The CET Brief

Modern commanders face more sensor feeds, intelligence reports and terrain data than any staff can process inside a decision cycle, and the gap between information and decision is where operations fail. David Yahid speaks with Nadav Poplawski, Co-Founder and CEO of UNIQAI Systems, whose service in Israeli special operations exposed the problem from the receiving end. The company’s operational decision-intelligence platform ingests terrain, operational environment and enemy data, then generates and compares courses of action, deliberately leaving the decision and the accountability with the human commander. It runs in the cloud or fully disconnected, and integrates with existing command-and-control systems rather than replacing them. UNIQAI Systems has been fielded across multiple IDF command levels and branches, with Israel’s Ministry of Defense among its customers, and the platform is now in testing with U.S. Special Operations. Poplawski discusses the company’s U.S. presence, partnership approach and routes into broader Army programs, and argues the next advantage in combat is decision speed, not more data.

Hemorrhage is the leading cause of preventable battlefield death, and the tool meant to stop it still depends on a stressed operator applying it correctly. Human error affects roughly 79 percent of tourniquet applications, and a forgotten time note can cost a limb after four or five hours. David Yahid speaks with Edan Razinovsky, CEO of Xmetix, founded by two brothers, an Israeli Navy SEAL and surgeon and a former Rafael engineer and special operator, who moved from smart clothing for special forces into hemorrhage control after October 7. Their TAK-710 is an automated tourniquet applied one-handed: pull a pin, press a button, and a sensor detects occlusion and tightens on its own, with 15 mmHg adjustments supporting controlled conversion for limb salvage. FDA listed and CE marked, it shipped in the hundreds to Australia after the Bondi Beach incident and sells in Poland, Latvia, Czechia, Israel, Japan, Greece, and to U.S. police and EMS. Xmetix is pursuing the Department of War, holds four patents including one granted in the United States, and has a large study planned at Fort Sam Houston. Razinovsky’s takeaway from AUSA: specialty units decide fast, and the live demo does the selling.

Intelligence teams often know how to process threats but miss them entirely because the right data sources were never discovered, and manual source collection is too slow and expensive to close the gap. David Yahid speaks with Shlomi Pinchuk, Co-Founder and CEO of Badger, who built the company from special forces and intelligence experience where publicly available information proved the most valuable planning stream during wartime operations. Badger is an AI-driven OSINT platform that discovers overlooked data sources, detects and verifies emerging threats, and pushes them into operational workflows. The system ingests both digital sources and human field reports, serves users from analysts to field operators on mobile, and delivers roughly 30x efficiency gains when replacing full workflows rather than individual steps. Badger is deployed with Israeli defense organizations at TRL 8 to 9 and with commercial customers in maritime security, insurance, airlines, and critical infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Israel with a growing U.S. presence anchored by a Utah office supporting government and defense sales. For Pinchuk, the hardest part of intelligence is not the analysis; it is finding the sources you never knew to search.

Legacy tactical radios were not built for the sensor feeds, drone video, and AI workloads that modern operations demand, and public cellular networks offer bandwidth but no security or control. David Yahid speaks with Rami Mirsky, CEO and co-founder of Raycom, who brings roughly 20 years of wireless communications experience and military service in both Israel and the United States. Raycom builds deployable private 5G networks with integrated edge compute, giving warfighters and first responders a secure network they own and carry. Each field unit creates an independent communication bubble, supports device onboarding through QR code or eSIM, operates standalone, and can merge with other units into a larger network as the mission scales. The company's Shark system is at TRL 7, has been demonstrated at Fort Bragg and to the U.S. Department of Defense, and is already deployed with emergency response customers. Raycom is a Delaware-based company with a Tysons Corner hub, participates in U.S. 5G ecosystem efforts, and offers network-as-a-service alongside hardware and application subscriptions. The data demands of the modern battlefield have outgrown every legacy alternative, and Mirsky is building the infrastructure to replace them.

Detection of small drones has improved rapidly, but the gap between identifying a threat and defeating it affordably remains wide open; spending a hundred thousand dollars to stop a thousand-dollar drone is a losing equation at scale. David Yahid speaks with Aaron Prat, CEO of Tehiru Aerial Systems, who came out of IDF Unit 8200 and pivoted the company into counter-UAS after October 7 following direct conversations with Ukrainian and Israeli defense stakeholders. Tehiru builds an end-to-end detection-to-interception platform targeting Group 1 through 3 threats with interceptors priced below five thousand dollars. The system integrates with third-party detection stacks, launches within roughly 500 milliseconds of receiving target data, and spans three maturity stages from explosive-based interception at TRL 9 to autonomous multi-launcher defense at TRL 5. Dozens of systems are being installed on Israel's northern border, and Tehiru has demonstrated to the U.S. Navy and Army while working with two major American primes. The company manufactures primarily in the United States with NDAA-aligned components and keeps key software, navigation, and compute capabilities in-house. For Prat, counter-UAS defense that cannot scale economically cannot defend anything at all.

Every person, vehicle, and vessel emits radio signals, but most security operations treat the electromagnetic environment as invisible noise rather than a source of intelligence. David Yahid speaks with Dr. Jonathan Abir, CEO and Co-Founder of GuaRdF, who built the company from operational gaps his team identified in signal intelligence and frontline decision-making during Israeli military service. GuaRdF's passive RF platform detects, classifies, and geolocates emitters without transmitting, identifying specific device types down to vehicle models and IoT hardware. The system fuses RF detections with video surveillance to cue cameras on persons or vehicles of interest, and a notable police use case correlates RF signatures with footage to detect license plate swaps in real time. GuaRdF has paying customers across five continents, serving defense organizations, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. The platform requires no transmission license, deploys plug-and-play in dense environments with hundreds of thousands of daily passersby, and supports flexible commercial structures from SaaS to capex. For Abir, the spectrum is not background noise; it is the first sensor in the stack.

