Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

Inside America's Largest Drone Manufacturer #drone #drones #defense #america #tech

21 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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Skydio is now America's largest drone manufacturer, bucking the 2014 Silicon Valley playbook that told hardware startups to outsource everything to China. The company kept production in the US, turning domestic manufacturing into a strategic advantage.

We're now by a wide margin the largest Western manufacturer of drones. So the recent past in Silicon Valley is that if you are going to do hardware, you should outsource all of it to China. And when we started Skydio in 2014, this was conventional wisdom. This is what investors would coach you to do. Now to be operating at scale in the US has just become a critical strategic advantage for us, and I think a critical thing for us as a country.