Executive Summary

KIR is building night-first security for South African mines. Autonomous drones patrol perimeters and cable routes, AI models detect intruders in real time, and one command platform sends the nearest guard to each incident. The drone is the sensor. The software is the product. The target is copper cable theft. Infrastructure theft and vandalism cost South Africa an estimated R187 billion in wider economic losses in 2021, and mines are hit directly: Sibanye-Stillwater lost over R1 billion in PGM production to copper theft in 2022 alone. Guards on foot cannot watch kilometres of fence line at night, and fixed cameras only see where they point. Working today: a trained aerial person-detection model, autonomous patrol and lidar mapping tested in simulation, and a command dashboard that turns detections into live alerts. Night and thermal detection is the current build, and one mine has already expressed interest in a pilot. KIR is raising pre-seed capital to complete SACAA certification, field its first patrol unit and convert a supervised pilot into a paid site contract. KIR is raising in pre-seed equity to fund SACAA operator certification, a thermal-equipped patrol drone with edge compute, night-detection model training and a supervised mine pilot, taking KIR from prototype to its first paid site contract. KIR is four founders, and the split is deliberate: every technical pillar of the product has a founder who owns it. Kgodisho Mogane, Founder and CEO Strategy, business development, investor relations and product vision. Completing a BComHons in Business Management (Strategy and Innovation) at Stellenbosch University, after a BCom in Entrepreneurial Management at the University of Johannesburg. He grew up in Lydenburg, inside KIR's first market, and is hands-on with the technology: drone autonomy, model training and mapping. Ibrahim Hajee, Co-founder, Robotics and Hardware (Eduvos) Owns the airframe and autonomy: drone systems and flight integration, including PX4 flight control and MAVSDK route planning. Ushay Parbhoo, Co-founder, Cybersecurity and Platform (Eduvos) Owns the software platform: the command layer, data handling and security, critical for a product that processes live surveillance footage under POPIA. Razeen Abdulla, Co-founder, Electrical Engineering (Wits) Owns power, payload and edge systems: the on-board electronics and Jetson-class compute that run detection on the drone. Why this team: KIR builds toward working artifacts, not slides. The team has already killed two earlier concepts the moment it found a fatal flaw, and has done the regulatory homework most drone startups skip, mapping a SACAA pathway from supervised flights to a beyond-visual-line-of-sight exemption. KIR is pre-revenue and in the build phase, preparing for its first supervised pilot. Spend to date has been deliberately lean. Detection models are trained on low-cost cloud GPUs, and autonomy and mapping are developed in simulation before they touch hardware, so hardware money only goes into a system that already works in software. Revenue model: annual per-site contracts that bundle autonomous patrols, AI detection and the command platform, priced as a recurring security service rather than billed flight hours. The same drones and site maps can also deliver compliance surveys, such as stockpile volumes and slope and tailings inspections, as a second revenue line. Path to revenue: SACAA operator certification (estimated at R100,000 and six months), a supervised pilot with the interested mine, then conversion into a paid annual contract. One live site gives KIR a reference customer that neighbouring mines in the corridor can see working. Copper cable theft is one of South Africa's most expensive crimes. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates that infrastructure theft and vandalism cost Eskom, Transnet, PRASA and Telkom about R7 billion in direct losses in 2021, and the wider economy about R187 billion. Mines are a prime target. Copper cable runs through shafts, conveyors, substations and pump stations, and cutting it stops production. Sibanye-Stillwater reported more than R1 billion in lost PGM production from copper theft in 2022, on top of over R1 billion a year in security spend. In 2022 Impala Platinum said cable theft stopped work somewhere on its Rustenburg operations every day, and one cut can halt a section for about a week. KIR's first market is the Lydenburg-Steelpoort corridor on the eastern limb of the Bushveld Complex, a dense cluster of platinum group metal and chrome operations run by groups including Valterra Platinum, Implats, African Rainbow Minerals, Glencore and Samancor. South Africa produces around 70% of the world's platinum, so security failures here hit a globally important supply chain. Mines already spend heavily on security, but the tools have gaps. Guards on foot cannot cover kilometres of fence line and cable route at night, fixed cameras miss anything outside their view, and drone security is usually sold as piloted flight hours rather than an integrated system. KIR sells the coordination layer: patrols, detection, alerts and guard dispatch in one platform. Local presence is a structural advantage. The Mining Charter and mines' social and labour plans push procurement towards capable suppliers from host communities. Regulation is a second barrier to entry: SACAA Part 101 certification and the safety record needed for night and beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations take time to build, and early operators build that record first. The opportunity is already attracting capital. Nigeria's Terra Industries, backed by international venture funds, sells autonomous security to mines and has a deal to supply South African mines. That confirms demand. KIR competes on proximity, a night-first product and a command layer built around the client's own guards. After mining, the same platform extends to other high-value sites exposed to cable and infrastructure theft: rail corridors, power infrastructure, logistics hubs and industrial parks.