Swarm Aero lands U.S. Air Force deal to speed up drone production

A California aerospace firm building giant swarms of unmanned aircraft has landed a deal with the Air Force to prove it can manufacture those aircraft faster and cheaper than anyone else in the industry.

Swarm Aero, a defense technology company that develops large uncrewed aerial vehicles designed to operate in coordinated fleets, announced more than $10 million in contracts with the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop and test a new method for mass-producing composite aircraft parts, the kind of lightweight, high-strength material used to build everything from fighter jet wings to commercial airliner fuselages.

The Air Force Research Laboratory, known as AFRL, is the Air Force’s primary science and technology organization, responsible for identifying and funding emerging technologies years before they become standard military hardware. Its involvement here centers on a manufacturing technique Swarm has spent the past four years refining, a high-rate composite production process the company says allows it to build large aircraft airframes at volumes far beyond what traditional aerospace manufacturing typically achieves, and at a fraction of the cost of comparable military aircraft built using conventional methods.

Peter Kalogiannis, CEO and co-founder of Swarm Aero, explained that the company treated manufacturing as a core design priority from its earliest days rather than an afterthought bolted on once a working aircraft existed.

“Since our first engineering hire, Swarm has invested in manufacturing and design in tandem. We are not designing or even building one aircraft only to then start thinking about how to manufacture it at scale. We have designed our manufacturing processes to enable us to deliver aircraft at the scale our customers require. Our team has a strong track record both in building large, novel aircraft extremely quickly and in delivering aircraft at volume. We’re looking forward to leveraging our manufacturing approach to build cost-efficient flyable aircraft components using our unique methods,” said Kalogiannis.

That emphasis on manufacturing speed reflects a broader problem the U.S. military has struggled with for years, the gap between building a single impressive prototype aircraft and actually producing enough of them to matter in a real conflict. Traditional composite aircraft manufacturing tends to be slow and labor-intensive, often requiring skilled technicians to hand-layer carbon fiber sheets and cure them in specialized ovens called autoclaves, a process that can take days per major component and makes scaling production to thousands of units extraordinarily expensive. Swarm’s pitch is that its high-rate manufacturing process sidesteps much of that bottleneck, and the company has already built infrastructure to prove it can operate at scale, opening an 80,000-square-foot (7,432-square-meter) Advanced Manufacturing Center at Drake Field in Fayetteville, Arkansas earlier this year, a facility the company says will eventually have the capacity to produce thousands of unmanned aircraft and create hundreds of skilled aerospace jobs over the next decade.

Oliver Palmer, Swarm’s Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder, framed the Air Force Research Laboratory partnership as validation from an organization with deep credibility in evaluating exactly this kind of manufacturing innovation.

“The Air Force Research Lab’s structures and materials and manufacturing teams have been consistent leaders in the industry and champions for introducing new processes that can reduce cost. We are honored to partner with them as we bring forward our novel manufacturing process. They both are tremendous partners and are well placed within the Department of War’s engineering ecosystem to evaluate what we are doing,” said Palmer.

Swarm Aero was founded in 2022 by a team drawing on decades of combined aerospace experience across companies including Scaled Composites, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Airbus and Archer, along with leadership that previously managed major Air Force acquisition programs, including a former commander of Air Force Material Command who oversaw a $60 billion annual weapons acquisition budget and a former leader of the Air Force’s $24 billion unmanned aircraft systems portfolio. That background has shaped the company’s core pitch to the military, that large uncrewed aircraft paired with coordinated software can accomplish missions traditionally requiring manned fighter jets or bombers, without putting a pilot’s life at risk, while costing several times less than the crewed aircraft they could eventually supplement or replace.

The strategic logic behind that pitch has become increasingly urgent as Pentagon planners study potential conflict scenarios in the Pacific, where China’s growing military capabilities and the vast distances involved have pushed American defense officials to prioritize aircraft that can be produced quickly and in large numbers rather than relying solely on smaller fleets of extremely expensive, exquisitely capable platforms. A single F-35 fighter jet costs roughly $80 million to $100 million depending on the variant, a price tag that inherently limits how many a nation can afford to field, whereas a large uncrewed aircraft built through mass-manufacturing techniques promises a fundamentally different math, trading some of the sophistication of a manned fighter for the ability to field dramatically greater numbers of aircraft across a contested battlespace.

The company raised $35 million in a Series A funding round earlier this year, led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures with participation from earlier seed investors including Khosla Ventures, funding that helped support the buildout of its Arkansas manufacturing facility. Swarm now maintains operations across Oxnard, California, Spokane, Washington, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., a geographic footprint that spans both its engineering headquarters and its growing production capacity, along with a presence in the nation’s capital positioned to maintain close contact with the Pentagon customers the company is ultimately building toward.