Vanquish

Vanquish is a distributed radar network built by CHAOS Industries , a Los Angeles defence-sensing startup founded in 2022. The system entered field use in 2023 and is pitched as an expeditionary sensor layer capable of covering a wide threat envelope — from Group 1 small drones up through cruise and ballistic missiles and crewed fighter aircraft.

Its distinguishing bet is architectural. Rather than concentrating aperture in one large monostatic radar, Vanquish scatters detection across many low-SWaP nodes that self-form into a coherent multi-static network. Transmit and receive functions are split across separate units, and the returns are fused across the mesh, which the company argues yields angular resolution and clutter rejection a comparably-sized single radar cannot match. The architecture also removes the single high-value emitter that anti-radiation missiles and jammers are designed to hunt: no one node is worth striking. CHAOS states the network operates through jamming and cites a coverage figure of roughly $100 per square kilometre — a vendor number that has not been independently benchmarked, but one that signals the fielding model of many disposable-cheap nodes rather than a small number of expensive ones. The company has not publicly disclosed the compute, waveforms or software stack running on the nodes.

Operators identified to date are the United States and an unnamed Middle Eastern partner. CHAOS reports more than 1,000 hours of TRL-9 field operation across those deployments, though it has not detailed where the system has been sited or against what targets. Whether Vanquish has engaged live threats in operations rather than exercises has not been publicly confirmed.

CHAOS was co-founded by John Tenet and Sean Bunyan and has moved unusually quickly for a hardware-first defence startup, raising a Series A led by Accel in 2023 and a Series B reported at $145 million in 2024, at a valuation put above one billion dollars. Vanquish sits in a fast-growing category of distributed, cheap-to-lose sensors that also includes work by Anduril , Fortem Technologies and Echodyne. Its distinctive pitch is the coherent fusion across many separated nodes — a bet that the future of air surveillance looks less like a single high tower and more like a mesh hidden in the terrain.