Peter Schmidt, founder and CEO of Ironaxe Corporation, believes the smartest way to stop a hostile drone is not to blow it up with a $30,000 heat-seeking missile. It is to catch it. On a recent episode of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Schmidt officially announced that Ironaxe, a subsidiary of Transcend Air, has officially come out of stealth mode after two years of covert development.
The company unveiled two aircraft built for the counter-UAS mission: Moirai, a tiltwing interceptor designed for repeatable, low-collateral defense of infrastructure and public spaces, and Slayer, a purpose-built hunter aimed squarely at long-range attack drones like Iran’s Shahed, rebranded by Russia as Geran. Together they represent a new layer for airspace defense, one built on precision and proportionality rather than raw firepower.
The Path to Counter-Drone Interceptors
Ironaxe’s parent, Transcend Air, spent nearly a decade engineering high-speed, tiltwing VTOL aircraft meant to move people between city centers faster than helicopters could manage. Schmidt, an MIT-educated entrepreneur, business aviation veteran and aerobatic pilot, explained that the economics of aviation pointed the company toward vertical takeoff and landing from day one. “What matters in making money in commercial aviation is there has to be enough demand to fill the seats for the service you want to offer,” he said. The biggest passenger demand sits in the middle of dense cities where only VTOL aircraft can realistically operate.
The company’s pursuit of speed, aircraft that could fly nearly twice as fast as a V-22 Osprey, caught the attention of the Department of War. Transcend has won seven military contracts since 2020. The pivot to counter-drone work happened almost by accident. Standing on the shore of the Arabian Gulf, staring across toward Iran, Schmidt’s business development lead asked a simple question: could the company’s subscale prototypes bring down Shahed attack drones? “Let me do some math,” Schmidt recalled saying, half-joking. The answer turned out to be yes.
Meet Slayer, the Long-Range Hunter
Slayer is Ironaxe’s answer to the deep-strike attack drones plaguing modern battlefields, aircraft like the Shahed, that Russia is launching by the thousands against Ukrainian cities. “That’s one issue, and that’s what the Slayer aircraft is designed to go after,” Schmidt said.
Built with a forward-pointing wing more familiar to conventional airplanes, Ironaxe optimized the Slayer for speed and range rather than hover-and-tangle maneuvering, to chase down long-range cruise-style threats before they reach populated areas.
Schmidt carefully framed Slayer’s mission. “I’m not here to claim that we have a one-size-fits-all solution,” he said, distinguishing Slayer’s deep-strike role from the more localized, precision-focused mission his other aircraft, Moirai, is the company’s go-to-market product, was built for.
Moirai takes its name from the Greek word for “the Fates,” the mythological beings who wove the destiny of gods and men on their looms, a fitting namesake for an aircraft that literally captures its targets with a net called the V-loom. While Slayer chases threats across open sky, Ironaxe purpose-built Moirai for the environments where nets, not missiles, make sense. This includes crowded stadiums, ports, substations or any airspace where collateral damage cannot be tolerated. “That’s where the Moirai comes in,” Schmidt noted.
Why Nets Beat Missiles
Schmidt described the current drone threat as “the most destabilizing factor in global defense since nuclear weapons.” Cheap, AI-empowered drones have made tanks and capital ships, in his words, “obsolete.” The problem is that the tools built to stop them cost far more than the drones themselves. The cheapest missile option the United States currently fields, an APKWS rocket fitted with a Raytheon infrared guidance head, costs about $30,000 dollars per shot. Yet it still has limited range.
Moirai sidesteps that math. Rather than intercepting with kinetic force, it deploys what Schmidt called an “entanglement effector,” either a silk-string net dubbed the V-loom or biodegradable swarm strips that wrap around a drone’s propellers on contact. “If they come in contact with a drone’s propellers, they immediately wrap around it and the drone falls out of the sky,” Schmidt explained. The strips are edible and harmless, and the loom can even carry a small parachute so the disabled drone floats gently to the ground instead of crashing.
That gentle landing matters for law enforcement and civil authorities. “If you’re a police officer, it means you can take this down safely in the middle of a street,” Schmidt said. The intact wreckage also preserves the full custody chain of evidence for criminal or administrative proceedings. Compare that to a laser or missile strike, which destroys any forensic value the drone might have held about its origin or intent.
