Skydio’s Adam Bry Says DJI Tried To Buy The Company In 2014. Twelve Years Later, DJI Can’t Sell Its Drones In Much Of America.

CEO Adam Bry dropped a detail about Skydio’s origin story on Thursday that has been reported before but rarely in Bry’s own words with this much texture. DJI tried to acquire Skydio in 2014. The three co-founders flew to Shenzhen, met DJI’s leadership, and walked away.

The reason Skydio said no is the same reason it is now valued at $4.4 billion while DJI faces an FCC Covered List designation, a December 23, 2025 authorization cutoff, and court filings estimating $1.5 billion in lost U.S. revenue for 2026.

“The main reason we decided not to do it was because we felt like they didn’t really understand the importance of autonomy and how much that was going to change who could use drones and how they could use them,” Bry said in a 34-minute interview with Sourcery published alongside Skydio’s $110 million Series F announcement. “We felt like it was really important and we believed in our ability to execute against it.”

That is the rejected acquisition target that ended up defining the moat. It is also the single most revealing exchange in the interview with Molly O’Shea.

The 2014 Deal That Did Not Happen

Skydio was a seed-stage company in 2014 with three co-founders: Adam Bry, Abraham Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe. Bry and Bachrach had come out of MIT’s Robust Robotics Group, where their research focused on autonomous flight in GPS-denied environments. Both had then worked on Google’s Project Wing drone delivery research before co-founding Skydio. They had just raised around $3 million. DJI found out about them quickly.

“They found out about us and pretty quickly became interested in acquiring the company,” Bry said. “Through that process we met their leadership. We visited China, Shenzhen. Ultimately decided not to do it.”

DJI at that moment was already the dominant global consumer drone brand. The Phantom 2 had shipped the year before. An acquisition of a three-person U.S. academic spinout with some autonomy research would have been a rounding error. Skydio walked away because Bry’s team believed DJI’s leadership was not prioritizing the technical bet they wanted to make.

That bet was autonomy, though the shape of it deserves clarity. In 2014 what Skydio saw earlier than most was deep-learning-based autonomous flight in consumer-grade hardware: computer-vision obstacle avoidance plus subject tracking that did not require a skilled operator. That is what the R1 (2018) and Skydio 2 (2019) shipped, and both were consumer drones. DJI was not absent from autonomy during this period either. ActiveTrack and APAS obstacle avoidance were shipping on DJI consumer platforms in the same years. The difference in 2014 was where each company chose to spend its R&D intensity, not a clean case of one side grasping autonomy while the other did not.

The specific architecture that defines Skydio’s business today, dock-launched autonomous drones for enterprise and public safety operators, is a 2023-era pivot, not a 2014 thesis. DJI itself now ships a full dock-based enterprise lineup: Dock 2 with the Matrice 3D and 3TD launched globally in March 2024, and Dock 3 with the Matrice 4D and 4TD followed. Both are fully autonomous drone-in-a-box platforms aimed at the same inspection and monitoring missions Skydio serves. “DJI did not understand autonomy” is a founder story Bry can fairly tell about a specific 2014 meeting. It is not an accurate description of the 2026 market.

The 2023 Pivot, Not The 2014 Thesis, Is What Built The Business

Skydio shipped the R1 consumer drone in 2018 and the Skydio 2 in 2019. Both performed technically but never scaled to DJI’s consumer volumes. The company exited consumer entirely in 2023. That is the inflection point for everything Bry described in Thursday’s interview. The enterprise and public safety positioning became the focus only after the consumer pivot and the X10 dock architecture became the product. The “we bet on autonomy in 2014” story compresses a nine-year gap and three product generations into a single origin arc.

The numbers Bry disclosed Thursday show where the bet landed. Skydio has now shipped more than 60,000 drones and flown more than 3.7 million customer missions. It sells to roughly 4,000 customers including every branch of the U.S. military, 29 allied nations, 1,200 public safety agencies, and 45 of 51 state transportation agencies. Sixteen million Americans live within two miles of a Skydio Drone as First Responder dock. The U.S. Army placed a $52 million order for nearly 3,000 X10D drones in March, which Bry called “actually not that much of an outlier for us these days.”

Annual revenue is “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Bry. Skydio is tripling production this year. The company is roughly 900 employees across three continents.

China Retaliated Directly In October 2024

The Chinese government has noticed. In October 2024, Beijing imposed direct sanctions on Skydio after the company began supplying Taiwan’s National Fire Agency. The sanctions ordered Chinese suppliers, including Skydio’s sole battery provider at the time, Dongguan Poweramp, to stop doing business with the company immediately. Skydio was reduced to rationing one battery per drone for months while it rebuilt its supply chain outside China.

“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government,” Bry said in the interview. “They announced the sanctions and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stopped them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us.”

Eighteen months later, Skydio says it now has the most secure drone supply chain in the world outside China. That claim is not independently audited. What is verifiable is that the company survived the sanctions and is shipping at scale again. The Chinese government attempted what DJI attempted in 2014 and failed at the same thing for different reasons.

