Skydio

Skydio designs and manufactures autonomous drones and the software that flies them. The company was founded in 2014 by Adam Bry, Abe Bachrach and Matt Donahoe, who met as graduate students at MIT working on autonomous flight and who went on to help start Google's Project Wing. Its central technical claim is onboard autonomy: the aircraft build a three-dimensional model of their surroundings from an array of navigation cameras and fly, avoid obstacles and complete inspection or search patterns without a skilled pilot at the controls.

The company began in the consumer market with the R1 in 2018 and the Skydio 2 in 2019, then withdrew from consumer sales in August 2023 to concentrate on enterprise, public safety and defence customers. The current line centres on the X10 professional platform, launched in September 2023, and the X2 military and corporate variant, together with docking stations that let a drone launch, fly a mission and return to charge without anyone on site.

Two markets dominate the business. The first is Drone as First Responder, in which a police or fire agency dispatches an aircraft to an emergency call before officers arrive; Skydio said in September 2026 that its DFR Command product had taken in more than 25 million calls for service through integrations with more than 35 public safety systems, including Motorola Solutions and CentralSquare. The second is defence and government. Skydio has supplied every branch of the US military, and won the US Army's Short-Range Reconnaissance Tranche 1 contract worth $20.2 million in its first year and up to $99.8 million over five.

That government exposure cuts both ways. More than half the company's business came from military customers by late 2024, and China sanctioned Skydio in October 2024 over drone sales approved for Taiwanese fire departments, then added it to an export control list in March 2025 — a direct hit on a hardware company that had to source components outside China. In April 2026 Skydio answered with a five-year, $3.5 billion commitment to expand US manufacturing, including $1 billion directed at domestic suppliers, a facility five times the size of its current space and a supplier co-location programme it calls SkyForge.