The defense sector is going through a quiet but profound transformation.
While public debate focuses on drones, hypersonic missiles, and artificial intelligence dominating the skies, a completely different battle is being fought right beneath our feet. The underground environment has always been treated as secondary territory in Western military strategies, but the operational reality of recent conflicts has shown that ignoring what happens below the surface can come at a steep price, and that’s changing how governments and investors view the defense and innovation sectors.
More than 10,000 military installations around the world currently exist underground, and the West, despite dominating airspace with impressive precision, still doesn’t have a solid answer for what happens meters below the surface. This strategic gap isn’t new, but the urgency to address it has never been as clear as it is right now, following recent conflicts that laid bare how tunnels can be used as logistical, combat, and even command infrastructure by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah operating in dense urban areas.
It’s precisely in this strategic gap that Traysar emerges, one of the most intriguing startups to appear on the defense radar in recent times. Founded about a year ago, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a subsidiary in Israel, the company is developing systems specifically designed to operate inside tunnels and underground structures, ranging from dismantling passages used by armed groups to drilling through the ground without relying on airstrikes. 🚧 The timing of its founding couldn’t be more telling: the company was born at a moment when the entire world was watching, in real time, the limitations of conventional forces against sophisticated underground networks.
And what makes this story even more curious is who’s behind it. Co-founder Gilad Adin doesn’t have a background in engineering or the defense industry. He spent decades in Israeli television as a respected anchor and journalist, eventually becoming CEO of Channel 10 News, which later gave rise to today’s Channel 13. Now, at 60, he’s on the front lines of a startup that has already raised $25 million at a valuation above $100 million, and has caught the attention of institutions like DARPA and MAFAT, the research and development arm of Israel’s Ministry of Defense.
For many older Israelis, Adin is remembered for delivering the first announcement on public television about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Younger generations might recognize his voice from the Ben-Gurion Airport announcements reminding passengers not to leave belongings unattended. His trajectory is, in itself, a sign of the times: the modern defense sector is no longer exclusive to engineers and military personnel. It attracts people with strategic vision and the ability to communicate complex problems to diverse audiences.
When my friends are already thinking about retirement, I feel like I’m at the beginning of the road, says Adin. In a way, I’m going back to the start. A not-so-young man, with two partners in their 30s, who grabs his laptop in the morning and walks happily to work.
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The Technology That Goes Deep
The core of Traysar’s proposition is developing technology capable of operating where conventional systems simply can’t reach. So far, the company has revealed two main systems, publicly presented for the first time during a major industry conference in Detroit. Each one tackles a different side of the same problem: what to do when the enemy hides underground.
The Autonomous Mini D9 for Tunnels
The first system is essentially a small autonomous D9, a nod to the armored bulldozers used by the Israel Defense Forces. The difference is that this version has been miniaturized to fit exactly within the dimensions of tunnels used by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Controlled remotely via fiber optic cable, the vehicle can advance through the passage, push past sandbags, blow up doors and mines, reach the end of the tunnel, and then dismantle it while moving in reverse.
The major differentiator is its ruggedness. The equipment was designed to absorb impacts and overcome obstacles, and it can even drill small holes at tactical points inside the tunnel and fill them with explosives to be detonated later. Many of these repetitive actions, like drilling and inserting charges, can be automated — just press a button and the machine carries out the task on its own. This is critical because communication drops frequently inside tunnels, and the autonomous components ensure the vehicle keeps functioning even when the signal is lost. 🤖
Drilling That Replaces the Airstrike
The second system is quite different and perhaps the most ambitious. It resembles a tool known as HDD, which stands for horizontal directional drilling, already used in the civilian market to run infrastructure like power and communication cables underground. Deployed from a command and control trailer in the field, this equipment allows forces to attack buried installations without resorting to aerial bombardment.
The idea behind it is fascinating and almost counterintuitive. As Adin himself explains, when we talk about a surface-to-surface missile, we’re talking about a missile that leaves the ground and returns to the ground, but there’s nothing in the world that moves through the earth. That’s exactly the concept Traysar is trying to bring to life: a system capable of rapidly digging its own path and detonating at the end — something the United States describes as non-kinetic penetration munitions.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, recently published an RFI, or request for information, seeking early proposals for exactly this kind of non-kinetic penetration capability against deep underground targets. The logic is clear: bombing from the air may not be the most efficient way to destroy installations buried at significant depths. And that’s exactly the kind of problem this company says it was born to solve.
