Defense Disruptor: How Echodyne Is Fighting Cheap Drones With Radar Innovation

The math was stark: a $100 commercial drone could destroy a $100 million radar system.

For Tom Driscoll, Co-Founder and CTO of Echodyne, this economic asymmetry represented both the core challenge of modern warfare and his company’s biggest opportunity.

“If I send 10 or 100 small drones, which each cost $100, and I destroy a $100 million radar, then you’re out $100 million,” Driscoll explained.

The solution, he argued, wasn’t building better expensive radars; it was making capable ones cheap enough to deploy everywhere.

Driscoll’s company claims to have cracked a problem that has stumped defense contractors for decades: how to build radar systems with the performance of military-grade phased arrays at a fraction of the cost, size, and power consumption.

The breakthrough, he said, lies in an entirely different approach using metamaterials — a physics field that allows steering radio waves through fundamentally new methods.

“We had a hammer, we went looking for nails,” Driscoll said of his team’s initial metamaterials research. “It turns out it’s very valuable in radar.”

The timing couldn’t be more critical. As cheap commercial drones flood battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East, militaries worldwide are scrambling for affordable detection systems that can match the scale of the threat.

Driscoll believes his technology offers a path toward what he calls “making the world safe in an age of autonomy” — a mission that extends from active combat zones to protecting critical infrastructure and borders.

From that starting point, he added, Echodyne has pursued a “dual-use” focus: first finding product-market fit against small drones and then broadening into security and defense.

A Different Way to Steer Beams

Driscoll described Echodyne as “a technology platform company,” arguing that its core advance is a new architecture for beamforming.

“The best radars in the world all have this ability to steer the radio waves, almost always via what’s called a phased array,” he said. Those phased arrays, he noted, have long been “very expensive” and often “large and power hungry.”

By contrast, he claimed Echodyne’s metamaterial approach “is a fundamentally different way to concentrate all of the energy of the radar” in narrow, rapidly switchable directions.

“That different approach has just been 10 or 100 times less expensive than every approach to building a classic phased array that’s ever been tried,” he said, calling the result “a game changer.”

Why Counter-Drone Came First

The company’s “beachhead,” Driscoll said, has been counter-UAS: detecting and tracking small, low-flying, often commercial drones in cluttered environments. The reason is partly economic.

“There have always been very high-performing radars that can detect these small drones,” he said, adding that some of the world’s top systems “cost north of $10 million each, some of them $100 million.”

Against swarms of cheap aircraft, he argued, “the other factor in situational awareness is distribution: getting enough out there to symmetrize the battlefield.”

Echodyne’s claim, he said, is that its radars deliver “most of the performance of a very high-end, very expensive radar while offering a price point that allows you to symmetrize the problem.”

In practical terms, he added, that shifts drone detection from a base-level asset to something like “a squad level, on a Razor or on a Humvee. Every person gets force protection against that threat.”

Ukraine as a Mirror, Not a Cause

The war in Ukraine, Driscoll argued, revealed rather than created the era of cheap, numerous drones.

“It was the war that happened at the time when this was possible,” he said. Civilian technology and rapid digital iteration, in his view, had already set the conditions. “If it occurred in any other place, we would have seen similar results,” he added.

Keeping up, he stressed, requires adopting the same pace on defense that offense now enjoys. “You have to plan on rapid evolution, rapid iteration,” he said. That means software-defined systems and the ability to “ship software updates to react to the changing nature of threats.”

He suggested some legacy contractors “did very good business for many decades in a certain modality,” and “change takes time,” but he emphasized Echodyne’s dual-use posture. “Although defense is today our largest revenue source, it is a dual-use technology. I believe that’s critical.”

Radar, he argued, also has intrinsic advantages in the cat-and-mouse of drones versus jammers. “Stealth is pretty much the only way to defeat radar, and stealth is still very expensive,” he said. “There’s no way to do cheap commercial stealth.”

