The go-boom side of defense tech kicked off AUSA with a bang. (Sorry.)
Day One of the Army’s annual arms expo was jam-packed with a whole bunch of new boom-and-zoom tech, from ballistic missile interceptors (courtesy of Anduril and Lockheed) to next-gen howitzers.
Heaviside Industries, though, made a splash on the small-and-speedy side of the ball, unveiling Tyr, a 5-pound loitering munition built to be a man-portable “tank killer.” It’s the first in Heaviside’s line of precision munitions, and the company says Tyr has already undergone live-fire testing and is currently under contract with the US military.
New kids on the block: Heaviside is a new-ish name in the new-age munitions world, but they’ve exploded (sorry, again) onto the scene with a flurry of big announcements since coming out of stealth earlier this year.
- The Los Angeles-based startup emerged with a $28M Series A led by Interlagos in May (first reported by Tectonic), and quickly followed that up three months later with a $60M Series B led by Felicis that valued the company at a cool $600M.
- Heaviside is headquartered in LA, but has a significant presence in Norway, where Tyr is being tested and produced. The company has a partnership with Norwegian munitions giant Nammo, which provides the warheads for Tyr and Heaviside’s future munitions.
Despite its short time in the public eye, Heaviside has quietly been building autonomous precision munitions for US and allied forces for about two years. Heaviside CEO Phillip Walker told Tectonic earlier this year that US special forces, NATO special forces, and conventional forces are already testing their tech in “multiple NATO countries and the US.”
- “We started the company to focus on closing the gap between price and precision for autonomous precision munitions,” Walker said. “Our focus is on being able to hit a sub-one-meter target at a very affordable price point.”
God of War: Tyr, named after the Norse god of justice and war, is the first in Heaviside’s family of precision munitions, and the small-but-mighty strike drone packs a heck of a punch in a super lightweight form factor.
- The full system (counting the reusable launcher) weighs 15 pounds all-in, including a five-pound warhead, available in Shaped Charge Anti-Tank, Anti-Structure Munition, Explosively Formed Penetrator, and Anti-Personnel Frag variants. The air vehicle itself weighs just five pounds.
- Tyr offers more than 60 minutes of flight time, over 25 miles of range, and a top speed of over 150 miles per hour, according to Heaviside. That’s been tested in Norway, where it’s flown and hit targets at -20°F.
- It’s also designed to be super portable, with detachable wings (which house the batteries) for easy carrying, and Heaviside says it can be “employed in ground and base defense operations, utilized as a counter-UAS system, or integrated onto larger unmanned systems.”
As we all should know by now, operating in contested and GPS/GNSS-denied environments is a prerequisite in modern warfare (especially in the Nordics). Heaviside says Tyr uses its in-house radios and computer vision software to hunt autonomously within a human-designated strike zone, find a target, and relay it back to an operator, who can then confirm the target for Tyr to strike.
“As peer adversaries increasingly employ autonomous unmanned systems on the battlefield, U.S. and allied forces must adopt technologies that extend our robotic advantage,” Heaviside president Nils Haagenrud said. “TYR does exactly that by enabling widespread fielding of a lightweight loitering munition with the range and lethality necessary to increase standoff distance.”