From Israel to the Defense Silicon Valley
The building of Traysar is a fascinating fusion of worlds that rarely overlap. In Israel, the company recruited engineers who came from special units within the Defense Forces — people who combine strong engineering knowledge with real hands-on field experience. In the United States, the company sought talent from SpaceX and The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling venture that builds underground passages to reduce traffic congestion.
The challenge handed to everyone was practically philosophical: defeat the laws of physics, because moving through the Earth’s crust is genuinely hard. To align these two very different worlds, the company had to literally create a shared dictionary, connecting Israeli military language — full of terms like logistical signature and thermal signature — with American civilian expertise in geology and drilling. After all, equipment behavior depends enormously on the type of soil, and the geology of Texas is completely different from what’s found in other regions.
Today the company has around 20 employees, more than 90% of them engineers, split between Israel and the United States. Leadership is shared among the three founders: Yadin Sofer, Adin’s son-in-law and serial entrepreneur, serves as CEO handling fundraising and financial management in the U.S. Asher Katz, a reservist who served for an extended period in the tunnel detection and identification lab of the Gaza Division, manages research and development. Adin handles strategy, marketing, sales, and ties with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
Startups Rewriting the Rules of Defense
The Traysar story doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a broader movement where tech-driven startups are redefining what’s possible in the defense sector, especially in niches that major industry players have ignored for decades. Companies born outside the traditional corridors of the industry have already proven that it’s possible to build cutting-edge military technology with faster development cycles, leaner structures, and a greater willingness to take on technical risks that traditional giants would never easily accept.
This defense innovation ecosystem is growing especially around problems that recent conflicts have brought to the surface with urgency. Tunnels are the perfect example. For decades, Western military doctrine assumed air superiority as a constant variable, but the underground environment simply neutralizes that advantage. There’s no plane or drone that solves the problem of a tunnel network built dozens of meters deep beneath a city.
What Adin discovered while studying the topic was a military reality that migrated underground faster than the West could prepare. It’s not just Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah that went below ground. Drug cartels have dug cross-border tunnels from Mexico into the United States. China has been investing for years in underground installations. India faces tunnels coming from Pakistan, Spain deals with passages from Morocco, and South Korea has discovered enormous tunnels prepared by North Korea for a potential invasion.
The Context That Made All of This Necessary
To understand why a company like Traysar can gain traction so quickly, you need to look at the context that shaped the last few years. The turning point in the company’s story was October 7th. That’s when Adin got the call from his son-in-law Yadin, who was living in New York and looking for his next big project after a successful exit. Together with Asher Katz, whom they met through the well-known Friday night dinners for Israelis at the couple’s home, the three began sketching out the idea for a company focused on combating tunnels used in warfare.
Interestingly, they didn’t find any other company — not in Israel, not anywhere in the world — working specifically in this space. And as tends to happen when you arrive somewhere no one else is, that’s usually not by accident. The first formal encouragement came from MAFAT. Adin recalls that at the end of the team’s presentation, there was silence in the room, followed by a single sentence from one of the department heads: we finally have someone to talk to about the underground.
That sense of urgency also shows up in how the company is managed. Katz makes it clear that there’s real time pressure, because the ability of the United States and Israel to neutralize these installations could shift the West’s deterrence capability and, in practical terms, the world order. The company has already conducted tests both at facilities in Israel and in actual tunnels in Gaza, in cooperation with MAFAT, with Yahalom — the elite combat engineering unit — and with the Combat Engineering Corps. 🌍
The War of the Future Could Be Underground
Beyond attacking and dismantling, Traysar is also working on underground protection — that is, moving critical systems below ground quickly and efficiently. This could be a command and control post or even a server farm. Sofer says that Pentagon executives have been repeatedly asking data center providers whether it’s possible to take these facilities underground, after American bases and major data centers were hit by missiles in the Middle East.
A growing criticism in the United States is that part of American military infrastructure is still exposed, with training conducted under giant tents that are easily vulnerable to drones. When you look at Ukraine, it’s clear that this kind of exposure doesn’t survive the modern battlefield. The perception is that the American military is still training for a war that no longer exists, and that training also needs to move underground.
For Traysar’s founders, the future may look less like the high-tech aerial campaigns of recent decades and more like a return to an older, more brutal type of warfare. Sofer ventures to say that the war of the future will resemble World War I, with the conflict in Ukraine showing that size and money don’t guarantee superiority on the battlefield. The ability to protect yourself and survive over time is what will decide the next conflicts.
Adin goes even further, drawing on a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, who said he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but was certain that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. His conclusion is straightforward: today we already know that World War III won’t be fought only in the air, at sea, and on land, but also inside the Earth’s crust. And the innovation that Traysar represents may be just the beginning of an underground technology race that the world is only starting to understand. 🚀
