Defense startup Mara has raised $7M in a pre-seed round led by Khosla Ventures to push its low-cost counter-drone system toward real-world deployment.
Backers include a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, Palmdrive, Protagonist, Freedom Fund and Indicator Fund, plus angel investors. Mara’s Spike platform pairs Spotter, a targeting unit with visual, acoustic and optional radar sensors, with Seeker, a 250-gram kinetic interceptor launched from a tube. The design spreads cheap nodes across a distributed mesh rather than concentrating defenses on expensive systems.
The bet is on scale: cheap FPV drones have become the deadliest threat on modern battlefields, and fiber-optic and AI-guided variants increasingly bypass electronic jamming. Mara has field-tested Spike with the US Army and Ukrainian forces, joined NATO’s DIANA accelerator, and piloted the system at a commercial port in South Korea.
CEO Daniel Kofman says the company will ship ground-mounted Spike platforms to initial defense customers by year-end, with vehicle-mounted and rucksack configurations following in 2027.
