This investment reflects a strategic alignment between Booz Allen’s expertise in AI, autonomy and defense tech with PDW’s proven, domestically produced drone platforms to accelerate the delivery of mission-critical UAS capable of advanced surveillance, operating in contested environments, and strike missions.

This work aims to directly address the Pentagon’s focus on domestic drone manufacturing and its urgent call for reliable, autonomous drone capabilities at scale. As a domestic manufacturer, PDW designs, engineers, and produces systems at its 90,000-square-foot drone factory in Huntsville and is capable of producing 100,000 drones annually.

“Drones are rapidly reshaping the speed, scale, and economics of modern warfare,” said Randy Yamada, vice president at Booz Allen. “Our investment in PDW reflects a shared focus on accelerating the deployment of mission-ready, resilient, American-manufactured drone capabilities. By aligning advanced autonomy with domestic production, we are making the kinds of capabilities the Department of War needs to stay ahead a reality and directly supporting its Drone Dominance Program.”

“At PDW, we aren’t just creating new capabilities, we’re building the industrial capacity to deliver drones at meaningful scale,” said PDW CEO James Slider. “This means expanding American manufacturing capacity, scaling next-generation engineering teams, and anchoring our supply chain here at home to put the U.S. and its allies in a position of strength. This is the capability gap PDW was built to close and the mission we execute against every day.”

This investment enables Booz Allen to bring its autonomy and digital engineering expertise to bear, developing new solutions that reduce the burden on the operator. It represents a significant commitment to bolstering the U.S. domestic drone manufacturing industry while making a real mission impact for the warfighter at the cost and scale the U.S. military needs.

“Booz Allen invests in companies that deliver mission impact at speed and scale,” said Bryce Pippert, executive vice president at Booz Allen. “PDW’s U.S.-made drone systems are a great fit for our portfolio and our Defense Tech teams who are advancing the next generation of autonomous capabilities.”

Source: Booz Allen

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Developed as part of AV’s holistically integrated C-UAS strategy, Halo_Shield introduces a unique, tile-based layered defense architecture that is open, scalable, and adaptable to today’s evolving threats. The system is designed to support emerging homeland defense priorities by enabling resilient, area-wide protection of high-value U.S. and allied partner assets, including borders, military installations, and other critical infrastructure. AV is currently demonstrating capabilities and has deployed Halo_Shield tiles at select critical sites.

“The character of the air threat has fundamentally changed,” said Wahid Nawabi, chairman, president, and chief executive officer at AV. “Cheap, massed, and coordinated aerial systems are stressing traditional point defenses. Halo_Shield is our answer—a collaborative, modular approach that brings together the best of AV and a trusted supplier ecosystem to close those gaps.”

At the core of Halo_Shield is a mission-tailored, distributed and domain-specific tile architecture—comprising Sentinel, Terrestrial, Nautical, Aerial and Celestial tiles. Each tile delivers a specialized combination of sensors, effectors, and command-and-control capabilities, drawing on technology from AV and its trusted ecosystem of suppliers. The result is a cost-efficient defense architecture that is offense-ready, extends protection beyond point defense and sustains decisive situational advantage in contested battlespaces across air, land, sea and space.

Designed for plug-and-play integration, Halo_Shield is deployable as portable fly-away kits and integrates seamlessly with existing customer sensors, effectors, and command-and-control frameworks—delivering scalable, resilient, area-wide protection with minimal training and personnel demands. Powered by AV_Halo, AV’s unified software platform, the system is purpose-built yet agnostic, designed to incorporate new capabilities while seamlessly integrating with customers’ existing command-and-control systems.

“Halo_Shield is engineered like an edge processing-capable set of tiles for modern air defense,” said Larry Lloyd, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at AV. “Each tile is a self-contained capability that can operate on its own or snap together to build exactly the defense architecture a mission demands. That modularity lets operators scale, adapt, and reconfigure in real time as threats evolve, without redesigning the system or retraining the force. It’s how you move from static point defense to a living, mission-tailored shield.”

