laser pulse travels at the speed of light — a drone moving at 100 mph covers only 20 to 30 microns in the time it takes the pulse to reach it at 1,000 meters. The targeting problem essentially disappears.

Michael says Aelius can autonomously detect, track, and destroy drones, with an effective range roadmap to 1–5 kilometers as the system matures. The laser can also be defocused past the target to avoid collateral damage, which makes it viable in urban environments where kinetic solutions are ruled out.

Market beyond the military

The Super Bowl reportedly saw 50 to 100 unauthorized drone incursions that DHS could not effectively address. Stadiums, power plants, and border crossings are all environments where you cannot shoot bullets into the air. Michael argues Aelius becomes the only viable option in those settings — silent, invisible, and precise.

On the terrorism threat, Michael says the FBI thwarted a drone-based attack on a power plant or nuclear reactor in Tennessee roughly three months before this conversation. His read is that a major successful drone attack on civilian infrastructure is a matter of time, not possibility, and that non-state actors now have the tools to inflict damage on trillions of dollars of assets.

Go-to-market

Aelius has interest from national labs and is pursuing Other Transaction Authority (OTA) procurement contracts rather than waiting for a formal program of record. The company expects to be producing 50 to 100 units by the time a formal procurement specification for what they're building would even be written — a deliberate speed advantage over the traditional defense contracting cycle.

Demand from vehicle platform companies — from startups to primes — wanting to mount the turret is described as an "unending list." The near-term constraint is prioritization: which opportunities to pursue with limited resources ahead of early-to-mid 2026 fielded deployments with DOD units.

Stanford banned Aelius from posting jobs on its platform because it's a weapons company. The backlash — amplified by posts from Larsson Jensen — ended up driving recruiting interest rather than hurting it, on the logic that the company getting publicly criticized for making weapons is exactly where people who want to build weapons will look.