On Industry Power and ‘Modified Commercial’

Asked about disruption, Driscoll cautioned that even breakthrough sensors won’t dethrone the largest integrators.

“I could have the world’s best radar and sell it for a dollar, and that would not disrupt Raytheon or Northrop,” he said.

He expects consolidation to continue. “Mergers and acquisitions are always a part of it,” he said, describing the majors’ “position of strength” in managing large government programs as “pretty unassailable.”

Newer firms can still force change, he suggested.

Citing a philosophy he said he first heard “20 years ago” — that the future is “modified commercial” — he argued that the defense sector is finally embracing products adapted from the civilian market. “This is not new thinking,” he said. “It’s just starting to be accepted. And change takes time.”

Driscoll also noted that a large prime took a minority stake in Echodyne in a past financing, characterizing it as a strategic investment, and said “well north of 90 percent” of the company’s raised capital comes from private investors.

What AI Should — and Shouldn’t — Do

Driscoll called recent machine-learning gains “undeniable,” but pushed back on what he sees as hype.

Treating AI as a “magic silver bullet,” he said, is “naive.” The hard work, in his telling, lies “under the waterline” — collecting quality data, labeling it, and building the machinery to manage it.

Echodyne uses machine learning “largely [for] classification related things,” he said: “bird versus drone versus vehicle versus aircraft, etcetera.”

But “the bulk of our [Digital Signal Processing] is algorithmic,” he added, praising the interpretability of conventional signal-processing. “If an algorithm doesn’t behave the way you expected it to, you can understand why. And that’s a very powerful tool.”

Software-Defined Products and ‘Growth Stage’ Priorities

Driscoll characterized the company as being in the “growth stage,” with priorities centered on fielding systems and expanding deployments.

“Our priority is to get this solution out there,” he said, adding that the company continues to invest in R&D because “software-defined” is “mandatory in today’s world.”

He pointed to Echodyne’s EchoGuard and EchoShield radars as examples of platforms that receive “regular software updates,” which he described as adding “very meaty new features” rather than mere patches. Demand signals, he claimed, are “very clear, very large, and growing at a very healthy rate.”

How He Tries to Foster Breakthroughs

Driscoll described himself as an applied-research thinker who pushes teams to connect ideas to manufacturable products.

“Even the team that’s doing the deepest research, you really need to connect them with the product,” he said. That connection, he argued, filters out elegant ideas that “will never work in a product.”

He also urged leaders not to “schedule research.” Unknowns make it a poor fit for rigid program timelines, he said, unless a company can afford multiple parallel bets. Short of that, in his view, research should be “well proven” before product teams depend on it.

Reflecting on a different kind of scale, he pointed to mass manufacturing as the overlooked engine of innovation: recalling Apple’s buildup in China, he said he didn’t “remember the exact number,” but believed manufacturing and talent investments there were “multiples” of tens of billions.

“Once you’ve got product-market fit, the thing to do is run the flywheel,” he said.

The Next Big Change in Radar

Pressed to look ahead, Driscoll was skeptical of headline-grabbing breakthroughs.

“Quantum radar is interesting,” he said, “but do I think that it’s going to fundamentally change the game? Probably not.”

What will, he argued, is discovering more applications with the scale of automotive radar, which pulled an entire supply chain forward.

Drones could provide that scale, he suggested, if cities need dense sensor networks to manage crowded low-altitude airspace.

“We’re probably going to need sensors,” he said. “It’s a pretty good sensor for that — radar.” If municipalities built “networks of radars that are helping manage the airspace,” he added, investment would “go through the roof,” pushing advances across the field.

For now, he framed Echodyne’s aim in straightforward terms. “Safe means protecting yourself in active combat,” he said. “Safe also means securing critical infrastructure [and] borders.”

The near-term task, as he put it, is simple: “Go offer a solution to something that, for quite a while, didn’t seem like it had a good solution.”