The takeaway: On Tuesday, Israel's Ministry of Defense picked two local startups — Kela and eyesAtop — to build the software that will command the IDF's future attack-drone swarms. The interesting part isn't the drones; it's the layer above them. What Israel is commissioning is essentially an operating system for autonomous swarms: the command-and-control brain that lets a single human operator direct many drones at once, and into which any new drone or sensor can be plugged later. It's one of the clearest signs yet of where drone warfare is actually heading — not toward flashier aircraft, but toward the software that coordinates them at machine speed.

What was decided

The MoD notified Kela and eyesAtop that they had exclusively won the tender to supply the autonomous command-and-control platform for the IDF's attack-drone program — the effort reported under the name "Digital Bat." In doing so, the ministry passed over Ondas, a US-based firm that had built a substantial Israeli drone business through acquisitions including Airobotics and Iron Drone. Choosing two home-grown startups over an established, better-capitalised incumbent is itself a statement about Israel's post-October-7 defence-tech doctrine, which has leaned hard toward fast, local, software-first players.

Who the two companies are, and what each brings

The split of work tells you what the system is.

Kela — one of the wave of Israeli defence startups founded in the wake of the October 7 attack, by Hamutal Meridor and Alon Dror, and recently backed by a $200 million raise — supplies the open, modular architecture. In plain terms: a software backbone that ingests data from many military and civilian sources, fuses it in real time, and presents it through one unified command picture. The word doing the work is modular. Because the architecture is open, new drones, new sensors, new capabilities can be added later without ripping out and replacing the core. That's the opposite of a traditional defence-procurement black box, and it's the design choice that matters most for a fast-moving threat.

eyesAtop — led by veterans of Israel's Unit 8200 signals-intelligence corps — supplies the operational brain: its ASR system, which lets a single operator command and control multiple drones simultaneously. The company says it has accumulated more than 500,000 operational flight hours in combat environments, which, if accurate, is a meaningful amount of real-world validation rather than a slide-deck claim.

Why "one operator, many drones" is the whole game

Put those two pieces together and you have the actual frontier of drone warfare. A single drone with a single pilot is old news. The hard problem — the one every serious military is now racing to solve — is scale: how one person coordinates a swarm of dozens or hundreds of drones faster than any human could manage them individually. That requires the machine to handle a great deal of the coordination — routing, deconfliction, sensor-fusion, target-tracking — while the human stays in charge of the decisions that matter. The C2 software is where that balance gets struck, which is exactly why it, and not the airframe, is the strategically valuable layer.

The unavoidable question

This is where a piece like this has to be honest. These are attack drones, and a platform built so one operator can run many of them necessarily pushes more of the moment-to-moment work onto the software. That raises the same question we wrote about only this week, when a bipartisan bill was introduced in the US Congress to keep a human in control of lethal AI weapons: as the machine takes over more of the coordination, where exactly does the human decision to use lethal force sit — and how firmly is it held?

Israel's reporting frames the system in terms of command and control, which implies a human commander remains in the loop; the public detail available so far doesn't spell out the precise autonomy boundaries, and we shouldn't assume the worst or the best. But the direction is unmistakable. The country that has been on the receiving end of drone and missile swarms from Iran and Hezbollah is now building the software to run swarms of its own — and it chose two young companies, an open architecture, and a design built around one human commanding many machines. That is the shape of the thing to come, and it's worth watching closely.

Sources: Calcalist / CTech and i-HLS.