Industry & Contracts
Drone industry news from UASFeed — procurement awards, defense primes and startups, funding rounds, and the business of uncrewed systems.
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Industry & Contracts
Defense-Tech VC Blows Past Its Own Records: $14.6B in Five Months, and Drones Are Eating the Check
Venture funding into defense and national-security startups hit $14.6B in the first five months of 2026, already crushing 2025's full-year record of $9.6B, as drone and autonomy megarounds from Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic dominate the flow.
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Industry & Contracts
Stark Banks 500M Euros at 3.5B Valuation as Europe Bets Big on Loitering-Munition Mass Production
Berlin's Stark Defence raised ~500M euros (~$570M) at a ~3.5B euro valuation led by Sequoia and Founders Fund, with the NATO Innovation Fund participating, pouring 80%+ into factories to build "thousands of systems per month."
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Industry & Contracts
Ondas Books $40M in June C-UAS and Strike Drone Orders, Q2 Total Tops $150M
Ondas Inc. secured more than $40 million in new defense orders during June 2026 — spanning Counter-UAS platforms, loitering munition systems, and related services — while its UK subsidiary Rotron completed a key flight trial of the SkyLance one-way effector under the UK Ministry of Defence's Project Brakestop.
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Industry & Contracts
AeroVironment: How a Glider Champion Built America's Tactical Drone Empire
From Paul MacCready's human-powered aircraft to a $990 million Switchblade contract and a $4.1 billion BlueHalo merger, AeroVironment has quietly become the backbone of U.S. tactical UAS — and is now reshaping itself into a multi-domain defense-tech mid-prime.
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Industry & Contracts
Anduril Industries: The Software Company Rebuilding the Defense Industrial Base
Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and four co-founders, Anduril Industries has grown from a border-surveillance startup into a $30.5 billion defense technology company producing autonomous systems across air, sea, and ground domains on its Lattice AI platform.
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Industry & Contracts
Baykar: How a Turkish Family Firm Cornered the Global UCAV Export Market
Turkey's Baykar — family-owned, Istanbul-based — built the Bayraktar TB2 from a domestic-independence program into a combat-proven juggernaut with 1.25 million flight hours, agreements with 36 countries, and an estimated 65 percent share of the global UCAV export market.
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Industry & Contracts
DJI Dominates the Drone Market — And Washington Wants It Out
DJI controls over 70% of the global commercial drone market and 90% of consumer sales, yet faces an effective US ban after a cascade of legislative and regulatory actions. Six independent audits have found no evidence of covert data exfiltration — but the structural debate is far from resolved.
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Industry & Contracts
DroneShield: The Counter-UAS Company Redefining Drone Defense at Scale
From a 2014 Virginia startup to an ASX200-listed company with 4,000+ systems deployed in 70 nations, DroneShield has built the counter-UAS industry’s most comprehensive product line—and is now betting that software subscriptions, not hardware sales, define its next decade.
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Industry & Contracts
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems: The Company That Built the Armed Drone Era
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is the private, family-controlled company that built the Predator, Reaper, and Gray Eagle — and is now in production on the FQ-42A, one of the first uncrewed aircraft to carry a fighter designation in U.S. military history.
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Industry & Contracts
Skydio Explained: The Autonomy-First Company Built to Replace DJI in American Defense
Founded by MIT researchers who trained on Google's Project Wing, Skydio built America's leading small-drone platform by betting on AI autonomy before the defense market existed. Congressional bans on Chinese hardware turned that bet into a franchise—then China struck back.
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Industry & Contracts
Wing Aviation, Explained: From Google X Moonshot to 40 Million American Customers
Wing Aviation — Alphabet's drone delivery spinout — holds the first FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate ever issued to a drone company, operates across three continents, and is on course to reach more than 40 million Americans through Walmart by 2027.
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Industry & Contracts
Zipline: How a Drone Startup Became the World's Largest Autonomous Delivery Network
Founded in 2014 to route blood and vaccines around failed road infrastructure in Rwanda, Zipline has logged 100 million autonomous miles, serves 4,000-plus health facilities across seven countries, and is now deploying its second-generation tethered-Droid delivery system in American suburbs.
