It’s been a busy past few days for the weekend warriors over at Skydio.
Yesterday, the US Army tapped California-based drone-maker Skydio to deliver 2,500 of its X10D small-UAS in a $52M contract, the largest sUAS order from a single vendor in Army history. The company said it moved from bid to award in under 72 hours.
Who said the military can’t move fast enough?
Sky high: Skydio is a bit of a household name in the drone world. Founded all the way back in 2014 by Adam Bry, Abe Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe, the company has since deployed its small drones with every branch of the US military, police departments nationwide, and 29 allied nations around the world.
The company’s been a hit with customers and investors alike:
- In November 2024, the company added a whopping $170M extension to the $230M Series E it raised in 2023, bringing its valuation to $2.5B.
- In total, the company has raised a cool $841M in funding. Cha-ching.
Hot commodity: Skydio’s X10D Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) drone—2,500 of which the Army’s getting its hands on under the new $52M order—has been a fan favorite.
- The drone has a top speed of 45mph, a sub-40-second deployment time, and can fly autonomously (no GPS) using onboard AI and six navigation cameras with 360-degree visibility that map terrain in real time and maintain flight in jammed environments.
- The X10D is also on the Blue UAS Cleared List and, according to the company, can be built in nine minutes at their Hayward, California, facility.
And this ain’t Skydio’s first rodeo with the Army.
- In 2022, the service tapped Skydio for the Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record, with a base-year value of $20.2M and a five-year production OTA of nearly $100M.
- In 2025, the Army began fielding the X10D and selected the company for Tranche 2 of the SRR program, under which Skydio delivered the drones to Transformation in Contact (TiC) units. Skydio’s the only vendor to span both tranches of the SRR program.
“X10D was sharpened by hard lessons in Ukraine and close iterative feedback with our soldiers through initiatives like the Army’s Transformation in Contact,” Skydio CEO Adam Bry wrote on X yesterday. “It is the perfect ‘hunter’ to find targets for ‘killer’ one-way attack drones and other munitions to strike, a tactic we’ve already seen in Ukraine.”
“The kind of capability that we’re delivering would have cost millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars per system,” he added in an interview on Fox. “For that $52M, you’d be talking about tens, maybe hundreds of systems, and with Skydio, we’re talking about thousands. This has never really before been possible to get so much capability into something so small.”