Perseus Defense YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Perseus Defense went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2025 batch as a Industrials company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2025
Industry: IndustrialsDefense
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Jason CorneliusCo-founder & CEO
Steve MessingerFounder

What Perseus Defense does

Perseus Defense is building a mass-manufactured Counter UAS solution for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Current solutions are one-to-one, too dangerous for use on U.S. soil, and orders of magntiude more expensive than the threats they defeat. Our self-guided missile platform is man-portable and multi-domain capable. It senses, engages, and eliminates threats with drastically reduced cost per engagement over existing kinetic solutions. Solving this critical national security problem requires understanding complex DoD needs along with actual rocket science including aerodynamics, guidance, navigation, control, and much more. Jason and Steve met at Penn State while they pursued their PhD and MS in aerospace engineering, respectively. Their past experiences designing space helicopters for NASA, making Boeing airliners land autonomously, controlling swarms of unmanned autonomous systems, teaching aerospace engineering at Stanford, winning multiple ONR and DOE engineering competitions, and founding an international drone competition makes them the perfect team to create transformative solutions protecting our service members. "If you build this, it will be mandatory equipment for every truck, boat, and convoy in the U.S. Military. We're talking thousands of units." - Former DoD Procurement Officer The White House just released Executive Order, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance" which adds billions of dollars, government support, and streamlined regulations to enable the development of our product. Traction: Jason and Steve used more than 100 end-user interviews across the DoD and DHS to shape the product to something of critical need to both boots on the ground and DoD purchasers. In 8 short weeks following a strict 2-week design-build-test cycle, the team has gone through 4 major guided missile iterations with over 30 live-fire flight tests. They were invited to Ft. Hood to present their platform to the 1st Cavalry Division, and also briefed the Pentagon and U.S. congressmen on current U.S. vulnerabilities to advanced drone technology. Perseus Defense is actively standing up cooperative research agreements with U.S. Army DEVCOM's Applied Research Laboratory, Aviation and Missile Center, Armaments Center, and High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Perseus Defense's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Perseus Defense, Summer 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Perseus Defense

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

America's Golden Dome for Drones

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We're building a self-guided missile platform that detects, tracks, and destroys hostile drones. It's man-portable, works across domains, and costs far less per engagement than current systems. Our product addresses a critical gap for the Department of Defense and Homeland Security where existing counter-drone solutions are either one-to-one, prohibitively expensive, or unsafe for use on U.S. soil.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We met while at Penn State but location is not specified. Post-YC, we'll base the company wherever it makes sense for working closely with DoD and DHS partners.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Our priority is proximity to defense customers and research partners, so we'll be where we can best engage with the Army's development labs and government stakeholders.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Perseus Defense YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Perseus Defense's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Perseus Defense would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.