No. Other companies do continuous monitoring for active shooters as part of their service offering, our goal is to activate and begin watching cameras once we are activated by a teacher in a given school.

We can be activated in different ways, including - via a mobile app, 911 call, panic button or gun detection technology.

We integrate with a school’s existing cameras.  We place a special network box at the school site, behind the firewall.  It operates similarly to an Internet Of Things (IOT) home appliance, collecting the sensor data and then forwarding it over to our servers over a secure connection.  We downsample the video (make it smaller) so that we can get all the on-site cameras to stream thumb nail videos to our ops team.  Note again that we only commence this video forwarding once we are called to investigate a shooting in that moment, and we stop the video streaming once the event is completed.

For our apps, we do use encryption and strong authentication.  Access to our drones is deemed more sensitive, so we use additional security mechanisms for communicating with and controlling our drones that are similar to how US classified networks operate.

Yes.  We use GPS to get an area for each person, and we integrate with beacon-based systems such as some panic buttons that provide more accurate location information.

We use a special sensor (LiDAR) and camera to create a digital copy or twin of a school.  We then import that data set into our 3D viewing application, built on a video game engine called Unreal.

A Common Operating Picture (COP) is a shared picture of what’s happening in a given location or area of a map, typically showing friendly actors and threat actors.

Yes, we can tie into  panic buttons as a trigger to tell us to go look at a school campus and see if there’s an active shooter event going on there.

Yes, AI gun detection can be another trigger that tells our ops team to go look at a given school campus, to see whether a person has a gun at the campus.

Yes, we share information with law enforcement, like what clothes a threat is wearing, their rate of fire and competency, as well as what effects we’ve applied to the threat.  We can also show the digital twin of the school to law enforcement, both on mobile devices for responding officers and via a web experience for 911 center operators.  We curate which video fees to show.  This is similar to how a TV crew for a sports game picks the best camera angles to give a viewer the best idea of what’s going on - often a viewer at home can be better informed in close to real-time than a person just watching from the stands.

Yes, during an event we keep parents appraised as the situation evolves, with a communications strategy co-authored with the school district leadership.

During an event we also have a dedicated staff liaison who gives teachers and other members of staff real-time updates on what’s happening.  No more sitting there in the dark waiting for an update.  In addition, teachers can use our app to indicate they have a medical emergency in their class, like a student’s insulin system ceasing to function due to network issues, and our ops team can then prioritize getting medical treatment to the classroom.

Yes, we record everything during a response for compliance purposes.  After an event, we work with a school district’s law enforcement team to create an After-Action Report, document any lessons learned and support law enforcement in any public disclosures they make.  Appropriately authorized members of law enforcement must sign off any recorded content before it can be released publicly. We maintain privacy of recorded footage, and do not release it without approval from law enforcement and/or the school district.

We install:

• Drones and drone boxes.

• A video appliance that subscribes to existing security camera streams and sends them to our HQ.

• Crypto and networking gear that protects the special network on which we fly our drones.

• Our radio system, which is how we communicate to drones and drone boxes throughout the school.

We have worked to minimize our infrastructure impact:

• The drone boxes require regular power only, not network drops.

• The video appliance is just a 1U or smaller server that needs to go on the network that the cameras use, and have access to stream the video over a VPN on the internet.

• The radio and crypto system does require network access, but we work to use the existing ports you already have wherever possible.

• Changes may need to be made to the network gateway at the school to ensure that connectivity for our drones to our HQ is prioritized over general network chatter during a security event.

There are various parts to this:

• Doing the 3D scan typically takes one to several days for one of our team to capture the school.

• Installing the boxes takes from several days to a week depending on the size of the school.

• IT setup and configuration can take 4-12 hours over several weeks.

We have a mix of former elite US special forces and law enforcement professionals, as well as elite drone racing pilots. Together they work to find the threat, confront the threat with drones, and communicate with other stakeholders including law enforcement, school staff, parents and students.

