Asia and South America Buy Israel's Portable Anti-Drone Laser

Autonomous Guard, an Israeli defence technology company formerly known as Technoplus Ventures, said on Thursday it had secured new international orders worth about NIS 10.5 million, or roughly $3.1 million, according to a statement issued through the Press Service of Israel on 28 August 2025. The deals were signed through the company’s subsidiary Skylock and come from customers in Asia and South America.

The orders include sales of the Hard-Kill system, described by the company as a portable laser-based defence solution designed to detect, identify and neutralise hostile drones, complementing Skylock’s existing electromagnetic countermeasures. The company said the system had recently completed operational testing and that the sales were part of a push to widen its international defence offering.

Who Autonomous Guard actually is

The company reached the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange through a reverse merger rather than a flotation. Calcalist’s CTech reported in September 2024 that Skylock would merge with Technoplus Ventures, a listed shell company, in a deal valuing the combined business at NIS 100 million (about $19 million at the time), with the Avnon Group holding 70 per cent. Skylock had projected revenue of about $15 million for 2024, and earlier that year had sold its MyDefense subsidiary to Bridgepoint for NIS 480 million.

The renamed business trades on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under the ticker AGRD and, according to its MarketScreener profile, employs around 81 people across AI-driven perimeter defence, autonomous patrol systems and sensor integration for military and homeland security customers.

Hard kill, soft kill, and why the distinction matters

Counter-drone systems fall broadly into two families: those that attack the link between a drone and its operator, and those that physically destroy the aircraft. Calcalist’s CTech surveyed the Israeli sector in March 2026 and found companies working across that whole span: radio-frequency cyber takeover that lands a drone intact, protocol manipulation for passive detection, laser-based scanning for identification, and acoustic detection using artificial intelligence. Skylock featured in the same survey as a supplier of integrated drone-threat prevention across multiple scenarios. The commercial appetite is visible in the deals: the survey noted that one Israeli counter-drone firm, Sentrycs, was acquired by Ondas Holdings for $225 million in November 2025.

The export market these orders sit in

Israeli defence sales have been climbing steeply. The Times of Israel reported in June 2026 that exports reached nearly $19.2 billion in 2025, up from $14.8 billion in 2024 and a fifth consecutive record. Air defence systems, missiles and rockets made up 29 per cent of the total, and sales to the Asia-Pacific region nearly doubled in value, from around $3.4 billion in 2024 to $6.1 billion in 2025, while Latin America accounted for 2 per cent of the total. Against those totals a $3.1 million order book is very small, which is a fair measure of how far a company of Autonomous Guard’s size sits from the Israeli defence giants.

What the announcement did not say

The company did not name the customers, the countries, or whether the buyers were governments or private operators. It did not say how many systems the orders cover, when they will be delivered, or how the NIS 10.5 million splits between the Hard-Kill system and other products. It also gave no detail on what the operational testing involved or who conducted it.