PARIS — The scramble by armies to counter the drones dominating modern battlefields has supercharged demand for miniaturized radars from Echodyne that provide detection and fire-control support for dozens of anti-drone solutions, the company’s CEO Eben Frankenberg said.
With the counter-drone market “red hot,” demand for affordable short-range radars could grow tenfold by 2030, Frankenberg told Defense News at the Eurosatory defense show near Paris last month. Echodyne, based near Seattle, is shipping radars as fast as it can make them, and will cut the ribbon on a new facility this month that at full rate will lift production capacity tenfold.
As drones have become the main killers on the battlefield in Ukraine and inflicted billions of damage in the Middle East, counter-unmanned aerial systems could be spotted all over the 2026 edition of Eurosatory, the world’s biggest defense show. The Echodyne team tallied at least 29 stands displaying the firm’s radars integrated in C-UAS offerings.
“There is a rush of interest globally for counter-drone,” Frankenberg said. “The Ukraine war made it obvious to everyone that drones had changed the face of warfare, but the Iran war made it obvious that everything’s at risk.”
Defeating drones starts with detection, and suppliers of relatively small and affordable radars such as Echodyne, Blighter and Robin Radar have benefited from surging interest in anti-drone warfare, which doesn’t require the powerful and expensive radars that equip missile and air-defense systems.
“The more traditional defense-radar companies make amazing radars,” Frankenberg said, citing RTX, SRC and Thales. “But they all cost half a million dollars or a million dollars a face. If you have a million cheap, lethal drones, you can’t have one battlefield-wide system at $5 million or $10 million. You have to have a ton of inexpensive, yet highly effective systems.”
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Echodyne’s compact, solid-state radars use the firm’s proprietary metamaterials technology, with densely packed antenna arrays to electronically steer radar beams without much of the complexity and cost of traditional phased-array systems.
The firm was founded in 2014 as a spin-off from Intellectual Ventures, with early investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Frankenberg said the reason to create Echodyne was to make radars with the performance of active electronically scanned array radars “for fractions of the cost.”
Echodyne’s small radars, about as big as a hard-cover book, cost around $40,000 a panel, while its bigger radars, the size of a small carry-on suitcase, are in the $160,000 range, the CEO said.
The company is investing $40 million in a new facility that will lift production capacity to 30,000 radar panels a year, a mix of smaller and larger models. Frankenberg said Echodyne has advanced its entire 2027 expansion plan to this year, with the new plant already online before the official ribbon cutting in July.
“There’s just massive demand now, and it goes back to the point that the only way to counter mass is with mass, and so there’s just going to be a huge number of these systems,” Frankenberg said. “We’re building this new factory for a reason.”
The market for small radars will probably reach hundreds of thousands of panels by 2030 from a market that today numbers in the tens of thousands, according to Frankenberg. He said Echodyne is currently leading in the segment, but didn’t want to provide an exact number for market share.
Echodyne’s first radar, the book-sized EchoFlight, designed for commercial drone collision avoidance, got a lot of press but “wasn’t going in a hurry anywhere commercially,” the CEO said. The firm got its first big break in 2017, when Anduril adopted EchoGuard for its Sentry autonomous surveillance tower, which in turn kicked off interest in the radar for ground-to-air drone detection.
The company developed the larger EchoShield radar using its metamaterials technology for clients wanting more detection range, and introduced the model around the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as demand for military counter-drone systems took off. Defense now accounts for about 65% of sales, a reversal of the mix before 2022.
EchoGuard can typically track a small quadcopter drone at 1 km (1,100 yards), while the larger EchoShield can do the same at 3 km and track more than 1,000 objects at a given time. The radars are usually part of a sensor stack including optical sensors and often also radio-frequency detection.
While “exquisite systems” for traditional air defense won’t go away, Echodyne expects much greater demand for affordable short-range radar than high-end systems, according to Frankenberg.
“You’re going to need a massive number of short-range systems. All those short-range systems need to be able to detect and track the incoming threat, which means they’re going to need some kind of radar.”
Echodyne has outgrown the startup phase and considers itself a medium-sized technology company, with around 60% of revenue from the United States and 40% from international markets, Frankenberg said.
The firm worked with Northrop Grumman around 2020 to integrate EchoGuard on Bushmaster chain guns for counter-drone fire control, with Frankenberg saying radar cueing solved tracking problems that optical sensors alone struggled with. That approach has since been adopted by turret makers including Kongsberg and Rheinmetall.
For any platform with a gun, “that gun needs to be able to defend the platform,” Frankenberg said. “Every maneuver unit should have this. At the end of the day, is that your most exquisite counter- drone system? Maybe not, but does it allow you to defend yourself in battle? Yes.”
The CEO said turning guns into anti-drone weapons requires a radar, maybe a computer upgrade depending on the platform, software algorithms, “and then the gun is ready to go. We think there’s going to be huge demand for this.”
Echodyne radars are used on high-powered microwave C-UAS from Epirus and ThinKom, laser-based systems from AeroVironment and Electro Optic Systems, in European laser-weapon programs, and in directed-energy projects with primes who make their own radars, Frankenberg said. Other solutions include pallets loaded with interceptors, and an Echodyne radar to cue them.
“We’re on pretty much anything you can think of in the counter drone space,” Frankenberg said.
No single system will win the C-UAS race, “you’re going to see a mass of systems,” Frankenberg said. He said lasers and high-powered microwaves are good options where appetite for collateral damage is low, whereas rotary machine guns are extremely effective “if you don’t care about collateral effects.”
With the proliferation of new drone counters, “I’m sure it’s confusing for buyers,” Frankenberg said. “There’s going be room for a lot of them to be effective and be winners, but which ones, it’s hard to pick right now.”
As for Echodyne, the firm became profitable last year and is open to all long-term options, including staying private, an initial public offering or an acquisition, according to the CEO. Frankenberg said his investors right now are “incredibly happy” with how business is going.
“We’re clearly in the middle of this market that’s red hot, and so from that standpoint, it makes sense that we would be attractive to people,” Frankenberg said. “We’re profitable, attractively profitable, so we can run as long as we want, but good business management is, always be open to what comes around.”
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