Each team has 11 members, made up of:

• An operations commander with decades of tactical experience who controls actions of our team.

• Four nationally ranks drone racing pilots.

• A threat tracker who’s job is to find and follow the threat through our digital twin of the school.

• A common operating picture manager, who looks at all the video camera feeds and curates the most relevant ones for our team and law enforcement.

• Four liaison officers, who communicate with whoever started the alarm, law enforcement, school employees and parents.

Train and rehearse. Just like an elite special forces unit, we spend a lot of time practicing hostage rescue and active shooter response. Our team also works on the drones and on evolving our apps to improve our situational awareness during events.

We train in our own buildings, training centers we partner with, at schools that have deployed our service together with their security resources, and in a simulator that we have created to allow us to train more challenging scenarios without causing unnecessary stress to children or teachers.

We currently only train with law enforcement when children are not in the buildings.  We plan to participate in joint drills with schools only once school administrators are comfortable with and have approved the perceived risks involved.

Typically 1-3 days - it’s a lot like working with a canine, which many officers have practiced, but we can talk to the officer through the drone to understand each other versus relying entirely on hand signals with a dog.

At any given time during our covered hours, we have one full team sat in our primary operations center ready to go. That team is leaning very far forwards, so much so that we can make a decision on a course of action in 5 seconds. We then have other full teams on standby. When our primary team is engaged in an event, the second team immediately reconstitutes, and if it becomes busy, the third does the same, so we always have a full team ready to respond in seconds to a new alert. Our current operations center is in South Austin, and we plan to build more operations centers in other states as our deployment base grows.

We often partner with school district safety teams to conduct joint exercises and demonstrate the solution before deploying to the district. When we deploy to a site, we work with on-site security staff to plan the best locations to place our drones, how many boxes are required, and to scan the campus in order to create the digital twin and connect all the sensor feeds. The deployment includes determining procedures for different types of events, and the policies for when we respond - our Concept of Operations (CONOPS). We conduct joint training and tests with on-site security staff at various intervals to ensure we will operate together successfully in a real event. Ultimately, our goal is to reduce the risk to life to security staff, and avoid putting security staff in situations in which they can make a mistake - e.g. target acquisition while clearing. This is true for on-site security personnel, armed teachers, school guardians, and anyone else appropriately authorized by the school or local authorities as part of a response.

Once law enforcement arrives on the scene, we hand off command and control to law enforcement and support them as a service while they continue the response. We pass situational awareness of what we’re seeing - before, during and after the hand off. We also team our pilots with law enforcement, going ahead of law enforcement officers and other security personnel as they clear corridors and rooms. Our drones have a speaker and microphone, so our central ops team can talk to law enforcement officers like another member of the team - making their roles easier and reducing risk.

We store all video footage from an event response, including security camera footage we had access to, drone camera footage, chat messages, voice communications - everything. We make this available to school district safety teams, and participate in after action reports. Our role is supporting school officials in their evaluation of the response, any requests for information must be routed through the local authorities with which we collaborate.

We have a nationwide installation partner that works with many high street brands.  The school can agree with us to use them, or the school can use its own facilities team.  Mounting the boxes is like mounting TVs on the walls, but likely will require a vertical lift as the boxes should be close to the ceiling.

Yes, often better than people on site:

• Our central ops team has a “God’s eye view” of what’s happening in the school in real-time during an event.  An SRO is like a mouse in a giant maze.

• Gun fire echos through corridors, making it difficult to tell which direction to go in.  We typically have the location of the reporter of the incident, and we have access to all the cameras.

• Most schools have at maximum one or two officers on-site, we have a whole team of 11 people we immediately put on an event, building shared situational awareness.

• We train all the time for these types of events - it is our focus and speciality.  Most school police officers have limited access to training locations and time to train.

• Our pilots fly our drones so fast and do not need to clear methodically as their lives are not at risk, allowing us cover ground much faster than an SRO can.