Source: AeroVironment

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“This historic raise is a signal to every patriot in Silicon Valley,” said Colby Adcock, CEO and co-founder of Scout AI. “The most important frontier in AI is the physical world, and it should be pursued in service to the men and women who defend this country. Some AI companies are stepping back from defense. We’re stepping up, and we’re bringing on the best engineers in the world for the mission. Come build Fury and ensure American dominance in the age of robots.”

Scout AI is the premier frontier AI lab for war, distinct from defense primes and defense-tech neo-primes focused on manufacturing and integration. Its singular focus is the AI brain for unmanned warfare, translating commander intent into coordinated autonomous action across large, mixed fleets. Fury is built for the tactical edge, enabling layered orchestration from command and control to unmanned systems across air, land, sea, and space.

“Scout AI is exactly the company this moment demands,” said Tyrone Lee, partner at Draper Associates. “As uncrewed systems reshape the battlefield, advantage will go to whoever can orchestrate and command them most effectively.”

Scout AI has made significant progress since its founding 18 months ago. In its first year, the company booked $11 million in contracts with the Department of War, unveiled Ox, its C2-based autonomous vehicle orchestrator, and publicly demonstrated a fully autonomous, end-to-end strike mission executed by AI agents. It has also assembled a 34-person powerhouse team, with deep experience across AI, robotics, and national security.

Collin Otis, CTO and co-founder of Scout AI added, “The U.S. military has been promised true, one-to-many autonomy for years. Fury finally delivers it. We’re deploying this $100 million to massively scale our foundational military AI and multi-agent collaboration to extend Fury’s lead as the most capable AI foundation model for war. That compounding advantage is what makes this moment so important and why we’re moving as fast as we are. Our adversaries are sprinting and we must outpace them.”

The round also saw participation from Decisive Point, Booz Allen Ventures, BVVC, Neman Ventures, Evolution VC Partners, Heraclitus Capital Management, Sigmas Group, Disruptive Founders Fund, and Vaughn Capital Partners.

Source: Scout AI

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This funding provides the strategic capital to move from prototyping to mission-ready, high-Mach platforms, keeping Hermeus on a path to deliver the fastest unmanned aircraft flying today. With the successful flight of Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, supersonic flight is now imminent. The team is now scaling to a fleet of three F-16 scale aircraft, accelerating our path to Mach 3 and starting customer payload integration.

To hit these milestones, Hermeus is growing its prototyping footprint with a new headquarters in El Segundo, California, while the Atlanta facility shifts its focus to production.

“Speed is life for us,” said AJ Piplica, founder and CEO of Hermeus. “This new funding lets us build multiple aircraft at the same time and scale our manufacturing capabilities, adding more hardware richness and robustness to our program. That accelerates our path to ramjet-powered flight. We are grateful for the support of our long-term partners who share our vision of building fast planes fast. Together, we’re bringing scalable, asymmetric capabilities to our national security customers.”

Hermeus is utilizing a hardware-first execution model to shorten timelines from design to deployment. This approach validates sustained flight into the high-Mach regime under operational conditions to meet modern defense aviation challenges.

“We’ve been believers in Hermeus from the start, and we couldn’t be happier to lead this Series C,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “The team is on a clear trajectory to solve a critical capability gap for their customers by building, flying, and iterating at a pace that matches the modern battlefield.”

Source: Hermeus

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ESAero is recognized for its deep engineering expertise, innovative electric and hybrid propulsion capabilities, rapid aerospace prototyping, and AS9100 Certified UAS manufacturing. Operating out of a 32,000 sq. ft. design and prototyping facility and a 53,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in San Luis Obispo, CA, with multiple integration and test facilities in the area, ESAero has expanded its operations to support system testing and advanced product development. ESAero’s culture of technical rigor and rapid innovation also aligns with AV’s mission-focused approach and commitment to developing mission-critical solutions tailored to U.S. Department of War requirements.

“ESAero brings an impressive agility in moving from design to manufacturing, which will accelerate AV’s ability to bridge the gap between conceptual design and manufacturing execution,” said Wahid Nawabi, chairman, president, and chief executive officer at AV. “ESAero’s capabilities are vital to addressing the urgent demands of a fast-growing defense tech market, where emerging needs are driving next-generation innovation and product development. We look forward to welcoming the team to the AV family.”

