Eben Frankenberg did not mince words about the market he's selling into. Speaking at the Eurosatory defense show near Paris, the CEO of radar maker Echodyne described demand for counter-drone sensors as "red hot" — and he's spending $40 million to prove he means it.
This month, Echodyne is opening a new manufacturing facility near its Seattle-area headquarters that will lift the company's production capacity roughly tenfold, to 30,000 radar panels a year at full rate. The build-out was originally penciled in for 2027. Frankenberg told Defense News and C4ISRNET the company decided to pull the entire expansion plan forward into 2026, a year early, because orders and forecasts left it little choice.
A Bet on Mass, Not Just Precision
Echodyne's pitch rests on a simple observation about how drone warfare has actually unfolded: attackers increasingly send swarms, not single aircraft, and defenders need sensors that scale accordingly. "The only way to counter mass is with mass," Frankenberg said, framing the radar shortage less as a technology gap than a manufacturing one — militaries and critical-infrastructure operators know broadly what they need to detect saturation drone attacks, but there simply hasn't been enough hardware to go around.
The company's two flagship products reflect that swarm-focused design philosophy. EchoGuard, the shorter-range unit, tracks small quadcopters out to about 1 kilometer. EchoShield extends detection to roughly 3 kilometers and — critically for defending against coordinated attacks — can track more than 1,000 simultaneous objects at once. Both are built around Echodyne's metamaterials-based electronically scanned array technology, which the company has marketed as a way to get radar performance approaching traditional phased arrays at a fraction of the size, weight and cost.
That cost structure is part of the scaling story. According to figures Frankenberg shared, Echodyne's smaller radar panels run around $40,000 apiece, with larger panels priced near $160,000. At those price points, arming a base, a border, or a stretch of critical infrastructure with layered radar coverage against drone swarms is a very different proposition than fielding a handful of exquisite, multimillion-dollar air-defense radars — which is precisely the market Echodyne is chasing.
From Startup Runway to Profitability
The expansion also marks a turning point in Echodyne's own trajectory. The company, which counts Bill Gates among its early backers, became profitable in 2025 — a notable milestone for a radar hardware startup that has spent years building out both the underlying metamaterials technology and the manufacturing base to produce it at volume. Its revenue mix now sits at roughly 65% defense sales, a reversal from before 2022, when commercial work made up the larger share of the business. That non-defense side hasn't disappeared — Echodyne's first radar, the book-sized EchoFlight, was built for commercial drone collision avoidance, and the company's sensors have also been used in event-security systems, including ones deployed to help guard the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
UAS Magazine, covering the facility announcement separately, framed the new Seattle-area plant as a direct response to surging global demand for compact counter-drone and surveillance radar — demand that Echodyne's leadership argues is still in its early innings.
How Big Does This Market Get?
Frankenberg's numbers on where the broader short-range counter-drone radar market is headed are striking. Per Defense News's reporting from Eurosatory, the market for these short-range radars is projected to grow from tens of thousands of panels sold today to hundreds of thousands by 2030 — roughly a tenfold expansion in unit volume over four years. That trajectory is what's driving Echodyne to build 10x capacity now rather than waiting for 2027 as originally planned; a factory that comes online a year late in a market moving this fast risks losing ground to competitors racing toward the same demand curve.
It's also a bet that the drivers behind today's counter-drone spending spree — the proliferation of cheap, weaponized quadcopters in conflicts around the world, and the resulting scramble by militaries and infrastructure operators to field detection systems capable of handling swarms rather than single intruders — are structural rather than a temporary spike.
Why It Matters
Radar has historically been the expensive, hard-to-scale part of any counter-drone system — the sensing layer that everything else, from jammers to interceptors to command software, depends on. If Echodyne's projections hold and the short-range radar market really does grow tenfold by 2030, that shortage becomes a central bottleneck in how quickly militaries and civilian operators alike can field credible defenses against mass drone attacks.
A company moving its own capacity expansion up by a full year, and doing so on the back of a fresh $40 million factory rather than a roadmap slide, is a concrete signal that the counter-drone sensing market is scaling faster than even industry insiders expected a year or two ago. For an industry that has spent the last several years watching swarms of cheap drones overwhelm defenses built for single, high-value targets, more radar panels at lower unit cost — arriving sooner rather than later — directly addresses one of the sharpest capability gaps in modern air defense.
