Two 20-somethings are building America's FPV drone war machine

Soren Monroe-Anderson was just 20 years old when he walked into the Pentagon with his friend Olaf Hichwa, trying to sell drones they’d built in his parents’ garage. A senior Department of Defense official shut them down immediately: “You can’t just waltz into the Pentagon as 21-year-olds and sell weapon systems to the D.O.D.”

Two years later, Monroe-Anderson, now 22, and Hichwa, 24, aren’t just selling to the Pentagon—they’re dominating it. Neros Technologies, the company they founded in 2023, has raised $121 million in total funding, won a coveted U.S. Army contract for its Purpose-Built Attritable Systems program, secured a $17 million Marine Corps contract for thousands of drones, and is supplying 6,000 drones to Ukraine through an international coalition. The Trump administration has budgeted more than $36 million for the Army program in 2026, and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Reuters the service plans to buy at least one million drones over the next two to three years.

Their story isn’t just another Silicon Valley fairy tale—it’s a generational inflection point where competitive drone racing skills, Ukrainian battlefield data, and venture capital collided to force the Pentagon to completely rethink how it buys weapons.

Former World Champion Drone Racers Turn Defense Industry Wunderkinds

Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa didn’t take traditional paths to becoming defense contractors. They met in 2017 at a drone racing competition in Muncie, Indiana, as teenagers who’d spent their high school years skipping class and senior proms to build racing drones from Chinese components. Neither has a college degree.

Monroe-Anderson, who attended high school in New Hampshire, became the better pilot—winning the MultiGP World Championship in 2020. Hichwa, who grew up in Maryland, became known for his engineering prowess. “He’s a mad genius,” said David Spencer, a fellow racer.

To beat Monroe-Anderson’s drones, Hichwa designed lighter circuit boards during his junior year of high school, soldering them himself and eventually buying an industrial machine from China to mass-produce them. He sold them to other racers for $30 apiece. An upgraded version of that teenage engineering project now powers Neros’s Archer drone.

Their expertise came from the world of competitive FPV (first-person view) racing, where pilots wear goggles to see video feeds from drone cameras while using joystick controllers to navigate obstacles. It’s a skill set that translates directly to military applications—but the Pentagon wasn’t ready to hear it from 20-year-olds in 2023.

Ukraine Changed Everything

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine transformed their high school hobby into world-changing technology. Ukrainians were beating back Russian forces with simple quadcopters jury-rigged with explosives, and the war was demonstrating that cheap, mass-produced FPV drones could achieve battlefield effects expensive Western systems couldn’t match.

In the summer of 2023, Monroe-Anderson showed up at Hichwa’s job at an AI startup in Palo Alto, begging him to make drones again. Monroe-Anderson had become fixated on helping Ukraine. Hichwa took it on as a side project and quickly got pulled in.

That fall, they traveled to Kyiv and distributed their drones to Ukrainian soldiers, collecting battlefield feedback. They met Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who told them anyone wanting to supply drones to Ukraine had to produce at least 5,000 per month. The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000.

“We found ourselves on opposite sides of an armed conflict,” Hichwa said, describing his relationship with Chinese suppliers who had sent him drone parts as a teenage racer. Last year, he traveled to Shenzhen to meet those suppliers, who showed him around their factories—never suspecting he planned to open his own plant. One factory that made hobbyist drones he’d flown in high school was now churning out 1,000 drones per day for the Russian military.

Racing To Beat China’s Production Advantage

The production gap remains Neros’s biggest challenge. At their El Segundo, California factory, about 20 technicians assemble roughly 2,000 drones per month by hand—the highest production rate for any U.S. drone manufacturer, according to the company. Chinese factories produce that in two days.

“We’re barely scraping 2,000 a month,” Hichwa said. “And they’re doing that in two days.”

But Neros has what Chinese manufacturers can’t offer the Pentagon: a China-free supply chain. To sell to the U.S. military, every component had to be sourced outside China and proven secure. That meant building an entirely new supply ecosystem from scratch.

“Vendors in the United States would laugh at us,” Hichwa said. American-made radios could cost $10,000 when he needed something for $30. The founders realized they’d have to build components themselves and seek suppliers outside the defense industry. Instead of using computer chips common in military equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, Neros used chips designed for parking meters at $1 each.

$121 Million In Funding, Major Pentagon Wins

Neros closed a $75 million Series B round led by Sequoia Capital last week, bringing total funding to over $121 million. Participants include Vy Capital US, Interlagos, and Peter Thiel’s fellowship program.

“Neros is one of the fastest companies in history to be awarded meaningful defense contracts,” said Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital. “Drone performance and high-throughput production go hand in hand. Neros should be the first one million drone factory in the United States.”

The Army selected Neros as one of three primary FPV drone manufacturers for its Purpose-Built Attritable Systems program. Under this initiative, Neros will supply Archer and Archer Strike platforms in 5-inch and 10-inch variants, along with Flatbow, an upgraded soldier-borne Ground Control System designed for contested electromagnetic environments.

