Notus Autonomous Systems: Military Command at Millisecond Speed

In a world increasingly defined by the speed of information, warfare has remained paradoxically slow. Tactical decisions often take minutes. Lives are lost because a human operator is manually piloting a drone or responding to a visual feed. Notus Autonomous Systems aims to bring military response times down from minutes to milliseconds. The startup is building a radically new class of drones and ground-based robots that operate not as isolated machines, but as coordinated swarms, guided by a centralized, AI-driven command hierarchy.

The company, founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, is redefining how the modern battlefield operates. Instead of requiring trained human pilots for each drone, Notus envisions a future where a single commander can orchestrate thousands of autonomous units simultaneously. Imagine something akin to the interface of a real-time strategy (RTS) game—like StarCraft or Command & Conquer—but deployed in the chaos of real conflict zones.

This is not theoretical defense tech built to impress boardrooms. This is battlefield-proven hardware and software, born out of firsthand experience in Ukraine and tailored for conditions where milliseconds can change outcomes.

Who Are the Founders Behind Notus Autonomous Systems?

The minds behind Notus are Arhum Jain and Emmanuel Margolin, two Caltech dropouts who decided to skip the conventional route of military contracts and funding rounds. Instead, they went to Ukraine.

There, amidst missile strikes and the constant wail of air raid sirens, they embedded themselves with hackers, engineers, and frontline soldiers. What they saw was clear: modern warfare isn’t about brute force anymore. It’s about code, coordination, and adaptability.

Jain brings technical expertise in building autonomous ground and aerial systems. Margolin previously co-founded a swarm drone defense company and has a deep understanding of drone warfare in real-world applications. Together, their mission is crystal clear: don’t just build military tech—build tech that wins.

Why Is Swarm Robotics So Revolutionary for Modern Warfare?

The concept of swarm robotics has existed in theory for years, but Notus is making it real. Traditional military drones are typically piloted one at a time. That model doesn’t scale. In real-world battle zones, every second counts, and the manual control model breaks under pressure.

Notus flips the paradigm. Their technology allows for thousands of autonomous agents—drones or robots—to act as a single, intelligent organism. Whether conducting reconnaissance, executing strikes, or responding to threats, the swarm works collaboratively with full awareness of the battlefield environment.

This model does more than increase scale—it enables real-time tactical advantage. It compresses the "sensor-to-shooter" timeline down to milliseconds, effectively creating a kind of digital command force that outpaces human reaction speeds.

What Is PALLAS and How Does It Work?

The first product from Notus is called PALLAS, a drone command system that aims to eliminate the current bottleneck in drone warfare: the operator.

Instead of one person controlling one drone, PALLAS allows one commander to direct thousands. This isn’t a feature-laden dashboard designed for peacetime evaluations. PALLAS is handcrafted from combat feedback, optimized specifically for environments like Ukraine, where communication is jammed, GPS is spoofed, and the margin for error is razor-thin.

PALLAS standardizes fragmented drone protocols and integrates control for multiple types of autonomous systems. It’s built with battlefield priorities in mind: resilience under electronic warfare, streamlined controls, and adaptability to diverse terrain and mission types.

This approach mirrors the design philosophy of gaming strategy engines, but applied to the most serious context imaginable. It marks a shift from operator-centric control to system-level command.

Why Did the Founders Choose Ukraine as Their Testing Ground?

The founding team didn’t settle for simulations or controlled military exercises. Instead, they immersed themselves in a live conflict zone. They went to Ukraine not just to observe, but to learn from those actively deploying drones in the most intense and high-stakes conditions of modern war.

What they witnessed shattered many conventional defense assumptions. Legacy systems were too slow, too fragile, and too disconnected from the realities of modern combat. Expensive systems built over the years became obsolete in weeks. The lesson was harsh but invaluable: if a defense product isn’t deployable within days and adaptable within hours, it’s already too late.

In this crucible, Notus discovered its mission—not just to build better tools, but to radically accelerate the loop from idea to battlefield.

How Does Notus Challenge the Traditional Defense Industry?

The traditional defense model is driven by contracts, PowerPoint decks, and years-long procurement timelines. Notus is rejecting that model entirely.

Instead of ticking boxes to satisfy bureaucracies, they’re building tools designed for one outcome: winning. Their ethos is field-first, speed-first, and soldier-first.

They believe "once the missiles start landing near your apartment, you don’t want theory—you want what works." That means faster iteration cycles, direct feedback loops from combat users, and deployment timelines measured in days, not years.

This approach is deeply disruptive to entrenched defense players. But for the founders of Notus, disruption isn’t a business model—it’s a survival strategy.

What Is the Vision for the Future of Military Command Structures?

Notus doesn’t just want to improve drone control—it wants to reshape the command structure of war. Their technology makes it possible to manage a battlefield in the way a gamer might manage units in an RTS game. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s their explicit design goal.

They foresee a future where military commanders click to deploy formations, reallocate air and ground resources on the fly, and receive instant feedback across thousands of units. War becomes not just faster, but more intelligent, as battlefield AI autonomously handles micro-decisions while human operators manage macro-strategy.

This future isn’t decades away—it’s already being built. Notus is leading the charge.

What’s Next for Notus Autonomous Systems?

As of mid-2025, Notus remains a small team, but its ambitions are anything but. With software and hardware already tested under fire, they’re now focused on scaling up production, refining PALLAS, and forming mission-critical partnerships with militaries that understand the need for speed and adaptability.

They also plan to expand their capabilities into multi-domain coordination, enabling land, air, and potentially sea-based autonomous agents to collaborate as a unified force.

Their ultimate goal is to enable any commander—regardless of background—to orchestrate thousands of intelligent machines in real time, bringing military infrastructure into the era of cloud-native autonomy and AI-first tactics.

Final Thoughts: Why Does Notus Matter Right Now?

In a time when geopolitical threats are rising and defense innovation lags behind, Notus Autonomous Systems offers a new kind of hope, not through promises, but through real tools that already work.

By merging the speed of AI, the flexibility of modern robotics, and the logic of real-time strategy, Notus is designing a new language for military operations. One that speaks in code, swarms, and milliseconds.

They’re not asking whether this future will come. They’re asking how fast we can build it.