The Australian CEO of DroneShield has quit just months after selling almost $50 million worth of shares in the defence tech company, whose share price fell by more than 15 per cent on Wednesday.

DroneShield’s chair has also announced his retirement, after he too sold $12.4 million in shares in November last year.

DroneShield is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and manufactures counter-drone systems for customers around the world.

In an announcement to the market, DroneShield revealed Australian CEO Oleg Vornik would step down as managing director and CEO after more than a decade in the role.

Vornik sold his entire pool of fully paid ordinary shares in DroneShield in 2025, worth $49.5 million, and a number of media appearances he was scheduled to make were cancelled.

He is expected to remain at the company as an adviser for the next three months to support a transition for newly announced managing director and CEO Angus Bean, who has been at DroneShield for a decade and was most recently its chief product officer.

Vornik’s resignation comes less than six months after DroneShield’s US CEO Matt McCrann quit the company, also leading to a drop in the value of its shares.

The company's share price remains up around 280 per cent over the past 12 months.

From first employee to a team of 500

When Vornik joined DroneShield in 2015, he was the startup’s first employee.

The company now has more than 500 workers, and is a member of the ASX200 stock market index.

Vornik said he is “looking forward to taking some time off” and will be “reconnecting with family and friends” before he decides what is next.

“It has been an experience of a lifetime to serve as DroneShield’s CEO,” Vornik said in a statement.

“With over 500 employees across the globe today, I am proud to have led DroneShield during a period of exceptional growth, and to have established the momentum for the next stage.

“Leading a rapidly growing public company from inception has been incredibly demanding.”


Outgoing DroneShield CEO Oleg Vornik (left) with incoming CEO Angus Bean (right). Image: LinkedIn

DroneShield chairman also steps down

DroneShield chairman Peter James also announced he would be retiring from the company’s board and would not seek re-election at its upcoming Annual General Meeting.

James in November last year also sold $12.4 million in shares in the company.

He has chaired DroneShield since it went public in 2016, and will be replaced by Hamish McLennan, the current chair of REA Group and previous CEO of Network Ten.

Bean would step into the CEO role as of Wednesday, DroneShield said.

“Appointing Angus [Bean] to lead DroneShield’s next stage of growth is a natural step in our succession plan, and we are pleased that an executive of Angus’ experience and capability was able to be appointed from within the executive team,” Peter James said in a statement.

“Angus led the development of products that we are best known for in the market, and is the key architect of our current and next generation technologies.

“He has built DroneShield’s 350-plus engineering team and has been a prominent representative of the business to many of our major customers over the years.”

While Vornik, James, and DroneShield director Jethro Marks sold nearly $70 million in shares in late 2025, the firm said this was “unrelated to the growth trajectory of the company, which remains strong”.

In the same month, DroneShield mistakenly announced it had secured $7.6 million in new government contracts.

It later advised the ASX that those contracts were not actually new, but had been “inadvertently marked as new contracts rather than revised contracts due to an administrative error”.

In the weeks following, Vornik did not appear at a scheduled speaking event at the Forbes Australia Business Summit, and a solo speaking engagement hosted by the Australian Computer Society – the publisher of Information Age – was cancelled.