“Joining AV represents a unique opportunity to amplify the reach and impact of our innovative work and achieve greater success,” said Andrew Gibson, president, CEO and co-founder of ESAero. “By combining ESAero’s engineering and manufacturing capabilities with AV’s unmatched expertise in autonomous systems, we are positioned to advance disruptive aerospace technologies and deliver real, timely value for our customers. I’d like to thank the talented ESAero team for their unwavering dedication, whose efforts have brought us to this pivotal point in our journey.”

The acquisition will further solidify AV’s position as a global defense technology leader spanning air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains and enhance the company’s ability to seamlessly transition from innovative design to advanced manufacturing—a capability critical to addressing the urgent demands of an evolving defense tech market, according to the company.

Source: AV

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Most RF detection systems identify and match signals against a library of known threats. As adversaries field increasingly advanced UAS and rapidly modify existing systems, the volume of unknown threats is growing. Hidden Level’s Power in the Sky continuously monitors the RF environment, identifies novel threats, and immediately translates them into actionable kinematic tracks, the company said.

“The threat landscape has fundamentally changed,” said Brad Garber, COO of Hidden Level. “Adversaries are deploying systems specifically designed to evade library-based detection. Power in the Sky was built for this reality, giving operators the ability to detect and respond to unknown threats before they gain the tactical advantage.”

Power in the Sky is built directly into Hidden Level’s Airspace Monitoring Service, with no additional equipment required. It integrates with optics and command-and-control systems and covers air, ground, and maritime environments delivering awareness that goes beyond traditional drone detection to address the full spectrum of emerging, non-standard threats.

“Power in the Sky highlights the flexibility of Hidden Level’s mission-defined hardware,” said Kevin May, VP of product and programs. “To deploy this capability there’s no rip-and-replace and no new infrastructure. Our systems are built to evolve and deliver substantial new capability through software, extending performance while protecting customer investment.”

Source: Hidden Level

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The partnership will support standardized workflows, democratized access to product data from the component level to the vehicle level, accelerated vehicle post-mission analysis, and improved traceability and trend analysis of historical data across all stages of vehicle assembly and testing.

REMUS vehicles are the world’s leading UUVs and are trusted by more than 30 navies worldwide, including 14 NATO members, for missions such as mine countermeasures, undersea survey, intelligence collection, and environmental sensing. Paired with HII’s proven REMUS UUVs, the ROMULUS USV significantly extends undersea reach by closing anti-submarine warfare sensing gaps and keeping manned platforms at a safer standoff distance. Together, ROMULUS and REMUS deliver a scalable, dual-domain solution across surface and subsurface missions that integrates with manned platforms to enable a hybrid fleet capability.

The Nominal-supported data project is one of several improvements HII is implementing across the REMUS and ROMULUS manufacturing pipeline to augment vehicle production and overall manufacturing capacity.

“The REMUS UUV is a proven, globally deployed platform, and our partnership with Nominal strengthens how we scale and evolve it while accelerating the development of the ROMULUS USV family,” said Eric Chewning, executive vice president of maritime systems and corporate strategy at HII. “By standardizing how we collect and analyze test data, we are shortening feedback loops, improving traceability, and moving faster from testing to delivery — advancing maritime autonomy at a time when it is critical to the security of the U.S. and our allies.”

“Autonomy programs move at the speed of their test-and-learn loop,” said Cameron McCord, CEO and co-founder at Nominal. “To maintain maritime security, autonomy is no longer optional, but necessary — and the HII and Nominal partnership will bring resilient technologies to bear at speed, at scale.”

The partnership builds on a successful pilot completed in 2025 that demonstrated meaningful cycle-time reductions across multiple workflows. During the pilot, teams reduced some analysis tasks from hours to minutes through standardized, automated analysis templates, and cut certain production test steps by approximately half by streamlining data capture and execution on the test floor.

In 2026, HII and Nominal will broaden deployment to support increased REMUS and ROMULUS production by integrating Nominal’s tools across HII’s product lifecycle and manufacturing systems. The focus is on providing engineering, test, and quality teams with a shared, repeatable way to collect, validate, and analyze data — reducing time spent assembling information and increasing time spent on expanding production capacity.

