Eric Trump Backs the Founder of the “Biggest Drone Company in Israel.” And War Has Been Very Good for Business.

At the Commanders stadium, Israeli defense founder Aviv Shapira is a star. The moment we enter, two Commanders employees are waiting. Erik Leibovitz, the team’s vice president of partnership development, begins by telling Shapira about his Israeli relatives, before inviting us to watch the players warming up on the field. Out in the misty rain, Leibovitz points to the electronic ribbons lining the stadium. “We have a lot of defense partners because we have a really targeted audience here—a lot of decision makers from the DOW,” he says, emphasizing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sometimes comes to games.

The men lead us up the elevator to the “partners suite,” a room with a free bar and buffet. They disappear beyond a curtain and return with armfuls of merch. One offers Shapira a pink breast-cancer-awareness shirt, which he accepts, before laughing and putting it back, lest I think he would wear pink. One of the freebies is a small towel that reads “I Fight For” with a blank box underneath. “It looks like it says, ‘I fight for nothing,’” I say.

“Yeah,” the employee laughs. “It does.”

The suite is full with the tech nouveau riche. There’s BigBear.ai, a defense AI company that’s splashed so much on the Commanders that its name is slapped over random entrance gates, and three OpenAI employees milling around behind us. And then there’s Shapira, a springy 45-year-old with ice-blue eyes, who believes much about his drone company, Xtend, has been misunderstood. I assume that feeling has intensified in the last month since the company was taken public via merger with the help of funding from American Ventures, which counts Eric Trump as an investor. Eric also personally invested in the merger. Or maybe it’s a response to the scrutiny that Xtend has received for providing, according to Shapira, 10,000 drones to the Israeli Defense Fund since the start of the war in Gaza.

But really, he means that Xtend is not actually a defense company. “We’re a physical AI company,” he clarifies. Yes, they just won a $40 million contract from the Department of Defense, but his ambitions are grander, to become a base layer of software for many different robotics. The software that pilots the drones, for example, can plug into things like Boston Dynamics’ robo-dog, Spot, or into other companies’ drones. Today, he wants to gauge the Commanders’ interest in a different use case: employing his drones to shoot nets at civilian drones that try to fly over the stadium.

Besides, he says, he never intended to be a defense founder. Minus his three years of missile testing in the IDF, he came from the gaming and entertainment world, founding a 3D video start-up called Replay in 2011 with his brother, Matteo Shapira. The company won two Emmys for its camerawork at sports games and was bought by Intel for $200 million. “Technology was supposed to change the world,” he says in his thick Israeli accent, while showing me footage from his Replay days, pointing out how the camera could zoom just beside Tom Brady’s head, sweeping right behind the ball as it spiraled to the end zone. “But Intel killed it.”

After spending three years at Intel Sports Group, Shapira linked back up with his brother, Matteo, engineer Adir Tubi, and drone racer Rubi Liani in 2018 to found Xtend. The idea was to make drones simpler to fly. Instead of fumbling with two joysticks, an Xtend user puts on virtual reality glasses, which provide a first-person perspective from the drone, and then points a small gadget where they want it to fly. The drones can now be flown by simply giving them voice commands.

The Commanders must have scored or something, because the stadium is cheering. Shapira shows me a video on his phone of someone operating an Xtend drone that looks worryingly like Call of Duty.

He dreamed, actually, that Xtend would be a gaming company. He wanted to use empty malls to let people race their drones for fun. But then, in 2019, the team heard about Hamas floating incendiary balloons over the border. So they grabbed an umbrella and some chairs and sipped drinks by the Gaza border, waiting for a black dot to emerge in the clear sky. They directed their drone straight into the balloon. “We intercepted it in 10 seconds,” Shapira says, describing the group’s cheering. “The bomb fell on their side and we were excited.”

From that point on, about 50% of his business was defense; after the October 7 attacks, it went up to 80. When the IDF released the jaw-dropping drone footage of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s final moments—the camera zooming through the broken wall of a dilapidated building, spotting Sinwar collapsed in the wreckage and recording him as he feebly throws a stick—it was reportedly filmed by an Xtend drone. (Shapira says he officially cannot confirm, but “we are the biggest drone company in Israel.”)

War exponentially scaled Shapira’s business, right as American investors were falling back in love with the military. In September, American Ventures, in which Eric Trump is an investor, helped take the company public in a reverse merger, which saw Xtend fold into a small construction company that was already public. Xtend is part of a greater wave of the Trump sons investing in defense tech: The two brothers’ investments have produced at least $3.2 billion in government business, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Shapira has only met Eric once, during the due diligence process at the American Ventures Palm Beach office. He had Eric try operating the drones remotely, ushering a hundred drones in Tampa into the sky.

When I ask about Eric’s involvement, Shapira volleys the question back to me: “Does it bother you in some way?”

No, I say. It’s just interesting—the sons must have known the scrutiny investing in defense tech would bring, the questions of conflicts of interest. Why would they do that?

Shapira nods. “I wonder what’s in their head.”

Is he worried about potential congressional hearings?

“Why do you think it is a concern?” he asks. Defense contracting is “very methodical,” he says, and Eric has “nothing” to do with it.

We take a break to eat. Shapira fills a plate with a crab cake, two chicken tenders, and a salad, lamenting the fattiness of American food. We sit down at a round table with CJ Pearson, a prominent MAGA influencer, who Shapira commissioned to help with comms.

As we eat, Shapira tells me about how Xtend’s end goal is Ender’s Game. He has posters for the movie adaptation of the famous ’80s sci-fi book all over their office, aspiring to a world where soldiers can be like the book’s main character and control many drones at once. In the book, the main character believes he’s playing a simulation the whole time, only to discover too late that his kill counts were real. In an interview describing the company’s partnership with the IDF, Shapira’s brother said, “We essentially built a computer game about how to defeat the bad guys without putting ourselves at risk.”

Is there a sense that Xtend and similar drone companies have made war feel too gamified? As one IDF soldier told the Middle Eastern publication +972, the drones “made killing much more sterile,” even making the process feel “kind of cool.”

“It’s not a gamification; it’s more of a modernization,” Shapira said. “Video games are really war games.”

Shapira paints a picture of a kinder, gentler war, where technology takes soldiers away from the trenches and from the tanks, to a chair behind a screen. “There’s many fewer civilian casualties today in war than there used to be just because of AI and technology,” he says. He describes the “chaos” in the early days of the war in Gaza, where his employees would take drones from the office to the battlefield to hopefully keep themselves off the front lines.