CERBAIR
French counter-drone company whose radio-frequency sensors locate drones and their pilots and whose jammers bring them down.
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What It Is
CERBAIR is a French company that detects and jams hostile drones. It was founded in 2015 by Lucas Le Bell and the French deeptech studio Technofounders, and is registered in Montrouge, just south of Paris. Le Bell is its president.
Its systems listen for the radio link between a drone and its remote control. That lets them locate the pilot as well as the aircraft, and then jam the link. The company describes the sequence as detect, characterise, neutralise.
CERBAIR names its clients as France’s armed forces and justice ministries, the French Navy, Naval Group, Airbus, the Colombian Air Force and Bangladesh’s interior ministry. Its website says its systems are deployed in more than 14 countries. Coverage of its June 2026 sale put the figure at 28 or 30.
Key Products
HYDRA is the detection line. It works by analysing radio-frequency signals, not by radar. The company gives the HYDRA 100 a range of up to 2 km and the HYDRA 200 and 300 a radius of 2 to 7 km. All three can be fixed, mobile or fitted to vehicles.
MEDUSA is the jamming line: digital jammers covering eight bands between 400 MHz and 6 GHz. They target Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and VHF/UHF signals. The company publishes no jamming range.
CHIMERA 200 combines detection and jamming in one compact unit, built to protect troops, convoys and military sites. CERBAIR gives it a 1.5 km detection radius and says it can jam up to five frequency bands at once.
Business and Financial Position
In June 2026 the private-equity firm Latour Capital bought CERBAIR through its Emergence Défense fund and the Fonds Innovation Défense, which Bpifrance manages. The change of control was announced at the Eurosatory defence show in Paris. The sellers included Technofounders, and the management team reinvested alongside Latour. The price was not disclosed.
Before that, CERBAIR was venture-backed. It raised €5.5 million in February 2020 from investors including Boundary Holding and the missile maker MBDA, which was already a shareholder. The company said then that sales had begun in early 2017, to special forces, prisons and private clients.
Two French government contracts stand out. In February 2022 CERBAIR and the electromagnetic interference specialist KEAS won a prison administration contract to protect several dozen more prisons against drones. The company now says more than 40 French prisons use its systems.
In November 2024 CERBAIR said it would fit a naval version of HYDRA to seven new French Navy offshore patrol vessels, ordered by the procurement agency DGA in 2023. Neither contract value was published.
Why It Matters
The Latour deal turns CERBAIR from a studio-backed start-up into a private-equity company with a state defence fund on its register. The company says it wants to become a global leader in anti-drone warfare within five years. It publishes no revenue, so there is no baseline to measure that against.
Its technology has a known limit. Radio-frequency detection and jamming need a radio link to find and cut. A fibre-optic-guided drone, of the kind Russian forces fly in Ukraine, has none. At Eurosatory in June 2026 CERBAIR signed a long-term partnership with Delair, pairing its detection and jamming with Delair’s ASPIK interceptor drone, which carries an explosive charge.
