Drones & Robotics AI Summit 2026: Entering the Quantum Era of Autonomy

Ghost Robotics crouching mechanical dog kicked off The Drones & Robotics AI Summit last month in New York. Watching Gavin Kenneally (CEO) present the Vision 60 and hearing about its hundreds of deployments with the US military, everyone in the packed house buzzed with excitement. Physical AI has finally come of age. According to most estimates, venture and private equity investments in the space have exceeded $30 billion in the last 12 months, more than double last year’s activity. A lot has changed in the year since hosting the last Summit; the humanoid buzz, OpenClaw, and now autonomous weapons are reshaping warfare across the Middle East and Europe. The opportunities will only be amplified with advances in generative AI and the promise of quantum computing.

Following The Summit, I sat with Bentzion Levinson, founder and CEO of Heven AeroTech, for coffee in Jerusalem, Israel, between sirens warning of Iranian ballistic missiles. During our hour-long (alert-free) meeting, he shared with me the early days of his Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) company’s journey to become Israel’s latest unicorn startup. One of the biggest takeaways from our meeting was his adoption of quantum computing to advance sensing data as part of a wider partnership with IonQ, their largest outside shareholder. The best way to understand the opportunities that Heven offers is to hear Mr. Levinson’s story and the evolution of his company and its commitment to solving real problems for warfighters everywhere.

The entrepreneur shared his founding story, “And after my (military) service, I left as a Combat Commander. I volunteered for a national project. And through this project, I realized that drones are amazing. They have amazing potential, but almost all drones in the market were flying cameras or flying sensors, a lot of them out of China back in the day, and still today.” It was 2018, and the Israeli border with Gaza was being terrorized by kite and balloon fires. Levinson rose to the task of using drones to autonomously identify and rapidly extinguish the threats. As he continued, “We used drones at first to identify fires and then to put out fires. And that’s how we transitioned from flying cameras to flying robots.” It was this revelation of the wider opportunities moving from sensing data to acting on it with UAVs that gave birth to his billion-dollar idea.

From this early experience, Levinson identified two distinct use cases: response times and mission payloads. “One of them is what we call more tactical, and this is true for both defense and commercial use cases.” Citing examples from his earlier experience, he continued, “If you want to do a mission like putting out a fire, you’re not going very far. It’s just that if you can get there within a few minutes, you can make a big difference. But say you want to go within a 10-mile radius, with the emphasis on heavy payloads. So that is the other use case, where the focus is more on handling heavy payloads and ensuring stability for their use. We don’t know exactly what the payloads will be, but we have to be able to support customers. That’s when we also realized that a lot of the use cases are going to be more long-range.”

While working with the Israel Defense Forces, the former soldier experienced these challenges firsthand and set out to fill the market gap with his current hydrogen-powered UAV. As Levinson explained, “If you want to do short-range missions, then batteries are great. But if you want to do long-range missions, batteries don’t have the energy density to get you there. So, traditionally, drones would use combustion or jet-powered systems. The problem is that these systems have significant thermal signatures that can be identified. They have a significant noise signature. You have to start getting fuel around these; they make them basically irrelevant for most defense use cases and very challenging for commercial use. Imagine, wherever you’re sitting today, 100 flying lawn mowers outside, or flying jets. We all know what it sounds like to have a plane flying over you. So planes or drones with combustion or jet engines can’t really scale in the commercial environment either, and that’s what led us to hydrogen fuel cells. So our first product line is heavy lift. Battery-powered drones can carry up to 100 pounds of payload and perform a variety of missions, really continuing the initial idea we had. And the second one is more focused on long-range stealth operations that we pioneered over the past 5-6 years, with a focus on hydrogen fuel cells. And today we have refueling stations too. We are working very closely as the only approved hydrogen drone for long endurance, self-driven, for the US government and Israel.”

In November 2025, IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) led a $100 million Series B investment in Heven as part of a technology partnership. In the words of Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ, “By integrating IonQ’s world-leading quantum technologies, Heven AeroTech will deliver a new class of unparalleled UAS capabilities. This partnership positions Heven’s drones to tackle missions no other player can with unmatched precision, resilience, and security.”

