00:00:00 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[00:00:00] S0: On first pass, we've defeated every single jammer that the US military has put us up against. So we played a bit of a prank on the soldiers. They knew our frequencies we were operating on. We'd already done a bunch of testing runs, they collected data. We flew seven kilometers over the jammer and then just hovered in front of them for, like, ten minutes. After ten minutes with five jammers going at once, they got to taking out one of our Controllings. We have two. And we asked them on the radio, hey. Can you guys see the payload? And they're like, yep. We see you have a payload. And they're like, no. Can you see what the payload is? We strapped a jar of Smucker's strawberry jam to our drone as the payload, and then the soldier saw the Smucker's jam. The jammer has been defeated by the jam. In a real world scenario, we would just have come in and hit the target. [00:00:45] S1: Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Soren Monroe-Anderson, the co founder and CEO of Neros. Neros is, I think, today, the biggest FPV drone maker in America. When I interviewed you last, I think you were just moving into your old warehouse, which has like a max capacity of 10, 20, 30,000 drones a year, and we are now in your new 250,000 square foot warehouse with a max capacity of a million drones per year. Do you wanna just start with like, what was the ramp like at that old warehouse, and what are you gonna be able to do here?
00:01:15 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:01:15] S0: Yeah. So we moved into our old facility in March 2024. We had been in a very small garage before that. We had built like a couple 100 drones out of that little garage, but we knew ramping production capacity was kind of the number one goal of the company at that point. And we wanted to be able to... We didn't have the orders for lots of drones, but we wanted to be able to say, like, look, we can do it. It took us about six months after moving into that facility to really have like a real assembly line going that we could kind of credibly say like, give us the order, we'll start delivering. But it wasn't until early twenty twenty five that we were really like, shipping more than a few 100 drones per month. So it's honestly been a really fast ramp up over the last twelve months, and also just to fill that facility, not just from the production side, but the team size. You know, we were Neros was 16 people when 2025 started, and we are currently about a 125, and I guess that number is gonna be even higher just by the, you know, time this interview comes out. We're we're growing the team very rapidly. Almost 10x a year. Yeah. At at this rate, yeah. So, you know, we thought we only had like a, I think three year lease on the old building, so it's not like we were planning to be in there for a really long time, but we did, you know, we really pushed the old facility to its limits now with both production and engineering, and so when we were... We started looking for a new building actually almost a year ago now, because we were very picky on certain things, so we wanted to start the process early. And we went through a diff... A few different phases of like what size of building we were gonna get, And, you know, we ended up landing on this 2 100 50,000 because we, over the past twelve months, have really oriented the company around being the first American drone company that can build a million drones per year. So we wanted to spec a facility that could support that goal, and not just assembly and test, but component manufacturing.
00:03:31 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
We've been, with our current production, running into limitations on what we can get from suppliers outside of China, and we've sort of known for a long time that to do what we wanna do eventually, it will really involve vertical integration, but with the demand signal we're seeing right now from the US government and from our allied partners, and just the... Honestly, the direction that the the world is going and how important FPV systems are, building massive sovereign capacity is really our number one mandate. So we wanted to find a size facility that could support the long term growth of the company, not be another, you know, two, three year stepping stone, be something that we can actually build into the global headquarters of Neros. You know, it'll be a lot of construction even to just get the, like, office space that we need in here, and then, you know, the the... An empty building doesn't equal a million drones per year. There's huge CapEx investments and and build out and just great, you know, engineering that needs to be done to to actually turn this into a factory. So it's... You know, we we haven't done the thing, but we've we've bought ourself a canvas to do the thing. [00:04:50] S1: You basically have all the the paints and the canvas ready to go, and now you just gotta go paint something.
00:04:50 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:04:50] S1: You basically have all the the paints and the canvas ready to go, and now you just gotta go paint something. [00:04:55] S0: Yeah. I'd say the the paint is still, you know, the the some of that's still lacking with with talent that we need to hire. You know, we have an amazing team, and we have the right building blocks, but we gotta get a lot more great people in to to be able to do to do this. [00:05:13] S1: Very few people have kind of had a pulse like you have on how the Russia Ukraine conflict has kind of evolved. So do you wanna just talk about what it was like going into early twenty twenty two and what's happened over the past three and a half years?
00:05:26 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:05:26] S0: Yeah. Coming up on, I mean, basically four years now. Yeah. You know, Neros has not been around for for all of that, but I've I've been closely tracking since the full scale invasion started. And when it started, it was a very impactful moment for me. And I've talked about this in the past, so I won't go totally deep into that, but I... It's been very, very interesting to see how it's made the world react to the technology that Neros is building because, you you know, we sort of had our own ideas even before the... We saw the Ukrainians doing it, and before Neros was a company, we had our own ideas of drone racing technology applied to defense applications, and, you know, thought it could be meaningful, but couldn't prove it really. And then the Ukrainians went and proved it. And then in 2023, when we were starting the company, we were just focused on building a better product for the Ukrainians that we were working with. And the the excitement from The US side was really limited. There was like most most people in the Pentagon did not care about small quadcopters, kind of understandably because they had not been a meaningful capability increase for the most part. So it would... From from what they had seen. Focusing on Ukraine for the first, you know, twelve months of the company was, I think, the right decision because we ended up making a much more useful product out of that, and it's still a really big focus of the company. But it's it's been interesting to see that the, you know, the mindset in America has totally flipped one eighty. Small drones are now a top priority from, you know, the senior leaders of of the Pentagon and of the country. So we definitely started at the right time and built up a... Like a competency incredibly fast. Exactly. We built up a competency, and then we were ready to deliver for these initial programs that The US is spinning up. And now we are trying to build capacity ahead of the government actually putting out contracts for, you know, millions of drones per year. There there's been some talk from the Pentagon and from, like, the Army saying that they're they're gonna try to acquire a million drones over the next year or two. Nobody exists to to deliver that right now. And I think, you know, that's not gonna happen on a on a one or two year timeline.
00:07:53 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
I think two to three years, we're gonna start to be able to deliver that, and the country's gonna start to be able to deliver that, and we're gonna push to go as fast as possible. But it's, you know, the the government is is trying to provide some amount of demand signal, industry is is responding. I would say we are out ahead in terms of FPV drone manufacturers, just in terms of our actual like proven production scale. And now with, you know, with this facility, again, it's just a big empty box right now, but it will be the largest the largest small drone factory in America, and yeah, it's gonna it's gonna allow us to the way we think about it is it's going to allow us to create credible deterrence. I think under sort of under this scale and without having the blueprint for factories like this, America does not have credible deterrence. And so that's what we were trying to build to put it most simply. [00:08:51] S1: If there's not a blueprint that exists on how to spin up some sort of supply chain and factory like you're trying to do here, how are you kind of coming up with that, you know, from first principles?