The Technology Behind Safer Drones and Smarter Navigation | Ep. 97 [Omer Sharar]

What does it take to build technology that keeps critical systems operating when reliability matters most? In this episode of Industry Ignited, host Dr. Leeanne Aguilar welcomes Omer Sharar, CEO and Founder of infiniDOME Solutions, for an engaging discussion on the future of GPS protection, resilient navigation, and the innovations driving next-generation autonomous systems. Omer shares the story behind his company's mission to develop practical, scalable solutions that help organizations navigate increasingly complex operational environments.

The conversation explores the evolution of navigation technology, the challenges of launching a hardware startup in the defense sector, and the importance of building products that are both highly capable and widely accessible. Omer also shares his leadership philosophy, explaining why transparency, adaptability, and a strong belief in solving meaningful problems have been essential to Infinidome's growth. His experience offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs, technology leaders, and innovators working to create lasting impact.

If you're curious about the future of drones, aerospace, defense innovation, or autonomous technology, this episode is packed with insights that extend far beyond engineering. Join Dr. Leeanne Aguilar and Omer Sharar as they discuss the technologies shaping tomorrow and the vision required to transform bold ideas into real-world solutions. Be sure to subscribe to Industry Ignited for more conversations with the executives, founders, and innovators leading the future of industry.

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Transcript

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 0:07

What happens when the signal that guides drones, vehicles, and critical systems can be disrupted by a device small enough to fit in your hand? Welcome to Industry Ignited. I'm Dr. Leanne Aguilar, and today I'm joined by Omir Sharar, CEO founder of Infinidrome in Israel, but now located in Toronto. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Yeah, correct. I'm based on the East Coast, primarily to develop our business in North America. We're very focused on the DOW and supporting US forces. Awesome. Well, Omir, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 0:40

Yeah. So your background spans mathematics, computer science, control systems, telecom synchronization, and complex engineering. What experiences most shape the way you think about technology and problem solving?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Well, yeah, I chose to study computer science and mathematics primarily because I thought of it as a good way to encounter interesting problems and find ways to solve them. And what I really liked about that, this profession, is basically that you can find a solution and very quickly understand if the solution actually worked and solved the problem or it did not. There is no question marks like in you know hardcore uh science in the lab, etc. But I have to say, I was never a brilliant coder. I uh I think that what I was good at, and I learned this throughout my my career, is that I'm very good at harnessing different people with different skill sets, each solving a different piece of a puzzle. And I was very good at putting all those pieces together towards a towards a common goal. And that's what basically what I try to do as CEO as well.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 1:43

Yeah, yeah, and that's super important. I mean, being able to do that. I mean, it's not that's not a skill that everyone has as well, being able to build a team and not only any team, but a team that's highly effective and efficient and can actually solve those problems.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Yeah.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 1:58

Yeah. Now, before founding Affinodome, you were deeply involved in timing and synchronization systems that relied on GPS. When did you first realize how vulnerable uh GNSS-based systems really were?

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Yeah, I mean, so just as a sort of background to our listeners, sometimes we say GPS, sometimes we say GNSS. GPS, the global positioning system, is the American system. That's approximately 24 active satellites orbiting Earth at 20,000 kilometers above ground level. GNSS, the global navigation satellite system, is the acronym for the multiple types of constellations out there. Like the Americans have GPS, which is free to use for everybody, although everybody, all the superpowers are afraid that the Americans will one day flip down the switch. The Russians have their own system called Glow NAS. The Europeans have their own system called Galileo, the Chinese have Bedou. And there are a few geostationary systems above India called IRNSS or Navik, above Japan called QZSS. Now Korea is building their own system, the UK is saying that they're building their own system. So, all in all, we're talking roughly about 100 satellites that provide us with this very important information. Information that really this technology is mind-blowing. It's an implementation of Einstein's theory of relativity, and it's now in the palm of our hands, and these guys and our small cellular devices that have chips in there that cost the manufacturers fractions of a dollar, that cost us a few dollars. And in the palm of your hand, you hold tremendous capabilities of extreme accurate positioning, extreme accurate timing. But this inherent capability is based on a very, very weak signal. I always like to say that the signal of GPS is approximately the same strength received from a 20-watt light bulb lighted up and lit up in Los Angeles, and you're trying to receive a signal in New York.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

