Impact launches Air Defense as a Service: autonomous interceptor drones in a sealed box, deployed at the sites drones are already hitting

San Francisco, August 4, 2026. IMPACT DRONES, INC., a counter-drone company backed by Y Combinator, today launched Air Defense as a Service: autonomous interceptor drones that ship in a sealed box, deployed at the sites drones are already hitting: data centers, the power grid, airports, and bases.The drone threat went industrial. Air defense math did not.

Legacy effectors cost $1 million or more per shot against $50,000 drones, so critical infrastructure has no affordable way to physically stop them. In March, drones took three AWS data centers offline in the Middle East and a dozen core cloud services with them; Amazon lost $200 million in one day.

A box on site, no crew on the pad.

 The IMPACT box sits at the site it protects. When sensors cue a hostile drone, an interceptor pierces its own frangible lid, launches, and rams the target, guided by onboard visual navigation that keeps working when GPS is jammed.

Priced like the threat, sold as a service

Interceptors cost like the threat they stop, and launches scale with the swarm. Sites subscribe to protection instead of buying missiles: hardware, reloads, and monitoring included, with a subscription sized to the site it protects.

The fleet

HUNTER, the point defense interceptor, holds the airspace over the site: up to 300 km/h, EO/LWIR terminal guidance, GNSS denied vision navigation, with a hardware lineage that is combat proven in Ukraine against Shahed-136, Geran-2, and Gerbera type drones.

SABLE, the pursuit interceptor now in development, brings turbine power and a delta airframe to run down jet speed threats at a design speed of 825 km/h. Both fly IMPACT’s autonomy stack.

Pilot deployments begin Q3 2026. IMPACT is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch. The launch goes live on Tuesday, August 4 at 10:00 CEST across Y Combinator’s social channels, which reach a combined audience of roughly 60 million.

“Drones are hitting data centers, substations, and airports today, and the defenses built for armies do not scale down to a single site. So we put the whole thing in a box. It sits at your site, it launches when something hostile comes in, and it rams it out of the sky. You do not buy missiles, you subscribe to safe skies. That is Air Defense as a Service.” said Jasper Lortije, founder and CEO of IMPACT.

Images courtesy Impact Drones