Darkhive

Darkhive

Darkhive is a San Antonio defense technology company building small, NDAA-compliant uncrewed aircraft and the software to fly and update them. It was founded in 2021 by John Goodson, chief executive, and Steve Turner, and is veteran-owned. Its stated premise is that US-made small drones have been secure but expensive and hard to use, while the Chinese products soldiers actually find intuitive carry cyber risk the Pentagon will no longer accept — and that closing the usability gap, not the hardware gap, is the harder half of the problem.

That framing explains the product mix: the software is at least as central as the airframes.

Products

Yellowjacket — a roughly eight-inch reconnaissance quadcopter for indoor and outdoor use, aimed at the simplicity and price point of a consumer Mavic.

Obelisk — a larger folding autonomous ISR aircraft, close to four feet across when deployed, reported at 45 minutes of flight time with EO/IR payloads and software that identifies and classifies surface vessels.

Broodbox — the mobile application used to fly Yellowjacket. Redqueen — a mobile app allowing voice control of drones. Fleetforge — a DevSecOps platform for securely building, testing and delivering software updates to uncrewed systems and other edge devices in the field, which is what distinguishes Darkhive from most small-UAS vendors. The company also integrates with the Team Awareness Kit.

Funding and Contracts

Darkhive is private and has raised roughly $55 million: a $4 million seed in 2023, a $21 million Series A in September 2024 led by Ten Eleven Ventures with Crosslink Capital, RTX Ventures and Stellar Ventures, and a $30 million Series B announced in May 2026 led by RTX Ventures, with Draper Associates, Bison Capital, 1011 Ventures, Crosslink, Alamo Angels and Stellar participating.

In December 2025 it won a $49.7 million US Army contract under the Pentagon’s APFIT programme for “Real-Time Command and Control at the Tactical Edge,” made public in March 2026. It is the largest single APFIT award to date, just under the programme’s $50 million statutory cap. At the Series B the company reported about $64 million in contracts secured and said the raise was to fund delivery against those commitments. Revenue is not disclosed.

Why It Matters

Darkhive is a clean test of whether a small US company can displace Chinese hardware in the hands of individual soldiers, which is where the replacement problem is hardest and the price sensitivity highest. Fleetforge is the more interesting asset: an authorised path for pushing software to fielded drones addresses a real constraint on how quickly autonomy can be updated, and the APFIT award being for command and control rather than airframes suggests the Army agrees.

The risk is execution at volume. The company has around $55 million in venture funding and $64 million in contracts, which means the contracts, not the balance sheet, now set the pace — and delivering a $49.7 million programme is a different exercise from winning it. RTX Ventures leading the Series B gives it a prime-adjacent backer, though that cuts both ways in a segment where primes may prefer to buy the capability outright.