Drone industry news from UASFeed — procurement awards, defense primes and startups, funding rounds, and the business of uncrewed systems.
Bloomberg reports the Army will buy at least $400M of AeroVironment's Locust counter-drone lasers — the Pentagon's first production contract for a directed-energy system beyond the prototype phase — sending AVAV up ~8-9% and turning the E-HEL program of record from negotiation into recurring revenue.
Read the story →The Army wants a Coyote Launcher-compatible interceptor that can kill Group 2/3 drones at 16+ km for under $150,000 a round, with industry responses due August 20.
JIATF-401's vetted C-UAS Marketplace, built by startup Kaizen under a $15M contract, has processed $21M in purchases and added the UK and Romania as allied buyers while linking to the Foreign Military Sales Fast Lane.
Nineteen finalists are trucking 120 attack drones apiece to Fort Carson this August, the live-fire elimination round of a $1.1B Pentagon program racing toward a 200,000-drone fleet by 2027.
The Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital signed a conditional loan of up to $820 million with Performance Drone Works on July 31, 2026, to mass-produce propulsion, power/control, and vision-system components for Group 1/2 drones industry-wide.
SEC filings show Israeli drone-robotics firm XTEND and Nasdaq-listed JFB Construction advancing toward a $1.5B all-stock reverse merger that would list XTEND AI Robotics as XTND, as XTEND also closes its Atlas acquisition and lands a spot in a $1B Pentagon drone program.
At Farnborough 2026, Ukraine's state defense industry unveiled a Liutyi variant carrying four wing-mounted missiles, each with a roughly 20 kg warhead — reframing a drone known for one-way refinery strikes as a reusable, multi-shot standoff weapon with a decoy mode.
Autonomy startup Saronic and Korean shipbuilding giant Samsung Heavy Industries have partnered to fuse USV autonomy with high-volume yard capacity, feeding Saronic's Port Alpha megashipyard in Texas and its Franklin, Louisiana yard.
Sila's $300M round scales a Moses Lake plant from 2 GWh toward 250 GWh of silicon-carbon anode — the component that sets the endurance-versus-payload trade on every small UAS. Federal records show DOE has been funding the same plant since 2019. No drone customers are named.
Skydio's X10, Dock for X10 and R10 joined the Blue UAS Cleared List on 23 July 2026, making its entire lineup cleared and the Dock the first Blue UAS-cleared drone-as-first-responder system — unlocking Byrne JAG, COPS and HSGP grant money just as the list itself moves from DIU to DCMA.
BAE Systems unveiled Brontanax at Farnborough on July 22, 2026 — the UK's first uncrewed autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft, self-funded to a finished prototype before the government committed £300 million and a 2027 first flight.
Doodle Labs says it is exploring US and European production within two years to feed surging demand for jam-resistant mesh radios — the scarce connective tissue deciding whether Western drone mass survives contested spectrum.
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