The drone dollars keep on coming.
Yesterday, California-based drone hotshot Skydio announced a $110M Series F, boosting its valuation from $2.5B after its 2024 Series E extension to an eye-watering $4.4B.
The raise comes exactly a month after the company snagged a $52M US Army contract for 2,500 of its X10D small-UAS—the largest sUAS order from a single vendor in Army history. Not a bad vote of confidence for investors.
Sky high: In case you’ve been living under a rock, Skydio has become the largest US drone manufacturer since it was founded by MIT robotics researchers Adam Bry (CEO), Abraham Bachrach (CTO), and Matt Donahoe in 2014, when US-made drones were just a twinkle in the Pentagon’s eye.
“If you roll back 12 years, basically all drones and drone components were made in China,” Bry said on the Sourcery podcast. “We made a very contrarian bet in 2014 when we started US manufacturing.”
Big buzz: Safe to say that bet’s paid off.
The company has since deployed over 60,000 of its drones to more than 3,800 customers, including every branch of the US military, 45 state transportation agencies, over 1,200 US public safety agencies, and 29 allied nations, putting its annual revenue in the hundreds of millions.
That ubiquity has made Skydio pretty attractive to investors:
- In November 2024, the company added a whopping $170M extension to the $230M Series E it raised in 2023, bringing its valuation to $2.5B.
- Counting the $110M Series F, the company has raised a cool ~$951M, now at a $4.4B valuation. Cha-ching.
Fan favorite: Skydio’s X10D Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) drone has been a particularly hot commodity.
- The drone has a top speed of 45mph, a sub-40-second deployment time, and can fly autonomously (no GPS) using onboard AI and six navigation cameras with 360-degree visibility that map terrain in real time and maintain flight in jammed environments.
- The X10D is also on the Blue UAS Cleared List and, according to the company, can be built in nine minutes at its Hayward, California, facility. Skydio’s also set to triple production in 2026.
- On top of the $52M Army contract last month, Skydio’s X10D was tapped for the Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record in 2022, with a base-year value of $20.2M and a five-year production OTA of nearly $100M.
- In 2025, the Army began fielding the X10D and selected the company for Tranche 2 of the SRR program, making it the only vendor to span both tranches of the program.
- This month, Skydio also snagged a $9M+ order from US Air Forces Central (USAFCENT) to deploy its Skydio Dock and X10D drone to US airbases in the Middle East.
“[The X10D] is the perfect ‘hunter’ to find targets for ‘killer’ one-way attack drones and other munitions to strike, a tactic we’ve already seen in Ukraine,” Bry wrote on X after the $52M Army contract.
Growing up: Despite the $110M raise, Skydio says its need for venture capital is dropping as its revenue grows—hence the lower funding round than the Series E, but at a higher valuation.
“The most significant fact in our Series F is how little we are raising,” CEO Adam Bry said on the Sourcery podcast. “Despite investor demand to put substantially more into the company…our capital needs are rapidly decreasing.”
But it does give them some more cash to expand their capacity to meet that demand, both from the Pentagon and a whole bunch of law enforcement agencies.
After the raise, Skydio announced plans to invest $3.5B in the US over the next five years to expand manufacturing capacity, speed up R&D, and bolster its domestic supply chains, which they say will direct more than $1B to domestic suppliers.
What do they say about a rising tide?