That's about how weak GPS is. And since all of those different constellations use the same bands and constant bands, all you have to do really to overpower that signal is to transmit something, anything really, in that same frequency, which is called the L band, L1, L2, L5, approximately somewhere between 1100 and 1600 megahertz. Now that capability became very widely known approximately, I would say seven, eight years ago. GPS has been around for a longer time. And when I started with the PT stuff, and I was in Israel a distributor or reseller for one of the largest PNT manufacturers that are making synchronization timing servers that are highly based on GPS, because again, GPS doesn't give you only accurate positioning, it also gives you very accurate timing. So I was their reseller in Israel, selling to many customers these different types of solutions. And as part of the training of how to sell these kinds of devices and how these devices work and how to build and tailor solutions based on these devices, you learn about this theoretical threat that sometimes GPS can go away. And that's why you need to be able to back it up. That was everybody's jargon. Everybody was talking about it back then. How to back up GPS, and that's resulted again in the timing space in atomic clocks that are based on rubidium, double double ovenized quartz, even cesiums. But then I started asking myself and asking around a simple question. Like in the cyber world, when you know you had the internet, in the beginning, everybody said, hey, it's really awesome. But then viruses started spreading out. And then you started thinking, what if malintent actors try to take away GPS purposefully, to take it away from you, to jam it, and to create a denial of service of GPS. And basically that's when I started learning that all really you have to do to get a jammer in your hands is to buy, to have $20 in your pocket, use a credit card, go online on one of these different, usually Chinese websites, and buy a GPS jammer that, as you said in the beginning, fits in your hand. And with a flick of a button, you can create a denial of service of GPS for anybody around you within a vicinity of about 100 meters. Wow. And you can multiply that 10x, 100x, basically if you have enough power, which is stuff that you can buy on Amazon for a few hundred bucks. So you can take away that GPS capability that everybody is relying on. And in my world back then, it was critical networks. Right. It was critical networks at the hearts of telecom, at the heart of financing networks, you know, trade exchange uses these critical servers, and more and more so, the defense space. Very proud to have a hand in designing the architecture behind the synchronization of one of Israel's missile defense programs. And that to some extent also relied back then on GPS. And that's when it sort of dawned on me how is it that I cannot provide my own customers protection solutions against an idiot like me that goes around with a $20 GPS jammer that he bought online that can take down a $10,000 time servers like that? It can take down drones, can take down UAVs, can take down anything that navigates or use a GPS as a critical pivot for its capabilities.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 7:48

Yeah. Now you described a pivotal moment when a customer actually asked you to test how quickly a GPS-based time server could be could recover after being jammed. What did that moment reveal to you and why did it spark the idea for Ethanodome?

SPEAKER_02 8:02

So, I mean, until that point, everything was very theoretical. Oh, yeah, you can buy a jammer. Oh, yeah, a spoofer is the size of a house, and we can get later on the difference between jamming and spoofing. But at that moment, I knew that I need to prove, first of all, to myself, how a GPS-based time server that I'm selling to my customers back then, it was one of the biggest defense customers in Israel, one of the biggest companies in the world that I sold our solutions to, or the company that I represented solutions to, and they asked me to test and demonstrate how it bounces back after being jammed. That's when I went online, and that's when I bought my first GPS jammer, as I said, for about 20 bucks, or maybe I invested a bit more, maybe 50 bucks. Don't catch me on that. But when I went when I got that, first of all, I was horrified to find out that within about two weeks, labeled wireless router or something like that, I had this in my hand. It was sent to a kiosk next to my house. And again, I unwrapped it, clicked the button, charged it, click the button on, and it took down that server. So I was most of all horrified to find out how easy it is to take something that we all take for granted, which is GPS, a little bit like a God-given right that we should all start asking the question what if somebody takes that away?

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 9:21

Yeah. Wow. So that said, founding a hardware-based defense tech company nearly a decade ago was not the obvious startup path, not an easy thing to do. And what gave you the conviction to build Affinodome anyway?

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Well, I mean, first of all, the the startup life I would say is not easy. Uh it's definitely easier to be a corporate guy. And I tried that. I worked for Hewlett Packard for a long time, and I always get impatient at some point because if there is a problem, if there's a pain point for especially for my customers or for people that I know or for applications that I think is critical, and I see a path to a solution, then I I won't rest until I can uh you know figure it out and try to m materialize it. I hope that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

I think that that that's what happened here in the beginning. Especially Israel is famous for software solutions, for SaaS solutions, B2B solutions. Back then, this was almost 10 years ago, and we founded Infinidome. It was June 2016. Doing something in defense was not a thing. Nobody did anything in defense in the startup world. The defense world were controlled by three companies, our big three in Israel IAI, Elbit, and Raphael, all of them, by the way, used to be my customers as well. And today are somewhat my customers today. But uh, it was completely controlled. Nobody invested in defense startups. And doing hardware was a little bit like shooting yourself in the leg because everybody knew, hey, why invest in hardware if I can invest in a B2B software, you know, solution that could, you know, be profitable and I can sell the company and within about two years. And by the way, don't tell anybody I said this. I know that we have listeners now, but but I I you know I beat myself up about this so many times about why am I doing this long road when you know obviously there are easier ways to succeed.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 11:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Again, I saw a path to a solution, a solution that was direly required in the world, and I had to go for it.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 11:26

