Illustration of onboard detection
Critical infrastructure
Theft answered before the downtime starts. Substations, solar fields and lines, with evidence that stands up.
Pilot supervised aerial overwatch
Always on station. Airborne in under 60 seconds.
Your alarms launch it. Our licensed pilots watch every flight.
- 60secAlert to airborne
- 10kmPatrol radius
- 24/7Always on station
On patrol over an ore export terminal
Two pillars
One station. Two jobs.
The problem
Detection alone is not security.
The country is full of beams, cameras and alarms that faithfully record losses they cannot prevent, because everything hinges on the minutes between a trigger and a trained human seeing the truth.
Rural armed response takes 45 to 90 minutes. We are overhead in under a minute.
The solution
We close the gap.
A Pharos Station lives on your ground. A beam trips, a camera flags, or your control room calls it, and the aircraft is overhead with thermal eyes on the spot, flown by a licensed pilot who confirms what is actually there before anyone rolls.
- Airborne in 60 secondsOn any trigger you choose: a sensor, a camera, a call from your control room, or a patrol on a schedule.
- Thermal eyes on the spotDarkness stops being cover. The pilot reads heat, not shapes, and sees what is standing at your fence line.
- Verified before anyone rollsYour armed response gets a confirmed position instead of a guess, and stops burning hours on tripped beams.
- Home before the next callThe aircraft flies itself back to the station and charges, ready for the next trigger the same night.
The operations room
Watched by people, not just software.
Every flight is supervised by a licensed pilot in a 24/7 operations room. Automation flies the aircraft, a human owns every decision that matters.
That room is wired to yours. Voice first, both directions: your control room can put the aircraft up, and ours calls you and your armed response the moment something is confirmed, then follows it in writing. The handoff is where most aerial response fails, so we built the channel before we built the schedule.
Your window
Watch with us.
Every client gets the Pharos app. When your site goes live, so does your screen.
The live view during a response
The home screen, status first
Every flight, grouped by day
Shown with demonstration data.
The live view
When an alarm launches the aircraft, you can watch the response as it happens, with the same thermal view our pilots see.
Status at a glance
Open the app and the first line answers the only question that matters: is everything all right.
Every flight on record
Patrols and responses are kept for 30 days under your service agreement, ready to hand to your armed response or insurer.
Works on any phone. Nothing to install. Book a site assessment and your screen goes live with your station.
The service
One service. Everything that flies is ours.
- We installA site survey takes a morning and gives you a fixed quote, a coverage map and a power plan. Flying within days of sign off, first patrol report in week one.
- We flyScheduled patrols, plus instant launch on the alarms, beams and panic buttons you already run.
- We superviseA licensed pilot on every flight, by name, in the log. Automation flies the aircraft, a human owns every decision that matters.
- We talk to youA direct line both ways between our control room and yours. You can put the aircraft up. We call you with what we see, and the pilot can talk your response vehicle onto the target.
- We reportLive feed to your control room, sealed evidence with chain of custody¹, and an incident report on your desk in 24 hours.
- We own itThe station, the aircraft, the batteries, the insurance and the pilots stay ours. You buy the watch, never the hardware, and nothing on your books depreciates.
One commissioning fee to go live, then a monthly service fee.
Your security, amplified
Everything you already pay for works better with eyes above it.
- R31 to 63k/moYour guards. Good people who see one fence line at a time
- R9 to 30k/hrThe helicopter that arrives after it is over
- R7.3bnThe 2024 bill for finding out too late
You have built the structure. Guards, cameras, a control room. One gap: nobody sees the whole site the moment something starts. So we close it. The drone patrols on a pattern no intruder can time. It picks up a warm body in the dark long before a torch or a camera could. And when something moves, it is overhead in under two minutes, feeding your guards a live target instead of a guess. Same team. Same budget. Nothing out of sight. New technology amplifying what you already have, not replacing it.
The machine
Engineered for the worst night of the year.
A weather sealed station that lives on your ground, built on DJI’s proven platform and hardened by Pharos for load shedding, dust and heat.