• When we do demonstrations to school police chiefs and officers, they usually see great value in the situational awareness enhancement as well as in the drones.

The drone operators are part of a whole response team for each incident, situational awareness is the responsibility of the whole team, which includes people with decades of experience in tactical operations centers.

No.  We operate a managed service, the only people flying the drones are our highly trained, world-class pilots.

We are fans of any brave person who wants to put their life on the line to defend children from gun violence.  Many of our team have worked in tactical roles, defending our nation and our citizens from bad actors.  Schools decide which schools should have police officers and how many, budgets are often a key factor, and the level of support from citizens for the taxes necessary to pay for the officers.  Our goals are to make each and every law enforcement officer in a school both safer and more effective, just as small drones are doing this for our warfighters and SWAT teams today.

Our founder Justin Marston watched how drones were incredibly effective against infantry soldiers in Ukraine, even though the drones do not have guns. One Ukrainian special forces operator told us that in 600 missions, the drone had only got shot once, even though the targeted soldiers could hear the drone coming and knew what to expect. It’s similar to trying to shoot a mosquito. The challenge in school shootings is all about response time - every second matters and every delay can increase loss of life. Justin realized that if the drones could be low enough cost and flown remotely, they could be put everywhere like fire sprinkler systems, and then operated by a centralized elite team.

Justin reached out to Bill King in November 2023, who had recently retired from the SEAL teams, and Bill thought the model could work. We then scheduled a technology demonstration at the Rosedale School Active Shooter Training Site in Austin, and recruited some of the best drone pilots in the country to fly against former elite special forces threat actors. The technology demonstration was successful, and that that led to the company being formed.

Justin Marston is a serial technology entrepreneur in Austin, having previously started four other investor-backed technology companies in national and cyber security as well as consumer and business software (SaaS). Bill King is a Navy SEAL veteran, having spent 32 years in the SEAL teams, he has been involved in numerous operations around the world including hostage rescue operations, and kinetic strike operations with Predator drones.

This is a political question, and not one that we can help with.  Given the US Constitution, it seems extremely unlikely that guns will be banned anytime soon, and our focus is on how we can make kids safer from gun violence right now.

Most schools already have hundreds of cameras in each school, filming all the time.  Our drones require a human pilot and have a 12 to 15 minute battery life before needing to be recharged.  In a typical school, the existing camera systems will capture decades worth of video footage each year while our drones will typically capture only a few hours of footage each year.

Yes. False alarms cost school districts millions of dollars each year and often take hours to clear. Our central team having a fused sensor picture (video cameras, other sensors as deployed) of what's happening in the school reduces the pressure during room clearing operations. Also, our drones can clear more quickly and more safely than requiring armed officers brandishing guns to move through every room of the school. Our goals are to work with on-site law enforcement to clear the alarm as fast as possible, minimizing the risk of collateral damage and trauma projected on children and staff during the lockdown. Having access to real-time information can reduce the unknowns for teachers and avoid mistaken identity – such as thinking the sound of officers clearing toilet stalls is in fact gunfire.

A third of high schools went through a gun lockdown they believed was real in the 2022–23 school year (Pew Research).  False alarms can still cause significant trauma in both teachers and students, especially when they are prolonged and people are unsure whether they are real or not.  We have spoken to teachers who are still traumatized from false alarms years after they occurred.  Better communication during alarms and faster resolution are key to minimizing trauma.

Most school shootings are over in under 120 seconds, and the majority end before external law enforcement arrives on scene.  This is why every second matters, because it can mean lives saved.  Just like sprinkler systems in schools for fires, the faster the threat is confronted and pacified, the lower the injury and casualty numbers.

We have found that teachers are supportive of our service for several reasons:

• Our service ensures teachers have a better understanding of what's happening during events – both false alarms and real events.

• Our goal is to protect teachers and students during an event, getting there faster than law enforcement can to reduce risk to life.

• Our presence can reduce the pressure on teachers to be the first response and carry guns.

