Andy Lowery - Inside the World's Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine | SRS #299

TL;DR

Eperis CEO Andy Lowery explains how Leonitis uses high-power microwave energy to create an adaptive electromagnetic force field that can destroy 49 drones simultaneously in under one second.

Key Points

• 1.Eperis was founded in 2018 by visionaries who foresaw the drone threat. Grant, Joe, and other financial founders anticipated drone warfare on US soil before it materialized, funding the company through the COVID discovery phase when the military doubted the approach.
• 2.Andy Lowery's path to Eperis ran through nuclear Navy service and Raytheon. He enlisted in 1991, studied RF and microwave engineering at the University of Illinois, served as a nuclear officer on USS John C. Stennis, and spent 2007–2014 at Raytheon as chief engineer on the EA-18 Growler's Next Generation Jammer.
• 3.Gallium nitride semiconductors are the core enabling technology. Unlike silicon, GaN withstands massive power densities and can amplify signals at levels that unlock a new class of directed energy and electronic warfare systems — Lowery calls it the key to his entire career niche.
• 4.Leonitis works like a morphing electromagnetic force field, not a traditional jammer. It couples high-power RF interference onto drone computer boards, causing a 'blue screen of death' effect — the system steers its beam across multiple target groups in under half a second, hitting three drone clusters sequentially within one demo.
• 5.The flagship 49-drone simultaneous shootdown demo happened in under one second. The beam was steered so rapidly across three groups that all 49 drones perceived it as omnipresent; Lowery gifted host Sean Ryan a baseball card containing a fragment of those drones.
• 6.Range is entirely size-dependent, scaling from 50 meters for tank protection to 1.5+ kilometers for base defense. A toolbox-sized unit protects vehicles from FPV fiber-optic drones costing $10,000–$20,000 that can destroy a $3–4 million Abrams tank; building-sized arrays defend embassies and airfields.
• 7.Leonitis counters 'dark drones' — fiber-optic tethered and fully autonomous drones that cannot be jammed. Because the effect is electromagnetic pulse-like rather than GPS or RF jamming, it works equally on drones with no RF link or GPS navigation, which current jamming-based systems cannot defeat.
• 8.The system functions as a close-in weapon system using electromagnetic bullets instead of physical ones. Analogous to the Navy's Phalanx CIWS (R2-D2-style 5,000-rpm gun), Leonitis provides the last defensive layer against 'leakers' — the 1-in-10 drones that slip through primary defenses like Iron Dome.
• 9.Legacy defense primes like Raytheon and Lockheed are structurally incapable of this type of innovation. Lowery uses Palmer Lucky's framing: primes are incentivized like law firms — waiting for government requirements and checks — while neo-primes like Eperis risk capital upfront to guess at future battlefield needs.
• 10.General Dynamics Land Systems is Eperis's primary scaling partner. GD provides the global field support, logistics, and personnel infrastructure (including presence in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East) that a startup cannot build from scratch when moving to mass production.
• 11.Eperis built a full simulation and training ecosystem outside Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The experience center uses Call of Duty and Blizzard veterans (about 12 designers) to create an Ender Game-style tower-defense simulator so soldiers train on identical scenarios to real combat, reducing the learning gap in the field.
• 12.The drone threat mirrors cyber attack doctrine — swarms overwhelm layered defenses by sheer volume. Just as Symantec needs billions of code lines to fight 150-line Trojans, physical defense networks face swarms designed so that sending 1,000 drones lets ~100 leak through, demanding ever-more layers of systems like Leonitis.
• 13.Eperis has secured $100 million-plus in US government contracts and a $1 billion-plus valuation. Deployed across two combatant commands, the company is in active discussions with Israel (whose Iron Dome struggles against dark drones and swarms) and operates within the Gulf region where drone threats are escalating rapidly.