Droneshield is an Australia-based defense technology company that specializes in counter-drone technology.
In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner and Motley Fool data engineer Beegee Alop talk with Droneshield CEO Oleg Vornik about counter-drones, the civilian and military markets, and lessons on leadership.
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Transcript is below. This podcast was recorded on Feb. 01, 2026.
Oleg Vornik: We get a lot of feedback from Ukrainians that in addition to saving their lives, it actually gives them a lot of that psychological confidence because you think about it, like for us, the buzzing annoying buzzing sound from a drone is just a bit of a nuisance. For them, it’s full on trauma because you hear that thing like it’s going to kill you.
Mac Greer: That was Oleg Vornik, CEO of Droneshield, an Australian based defense company that specializes in counter drone technology. I’m Motley Fool producer Mac Greer. Motley Fool co founder and CEO Tom Gardner talked with Vornik about that technology and about the business of Droneshield.
Tom Gardner: Hello, Fools. Very excited for this time together with the CEO of Droneshield Australian company in the counter drone Solutions business, and the CEO Oleg Vornik is with us. Thank you so much for being here, Oleg.
Oleg Vornik: Thanks for having me.
Tom Gardner: We also have Beegee Alop from the Motley Fool, who’s going to be guiding us through some of the technical questions we’re going to ask. But I think Oleg, what we want to do to start this time together is just maybe a one or two sentence description of the business because we’re going to be going through the hardware and software solutions in a bit. But just a quick overview and then the history. We know you were founded in 2014. I’m curious what the first year was like in a business that nobody was likely making any significant purchases from in the first 12 months. I’d love to hear just one or two line overview and then a little bit of the history of the company.
Oleg Vornik: Droneshield makes hardware and software that detects and takes down drones. It uses completely soft approach, so there’s no physical harm to the drones or, in fact, any surrounding environment. Modalities are like the radio frequency and radars and cameras to detect, and then mostly smart jamming to take the drones down. In terms of our first year in the business, so the company was started by two American scientists, and they had the idea back from the Boston Marathon, which had terrorist attack a couple of years earlier before the business started that as any technology evolving, drone technology was going to rapidly evolve. Back then, drones would fly 30 yards, smash against the nearest building, and that would be the end of it. You couldn’t really do much nefarious activity with it. But the head division that as drone technology was going to, the bad guys would eventually start using it effectively, as we, of course, saw subsequent in Ukraine and other places. The first year was very much just a garage company until they had a conversation with a New York based fund manager who agreed to give them some seed money in exchange for two conditions. One, the listing on the Australian stock exchange as means of raising more money for more growth for the business, and secondly, to have somebody commercial to come in and run the business, and they knew me from previous experiences. I was a banker at the time and looking to do something more productive in my life. They gave me a call and introduced me to the two founders, and the rest was history.
Tom Gardner: Now let’s talk about the product sweep of the business. You mentioned that this is non kinetic. These aren’t hard kill devices that are taking down drones, but maybe just a little bit of the overview as to why there’s a demand now and why that demand is half military and intelligence and half civilian opportunity out there for the business. Maybe we start with the hardware, and then you can talk a little bit about the software and subscription.
Oleg Vornik: First series demand we saw was in 2018 where Houthis were attacking Saudi oil facilities using small drones. Now, why small drones, that’s the only effective way of attacking that they had. Saudis were scrambling to find effective counter drone systems, and there were our first multimillion dollar customer. Then, of course, Ukraine happened at that point, to where we’re supplying poles with our systems, and poles turned around and donated some of them to the Ukrainians. We had early experience in protecting against the Russian drones attacking Ukraine, and that drove Ukrainians to ask for more of our systems, and we’ve delivered hundreds of our systems to Ukraine since then. The technology uses a combination of different types of approaches. You have radio frequency, which is essentially listening for the connection between the drone and the controller. The connection is not just the controller telling the drone what to do. Often, the drone wants to report back where it is, the telemetry, and also the video feed from the drone. We can listen to that traffic both ways. Then on the flip side, when you’re defeating, you’re looking to severe that traffic both ways and also the connection to the satellite. When often people think about autonomous drone, what they’re really thinking is a drone controlled by the satellite as opposed to by human, and we severe the connection to the satellite as well.
Now, the best way to deal with drones is a layered approach. When you introduce a radar, a radar is like a motion detector in the sky. Anything that moves will get picked up. Radars stand-alone have their own issues in the sense that other flying objects like birds or even moving trees often get picked up. Radars have evolved as technology to detect large, shiny reflective objects like airplanes high up in the sky, where there is no other object that can be confusing that looks like an airplane. But a small plastic object that doesn’t really give much reflection, which is what radar relies on, then means that radars have a lot of difficulty by themselves, and often you need to have customized radars that are specifically formulated for tracking drones. You take your radar, you take your radio frequency sensor, and then you can add a camera to it, as well. A camera does that final visual confirmation. Camera has been developed to track humans and vehicles for decades, but it’s actually quite difficult to use a camera to detect an object flying 100 miles an hour against complex background like weaving in and out of buildings, trees, and so on. You’re looking for specialized software behind each of these modalities, a ref radar and camera to accurately fuse it together into a single track or tracking multiple drones at the same time. That’s the beauty of the Smart Command and Control system. Then on the defeat side, apart from Jami, you can do other things. Like, I’m not a big fan of bullets or lasers, not so much because of being anti war or whatnot. But war is a terrible thing, but simply because those are very narrow applications, unless you are in an open warfare, say, for example, you on a stadium, or you are protecting military base within the US, you can’t really just get a gun out and start shooting. You’re not allowed to. You’re restricted to more passive methods like jamming or with quite like interceptor drones. We don’t make our own planes of people make great interceptor drones, but you can integrate that into your command and control system that sends out the good drone and basically either rams or captures the bad drone.
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