- IP55Sealed. Flies through the storm season
- 25minRecharge. Back on station before the next trigger
- Full dayBattery reserve with no mains, and flying hard barely spends it
When the grid goes down, the station does not.
- PowerA battery reserve sized for a full day without mains, as standard, and the reserve is not what a busy night spends. Flying the site hard costs the battery less than a cold night does. Solar and generator builds for ground with no grid at all.
- ConnectivityTwo paths, not one. A wired link that cannot be jammed, with automatic failover to mobile, and a satellite path where fibre never reached. The monitoring rides the protected side, so the station can still tell you it is running.
- OversightReserves monitored around the clock and tested on a schedule, with spares held regionally against the parts that matter. The control room sees an outage before you feel it.
An outage is not downtime. It is when the station watches hardest.
The aircraft
Nothing gets close unseen.
A Matrice 4TD flown by licensed pilots. It launches itself, flies the pattern, and is home recharging without a hand touching it.
- 640×512Thermal. Finds a person in total darkness
- 112×Zoom. Reads a plate from beyond earshot
- 1.8kmRangefinder. A verified position, not a guess
- 42minEndurance. The incident and the return leg
No playbook for the sky.
Every ground defence has a learned counter, where the camera ends, when the shift changes. Almost no one has ever had to plan around the sky.
The aircraft flies patterns that cannot be memorised and sees heat, not light. From the ground you cannot tell if the sky is empty or watching.
In thermal, darkness is not cover any more. It is contrast.
Detection runs onboard the aircraft, not in an offshore cloud. Imagery stays inside your escalation chain.
A privacy feature first, a technology feature second.
Compliance first, by design.
Pharos flies under SACAA Part 101 with licensed pilots, with BVLOS and night approvals underway ahead of first deployments in 2026. PSIRA registration is in progress, and footage is handled under POPIA. The Information Officer is named and the retention period published before the first station flies, and how we handle what you send us through this site is already written down in our privacy notice. Every aircraft is fully insured. Ask us for the certificates, we would rather you check.
The only person who feels observed on a Pharos site is the one who climbed the fence.
Find your ground
Built for the realities we live with.
Wildlife and reserves
Helicopter capability without helicopter hours. Thermal patrols over the poaching window, verified alerts to your rangers.
Estates and farms
A response layer above your guards. Fewer false rolls, verified incidents, privacy done visibly and properly.
Who we are
A lighthouse never sleeps. Neither do we.
Pharos is named for the lighthouse of Alexandria, the first structure built purely to keep watch through the night, and founded in Cape Town in the shadow of Umlindi Wemingizimu, the Watcher of the South.
Nine years and about 480 hours flying this country taught us how much of it is unguarded after dark. The people who built the safety case answer the phone and walk the survey.
pharos.
Dimitri Vaindirlis
Cofounder · CEO · Chief Pilot
Licensed remote pilot since 2017, nine years flying commercially in South African conditions, about 480 hours of it. Builds and flies the system, and leads the SACAA BVLOS pathway.
Craig Rhodes Harrison
Cofounder · Chief Commercial Officer
Cinematographer and drone operator with a decade of field time across Southern African reserves. Runs revenue, partnerships and the company’s PSIRA and POPIA standing.
Our mission is to keep the light on over the places that matter most, so no property worth protecting is unwatched after dark.
Book a site assessment
Your ground. Our watch.
A site survey takes a morning and gives you a fixed quote, a coverage map and a power plan. There are two ways to start it, and both end in the same place.
One
Leave your details.
Tell us where you are and what you are protecting. A founder calls you within one business day, and brings the assessment to you.
Use the form belowTwo
Map your ground first.
Outline your property on a satellite map and answer four questions. You see an indicative plan for your own ground before you speak to anyone, and what you draw comes to us with it.
Check your site, two minutesA limited number of founding sites for 2026. We are placing our first stations with a small group of operators, reserves and estates who want the capability first. You will not be a test. You will be first.