It’s been a big month for Alabama-based drone maker Performance Drone Works (PDW). Weeks after opening a new 90,000 sq ft factory in Huntsville, the company announced earlier this week that it’s won a $20.9M contract under the Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative—PDW’s third contract with TiC so far.
Need for speed: PDW, formed in 2018, was born out of the Drone Racing League (basically F1 for drones). In case you’ve been living under a rock, drones that go super fast have become pretty important off the racing circuit since then, and the company pivoted hard to defense to meet the DoD’s need for speed(y drones).
They have two main offerings on the drone front:
- C100 Heavy-Lift Quadcopter: PDW’s flagship product, a medium-range and modular reconnaissance quadcopter with a 10lb payload and a range of about 6-9 miles.
- AM-FPV (Autonomous Micro FPV Drone): A tiny short-range FPV drone built for ISR and strike. It’s super small, super speedy, and easily packable.
Under their new $20M TiC contract, PDW will supply the Army units within the 18th Airborne Corps and US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) with a bunch of those C100s. With their new factory able to pump out 350 C100s and 5,000 AM-FPVs a month, that should make a certain drone-crazed Secretary of War quite happy.
They’ll also supply the Army with three modular Multi-Mission Payloads (MMP) loaded onto the C100 that will:
- Enable GPS-denied operations.
- Extend drone-to-drone and beyond line of sight (BLOS) communications.
- Identify and attack enemy signals of interest.
Moving fast: The Army’s Transformation in Contact (TiC) initiative, launched by Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in 2023, pushes new technology out to soldiers super-fast for real-time field testing. The goal is to give companies immediate feedback so they can adapt their tech based on end-user demands.
As the Army’s CTO and the man in the middle of the TiC effort, Alex Miller, told Tectonic in a recent Q&A, “Instead of going through a bespoke process where people who aren’t in the fight or in the field write requirements and make purchasing decisions, we take a bunch of commercial and military tech and give it directly to units, and let our acquisition professionals and requirements writers engage directly with our soldiers.”
TiC check: Given that PDW had already won over $15.3M in TiC contracts to field the C100 with Army units across INDOPACOM, EUCOM, and CENTCOM, it’s safe to say the feedback from the field has been good.
“We’re able to see feedback against a variety of different users and instill that into our manufacturing line and quickly get updates to users,” PDW CEO Ryan Gury told Tectonic in an interview. “It’s within months—it’s unbelievable, and all that allows us to extend our value, reliability, and modularity.”
That fancy new factory doesn’t hurt either. “Scale is a huge portion of our value, and we’re able to deliver low-cost assets that offer much more lethality at scale than typical,” he added. “We’ve also placed our engineering team alongside the manufacturing lines, so we’ve assembled our factory alongside the TiC initiative. Our rate of change and speed to the customer is what we believe to be industry-leading.”
Given that the Army’s demand for drones doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, PDW is dead set on deepening its relationship with what Gury calls “the best customer in the world.”