OceanSound Partners has made a strategic investment in IMSAR, a developer and manufacturer of low-size, weight and power synthetic aperture radar payloads and mission software used across unmanned and manned aircraft.
IMSAR founder and CEO Ryan Smith will continue leading the company and has retained a significant ownership interest alongside the management team.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Springville, Utah, IMSAR develops radar systems capable of all-weather, day-and-night imaging, moving-target indication and change detection.
The company’s technology is designed to operate in environments where optical and infrared sensors may be degraded.
IMSAR’s NSP-series radars, onboard processing technology and Lisa 3D mission software are installed across more than 100 unmanned and manned platforms worldwide.
Supported platforms span Group 2 through Group 5 unmanned aircraft and include Shield AI’s V-BAT, AV’s Jump 20, Textron’s Aerosonde, Tekever’s AR3 and AR5, Insitu’s ScanEagle and Integrator and light manned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft.
IMSAR supports U.S. Navy and U.S. Army requirements as well as allied defense ministries across Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Americas.
With OceanSound’s backing, IMSAR plans to invest in radar performance, next-generation products and manufacturing and commercial infrastructure.
The company also intends to expand AI-enabled exploitation and automated target recognition through its Lisa 3D platform.
IMSAR plans to use machine learning across its accumulated radar data to improve automatic target recognition, change detection and target classification.
Longer term, the company intends to broaden beyond radar into a multi-mission radio-frequency sensing platform through internal development and acquisitions of complementary sensing and AI technologies.
IMSAR plans to remain platform-agnostic rather than compete directly with the unmanned aircraft manufacturers that integrate its technology.
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher served as legal adviser to OceanSound.
Guggenheim Securities served as exclusive financial adviser to IMSAR, with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton serving as legal adviser.
KEY QUOTES:
“IMSAR has built something rare: technology that is genuinely hard to replicate, proven in the field, delivered by a team that operators trust. IMSAR’s RF surveillance solutions are well positioned to address critical U.S. Department of War priorities, including the Department’s Drone Dominance program, delivering lower-cost and high performance autonomous and counter autonomous solutions at scale and quickly to better manage threats from U.S. adversaries. OceanSound has spent years investing behind the companies modernizing how defense customers sense and understand their environment, and IMSAR is among the most impressive we have encountered. We are proud to partner with Ryan and the entire IMSAR team, and we look forward to helping them build on their differentiated drone-focused technology developed over more than twenty years.”
Joe Benavides, CEO and Founder of OceanSound Partners
“Our purpose is to give operators a clear picture when nothing else can see. We talk about democratizing radar, and what we mean is simple: a capability that used to require a large, expensive aircraft now flies on something a small team can launch from a ship or the back of a truck. Everything this company has built has come from our engineers, technicians and field teams spending time with the people who fly these missions, watching what fails, and fixing it. We chose OceanSound because they understand that the mission and the engineering come first, they know this market and the people in it, and they have built businesses like ours before.”
Ryan Smith, CEO and Founder of IMSAR
“OceanSound was built to partner with founder-led technology companies at exactly this moment, when the capability is proven and the opportunity in front of them is larger than what they can serve today. We are investing in commercial reach, in the software and analytics layer, and in added capability across the sensing portfolio. The people who built this company are the reason we are here, and we are investing behind them.”
Ted Shanahan, Partner at OceanSound Partners
