- A startup founded by former teenage drone racing champions won a US Army contract worth up to $500 million for its FPV attack drones
- This marks the Pentagon’s largest ever small drone contract, which runs through 2031, even as it struggles to accept Chinese-built drones and components with a much smaller manufacturing base
- This contract allows Neros to push for a 250,000 square meter factory targeting one million drones annually by 2028
Founded in 2023 by former teenage drone-racing prodigies Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, Neros Technologies has won a US Army indefinite-delivery contract worth up to $500 million for its Archer FPV attack drones.
The contract runs until June 2031 and is among the largest of its kind. It comes on the back of tens of thousands of deliveries to Ukraine under a multinational drone coalition contract. Neros has an office in Kiev supporting the country’s war effort, with the Archer serving as a Chinese component-free alternative to the cheap drones that dominate the market elsewhere.
It marks one of the Pentagon’s biggest commitments yet to the cheap, expendable aircraft that Ukraine’s war has turned into the decisive weapon of modern ground combat and, increasingly, in the airspace just above it.
What is Neros’ Archer Drone?
The Archer drone is arguably the most successful American-made budget FPV drone to date.
With two years of Ukrainian frontline use, deliveries of over a thousand per month and cumulative shipments in the tens of thousands, Neros has a record that no other American manufacturer comes close to matching on volume alone.
The Archer is an 8-inch quadcopter that carries a 4.5-pound payload over 12 miles, built entirely without Chinese components: a rare mix that put the Neros on the Pentagon’s Blue UAS approved list and earned it Chinese sanctions.
The deal for Neros’ Archer stems from the Army’s Purpose-Built Attritable Systems (PBAS) program, which selected it last November as one of three primary manufacturers tasked with pushing modular FPV drones down to the division level, and it lands amid a service-wide procurement swing: Army officials say they intend to increase annual purchases of 50 drones to at least two million over the course of at least two years.
Neros hopes not only to ride the wave, but to catch the bulk of it: The endeavor, which started with 30 basement-built drones that the founders hand-delivered to Ukraine for testing, is now aiming considerably higher, with the US military vouching for its ambitions.
There’s a reason for that: Nero’s is the closest the US has to an answer to Chinese dominance in the industry. This year it occupied Project Millennium, a 250,000-square-foot Los Angeles facility about 100 times its previous footprint, and it has publicly committed to reaching 1 million drones a year by 2028.
If the promise holds, Neros would single-handedly increase current U.S. drone capacity about tenfold: One estimate for 2025 puts total U.S. production capacity at approximately 100,000 units per year.
So far, the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance initiative, a roughly $1.1 billion initiative aimed at fielding about 300,000 low-cost attack drones by the end of 2027, is clashing with the fact that most American-made FPVs cost multiples of the roughly $5,000 per drone. unit that the military currently wants to pay.
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