Reliable Robotics Raises $160 Million As SpaceX Alum Pushes FAA For First Commercial Uncrewed Cargo Cert

Reliable Robotics closed a $160 million funding round that values the Mountain View, California company at nearly $1 billion, CEO Robert Rose told Bloomberg’s Cailley LaPara in an interview published April 21, 2026. Total capital raised now stands at $300 million, and the money pays for what Rose called a “mountain of evidence” the company is assembling for the Federal Aviation Administration to certify an uncrewed Cessna 208 Caravan.

The round was led by Nimble Partners, the San Francisco venture firm founded in 2020 by hedge fund veteran John Burbank, who joins Reliable’s board. Existing investor RTX Ventures, the venture arm of aerospace and defense giant RTX Corp., also participated. Reliable says commercial and military customers have placed more than 200 orders for its autonomy system.

For the drone industry, this matters because Reliable is the closest anyone has gotten to putting a large, fully autonomous aircraft into commercial U.S. airspace under Part 23 airworthiness rules. The certification pathway it is cutting will set the precedent large BVLOS drone operations follow.

Rose Wants To Execute, Not Explain

Rose, who spent years at SpaceX and Tesla before co-founding Reliable in 2017, told Bloomberg the company knows what the FAA wants and needs the engineering headcount to produce it. “We know what needs to be done. We just need to execute, and that’s going to require scaling.”

Reliable’s system keeps a Cessna 208 under continuous autopilot through taxi, takeoff, cruise, landing, and rollout, with a ground operator monitoring and able to intervene. In November 2023, the company flew a Cessna 208B Caravan with no one on board for 12 minutes out of Hollister Municipal Airport, supervised from Mountain View 50 miles (80 km) away. That was the first FAA-approved uncrewed flight of a large cargo aircraft in U.S. history.

The Pentagon Is Already A Customer

The U.S. Department of Defense has already deemed Reliable’s fully uncrewed system airworthy for military operations, which landed the company an $17.4 million contract with the U.S. Air Force announced last October. Flight demonstrations begin this year, with the aircraft eventually deploying to the Indo-Pacific for logistics missions.

The dual-use framing is deliberate. Air Force operational hours feed directly into the FAA case for civil certification.

Albuquerque Cargo Service Is The Commercial Wedge

Reliable isn’t waiting for the full type certificate to start flying commercial cargo. The company won the only city-led slot in the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program through a partnership with the City of Albuquerque, and plans to run autonomous cargo routes between Albuquerque International Sunport, Santa Fe Regional Airport, and Durango-La Plata County Airport in Colorado through its Part 135 subsidiary, Reliable Airlines. First flights are expected this summer.

That is a commercial freight operation, not a demo. And it is running on autonomy hardware the FAA is simultaneously evaluating for permanent certification. Rose told Bloomberg other aviation operators are interested in pieces of the stack Reliable built on the way to autonomy, including an advanced radar he said could help prevent accidents. “Autonomy is the big headline, but there’s actually a lot that you can do along the way to improve safety.”

DroneXL’s Take

I have been covering Reliable since the 2023 Hollister flight and the pattern is now obvious. Reliable picked an airframe that is already certified, already flying cargo for FedEx, and already familiar to FAA inspectors. It retrofits autonomy onto a known quantity instead of asking the FAA to certify something new. That is the wedge the drone industry hasn’t figured out. Zipline, Wing, and Amazon Prime Air have all built purpose-built aircraft, which forces the FAA to evaluate the airframe, the autonomy stack, the operating concept, and the airspace integration all at once. Reliable split the problem in half.

The Nimble Partners lead is worth a second look. John Burbank is a macro investor, not a classic aerospace VC, and his bet is on the regulatory timeline clearing rather than on the next hardware breakthrough. That lines up with the FAA’s new SMART air traffic AI program. The infrastructure to absorb autonomous flights at scale is being built in parallel to the aircraft that will use it. Capital is pricing that in.

Here is my call. Reliable flies its first paid commercial cargo revenue hop out of Albuquerque before the end of summer 2026, and it will be the first time a large-category uncrewed aircraft has moved paying freight in U.S.-controlled airspace. The FAA type certificate Rose has publicly targeted for 2028 slips to early 2029, because first-of-kind paperwork always does. But the commercial flights happen this year, and once they do, every Part 108 drone operator gains a working precedent to cite.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.