Title: 3 Hoyas Reshape Drone Detection With Guardian RF Start-up

John Andrzejewski (C’25), Eli Kerstein (C’24) and Lucas Raskin were Georgetown physics majors interested in signal processing when they got an opportunity to work together on a project.

Classmates from the School of Foreign Service — Rasmus Dey Meyer (SFS’25) and Nathaniel Salander (SFS’25) — organized a defense technology hackathon in El Segundo, California, and invited the three friends to compete.

Little did they know that the opportunity would alter their professional futures and put them at the forefront of global politics and emerging technologies.

Going up against some of the brightest minds in technology and engineering, they entered the competition as a shot in the dark, Raskin said. They thought they wouldn’t make it far and even forgot to name their team, hastily calling themselves Georgetown Physics.

In the 24-hour competition, they spent day and night coding their project — a piece of software that uses proprietary signal processing to detect drones and their operators.

“These [other competitors] go to MIT and Caltech. There was no way we were going to do well at this event. Then the morning comes around, we’d been up for 20 hours at this point, and they’re like, ‘You guys are in the finals,’” Andrzejewski said. “We couldn’t believe it. That was the moment it started to feel real. I felt like I was dreaming.”

After their underdog win, their venture has transformed into a bustling startup they’ve named Guardian RF, a company that specializes in drone detection technology.

“When you get an opportunity like this and get to work with people you trust as we have, you take it,” Raskin said.

A New Front in Drone Technology

Before the competition, the three physics students thought they knew where their careers were headed. A finance career for Andrzejewski. A telecommunications role for Raskin. And government work for Kerstein.

The hackathon changed everything for them. When they returned from California, the three friends wanted to turn their lines of code into a commercial product. They applied to Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based startup accelerator program, and were told that they needed hardware to commercialize their product.

The Hoyas pulled three all-nighters in a row to get it done, crowding around blackboards in empty classrooms in Walsh Hall to build their hardware — all during finals week at Georgetown.

They wanted to build something different. Existing solutions for drone detection are often expensive and bulky, with units typically the size of a refrigerator, Raskin said. Meanwhile, inexpensive consumer-grade drones pose threats to public safety.

“It boils down to economies of scale. You have to be able to detect, track and disrupt drones within cost parity of the drones themselves, which is something we have been failing to do,” he said.

Guardian RF addresses this challenge with its sensor nodes that fit in the palm of your hand. The sensors trace the radio frequencies that drone operators use to communicate with their drones – which can be difficult in identifying drones from other data sources and determining which drones are potentially friendly or hostile. 

When employed in sufficient numbers in a mesh network, the sensors can triangulate the position of drones and their operators.

“That allows you to save on hardware costs, which is a huge boost for the go-to-market because there’s a big latency between people’s demand for drone detection and their willingness to procure and operate a multimillion-dollar bespoke, high-end exquisite system,” Raskin said.

Drone Detection and Public Safety

Over the last year, Guardian RF has sold its product to customers both in the U.S. and abroad.

While the technology has been used in Ukraine by the Ukrainian military, Guardian RF sees its biggest opportunity in the public safety sector in the U.S. As in Ukraine, people can weaponize inexpensive drones to target critical infrastructure like electrical grids or start wildfires, Raskin said.

Guardian RF hopes to bridge the gap by providing a scalable solution to detect drones and support homeland security in the U.S.

“We think this is the biggest public safety threat. If you think of the long arc of weaponry, bending toward things that are cheaper and able to be used from further away, drones are the pinnacle of that,” Raskin said. “We need to have a countermeasure and can’t be treating this issue reactively. That’s where the name Guardian came from, about protecting people and doing what’s right.”

Only at Georgetown

While the three co-founders studied physics, Raskin explained how Georgetown’s interdisciplinary environment creates an incubatory space for ideas and encouraged them to pursue their start-up.

“When you leave the classroom and go to Yates, go to Five Spice and do all the other Georgetown stuff outside of the [physics] department, you’re rubbing elbows with a lot of people whose bread and butter are China, Middle East, energy policy, a lot of cool stuff that we don’t get to think about,” Raskin said. “If you take advantage of the Georgetown education and put yourself out there, you get great perspective.”

The start-up leaders hope their story can inspire more physics students at Georgetown to pursue entrepreneurship.

Raskin also recently designed a new course for Georgetown physics students alongside Rowan O’Sullivan (C’25) that was first offered in fall 2024 and will be a requirement for all physics majors. The two students wanted to design a class that would better support students interested in entrepreneurship. In A Guide to Thrive as a Physics Major, students learn leadership and communication skills and are paired with student mentors to help guide them through their Georgetown journey. They hear from physics faculty about their research and how their physics education can be applied in the real world. 

“As the zeitgeist in venture capital has shifted toward defense technology and AI, there is an opportunity to establish a new career pipeline for Georgetown’s brightest minds in STEM — one that extends beyond the traditional paths of consulting and finance,” Raskin said. “We have the talent here to build billion-dollar businesses that advance American interests. Georgetown simply needs to nurture it and bring its formidable network in the defense capital of the world to bear for student founders.”