Powerus may have just rung the bell at the Nasdaq, but they’re not resting on their laurels.
This morning, the newly public drone company announced exclusively to Tectonic that it secured an $82M order for its interceptors —the second, and largest, order under a $90M IDIQ contract awarded by the US Air Force in August.
It’s not often an IDIQ ceiling gets hit—especially in 2 months—but remember: Powerus ($PUSA) went from idea to publicly traded company in a year, so moving fast is kind of their whole thing.
Power play: Now, Powerus couldn’t say what product they’re under contract for, beyond “counter-unmanned aerial systems,” or who the exact buyer is, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots. They have one interceptor on offer, and one IDIQ with a ceiling over $82M.
The company’s first cUAS offering, the Guardian-1, is a compact, six-pound battery-powered interceptor drone.
- It has a cruise speed of 100mph, a top burst speed of 211mph, 10 miles of range, 28 minutes of endurance, and a max altitude of 16,404 feet.
- It uses radar-assisted target designation and a camera-guided final approach, and the company says it scored “hundreds” of confirmed interceptions.
The latest iteration of the interceptor, the Guardian-2, has the same form factor as the first, but with some upgrades.
- Speaking to Tectonic earlier this year, Powerus co-founder and president Brett Velicovich described the interceptor as “our next-generation, semi-autonomous evolution built on lessons learned from real-world deployments and capable of integration into various sensor and radar detection systems that the US government employs globally.”
- The interceptor’s design is “informed by battlefield lessons learned in Ukraine, particularly around counter-UAS tactics, survivability, and rapid iteration,” he added, but the “systems are made and produced in the United States.”
Shoot ‘em down: Powerus’ Guardians have been a hot commodity, especially with the Air Force.
- In May, the US Air Force awarded Powerus a contract to deploy the Guardian interceptors into the Middle East “at scale,” Velicovich told Tectonic at the time, to end customers within the “US Air Force Special Operations community.”
- An undisclosed oil and gas company operating in the region also tapped Powerus in August to provide air defense for critical energy infrastructure under a contract valued at an initial $22.3M.
That’s a pretty good first year on the market, but this bulk buy takes it to another level, and Velicovich is fired up.
“This $82 million order is a powerful validation of that mission,” Velicovich told Tectonic in a statement. “It demonstrates that the military is ready to move at the speed of the threat—and that Powerus is positioned to help lead that transformation. We’re moving fast, building in America, and focused on giving our warfighters the autonomous capabilities they need to win.”
