Stelius raises $5M pre-seed to build megawatt-class high-power microwave systems for drone swarm defense and directed energy

Speaker 2: Our next guest Our last guest solves Starson from Stellios Straws. Founder and CEO. Our next guest fixed... Made a new microwave. Okay.

Speaker 1: Tell us about it, Richard. Thank you for joining TVPN. How are you doing?

Speaker 6: I'm doing excellent. Gentlemen, thank you so much for inviting me. It's hard to imagine a better place to launch a deep tech company than TVPN. Been a huge, huge fan of the work that you are doing and excited excited to be with you. Take us through it. Introduce the company and the product. Let's let's do it. Yeah. So we started Stellius with the vision to build the future of high energy power systems in America. We... In The United States, we actually pioneered all of those technologies from directed energy to HPM, high power microwaves to compact fusion, but many of those industries were allowed to atrophy over the years. We are bringing them back. We are innovating, making them better, more compact, more powerful, and making sure that we're building those systems here in The United States of full vertical integration with domestic production and making those systems affordable and readily available, essentially for our warfighter, for the country. And eventually, with our fusion business, we wanted to make sure that America leads in compact fusion and next generation energy sources.

Speaker 2: So you are making web... Microwaves to microwave people? Is it... Hopefully hopefully not hopefully not people. No. But but defense defense is like the first category that you're focused on. What are the different applications? Drones? Yeah. So it's a... Yeah. Yeah. Great great question. No. I just wanna be I just wanna be clear. Just

Speaker 6: It is an important question to clarify. Yes. Sure. High power microwaves, so megawatt class, gyrotrons, glistrons, they have a wide range of applications. Mhmm. The vast majority of them today are driven by defense. Mhmm. If you're... If if you've got a a thousands of drones flying at you that are extremely cheap to produce, you want to be able to take them down without expending extremely expensive munitions. And, megawatt class microwaves are, uniquely, con... Conditioned and and and capable of taking down those large swarms of drones. So that will be the the biggest application. Counterelectronics, frying electronics on drones, on any, on humanoid robots, or, you know, satellites, as well. There's space space space domain as well. Yes. They can be used for area denial for anything, and they are non lethal to humans, but this is, not,

Speaker 2: the driving force. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. What about what about, with drones, like, obviously, you're still, you know, developing and improving the technology, but what about, like, range and how much area can you cover if a drone, you know, a drone swarm is, or the operator is aware that that this technology is out there? I'm assuming they would, you know, spread out the drones over a a really wide area. So, like, what what are the different trade offs? Obviously, microwave tech would be a part of a broader system of sort of drone denial, but, like, where where does it shine?

Speaker 6: That's that's... This is exactly right. It's one of the components of a layered of a layered defense system. Right? If you've got an area of, let's say, a few 100 meters that a swarm is approaching you, you can configure the beam to take them down simultaneously. Mhmm. And this is, the range, that we are targeting is, one to two miles for complete area denial and then disruption at further distances and jamming at further distances. This is where, going into, megawatt class microwaves is so important. So, basically, with solid state technology or with lasers, it's really hard to go, above tens of kilowatts, hundreds of kilowatts. Mhmm. The devices that we're building are more configured for 100 kilowatts to a megawatt class of operation. And so the more power you've got, the, longer range and more,

Speaker 1: defensive capabilities you build. So what is powering the work? Mean, a megawatt, are you... Is this like a shipping container sized diesel generator that's on a truck and then that sits next to the array of microwaves?

Speaker 6: Yeah. It's a it's a great question. So for 100 kilowatt class devices, they can be mobile on mobile platforms. For megawatt class devices that are more stationary, they will be protecting things like forward operating bases, data centers, borders. Sure. And as we all know, data centers are becoming a big, a big target for u... For UAS, and we've

Speaker 1: some interesting discussions in in protest. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Data centers all over the world. And, I mean, even going back to, like, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, there was a drone attack on some

Speaker 6: oil and gas infrastructure in The Middle East. Exactly. There's been a whole bunch of... Exactly. And even even in the recent conflict, the... One of the first targets that was hit was a data center Yeah. In

Speaker 1: in Middle East. So Is this not useful for high flying drones? Like, if there's a if there's a drone that's more than a mile in the air, and then and then it it it... Maybe it's disabled as it's coming down, but then it's just falling and it already has a warhead. You need a different solution for that type of attack? You would need you would need a layered solution. Okay. Yeah. Absolutely. You would need a layered solution,

Speaker 6: but, the more we advance in, on the power spectrum Mhmm. And frequency, eventually, we will be able to protect higher and higher or Sure. Altitudes, longer ranges from bigger and more shielded

Speaker 1: UAS systems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So, yeah, it's all part of the Ensemble. And, I mean, we've talked to tons of companies that do everything from, like, kinetics using five five six rounds to the anvil technology from Andoroll and running a drone into, you know, all sorts of different technologies are gonna be used in concert here. Sorry, Jordy. Do have another question? Yeah. Talk about talk about the progress to date.

Speaker 6: So we're we're just getting started. This is why I'm so so thrilled to be with you guys. Hopefully, it will be the first of many exciting announcements. So we, started around June, signed a $2,000,000 contract to build the systems pilot units. And then fairly quickly, we're extremely lucky to raise the round that converted very, very quickly. How much did you raise? It was 5,000,000 pre seed.

Speaker 1: I

Speaker 6: I need to give a lot of shout out if I basically start naming all of the people who supported that. It it it would take a little little while, but huge thank you to all of our supporters, Jamie Gal from WaveFunction, Qubit Capital, Mana Ventures, and many others who supported us and believe in this this mission and vision. This is a... The community of support and the outpour of support that we're seeing around the mission of building high power microwave systems, directed energy systems. And, also, a lot of people share our vision that we... America must lead in compact fusion, which is kind of a sleeper for us. We're just getting started on the research and the design of a compact fusion system. But once it succeeds, it it will change the game in how we move things and from hypersonics to supersonics to spaceflight. That's... This is the future that I hopefully will be announcing with you guys, in a in a few months or a year or a or a couple of years. Very exciting. Can't wait. Thank you so much. Yeah. Really great to meet you, and congrats on all the progress. Have a great rest of so much. Appreciate you, Richard. Cheers.

Speaker 1: Let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco is the critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences, a new value with Cisco.