Yeah, so the problem was big enough that it motivated you and inspired you to commit to that longer path and take the hard road.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

I I just saw this opportunity that it was all like a little bit of a like a light in the end of the tunnel that uh you're basically can see so clearly a vision of how is it possible it does not exist until now, a proportional way to protect GPS? How is protecting GPS only a prerogative of fighter jets and $10 million UAVs? How can we make that technology available for lower end systems? You know what? For me and you to use on in our future autonomous car to be able to navigate just as well as we need to figure out how to protect that thing from hackers.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 12:12

Right. Yeah. No, safety, I mean, that's a huge safety risk and and so many negative implications. So many things could happen for that kind of risk. Now, for for listeners who may not live in the GNS world every day, can you explain the difference that you alluded to before between jamming and spoofing and why both pose such a serious growth risk?

SPEAKER_02 12:32

Sure. So as I said, jamming is a little bit so I'll go to the cyber world because it's very easy to understand. And by the way, I do see today that the electronic warfare world, which, you know, this is our home in terms of anti-jamming, is getting a lot closer to the cyber world than ever before because it's moving so fast, because we're seeing the threats dynamic and evolving continuously. The protection solutions have to be able to be as dynamic, as flexible to keep up. Start to come back. Jamming in the cyber world is a little bit like a denial of service attack. You transmit something in the same frequency as the GNSS signal, which, as I said, is well known and is constant and it's very well documented. And it can be anything really. It can be white noise, it can be narrow band, it can be wider band, it can be different types of modulations, which is different types of signals that you're generating to disrupt that receiving capability of GPS. And basically, that creates a problem with any GNSS receiver that all of a sudden its quality of being able to lock on to the GPS signal or GNSS signal, starting to be degrading very rapidly to a point that it loses reception completely. The equivalent of taking a metal bucket and putting it over your antennas. As I said, it doesn't happen like that. So it's not like, oh, I can switch it off. It degrades very rapidly. And anything that depends on GPS, for example, UAVs that don't only use GPS to get from point A to point B, they use GPS to actually stay in place, stay in the air, take away that capability or massively degrade that capability. That's the easiest way to make it hurtle into the ground. So that's jamming.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 14:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Oofing, up until about five-ish years ago, was a very, very complicated method of attack to perform. You needed to have an SDR software-defined radio the size of, you know, half a room to be able to do that and about a million dollars in your pocket. That changed dramatically in the past five years. And that started off by small devices that you can buy online and you can pre-program them to mimic GPS. And basically have those devices transmit signals as if they came from eight satellites at the same time. And that causes the GPS receiver on your phone, on your drone, on your tank, it doesn't really matter, to lock on to that signal, the fake signal, instead of the real signal in the sky. It's a little bit like hacking in the cyber world or a man-in-the-middle attack. You basically have somebody giving you false data and you act upon this data. That is sometimes even more dangerous than jamming.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:16

And in Israel, by the way, uh, since the beginning of the war in October 7th, 2023, almost on a daily basis, everybody, and I mean really everybody, experienced spoofing. So on the way to work, instead of you know driving from my home in Tel Aviv to my office in Kaysaria, all of a sudden I was in the Beirut airport or in the Iran airport. And the reason, actually, that we suffered so much jamming and spoofing in Israel, and this was you know public information made by IDF spoken back then, it's not that the enemy is using these techniques. They are using these techniques, but more so IDF itself was using these techniques to defend Israel from anything GPS guided by our aim enemies, the Aids, by the Houthis, by the Hezbollah, by the Hamas. Right. Actually, IDF itself disrupted IDF's own platforms, and that's why actually that made my job a lot easier.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 16:12

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

Everybody experienced this firsthand, and everybody understood that going into battle with no protection on GPS doesn't make any sense anymore.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 16:22

Right. Yeah. Wow. GPS is now embedded in nearly everything from drones and vehicles to telecom and critical infrastructure. Why has resilience lagged so far behind dependence?

