21 February 2025
“One of the first things we did when we started the company was go to Ukraine, and we were told if we could not make 5,000 drones per month, we were essentially useless,” says Neros co-founder and CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson. “So we set out with this in mind.”
The challenge and the goal seems to have worked out for Neros, as the U.S. company is now contracted to deliver 6,000 of its Archer FPV attack drones to Ukraine over 6 months. Part of an international campaign to supply drones to Ukraine, the Neros contract represents possibly the highest rate for any American drone producer.
The Archer is an 8” FPV—which Neros claims “exceeds state of the art performance”—that can carry a 4.5-pound warhead to a range of 12 miles or more. The drone is designed to fly night and day, as well as in unfavorable weather conditions. To prevent jamming—which can prevent a drone from hitting its target—the Archer operates on multiple control frequencies and includes a wide-band video transmitter.
“Jamming is a problem for everyone, including us, but we have shown very strong results,” says Soren-Anderson. “Because we design all our radios ourselves, and have been learning from what works in Ukraine for over a year, we are using a completely different setup than other U.S. drone companies.”
The Ukraine contract does not include payloads, as the Ukrainian combatants plan to use their own, locally manufactured warheads—although Monroe-Anderson appears to feel that may be a mistake.
“Neros is working on purpose-built, lethal payloads with our partner, Kraken Kinetics,” he says. “We've seen that the system as a whole is much more performant when the drone and warhead are designed together, so we've put a large priority on this effort.”
The Neros Archer is significantly less expensive to acquire than other small drones on the BlueUAS list that identifies models approved for purchase by U.S, government agencies—which also makes it attractive to Ukraine forces. First, the 6,000 drones are being purchased for Ukraine by the International Drone Capability Coalition—an organization that hardly has a U.S. Pentagon-sized budget. Secondly, training accidents and battle deployments are less of a concern when not losing expensive hardware.
“We are extremely focused on making the most capable and manufacturable FPV system in the Western world,” says Soren Anderson. “Our adversaries can produce millions of FPVs, and right now, the U.S. military is way behind most of the world in using FPV drones. We want to fix this.”
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