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Highlights

How Aurelius Systems Is Building Cost-Effective Directed Energy Weapons Using Automotive Manufacturing Principles

The directed energy weapons market has a forty-year credibility problem. Millions spent on systems that break constantly. Promises that never materialize. By the time Michael LaFramboise co-founded Aurelius Systems, military buyers had learned to assume failure.

Michael’s background gave him a unique lens on the problem. At Coherent, the largest U.S. laser manufacturer, he worked R&D on high-power laser manufacturing systems—”very similar and almost identical in a lot of ways to the systems that you use on a laser weapon. We’re just cutting instead of four inches away we’re cutting at like a mile away.” He then moved into sales, running west coast operations for subcomponents and diodes. “If you ever start a company, especially in the beginning, like 90% of your company is engineering and sales,” Michael explains. “I’d done both in the space. Probably like five people under 70 in the country have done that.”

That vantage point—seeing both the technical specifications and the commercial realities—revealed what others had missed: the commercial laser market had matured enough to completely reimagine defense economics.

The Commercial Off-the-Shelf Arbitrage

While traditional directed energy systems cost tens of millions and require constant maintenance, Aurelius inverted the development philosophy. “Our R and D thesis is we are going to build the system in its entirety from commercial off the shelf components,” Michael says. “All the hardware, wire harnessing, power systems, the cooling, the laser, the optics, everything. We’re going to build all of it commercial off the shelf. And then if it fails in test, then we will upgrade it one level to some level of bespokeness.”

The cost differential is extreme. Aurelius’s marginal cost per shoot-down: approximately 10 cents. The current solution: “We have ships going through the Red Sea and there are Houthi drones attacking them or something, they will use like the $2 million block four Sea Sparrow missile to shoot those down.” That’s 20 million times more expensive per engagement.

The insight came from Michael’s automotive background at Chrysler combined with his laser manufacturing experience. “We buy laser systems that are used for commercial industrial manufacturing. We don’t buy directed energy lasers because those lasers are 10x the cost of the material processing laser and the material processing laser is exactly the same output. Like it’s like 98% the same.”

This contradicts forty years of defense industry orthodoxy. “This is the exact opposite of how directed energy weapon systems have been built for the last 40 years where it’s like 400 ARL and AFRL PhDs all coming together to make the most super bespoke, hyper perfect thing ever,” Michael notes. “But we found that you can get like 80 to 90% physics perfection on a system for like 2% of the cost.”

His product philosophy borrows from Detroit: “I want to make like an F150. I want to make like a Ford Focus or Toyota Corolla. I do not want to make a Ferrari or like a Maserati.”

Demonstration as Customer Education Strategy

Revolutionary unit economics weren’t enough. Decades of failed directed energy programs had created deep institutional skepticism. “I dealt with the skepticism because directed energy weapons had failed so hard for so many decades,” Michael recalls from his Coherent days.

Aurelius made customer education through field demonstration their primary 2024 focus. Not controlled lab tests—adversarial conditions that stress systems beyond typical operational parameters. They shot down drones “in heavy rain and like 99% humidity with heat warping at night and stuff like that,” earning signed memorandums from high-ranking officers that function as transferable proof points.

The demonstrations happened nationwide—Hawaii, Austin, and other locations—building a portfolio that preempts skepticism in subsequent conversations. “When you do that and you have the memorandum signed, it gets a lot easier,” Michael says. “People are like starting to not need to be like, okay, I need to see a demo under these conditions.”

This approach addresses a specific go-to-market challenge: in defense, you’re not just selling to your immediate contact. You’re selling to everyone in their chain of command who needs convincing. Transferable proof—signed memorandums, documented performance under extreme conditions—does the work when you’re not in the room.

Hire for Structural Complexity, Not Just Headcount Milestones

Defense presents a structural go-to-market challenge that compounds traditional enterprise complexity. “It’s very weird working in a space where your purchaser, your end user, and your authorizer for funds are all separate people that don’t know each other,” Michael explains. “Normally, if you’re in consumer, everything is in one. If you’re doing SaaS, then you have like two people. You have someone buying the SaaS product and someone using it generally in a company. But we have three.”

