Series A Funding and Investor Confidence
El Segundo–based defense tech startup CX2 closed a $31 million Series A in mid-June 2025, a round whose size, speed, and explicit "spectrum dominance" framing together mark a moment when private capital has stopped asking whether AI-driven electronic warfare is a real market and started pricing it like one. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported the financing on June 16, 2025, describing CX2 as raising the round "from a group of investing firms as it seeks to break into new defense technology." Axios later named Point72 Ventures as lead with Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Pax Ventures participating. In a sector where terms often leak through tier-one VCs, a clean, un-contested $31M close suggests the company had enough inbound demand to skip the press tour.
CX2 frames its market in unusually blunt terms. On its own site, the company says it "delivers spectrum dominance to the battlefield by providing AI-enabled hardware and software that see, disrupt, and defend." The language strips the usual defense-tech hedging and treats the electromagnetic spectrum as a contested operating environment rather than a support function. Point72 partner Chris Morales made the same pitch from the buy side: "We believe electronic warfare represents one of the most critical capability gaps in U.S. defense." The Series A is the first public validation of that thesis from outside capital.
The broader signal is one of acceleration. The U.S. Army's evaluation of CX2's Wraith drone, reported in May 2026, came less than a year after the round closed. CX2 is not trying to out-produce Anduril or the primes — it is trying to prove a capability, win a program of record, and then let procurement money do the heavy lifting on headcount. The $31M is enough to fund a small, focused engineering team through Army evaluation and a follow-on contract bid, and not much more. Investors are betting that the Army's Wraith evaluation converts into a funded program, at which point the headcount math changes overnight.
Wraith Drone: AI-Enabled Electronic Warfare Platform
The Wraith is a Group 2 quadrotor that CX2 launched in December 2025 to put an autonomous electronic warfare payload into the hands of a brigade-level EW platoon. It folds to roughly 15 by 48.5 by 20 inches, weighs about 32 pounds, and runs for around 45 minutes per sortie. CEO Nathan Mintz has framed the cost problem in stark terms, telling Axios, "We are in the position now of firing multimillion-dollar missiles at $20,000 drones and $10,000 jammers," and arguing that legacy counter-drone economics no longer hold on a 21st-century EW battlefield.
Inside the airframe, the Wraith fuses three sensor classes into one sortie. RF receivers pick up hostile emissions; onboard software classifies the signal type; an electro-optical/infrared gimbal then optically confirms the target before any geolocation is pushed downstream. During Exercise Ivy Mass at Fort Carson in May 2026, the Army's Apache Company's EW Platoon, 4-10 Cavalry, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, ran nearly a dozen planned autonomous sorties without contractor hand-holding, and Wraith's onboard engine matched live emissions against known signature databases to classify threats in real time, including in dense electromagnetic conditions where multiple emitters were active at once.
Navigation is the harder problem, and it is where the platform's AI claim gets specific. Wraith runs CX2's proprietary Pathfinder navigation software layered with hardened GNSS protections and a non-GPS navigation architecture. The drone uses onboard processing and autonomous navigation protocols to keep flying when GPS is denied. A resilient communications stack carries the resulting target data back to commanders through degraded RF environments.
The Wraith is not meant to operate as a standalone box. During Project Convergence Capstone 6 at Fort Irwin, CX2 integrated Wraith's RF detection, characterization, and identification data directly into Anduril Industries' Lattice command-and-control network, giving EW soldiers and ground force commanders a shared real-time picture of the electromagnetic spectrum alongside other battlefield sensors. Separately, CX2's systems are now natively compatible with Legion, Picogrid's battlefield integration platform, and during the Scarlet Dragon exercise Wraith-class detections cued a radar for additional data on a point of interest. Picogrid co-founder Martin Slosarik said the partnership "allows soldiers and their commanders to deploy layered air defenses and execute sophisticated workflows."
The platform's job is to hunt the archer rather than the arrow. That philosophy also drives CX2's Vadris payload, an RF-seeking seeker mounted on first-person-view drones that overlays a live bearing arrow to the enemy operator's control link in the pilot's video feed. Vadris was selected for the Payloads category and designated award-ready on the Army Applications Laboratory's DevX Autonomy program, and is available for procurement to government buyers who hold a DevX Autonomy account. Together, Wraith and Vadris sketch a portfolio built around one bet: that the next fights will be won or lost in the spectrum.
DoD Spectrum Dominance Strategy and Budget Shifts
The Pentagon has spent years watching its electronic warfare arsenal hollow out, and CX2's $31 million Series A landed at exactly the moment that gap started to drive budget lines. Axios framed the problem bluntly in May 2025: "Mastery of the electromagnetic spectrum is a life-or-death matter, and the U.S. has for years let its electronic warfare arsenal atrophy." The Department of Defense operated on an $842 billion budget in FY2024.
The Ukraine war has shaped how that money is being allocated. Mintz told Axios that "Ukraine and Russia are flooding the front lines with electronic interference that messes with navigation, drones and other munitions," and pointed to the same cost asymmetry: "We are firing multimillion-dollar missiles at $20,000 drones and $10,000 jammers."
The Army has been the most visible customer moving on that logic. CX2 worked with the 10th Mountain Division as part of the service's transforming-in-contact initiative, and its sensors were exercised under the Scarlet Dragon series run by the XVIII Airborne Corps. During one Scarlet Dragon event, CX2's systems detected and tracked large RF emission signatures from UAS and Apache helicopters; the Army then used Picogrid's Legion platform to cue a radar for additional data on the same point of interest. XVIII Airborne Corps commanding general Lt. Gen. Greg Anderson said Scarlet Dragon exists to "develop and test Soldier-driven, rapid innovation and technical transformation while providing the Army a model to revolutionize the acquisition process."
