---
title: Drone Defense Startup Mara Raises $7M Led by Khosla Ventures to Stop Cheap FPV Drones
description: Mara has raised a $7M pre-seed led by Khosla Ventures for Spike, a counter-UAS system pairing Spotter sensors with a 250g autonomous interceptor drone.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
updated: 2026-08-26T09:48:00.411Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/mara-7m-khosla-counter-drone-fpv
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/mara-spike-hero.webp
categories: Startups, Science & Tech
content_type: News
region: San Francisco
publication: Sovereign Magazine
about:
  - type: Organization
    name: Mara
    description: Mara is a San Francisco defense hardware company founded in October 2024 by Daniel Kofman and Sriram Raghu. Its Spike system defends against small FPV drones by pairing Spotter, a sensor unit with visual, acoustic and optional radar detection, with Seeker, a 250-gram tube-launched autonomous interceptor. Spike has been tested with the US Army, a US special operations unit, NATO and Ukrainian forces. Mara raised a $7 million pre-seed round led by Khosla Ventures in August 2026.
    url: https://mara.inc
    foundingDate: 2024-10-01T00:00:00.000Z
    industry: Defense technology
---

Mara, a San Francisco defense hardware startup, has raised $7 million in pre-seed funding led by Khosla Ventures to move Spike, its counter-drone system for small first-person-view (FPV) drones, from field testing into deployment. a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund and Indicator Fund joined the round alongside angel investors.

An FPV drone costs a few hundred dollars and can disable a vehicle worth millions or knock out power for millions of people. Ukrainian commanders have attributed as much as [70 to 80 percent of battlefield casualties](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/armin-papperger-rheinmetall-ceo-dismisses-ukrainian-drones) to drones of all types. Most of the counter-UAS industry was set up for a different target: larger drones, such as the Iranian-designed Shahed, flying high overhead on a predictable course.

Small FPV drones launch from anywhere, arrive in groups from several directions at once and increasingly fly on fiber-optic control links or onboard guidance that jamming cannot touch. Russia fielded fiber-optic drones in spring 2024 and Ukraine had approved more than 80 designs of its own by February 2026. In June 2025, Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb used 117 FPV drones launched from trucks parked inside Russia to hit five airbases thousands of kilometers from the front.

## The Counter-UAS Gap Against FPV Drones

Traditional counter-UAS systems put a gun, a laser or a semi-piloted interceptor behind one sensor and one field of fire. That works against a larger, high-flying drone, or against one FPV at a time. It stops working when several small drones come in from different vectors within seconds of each other. Over the "gray zone" along the Ukrainian front line, hundreds of FPVs can be in the air per square kilometer doing exactly that.

> "Small drones changed the battlefield because they distributed the cost and capability of precise attack. Most defenses still concentrate both replacement cost and line of fire. Spike instead creates a distributed mesh of small, cheap nodes that can each aim and shoot in multiple directions at once."
> — Daniel Kofman, co-founder and CEO, Mara

Spike pairs stationary targeting sensors with a magazine of small interceptors, giving 360-degree hemispherical coverage from a portable package. Every part of it, from the sensors to the interceptors, is designed to be attritable, so the system can fire on dozens of threats at the same time at a total cost below that of the asset it is protecting.

## Spotter Sensors and the Seeker Interceptor Drone

Spike's two parts work alone or together. Spotter, the targeting unit, combines visual and acoustic sensors with an optional low-signature radar and Mara's own AI for detection by day, at night and in bad weather. Seeker is the interceptor: a 250-gram, tube-launched drone that flies at 200 kilometers per hour and closes on its target with onboard intelligence rather than a human pilot. Mara says it is inexpensive enough to be used and lost freely. A single magazine holds up to 48 Seekers, and a launchpad reloads in under a minute.

Spotter can pass a launch order to Seeker without an operator, but a human stays on the loop to set the rules of engagement and abort a launch if needed.

A rucksack-portable kit protects a dismounted squad, vehicle-mounted Spikes cover a convoy, and larger deployments create multi-kilometer perimeters around military bases, front-line positions, sporting events or power plants.

## Field Testing With the US Army, Special Operations and Ukraine

Kofman and co-founder Sriram Raghu met in high school in 2013 and have worked together since. Their first drones were tactical FPV prototypes for a Department of Homeland Security program, assembled in their college dorm rooms. They went on to co-found Optivolt, alongside its current chief executive, which shipped smart solar panels to [Anduril](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/how-a-seven-year-old-startup-just-landed-a-1-1b-defense-contract-that-could-reshape-military-), the US Air Force and Ukraine. They started Mara in October 2024 out of a conviction that the industry had left the most lethal gap in defense wide open. Mara went through a16z's Speedrun accelerator in early 2025, where Kofman opened his Demo Day pitch with the line that cheap drones are the number one cause of losses in modern combat.

