At the Commanders stadium, Israeli defense founder Aviv Shapira is a star. The moment we enter, two Commanders employees are waiting. Erik Leibovitz, the team’s vice president of partnership development, begins by telling Shapira about his Israeli relatives, before inviting us to watch the players warming up on the field. Out in the misty rain, Leibovitz points to the electronic ribbons lining the stadium. “We have a lot of defense partners because we have a really targeted audience here—a lot of decision makers from the DOW,” he says, emphasizing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sometimes comes to games.
The men lead us up the elevator to the “partners suite,” a room with a free bar and buffet. They disappear beyond a curtain and return with armfuls of merch. One offers Shapira a pink breast-cancer-awareness shirt, which he accepts, before laughing and putting it back, lest I think he would wear pink. One of the freebies is a small towel that reads “I Fight For” with a blank box underneath. “It looks like it says, ‘I fight for nothing,’” I say.
“Yeah,” the employee laughs. “It does.”
The suite is full with the tech nouveau riche. There’s BigBear.ai, a defense AI company that’s splashed so much on the Commanders that its name is slapped over random entrance gates, and three OpenAI employees milling around behind us. And then there’s Shapira, a springy 45-year-old with ice-blue eyes, who believes much about his drone company, Xtend, has been misunderstood. I assume that feeling has intensified in the last month since the company was taken public via merger with the help of funding from American Ventures, which counts Eric Trump as an investor. Eric also personally invested in the merger. Or maybe it’s a response to the scrutiny that Xtend has received for providing, according to Shapira, 10,000 drones to the Israeli Defense Fund since the start of the war in Gaza.
But really, he means that Xtend is not actually a defense company. “We’re a physical AI company,” he clarifies. Yes, they just won a $40 million contract from the Department of Defense, but his ambitions are grander, to become a base layer of software for many different robotics. The software that pilots the drones, for example, can plug into things like Boston Dynamics’ robo-dog, Spot, or into other companies’ drones. Today, he wants to gauge the Commanders’ interest in a different use case: employing his drones to shoot nets at civilian drones that try to fly over the stadium.