- A startup founded by former teenage drone racing champions has won a US Army contract worth up to $500 million for its FPV attack drones.
- It is the Pentagon’s largest small drone contract ever, running through 2031, even though it is saddled with Chinese-made drones and components with a much smaller manufacturing base.
- This contract allows Neros to push for a 250,000 square foot factory targeting one million drones per year by 2028.
Neros Technologies, founded in 2023 by former teenage drone racing prodigies Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, has won an open-ended delivery contract from the US Army worth up to $500 million for its Archer FPV attack drones.
The contract runs until June 2031 and is one of the largest of its kind. This follows tens of thousands of deliveries to Ukraine as part of a multinational drone contract. Neros has an office in kyiv to support the country’s war effort, where the Archer provides a Chinese-component-free alternative to the cheap drones that dominate the market elsewhere.
It’s one of the Pentagon’s biggest commitments yet to cheap, expendable planes, which the war in Ukraine has transformed into the defining weapon of modern ground combat and, increasingly, the airspace just above.
What is Neros’ Archer drone?
The Archer drone is arguably the most capable budget FPV drone made in the United States to date.
With two years of frontline use in Ukraine, deliveries of over a thousand per month, and cumulative shipments in the tens of thousands, Neros has a record that no other U.S. manufacturer comes close to matching in terms of volume alone.
The Archer is an 8-inch quadcopter carrying a 4.5-pound payload beyond 12 miles, built entirely without Chinese components: a rare blend that put Neros on the Pentagon’s list of approved blue UAS and earned it Chinese sanctions.
The deal for the Neros Archer stems from the Army’s Program Attritable Systems (PBAS), which selected it last November as one of three major manufacturers tasked with pushing modular FPV drones up to the platoon level, and it lands in the middle of a service-wide procurement crisis: Army officials say they intend to increase annual drone purchases from about 50,000 to at minus a million in about two years.
Neros hopes to not only ride the wave, but capture its essence: The effort that began with 30 basement-built drones that the founders hand-delivered to Ukraine for testing is now aiming considerably higher, with the U.S. military backing its ambitions.
There’s a reason for that: Neros is the closest solution the United States has to responding to Chinese dominance in the industry. This year, it occupied the Millennium Project, a 250,000-square-foot facility in Los Angeles, roughly 100 times its previous footprint, and it publicly committed to reaching 1 million drones per year by 2028.
If the promise is kept, Neros alone could increase current U.S. drone capacity tenfold: one estimate for 2025 puts total U.S. manufacturing capacity at around 100,000 units per year.
For now, the Pentagon’s roughly $1.1 billion Drone Dominance initiative aimed at deploying some 300,000 low-cost attack drones by the end of 2027 continues to run up against the fact that most U.S.-made FPVs cost several times the roughly $5,000 per unit the military currently wants to pay.
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