Critical infrastructure
Theft answered before the line goes down, with evidence that holds up afterwards.
Aerial overwatch, flown by licensed pilots
Always on station. Airborne in under 60 seconds.
Your alarms launch it. Our licensed pilots watch every flight.
- 60secAlert to airborne
- 10kmMaximum operating radius
- 24/7Always on station
What we do
We keep a permanent watch in the air above your ground. By night it keeps crime away. By day it inspects what you own. It never goes home.
Flown by licensed pilots from a 24/7 operations room. Delivered as a service, nothing for you to buy or fly.
Two pillars
One station. Two jobs.
The problem
Knowing is not stopping.
You already have beams, cameras and alarms. They record what happened. They cannot stop it. Everything comes down to the minutes between the alarm going off and someone actually seeing what is out there. That gap is when the loss happens.
Rural armed response takes 45 to 90 minutes. We are overhead in under two minutes.
The solution
We close the gap.
A Pharos station sits on your ground. A beam trips, or your control room calls it in, and the aircraft is overhead in under two minutes. A licensed pilot flies it, looking at thermal, and tells you what is actually there before anyone gets in a vehicle.
- Airborne in 60 secondsOn any trigger you choose: a sensor, a camera, a call, or a patrol on a schedule.
- Thermal eyes on the spotThe pilot is reading heat, not shapes. A person at your fence line has nowhere to stand that is dark enough.
- Verified before anyone rollsYour armed response gets a confirmed position instead of a guess.
- Home before the next callThe aircraft returns to the station and charges, ready for the next trigger the same night.
The operations room
Watched by people, not just software.
A licensed pilot watches every flight from an operations room that runs 24/7. The automation flies the aircraft. A person makes every decision that matters, and their name is in the log.
Most aerial response falls apart at the handover, when nobody can reach anybody. So we built the direct phone link to your control room before we built anything else.
Your window
Watch with us.
Every client gets the Pharos app. When your site goes live, so does your screen.
Shown with demonstration data.
The live view
The same thermal view our pilots see, as the response happens.
Status at a glance
The first line answers the only question that matters: is everything all right.
Every flight on record
Every patrol and every response is kept for 30 days under your service agreement. If your armed response or your insurer needs it, you hand it over.
Works on any phone. Nothing to install. Book a site assessment and your screen goes live.
The service
One service. Everything that flies is ours.
- We installThe site survey takes a morning. Once you sign, we commission your station and fly your first patrol.
- 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.
- We talk to youA direct line both ways. You can put the aircraft up, and the pilot can talk your response vehicle onto the spot.
- 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 and the pilots all stay ours. You are buying the watch, not the hardware. Nothing on your balance sheet.
Your security, amplified
Everything you already pay for works better with eyes above it.
You have already built the structure. Guards, cameras, a control room. There is one gap in it. Nobody sees the whole site at the moment something starts. The aircraft flies a pattern nobody can time, and it picks up a warm body in the dark long before a torch would. When something moves, it is overhead in under two minutes, and your guards get a live position instead of a guess.
The machine
Engineered for the worst night of the year.
A sealed station that sits on your ground. Built on DJI hardware, then hardened by us for the load shedding, dust and heat we actually get here.
- IP55Sealed. Flies through the storm season
- 25minRecharge. Back on station before the next trigger
- Full dayStation power with no mains. This is the base station, not flight time
When the grid goes down, the station does not.
- PowerThe station runs a full day with no mains power. It keeps charging the aircraft, keeps watching, keeps reporting. Load shedding does not stop it. Where there is no grid at all, we run the station on solar or a generator.
- ConnectivityTwo paths, never one. A wired link that no jammer can reach. Mobile takes over the moment it drops, and satellite covers you where the fibre never arrived.
- OversightWe watch the power reserves around the clock and test them on a schedule. The control room sees an outage before you feel one.
An outage does not stop the watch. When your power goes, the station keeps flying and keeps reporting.
The aircraft
Nothing gets close unseen.
A Matrice 4TD, flown by licensed pilots. It takes off, flies the pattern and returns to charge on its own, with a pilot watching the whole time.
- 640×512Thermal. Finds a person in total darkness
- 112×Zoom. Reads a plate from beyond earshot
- 1.8kmRangefinder. A verified position, not a guess
- 42minFlight time in the air, one sortie. The incident and the return leg
No playbook for the sky.
Anyone who has cased your site knows where the cameras stop and when the guards change over. A patrol in the air is much harder to learn from the ground, and much harder to plan around.
A camera stays where you put it. An aircraft does not.
Detection runs on the aircraft itself, not on a server in another country. The footage goes only to the people you have named.
A privacy feature first, a technology feature second.
Compliance first, by design.
We fly under SACAA Part 101 with licensed pilots. We are working through night approvals and BVLOS approvals, both ahead of our first deployments in 2026. BVLOS lets a pilot fly beyond visual line of sight. Footage is handled under POPIA, and the Information Officer is named and the retention period published before the first station ever flies. What happens to anything you send us through this site is already written down in our privacy notice. Ask us anything. 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
What a helicopter gives you, without paying for helicopter hours. Thermal patrols through the poaching window, every night.
Estates and farms
A layer above your guards. Fewer vehicles rolled for nothing, and every real incident confirmed first.
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. We were founded in Cape Town in the shadow of Umlindi Wemingizimu, the Watcher of the South.
Nine years and about 480 hours flying this country showed us how much of it nobody is watching after dark. The person who built the safety case is the person who answers the phone and walks your survey.
pharos.
Dimitri Vaindirlis
Founder · 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.
The company’s PSIRA and POPIA standing sits with the founder.
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.
Give us a morning on your property and you get five things back. A map of exactly what we can cover. Where the stations go. A power plan built around the load shedding you actually get. Where you stand on airspace and approvals. And a fixed price. It costs you nothing and you are not committing to anything. There are two ways to start, and both end in the same place.
One
Leave your details.
Tell us where you are and what you are protecting. The founder calls you back inside one business day, and brings the assessment to you.
Use the form belowTwo
Map your ground first.
Draw your property on a satellite map and answer four questions. You see a rough plan for your own ground before you talk to anyone, and what you drew comes through to us with it.
Check your site, two minutesWe are taking five founding sites for 2026. They go to operators, reserves and estates who want this first. You will not be a test. You will be first.
Received.
The founder calls you within one business day.
Sooner is better. WhatsApp or call 074 132 8500.