The “Flying Body Cameras” Framing Returns

Bry spent a meaningful portion of the interview on public safety. He cited a March incident in Santa Fe, New Mexico where a Skydio drone located an unconscious overdose victim within four minutes of arriving on scene. The responding officer administered Naloxone and started CPR before paramedics took over. The 47-year-old man survived. Bry also referenced a San Francisco call where a Skydio drone arrived first at a reported rooftop gunman and identified the weapon as a broomstick, defusing what Bry framed as a potentially lethal officer encounter.

The rhetorical framing is what deserves attention. “These things are essentially flying body cameras,” Bry told O’Shea. “They document exactly what’s happening.” It is the same phrase he used at the Las Vegas Metro press conference in January. The framing positions autonomous aerial response as a transparency tool rather than surveillance infrastructure.

A body camera records the specific interaction between an officer and a civilian the officer is already lawfully engaging with. A DFR drone flying over residential blocks to reach a call records everyone it passes. The Syracuse backlash, where 67 percent of surveyed residents opposed a proposed Skydio DFR rollout, is an early signal the public is not accepting the body-camera analogy. When the first civil rights lawsuit against a Skydio-equipped DFR program reaches summary judgment, the phrase is going to get quoted back at Skydio’s lawyers.

Bry’s Hottest Take Is Also A Warning Shot At His Own Industry

O’Shea asked Bry for his “hottest take.” His answer was not the pro-robotics cheerleading most founders deliver in that slot.

“I think that we are going to see a lot of pain and carnage on the investments and expectations that are being set in this sort of most recent round of robotics companies,” Bry said, “because the physical world does not work the way the software world works.”

He continued: “The learning cycles are slower. They’re more expensive. It’s harder to build the business because you’re selling to real physical industries that are going to have to change the way they do physical work.”

In a funding environment where humanoid-robotics startups are raising nine-figure rounds on demo videos, that is a direct shot. It is also consistent with Bry’s framing of the Series F itself as a deliberately small raise from a company with real revenue. Skydio is positioning itself as the adult in a room full of hype.

The Agentic AI Roadmap

Skydio is building what Bry called “flying agentic AI.” Where most agentic-AI products today live in a browser and take actions in digital systems, Skydio’s bet is that the same architecture can run on a flying platform that takes actions in the physical world. The near-term roadmap supports the claim. The X10 and X10D quadcopters are the current platforms, the R10 indoor drone is shipping, and the F10 fixed-wing was referenced but not publicly detailed. All run on the same core autonomy stack Skydio has trained on “hundreds of thousands, millions of flights,” according to Bry.

DroneXL’s Take

The 2014 DJI acquisition story is the interview’s best anecdote, but it does not quite carry the weight some readers will give it. If Bry had said yes in 2014, another U.S. autonomy-focused drone startup would likely have filled the gap over the following decade, and the federal policy shift against Chinese drones would still have created pressure for a domestic alternative. The specific shape of today’s market depended on both the 2014 decision landing the way it did and the 2023 consumer-exit pivot landing the way it did. Neither alone explains the result.

I have covered this industry long enough to remember when Skydio looked like a consumer-photography experiment and DJI looked unstoppable. The R1 was a novelty. The Skydio 2 was a follow-me drone. Nobody was writing “this is the company that will anchor the American drone industry” articles in 2019. The shift came when Skydio made the consumer exit in 2023 and staked the company on enterprise autonomy at exactly the moment federal policy began treating Chinese drones as a national security problem. Luck, timing, and lobbying matter. The decision not to sell to DJI in 2014 also mattered.

Here is my read on what Bry signaled in this interview beyond the headline Series F number.

First, he is hardening the “flying body cameras” language in preparation for the public-opposition fights Skydio has already encountered in Syracuse, on ACLU comment dockets, and in EFF policy briefings. Whether those fights stay in city council chambers or escalate into litigation is an open question, not a prediction.

Second, the “pain and carnage” quote is a direct attempt to differentiate Skydio’s $4.4 billion valuation from humanoid-robotics and autonomous-vehicle rounds Bry sees as speculative, and it is a quote that will be used against him if Skydio itself stumbles.

Third, the agentic-AI framing is currently a direction, not a product. Skydio’s Ascend 2026 conference is scheduled for September 23 and 24 in Summerlin, Nevada. That is the right place to watch for whether “flying agentic AI” becomes a roadmapped feature or stays a founder phrase.

The larger question this interview raised and did not answer is whether Skydio’s current advantage survives a change in the regulatory weather. The $4.4 billion valuation, the tripled production plan, and the pace of public safety deployments are all downstream of Chinese drones being written out of federal and state procurement. If the FCC Covered List designation gets narrowed in DJI’s Ninth Circuit appeal, or if a future administration reopens the procurement pipeline, Skydio’s unit economics look different. Bry did not address this scenario in the interview, and he was not asked. He should have been.

Source: Sourcery interview with Adam Bry on YouTube.

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