Source: HII

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Modern military operations increasingly depend on unmanned systems, but those systems are only as effective as their ability to receive commands and transmit data. The Crow Industries and Parry Labs integration addresses these vulnerabilities head-on. When one communication pathway is jammed or disrupted, the system can switch communication bands to maintain connectivity. Additional capabilities help protect communications from detection and interference, while enhanced remote control functionality ensures operators maintain control in contested electromagnetic environments.

“Integrating Phantom into Fenris and bringing their UGVs into the GEMMI ecosystem demonstrates how advanced U.S. technologies can work together to deliver immediate operational advantage,” said John “JD” Parkes, CEO of Parry Labs. “This partnership addresses a critical gap in contested environments—ensuring our operators maintain control when adversaries try to deny communications. This is exactly the kind of rapid, mission-focused integration that modern defense demands.”

“This partnership with Parry Labs provides the type of technical capabilities our defense customers have been asking for,” said Dr. James Crowell, founder and CEO of Crow Industries. “Communications switching ensures our Fenris UGVs maintain connectivity regardless of the operational environment and helps reduce the risk of warfighters on the battlefield with state-of-the-art technology.”

The partnership extends beyond keeping individual platforms connected. Crow Industries has also integrated Fenris into Parry Labs’ GEMMI (Ground-based Edge Mission Management Infrastructure), creating a unified command center for coordinating multiple unmanned vehicles across different domains. GEMMI enables commanders to coordinate multiple unmanned vehicles across domains from a unified interface, supporting future autonomous operations.

The collaboration builds on Crow Industries’ momentum developing and deploying Fenris across U.S. and Allied military organizations. The addition of Parry Labs’ proven edge computing capabilities further strengthens Fenris’ position as the leading American-made solution in the critical Group 2 UGV category.

Source: Crow Industries

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The agreement builds on an existing agreement established in 2015 with Malloy Aeronautics (which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2024) who supply their uncrewed all electric logistics platform (T-150) to SURVICE Engineering, who support the US Armed Forces, including the US Marine Corps, with specialist combat equipment including uncrewed logistics platforms.

“The agreement comes at a time when UAS are increasingly important to defense and security, conducting a variety of roles from low-cost logistics to more complex and capable uncrewed systems that can operate alongside crewed combat aircraft.  We look forward to working together with SURVICE Engineering to develop this capability for the rapidly evolving battlespace,” said Anthony Gregory, business development director, BAE Systems FalconWorks.

“Partnering with Malloy, our successes include fielding the TRV-150 to the USMC and US Army and demonstrating use cases beyond logistics, including mine clearing, obscurant deployment, and weaponisation. The agreement with FalconWorks is a logical next step to continue advancing UAS technologies and use cases and we are excited to expand our relationship across the BAE FalconWorks portfolio and look forward to many more successes,” said Greg Thompson, president, SURVICE Engineering.

The new agreement will see BAE Systems and SURVICE Engineering working together to explore opportunities for collaboration across a wider product portfolio of small / tactical UAS. This agreement forms part of a wider BAE Systems strategy to accelerate new possibilities in uncrewed air systems to meet national and international defense and security requirements.

Source: BAE Systems

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“Amentum’s unmanned aerial solutions are designed to ensure the MQ-9 Reaper remains a formidable force in complex, dynamic environments,” said Mark Walter, president of Amentum’s engineering and technology business. “Our experience delivering enhanced mission capabilities and MQ-9 unique operational constructs, such as Satellite Launch and Recovery (SLR), offers innovative versatility and efficiency to meet the U.S. Air Force’s evolving and dynamic mission needs.”

Specifically, Amentum will deploy specialized professionals, weapons loading strategies, and aerospace ground equipment solutions in the U.S. and globally for the MQ-9 Reaper to reinforce combat readiness and training capabilities at designated sites.

“Amentum is uniquely positioned to enhance the operational excellence of the MQ-9 Reaper,” said Amentum senior vice president of modernization and training, Mark Evans. “Our legacy dates back to early systems like the MQ-1 Predator and the RQ-4 Global Hawk, which provided Amentum with deep technical insights and operational proficiency in MQ-9 systems worldwide.”

Source: Amentum

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