SiFly has raised $20 million in Series A funding to start production of its Q12 long-endurance drone, with the first revenue-generating deliveries now targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Shield Capital led the round, joined by Qudit, BBK Capital and Alumni Ventures, among others. Founder and CEO Brian Hinman says the money buys roughly 18 months of runway.

The Santa Clara, California company expects to ship about 1,000 Q12s next year from a planned manufacturing site in Sunnyvale. That is a real step for a drone that, when DroneXL covered its May 2025 unveiling, was supposed to start deliveries in Q4 2025. Production has not begun.

Hinman is open about the tension underneath the round: U.S. restrictions on Chinese drones are pushing demand up, and the Q12’s motors still come from China.

SiFly Plans 1,000 Drones a Year From a Sunnyvale Plant

SiFly expects to ship roughly 1,000 Q12 drones in 2027, built at a 15,000-square-foot facility the company is negotiating to lease in Sunnyvale, California. Production has not started yet, and the first revenue-generating deliveries are targeted for the first quarter of 2027, Hinman told Aviation Week.

The Sunnyvale site should carry the company for about 18 months, Hinman told Aviation Week; after that, manufacturing could move to Arizona or Texas. SiFly’s announcement of the round says the money also funds continued work on its DronePort infrastructure and the regulatory side of the business.

The aircraft itself has receipts. The Q12, a quadcopter with a 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) maximum takeoff weight built for endurance and forward flight, set a Guinness World Record on July 26, 2025, with a flight of 3 hours and 11 minutes over California’s Salinas Valley, certified by an adjudicator on site. SiFly pitched the Q12 at its unveiling as a 10-pound-payload, 90-mile (145-kilometer) aircraft for public safety, inspection, mapping and agriculture, and that target market has not changed.

The timeline has. Q1 2027 is five quarters past the delivery date SiFly gave at launch, and Hinman knows what that costs a startup: nobody takes a drone maker seriously, he says, until a lot of units are shipping and people are validating the product.

SiFly’s American Drone Still Runs on Chinese Motors

SiFly sources the Q12’s motors from China and assembles its batteries in Malaysia. Assembling those motors in the United States from globally sourced parts would cost roughly three times as much, Hinman says. Domestic-content rules that reach deeper into the supply chain push the price higher still.

None of that conflicts with the NDAA-compliant label SiFly puts on the Q12: the component rules police where a drone’s cameras and radios come from, not its motors, a distinction DroneXL unpacked in its NDAA-compliant drones guide. It does mean the “American drone” label sits on top of a bill of materials that still runs through China, the pattern DroneXL documented this month in its reporting on the American drone component gap (and the pressure point China squeezed in 2024, when sanctions cut off Skydio’s battery supplier).

The military’s ambitions go further than assembly. Hinman says the military wants motors whose metal is dug out of American ground, down to the neodymium in the magnets. “We need rare earths to make good magnets. That’s just not physically possible today,” he said.

DronePort Fits a Drone Fleet in a Parking Space

SiFly’s DronePort packs three or four Q12s into the footprint of a 20-foot (6-meter) shipping container, occupying about a single parking space. Drones land on the roof and are lowered inside, and Hinman says customers increasingly want the aircraft and the automated base sold as one system.

Beyond the Q12, SiFly is continuing design work on the Q250, a heavy-lift drone conceived around agricultural spraying, with cargo and firefighting behind it on Hinman’s list. He argues the spraying market gets more attractive as restrictions squeeze the Chinese suppliers who dominate it. DJI controls roughly 80 percent of the U.S. agricultural spray market, as DroneXL reported when the Agras T55 and T100 launched globally in July with no word on U.S. availability.

The Series A does not cover full Q250 development. Hinman says that will take more equity and potentially debt. For now, the job is getting Q12s out the door.

DroneXL’s Take

SiFly is one of the more credible American drone stories going, and I don’t hand that out easily. The endurance record was certified by a Guinness adjudicator in a Salinas Valley field, not claimed in a render, and Hinman admits nobody takes you seriously until units ship.

That honesty is rarer in this industry than it should be. It also cuts against SiFly itself: the company has already let one ship date slide, from Q4 2025 to Q1 2027, so its credibility now rides entirely on the new quarter.

But read what this round actually documents. Washington’s restrictions are driving the demand SiFly is raising against, and the drone answering that demand flies on Chinese motors because American assembly would triple the cost. Yes, the restrictions are working as intended in one sense: they are minting real orders for real American aircraft. My read is that they are minting demand far faster than anyone is building the layer underneath it. Banning Chinese aircraft without building the domestic base of motors and magnets underneath them doesn’t end the dependence; it moves it one layer down the bill of materials, where it is harder to see and, per Hinman’s own math, three times as expensive to fix. Skydio’s battery crisis was the warning shot. Hinman saying domestic rare-earth sourcing is “just not physically possible today” is the industry stating it on the record.

Watch Q1 2027. If revenue-generating Q12s are in customers’ hands by spring, SiFly will have done something no press release can: shipped.

Sources: Aviation Week, SiFly via PR Newswire

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