SPEAKER_02 16:36

I I would dare say a little bit ignorant. It's sort of like a question that I received in the early days when after I founded the company, our first, by the way, our first goal was to go after autonomous vehicles and purely commercial applications. Again, because the defense space was sort of like a no-no for startups.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 16:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

But uh one of the things that I got asked a lot is why would anybody want to disrupt GPS? Really naive question like that. And I said, because they could. Because why not? Why would anybody do a cyber attack? Why would anybody, you know, distribute viruses? Because they could. And because it's a way to cripple your enemies or anybody else's capabilities. And actually, the first time that we saw this sort of spread of GPS jammers was not by enemies or or Russia, like we're seeing today in Ukraine. It was really widely spread by truck drivers and by cargo thieves in Latin America. Oh, okay. Mexico, for example, loses approximately 1% of their GDP, which is a staggering number, to cargo theft. Wow. Cartels, their MO, their modus operandi, is actually using these GPS jammers to make the truck disappear from the grid, the police not able to go and save the poor truck driver. And that's how basically they make the cargo disappear. And that's how we saw how easy it is to procure a GPS jammer and how easy it is to use it for malintent or simply to hide. We had truck drivers using GPS jammers to hide from their bosses, so they won't be able to track them.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 18:10

Right. Yeah, that's wild. But yeah, you're you're right. I mean, if if people can do it, they will do it, and often for with, you know, malintent, unfortunately. And that's a huge problem. And I think I guess worldwide is is what I'm you know understanding as well. And people just don't understand. They don't know. I mean, before speaking to you, I knew little, very little about, you know, jamming and spoofing and and was astounded by, you know, the the risks and how easy it is to obtain that technology and to cause harm.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Yeah, definitely.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 18:43

Yeah. So you mentioned that getting into the defense industry was basically a big impossibility. I know at that time. So how did how did you break into the space?

SPEAKER_02 18:52

First of all, we understood that today there are great anti-jamming. And back then, when we founded the company, there were great anti-jamming solutions out there, which is weird because why would you develop something in a space that is already saturated? First of all, it was controlled by the 10,000-pound gorillas, as we call them. The three big defense players in Israel, the Lockheed Martins out there, had fantastic solutions that were developed according to DARPA's and Mafat's requirements, but they were developed and defined to solve navigation resiliency for fighter jets for super high-end, high-costing solutions. And when your anti-jamming system costs $50,000, it's obviously not going to fit on top of a $10,000 drone. Right. Yeah. And that's first of all, not in terms of size and weight, which they're big. They're about as big as my as my head. And second of all, in terms of sheer price. And now we all understand that commercial off-the-shelf, a tradable, affordable solutions are the key to succeed. So the way that we went into that, and first of all, the burden of proof was on us. When you go into such a saturated field with these massive players with very deep pockets, the burden of proof is on you. And you have to prove to everybody that you know, pardon my friends, you know what the hell you're talking about. In the beginning, we were dismissed. Go away, kids. You don't know what you're talking about. Luckily, our CTO, Moshe, he's not a kid. Uh 77-year-old uh engineer with massive electronic warfare experience. So he basically said, I know how the defense guys are doing it, we can do it differently. We can do it smaller, lighter, maybe not as effective in terms of protection.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 20:42

Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

To be able to protect these fighter jets. But hey, if today between 3 and 5%, only 3 and 5% of GPS-based platforms in military have any type of protection, we're going to look at the rest of the 95%. We're not competing with those guys. We want to make sure that again, defending GPS is a right everybody has. And that's what we truly believe, that that's what we truly believe that we can change. And that was our spiel. So, first of all, making things smaller, lighter, a lot more affordable. In the beginning, I was a little bit ashamed to saying that we make affordable stuff. No. Our core competence is making affordable stuff. The second point, we move faster. We move, we're a lot more agile than these big players. And we proved it during this war in Israel.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

This war in Israel proved that if you do not innovate as quickly as the war evolves, you're going to be left behind. We saw this in many, many cases. We moved extremely rapidly, a lot quicker than the big 10,000 pound gorillas that we're sometimes up against. And finally, solutions are completely retrofit and they are very, very flexible, meaning that to adopt them, the entry barrier, the adoption barrier is It's completely, completely removed, or at least as low as lowered as possible, which means that to try us out, basically we can whip up a demo within about two hours with some duct tape and zip ties. And I think that's a huge advantage over telling somebody, hey, you got to throw out your existing design and adopt our navigation system, which is what what most of the 10,000-pound gorillas do because hey, they can do right if they can sell something for fifty thousand dollars. Their entire cost structure is based on selling something at fifty thousand dollars. Of course, you want to sell something at a tenth of that, at a twentieth of that.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 22:36

Yeah, so your your solutions really have been disruptive with size, weight, power, and cost advantages. So you're able to offer something quickly, not only that quickly, that can be retrofitted to other systems. And so really making your your technology very different and advantageous to those other major defense platforms. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah. So your products are designed to protect smaller drones, vehicles, and other systems that historically could not afford or carry traditional anti-jamming solutions. Why is that gap in the market so important right now?

