Airspace Systems raises $20 million

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Airspace Systems Inc., which manufactures comprehensive drone defense systems, has announced that it raised $20 million from a Series A funding round led by Singtel Innov8, the venture capital arm of Singtel.

As part of its investment, Jeff Karras, Managing Director of Investments at Singtel Innov8, will join Airspace’s board of directors.

“Demand for protecting stadiums, commercial buildings, power plants and, for that matter, any other public venues from potential drone threats is growing rapidly,” Karras says.

“There are a number of important drone defense technologies flooding the market but there has not been one which integrates all the best capabilities under a single platform until the solutions developed by Airspace.”

Additional participants in the funding round included s28 Capital, as well as previous investors Shasta Ventures and Granite Hill Capital Partners.

According to Airspace co-founder and CEO Jaz Banga, Airspace will use the latest funding to produce the Airspace Command Center (AC2) at scale. AC2 is a comprehensive drone defense system.

Airspace will also use the funding to expand its Silicon Valley-based machine vision, autonomous navigation and embedded systems teams.

“We’re leveraging the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, computer vision, high-speed robotics and neural networks to create something like a firewall in the sky,” Banga says.

“We’re building the complete drone security system that lets the good drones in and keeps the bad ones out.”

​Founded by engineers who previously worked at Apple, Google and Cisco Systems, Airspace says that it is leading the counter UAS industry in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to “detect, classify and capture the most complex and dangerous drone threats.”

Airspace says that its latest technology, the Mobile Airspace Command Center(MAC2), identifies potential threats in the sky. When a rogue UAS is spotted, MAC2 deploys a variety of countermeasures, including the Airspace Interceptor, which “autonomously navigates and reacts to a rogue drone’s every move and then safely captures and removes enemy drones to avoid collateral damage.”

Airspace uses AI, machine vision and deep-learning neural networks to defend against the most difficult UAS threats faced by public event venues, military personnel and law enforcement agencies.