Armored vehicles protect their crews by sealing them inside, but that same protection strips away awareness of threats outside, above, and at close range. David Yahid speaks with Ido Rozenberg, President and CTO of Axon Vision, who founded the company nine years ago with teammates from elite IDF technical units, long before edge AI in defense became a category. Axon Vision embeds AI into military platforms, from passive perception layers for armored vehicle awareness to counter-drone active protection with Force Field, remote weapon station automation, and terminal munition guidance through Edge Guide. The company operates across Israel, Europe, the Gulf, and the U.S., with programs of record and growing deployment traction. Rozenberg relocated to the United States to navigate procurement, compliance, and customer relationships firsthand, working through the Americanization that U.S. defense customers expect beyond paperwork. Nine years of recorded military sensor data and the engineering of integrating AI into legacy hardware, not the latest model, form the real moat.

Autonomous drones need to land on moving vehicles, refuel in midair, and coordinate across platforms, but camera-based tracking demands heavy compute and fails at the speeds contested operations require. David Yahid speaks with Mark Goldfarb, CEO and co-founder of Sixdof Space, whose core sensor originated in AR/VR head tracking before pivoting to defense after an encounter with ELTA at CES. The system compresses light into a one-dimensional signal, delivering six-degrees-of-freedom positioning at 400 updates per second using coded infrared beacons rather than image processing. Each beacon carries a unique ID, enabling drones to identify the correct landing station or pass short messages without RF communication. Sixdof Space has roughly 300 systems deployed, including work with Lockheed Martin on next-generation midair refueling for the U.S. Air Force and General Dynamics with weapon training and simulation exercises. The company sells through its U.S. entity and has addressed cybersecurity and component-origin compliance, with flexibility to localize assembly as contracts require. For Goldfarb, the path to real-time autonomy runs through light, not compute.

The missing piece in autonomous marine defense is not the boat - it's the ability to get it back, refuel it, and keep it operating. Amitai Peleg, Co-Founder and CEO of Sealartec, reveals how his team is solving the logistics bottleneck that has kept unmanned surface vessels from scaling, and why that breakthrough could change naval operations worldwide.

David Yahid of CET Sandbox sits down with Amitai to unpack the hard truth behind marine robotics: launching a drone boat is easy, but recovering it in rough seas is the real barrier to mass deployment. Amitai explains how Sealartec turned that overlooked problem into a patented system for autonomous launch, recovery, docking, and refueling - technology that is already being demonstrated with major defense players.

You'll discover:

• Why autonomous boats still need a "landing" solution before they can become truly useful
• How a Navy experience and a mechanical engineering background sparked the company
• The garage-built prototype that led to a working sea trial in harsh conditions
• How Sealartec moved from first funding to live demonstrations with the US Navy and US Coast Guard
• Why autonomous refueling may unlock far larger scale than launch and recovery alone

Amitai shares how Sealartec's systems are now being tested and deployed with organizations including BAE Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, the US Navy, the US Coast Guard, and other global maritime partners. He also explains why the company is shifting toward the US market, building local production strategies, and preparing for a future where autonomous vessels can operate longer, farther, and at greater scale.

This episode is essential listening if you're interested in defense technology, autonomous systems, marine robotics, or the infrastructure that makes unmanned fleets actually viable. If you've ever wondered what it takes to turn a launch-and-recovery bottleneck into the backbone of the autonomous navy, this conversation lays it out.

Spectrum dominance is becoming a battlefield necessity, and Sensorz is building the stack that helps militaries detect, classify, and react to RF threats in subseconds. Meir Friedland explains why the old way of handling signals intelligence is breaking under the pressure of drones, GPS spoofing, software-defined radios, and an exploding number of waveforms.

I sat down with Meir Friedland, Co-Founder and CEO of Sensorz, to unpack how a company can turn deep communications intelligence expertise into an end-to-end defense platform. Meir shares how Sensorz went from identifying a gap in the commercial spectrum space to delivering turnkey solutions for tactical units, border security, force protection, and strategic defense customers.

You'll discover:

• What "spectrum dominance" actually means in practice - from detection to rapid reaction
• Why modern battlefields are creating an invisible wireless war that most systems were never designed to handle
• How Sensorz combines algorithms, C2 software, and its own receivers and SDRs into one vertically integrated offering
• Why accessibility matters as much as raw technology, and how the team is making complex RF data usable for non-experts
• How the company builds models and signal libraries while keeping customer data sovereign through its RF Studio pipeline

Meir also breaks down the three customer archetypes Sensorz serves - highly tactical teams that need speed and simplicity, large-scale deployers securing borders and armored vehicles, and strategic operators facing unknown signals where every day saved can change the outcome of a mission. He explains how feedback from the field, especially in Israel, is accelerating product development and revealing use cases they did not expect.

This episode is a sharp look at what it takes to build defense technology for a spectrum that is growing more crowded, more dynamic, and more contested by the day. Essential listening if you care about electronic warfare, SIGINT, defense innovation, or how real-world field requirements shape breakthrough products.