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Utah-based radar payload developer IMSAR LLC has secured a strategic investment from private equity firm OceanSound Partners to accelerate product development, expand manufacturing, and advance its AI-driven target recognition capabilities.
The investment will support IMSAR’s efforts to enhance radar performance, speed up time-to-field delivery, and broaden its sensor portfolio both organically and through targeted acquisitions. Under the leadership of Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Smith, who retains a significant ownership stake alongside the management team, the company plans to scale production while remaining an open, platform-agnostic supplier to the unmanned aircraft ecosystem.
Founded in 2004 and based in Springville, Utah, IMSAR specializes in low size, weight, and power (SWaP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payloads and mission software. Its technology provides all-weather, day-and-night imaging, moving target indication, and change detection across wide areas where conventional optical and infrared sensors are often degraded. The company’s compact, pod-mounted NSP-series radars connect using a single interface for power, Ethernet, and navigation data, eliminating the need for custom radomes or structural airframe modifications and allowing installation or replacement in minutes.
IMSAR’s radar systems, onboard processing, and Lisa 3D mission software are currently integrated on more than 100 manned and unmanned platforms globally. Compatible platforms span Group 2 through Group 5 unmanned aerial systems, including the Shield AI V-BAT, AV Jump 20, Textron Aerosonde, Tekever AR3 and AR5, Insitu ScanEagle, and Integrator, alongside light manned ISR aircraft. Nearly all underlying hardware and software, from electronically scanned antennas to operator interfaces—are engineered internally.
Leveraging two decades of operational flight data, IMSAR plans to integrate machine learning into its Lisa 3D software platform to enhance automated target recognition, change detection, and target classification. Over time, the firm intends to transition its offerings from standalone radar payloads toward broader, multi-mission radio frequency sensing systems.
Joe Benavides, CEO and Founder of OceanSound Partners, said, “IMSAR has built something rare: technology that is genuinely hard to replicate, proven in the field, delivered by a team that operators trust. IMSAR’s RF surveillance solutions are well positioned to address critical U.S. Department of War priorities, including the Department’s Drone Dominance program, delivering lower-cost and high performance autonomous and counter autonomous solutions at scale and quickly to better manage threats from U.S. adversaries. OceanSound has spent years investing behind the companies modernizing how defense customers sense and understand their environment, and IMSAR is among the most impressive we have encountered. We are proud to partner with Ryan and the entire IMSAR team, and we look forward to helping them build on their differentiated drone-focused technology developed over more than twenty years.”
The agreement comes as demand grows for scalable, lower-cost autonomous sensing solutions across defense agencies, including the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and allied defense ministries across Europe, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific.
Ryan Smith, CEO and Founder of IMSAR, said, “Our purpose is to give operators a clear picture when nothing else can see. We talk about democratizing radar, and what we mean is simple: a capability that used to require a large, expensive aircraft now flies on something a small team can launch from a ship or the back of a truck. Everything this company has built has come from our engineers, technicians and field teams spending time with the people who fly these missions, watching what fails, and fixing it. We chose OceanSound because they understand that the mission and the engineering come first, they know this market and the people in it, and they have built businesses like ours before.”
Ted Shanahan, Partner at OceanSound Partners, added, “OceanSound was built to partner with founder-led technology companies at exactly this moment, when the capability is proven and the opportunity in front of them is larger than what they can serve today. We are investing in commercial reach, in the software and analytics layer, and in added capability across the sensing portfolio. The people who built this company are the reason we are here, and we are investing behind them.”
Advising on the transaction, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP acted as legal advisor to OceanSound Partners. Guggenheim Securities, LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor and Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP served as legal advisor to IMSAR.
