Epirus

Epirus builds one core technology and has stayed narrowly focused on it since its founding in 2018: solid-state high-power microwave systems that disable electronics across a wide area rather than shooting down targets one at a time. The company is headquartered in Torrance, California, with additional production capacity in Lawton, Oklahoma, and it has raised more than 550 million dollars across its venture rounds, including a 250 million dollar Series D in 2025 that it said would fund scaling up manufacturing of its flagship product. That product is Leonidas, a software-defined high-power microwave weapon that generates a beam of electromagnetic energy able to knock out the electronics inside a group of drones simultaneously, rather than requiring an interceptor per target the way a missile or a laser typically does. That distinction matters against the kind of cheap drone swarms that have become common on modern battlefields, where a single expensive interceptor per incoming drone quickly becomes uneconomical.

Epirus has built variants around that core technology, including Leonidas Pod, a smaller form factor meant for integration onto vehicles and other platforms, and Leonidas H2O, adapted for maritime environments where salt air and moisture complicate traditional electronics. The company's most visible government relationship has been with the US Army, which has run Leonidas through its Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Power Microwave program, an effort to field counter-drone defenses that protect fixed sites and maneuvering formations from swarming threats. Epirus delivered four prototype systems to the Army by early 2024 under that effort and later won a 43.5 million dollar award to move into IFPC-HPM Generation II development, alongside a separate 66.1 million dollar Army award for related HPM work. The Navy has also tested Epirus systems in maritime settings, and the company has described interest from the Air Force and DARPA as it works to expand beyond its original Army relationship.

Epirus describes its broader ambition as addressing what it calls asymmetric threats, the growing gap between the low cost of mass-produced drones and the high cost of traditional missile-based defenses meant to stop them. Beyond pure counter-UAS work, the company has talked about applying the same microwave technology to broader electronic warfare and air domain awareness missions across ground, air, sea, and space, though Leonidas and its variants remain the company's only fielded products to date. Epirus stays privately held, backed by investors including 8VC, and has not disclosed a path toward going public, focusing instead on scaling production of Leonidas to meet what it describes as fast-growing demand from the Pentagon's push to counter proliferating drone threats.