Neros Technologies

Neros Technologies was founded in 2023 in El Segundo, California, by Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, two former professional drone racers who pivoted from the competitive FPV circuit into defence manufacturing. Monroe-Anderson, who serves as chief executive, was barely out of his teens when the company started; Hichwa, his co-founder, came from the same racing background. The pair built the firm around a single thesis — that the United States and its partners need a domestic supplier of small, attritable first-person-view drones, manufactured at the volume Ukraine has shown the modern battlefield demands, and free of Chinese components.

The product line is narrow and deliberate. The Archer is an 8-inch FPV quadcopter carrying a 2 kg payload to ranges of more than 19 km, engineered for resistance to electronic-warfare jamming and designed to be cheap enough that operators can lose it without flinching. A kinetic variant, the Archer Strike, carries a lethal payload for use against vehicles and fortifications. On the operator side, Neros builds two ground control stations: the Crossbow, a tactical handheld unit hardened against jamming, and the Longbow, a higher-power station intended for fixed positions where range matters more than mobility. Every part of the airframe and flight stack is sourced outside China — a defining constraint that distinguishes Neros from the broader hobby-derived FPV market.

The customer base is anchored on Ukraine. Neros has been delivering Archers to Ukrainian forces since 2024, and the system has been used in combat against Russian armour and infantry positions. The company has cited a production capacity goal of 10,000 drones a month, scaled from a Los Angeles-area facility, and US officials have pointed to Neros as a template for the kind of high-cadence drone manufacturing the Department of Defense wants to encourage at home. The Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, aimed at fielding thousands of attritable autonomous systems, has put firms like Neros squarely in view, and the company has been linked to evaluations by US Special Operations Command and the Marine Corps as both services look for affordable strike drones.

On the funding side, Neros has raised institutional venture capital from investors including Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital, with reported rounds placing it in the tens of millions of dollars by 2024. The headcount remains modest by defence-prime standards — the company’s pitch is that a small, vertically integrated team can outproduce legacy contractors on price and lead time for this class of system.

The firm operates in a politically charged corner of the market. American policymakers have spent the past two years trying to wean US and allied militaries off DJI and other Chinese drone suppliers, and Neros’s “no Chinese parts” claim is both a sales pitch and a regulatory hedge. It also places the company in direct competition with established US defence-tech players such as Anduril and Skydio, though Neros sits at a lower price point and a smaller form factor than most of those rivals’ platforms.

What sets Neros apart, for now, is focus. The company makes one drone, in one size, for one job — and is betting that the war in Ukraine has permanently changed what Western militaries expect to buy.