SPEAKER_02 23:08

Well, I mean, we all saw it in Ukraine. We saw that actually the war in Ukraine and the Ukrainian military changed the game and changed how all Western militaries think about capabilities in general. The name of the game is not how many $10 million reapers, you know, UAVs we can build and we can deploy, because that number is going to be very small because they're extremely expensive and hard to build. And unfortunately, we saw in the war in Iran now, and before that, by the Houthis, we saw those big birds downed. I wouldn't say just as easily, but definitely uh it wasn't too scarce of a of a of a an occasion to see them down by these sort of primitive forces. So, what the Ukrainians proved is that the name of the game has to be quantities, ability to build in quantities, flow in quantities, understand what needs to get better, improve, and then repeat. That's the name of the game. I think that they took it to the extreme. Now they're building $500 FPV drones, and most of their capabilities are based on that, unfortunately, because that still puts the operator at risk. But for most Western militaries, primarily the DOW, the one too many capabilities, which means autonomous capabilities, which means swarming capabilities, all of these things require navigation resiliency and still require very, very low-costing platforms. And we're seeing this in all of the programs. We saw this in Replicator, the DOW program. We're seeing this now in the drone dominance program. We're seeing this in all new programs that are issued by DOW, either by for DIU or uh Air Force or whoever. At the end of the day, the name of the game is how to make things cheap, how to make things actually easily manufacturable, but they have to be able to operate and they have to be resilient enough to be able to do so autonomously. This is exactly where we come in.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 25:05

Right. Yeah. Now, Affinity Drome initially explored automotive autonomy, cargo security, and commercial case uses before pivoting more directly into defense. What did COVID and later the war in Ukraine reveal about where the most urgent need really was?

SPEAKER_02 25:21

Well, we started with automotive. We worked with different OEMs and tier ones in the automotive industry because as a startup company trying to raise money, that's where the money was at. Everybody wanted to be the next mobile eye, a sensor on autonomous vehicles that enables autonomy. But most of the conversations with these automotive players went like, oh yeah, we know that we need GPS resilience. And I said, that's fantastic. And they said, Oh, we need GPS resilience for each one of our vehicles. And I said, That's great. And they said it needs to fit in our $10 bucket for cyber protection. That's when I said, I don't understand how to make that work. So there was a uh dissonance between the what the market knew that it needed to be resilient enough and what it wanted to pay. And at that point, COVID came in. And COVID threw anything that's autonomous level four and five, way, way into the future. This was back in 2020, and we're still seeing that it's not there yet. Still some time until there's true autonomy, level four or level five, or whatever the definitions are today. So that caused all of these futuristic programs for true autonomy to be defunded. And for us, I like to say that back then, one of my earliest investors who's still supporting this company, Next Gear Ventures, and Talcoen, who I'm very proud to say is still on our board and still very, very supportive of the company. Back then I asked him, okay, I want you, Next Gear Ventures, to lead our seed round. And they are kings of mobility. They are kings of the automotive space in Israel. And I like to say he put a virtual knife to my throat, not a real one, don't worry. But a virtual knife to my throat and he said, Where are your solutions needed tomorrow? And the answer wasn't automotive, it wasn't cargo theft, it wasn't homeland security, it was unmanned aerial defense. Right. Because that's where the pain point was clearly defined. And that's exactly where we knew we need to be tomorrow morning. And that's when we pivoted the entire company to focus on that. We're not giving up on the commercial side. The commercial side will come. Right. But we need to establish ourselves and to prove our worth in the defense, unmanned aerospace world. This is what we're doing today. And I'll tell you later a little bit of where we're going.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 27:36

Okay, great. So you've talked about innovation under fire and how real-world battlefield deployment accelerated your learning cycle. How has operating in high-pressure environments shaped your company and its products?

