Performance Drone Works raised $110 million this week. The Drone Racing League built the pipeline.
PDW, as the company is known, closed its Series B on March 25, 2026 — a $110 million haul led by Ondas Holdings with participation from Hood River, Cedar Pine, Hanwha Asset Management, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The valuation, per TAM Radar, sits at $1.2 billion. Ondas, its parent company, reported full-year 2025 revenue of $50.7 million — up 605 percent from $7.2 million in 2024, per the company Q4 2025 earnings presentation.
The story is in the origin. Ryan Gury was the chief technology officer of the Drone Racing League — he designed the hand-built racing drones that flew through arenas at 90 miles per hour, night after night, without the luxury of a safety net. A crash on a live broadcast meant a viral fail video and a rebrand problem. Gury holds the Guinness World Record for fastest battery-operated RC quadcopter at 163.5 miles per hour. He co-founded PDW alongside Matt Higgins and veterans from U.S. Special Operations. Ryan Gury is CEO and co-founder of PDW; James Slider is CEO of parent company Ondas Holdings. The board is chaired by retired General Tony Thomas, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. The result is a company with a particular engineering culture: build light, build fast, build so it does not die in the air.
That culture produced the C100. It is a 21-pound quadcopter that fits in a rucksack, deploys by a single soldier in about five minutes, and can loiter for 74 minutes on a single charge. It carries a 10-pound payload — ISR sensors, electronic warfare modules, or a laser designator. In 2022, a C100 set a world record for longest flight by a battery-operated drone: two hours and 14 minutes. In its operational configuration, endurance is 74 minutes — enough for a patrol orbit, a strike call, or a laser handoff to an F-35 dropping a laser-guided bomb. The system is NDAA-compliant, Blue UAS certified, and contains no Chinese-made parts.
The Army selected PDW C100 and Anduril Ghost-X for its Company-Level Directed Requirement sUAS program in September 2024, each delivering 48 drones for the first tranche. Since then, PDW has won three Army Training in Contact (TiC) contracts, the most recent worth $20.9 million in September 2025. TiC units have deployed C100s across INDOPACOM, EUCOM, CENTCOM, and NORTHCOM — every geographic combatant command, per Defense Daily. The Air Force 93rd Air Ground Operations Wing at Moody Air Base in Georgia has also issued a contract for C100s. PDW has pitched the C100 for Secret Service VIP overwatch and threat detection.
What the military is buying is a drone that does not need GPS. Recent tests showed 11 GPS-free autonomous flights across 114 total missions, with the C100 navigating using visual systems in denied environments, per PDW own test documentation. The ground control station runs on Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), the military field-deployed situational awareness software. Multi-mission payloads were integrated in five months. The company has logged 50,000-plus flight hours.
Ukraine is the backdrop for all of this. The war has demonstrated what small, attributable drone systems can do at scale: they account for 70 to 80 percent of all damage to enemy forces. Ukraine is on track to manufacture 2.5 million to 3 million military-use drones in 2025. Co-founder Matt Higgins put the math plainly: You can take a $1,000 drone and take out an $8 million tank — that is an asymmetrical advantage the world will never unsee. PDW attritable multirotor FPV, the AM-FPV, is designed to be cheap enough to lose: unit price around $5,000, field-assembled in under 120 seconds without tools or soldering, per Breaking Defense.
PDW opened a 90,000-square-foot facility in Huntsville, Alabama called Drone Factory 01. At current ramp rates, it can produce more than 350 C100 motherships and 5,000 AM-FPV drones per month. A year ago, the board was debating whether 30 C100s per month was achievable. The company is now making 70 per month, with plans to double that. The factory outgrew its original space in eight to nine months.
The global military drone market stands at $20.7 billion in 2026, projected to reach $39.4 billion by 2031 at a 13.8 percent CAGR, per TAM Radar. The bet PDW is making is that the attritable model — cheap enough to lose, good enough to matter — becomes the default U.S. procurement posture. Ukraine has run that experiment at a scale the U.S. military has not attempted yet. The $110 million buys the factory to answer the question if the answer is yes — and buys runway to keep building if it is not.
† Add verification or hedge: either identify the source documenting this record, or change to: "In 2022, a C100 reportedly set a world record for longest flight by a battery-operated drone: two hours and 14 minutes." Alternatively, remove the claim until sourced.
