Last week, we said Neros was turning things up a notch. We might’ve jumped the gun—now they’re really turning it up.
Earlier this week, the white-hot drone startup announced it closed $75M Series B. As a cherry on top, they were tapped for the US Army’s Purpose Built Attritable System (PBAS) program.
Not a bad Monday for the boys from El Segundo.
Drone dollars: Neros has clearly caught the eye of a certain Sand Hill Road powerhouse. Sequoia Capital, which led Neros’ $10.9M seed round last year and participated in their $35M Series A in March, came back for more to lead their $75M Series B.
Vy Capital, which led Neros’ Series A, and Interlagos, which participated in it, also returned to the cap table in their Series B. So far (emphasis on so far), they’ve raised a total of $121M.
A lot o’ Archers: After their seed round, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who led the round, told Reuters, “I think Neros is already best designed in the world for their class.” Since then, they’ve been hard at work backing that up, and their Archer FPV drone has quickly become a fan favorite in the US military. Here’s why:
- It’s built without any Chinese components down to the chip level, comes in at around $2,000 per unit, and has a range of about 20km.
- In February, they won a major contract to send 6,000 drones to Ukraine within six months, the highest rate for any US producer at the time. They’ve since built on that contract to expand their presence in Ukraine, opening an office in Kyiv in
- Last week, they won an even bigger $17M contract with the US Marine Corps to deliver around 8,000 Archer Strike drones—kitted out with an explosive payload from Kraken Kinetics—to extend the lethal range of the Marines’ infantry formations.
“Neros is one of the fastest companies in history to be awarded meaningful defense contracts,” Maguire said in the company’s announcement. “It shows how mission critical FPV drones are.”
Ramping up: The company’s track record in scaling production and delivering on large contracts has been a big validating factor for Neros.
“We’re at about 2500 drones per month right now,” Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros CEO and co-founder, told Tectonic last week. “Scaling to 5,000 with our current production line, facility, and supply chain is all completely doable very quickly, but we need the demand to be able to do it.” Needless to say, that demand is arriving en masse.
On top of boosting production for their active contracts, Neros added that they’ll “substantially increase” spending on R&D focused on “future-looking architectures to shape the next generation of autonomous systems,” meaning the Archer and their suite of other drones, radios, and ground control stations have some new friends in the works.
Army of Archers: In case all that wasn’t enough, Neros was named one of three US drone companies tapped for the first phase of the Army’s Purpose Built Attritable System (PBAS) program, buying up low-cost, expendable drones. The PBAS program has a budget of over $36M in 2026, and Neros—which will deliver Archer and Archer Strike drones to the Army—is set to cut off a big slice of that.
Neros is also delivering Flatbow, an upgraded soldier-borne version of their Crossbow Ground Control System, to the Army under the PBAS program.
With the Pentagon planning some large-scale drone orders—especially the Army’s reported plan to buy up at least 30,000 drones in the next few months and millions over the next few years—it’s looking like Neros could have plenty more suitors lining up soon.