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
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.
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Industry & Contracts
Red Cat's Hellcat sUAS Debuts at Eurosatory — Shaped by Ukrainian Warfighters in the Field
Red Cat Holdings launched the Hellcat small UAS at Eurosatory 2026, a battlefield-refined successor to the Army-fielded Black Widow co-developed with Ukrainian drone operators, featuring a three-camera payload, GPS-denied operation, and 6.8-mile range.
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Industry & Contracts
Drone Insurance Decoded: Liability, Hull, BVLOS, and What Things Cost
Part 107 proves you can fly — it doesn't cover anything when something goes wrong. A structured look at commercial UAS insurance: coverage types, premium ranges by operation, the on-demand policy model, and why BVLOS requires its own specialist approach.
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Industry & Contracts
Airbus and Kratos Unveil U740 Valkyrie at ILA Berlin, Targeting Luftwaffe Service by 2029
Airbus Defence and Space has teamed with Kratos to bring a Europeanized XQ-58A Valkyrie to ILA Berlin as the U740, targeting German Luftwaffe operational use by 2029 — alongside a reveal of the all-European Ravenstorm UCCA concept aimed at the early 2030s.
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Industry & Contracts
Alta Ares Closes €50M, Then Lands Airbus Partnership 48 Hours Later
The two-year-old French counter-drone startup secured a €50M round on June 9, then signed an MoU with Airbus Defence and Space at ILA Berlin on June 11 — giving its Ukraine-tested interceptors a direct path into NATO battle-management networks.
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Industry & Contracts
AeroVironment and Ubiqconn Target Taiwan's Controller Fragmentation Problem
AeroVironment and Taiwan's Ubiqconn Technology have signed an MOU to build a common drone-controller ecosystem for Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, which is pursuing procurement of tens of thousands of domestically produced UAS — and needs a single interface to run all of them.
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Industry & Contracts
PDW Acquires Vanteon to Own Its RF Stack for Contested-Spectrum Operations
Performance Drone Works is buying Rochester-based Vanteon Corporation — 40-plus years of RF and software-defined radio engineering — to bring comms resilience in-house as GPS-denied, spectrum-contested environments become the baseline threat assumption for military small UAS.
