America's mass-produced FPV drones — from teenage drone racers to a $2.5B defense company
HQ: El Segundo, CA, United States | Founded: 2023 | Employees: ~200-300 (est.) | Stage: Late Stage VC ($2.5B valuation) | Website: https://www.neros.tech
Neros was founded in 2023 by Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, two former professional FPV drone racers who met at a 2017 drone-racing competition in Muncie, Indiana. Monroe-Anderson, around 20 years old at the time, walked into the Pentagon with Hichwa to pitch drones they had built themselves — an approach that matched the lesson of Ukraine's battlefield: cheap, attritable, mass-produced drones were beating exquisite platforms.
The company designs, manufactures, and sells American-made FPV strike drones and interceptors from a 250,000-square-foot factory in El Segundo, California. Its flagship Archer drone costs roughly $2,000 per unit with a range of about 20km, and in 2025 Neros became the first company to place an FPV drone on the Pentagon's Blue UAS list — letting the Department of War buy and field it without lengthy approvals. In 2026 it won up to $500 million in U.S. Army contracts to field American FPV drones at scale, secured Marine Corps contracts for the Archer Strike platform, and supplies systems to Ukraine, where Russian forces have reportedly deployed Neros drones against their own manufacturers' homeland — a dynamic that led Russia to sanction the company.
Capital scaled with the mission: a $35M Series A (March 2025) led by Vy Capital with Founders Fund, NEO, and Sequoia Capital; a $75M Series B (November 2025) led by Sequoia Capital with Interlagos participation, landing in The New York Times' profile of 'the 20-somethings who raised $121 million to build military drones'; and a $250M Series C (August 2026) led by Sequoia Capital and American Strategic Technology Fund with Interlagos, MANTIS Venture Capital, and Thiel Capital — tripling valuation to $2.5B and funding the ramp toward a million units a year, plus new products including Archer AI (multi-drone control), Marksman, and Bandit (counter-UAS interceptor).
Neros is the archetype of post-Ukraine American defense manufacturing: two teenage drone racers who reached the battlefield before the boardroom, building $2,000 FPV strike drones at a pace traditional primes cannot match. The company's trajectory — $35M Series A to $75M Sequoia-led Series B to $250M Series C at $2.5B in 17 months — tracks the Pentagon's own pivot to attritable mass over exquisite platforms, capped by a $500M Army program and first-mover Blue UAS listing. The bear case is real too: Russia sanctioned Neros (a badge of honor in this market), unit economics at 'a million drones a year' are unproven, and Anduril plus a wave of VC-funded drone startups are racing for the same contracts. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire calling them the 'Toyota of defense drones' is the bull thesis in one line — the question is whether mass production at automotive cadence survives contact with the defense procurement cycle.
Category: Aerospace & Defense Startups
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