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The Shawn Ryan Show · 3 min · Oct 23, 2025

Shield AI moved beyond a small quadcopter market

Brandon Tseng says the military quadcopter market was too small to support the company, so it bought Martin UAV and Heron Systems in 2021. Those deals opened a path to put its AI pilot on V-BATs and fighter aircraft.

Brandon Tseng

Brandon Tseng is president and cofounder of Shield AI.

Co-founded Shield AI, maker of autonomous V-BAT drones and AI pilots flying F-16s; former Navy SEAL.

About this segment

Brandon Tseng says the military quadcopter market was too small to support the company, so it bought Martin UAV and Heron Systems in 2021. Those deals opened a path to put its AI pilot on V-BATs and fighter aircraft.

From “Brandon Tseng – Shield AI’s X-BAT: The First AI Fighter Jet to Outsmart Top Gun | SRS #247”, Oct 23, 2025. Watch the full episode

“there's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products.”
Brandon Tsengat 1:14:35 · The Shawn Ryan Show1:14:35

Takeaways

  1. The quadcopter market drew little defense spending.
  2. Shield AI bought Martin UAV and Heron Systems in 2021.
  3. The acquisitions added V-BAT and fighter-jet platforms.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:51:22X-BAT aims to deliver fighter capability without runways7:14
  2. 1:15:48Autonomous systems learn through simulation and reward5:02
  3. 1:40:38Shield AI can integrate an AI pilot with three engineers in three months2:54

  4. 1:13:20Shield AI moved beyond a small quadcopter market2:51

  5. 6:15V-BAT supported a major Caribbean drug interdiction2:23Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:13:33

    I mean, we were just talking about, you know, doing hits and all this stuff. And so what exactly, in the soft world, because that's all I can relate to. It was primarily used in call-out operations. So, right, it wasn't going to be used in a dynamic, like, HR mission or anything like that. But, like, when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a call-out, where, right, you can think of, like, for the non-military audience, like, the FBI surrounding.

  2. 1:13:59

    a house like come out with your hands up right there's pros and cons to executing an operation that way but during those types of operations you execute a call out right um people would come out of the building it's like well let's go make sure everybody's out of the building you send a quadcopter in or you send the quadcopter in first those types of operations damn damn i mean what i mean what what did that what did that wind up developing into what was the next product yeah so a couple things one to the point where like recognize really quickly that hey this market is vicious small everybody thinks of quadcopters as toys this is again back in 2018 1920 like there's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products. We said, Hey, we have to figure out how to, um, get onto more strategic, more, uh, yeah, strategic platforms, uh, strategic

  3. 1:14:58

    capabilities. Um, that's where a lot of the defense dollars were moving. So what we ended up doing was during the time, um, we decided, Hey, we have to, we're going to, we're going to buy, uh, another platform. So made that decision in late 2019, 2020, there was a couple acquisition targets that we were looking at, ended up in 2021 buying two companies, both at the same time. One of the companies, Martin UAV, they made the VBAT. The other company, Heron Systems, they were working on AI and autonomy for fighter jets. And so what we were able to do is, hey, let's put the AI pilot on the vbat which is again you think of it as like a miniature predator reaper drone um and then you know we wanted access to these programs where we could put ai pilots onto fighter aircraft i mean so we'll get into the fighter aircraft here in a little bit but i mean how do these things

  4. 1:15:55

    how do they think i mean is it literally like to the quadcopter all the way up to the