FAIRBANKS, Alaska — When Neros Technologies was founded in 2023, there wasn’t much demand in the U.S. military for small, first-person-view drones.

“It took us a while to find the right customers and end users who were excited about the technology and wanted to move very quickly,” Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros CEO and co-founder, told Defense News during a recent Defense Innovation Unit test event here.

But the company believed strongly there was military utility for small, cheap, attack drones — a reality playing out daily on the battlefield in Ukraine. So, in the firm’s early days, Monroe-Anderson and others traveled to the war-torn country to better understand how the systems were being used and what capabilities were needed.

Those visits helped sharpen the company’s focus in three areas: production, supply chain and rapid iteration, said Monroe-Anderson, a 22-year-old professional drone racer and hobbyist turned weapons-maker.

Neros worked quickly to raise the private capital it needed to build a 15,000 square foot facility in Los Angeles from funders like Peter Thiel and Sequoia Capital. It scoured its supply chain for alternatives to Chinese components. And it continuously upgraded its systems based on lessons it was seeing in Ukraine, where it has since established an office.

That early work is starting to yield results for the firm. In February, Neros won a contract from the International Drone Coalition to provide 6,000 drones to Ukraine over six months. The IDC was formed to help fuel the country’s drone supply — factories in Ukraine produced more than 2.2 million drones in 2024 — and the contract is among the largest known awards to a U.S. supplier.

Neros is now building about 1,500 of its Archer drones per month, an 8-inch quadcopter that has a range of over 12 miles and can carry a 4.5 lb. payload. Two-thirds of those systems go to Ukraine and the remaining 500 to the U.S. military, including the Marine Corps, Army and U.S. Special Operations Command, Monroe-Anderson said.

The company is currently one of two FPV companies on DIU’s list of firms whose drones meet DOD’s supply chain requirements, which prohibit the use of Chinese suppliers for key components. Last December, Neros was placed on a list of 13 U.S. defense companies sanctioned by China. The firm called the move “a badge of honor.”

Monroe-Anderson said Neros wants to increase its production capacity to 10,000 drones monthly by the end of this year. Its longer-term vision is to build a factory that can produce one million drones per year with the U.S. Defense Department as its primary customer. It’s a target that Monroe-Anderson says is “absolutely required” for the U.S. to defend itself in future wars.