Skydio

Skydio is the only company selected for both Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 of the US Army's Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) programme, the service's first programme embedding reconnaissance quadcopters as standard platoon equipment. On 17 June 2026, the Army awarded Skydio a $52 million contract for 2,500 X10D drones at approximately $20,800 per unit, the largest single-vendor small-UAS order in Army history, with bids closing in under 72 hours. Skydio cites a nine-minute build time per airframe at its Hayward, California facility; comparable prior capability cost several million dollars per system, implying a per-unit price reduction of roughly 50 to 100 times.

In April 2026, USAFCENT awarded Skydio its first overseas deployment contract worth over $9 million, supplying X10D drones and Dock autonomous drone-in-a-box systems to Middle East airbases. That same month Skydio committed $3.5 billion over five years, launching the SkyForge supplier co-location programme with a new factory at five times current size; $1 billion was ring-fenced specifically for US suppliers. Skydio also opened a GPS-denied R&D laboratory in Zurich, led by Davide Falanga with four engineers from ETH Zurich, targeting European qualification.

Skydio has grown from a consumer-drone brand into the dominant US tactical sUAS platform, directly benefiting from the FCC-mandated exclusion of DJI and Autel Robotics from the federal market. The X10D flies without GPS using visual SLAM, making it operational in jammed or denied environments. Skydio's simultaneous expansion into Army platoon supply, Air Force airbase security, and international co-manufacturing positions it as a platform business rather than a single-product supplier, the SkyForge and Zurich investments are the industrial and R&D foundations for that broader ambition.