Powerus

A drone company born in a Ukrainian safe house

Powerus was not built in a defense-industry boardroom. Its seeds were planted in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Michael Sinensky — who owned WeShield, a company that had gathered medical supplies globally during the COVID-19 pandemic — traveled to Ukraine with his business partner Roman Vinfeld to deliver medical kits (New York Times). Vinfeld spoke the language; the two had been friends since high school. “We saw firsthand the start of the drone wars,” Sinensky said. “Our warehouse of humanitarian supplies got destroyed.” While sheltering in a safe house in Lviv, the pair met Brett Velicovich, an Army Special Operations veteran who was vetting American drones sent to Ukraine for testing — and finding them subpar (New York Times). The group went on to form Powerus alongside Andrew Fox, the company’s chief executive, and Ziv Marom, with the stated goal of helping Americans and their allies prepare for a new era of drone warfare.

The company was formally founded in 2025 and is based in West Palm Beach, Florida (Al Jazeera). Rather than designing weapons from scratch, Powerus licensed battle-tested Ukrainian technology and acquired other drone firms — including Tandem Defense, whose modular drones could be snapped together, and Kaizen Aerospace, founded by Marom, which makes drones that can lift up to 1,000 pounds of cargo and fly autonomously (New York Times).

The Guardian interceptor and the economics of drone warfare

Powerus’s flagship product is the Guardian, a small interceptor drone built to knock incoming one-way attack drones out of the sky. It costs about $5,000 per unit — based on a Ukrainian design that proved effective against Russian Shahed drones — and its pieces snap together “like Legos” using off-the-shelf microchips and GPS modules (New York Times). The Guardian-1 platform is a lightweight, high-speed counter-UAS system with a reinforced carbon fiber airframe, engineered for rapid deployment and single-operator use (Powerus).

The pitch is economic as much as technical: when an interceptor costs more than the drone it stops, the attacker wins by attrition. The Times noted that in the Emirates, defenders were using PAC-3 interceptors costing millions of dollars each to destroy $40,000 Shahed drones — an unsustainable strategy (New York Times). Powerus’s model is co-production near the customer: its first Middle East factory came online in the United Arab Emirates in August 2026, where workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3D-printed components, and the company is building a factory network it says will raise production from about 3,000 interceptors a month to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027 (New York Times). Its Guardians only address part of the threat picture, though — they are designed for midsize drones, and Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security called them “complements, not substitutes, for the PAC-3.”

The U.S. military has bought in: after a successful demonstration, the U.S. Air Force placed a limited purchase order for the Guardian, announced April 30, 2026 (defence-blog.com), and the company signed a contract with the Air Force worth up to $90 million (New York Times; Al Jazeera).

The Trump connection and the unusual merger

Shortly after the Iran war began, Powerus announced an unusual merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings (Aureus Greenway Holdings), a publicly traded operator of golf courses in Florida (New York Times). Under the deal’s terms, the golf operator would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Powerus, and the combined company expects to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker “PUSA” as “Powerus Corporation” (Powerus).

The deal was brokered by Dominari Securities, an investment firm owned by Dominari Holdings, which counts Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump among its shareholders and advisory-board members (New York Times). The two brothers are themselves investors in Powerus through a vehicle called American Ventures, which is expected to hold about a 9.9 percent beneficial stake in the combined company, according to U.S. regulatory filings (Al Jazeera).

Both the company and the brothers insist the relationship is hands-off. A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. has told media outlets that he is a passive investor with no role in the company’s operations or contracts and had no prior knowledge of the Pakistan deals (Al Jazeera; The Week). Powerus told Al Jazeera that the Trump brothers “are not advisers to Powerus and have no involvement in how the company runs its business or structures its defence relationships,” and the White House has said there are no conflicts of interest (Al Jazeera). The company has issued a string of announcements involving Trump-world figures regardless: retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as the White House senior adviser to President Trump, joined its advisory board, and Unusual Machines — a Florida drone-component maker with Trump Jr. on its advisory board — invested $30 million in June 2026 (New York Times).

Selling to both sides of the India–Pakistan rivalry

Powerus’s first deal in South Asia was not in Pakistan — it was in India, Pakistan’s archrival. In a June 30, 2026 filing to India’s stock exchanges, Paras Defence and Space Technologies said Powerus had granted it an exclusive licence to manufacture and sell its Guardian-1 interceptor technology in India (Al Jazeera).

Less than three months later, on September 16, a Powerus delegation led by co-founder and COO Brett Velicovich was received by Pakistan’s military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at military headquarters in Rawalpindi (Al Jazeera; The Week). A day later, the company announced it had received a “limited procurement order” from Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems and had signed a separate memorandum of understanding with senior Pakistani defence officials. Powerus clarified to Al Jazeera that “the MoU was signed with the Pakistan army” while “the related procurement order was placed by Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence” — a detail Pakistan’s own military statement (ISPR) omitted entirely (Al Jazeera).

Neither the value of the order nor the systems involved have been disclosed (Al Jazeera). Powerus said the memorandum was not a definitive agreement, created no purchase obligation, and would be subject to U.S. laws and government approvals. “We are proud to support Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence, and the memorandum gives both sides a strategic framework to build upon,” Velicovich said (Al Jazeera). He added that the company was exploring ways to build technology in Pakistan, and founder and CEO Andrew Fox called Pakistan’s private defence sector “emerging but still not mature,” leaving room for U.S. firms to move faster (The Week).

The deal drew scrutiny on two fronts. One of Powerus’s co-founders, Ziv Marom, is a veteran of the Israeli military — a sensitivity in a country that does not recognize Israel — and a senior executive, VP for M&A Justin Gans, previously served at Elbit Systems of America, the U.S. arm of Israel’s Elbit Systems (Al Jazeera). And analysts questioned the procurement logic for a country that already builds drones domestically and buys from China and Turkiye: “Pakistan technically already makes or is capable of making each of the drones shown by Powerus,” said Bilal Khan of the Quwa Group. “It’s unclear where Powerus fits in the long term.” (Al Jazeera). A retired Pakistani general put it more bluntly: “A company less than a year old, not yet listed and without a delivery record would not usually clear these checks for a strategic defence partnership. Such firms are typically considered too immature unless the MoU is political signalling rather than a procurement decision.”

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim the merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings has closed — both companies expect it to, in the final quarter of 2026 (Al Jazeera) or early October (The Week via Reuters), but it had not closed at research time. It does not claim the Pakistan procurement order has been fulfilled, or assert its value or the systems involved, all of which are undisclosed. It does not repeat the company’s own battlefield-effectiveness claims (“thousands of intercepts”) as independently verified facts. And it does not characterize Donald Trump Jr.’s role as anything other than what the sources say: a passive investor whose spokesperson denies any involvement in operations or contracts.