SPEAKER_02 27:50

Well, I mean, in the beginning of uh October 7th war, we were all uh surprised. Uh, it was really one of the most catastrophic events. I passed personally. I lost friends on October 7th and afterwards. And I'm sorry. Um it was it was a traumatic event for all of us. And and everyone in our small company, uh, we were about 20 back then, we're 25 now. So everyone in our in our small company was affected, uh, either in a similar way or knew somebody who was affected. And a third of our company in a day were drafted to reserve forces. So imagine yourself such a small company that builds you know hardware that has an engineering team and RD and application engineers and sales force, etc., lose a third and all of a sudden go and and you do you have no idea when they're gonna come back because they're even unavailable to answer your phone. Luckily, most of these people who were uh employees who were drafted to reserve forces were in the drone space. So the first thing that we did is Moshe and I, that 77-year-old kid that I told you about earlier, yeah, we went into the office on Saturday and we started assembling systems that just were off the off the factory, off the fab. And this was like our first um uh batch of a product back then that we called GPS Dome 2, our higher-end product. We started assembling them, we started testing them, and we started deploying them with our employees who are going into the field to try to take them literally to battle. It was also a traumatic uh event for me not to hold to uh wield a weapon and then run across the hills. But you know, that's when I understood that my reserve forces is to do the best I can to build systems and to deploy them in the field and literally protect, you know, civilians and protect our soldiers, enable them to use drones instead of putting themselves under fire. So I think with that mission in heart, as cheesy as that might sound, we were able to get everybody in the office who was able to go to work, was on reserve forces. We each double down and worked 200% of our time day and night to be able to test our stuff as early as possible, build them, deploy them, and then more importantly, to understand what does not work. And I think that's the most important thing because a lot of the Western companies that are sometimes leading the world in terms of technology, the distance between them, the engineers that are building these products and using them in the field is a huge distance. For us, we just have to step outside the office to test them. I think that's a huge advantage. There are a lot of disadvantages of having 95% of my team in Israel. This is one of the advantages. We feel technology extremely quickly, we understand what the soldiers actually need, and we come back to the drawing board, we improve it, we build testing capabilities like crazy in the past year to be able to replicate conditions in the field. This is one of our advantages now, despite us being such a small company with shallow pockets, but we're able to do this extremely quickly. So the iteration between fielding a new product, getting feedback, improving it, and re-fielding it again is extremely, extremely low. And this is what we offer our customers.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 31:05

Yeah. Yeah. Now that is a huge advantage. I mean, you have a unfortunately real-world situation where you can test and, like you said, quickly reiterate and test again. And so that gives you the innovation advantage in that regard, there. Yeah. Now, as a smaller company competing against major defense contractors, how do you win in a market dominated by very large players with the deep pockets and long relationships?

SPEAKER_02 31:28

Our only chance is to be as excited for a you know a $100,000 project as we are for a $10 million project. The only way is to really understand and to get feedback from our customers in the field. And like I said, the way that we are doing this in Israel is the way that we're trying to do this everywhere around the world. So this year has been a huge, huge catapult in India. We have very strong partners in India that also decided to invest in the company. This allowed us to get much, much closer to the Indian military, to understand exactly what they're going through and understand exactly what they need in terms of capabilities and to come back and to bake that those conclusions into our products. We're doing the same in Europe. We're doing the same now in the United States. Again, sitting down with as close as possible to the actual operators and understand what they need in order to succeed in their missions and the ability to move much quicker and to even take their devices. And we're working with a lot of the UAV platform manufacturers, those are primarily our customers. So to work with their configuration, take that into our office, be able to test that under real life conditions, this is our advantage. This is our way to move quicker, to be a lot more flexible. And also, one of the things that we understood that has to get better during the war is the fact that no matter how good your anti-jamming product is today, in about six months, maybe 12 months, it has to be able to be upgraded as well.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 33:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

Because, like in the cyber world, if you're buying a computer today that has the best antivirus in the world, a new virus can pop out six months down the road, which brings it down. And without updating that antivirus, you're going to be rendered useless. The same thing as an EW, the same thing as anti-jamming. This is why we have an inherent capability, both in our lower end product, Sunstone, and in our higher end product, Aura, and in every product we're looking for tomorrow to be able to be field upgradable, fully field upgradable. So what when we understand that something could get better, we release a new software version. So when our customers buy a product today, they buy hardware that is future-proof or as future-proof as we can make it. Right. Which means every six to twelve months they're going to get an upgrade and they're going to get the latest and greatest capabilities to protect against anything that popped out in the latest um months.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 33:52

Right. No, that's awesome. Yeah. So it's safeguarding for the future. And just like you mentioned, as fast as you're innovating, the bad guys on the other side are also innovating too, unfortunately, and trying to get around the and as I said before, it's sometimes not the bad guys.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

It's sometimes we are fighting the good guys. So IDF, for example, is the major culprit in jamming and spoofing GPS in Israel. We have to be able to protect against well, IDF.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 34:20

Yeah, exactly. You recently restructured the company as a US Israeli subsidiary and are building manufacturing capabilities in the United States. What does that move mean strategically for Infinidome's next chapter?

