The defense tech pond-hopping is continuing in full force.
On Tuesday, Virginia-based eVTOL, drone, and avionics holding company AIRO announced that their Phoenix, Arizona, facility has pumped out the first US-made batch of their Danish subsidiary’s flagship Group 1 ISR drone, the RQ-35 Heidrun.
On a roll: Founded back in 2005, AIRO has rolled up quite a portfolio of aerospace businesses across the eVTOL, avionics, and drone sectors:
- In 2020, they acquired Aspen Avionics to bring comms, navigation, displays, and other aviation electronic components under their wing.
- They merged with Texas-based eVTOL company Jaunt Air Mobility in 2022, with eyes on both defense and commercial applications.
- That same year, they snapped up Danish drone-maker Sky-Watch, which, since Jaunt is still pre-revenue and drones are rather in vogue, has been their most successful business unit.
- AIRO’s clearly been pretty hot on European drone companies. Last month, they launched a transatlantic joint venture with Nord Drone Group, a Ukrainian holding company focused on combat UAVs, to manufacture strike drones in the US.
Watch out: Sky-Watch’s flagship product, the RQ-35, has been a big-time growth driver for AIRO, which went public in June. In the third quarter this year, Sky-Watch’s drone deliveries made up the bulk of AIRO’s revenue, and they’re expecting to wrap up the year with $20M in drone orders in Q4.
The RQ-35s that Ukraine and European NATO countries are placing big orders for are currently made in Sky-Watch’s factory in Denmark, but AIRO is hoping that some Arizona sun will make them just as popular on this side of the pond.
(Heid)Running the table: Sky-Watch’s RQ-35 Heidrun has been in especially high demand in Ukraine, where it’s been deployed since 2022. AIRO’s betting that putting a ‘Made in America’ sticker on these combat-proven drones will be their ticket to big league contracts stateside.
- The RQ-35 is a hand-launched, single-operator ISR drone with a roughly 30-mile range and a flight time of up to 150 minutes.
- AIRO says the RQ-35 features “robust encryption, adaptive frequency hopping, and integration of external data sources for navigation and targeting,” allowing it to “maintain mission integrity in GPS/GNSS-denied and EW-contested environments.”
- The RQ-35s produced in AIRO’s Arizona facility were “built to the same specifications as those produced at AIRO’s Denmark facility,” the company said in a statement.
Boosting production in the Grand Canyon State doesn’t mean Sky-Watch is forgetting its European roots, especially when, as Ukraine’s military advisor to NATO said on Tuesday, the alliance needs to arm itself with “as many drones as bullets.”
“Production has been growing at our Sky-Watch facility in Denmark to meet increasing global demand, and Denmark will continue to serve as our European hub for the RQ-35,” AIRO told Tectonic via email. “In parallel, we are standing up and expanding U.S. manufacturing capabilities to support domestic and allied defense needs, ensuring rapid delivery from home soil and advancing Blue UAS certification.”