The same year that Steve Jobs introduced the first mass market laptop that offered built-in Wi-Fi through a hula hoop, Singapore-based smartBridges started tapping into the technology’s industrial potential.

Founded by Nimesh Parikh, the company would go on to provide long-range connectivity for campers in Mount Everest and tsunami survivors in Southeast Asia, shooting Wi-Fi signals over mountains and supporting real-time digital lists of missing persons. The 2008 financial crisis shifted its operations to a smaller scale, focusing instead on connectivity components like Wi-Fi cards while retaining its trademark range.

A pair of its early transceivers are still in every Airbus A320, said Doodle Labs Co-Chief Executive Amol Parikh, who officially took over the business from his father in 2024 with his brother Ashish Parikh, after Doodle Labs spun off from smartBridges in 2008. Now splitting its operations between Singapore and Marina del Rey, Doodle Labs’ long-range radios and sensors have been deployed widely across commercial and defense sectors.

“We provide connectivity that is reliable in any kind of condition, any type of environment,” Amol Parikh said. “We partner really closely with our customers to understand what their needs are.”

Located near the South Bay, Doodle Labs is one company among many that joined the booming aerospace cluster in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It started to build its U.S. footprint in 2018, around the time that SpinLaunch Inc. and Relativity Space Inc. came to Long Beach.

A high demand

Originally specializing in commercial robotics and drones, Doodle Labs found its break into defense with the onset of the full-on Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when drones went beyond being delivery tools to become weapons and reconnaissance devices during a “shift in the zeitgeist,” said Amol Parikh.

That shift has rippled through the global drone industry, which is projected to reach $57.8 billion by 2030, according to Germany-based market research company Drone Industry Insights. Cheap, easy to produce en masse, capable of traveling long distances and capable of making a “strike with precision,” Michel Martin of NPR placed drones at the center of “the technology of war.”

“It’s probably the biggest tech sector within the defense tech industry,” said Ali Javaheri, a senior research analyst at PitchBook Data Inc. He added that the demands for drones focus on cheap ones that can be produced in bulk and serve a variety of purposes, “which also means that at the component level, the demand will continue.”

Connectivity is at the heart of such rapid development. A National Defense Magazine report suggests that as traditional connectivity methods struggle in conflict zones and precarious infrastructure environments due to interference and degrading signals, having a safe and sure connection becomes critical.

“The more stable and resilient the link between the operator and the drone, the more ambitious the mission can be,” the report continued. “In many ways, drones will only advance as far as their communication technology allows them to go.”

The demand for secure and reliable connectivity is further cemented by an “asymmetric capabilities to cost,” said Amol Parikh, who added that “these technologies need to be incredibly, incredibly low cost compared to the impact that they can have.”

To achieve its competitive edge, the company drew from its commercial roots and established supply chains to reduce the cost and “design against where it fails.”

By expanding its trademark technology into both small-scale radio footprints and bidirectional amplifiers for larger drones, Doodle Labs was able to weather the fast-changing landscape of electronic warfare and stay ahead. It continued to tune into the defense sector and had a presence via client projects in the Iran war, Amol Parikh said.

“In the Iran conflict, these $15,000 (Iranian) Shahed (drones) are being met with million-dollar missiles from the U.S. side. There’s an absolute asymmetry there,” he added. “That’s the piece that we absolutely facilitate, because of the price point that we’ve been able to support, because we’ve always been at scale … that is a significant moat that we have compared to our competition.”

Beyond defense, Doodle Labs’ Wi-Fi card has also been certified to use in space by NASA for 15 years. While unable to disclose specific names, Amol Parikh shared that a few of its clients, who are involved in the recent launch of Artemis II, are in discussions with Doodle Labs to collaborate on future space projects involving lunar bases and space rovers.

Automation and dual-use technology

Additionally, the drone and robotics industry is seeing a move towards automation and artificial intelligence at the intersection with defense. The “Swarm Forge” initiative, officially solicited by Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office in March, aims to accelerate drone swarm technologies that enable unmanned aerial vehicles to collaborate with minimum human interference.

That doesn’t make connectivity irrelevant, however.

“Drones aren’t fully autonomous quite yet; they still need somebody operating them. It’s a critical component of it,” Javaheri said. “Even if they’re moving autonomously, they still need to be able to essentially talk to each other, so they can coordinate movements. That’s where connectivity still comes in and why it’s still going to be important.”

Doodle Labs shared that while it has developed drone command and control technologies and protocols – which is the piece that automation is taking over – the core use for its technology focuses instead on sensors to transmit high bandwidth data traffic. That includes sending high resolution video feeds in real time over long distances in challenging environments.

“Especially the way that the U.S. is approaching drones for defense, they still have a visual component to be able to confirm a target prior to strike,” said Amol Parikh. “That is the part that we facilitate, and it’s incredibly important.”

Andy Park, L.A. office managing partner at Ernst & Young Global, pointed out that beyond a push towards automation, investor interest also leans towards dual-use defense technologies that can be deployed in civilian lives. Self-driving cars, unmanned drones and artificial intelligence, for example, can enrich both sectors with a similar technological palette.

“Dual-use is key, if this market in this industry is going to truly attract the right capital,” said Park, who is also the 2026 board chair of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “You can’t consistently just rely on the public sector. You have to rely on the private sector. And you got to consider uses for dual use – how do we use this in day-to-day human consumption and human life to generate a return on that investment.”

Doodle Labs did not overlook this trend. Amol Parikh shared that while the company is establishing a growing presence in the defense space, it still stays in touch with its commercial roots. Its Wi-Fi cards have been applied in multiple civilian projects, including humanoid robots and Boston Dynamics’ viral robot dog “Spot.”

‘Made in America’

With President Donald Trump’s administration proposing a $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal year 2027, domestic drone companies are seeing an increased demand to manufacture within the country.

A report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University suggests that as foreign-origin drones flood the market, the U.S. government has started to work more closely with domestic partners to procure military-grade drones and appliances. The June 2025 executive order “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” seeks to scale domestic production, accelerate drone testing and increase exports of U.S.-made drones to global markets. It calls a “strong and secure” domestic drone sector “vital” for American independence from foreign suppliers. The Drone Dominance Program from the U.S. Department of Defense also invested $1 billion to procure more than 300,000 low-cost, one-way, domestically made attack drones by 2027.

Doodle Labs, while still waiting to see what the capital allocations will be once the programs fully roll out, said that it has the capacity to meet the demand when the chance arises.

“That is one that is very much designed to accelerate and build up the U.S. drone inventory and the drone capabilities. That is a driver that is putting a lot of capital to work and incentivizing a lot of the drone manufacturers to focus on,” Amol Parikh said. “We have the capabilities that meet all of the technical requirements, and we have the production supply chain that can support this massive scaling that all these guys are needing to do.”

He added that while the company manufactures primarily in Singapore, the company will be considering moving its factory into the U.S. For now, the specific location is still under review pending local collaborators, but California and Texas are among the top candidates.

“We’re on our U.S. side, as we’ve been largely focused on the U.S. market,” he said. “The company’s a U.S. company.”