Tiltwing Engineering as a Business Advantage
Moirai’s defining feature is its tiltwing architecture, an aircraft configuration Schmidt calls the most technically demanding in aviation. “tiltwing is the most technically challenging aircraft architecture,” he said, pointing out that it is even harder to control than the tilt-rotor design used on the V-22. Wings normally stall past a certain angle, but Ironaxe’s software allows Moirai to fly stably at any wing angle, climbing, descending, and maneuvering through the stall the way a multicopter hovers. That capability translates directly into performance. Moirai reaches speeds above 100 miles per hour, can loiter aloft for more than half an hour on a single battery and doubles that endurance with a second battery pack.
With regard to autonomy, an operator can fly Moirai manually like an FPV drone, hand off targeting decisions to onboard AI or blend the two depending on rules of engagement or use of force set by a mission commander.
“If you need VTOL, we will have the longest range, the longest endurance while still keeping the maneuverability of a quadcopter,” Schmidt said. He noted that of 170 drone designs currently flying over Ukraine, none use a tiltwing layout, to highlight how unique Ironaxe’s approach really is.
Mission-Built for Public Safety and Battlefields
Ironaxe positions Moirai for three overlapping markets: military base and port defense, federal and public safety agencies including DHS, and critical infrastructure operators guarding stadiums, substations and pipelines.
Schmidt walked through a stadium scenario in detail. Several Moirai units would sit prepositioned inside and outside the venue, on the ground and drawing essentially zero power until a detection system cues them to launch. Then, “It leaps up and goes into action” the moment a threat is confirmed.
Notably, Ironaxe does not build its own detect, track and identify systems. Instead, it plans to integrate with whichever platform a customer already uses. Schmidt cited the New Jersey State Police at MetLife Stadium as an example of an agency that has already selected its own detection technology. After integration, once cued, Moirai’s onboard camera and AI targeting model would take over, guiding the aircraft to fly just above a target drone before deploying its net or strips.
Ukraine as Proving Ground, 3D Printing as Scale Plan
Ironaxe has already begun integrating terminal guidance software from two Ukrainian AI providers whose technology is deployed on the front lines, a partnership Schmidt called a direct response to watching Shahed drones terrorize Ukrainian cities. In forward-deployed scenarios near contested territory, he envisions Moirai operating with no human in the loop at all, launching, flying across contested ground and executing an intercept autonomously once cued.
Manufacturing scale is the next challenge. Schmidt’s answer leans on the company’s 3D-printing partnership with Auburn University’s Vehicle Systems, Dynamics, and Design Laboratory (VSDDL) Lab, where aerospace engineering professor Imon Chakraborty has spent years pioneering 3D-printed aircraft structures. “We’ve had a super fruitful partnership over multiple government contracts with Imon Chakraborty,” Schmidt said. “If you can make a product that’s 3D printed, it revolutionizes manufacturing.”
Rather than building dedicated production lines, which he describes as expensive and inflexible once certified, Ironaxe designs aircraft from printed modular panels that snap onto carbon fiber structural spars like building blocks. Schmidt envisions a future where a warfighter adjusts a range slider on a handheld device and receives a freshly printed, mission-tuned Moirai variant within hours. In the U.S. Air Force’s “Game of Drones,” Ironaxe validated the concept when Colonel Dustin Thomas, callsign Whiz, built a modified working Moirai unit himself with help from the 416th Experimental Test Force at Edwards Air Force Base.
What Comes Next for Ironaxe
Ironaxe is now focused on landing customers and partners. The company still needs outside customers to help finish engineering the last details to make Moirai genuinely field-ready. “That last 10 percent that makes it a product that people love needs to come from the customer,” he said. To bridge that gap, Schmidt has a demo road show for police departments planned for this Fall. He expects initial Moirai version 1.0 units to reach customer hands by the fourth quarter of this year.
With the recent SAFER Skies Act extending new counter-UAS authorities to state, local, and tribal law enforcement, Moirai arrives on the scene exactly at a moment when both the technology and the policy landscape are finally converging. Interested partners and agencies can reach Ironaxe through its newly launched website,or connect directly with Schmidt on LinkedIn.
Watch Episode 131 of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast with Ironaxe CEO Peter Schmidt.