• If a teacher does wish to carry a gun, we can be his or her wingman – we make entry, we reduce the risk of the teacher getting shot or making a bad targeting decision and shooting a child by accident.

• Our drone boxes are unobtrusive on the ceiling in larger rooms, and similar to sprinkler systems, blend into the background over time. We have been told that this feels less like militarization of schools than having multiple law enforcement officers patrolling with assault weapons.

In demonstrations, the vast majority of law enforcement officers want to be backed up by drones.  It’s like having a pack of police dogs available on demand, taking the risk so an officer doesn’t have to risk his or her life making a tactical entry solo.  We provide situational awareness to the officer in real time during the response - he or she is no longer alone.

We are like having an invisible SWAT team hidden in the ceiling of the school.  We only fly the drones when a teacher has said that your child’s life is at risk, so we hope your child never sees our drones, apart from potentially during a full drill exercise.  In general, our surveying of students has discovered that they find drones less frightening than teams of police doing clearing with long guns.

The vast majority of parents who have seen a live demonstration of our service want it in their schools.  In two TV polls, KSAT found that 85% of parents want it in their schools, and KARK found that 91% want it.  Our service is very compelling when you see it live.

Our standard school pricing is roughly $1 per square foot for initial setup, and then roughly $0.25 per square foot per year for the managed service.  We work with each partner during our discovery process to provide clear pricing estimate based on your unique campus setup, square footage, and unique needs.

Yes.  We have a detailed white paper on our ROI, available on request, but it is made up of:

• Reduced Risk: We take on the risk for the initial response, and have insurance to cover it.

• Cost Avoidance: We can help districts reduce their direct and/or indirect headcount costs associated with school safety.

No.  Only an officer can arrest someone.  Our goal is to distract and degrade a school shooter until law enforcement can arrive on scene, saving lives, because every second matters.

It has varied by school, district and state:

• State Legislatures: Texas and Georgia legislatures have funded pilots, more are considering it.

• Federal Grants: Non-lethal drones are a specific focus area for FY27 DOJ COPS STOP grants.

• Parents: We have had several schools raised funds directly from parents to deploy our service.

• Bonds: We have pricing specifically suited to bonds, and can also work with Bond Anticipation Notes (BANs).

• Operating Budgets: We are typically a tenth of the cost of achieving the same response time with human officers alone.

Yes.  We have already seen schools in Texas and Georgia contract with us using funds from the Texas and Georgia legislatures.  The DOJ COPS STOP grant program for FY27 includes report language specifically highlighting non-lethal drones as a focus area for innovation.

Would you run a school without a sprinkler system to prevent fires?  The last mass fire in a school was in 1958, since then thousands of children have been shot in schools, and 2026 is currently on track to be the deadliest year on record according to the School Safety Database.  Your children are far more likely to get shot than burnt in a fire.  Every day that you do not have an Active Shooter Suppression System in place is an additional day of risk taken unnecessarily.

We do, it’s part of the service offering.

We support mental health charities and spending no mental health to reduce the likelihood that a team resorts to an act of gun violence, just as we should spend money on teaching teens that arson is wrong.  But we still put sprinkler systems in schools to stop fires, we don’t rely entirely on mental health.  The two are not mutually exclusive, the question is whether improving child safety from gun violence in schools is worth the associated cost?

That is a question that every school, parent, teacher, citizen and legislator must weigh for themselves.  However:

• A fire suppression system costs between $1.50 and $5 per square foot to install.  Our service costs $1 per square foot to install, and kids are around 100X more likely to get shot than to get killed in a fire.

• Our managed service costs $0.25 per square foot per year.  Achieving the same response times with armed offices only typically costs around 10X the cost of using drone empowered officers.

• Our service is currently during school hours, but we intend to upgrade to 24/7 during 2027, which will mean that all events at all times at the school are covered.  This would be prohibitively expensive to do with officers only.

• Parents and law enforcement officers from the Uvalde, Parkland and Westside shootings, having seen our technology demonstrations, have all said on video interviews that they think we would have saved kids’ lives at each of those mass shootings.

