Performance Drone Works

Performance Drone Works

Performance Drone Works designs and builds small unmanned aircraft for US military and public safety customers from Huntsville, Alabama. It came out of the Drone Racing League’s engineering network and was co-founded by FPV engineers and special operations veterans — a lineage that shows in a product line built around cheap, modular airframes rather than exquisite ones. James Slider became chief executive in early 2026; co-founder Ryan Gury moved to chief innovation officer. Its Drone Factory 01, a 90,000-square-foot plant opened in Huntsville in 2025, is where the company’s scaling case rests.

Key Products

C100 — the flagship Group 2 quadcopter, flown for ISR, electronic warfare and strike, in defense and public safety variants. It carries PDW’s modular Multi-Mission Payload suite and has drawn every one of the company’s confirmed Army awards.

Attritable Multirotor (AM) — a strike drone that PDW moved into production in March 2026, offered with 5-inch, 7-inch and 10-inch arm configurations on a common payload interface. This is the platform aimed at the high-volume one-way attack market, and it is where PDW’s growth thesis increasingly sits.

CORE and SIM — mission planning software and an operator training simulator, plus a range extension kit and an anti-jam radio.

Business and Financial Position

PDW is private. Crunchbase records roughly $135 million raised across three rounds: a $9 million seed in December 2023, a Series A of about $16.4 million, and a Series B of more than $110 million announced on 25 March 2026 led by Ondas, with Hood River, Cedar Pine, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund and Booz Allen Hamilton participating. Ondas had put $35 million in via Series B-3 preferred stock in November 2025. Reported headcount was around 350 by mid-2026.

The largest single commitment is not equity. The Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital signed a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million on 31 July 2026 to expand domestic manufacture of drone propulsion, power, control and vision components for Group 1 and Group 2 aircraft. It is a commitment against conditions, not cash received, and the drawdown schedule is not public.

Confirmed contracts run smaller: about $15.3 million from the Army in December 2024 for 40 C100 bundles with EO/IR sensors and ground control stations, and a $20.9 million Transformation in Contact award in September 2025 for C100s and payloads to 18th Airborne Corps and Army Special Operations units.

Why It Matters

PDW is one of a handful of American firms trying to prove that NDAA-compliant small drones can be built domestically at Chinese-adjacent volumes. The company’s stated capacity of up to 100,000 units a year at Drone Factory 01 comes from its own and Ondas’s releases and has not been demonstrated against delivery records; awards to date are in the tens of millions, not the hundreds.

The clearest test so far went against it. PDW competed in the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Gauntlet I in early 2026 and did not place in the top 11 that received prototype delivery orders, in a competition aimed squarely at the attritable strike segment it has just entered. The $820 million loan commitment says the government wants PDW’s component supply chain to exist. It does not yet say the government is buying PDW’s aircraft at scale.