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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 Departmen
Category: Aerospace & Defense Startups
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