The Department of Defense has awarded Hidden Level a $100 million Other Transaction Authority contract to field the company’s passive radar and radio frequency sensing technology against escalating unmanned aircraft system threats.

The award, issued by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering through Army Contracting Command, Rock Island, follows Hidden Level’s performance in recent government evaluations, including Technology Readiness Experimentation 25.2 and Falcon Peak 25.2. The company was also named a top performer in the Defense Innovation Unit’s Low-Cost Sensing Challenge.

“This award is an important step to delivering our critically needed technology to see without being seen,” said Jeff Cole, founder and CEO of Hidden Level. Dr. Mike Tran, director of prototyping in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prototyping and Experimentation, said the OTA “gives us an important mechanism to keep maturing, evaluating, and transitioning advanced sensing into operational use.”

The OTA lets U.S. military customers engage Hidden Level directly to prototype, integrate, and field the company’s sensor systems at scale, including its BREAKER, SURGE, BYOTx, and Airspace Monitoring Service products. The systems are designed to detect RF energy and RF-silent aircraft without emitting signals of their own, and are built on an open architecture intended to integrate with existing command-and-control systems.

Syracuse, New York-based Hidden Level, founded in 2018, has previously supplied sensing technology to the U.S. Army, Air Force, and NASA, along with several combatant commands. Hardware and software for the new contract will be designed and manufactured in Syracuse using a U.S.-based supply chain, according to the company.