Neros is turning things up a notch.
Earlier this week, the California-based drone startup announced that it has scored a multi-million-dollar delivery order contract from the US Marine Corps for thousands of its Archer drones. Plus, most of the FPVs will have a mini-warhead attached to make them lethal.
Big buzz: Neros’ Archer FPV quadcopter is popular with the US military for a few reasons:
- 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.
- Neros has focused on resilience to electronic warfare, engineering and building jam-resistant radios and ground stations in-house.
- They offer a comprehensive hands-on training program with deliveries, helping operators get up to speed and field drones faster.
- Its Archer Strike kamikaze drone with a munition payload (made by Kraken Kinetics) is approved for use by the Marine Corps.
- And most importantly, they can produce at scale—Neros told Tectonic it can currently pump out about 2,500 drones per month and is expanding its capacity to make more.
Drone dollas: Under the Marine Corps contract, Neros co-founder and CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson told Tectonic that the company will deliver “thousands of systems,” but couldn’t get into specifics.
Luckily, at the T-REX event at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, in August, USMC officials announced plans to order about 8,000 FPV drones from Neros for $17M to extend the lethal range of its infantry formations. Monroe-Anderson said those numbers were in the right ballpark for the final contract.
Order up: Delivering on a contract of that size is a tall order, but Neros has a track record to back it up. In February, they won a major contract to send 6,000 drones to Ukraine within six months, the highest rate for any US producer to date.
“We used that contract as one of the large factors in ramping up our production rate, and it let us kind of establish a very nice baseline,” Monroe-Anderson told Tectonic. “It’s one of the reasons why we expect to be able to deliver on this Marine Corps contract in only a few months.”
Output aside, making stuff that works is pretty important for operators, too. In July, the New York Times reported that Neros’ Archer was “one drone [that] stood out” at a DIU-organized field testing event in Alaska, writing that the drone “managed to hover about 10 feet over the soldiers’ heads, despite their jamming equipment.”
And with some big talk coming out of the Pentagon about large-scale drone orders—including a reported plan to buy up at least 30,000 drones in the next few months—Neros might have some more suitors soon.
“There is no other company in America that has proven the production ramp that we have, especially in the FPV space,” Monroe-Anderson told Tectonic. “This is a high quantity contract compared to anything that’s come before it, but we think we’ll be able to deliver it very rapidly.”