SPEAKER_02 34:34

Well, I mean, from the get-go, we understood that the US market is our primary market, that we have to figure out how to try to penetrate and to bring our technology, especially in terms of awareness, to make the DOW operators aware that they can start demanding GPS protection for their drones, even if they're small drones. And we understood very early on that we have a few barriers that stop us from succeeding here. One is the fact that we don't really have a team in the United States. We have a very capable Infinidome Solutions President Ben Sanford, who's based out of the East Coast and he's an ex-SF West point grad and as American as can be. But he was fighting a one-man battle over here. Without my immediate backup, we understood that we were lagging behind. And without the capabil engineering capabilities that we plan to build here, we understood that that is another barrier. So that's one barrier. The second barrier is the fact that our products, no matter how good a friend Israel is to the United States, are made in Israel. And we understood that that is something that is a barrier for uh some programs, especially government-funded programs, to adopt non-US products when we are sometimes competing against US companies. And finally, the fact that we are an Israeli company also became a barrier. And this is funny, but sometimes these big companies, well, I hate to say they're run by lawyers. And for a lawyer to deal with an Israeli company is much, much more complicated than to deal with an American company, even for investors. For an American investor to deal with an Israeli Israeli company is much more complicated than with an American company. So we decided to take those barriers one after the other. The first thing that we did is we started what is called a flip procedure, which is basically a re-incorporation. As you said, is an American company called Infinidome Solutions that fully owns the Israeli entity as a subsidiary, Infinidome LTD. This is how we're structured today. We plan also to establish a new company called Infinidome EU as a European subsidiary of Infinidome Solutions, the American subsidiary. So the overall ruling company is the American company. The company today that we can sign contracts with, NDAs with, whatnot, is the American company, which makes life a little bit easier.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 36:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Second thing that we did is I myself moved to the East Coast. First stop is Toronto, as you said in the beginning of the conversation, but I do plan to move, and I'm going to plan to move to where our focus will be in the United States, which is still not decided yet in terms of location. When it's decided, then I'm going to move into uh whatever location that is in the United States. And the third thing regarding the manufacturing side, this is also something that we understood that we need to do. In the past year, we vetted several manufacturers. We down selected two manufacturers, and we plan now to manufacture by the end of 26 our products in the United States. So they're fully built in America products.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 37:32

Awesome. Yeah. So striking down those objections one by one, right? Yep. It's like, yeah, not letting location or or formation, I guess, you know, where the entity is, be a barrier in moving your vision forward.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

Yeah. And that was very correlated with, you know, Secretary Heggseth's make American drones great again, or whatever rephrasing I attempted to do here. But yeah, the whole idea of built in America and full transparency of the value chain is extremely important. And we also understand that no matter how sympathetic you are to the Israeli situation, having your entire product line manufactured in a factory that's in a country under war is a risk. And we wanted to mitigate that risk. And this is why we're starting manufacturing in the United States, in Europe, and even in India. Everybody wants to buy locally, and this is what we plan to do.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 38:23

So, Omir, as you look ahead and beyond creating the manufacturing facilities here in the US, what is your vision for Infinidome over the next three to five years, particularly in North American global defense markets?

SPEAKER_02 38:36

Well, it's actually we're looking now at two distinct directions. And we're now raising a Series B, uh, looking for American defense tech investors to participate. We're just starting to raise money now, so very hopeful to find them. But we're looking at two directions. So we have proved that we can make the core technology, the anti-jamming technology, very well. We have proved that in several theaters across the world with several customers selling millions of dollars worth of our products already and fielding them. But we are thinking now about two distinct directions. One direction is we want to expand the core capability into a full navigation solution, combining machine learning capabilities. We want cognitive abilities of our anti-jamming system to be able to morph and change according to the environment. Not to be even, not only to be reactive, which is great, seeing one environment and then being able to adapt for it, but also to be proactive and to predict exactly what best configuration it needs to be in to be able to provide as as good protection as possible. Together with alternative navigation capabilities, inertial, vision-based navigation, radar-based navigation, which is some of the stuff we're looking to do right now and doing already with partners like Honeywell and HANWA. These are capabilities that we plan to actually build full navigation solutions. So actually expanding from a core module to a more extensive solution because we want the UAV manufacturers to focus on what they do best: build UAVs, build a software for UAVs. We want to take care of the navigation resiliency completely. That's one side. The other side is a little bit contradictory because, again, we proved that we can make small stuff, like I'm holding in my hand right now. This is our two-element GPS anti-jamming, but we know that this is also the beginning of something that's even smaller. And we believe that our future can also go and will also go into the munition space. One of the most horrendous things that happened throughout the Ukrainian war is that all of the support the US gave the Ukrainians or sold the Ukrainians in the form of GPS guided munitions missed their targets due to jamming. I'll give you an example: the BAE Excalibur, a great GPS-guided 155 munition shell, degraded from 95% accuracy to roughly 5 to 6% accuracy.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

Only one out of 19 shells actually hit their mark because of GPS jamming, and because the fact that the Ukrainians had no access to anti-jamming capabilities, we want to change that. And the way that we're going to do so is to build the same capabilities that we have built on modules to build them on small integrated solutions like the one I'm holding in my hand. And with this guy, with a target weight of about 50 grams and target price of about a thousand dollars, we believe that we can actually provide a default protection for all GPS guided munitions. And I think that's uh a future with much, much, much bigger quantities, a longer integration cycle, but this is what I'm here to do.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 42:03

No, right. That is has huge implications. And yeah, that's wild that the impact that the jammers are currently having. I mean, that's devastating, right? So beyond anti-jamming, you're also working toward more resilient navigation that can handle spoofing and degraded or denied GPS environments. Where do you see the future of navigation resilience headed?

