Skapion, a defence technology company focused on counter-swarm systems, has unveiled what it calls a “Native Counter-Swarm” air-defence system designed to detect and defeat large-scale coordinated drone swarm attacks.
The company said it recently raised a $36 million seed funding round led by UP. Partners and Khosla Ventures to accelerate development and validation of the system.
Skapion’s announcement comes as drone swarms have increasingly been used to pressure conventional air-defence systems, which are often designed to handle single or small numbers of threats. The company pointed to recent conflicts in Ukraine and Iran as examples of legacy systems being saturated by mass attacks intended to deplete interceptor inventories and budgets.
Skapion said its system was designed around a “many-to-many” architecture intended to allow multiple interceptors to engage multiple targets simultaneously. The company said the system was designed by its founding architect, General (ret.) Pini Yungman, described in the release as an architect of Israel’s Iron Dome and former general manager of Rafael Air & Missile Defense.
According to Skapion, the system is a mobile, fully kinetic capability designed to simultaneously engage more than 100 targets, with an interception rate above 97% and a lower cost per interception compared with conventional air-defence solutions.
The company said the system centres on an AI-native command-and-control architecture that can fuse data from Skapion sensors or third-party detection and tracking systems. It is designed to evaluate and prioritise threats, allocate interceptors and manage engagements in real time, supporting either end-to-end autonomy or a single human operator “on the loop”, depending on customer policy.
Skapion said its architecture is open and sensor-agnostic, allowing integration with external threat data, existing command-and-control systems and other counter-UAS systems. It said this could support deployment as a standalone air defence battery for critical infrastructure and manoeuvring forces, or as a complementary national air-defence system.
The company said its kinetic approach is intended to engage communication-independent and autonomous threats, with a vertical-launch design providing 360-degree engagement capability. Skapion said the system is designed for deployment across ground, airborne and maritime platforms.
“Native Counter-Swarm means designing the entire system from day one for simultaneous mass engagement,” said Ido Bar-On, co-founder and CEO of Skapion.
