Anyone who has taken a face full of high beams on a dark two-lane road knows the drill. For a second or two you are not really driving, you are guessing, because your eyes are too busy drowning in light to form a picture. A camera has the same weakness. Unlike your eyes, it can be held in that state on purpose, from a distance, for as long as someone keeps a beam parked on it.<\/p>\n
That is the entire idea behind a counter-drone test campaign that NUBURU, a Denver laser company listed on the NYSE American, announced on July 7 alongside Italy’s Tekne. According to the official announcement<\/a>, the trials at Tekne’s facilities in Italy achieved complete suppression of a drone’s electro-optical sensors by overwhelming them with light, denying the aircraft any visual acquisition. No explosion, no falling debris, no melted airframe. The drone keeps flying. It just stops seeing.<\/p>\n The result people will remember came from a tactical scenario. A drone was tasked with detecting and tracking a designated operator on the ground, and with the dazzler running, that person walked to within roughly 66 feet (20 meters) of the aircraft without being detected, as The Defense Post<\/a> reported. In a fight where the standing assumption is that the drone sees you first, that is a strange and useful outcome.<\/p>\n The counter-drone business has mostly settled into two camps. One camp shoots drones down with interceptors that cost more than the drone, math we walked through when Germany strapped a drone-burning laser to a tracked robot<\/a> precisely to escape it. The other camp cooks them with high-energy beams, like the 50 kW DragonFire that Britain is now squeezing onto a Royal Navy destroyer<\/a> five years ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n A dazzler sits in a third, humbler category. It destroys nothing. NUBURU says the system ran at irradiance levels between 0.1 and 0.5 milliwatts per square centimeter, inside applicable optical safety regulations. That is not a weapon that slices wings off. It is, in effect, an extremely rude flashlight tuned to the exact job of ruining a camera’s day.<\/p>\n The campaign covered two different drone platforms, in both continuous-wave and pulsed operation, and the company says the dazzling effect held in every configuration tested. Engineers also ran the beam at up to five times regulatory exposure limits, purely to map how the system behaves at the extremes.<\/p>\n The range figure comes with a catch, and for once the catch runs in the machine’s favor. The trials happened indoors, so the maximum distance of about 330 feet (100 meters) was the length of the building, not the ceiling of the technology. NUBURU says beam-propagation physics supports modeling engagements measured in kilometers, with product work starting at roughly one kilometer. That part is extrapolation, not measurement, and the company labels it that way itself.<\/p>\n The operator-approach run is the piece of this test with real battlefield texture. Small drones dominate modern reconnaissance because hiding from a camera overhead is genuinely hard, and every soldier, convoy and installation now plans around that. NUBURU believes the result supports using optical dazzling to conceal personnel during close-range counter-drone work, buying room for other approved measures to finish the job.<\/p>\n There is a quieter selling point too. Radio jamming, the classic soft-kill answer, has a famous blind spot in fiber-optic drones, the ones trailing a hair-thin cable that never touches the radio spectrum. A dazzler does not care how the video gets home. It attacks the camera itself, which every visually guided drone has to carry.<\/p>\n None of this replaces the rest of the toolbox, and nobody involved claims it does. The Pentagon’s own recent lesson, from an Army live-fire test at Fort Hood<\/a>, is that the fastest wins come from wiring existing radars, turrets and software together. A dazzler slots into that kind of layered setup as one more effect on the menu, the one that leaves nothing burning on the ground.<\/p>\n NUBURU is not a defense prime. Founded in 2015 in Colorado, it spent nearly a decade building high-power blue lasers for industrial work, because blue light gets absorbed by copper and other reflective metals far better than infrared does. The marquee application was welding EV battery cells and busbars, the fiddly copper joints every electric car depends on.<\/p>\n The business never scaled. The company went public through a SPAC merger, revenue stayed close to nonexistent, and the stock spent the end of 2025 in penny territory. As recently as late June, NUBURU was reassuring the NYSE American that it now clears the $4 million equity floor required of listed companies with a history of losses.<\/p>\n The reinvention, launched in 2025 under Executive Chairman and Co-CEO Alessandro Zamboni, recast NUBURU as a dual-use defense and security platform built largely by acquiring Italian firms. In January it completed the purchase of Lyocon, an Italian blue-laser maker, and in March the group showed a proof-of-concept dazzler small enough to hang on a rifle’s Picatinny rail. As New Atlas<\/a> reported, that portable unit runs 1 to 10 watts across green, blue and infrared bands, claims it can blind or damage drone sensors out to 1,640 feet (500 meters), and targets cheap drones up to 55 pounds.<\/p>\n “The material milestone is the test evidence,” Zamboni said of the Tekne campaign. Coming from a company whose past year has been a parade of acquisition announcements, that reads like a promise to let measured data do the talking.<\/p>\n The Tekne relationship is itself sitting in a regulatory waiting room. On May 26, NUBURU signed a binding agreement to acquire 70 percent of Tekne, a NATO-accredited supplier of special vehicles and defense electronics since 2017. Because Tekne counts as strategic Italian industry, the deal falls under Italy’s Golden Power screening, notified to the Prime Minister’s office on June 5 and still awaiting authorization. Until Rome signs, NUBURU owns none of that 70 percent, and the company says so plainly.<\/p>\n The two firms are not waiting idle. A joint engineering workstream is already turning the test data into product architecture for portable, vehicle-mounted, maritime, tower and fixed-site packages, plus a next-generation dazzler combining green, blue and infrared sources in one device for day and night use. The commercial target is a laser anti-drone segment that third-party estimates cited by NUBURU put at $1.46 billion in 2024, headed for $12.77 billion by 2033.<\/p>\n The honest asterisks are stacked in NUBURU’s own release. These were controlled indoor tests, not an operational qualification, not a procurement award, and not an authorization to deploy anything. Every future sale runs through safety reviews, export controls and, where Italy is involved, Golden Power conditions.<\/p>\n So the state of play on July 11 is this: a laser that blinded two drones from the far end of a building, a person who strolled up to a hunting drone unseen, and a paper trail that currently ends at a desk in Rome. The counter-drone business gets flashier machines every month. This one just showed you don’t always have to kill the drone. Sometimes it’s enough to poke it in the eye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone who has taken a face full of high beams on a dark two-lane road knows the drill. For a … <\/p>\nEveryone else burns the drone. This one blinds it<\/h2>\n
66 feet from a drone that’s hunting you<\/h2>\n
The company behind it made its name welding metal, not blinding drones<\/h2>\n
Rome gets the last word<\/h2>\n