Phinorm Inc.

Counter-drone systems detect objects but cannot reliably identify them. Operators suffering from decision fatigue guess under time pressure, and the result is a missed threat, wasted shot or friendly fire. Buyers keep spending on detection hardware while classification is still unsolved inside the size, weight, power and cost budgets where it is needed most. NATO puts the serviceable segment at $84B, growing 17% a year.

Featherlight is a software upgrade for radars already in the field. No new hardware, nothing upstream of the feed changes, and it runs on the compute the sensor already has. Most approaches throw a heavy AI model at a noisy signal. Featherlight does the discrimination earlier, in the signal itself, so what reaches the classifier is already clean and small. Less compute, far less training data to learn a new threat, and a decision chain an operator can trace rather than take on faith.

At our Berlin test site in June 2026 we ran Featherlight on a low-cost 77 GHz automotive-class radar across five days and 64 hover captures. On the small-drone case it found the drone 2.2x as often as the radar's stock processing and 1.8x as often as the best conventional benchmark, at 55% more range, with zero false alarms. Jointly developing MVPs with two integration partners on their own hardware, benchmarking head-to-head against their existing baseline. Customer discovery spans 423 interviews across 242 organizations; First place and largest ever prize at the 2026 UChicago Global New Venture Challenge, the NATO Innovation Fund Acceleration Prize, Starburst Innovation Corridor Defense Accelerator. First patent application filed in Germany, second application in progress.

• Record-Breaking $435,000 Awarded at 19th Annual Global New Venture Challenge; Phinorm, Morton Labs Tie for First Place - Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

  Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation - · Jun 5, 2026

  Phinorm provides on-device drone detection software for defense sensors, while Morton Labs is building computational infrastructure to accelerate fusion energy research. The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation today announced the winners of the 19th Annual Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC), where a record $435,000 was awarded to ventures led by Chicago Booth Executive MBA

• 
  VetsinTech Announces Finalists in Annual Tech Startup Pitch Competition 2026

  www.prnewswire.com

  /PRNewswire/ -- VetsinTech, the leading national non-profit dedicated to supporting veterans through tech-based programs and opportunities in education,...