SPEAKER_02 42:24

I mean, that comes back a little bit like what I said before about the more extensive solution. So I think that there is no silver bullet to you know provide full protection. There's no such thing. Everything can be beaten down. And the way to solve this is multiple layers of resiliency, combining anti-jamming with inertial, with vision, with other capabilities, and to fuse them and integrate them in a good enough. I think that is the key solution. And that is where UAV navigation is headed. The way to do it quickest, smallest, and the in the most affordable way will win. Today, when a UAV manufacturer builds a UAV, they buy the GPS from that company and the inertial from that company and the camera from that company, and they try to do as best a job as possible to integrate that. We want to solve that issue, and we believe that the solution has to come from a single point, and we want to become that point for a lot of our customers. Awesome.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 43:24

And finally, Omir, for founders, engineers, and innovators building in defense tech or other mission critical industries, what have you learned about perseverance, speed, and building something that truly matters?

SPEAKER_02 43:36

Well, I mean, there's always uh this um saying uh for a lot of the founders, which is oh, what's a problem? Raise money, uh, fake it until you make it, right? I hate that saying. I could not look in the eyes of customers or or investors and pard my French, but to bullshit my way across. I'm very bad at it. That's it's not me. I'm very transparent. Sometimes that's shooting. Myself in the leg, I'm always very upfront about what I can do, what I cannot do, and what I will be able to do, and what I will not be able to do. So I think that being truthful is a strength, but you also have to make believers of your own company inside your own company because that's the only way you can actually change things. And I think that despite a lot of the odds being against us so many times along the way, and so many times we were close to, I wouldn't say giving up, but you know, not far from it, it's at those points that you actually have to come back, take away all of the nonsense aside, and figure out wait, what do I have in my hand? And if you still believe that you have in your hand something that can change the world, that's all that matters. Go for it. You have to go for it because you understand that that is what can save soldiers' lives at the end of the day. And I think that if I would have made, and no disrespect, but another ad company or another B2B software, let's zoom from home or something like that, I don't think that I would be able to keep doing what I'm doing despite of the the the toughness. And I think that if there's one pointer that I can give out to founders in the beginning of this long way, is to find people who believe in you.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:15

Um, it can be investors like Tal Cohen that I said before, which always, when I talk to him, I get slapped around. I on the verge of tears, but I learn so much that I get better and I get stronger, and it toughens me up. Tough love, as we say. Um, but uh sometimes it's investors and and partners. So I'm very fortunate to have met Honeywell Aerospace back in 21 and Hanwa Aerospace back in 22. Both of them, huge aerospace companies, one in the United States, obviously, and across the world, and one in South Korea. Both of them understood that we have something unique in our hands. Both of them understood the DNA of the company and the fact that we can be leveraged to combine with their capabilities. And I think that their support in the company in the form of investment and partnership also gave us the strength to go raise more money and to be a lot more legit in this world of 10,000-pound gorillas.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 46:12

Yeah, right. Yeah. So really when you're starting a company, make sure it's something that you truly believe in, that you will stand behind and through the good times and the bad, because especially when it comes to innovating, it's a long road and being able to believe in it enough to inspire those that come along with you. And then finding partners who also believe in the vision and support, you know, that the innovative environment as well is what I'm hearing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

Yeah, completely. And those strategic investors at the end of the day, uh despite there are a lot of downsides and having such huge companies invest in you, the upside is that they're the best validators of your technology. And in a world that is very vague, sometimes opaque to uh to investors sometimes, because how can they invest in technology that they really don't understand? Because we do hard stuff in terms of understanding there are not a lot of a lot a lot of people in the world that understand exactly what we do.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:09

Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:10

That validation from strategic investors is crucial.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:13

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, thank you. Yeah, good good advice and insight. Well, omir, thank you for joining me. How can listeners learn more about you and um what you're up to at Infinidome?

SPEAKER_02 47:26

Uh well, the easiest is to go to our website, it's infinidome.com. Another option is to email me. I'm happy to give advice to whoever wants. It's omir at infinidome.com, easy enough. Or look me up on LinkedIn. I'm trying to be as responsive as possible. And I want to take this opportunity to thank you, Leanne, for having me on this podcast. It was great. Thank you.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:47

Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in to Industry Ignited. Be sure to subscribe and join us for the next episode. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and keep igniting industry.