The complexity doesn’t scale linearly. “Whenever you have these different points, it doesn’t expand linearly the difficulty or the complexity of the sales cycle. It expands exponentially.”

Michael’s response: hire a lobbyist six months after the pre-seed. This wasn’t growth-stage infrastructure pulled forward—it was fundamental to their go-to-market model. “If you’re doing something really critical for national security, you can get a lot of support in a way that’s very weird but very helpful,” he explains. Congressional support provides air cover and funding continuity during the one-to-three year sales cycles typical in defense.

The strategy came from pattern-matching, not innovation. “Following the Anduril playbook for how you do an early stage defense company is probably a very appropriate thing to do,” Michael says. “They know a lot of like especially in the beginning, you know that team is just really cracked out.”

The lesson generalizes: in markets with structural complexity—multiple disconnected stakeholders, long sales cycles, regulatory requirements—identify which specialized roles unlock your market and hire them as infrastructure, not overhead.

Target the Inappropriate Use Case, Not the Incumbent Product

Aurelius doesn’t position against Sea Sparrow missiles for their designed application. Those missiles work for shooting down aircraft at nine miles. The market dislocation is their misapplication to counter-drone warfare. “We’re trying to fit that missile application into this finding and seeking and hitting this drone when it’s moving like 80 miles an hour at you with some C4 on it and you don’t even detect it until it’s a few kilometers out,” Michael explains. “The missile works like 30% of the time anyway when you shoot at this drone.”

The positioning writes itself: “There isn’t anything in the market that’s been developed for counter drone at any kind of significant distance.” Aurelius focuses on Group 1 and Group 2 drones—FPV quadcopters with explosives and small planes—where customers are forced to use wrong-fit, expensive solutions with poor effectiveness.

This is different from competing on features or price against an established category leader. It’s identifying where customers have no purpose-built solution and are cobbling together expensive workarounds.

Channel-Specific Founder Voice

Michael takes a deliberately bifurcated approach to founder-led marketing based on where different stakeholders actually spend time. “If you want like meme stuff, go to X. If you want like buttoned up professional stuff, go to LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn targets acquisitions officers and military procurement professionals with professional announcements and progress updates. X gets authentic content, including frustrations that resonate with other founders. When recruitment services flood his inbox after announcing funding—”you start to have like 17 recruiters a day reach out to you for recruiting services, consulting services and that pisses me off the most”—he posts about it.

“That gets some of our most aggressive liking because I think a lot of people vibe with that as they’re getting just like blown up,” Michael explains.

The approach works because it’s not just tone-matching. It’s mapping which actual humans in your buying committee and hiring pipeline use which platforms, then adapting voice accordingly. Acquisitions officers aren’t reading your X posts. Engineering talent isn’t making procurement decisions based on LinkedIn content.

Timing Market Restructuring

Aurelius won a DIU grant in February 2025 and secured Army X-Tech competition wins, positioning them to deliver first systems in 2026. That timing coincides with the largest DOD restructuring in decades. The department is consolidating “118” technology acceleration organizations down to “10 to 20” under a new PAE structure, with the explicit goal of reducing procurement timelines from years to “90 day turnarounds on stuff.”

“Everyone who did acquisitions before is going to have to learn how to do their whole field again,” Michael observes.

For a company built on rapid iteration with commercial components rather than bespoke multi-year development cycles, the timing creates asymmetric advantage. Established primes optimized for the old system now face the same learning curve as startups—but without the organizational flexibility to adapt quickly.

Michael’s long-term vision extends beyond terrestrial counter-drone systems. “We become a trillion dollar company by doing space weapon systems,” he says. In vacuum, with no atmospheric interference, “my range is much further out on a smaller system.” His effector moves at 300 million meters per second—light speed. “The only way you’re going to do any kind of scaled long distance warfare is through light.”

But the immediate mission remains tactical: flip the cost equation so “it costs the enemy more money to produce FPV suicide drones than it costs for us to shoot them down.” In conflicts where Ukraine reports the majority of casualties come from drone attacks, and forward operating bases lack effective counter-measures, that economic inversion is the deterrent that actually matters.