Check out these 6 Defense & AI Startups in Miami (⁨@eMergeAmericas⁩ 2026)

[music] All right, back for another year at a merge America's live in Miami Beach. Going to talk to some of the best people in tech. Let's see how many interviews we can get. All right, here with Damon George from Vatin Systems. Standing in front of a big missile. What the hell's going on here, man? Yeah, so Vatin Systems, we're based out of Bristol Rhode Island. We design, develop, and deploy modular, low-cost attritable UUVs. Here behind us, we have our Skelmir S6, 6-in diameter vehicle. Um roughly 6 ft long. We have a modular payload nose cone that we can integrate multiple payloads on. And then we have a scaled-up version of this, the S12, roughly 17 ft, 12.75 in diameter. Wow, okay. So, who are your main clients? Obviously, the military, but what branches? Like Uh yeah, primary use case and customer base for the S6 is NSW. So, we're working with mostly right now. And our bigger vehicle, US Navy. And then commercial use space use cases as well. Port Harbor security fence. Wow, awesome. Yeah, never seen a missile like this up close. So, this is pretty cool. Thanks. Here with Ankit from Glide. What is this? Like some military transport vehicle? Well, this is the world's first autonomous vehicle which goes on the road and on the rail. Kind of think of it like a truck train. So, you see right over there there's rail gear over there. That's called as a high rail gear. And so, this has capabilities to go off-road um on the rail, on the road, and that too autonomously. And this is the world's first of its kind. It's also powered by our own AI orchestration system called as Ezra 16, which is capable of basically routing anything from point A to point B. How much rail we should use, what road we should use. Basically, our point is to get the truck on the on the tracks. Okay, so it's transporting materials to maybe someone in a bad spot in combat or something. What is it? It could be on the on the on the DOW side of things. It could be any of the applications. Well, a lot of times in contested logistics, um you know, having transportation from one point to another with continuous can be difficult. It can be challenging. It can be very very risky. And so, we want to remove We want to remove the people who do this and let the robots do it autonomously. Wow, super cool. The way I think of it is it's not just a defense application, which is one of our primary use as we are dual use company, but think about in a port scenario. You've got containers coming in in a port from one point to another. These These babies can, you know, take it from any point to any point inside a port autonomously. Wow, looking at the future here with Glide. Thanks a lot. Thank you. All right, we're here with Carl from Pivotal. This looks like a self-flying car thing. What is this? Well, it's a self-flying car, but it's also a piloted flying vehicle. So, what we have is an ultralight eVTOL aircraft. So, it's electric, takes off lands vertically, tilts into cruise much like an airplane, but it's a a very automated machine. It's very simple to fly, very low pilot workload. Wow, so okay, so it can be automated, but then they can take control as well. Like is that that's what I'm hearing? Yeah, so it's all fly-by-wire digital control, software-driven aircraft. So you can fly on board of the single control stick and a touchscreen. We also use a ground control station in flight test, so you can fly it like from the ground. We also can build automation to just purely automate the flight as well. So a lot of functionality. Is it going to be the consumers or the military or the government? What's going on here? We're doing a variety of things right now. So we started with consumer sales, private owners looking to have fun and short hop commutes or just recreation. We've actually now started partnerships where we've actively trained paramedics in some fire departments that have hard-to-reach geographies. So the paramedics will go stabilize patients and wait for the rest of the crew to show up. And we're actively pitching to the defense market as well. It's a lot of flexibility with this machine. Wow, awesome. Check it out, Pivotal, coming soon. All right, here with Christopher Perez from the academy. Some guys I've worked with in the past. Will you just give us a rundown of everything you're teaching the students these days? No problem, Chris. Thanks for reaching out to me to to do this vlog. I appreciate it. When it comes to the academy and and specifically the programs we're currently offering, some of the most popular programs are cybersecurity, our cloud programs, our coding programs, business analyst, and project management. Yeah, okay. So what is what's hot going to be in in 2026? What do you think? So right now, without a doubt, the the programs that are trending the most would be our cybersecurity programs. That program is roughly 12 weeks in duration, going to cover certified ethical hacker, your CompTIA Security Plus, your CISSP certification, as well as Microsoft Azure to give you some of that that [snorts] cloud experience that you're going to need to run some of these uh cybersecurity tools. Other than cybersecurity, another very popular program would be our full stack web developer program. That program's going to focus on HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Um also teach you Power BI for the uh business reporting and data reporting side of of websites. And then finally, you're going to get exposure to Microsoft SQL databases um in the cloud so you can learn to spin up SQL databases, manage data databases, and and back them up, do the the proper authentication and so forth that you would need to manage a SQL database. You know, I just interviewed an executive yesterday and he said DBAs are going to be huge going forward with AI and everything. DBAs are coming back. Definitely check out the academy. Thanks a lot, Chris. No problem. Great to see you again, Chris. I'm here with Ivan from Let's Prototype. So you build people's inventions, it looks like. Exactly. That's what we do. Our clients come to us with an idea and then we analyze that idea. We gather all the requirements of the of this client and we start creating a document to to make a first approach to what a prototype may look like. How are we going to do the design, electronics if it has electronic, AI, or whatever the prototype needs. Okay? So we go through a process of design, prototyping, and then mass production. Give us an example of some things you've done for people. Okay. So here there are plenty of examples we've done for for people. But I think the best would be to show this one, okay, which is not an Apple Watch. This one is a it's a it's a a smart watch we created for Smart Paddle Sport, okay? So it's able to you can get the score here or you can get a ball launched to you to to start the game or even you can strike the ball and it would tell you what kind of strike you you did. So, it's it's got like 11 different type of strikes and it will give you statistics of how you played. Wow, awesome. Well, if you have an invention, go to this guy, Let's Prototype, check them out. Brian from Orimus, looks like one of those robot dog things. What's going on here? Yeah, so we're building a fully autonomous robotic dog. We Sorry, we've built a fully robotic autonomous dog that's running our own tech AI stack, real-time AI running on the edge. So, what that means is that it doesn't need to be connected to a network, it doesn't need any controls, anybody to tell it what to do. We set it free, it travels the area, creates a heat map of everything that's going on, and starts to learn the environment. So, once it's learned the environment, it starts to understand what's going on. Are people supposed to be here? Are they a threat? Have they been bounced? It It's a real-time security apparatus to add to your team that's creating real-time interactivity. Okay, so it's used as like a security like actually like a mechanical guard dog, right? With AI? It is actually. So, you given the application, let's say you have a school and you have a perimeter of the school and you have a parking lot and you have all these different areas where people could in theory get into your location. And where the security guard has a limited range of movement, this dog is able to continually monitor and track the area and also have an understanding of what's going on. So, if a person has been uh trespassing and isn't supposed to be there, the dog will know that person's not supposed to be there, alert security that they have an issue, and document what's going on, and send that alert back to the team. With facial recognition built in? Yeah, so we have lidar, we have uh facial recognition, and we also have heat sensing, so we could sense all different different metrics of things that are going on. Wow, awesome. Orimus, check them out, guys. This is cool.