Over the past several months Spike's components have moved into live exercises. Seeker completed intercepts cued through US Army software at an exercise in Texas. Spotter ran hands-free on an armored vehicle during an Army exercise in Europe, feeding its detections into Army command software. In field testing with a US special operations unit, Spotter detected the target and cued Seeker to launch without operator input in an end-to-end engagement. In September 2025 Mara's acoustic and electro-optical sensors were part of a counter-drone prototype led by the US Naval Postgraduate School that ran aboard a Dutch fast interceptor boat at NATO's Bold Machina exercise in the Netherlands.

In July, Ukrainian forces operated Spotter 40 kilometers from the front line, where it tracked multiple FPV drones. Outside the military, Mara is running a civilian pilot at a port in South Korea. The company holds cooperative research and testing agreements with three US defense organizations, was selected for NATO's DIANA accelerator, and is in early talks with military partners in the UK, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

"Mara has moved rapidly from proof-of-concept to user testing for an autonomous system," said Nicole Fraenkel, partner at Khosla Ventures. "What caught my eye is that they're building counter-drone autonomy with a system cost that's orders of magnitude lower than anything else we've seen."

## Counter-Drone Funding in 2026

The round comes amid a run of counter-drone investment. Khosla Ventures co-led a $36 million seed round for counter-swarm company Skapion in July. Epirus, which uses high-power microwaves against drone swarms, raised $250 million in 2025, and Allen Control Systems, maker of the Bullfrog gun turret, raised $200 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in June. Governments are spending as well: the [Pentagon's fiscal 2027 budget request](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/pentagon-820-million-drone-component-loan) includes $14.4 billion for counter-drone programs, and the UK's Defence Investment Plan published in June commits £1.8 billion to counter-UAS. MarketsandMarkets puts the counter-UAS market at $9.2 billion this year and expects it to reach $29.7 billion by 2031.

## Mara's Deployment Plan for 2026 and 2027

Mara is focused on getting ground-mounted Spike to key customers by the end of 2026. Vehicle-mounted and man-portable versions follow in 2027 alongside a production scale-up. Beyond that, the company's stated mission is to use machine autonomy to defend human autonomy, by mass-producing an arsenal of cheap, small robots to hold the line of contact in any battle, on land, in the air or at sea.

## FAQ

**Q: How much does an interceptor drone cost?**
Mara has not published a unit price for Seeker. The company says the 250-gram interceptor is cheap enough to be used and lost freely and that a full Spike system costs less than the asset it protects; its website puts Seeker at 20 times cheaper than the next best interceptor. For comparison, Ukraine's mass-produced Sting interceptor, designed for larger Shahed drones, costs around $2,500.

**Q: What is the most effective defense against drone swarms?**
No single weapon covers every case. Jamming fails against fiber-optic and autonomous drones, and a single gun, laser or piloted interceptor can only engage one target at a time from one direction. Mara's approach is to distribute many cheap sensors and interceptors so the system can fire on dozens of drones at once across 360 degrees, with a human on the loop setting the rules of engagement.

**Q: How do Ukrainian interceptor drones work?**
Ukraine now produces interceptor drones at a rate of around 1,500 a day, most of them aimed at Shahed-type attack drones. A ground crew or radar spots the target, a pilot or onboard guidance flies the interceptor into it, and the drone is destroyed by impact. Seeker follows the same kinetic principle but is cued automatically by Spotter and flies itself to the target.

**Q: Why can't jamming stop FPV drones?**
Electronic jamming cuts the radio link between a drone and its pilot. Fiber-optic FPV drones carry a spool of cable tens of kilometers long, so there is no radio signal to cut, and drones with onboard guidance can finish an attack after losing contact. That is why Mara and others have moved to physical interceptors rather than electronic warfare alone.

**About Mara**

Mara is a San Francisco defense hardware company founded in October 2024 by Daniel Kofman and Sriram Raghu. Its Spike system defends against small FPV drones by pairing Spotter, a sensor unit with visual, acoustic and optional radar detection, with Seeker, a 250-gram tube-launched autonomous interceptor. Spike has been tested with the US Army, a US special operations unit, NATO and Ukrainian forces. Mara raised a $7 million pre-seed round led by Khosla Ventures in August 2026.

[Website](https://mara.inc)