Steve Messinger

Steve Messinger
Occupation	Co-founder and CTO of Perseus Defense
Known for	Counter-UAS guided micro-missile platform

Steve Messinger is an American defense technology entrepreneur and engineer. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Perseus Defense, a company developing guided micro-missile systems for counter-unmanned aerial system (counter-UAS) applications for the United States Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Perseus Defense is a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2025 (S25) batch.

Career

Messinger studied aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his co-founder Jason Cornelius. While at Penn State, he worked as an R&D engineering intern and subsequently as an R&D engineering graduate assistant at the Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory from 2019 to 2022, where he conducted research in swarm robotics and participated in Navy-sponsored competitions involving autonomous systems.

From 2022 to 2024, Messinger worked as a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Engineer at Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing, where he contributed to autonomous landing systems for commercial aircraft. In 2024, he served as a Research Scientist in Collaborative Autonomy at EpiSys Science, Inc., developing collaborative behaviors for unmanned surface vehicles. He also briefly co-founded Oyster IQ in 2024.

In 2025, Messinger co-founded Perseus Defense with Jason Cornelius. The company's primary product is a portable micro-guided missile battery designed to counter small unmanned aerial systems (Group 1 and Group 2 drones). The system is intended to address a cost asymmetry problem in modern warfare: conventional kinetic counter-drone solutions can cost $250,000 or more per engagement, while the drones they target may cost as little as $500. Perseus Defense states its missile system is designed to be approximately 25 times cheaper than existing counter-UAS kinetic solutions, with an effective range of over 1,000 meters.

The company's missile pods are designed for use across multiple platforms, including ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and boats, with mounted, dismounted, and low-collateral variants. Perseus Defense's stated mission is to enable mass production of affordable, scalable micro-guided missiles ready for field deployment.

Messinger has been based in both Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, California.