Mara has raised $7 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures to move its Spike counter-UAS platform from field testing toward broader deployment. The round also included a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund, Indicator Fund, and angel investors.
San Francisco-based Mara is developing an autonomous defense system designed to detect and intercept small first-person-view drones.
Its Spike platform combines stationary targeting sensors with small interceptors to provide 360-degree coverage against multiple incoming threats.
The system consists of two primary components. Spotter combines visual, acoustic and optional radar sensors with in-house AI for day, night and all-weather detection. Seeker is a 250-gram, tube-launched interceptor capable of speeds of approximately 200 kilometers per hour.
Spike can autonomously pass targeting information and launch commands from Spotter to Seeker, while keeping a human in the loop to define rules of engagement and abort launches when required.
Mara was founded in October 2024 by Daniel Kofman and Sriram Raghu.
The company’s technology has already been tested in U.S. Army exercises in Texas and Europe, with a U.S. special operations unit and by Ukrainian forces approximately 40 kilometers from the front line.
Mara is also deploying Spike through a civilian pilot at a South Korean port and has cooperative research and testing agreements with three U.S. defense organizations. The company was selected for NATO’s DIANA accelerator and is engaging with military organizations in the UK, Czech Republic and Ukraine.
Mara plans to deploy ground-mounted Spike systems to key customers by the end of 2026, with vehicle-mounted and man-portable configurations expected alongside production scale-up in 2027.
KEY QUOTES:
“Small drones changed the battlefield because they distributed the cost and capability of precise attack. Most defenses still concentrate both replacement cost and line of fire. Spike instead creates a distributed mesh of small, cheap nodes that can each aim and shoot in multiple directions at once.”
Daniel Kofman, Co-Founder and CEO of Mara
“Mara has moved rapidly from proof-of-concept to user testing for an autonomous system. What caught my eye is that they’re building counter-drone autonomy with a system cost that’s orders of magnitude lower than anything else we’ve seen.”
Nicole Fraenkel, Partner at Khosla Ventures
