At a Glance

• Founder: Deo, 24, Indonesian, based in San Francisco
• Company: Arlo Industries, founded 2025, team of 3
• Backed by: Y Combinator (2026 batch)
• Product: Mentat, a passive drone and missile tracking mesh
• Cost comparison: a single traditional radar unit can run tens of millions of dollars

Deo was living in Israel when a Shahed drone exploded close enough to his apartment to feel it. That night didn't just scare him  it gave him a product idea.

Deo, an Indonesian founder now based in San Francisco, is the person behind Arlo Industries, a defense-tech startup that builds Mentat: a network of low-cost sensors designed to track drones and missiles without using radar. The company launched out of Y Combinator's 2026 batch, and at just 24 years old, Deo is already showing the technology to military operators in Ukraine, Europe, and the United States. Mentat works by using many small, passive nodes instead of one expensive, radar-emitting tower  a design meant to catch the kind of low-flying drone swarms that traditional systems miss.

What is Mentat, exactly

Mentat is a passive, distributed sensing network. Instead of one radar dish broadcasting signals that enemies can detect and target, Mentat spreads tracking across many smaller, quieter sensors working together.

Think of it less like a single lighthouse and more like a chain of streetlights  no single point gives away the whole picture, but together they cover the road. That mesh approach is also why the system scales cheaply: adding more nodes costs roughly the same each time, but the tracking accuracy climbs much faster.

Why did Deo build this instead of something else?
Deo studied Mechanical Engineering at Technion, the Israeli university known as the birthplace of the Iron Dome system. He lived there for more than six years, through multiple periods of active conflict, watching Israel's air defense systems intercept threats in real time.

That's where the idea took shape. As he put it in Arlo Industries' own launch materials, the goal was to make sure "conflict should be concise and precise." Before founding Arlo, Deo co-founded and served as CTO of Makrverse, a platform helping engineers commercialize their own patented inventions  itself a spin-out of research he did as a robotics researcher at Technion.

"Conflict should be concise and precise."  Deo, Founder & CEO, Arlo Industries

How much does a traditional radar system cost  and why does that matter?
A single ground-based radar unit can cost tens of millions of dollars, while still broadcasting its own location to anything listening nearby. That combination  high cost, low stealth  is exactly the gap Mentat is built to close, especially against cheap, low-altitude threats like Shahed-style drones that fly under conventional radar coverage.

Who is actually using this technology?
Arlo Industries has already demonstrated Mentat directly to Ukrainian military units on the frontlines, along with operators across Europe and the United States. The team behind the product includes a PhD specializing in drone autonomy alongside former military personnel, giving the three-person company technical depth well beyond its size.

For a company barely a year old, that kind of frontline access is unusual  and it's part of why Arlo Industries stood out enough to earn a spot in Y Combinator's competitive batch, alongside a wave of other defense-tech startups building counter-drone systems, autonomous strike platforms, and satellite imaging tools.

What does this mean for Indonesia's tech scene?
Deo's story is a reminder that Indonesian-born engineers are now building at the edge of some of the world's most technically demanding industries, not just consumer apps. His path  Jakarta roots, an engineering degree in Israel, and a defense startup in San Francisco's most competitive accelerator  is an unusual one, and it's exactly the kind of career trajectory more young Indonesian engineers are starting to chase.