Autonomous ISR drones for the U.S. military. Vision-based navigation. Backpack-deployable. $4,000 per unit. Built in America.
“In the contested mile, GPS dies first.”
Argus is a $4,000 reconnaissance drone that flies without GPS. No satellites, no comms link, no pilot mid-flight. A soldier opens a backpack, taps a target, and the system flies the mission on what its cameras see · vision-inertial odometry, satellite-image matching, on-device autonomy. It returns with imagery on landing.
Most legacy small UAS lose position when GPS is jammed · ninety-five percent fail in contested airspace, per DoD contested-environment reports. There is no sub-five-thousand-dollar autonomous ISR option built for a fire team · one that can be replaced if it doesn’t come back. Argus is that option.
The founders have flown this regime themselves. The CEO grew up in Afghanistan during wartime; the platform he wished existed is the one he is now building. The CTO led sensor fusion on Tesla Autopilot. They stopped doing other things to do this one thing · a small, cheap, autonomous drone that does not need a satellite to know where it is.
Vision is enough. The technology has caught up. Argus is the product that proves it.
Each subsystem ships on the drone itself · no cloud, no link, no pilot. Built to run on a Jetson Orin Nano sized for a backpack.
Feature tracking and stereo depth on the camera and IMU. The drone knows where it is · and how it is moving · without asking a satellite.
A fine-tuned DINOv2 network matches what the drone sees against 806,000 indexed satellite tiles. Sub-second query, fully offline.
A 1.5B-parameter language model fine-tuned for drone missions. Natural-language commands interpreted into flight plans. Runs on the airframe.
V1 prototype, flying. 83 sessions logged. Built from off-the-shelf components and tuned for low-altitude GPS-denied operation at 1.8 m AGL. Production targets an NDAA-compliant supply chain.
What ‘works in a deck’ doesn’t fly. These are measured numbers from V1 prototype telemetry, current as of 2026.
Per-airframe target. Comparable legacy systems run $50,000–$200,000.
Localization runs on cameras, IMUs, and a 150 MB on-device index.
Sustained on a Jetson Orin Nano. 0.025 px LK precision, 1.3 cm/s bias.
ArgusSAT contrastive accuracy. 5 of 6 blind locations recovered in a 32 km² area.
Covers 83% of CONUS. The entire index fits offline in ~150 MB.
2,207 raw camera frames captured. 210 optical-flow logs processed. Every flight tunes the model.
Side-by-side, public spec sheets and field deployment data. Argus operates at 1.8 m AGL · the altitude where GPS jamming hits hardest and close-in ISR matters most.
“Ninety-five percent of military drones fail in GPS-jammed environments.”
Vision-only nav. On-device LLM planner. NDAA-compliant by design.
GPS-degraded, not GPS-denied. Waypoint missions need satellites.
Built for F-16, MQ-25, V-BAT. Not sized for a fire-team backpack.
GPS-dependent. Operator-controlled. Different category (loitering / fixed-wing).
Hivemind autonomy bundled. Ten times the unit cost of Argus.
Every founder and engineer works for equity. They are here because the mission matters more than a paycheck.
[ F.01 ]DRONE R&D · COMBAT-ZONE FLIGHT TIME
Grew up in Afghanistan during wartime and saw what happens to ground forces without situational awareness. Led drone R&D programs and designed and built the V1 prototype. Founded Argus to build the platform he wished existed.
[ F.02 ]TESLA AUTOPILOT · SENSOR FUSION
Led autonomous-systems sensor fusion at Tesla Autopilot. Deep expertise in vision-based navigation, computer vision, and embedded AI. Left Tesla to build the autonomy software for GPS-denied warfare.
NASA / ISS CubeSat · NASA L'SPACE
Computer Vision · IEEE co-author
Embedded Systems · deployment tooling
Argus is an 8-person team in San Jose, CA. We respond to every brief inside one business day. No forms, no funnels.
Pre-seed. $2M SAFE @ $18M cap. 18-month runway. Series Seed at Phase 2 entry.
Open data roomSBIR Phase I submitted. Active military LOIs. Discuss pilot deployment via OTA.
Brief our teamWe hire VIO, embedded AI, and aerospace engineers. Equity-based. Mission-aligned.
Send a résuméPress kit, founder interviews, demos. Reach out for embargoed material.
Open press line