Drones, Counter-Drones, And Related Technology Investments
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A New Era In Technology
by Alex King, CEO, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc.
I am incredibly excited about new technology development. This is a change, a welcome change.
For me, the years 2010-2020 were duds from a technology development perspective. Yes, Big Tech mooned during this time but Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer services companies, the goal being to admaxx revenue by learning and then directing consumer behavior, seemed like a slow boat to nowhere to me. A lot of brains doing nothing very interesting. And then crypto, sheesh.
The AI Explosion
Then the LLM explosion happened and everything changed. In about 2015 I spent some time at Microsoft’s research labs talking to people working on large language models, and I met Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman around this time too. (Briefly. They won’t remember me, but I sure remember them). Today Hassabis is the King Of AI at Google and Suleyman his opposite number at Microsoft. Remarkable. And the technology coming out of the LLM explosion is truly innovative, a break with the past. The more I use Claude CoWork, the more I learn how to get value from it, how to work with it, the more blown away I am. It is a bigger step forward from the browser to CoWork than it was from the isolated to the connected computer. And we’re still early; if I think back to the Internet 1.0 revolution, I would put the agentic AI revolution at an equivalent level to around 1993-4 in the development of the Web - we’re not even at the Netscape Moment yet.
Hardware At The Forefront Once More
AI has also spawned massive innovation in hardware, which had also been stagnant for the longest time. Yes, faster WiFi was good but not revolutionary. What’s revolutionary is the huge pressure on hardware to now keep up with the software, and that is flowing through all the way to fundamental semiconductor fabrication technology. You don’t need gate-all-around if you don’t have LLMs.
Industry After Industry Falls Prey To Technology. Even Defense.
Since the course of the world is pretty much set, which is to say life is going to be getting nastier, more brutish, and shorter for some, we might as well find ways to try to make a little money from it before the big white flash hits.
The combination of AI and the hardware it has spawned is going to hit legacy industries much harder than people yet realize. If you are in a monolithic, guild-managed industry, I suggest you find refuge, because the deflationary impulse is coming for you. Life sciences are already being revolutionized from within by AlphaFold and a thousand other new applications; and defense is moving from being a matter of physically superior air, sea and/or land power into small form factor strength. Drones - aerial, naval, land-based - are in their very early days as military instruments. They are also being tested live in war theaters around the world. And investor dollars are flowing toward them. This is a superb confluence of interests against which to invest in the sector in my view.
Newly Covered Stocks - Ondas Holdings, Swarmer, One Stop Systems, Amprius And More
We’ll be covering all these names and more, starting in the next few days. As always our Inner Circle members will get our best work first. But by way of background I thought we would start by sharing our market map of names in this sector. You can read it here:
Stay tuned for coverage starting soon.
Cestrian Capital Research, Inc - 18 March 2026.