CX2's own framing tracks that policy line. Its Picogrid partnership integration is now native to Legion, which lets commanders fuse CX2's RF detection with radars, passive acoustics, and the Palantir Maven Smart System already adopted by the XVIII Airborne Corps.
Pentagon leadership signals are running in the same direction. In September 2025, the President signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles, and as of mid-2026 both Armed Services Committees had voted the proposed name change out of committee as part of the 2027 NDAA, with the House adopting the change in its version of the bill in July. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the rebranding alone could cost between $10 million and $125 million.
The open question is whether the FY2027 budget, once finalized, will convert that rhetoric into EW-specific appropriations that startups like CX2 can scale against, or whether the dollars will continue to flow through traditional prime contractors' program offices.
Incumbents Push AI-EW Faster as CX2 Closes the Distance
The defense primes are not standing still while CX2 scales. Anduril Industries, the closest analogue to CX2 in culture and product philosophy, is the clearest case study in how venture-backed primes absorb pressure from newer entrants. Zero G Talent's live board shows Anduril added 212 roles in the past seven days, with senior postings across space systems, supply chain, mission systems, and software engineering. The board salary band sits at roughly $98,000 to $253,000 (median $194,000) across 2,027 salaried roles. Senior Principal Chief Engineer roles in space special programs top out at $386,000 per year, a compensation signal that Anduril is paying for AI-adjacent EW and autonomy talent rather than waiting for it to mature in-house.
RTX, the parent of Raytheon, faces a backlog of compliance baggage. In August 2024, RTX agreed to pay a $200 million fine for unauthorized export of defense technology to China, Russia, and Iran across more than 750 violations of the Arms Export Control Act and ITAR. In October 2024, the company entered a deferred prosecution agreement with DOJ over a whistleblower-driven fraud scheme spanning 2009 to 2020, agreeing to penalties of more than $950 million; separately, RTX settled allegations of defrauding the Defense Department and bribing a Qatari military official for nearly $1 billion that same month. Those penalties have not stopped RTX from reorganizing. It merged Raytheon Intelligence & Space with Raytheon Missiles & Defense in July 2023 under the RTX banner.
The competitive pressure shows up most clearly in the talent and startup-acquisition channels. Mintz worked at RTX and Boeing before co-founding Epirus, the directed-energy contractor that raised $250 million in March 2025 and counts the Marine Corps among its customers.
The most concrete counter-move documented in the open record is Anduril's hiring posture. With 212 fresh postings in a single week and senior engineering compensation reaching the high $300,000s, Anduril is buying the same autonomous-systems and RF talent pool that CX2 draws from in El Segundo and Costa Mesa.
Broader Trend: AI-Powered EW Startups Post-Ukraine
CX2's $31 million Series A did not appear in isolation. It landed inside a defense-technology market that has been fundamentally reshaped by the war in Ukraine, where the economics of the electromagnetic spectrum have been rewritten by cheap, attritable drones and AI-driven targeting. CNBC reported in April 2026: "The first $500 drone took out a $5 million tank on the battlefield in Ukraine."
That inversion has produced an obvious market signal. The number of Ukrainian drone-sector companies rose from 41 in 2022 to 132 in 2023 to 183 in 2024, and Ukraine produced an estimated 4.5 million drones in 2025 alone, more than two million of which were first-person-view strike drones, per GIS Reports. Ukraine has begun exporting drones and establishing European export centers, and its operational data has become a kind of living spec sheet for Western startups to copy. Drones and electronic warfare are credited with neutralizing roughly 85 percent of Russian targets at the front in 2025.
The venture ecosystem around CX2 is thick with similar bets. Mintz himself co-founded Epirus. Tiberius Aerospace, founded two years ago by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, is building AI-enabled drones with direct feedback loops from the Ukraine battlefield. Ark Robotics is developing software that lets a single operator control hundreds of unmanned systems across air, land, and sea. And Anduril Industries, the autonomous-systems incumbent founded by Palmer Luckey in 2017, is one of the most aggressive AI-EW integrators in the U.S. market.
Capital flows confirm the pattern. CNBC documented "explosive growth in order intake between 2021 and 2025" among the largest European primes, with Rheinmetall's order intake up 323 percent and Saab's up 284 percent. Rheinmetall forecast sales growth as high as 45 percent for the year. Behind those primes, a startup cluster has formed around Munich, where pure-play defense startups roughly doubled in recent years to around 60.
| Company | Order intake growth (2021–2025) | 2025 sales forecast |
|---|---|---|
| Rheinmetall | +323% | up to +45% |
| Saab | +284% | — |
European governments are institutionalizing the trend. In October 2025 the European Defense Readiness Roadmap 2030 introduced initiatives including Eastern Flank Watch, the European Drone Defense Initiative, the European Air Shield, and the European Space Shield. In February 2026, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK launched the Low-Cost Effectors & Autonomous Platforms (LEAP) initiative to jointly manufacture low-cost air defense systems and autonomous drones using Ukrainian expertise. In December 2025, the German drone maker Quantum Systems and Ukraine's Frontline Robotics formed Quantum Frontline Industries as a first joint venture under that framework.
One tension cuts across the trend. Ukraine's wartime experience has favored decentralized, attritable systems optimized for mass and low cost, while U.S. doctrine and the Pentagon's procurement habits still reward exquisite, high-end platforms — the same $4 million Patriot-versus-$20,000-Shahed math Mintz cited. The Wraith's appearance in a brigade EW platoon and Anduril's six-figure salary postings for EW chiefs suggest that gap is closing on two fronts at once: the startups are scaling attritable systems into the force structure, and the incumbents are recruiting the people who know how to build them.
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