Secretive U.S. drone maker AEVEX lands $400M drone contract

U.S. drone maker AEVEX has won an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to nearly $400 million to supply unmanned aircraft systems to an unnamed U.S. customer, the company said on November 10.

The multi-year deal sets a spending ceiling and lets the customer order drones and related support services as needed, instead of buying a fixed number up front. Contracts of this kind are common for classified or fast-moving programs, where the buyer wants to place orders quickly as requirements change.

“This award deepens our role in helping customers field unmanned aircraft systems that can be manufactured at scale and adapted as mission needs evolve,” said Roger Wells, AEVEX’s chief executive officer.

The announcement fits a pattern for the Solana Beach, California, company, which rarely names its customers or the drones involved in its deals. AEVEX is best known as the maker of the Phoenix Ghost, a family of one-way attack drones that the Pentagon rushed to Ukraine in 2022 without naming the manufacturer. The company only stepped forward as the producer more than two years later, when it displayed the drones at a U.S. Army trade show.

U.S. Army Cpl. Dylan Jones conducts final checks on an AEVEX ATLAS drone during field testing in Grafenwöhr, Germany, July 25, 2026.

Since then, AEVEX has picked up a series of contracts for strike drones, many with few public details. The U.S. government ordered more AEVEX kamikaze drones in a previous deal, and the company secured $88 million for precision strike systems. The U.S. Army has also confirmed it is buying the rocket-boosted Disruptor strike drone, a system linked to AEVEX’s Phoenix Ghost line, after it evaluated the secretive Disruptor kamikaze drone.

AEVEX says it designs its drones for low cost, modular payloads and fast fielding, and builds them in its own facilities. The company has also shown larger designs, including a jet-powered attack drone, as when AEVEX showed off its Specter attack drone at AUSA.

Demand for cheap attack drones has grown sharply as the U.S. military studies the war in Ukraine, where both sides fire thousands of one-way attack drones each month. The Department of War has pushed the services to buy drones faster and in larger numbers, often through flexible contracts like this one.