If there is one thing that will define Fall 2025 in the defense tech world, it’s partnerships. Yesterday, edge computing company Armada announced that they’ve inked a deal with drone giant Skydio to “equip federal, state, and local agencies with the ability to capture and process drone intelligence in real time,” even in jammed environments.
Basically, that means that intelligence and info that Skydio’s widely deployed drones collect can now be processed immediately on Armada’s edge compute platform—Armada Edge Platform (AEP)—and in its ruggedized data centers, called Galleon.
“Working with Armada gives our customers the ability to run advanced analytics at the edge, ensuring they have the intelligence they need even when connectivity is limited, or adversaries attempt to disrupt operations,” Co-Founder & CEO of Skydio Adam Bry said in a statement.
Armada CEO Dan Wright added that his company’s compute should massively speed things up on the front line: “By pairing Skydio’s autonomous flight capabilities with Armada’s deployable compute and Marketplace, we enable agencies to process and act on drone intelligence in real time—no matter how contested the environment.”
Up in the air: Armada and Skydio are both giants in their respective games, but let’s kick things off with the fun flying stuff.
Skydio was founded all the way back in 2014 by Adam Bry, Abe Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe, and since then has deployed UAS to every branch of the DoD and to police departments and allied militaries around the world.
- Last fall, the company raised a whopping $426M Series E, bringing its valuation to $2.5B according to Pitchbook data.
- In total, the company has raised $841M in funding. Jealous.
- Its drones are used in everything from policing, to the Army’s short-range reconnaissance program, to frontline operations in Ukraine.
- According to Obviant data, the company has won a total of $81.6M in prime contracts and $123.2M in subcontracts. Not too shabby.
Skydio has a whole range of drones that are designed to fly autonomously (i.e., with very little human-in-the-loop), but their specialty is reconnaissance and surveillance—that’s why the Armada compute glow-up could be such a game changer. Data is only as relevant as the speed at which you can process it, or so the saying goes.
Plug it in: Armada isn’t doing too badly for itself, either. The company was founded back in 2022 to fix a pretty gnarly problem: AI is changing the way that we fight wars, but it requires a shit-ton of compute. And that computing power is pretty damn hard to find on the frontline, especially when you don’t have a solid comms link to a centralized data center.
Armada’s suite of edge computing solutions seeks to address this.
- The company produces modular, ruggedized “data center[s] in a box” called Galleon (think a data center in a shipping container), which comes in four different sizes.
- They’ve also got a platform for connected assets (like Starlink and sensors) called Atlas and a marketplace for edge computing applications, software, and hardware.
And the idea has been hugely popular with investors: This summer, the company raised a sweet $131M funding round from backers including Founders Fund, Shield Capital, Lux Capital, Overmatch, and Pinegrove. That brought total funding to over $200M, according to CEO Dan Wright.
They’ve also inked partnerships with Starlink and Second Front, and have contracts with the US Navy and across the commercial sector (they’re big on oil rigs).
Better together: The two companies say this new partnership will reduce reliance on cloud data centers for police and military units when using Skydio’s drones, especially when GPS and comms are cut. Here’s what they say the team-up will be good for:
- Disaster response and frontline tactical ops, where connectivity is low.
- Autonomous patrol—Armada’s computing can help detect credible threats.
- Critical infrastructure inspection—especially in the middle of nowhere.
- Precision mapping and tactical recon.
And the partnership has already been put to the test—according to Armada, Skydio drones plugged into Armada compute capabilities have been used by the “Alaska Department of Transportation for rapid damage assessment and infrastructure monitoring in extreme conditions.”