A throwable autonomous counter-drone interceptor. User-initiated. Fully autonomous in flight. GNSS-free. RF-free.
Small drones have fundamentally changed both modern warfare and the security of civilian infrastructure. A £500 (≈$635) commercial quadrotor can neutralise a £2 million (≈$2.54M) armoured vehicle, or force the shutdown of a power station, contaminate a water supply network, or ground an airport for days.
The threat is no longer confined to the battlefield. Prisons, energy facilities, transport hubs, and public events now face the same asymmetric calculus that has reshaped frontline combat in Ukraine: cheap, commercially available UAVs deployed against targets with no proportionate kinetic response.
Existing countermeasures were not built for this. Electronic jamming is increasingly defeated by autonomous flight modes requiring no RF link. GPS spoofing is rendered irrelevant by GNSS-free navigation. Directed energy and radar-guided systems carry six- and seven-figure price tags, wholly uneconomic against a £300 (≈$380/€345) threat, and impossible to deploy at scale across distributed infrastructure.
The arithmetic is broken at both ends of the threat spectrum. What the battlespace and the critical national infrastructure estate both demand is the same thing: a kinetic, autonomous, low-cost response, one that matches the unit economics of the threat, can be stockpiled in quantity, and requires no specialist infrastructure to deploy.
What the battlespace demands is a kinetic, autonomous, low-cost response, one that matches the unit economics of the threat, can be stockpiled in quantity, and deployed without specialist infrastructure.
"The cost imbalance is the strategic problem. You don't solve it with a more expensive missile — you solve it with a smarter, cheaper interceptor at volume."
The Protegens interceptor is a user-launched, single-use autonomous UAV, a kinetic effector that detects, tracks, and eliminates hostile drones using onboard AI vision. No RF uplink. No GPS dependency. No human in the loop requirement for terminal homing.
Pre-booted and held in operational standby inside its canister, the system achieves less than 0.3 seconds from alert to airborne. The canister format allows rapid deployment by small teams with no specialist equipment.
Three platform variants span the full threat spectrum, from close-in FPV defeat through to Shahed-class loitering munition intercept, all sharing the same AI backbone and sensor stack.
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P2 Personnel
Personal Last-Line Defence
300g AUW
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P2 Sentry
Autonomous Perimeter & Vehicle
700g AUW
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P2 Infrastructure
Fixed Installation Defence
1700g AUW
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| Role | Soldier-carried last-line personal interceptor. Drawn from webbing and fired by hand. | Autonomous ground sentry or vehicle-mounted perimeter defence. Set and forget. | Fixed installation protection against large UAS and Shahed-class threats. |
| Threat class | Small FPV / quadcopter | FPV / quadcopter / small UAS | Shahed-class / large UAS |
| Deployment | Manual — operator fires | Autonomous — acoustic detection | Autonomous — sensor fusion |
| Effective range | 100 – 200m | 200 – 500m | 1 – 3km |
Protegens was started by people who have seen the drone threat first-hand and found the available responses inadequate. That is the origin of this system — not a technology looking for a problem.
The team has backgrounds in defence engineering, autonomous systems, and AI. We build hardware that has to work, not just demonstrate.
We are based in Farnborough and are working directly with UK procurement and research bodies to move this from active flight testing into programme.
We engage directly with defence procurement teams, system integrators, programme offices, and government research bodies. All enquiries are treated as commercially confidential. NDA available on first contact. Briefings available at Farnborough or by secure remote arrangement.