No, nothing is 100% effective.  If a kid pulls a gun out of his or her bag and shoots someone in 3 seconds, it’s almost impossible to stop that.  But most school mass shootings take 1-2 minutes to unfold, and our goal is to ensure that we engage the shooter well within that first minute to reduce the death count.

We are launching our service operating from 7AM to 5PM US Central time, Monday to Friday. We expect to broaden to 24 by 7 operations by the during 2026.

Yes, and we hope you never have one, we hope never fly on one, and we believe that we are a deterrent just by being installed in the school.  However:

• At least 605,000 high schoolers took a gun to school during a single school year, according to the CDC.

• A third of all high schools experienced a gun related lock down in the 2022-23 school year according to Pew Research.

• The majority of children go through at least one gun related lockdown during their K12 education.

• School shootings create 100X more victims than school fires, but every school is still required to have a fire suppression system.

The steps are:

• We have an initial project kickoff meeting.

• We work with the school to agree on a communication plan to stakeholders.

• We do a 3D scan of the school to create the digital twin.

• We mark up the school - adding camera feeds, security exits, which windows have film on, etc.

• We create the tactical plan with the school’s team.

• We ship the drone hardware and boxes to the school.

• We ship our video appliance and radio infrastructure to the school.

• Our install partner or the school’s facility team installs them.

• We work with your IT department to get the tech setup, including integration with other systems like panic buttons.

• We connect them to our network and ensure our ops center can access them.

• We conduct initial testing of the system.

• We do on-site, in-person training for police officers and school administrators.

• We make training windows available for staff on using the app.

• We agree on a target date with the school to take the service live in the school, which is also conditions based.

• We go live and start protecting the school with an on-demand air force.

We do.  We have a $5M per incident insurance policy for accidental injury or damage.  This is similar to security guard companies, which have their own insurance.

We take responsibility for injuries to innocent bystanders, just as a security guard company takes responsibility for the behavior of its security guards.

Yes, we negotiated our contract and Master Service Agreement with the outside counsel for Boerne ISD, Walsh Gallegos.  From their website: “For over 40 years, Walsh Gallegos has dedicated itself to serving school districts, charter schools, and other educational and governmental institutions.  Our attorneys in Albuquerque, Amarillo, Austin, Houston, Irving, Oklahoma City, Rio Grande Valley, and San Antonio are knowledgeable in every aspect of school law. We are innovators in client service and pride ourselves on practical, straightforward counsel on matters involving personnel, student issues, facilities & business, special education, and litigation.”

Typically none, we have our own insurance, and we expect over time that school districts that use us will see decreased insurance premiums.  To some degree, a school district is outsourcing first responder risk to us as a managed service.  An ineffectual law enforcement response to an active shooter situation is likely the greatest existential financial risk to a school or school district - as per the settlements in the Uvalde and Parkland school shootings.

Campus Guardian Angel is a brand in the Mithril Defense family. Mithril Defense services a range of industries and customer types.

Yes, everywhere.  Small drones have almost entirely replaced dogs in SWAT teams, because:

• Drones are much lower cost than canine units.

• Nobody cares when drones get destroyed, compared to dogs getting injured or killed.

• Drones are far easier to replace than dogs - they don’t need long training programs.

• Drones do not require dedicated handlers and vehicles, most officers can fly a DJI drone with limited training.

Yes we do.  Legislatures represent citizens and parents as elected representatives, so we show legislatures how our service works and answer questions.  Decisions on whether to install Fire Suppression Systems in schools are not taken at the local level, they are legislated, so every child is protecting from catastrophic fires, and that fire code has prevented mass deaths from fire in schools for decades.  We believe that every child deserves an education free from the fear of mass gun violence, and that every school must have some type of active shooter defense capability on-site.

Our drones and service do not require guns.  It is the only way that we can think of to confront active shooters in schools without putting guns into schools.