01
Cost exchange
Legacy missiles and ATGMs cost orders of magnitude more than the assets you need to destroy—whether that’s a quadcopter or a main battle tank.
Hardware startup · Prototype in flight test
Autonomous strike platforms built for cost asymmetry.
Expendable autonomous munitions that defeat drones, armor, and high-value targets at a fraction of their cost.
Vandaris is a defense hardware company building high-agility autonomous kinetic vehicles—for counter-UAS intercept and precision strike against tanks, armored vehicles, and other priority targets without legacy missile economics.
Strike vehicle · Gen 1
Interactive model
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The problem
The wrong economics win wars—and the wrong economics lose them.
Defenders cannot afford $3M missiles against $500 FPV drones. Attackers cannot afford to lose $5M tanks to waves of $50K autonomous strikers. In both directions, the side with favorable cost exchange wins.
Vandaris builds one autonomous kinetic architecture for air targets (hostile UAS) and surface targets (armor and high-value vehicles)—so operators can engage at volume, not ration shots.
02
Autonomous terminal engagement
Manual kill chains are too slow for swarming UAS and too scarce for distributed anti-armor fires across a wide front.
03
Multi-target mission set
Operators need one expendable platform class for air defense and surface strike—not separate program lines for each threat type.
What we’re building
One integrated strike vehicle—not a kit of parts.
We own the airframe, autonomy, and terminal engagement end-to-end—configurable for counter-UAS intercept and kinetic strike against armored and high-value surface targets, built for high-volume manufacturing.
Mission & approachPerception & targeting
GPS-denied image-based visual servoing (IBVS)—real-time pixel-error tracking and velocity command generation from onboard camera feeds.
Autonomous guidance
Closed-loop terminal guidance for intercept and strike profiles—air-to-air and air-to-surface—without continuous operator control per engagement.
Kinetic effector
High-agility expendable airframe for terminal engagement against maneuvering UAS and high-value ground vehicles.
Operational envelope
Gen-1 design targets.
Engineering objectives for the Gen-1 airframe under active flight validation—stated as design targets, not yet qualified specifications.
90mph
Dash speed
12km
Engagement range
<90s
Launch to track
30Hz
Onboard control loop
Autonomy · Engagement view
One control loop, two perspectives.
The same visual-servoing loop, shown from the command picture and the seeker. Left: top-down intercept geometry—pursuit curve, field-of-view cone, and line of sight. Right: the onboard camera locking the target as pixel error drives to zero.
ACQUIRING
ΔX
—px
ΔY
—px
Error
—px
Range
—m
Closing
—m/s
Lock confidence
0%
Proprietary HITL simulator · Command picture + seeker view · Shared telemetry bus
- Current MVP architecture
- Python / OpenCV on ARM64 — perception and IBVS control loop
- Target deployment hardware
- Raspberry Pi onboard flight controller · Pi Camera FPV feed
- Field validation
- HUD composited over real-world footage via
ibvs_sim.py --video
Why now
The threat crossed a line. Defense procurement didn’t.
Cheap UAS swarms and autonomous anti-armor strike have reshaped both sides of the battlefield. Legacy programs still move on decade-long cycles—the gap is structural, and it favors teams that ship flight hardware on startup timelines.
Progress
What exists today
Gen-1 airframe
Designed, prototyped, and in active flight development.
IBVS control loop
Closed-loop pixel-error tracking and velocity commands—running in sim and on ARM64 hardware.
Iteration speed
Weekly build–fly–learn cycles—not multi-year design reviews.
Next milestone
Closed-loop autonomous terminal engagement—counter-UAS and anti-armor flight regimes.
Market
Who pays—and why the budget is real
Counter-UAS
Intercept hostile drones and loitering threats at defender-favorable cost
Anti-armor strike
Kinetic defeat of tanks and armored vehicles without million-dollar munitions
High-value targets
Mobile command, logistics, and priority surface assets
Expeditionary fires
Low-footprint launch for forward units and distributed operations
Why us
A defense prime moves in years. We move in weeks.
- —Technical founders with depth in autonomy, aerodynamics, and flight hardware—not slideware.
- —Integrated product: one team ships airframe + software together.
- —Hardware-in-the-loop IBVS simulator tunes gains before every flight test cycle.
Current focus
Closing the loop from autonomous track to terminal kinetic effects—counter-UAS and anti-armor—in operationally relevant flight regimes.
Engaging early government and industry partners to align requirements before scale production.
Founders
We’re building a billion-dollar defense company from first principles.
If you’re an investor or accelerator partner who backs technical founders solving hard physical-world problems—we’d like to talk.
Include a line on your background and what you’re looking for. We read every serious inbound.
angus@vandarisdefense.com