9 Mothers is building a 35-pound robot that shoots down fast-moving drones for the DOD — $1.6M already sold

Russell Smith founded 9 Mothers after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch. The company builds AI-powered counter-drone systems for the US Department of Defense, and its flagship product is a 35-pound autonomous robot that kinetically defeats fast-moving drones — day or night.

The robot sells for roughly $150,000 a unit. 9 Mothers has already sold $1.6 million worth of units directly to the DOD — delivered hardware, not R&D contracts. Smith says the company expects to sell over 100 units this year, targeting $50 million in revenue, with a path to 1,000 units and over $100 million in revenue next year. He describes both figures as "completely believable" and says multiple credible purchase paths exist to support them.

“We make AI mission systems for the DOD, and our first product is Counter Drone. We make a very small robot. So it's 35 pounds. We sell it for about $150k. And it's capable of defeating multiple fast moving drones day or night... We've sold like $1,600,000 of stuff to the DOD — direct sales of units, not research and dev stuff.”

The technical problem

Most existing counter-drone systems are built to defeat slow-moving targets — sub-10 mph drones — which Smith argues bears little resemblance to real-world threat profiles. 9 Mothers has been demoing against drones flying at 65 mph and shoots faster than that in internal testing.

No single sensor type works reliably in all environments. Acoustics get drowned out near turbines or rotary aircraft. Radar struggles in cluttered environments. Vision fails in low light. 9 Mothers fuses acoustic, visual, and radar inputs into a single targeting picture, allowing the system to adapt to new sensors as threat environments change. Smith draws a direct line to the IED problem in Iraq and Afghanistan — these are, in his framing, flying IEDs.

Weapons and ammunition

The current platform fires 12-gauge shotgun rounds, which Smith says outperforms 5.56mm against small fast targets. The company uses an off-the-shelf gun for now but is weeks away from first firing of its own belt-fed shotgun system — the first of its kind, by Smith's account. 9 Mothers also manufactures its own ammunition to tighter tolerances and slightly higher pressure, closer to match grade, to improve consistency at the system level.

Friendly fire

The system can run in fully automatic mode or operator-directed mode, and can be configured to deprioritize drones flying away rather than toward it. If a friendly drone is on a known network, the system can pull that data. In practice, Smith acknowledges, militaries often don't have reliable real-time data on which drones are theirs — so operators typically retain the ability to override targeting decisions before engaging.

9 Mothers is participating in Y Combinator's current batch at a somewhat later stage than most demo day companies.