AeroVironment

AeroVironment was founded in 1971 by Paul MacCready , the Caltech-trained aeronautical engineer best known for the Gossamer Condor, the first sustained human-powered aircraft. The Pasadena lab spent its early decades on solar planes, electric vehicles, and high-altitude research craft for NASA before pivoting decisively into small military drones in the 1990s. The company is now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, trades on the Nasdaq under AVAV, and is run by Wahid Nawabi, an Afghan-born engineer who took over as chief executive in 2016 after a decade in the firm’s unmanned systems business.

The product line splits cleanly between reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions. The hand-launched RQ-11 Raven is the most-fielded small UAV in US Army history, sold to dozens of allied militaries since the early 2000s. The slightly larger RQ-20 Puma — recently fitted with a GPS-denied autonomy kit developed in response to Ukrainian front-line feedback, where Russian jamming routinely strips small drones of satellite navigation — covers longer-range ISR. The Wasp III handles the miniature end of that range, and the Group-3 JUMP-20, a vertical-takeoff fixed-wing aircraft picked up through the 2021 acquisition of Arcturus UAV, sits at the heavier end. On the strike side sits the Switchblade family: the backpack-portable Switchblade 300, the original tube-launched lethal small UAS, and the heavier Switchblade 600, designed against armoured targets, with roughly 6,000 units now deployed across 55 customer countries. In May 2025 the company unveiled Red Dragon, a new loitering-munition platform that Nawabi has publicly framed as a Replicator-class product, with stated ambitions to build “tens of thousands” of units per month.

Switchblades have become the company’s defining export. The US has supplied the munition to Ukraine in steadily growing tranches since the spring of 2022, and the war has functioned as a live proving ground that has both validated the design and exposed its limits against electronic warfare — feedback that is now visibly shaping subsequent variants and the Puma autonomy retrofit. Beyond Ukraine, the Switchblade has been adopted by the British, French and Lithuanian armies among others, and the US Marine Corps’ Organic Precision Fires programme remains a foundational customer.

The 2025 acquisition of BlueHalo, a Maryland-based defence firm focused on directed-energy weapons, space communications and counter-UAS, transformed AeroVironment from a pure small-drone house into a broader autonomy and effects company. Headcount climbed to roughly 3,750 by the time the deal closed, and the combined business gives AeroVironment a counter-drone and space portfolio that more directly competes with Anduril and L3Harris. Annual revenue has been climbing on the back of Switchblade demand and the BlueHalo addition, with the company guiding to a sharp step-up in fiscal 2026.

The firm’s distinctiveness lies in its unusual position: an established, publicly traded prime that nonetheless makes the kind of attritable, soldier-portable systems normally associated with the new wave of defence start-ups. With Red Dragon ramping and the BlueHalo integration in progress, AeroVironment is now one of the few US suppliers attempting to deliver loitering munitions at the volumes the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative is asking for.