Cellebrite Locks Down SkySafe as Its Only Drone Forensics Partner, Betting Big on Counter-Drone Data - DroneXL

Cellebrite has become the exclusive digital forensics partner to SkySafe, expanding a relationship the two companies first built out through Cellebrite’s March 2026 acquisition of SCG Canada. The deal, announced Tuesday, ties Cellebrite’s mobile-device extraction platform directly into SkySafe’s drone detection and airspace intelligence feeds, giving investigators a single workflow that spans what a drone was doing in the sky and what’s stored on the device itself. Cellebrite (Nasdaq: CLBT) builds digital forensics tools used by more than 7,000 law enforcement, defense, and enterprise customers worldwide to extract and analyze data from phones and other devices in roughly 3 million investigations a year, according to the company. SkySafe runs a cloud-based drone detection platform that tracks and classifies unmanned aircraft activity in real time, then hands investigators the flight history to work with. THE PARTNERSHIP MERGES FLIGHT DATA WITH PHONE FORENSICS INTO ONE CASE FILE Investigators chasing drone incidents typically work two separate problems: what the drone was doing (flight path, altitude, launch point, pilot location) and what’s recoverable from any seized hardware or associated devices (photos, telemetry logs, app data, communications). Cellebrite and SkySafe are merging those into one pipeline. SkySafe supplies the real-time and historical flight data; Cellebrite supplies the extraction and decryption layer for whatever devices the investigation turns up. “This partnership bridges the critical and often life-saving divide between digital forensics and real-time intelligence,” said Shiven Ramji, Cellebrite’s President of Products and Technology, in the companies’ announcement. “By working closely with SkySafe, we can help empower organizations to protect their communities, safeguard infrastructure and respond to emerging threats with unprecedented speed and clarity.” SkySafe founder and CEO Grant Jordan framed the deal around the airspace-intelligence side of the equation. “Effective drone investigations begin with trusted airspace intelligence,” Jordan said. “Together with Cellebrite, we’re helping agencies and organizations detect, analyze and act on drone activity using comprehensive forensic data that supports both immediate response and long-term investigations.” SKYSAFE HAS BEEN BUILDING TOWARD THIS FOR YEARS SkySafe isn’t new to institutional partnerships. DroneXL covered SkySafe’s strategic alliance with Motorola Solutions in April 2025, which piped SkySafe’s drone-detection feeds into Motorola’s command-center software, the same 911 dispatch platform that runs in more than 60% of North American public-safety agencies. SkySafe has also picked up institutional customers directly, including a February 2026 deal to install its drone detection system at the University of Louisiana Monroe. The Cellebrite deal lands in a counter-drone market that’s been consolidating fast this year. Motorola Solutions bought Israeli counter-drone company D-Fend Solutions for $1.5 billion in June, and Bridgepoint has reportedly been shopping counter-drone firm MyDefence for around $1 billion. Cellebrite locking in SkySafe as its exclusive drone forensics partner reads as a similar bet: own a piece of the pipeline before a competitor does. DRONEXL’S TAKE Notice what word is doing the heavy lifting in this press release: exclusive. Cellebrite isn’t just adding SkySafe as a data source among several, it’s locking the door behind it. That’s a meaningful signal about where Cellebrite thinks the money is. Phone forensics is a mature, commoditized market. Drone forensics, tying flight telemetry to a specific device and a specific investigation, is still wide open, and Cellebrite wants to own the connective tissue before Axon, Motorola, or someone else builds the same bridge with a different detection vendor. The public framing here is all threat detection and public safety, which is real, but it’s worth sitting with the flip side too. Every one of these partnerships expands the amount of drone activity that gets logged, correlated, and made searchable by law enforcement. That’s exactly the kind of infrastructure DroneXL has warned about before: legitimate hobbyist and commercial flights get swept into the same surveillance data pipeline built to catch bad actors, with no clear line drawn between the two. A university installing SkySafe to watch for actual threats and a police department cross-referencing every drone flight near a protest with Cellebrite’s forensic tools are using the same underlying system. Watch whether this partnership stays confined to genuine threat response, explosive plots, unauthorized incursions near critical infrastructure, or creeps into routine surveillance of legal Part 107 and recreational flights, the same mission creep this industry has already seen with Remote ID enforcement. Source: Cellebrite DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.