Looks like someone wants to unleash drone dominance.
Yesterday, the FPV phenoms from El Segundo turned things up a notch big-time with Project Millennium: A new 250,000-square-foot factory down the road in Torrance, CA, where they’ll ramp up production of their Archer drones to a million a year.
If you were wondering what they were planning to do with that $75M Series B last November (and the $121M they’ve raised so far), now you know.
Big buzz: Neros, founded in 2023 by Olaf Hichwa and Soren Monroe-Anderson, has capitalized on the drone dominance mania in a big way, especially with their Archer FPV:
- Archer is a quadcopter FPV free of Chinese components down to the chip level that costs a couple thousand bucks (~$2,000).
- Neros has a few variants of the Archer: A five-inch, an eight-inch, a ten-inch, and even a fiber-optic one with Kela Technologies, announced in December.
- In February, they won a contract to send 6,000 drones to Ukraine, and in November, they landed another to supply the Marine Corps with 8,000 Archer Strike drones.
- The company has also been tapped for the US Army’s Purpose Built Attritable System (PBAS).
Staying local: With Project Millennium, they’re gunning to produce enough drones to fill even bigger contracts, and, according to the company, “create a drone industrial base that is competitive with China.”
- The factory will have 250,000 square feet of manufacturing space, a massive jump from their current 15,000-square-foot facility in El Segundo, where they currently produce 2,500 per month.
- They doubled down on LA because of the “extraordinarily high talent density for aerospace,” and, “frankly, just speed,” Neros’ Head of Finance Felix Pomerantz told Tectonic.
- The startup is planning to move into the new space in the next month and is aiming to pump out 100,000 drones within the first year.
“Every drone that comes off the line is spoken for: We try to build the stock, but demand invariably outstrips supply,” Pomerantz said. “We’re ramping up as fast as we can to try to move to a world where, down to the unit level, somebody can, almost like Amazon, order ten Archers, 1,000 Archers, or 10,000 Archers, and we’ve got them ready to go. That’s sort of Nirvana.”
Given that the Pentagon is looking to buy over 300,000 small drones under the Drone Dominance Program, that capacity could pay off quick.