NAPLES, FL – Aug. 28, 2026 – Counter-drone has gone from a small line item to one of the fastest-growing corners of defense spending. MarketsandMarkets puts the global counter-unmanned aircraft systems market at $6.6 billion in 2025 and sees it hitting $20.3 billion by 2030, close to a tripling in five years, growing about 25% a year.
Hardware is only part of it. Spotting a hostile drone, figuring out what it is, tracking it, and knocking it down is a sensor and software problem before anyone fires anything, and the systems doing that work churn out data nonstop. So compute and storage, the plumbing underneath AI, are now part of a market that used to be all radar and interceptors.
Here are four companies working on different pieces of that problem.
Change Agents Corporation (Nasdaq: CHGA) builds agentic artificial intelligence software and is now pushing into AI-enabled autonomous air defense and counter-unmanned aerial systems. The company recently announced that it has been accepted into the partner program at Seagate Technology Holdings plc (Nasdaq: STX). Through the program, Change Agents get access to Seagate partner resources, including product information, training, sales and marketing tools, and everything else available through the Seagate partner portal.
The company said getting in widens its engagement with the broader technology ecosystem as it builds out its strategy around artificial intelligence, autonomous defense systems, advanced computing, data storage, and next-generation counter-UAS technology. It also gives Change Agents a line into a global provider of mass-capacity data storage while it looks at infrastructure and technology that could support its AI and autonomous defense work.
Seagate is a useful place to be plugged in right now. The storage maker booked $12.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026, up 34%, including $3.6 billion in its June quarter alone, up 48%. It shipped 218 exabytes of capacity that quarter, up 34% from a year earlier, and data centers accounted for 89% of it. That is the AI buildout showing up in hard drives.
That matters because of how much data these systems eat. AI and autonomous platforms are driving up the need to create, store, move, and process data, and Change Agents has said it sees enterprise-class storage as an important piece of the infrastructure behind data-heavy AI workloads, autonomous platforms, and mission-critical computing.
The defense side came together earlier this month. Change Agents formed Autonomous Air Defense LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary built to go after AI-enabled drone surveillance and counter-UAS technology for defense, homeland security, and critical infrastructure customers. Along with the launch, the company put Maj. Gen. Malcolm Frost (Ret.) on the advisory boards of both Change Agents and the new subsidiary. Frost spent 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired as a two-star general. He commanded the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, served as deputy commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, and was deputy director for operations at the National Military Command Center on the Joint Staff.
"The convergence of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and next-generation counter-drone and air surveillance technologies represents one of the most important developments in modern defense," Frost said.
Next came membership in the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement and plans to take part in IDGA's Counter UAS Summit, which puts military leaders, government agencies, defense contractors, and technology developers in the same room to talk about drone threats and how to stop them. Michael Mathews, a director of Change Agents Corp., called the moves "important milestones as we continue executing our strategy to build a meaningful presence in the rapidly evolving autonomous defense market."
Three announcements in under a month have given Change Agents a defense subsidiary, a retired two-star on its advisory board, a seat in the counter-UAS conversation, and now a line into the storage layer underneath all of it. The company says it is still looking at acquisitions and partnerships as it works to build a bigger platform in autonomous defense.
AeroVironment (Nasdaq: AVAV) has spent the past year turning itself from a tactical drone maker into a full counter-drone supplier, and the numbers show how big that shift has been. Fiscal 2026 revenue, for the year ended in April, came in at $1.98 billion, up 141% from the year before. Fourth-quarter revenue hit $641.6 million, up 133%. Autonomous Systems made up $492.4 million of that quarter, and Space, Cyber, and Directed Energy added $149.2 million.
The BlueHalo deal, which closed in May 2025, gave the company a complete detect-to-defeat lineup, and the U.S. Army has been buying it. On July 1, 2026, the Army awarded AeroVironment a $500 million, three-year contract for layered counter-drone defense. It covers the Titan 4 RF system, the fixed-site Titan MS with X-band radar that can track more than 500 targets at once, the LOCUST X3 laser, and AV_Halo COMMAND software to tie it all together. A separate $95.9 million award covers the Freedom Eagle FE-1 interceptor missile.
The order book backs that up. Funded backlog closed the fiscal year at $1.2 billion, up from $726.6 million a year earlier, on $2.7 billion in bookings and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.4. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $286.1 million for the year.
For fiscal 2027, management guided revenue to $2.125 billion to $2.225 billion with adjusted EBITDA of $305 million to $325 million, which assumes counter-drone buying keeps up close to its current pace.
Palantir Technologies (Nasdaq: PLTR) works higher up the stack. It sells the software that turns raw sensor and operational data into decisions, and few companies of its size are growing this fast. Second-quarter 2026 revenue hit $1.935 billion, up 93% from a year earlier. U.S. revenue was $1.573 billion, up 115%, split between $809 million from the U.S. government, up 90%, and $764 million from U.S. commercial customers, up 149%.
The defense business runs through the Maven Smart System, which chews through imagery and sensor data from drones, satellites, and other surveillance platforms to cut analyst workload and speed up decisions. The Pentagon moved Maven from an experiment to a formal program of record and pushed it out department-wide, after a 2025 contract change raised its value to as much as $795 million. Palantir also holds an Army enterprise agreement potentially worth up to $10 billion over a decade, and NATO picked up the Maven Smart System in 2025.
The company is signing deals faster than it books revenue. Palantir closed $3.373 billion in total contract value during the quarter, up 49%, including 220 deals worth at least $1 million and 73 worth at least $10 million. Its Rule of 40 score hit 155%, and it ended the quarter with $9.2 billion in cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.
Full-year 2026 guidance calls for revenue around $8.15 billion, roughly 82% growth, with adjusted free cash flow of $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion. With that much cash coming in the door, Palantir can keep chasing long defense programs without having to raise money to do it.
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