Motorola Solutions Buys D-Fend For $1.5 Billion, Turning Counter-Drone Takeover Tech Into A Public Safety Product

Motorola Solutions agreed on Monday to buy Israeli counter-drone company D-Fend Solutions for $1.5 billion, putting radio-frequency drone-takeover technology directly into the hands of the same company whose 911 command-center software already runs in more than 60 percent of North American public-safety agencies. The deal is the second drone-related acquisition Motorola has announced in just over a year, and it lands at the exact moment a new federal law is opening the U.S. market to the kind of mitigation tools D-Fend makes.

D-Fend’s flagship product, EnforceAir, uses radio waves to take control of a rogue drone in mid-flight and land it safely, rather than jamming its signal or shooting it down. The system is deployed in more than 30 countries and is already used by the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice. I have been tracking Motorola’s quiet accumulation of drone assets since the company started signing public-safety integration partnerships in early 2025, and this is the move that ties the whole strategy together.

Motorola shares rose more than 2% on the announcement. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

D-Fend takes over drones instead of jamming them

D-Fend’s approach matters because it solves the biggest problem with existing counter-drone tools: collateral damage. Jamming knocks out every signal in range, including aircraft navigation and cell service. Kinetic interception sends a drone falling onto a crowd. EnforceAir instead hijacks the control link, isolates the target, and walks it down to a safe landing while authorized drones keep flying.

Founded in 2016, the privately held company has posted annual revenue growth above 50% over the last three years, with full-year 2026 revenue expected to reach $185 million, according to Motorola. Its advisory board includes former senior officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. military, which has helped open doors in the American government market.

There is one limitation the press release does not mention. RF-takeover systems work by commandeering the radio link between a drone and its operator. Against fully autonomous or optically guided drones that navigate by camera rather than a control signal, that link is not there to seize. Israeli outlet Calcalist, which first reported the sale, noted EnforceAir is less effective against camera-guided drones for exactly this reason. The Ukraine battlefield has already pushed hard toward fiber-optic and AI-guided drones to defeat RF-based defenses, and that is the edge case any buyer of this technology inherits.

The Safer Skies Act created the U.S. market Motorola is buying into

The timing is not a coincidence. The Safer Skies Act, enacted as Sections 8601 through 8607 of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act and signed into law in December 2025, authorizes trained and certified state and local police to detect, track, and in some cases mitigate drones that pose a credible threat at covered venues. As we reported when the NDAA passed, this was the first time domestic counter-drone authority moved beyond a handful of federal agencies.

Before that law, only bodies like the Department of Defense, DHS, the FBI, and the Secret Service could legally disable a drone under 6 U.S.C. 124n. Now thousands of local officers who complete DOJ-approved training will be able to operate approved counter-UAS systems. The push was driven by the 2026 FIFA World Cup across 11 U.S. cities and by the NFL’s documented total of more than 2,000 drone incursions per season over stadiums. We covered the $500 million FEMA grant program that funds the equipment to match that new authority, and the FBI’s National Counter UAS Training Center in Huntsville that provides the certification.

A law that authorizes mitigation, a grant program that funds the hardware, and a training center that certifies the operators add up to a customer base that did not exist 18 months ago. Motorola just bought the product to sell into it.

This is the capstone on a year of drone dealmaking

The D-Fend purchase completes a pattern Motorola has been building piece by piece. In 2025 the company paid $4.4 billion for Silvus Technologies, which makes the secure mesh-networking radios that connect drones in the field. That gave Motorola the communications layer for drone operations. D-Fend now gives it the counter-drone layer. The same company can sell you the network that runs your drones and the system that takes down someone else’s.

That sits on top of a series of public-safety integration moves DroneXL has tracked through 2025 and 2026. Motorola invested in Seattle drone maker BRINC and integrated its aircraft with APX radios and dispatch software, a partnership we examined when BRINC launched its Guardian drone and new factory. It partnered with SkySafe to fold drone detection into its CommandCentral platform. And it teamed with Nokia to power the first drone-as-first-responder program in South Carolina, which we covered when Summerville went live. Detection, dispatch, networking, and now active mitigation are all under one roof.

“Rogue drones have transformed our skies into a landscape of unpredictable risk, where simple detection is no longer enough,” Motorola chairman and CEO Greg Brown said in a statement. D-Fend chairman and CEO Zohar Halachmi framed the sale as a way to reach Motorola’s existing public-safety and federal customers faster.

The counter-drone market is expanding fast

The anti-drone market was valued at $2.47 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $8.42 billion by 2031, according to research firm Mordor Intelligence figures cited by Reuters. As with any single-firm market projection, that number is an estimate rather than a settled figure. Recent events have made the case for buyers: attacks on critical infrastructure including data centers during the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, and a wave of airport disruptions across Europe, most recently a possible drone sighting that halted flights at Munich in late May.

Those incidents are exactly the scenarios D-Fend’s marketing targets, and they are the reason a public-safety conglomerate is willing to pay $1.5 billion for a nine-year-old startup.

DroneXL’s Take

I have watched Motorola assemble this in real time. When I covered the SkySafe alliance in April 2025, then the BRINC investment, then the Nokia-powered Summerville launch in February, each one read as a separate public-safety deal. They were not. They were stages of the same build, and the Silvus and D-Fend acquisitions are the bookends: own the network the good drones fly on, own the system that brings the bad ones down.

Here is the industry delta. For years the drone business was defined by airframes, with DJI dominant and Skydio positioned as the American alternative. The center of gravity has moved to software, connectivity, and now airspace control. We made that argument when Summerville chose a Nokia-Motorola stack over any drone brand. A company that does not manufacture a single aircraft is now one of the most important players in American drone policy, because it sells the infrastructure that surrounds the aircraft.

For Part 107 pilots and delivery operators, this is the part worth watching. The Safer Skies Act was written narrowly for stadiums and critical infrastructure. But once a single vendor can sell detection, takeover, and dispatch as one integrated package to every agency it already serves, the friction that has kept counter-drone capability rare disappears. The pressure to use it beyond the original scope is structural, not hypothetical. We documented that same concern in the DHS permanent counter-drone office and in the bill that would extend mitigation authority to wildfires.

The open question the announcement does not answer is how RF takeover holds up as the threat moves to autonomy. Motorola is buying a system whose core method depends on a control link to seize, in a world where the most capable adversary drones are racing to remove that link. Whether EnforceAir’s roadmap keeps pace with optically guided and fiber-controlled drones is the variable that determines whether $1.5 billion bought a durable platform or a snapshot of where the threat used to be. Brown did not address that in his statement, and the press release did not raise it.

Source: Reuters, Motorola Solutions press release.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.