The Marine Corps contract, valued at approximately $17 million, will deliver around 8,000 FPV drones with comprehensive operator training across the Fleet Marine Force. Built without Chinese components and certified under the Department of Defense’s Blue UAS program, the Archer FPV brings secure capability to Marines in contested environments.

“This order reflects the lightning pace the Marine Corps is working at to train, develop TTPs, and deploy FPV capabilities,” Monroe-Anderson said. “The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team have been instrumental in positioning the Marines as the first-mover in FPV within the service branches.”

The Archer Strike platforms integrate with Kraken Kinetics Terminus strike payloads for engaging targets at distances over 12.4 miles (20 kilometers). At roughly $2,000 per unit, they cost a fraction of traditional military drones while offering jam-resistant communications engineered in-house.

Defense Innovation Unit’s “The Boys”

The Defense Innovation Unit, an experimental Pentagon branch headquartered in Silicon Valley, has championed Neros for over a year, with drone specialists affectionately referring to Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa as “the boys.”

At a flyoff in Alaska this summer, military officials crowded around Monroe-Anderson as he piloted his drone toward a jamming device that tried unsuccessfully to disrupt it. A Neros Archer was among several drones buzzing around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July when he announced policy changes aimed at turbocharging domestic drone production.

Major Steven Atkinson of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab recounted searching for American companies willing to supply small drones like those used in Ukraine for under $2,000 per unit. He came up empty—until he found Neros.

“They were pretty young, but they did FPVs,” Atkinson said. “What they have been able to accomplish is unheard-of.”

Neros trains soldiers on Archer drones for five days—longer than DJI’s consumer drones that require no special training, but a remarkably short timeline for military systems. The company employs 80 people in Los Angeles, Kyiv, London, and Washington D.C., virtually all older than its founders.

Scaling Challenges Ahead

Despite their success, challenges remain. Drone racers build systems that are fast and nimble, requiring mastery to operate. Manufacturing tens of thousands is different from building one racing drone. The company is expanding its El Segundo factory and hiring aggressively to meet contract demands.

“Our Series B fundraise represents the culmination of more than two years of company growth, focused product development, and aggressive iteration based on real battlefield results,” Monroe-Anderson said according to the NYT. “Both government and private partners understand the critical gaps in the West’s drone manufacturing capabilities and are deploying the needed capital to start filling them.”

Neros plans to use the new funding to massively scale production of its Archer platforms and Ground Control Systems, support vertical integration of manufacturing, invest in allied component suppliers, and increase R&D on next-generation autonomous systems.

“There is no other company in America that has proven the production ramp that we have, especially in the FPV space,” Monroe-Anderson told defense publication Tectonic. “This is a high quantity contract compared to anything that’s come before it, but we think we’ll be able to deliver it very rapidly.”

The company is also expanding internationally, continuing to grow its Ukrainian office in Kyiv and already delivering drones to the UK Ministry of Defense.

DroneXL’s Take

This story represents a remarkable reversal of technology transfer that should give Pentagon procurement offices serious pause. Two years ago, we reported on Ukraine achieving 100% domestic FPV drone production from basement workshops, with volunteers assembling drones that were outperforming $100,000 American Switchblades for $400. Ukraine scaled to over 4 million drones annually while American manufacturers struggled with Chinese parts dependency.

Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.

The fact that teenage drone racers are now teaching the Pentagon how to build and deploy FPV systems says everything about how fundamentally warfare has changed. We’ve extensively covered Ukraine’s drone innovations reshaping modern warfare and inspiring NATO—what’s stunning is how fast those lessons traveled back to American soil through unconventional channels.

Neros’s China-free supply chain ambition directly addresses vulnerabilities we’ve highlighted repeatedly. When China added 11 U.S. drone companies to its Unreliable Entity List earlier this year, it exposed how dependent American manufacturers remain on Chinese components. Neros is building the alternative ecosystem—but at 2,000 drones per month versus China’s 1,000 per day, the production gap remains massive.

The Pentagon’s DOGE unit seizing control of the drone program with plans to acquire 30,000 drones in coming months creates urgency for companies like Neros to scale rapidly. The Army’s goal of one million drones over the next two to three years requires American manufacturers to fundamentally transform their production capabilities.

What Neros proves is that the barrier wasn’t technical capability—it was willingness to abandon traditional defense industry assumptions. Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa succeeded because they approached the problem as drone racers who understood FPV systems intimately, not as defense contractors trying to adapt existing platforms. They went to Ukraine, observed what actually worked in peer warfare, and built accordingly.

The question now: Can Neros and other American startups scale fast enough to meet military demand while maintaining the quality and innovation that got them Pentagon contracts in the first place? Or will the production gap with China remain an insurmountable strategic vulnerability?

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.