In their ’20s,’ they sold $121 million worth of military drones to the US

Soren Monroe-Anderson, a drone racing champion, was just 20 years old when he first tried to sell his drones to the US military. He built them for the Ukrainian forces in his parents’ garage with a friend.

The army was not interested.

“’You can’t just walk into the Pentagon at 21 and sell weapons systems to the Department of Defense,’” said the friend, Olaf Hichwa, recalling the response of a senior Defense Department official.

But two years later, Monroe-Anderson, now 22, and Hichwa, who just turned 24, are selling drones to the U.S. Army.

Neros, a company they founded in 2023, was selected to supply its flagship drones, called Archer, to the Army, according to documents obtained by . Neros is one of three U.S. drone makers chosen as suppliers for the first phase of an Army program that buys low-cost, expendable drones.

Although specific financial terms were not disclosed, the Trump administration has committed more than $36 million to the “Purpose-Built Attritable Systems” program in 2026.

The selection of Neros comes as military leaders race to catch up with adversaries that have the ability to produce small drones on an industrial scale, which have become crucial in modern warfare. The Army intends to buy at least 1 million drones over the next two to three years, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said on Friday.

While the government shutdown has complicated military efforts to buy drones, some contracts already in the works are moving forward.

The Army contract has been closely watched as an indication of which American drone companies will dominate the market. For Neros, this comes after raising $75 million in venture financing, led by Sequoia Capital, and receiving a $17 million contract from the Marine Corps for thousands of drones, as well as an international contract to supply 6,000 drones to Ukraine.

Neros’ latest round of funding concluded last week, bringing the startup’s total raised to $121 million and cementing Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa’s status as wunderkinds in the emerging American drone industry.

The Defense Innovation Unit, an experimental part of the Pentagon based in Silicon Valley, has supported Neros for more than a year, with some drone experts in the unit affectionately referring to Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa as “the boys.”

In a flight test in Alaska last summer, military officers crowded around Monroe-Anderson as he flew his drone undisturbed toward a device that was trying, unsuccessfully, to jam it. A Neros Archer drone was one of several flying around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July when he made a video announcement about policy changes to speed up domestic production.

In an interview in May, Maj. Steven Atkinson of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab said he was looking for American companies willing to supply small drones like those used in Ukraine for less than $2,000 per unit. He didn’t find any—until he found Neros.

“They were pretty young, but they did FPVs,” recalled Atkinson, referring to drones with a first-person view, flown by pilots who wear special glasses to view images from the drone’s camera while navigating with a joystick control.

“What they were able to do is unprecedented,” he said.

Monroe-Anderson and Hichwa gained their expertise in the world of competitive drone racing. Monroe-Anderson, who went to high school in New Hampshire, and Hichwa, who grew up in Maryland, spent their teens assembling drones from kits and components they ordered from China. They were so focused on flying and competing that they missed many classes and proms. Neither of them has a college degree.

The two met in 2017 at a drone racing competition in Muncie, Indiana, and quickly began exchanging ideas on how to make their drones fly faster.

Monroe-Anderson was the better driver, winning the MultiGP World Championship in 2020. Hichwa was known for his engineering prowess. “He’s a crazy genius,” said David Spencer, another pilot.

In an attempt to surpass the Monroe-Anderson drone, Hichwa designed a circuit board for his own drone that was lighter than those available on the market, soldering it himself. He ended up purchasing an industrial machine from China that mass-produced them, selling them to other riders for $30 each during his junior year of high school. An improved version is used in Neros’ Archer.

Despite his racing experience, some challenges remain. Drone pilots tend to build fast, agile systems that require a certain level of skill. Neros typically trains soldiers to operate Archer drones for five days. In contrast, DJI, a Chinese company that produces more than 75% of the world’s commercial drones, is known for drones that can be flown without special training.

And the skill needed to make one racing drone is different from the expertise to make tens of thousands. At the Neros factory in El Segundo, California, about 20 technicians manually assemble approximately 2,000 drones per month.

It has been especially challenging to make cheap drones without Chinese parts. Almost everything they used as teenagers — propellers, motors, batteries, radios, cameras — came from Shenzhen, China. But to sell to the US military, Neros had to set up an American supply chain and prove that its drones do not contain critical components from China.

Suppliers in the U.S. “would laugh at us,” Hichwa said. US-made radios could cost up to $10,000 when he was looking for one that cost $30. The founders soon realized they would have to manufacture the parts themselves and source suppliers outside the defense industry.

Instead of using chips common in military equipment that cost hundreds of dollars each, Neros used a chip designed for parking meters that cost $1, Hichwa said.

The inspiration to create the drone company came from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which transformed his school hobby into a technology with global impact. Ukrainians were fighting Russian forces with simple quadcopters fitted with explosives. In the summer of 2023, Hichwa was working at Skywalk, an artificial intelligence startup in Palo Alto, California, when Monroe-Anderson showed up at his work, begging them to start making drones again. Monroe-Anderson, who chose not to go to college for now, was focused on helping Ukraine.

Hichwa took it on as a side project and soon became deeply involved. They spoke by phone with Ukrainians Monroe-Anderson met on social media and made dozens of drones that fit into easy-to-transport stacks. That fall, they went to Kiev and distributed their drones to Ukrainian soldiers, collecting feedback on their performance. They met Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is also the country’s minister of digital transformation, who told them that anyone who wanted to supply drones to Ukraine would have to produce at least 5,000 per month.

The trip reinforced what they already knew: America itself is vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones a year, while the US barely made 100,000.

They set up base in El Segundo, a hub of the aerospace industry, where their passion attracted the attention of venture capitalists and Peter Thiel, who eventually awarded a Thiel Fellowship to Monroe-Anderson.

“When we find founders like this, we bet on their trajectory,” said Ian Rountree of Cantos, a venture capital firm that led the seed round. He was impressed that Monroe-Anderson was able to attract much more experienced employees, including Sean Wood, the company’s chief operating officer, who worked at SpaceX for 12 years. Neros employs 80 people, almost all of them older than its founders.

But mass production is still a challenge. Last year, Hichwa traveled to Shenzhen to meet the Chinese suppliers who sent him drone parts when he was a teenage pilot. They welcomed him as a valued customer, without suspecting that he planned to open his own factory. A factory that produced the brand of hobbyist drones he flew in high school was now making 1,000 drones a day for the Russian military, he said.

“They are, to a certain extent, my friends,” Hichwa said. “But we find ourselves on opposite sides of an armed conflict.”

He said he tried to remember as much as possible about the machines they used, impressed by what it would take for Neros to reach that level.

“We’re barely making 2,000 a month,” he said. “And they do it in two days.”