Perseus Defense builds $10K counter-drone missiles to fill gap between Patriot and short-range systems

your stuff on on X. I saw the image of this massive like weapons. Oh yeah. Wow. Got to update the show. Welcome to the show, guys. Welcome to the show on or off. No, you're good. You good. Cool. Welcome for hopping on. Uh we're going to kind of have you pass back the mic and uh back and forth.

Uh just get it as close as you can. But uh introduce yourselves. Who are you? What are you building? Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius. Uh this is Steve. Hey, what's up guys? Steve with Perseus Defense. What's up? And we're building 16inch missiles to shoot down drones. 16inch missiles to shoot down drones. Okay.

Okay. Uh what what yeah like do we not have 16 do we not have 16inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something that's like like we're familiar with like the Patriot and then the bullet. How much do they cost and how do you fire them? Yeah, it's a good question.

So there are some existing solutions for like the counter UAS problem, right? We see walk through the Yeah, walk through the solutions for sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare, so GPS jamming unreliable, right? There's the there's easy ways to defeat them.

You know, you can make a more advanced drone and this is what we have the fiber optic cables. Fiber optics. This is like already defeating some of those solutions that we have. And then there's like the Death Star laser beam which is very expensive, immobile, very heavy, requires a lot of power. There's AI machine guns.

And so like there's a million solutions. And we were your buddy that does that uh uh ACS control gone on in the truck. Yeah. And so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases and they need more. We we need more and they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered.

So some of them like ACS is very short range. Some of them like a Patriot is very long range.

And so we looked at it who's going to fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a $10 million missile to shoot it at 10 miles away, but we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's, you know, right on top of. So what's the what's the range? It's a 16inch missile. Half mile. Half mile.

Half mile. And and is the benefit of that the payload? like you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther. Like what are the trade-offs that go or what are the benefits that go into having really the cost? The cost. Yeah.

So if you look at like the best solutions today, you know, Rathon has something called Coyote. That's still $250,000 per drone that we take out. The drone that we take out cost $1,000. So like not a great scale, right? So we're building these things for sub $10,000 a shot. Trying to drive that cost down.

And then you have a How how is how does it do targeting and like actual tell you about it? Yeah. So there's a thermal seeker on board the missile. All the computes on board the missile. It's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drones.

Uh so you can just shoot these out into the and um so we have the display out back with like the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles that we got some Navy Seals to send us. But you can see like these things could they're cheap. They can pop off. You can have like they're only a pound each.

So you can have like 25 missiles in one pod that's only like 30 lb or so. So a guy can carry around like a mini surfaceto air missile site basically. That's crazy. Crazy. uh what's the progress of the business? Are you going straight to program of record? Are you doing some uh some different grants?

What what's the business model? Sure. It's a good question. So, you know, typical way to do this is you apply for a cber, small business innovation project. And we've so we've done some of those applications, but we're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles. So, I was in the Pentagon 3 weeks ago.

I carried missiles inside the Pentagon to show two offices there. We're working with Fort Hood, so first calvary division down there. They've been super helpful giving us feedback on our solution trying to help us accelerate it into the DoD. So, we're talking to the soldiers at the ground level.

We're talking to the Pentagon. We're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DoD and really have a list of supporters. They're just waiting for us to get the technology ready so that they can bring us out. We can demo it and get it ready to rock. What's it like uh testing a product like this?

It's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But uh but but you know a lot of your batch mates here can go and just ship a product you know to make make an edit ship it to prod and then uh the stakes are a little bit lower. So like where are you guys even testing and and all that stuff?

Can't say on here where we test at but every two weeks we do we do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco and we load the truck up. We take a bunch of missiles out into a very far away land uh and we test. So that's been the entire YC batch. Every two weeks we've done it.

So four or five cycles and then in between those two weeks we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design improving it. So in the 10 weeks of YC we've done five major missile iterations launched over 30 missiles and it's it's progressing quite fast.

I will say the the first thing that we bought with the YC company or with the YC money was a Ford Expedition and so we just packed that thing full of all the and then we blew it up. Yeah, exactly. Lightning round. Uh favorite entrepreneur? Who do you look to for advice or uh or as a role model?

We're looking at Dino at Seronic right now and trying to match that trae growth trajectory that they're having a lot. And I'll say Steve Blank, we're kind of friends with him down at the Stanford class. He's awesome. I love him. Yeah, I interviewed him a while back. He's great. Uh second lightning round question.

How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? First, I used to wash horse trailers. Wash horse trailers. Equestrian. There you go. Let's give it up for people who gather their money question industry. Thank you so much for coming on. Good luck with the rest of demo day. Cheers.

We will talk to you soon. Uh we, if you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We uh are going to have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. Uh the team's going to bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available. Uh but up next, we have Meteor. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Nice to meet you.