Levinson unpacked the IonQ relationship further and the types of new innovations he is currently implementing with quantum computing. “End of last year, we did a big round, at a billion-dollar valuation, with a public company, IonQ, a leader in the quantum ecosystem. It was to support our growth, including investments in additional technologies, such as quantum technologies. So since then, we’ve really focused on production. We are launching a very large, significant facility that’ll be both a gigafactory for drones and an innovation center.” He added that this gigafactory will be located in Virginia, as their customer base is primarily in the DC area.

Heven’s founder excitedly illustrated how quantum is like GenAI on steroids for autonomy, “So the drone platforms are only as good as what they can do on a mission. There are multiple mission profiles. And in our case, it’s even more challenging because if you’re working on a battlefield and you’re above the ocean, navigating and knowing where you are without GPS is very difficult. This ability to communicate brought our research teams to quantum technologies, not necessarily quantum computing, but quantum sensing for navigation and quantum networking technologies for communications. These solutions basically enable us to navigate and communicate anywhere in the world without any GPS or a signature.”

The drone pioneer continued, “So there are other ways of doing navigation, for example, doing vision-based navigation, where you look at the ground, and you can know where you are with very advanced software, but it doesn’t work above the ocean. Some companies have been using fiber-optic connections on drones, especially small drones, to communicate and navigate, but again, those systems don’t work over hundreds of miles. And that’s what brought us to navigation using quantum sensors and very advanced quantum clocks. ”

In September 2025, shortly before their investment in Heven, IonQ acquired Vector Atomic, a leader in “advanced quantum sensors for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) applications.” According to the press release, Vector had over $200 million in government contracts related to national security. As the announcement further detailed, its technology portfolio included “high-performance clocks, synchronization hardware, gravimeters, and inertial sensors, further establishing IonQ as the only quantum company integrating advanced computing, networking, and sensing capabilities within a single platform.” The acquisition of Vector solidified IonQ’s market position, enabling it to compete in the growing quantum sensing and navigation arena, which includes such leading tech providers as SandboxAQ, Q-CTRL, Infleqtion, Lockheed, and RTX.

Discussing IonQ’s unique tech portfolio, Levinson expressed, “We are working with IonQ, which is the largest standard on quantum in the world today. And we are working together to make these systems lightweight and fit for drone applications.” After explaining how quantum can work in GPS-denied environments, he shared that it can also serve as a stealthy long-range communication platform. “The other piece is communication, so short-range communication, there are different levels, also challenged by jamming. We have satellite communication, Starlink, and others. The challenge is that a lot of the stuff out there leaves signatures that can identify where a drone is flying. So quantum networking technology, which involves multiple quantum sensors communicating with each other, can enable these systems to communicate without any signatures. You can identify where it’s coming from, and it’s basically unjammable.”

The startup entrepreneur summed up the relationship, “They also led our recent funding round, which tells a bit about the closeness and the importance of our partnership. But we think these are important to ensuring drones in future conflicts actually work. The way I think about it is if our drones can navigate where they are, and communicate so our adversaries don’t detect them, that’s a game-changing scenario.” This is amplified by the cost savings of using Heven’s platform, which is amplified by quantum-enabled sensors. “We’re usually about 5% of what a traditional military drone would cost. Our drones are multi-use, so the value you get for flight hours is obviously significantly higher than those [single-use drones]. And we use these systems as mother ships, for example, to launch a variety of capabilities, from heavy-lift, long-endurance, quantum-enabled drones. So again, we’re a fraction of the price of traditional alternatives.”

From a competitive standpoint, Heven is currently operating on an open road. While companies like Doosan have hydrogen UAVs, and Elroy and Sabrewing manufacture hybrids, no one today is offering the combination of long-haul missions with heavy payloads, without signatures in GPS-denied environments. However, on the horizon, it is important to recognize that Shield AI, AeroVironment, Kaman, and upstarts that will eventually launch in this growing defense-tech industry will contest Heven for market share. Long-term, their quantum edge with IonQ could become their deepest moat to protect the castle.

As Levinson boasts, “We’ve kind of been the pioneers and have a really good advantage. Again, it’s 5 to 6 years of solving many different parts of the components. We expect more of the market to get in this wave. We have a very significant position on the IP and patent sides, as well as in practical partnerships and technology. So I think we have good positioning today. So we’re really working hard to get to scale and get to the field at scale, and are really solid about our position as the market leader in the space.”