The White House has now put names to the roughly 40 companies it hosted at its first Drone Dominance industry event on August 18, and the list the White House press office provided to DroneXL settles who was in the room. All three drone companies the Trump family is financially tied to were there. Ten of the eleven companies the Pentagon actually paid for attack drones in March were not, or at least do not appear on the list.
Four of the 40 names are headquartered outside the United States, in Germany, Switzerland, Israel and Japan. Eleven are there for parts rather than aircraft: batteries, magnets, motors, chips and cameras. Two trade associations round out the count. I covered the event itself three weeks ago, when the guest list was a number. Now it is a document, and the document says more about the administration’s drone policy than the speeches did.
All Three Trump-Family Drone Companies Sat In The White House Room
Unusual Machines, Powerus and XTEND all appear on the White House attendee list. Those are the three companies whose combined Trump-family holdings Bloomberg valued at about $750 million in March, and they are the three drone stocks that have moved on this administration’s trade and procurement decisions.
Donald Trump Jr. sits on Unusual Machines’ advisory board and held 331,580 shares as of November 2024, per company filings. Both Trump sons backed the Powerus merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings in March, a deal DroneXL examined the week it was announced, and Unusual Machines invested in it. Eric Trump’s exposure to XTEND runs through American Ventures, which backed XTEND’s reverse merger onto the NYSE, a listing that closed on September 3 while I was on a call with its chief executive.
Two of the three had already rallied on a Trump signature. When the president signed the Section 232 drone tariffs on August 13, Unusual Machines closed 24% higher the next day at a record, and shares in the Powerus vehicle gained 4.9%, as I reported at the time. Five days after that signing, both companies had a seat at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building event I reported on at the time, which Breaking Defense first put at roughly 40 companies and nearly 100 attendees.
Nothing on the list shows favoritism in who got invited: Skydio and Zipline were there too, and neither has a Trump in the cap table. What the list does show is that the administration’s drone industrial policy and the family’s drone portfolio now occupy the same room, and the White House has still offered no disclosure or recusal to separate them.
Ten Of The Pentagon’s Eleven Gauntlet I Winners Are Missing From The List
Neros is the only company on the White House list among the eleven that won first-round Drone Dominance orders at Fort Benning in March. Skycutter, which finished first, is absent, and so are Napatree, ModalAI, Auterion, Ukrainian Defense Drones, Griffon Aerospace, Nokturnal AI, Halo Aeronautics, Ascent Aerosystems and Farage Precision.
Those eleven companies hold orders for 24,320 attack drones, per the program’s public leaderboard, and DroneXL published the full ranking in March. They are the companies the Department of War has actually paid under the program the event was named for. The list is what the White House press office supplied and I am treating it as complete, but the caveat stands: an absence here means a company does not appear on the document, not that it was turned away.
The Gauntlet companies that did make the room are the ones that lost or have not yet been scored. XTEND competed at Fort Benning without taking orders, requalified for Gauntlet II at Camp Grayling, and flew at Fort Carson in August; Swarm Defense of Auburn Hills, Michigan, competed in Phase I and was not a top performer; Red Cat, whose Teal subsidiary also went to Gauntlet II, was there as well. Performance Drone Works, which never won a Gauntlet I order, was in the room five weeks after the Office of Strategic Capital offered it up to $820 million to build components in Huntsville.
Three of the biggest names in American military drones are not on the list either. Anduril, AeroVironment and Shield AI do not appear, and neither does Kratos. The room the White House assembled was the small-drone startup economy, not the prime contractor base.
Four Of The ‘American’ Drone Companies Are Headquartered Abroad
Helsing, Wingtra, XTEND and Exedy are on a list the administration framed as a gathering of American drone makers, and none of the four is headquartered here. Helsing is German, Wingtra is Swiss, XTEND began in Tel Aviv, and Exedy is a Japanese clutch maker with a Michigan drone unit.
Each has an American footprint to point to. Helsing announced a $50 million plant in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 14, designed to build more than 2,000 HX-2 strike drones a month, a story DroneXL covered two days later. XTEND has a factory near Tampa and its US arm, XTEND Reality Inc., is the entity that competes for Pentagon work. Exedy Drones USA builds agricultural spray drones in Michigan for a market the FCC’s Covered List is pushing away from Chinese hardware; the list carries it twice, once as Exedy and once as Exedyusa, and I have counted it once. Wingtra is the odd one out: its site says engineering and manufacturing are based in Zurich, with sales and support teams in the United States, though its WingtraRAY sits on the Blue UAS Cleared List.
The tariff order the president signed five days before the meeting draws exactly this line. Drones from the European Union, Japan and Switzerland pay 15% instead of 25% or 100%, but only if substantially all of the hardware and software originates in those countries or the United States. Three of the four foreign firms in the room are from countries that qualify. Whether their supply chains do is the question Commerce has not yet published rules to answer.
Eleven Chairs Went To Batteries, Magnets, Motors And Sensors
Eleven of the 40 names on the list are there for components and materials rather than finished aircraft, and the batteries, magnets and motors they build are the part of the supply chain China still controls. That share says what the administration believes the domestic drone problem actually is.
The battery bench alone had four seats. Sila, the Alameda silicon-anode company, received a conditional loan commitment of up to $1.4 billion from the Office of Strategic Capital on August 7, eleven days before the event, to expand its Moses Lake, Washington, plant and build a cell factory for military and industrial drones. Amprius, another silicon-anode maker, was there, along with EGI Battery of Ann Arbor, which plans 300,000 NDAA-aligned pouch cells a year from a Michigan line starting this quarter, and Packet Digital of Fargo, North Dakota. MP Materials, the rare-earth miner the Pentagon took a stake in last year, covered the magnet end.
Westmag is the next step up that chain. The South San Francisco company emerged from stealth in June with $11 million from Andreessen Horowitz to wind drone motors domestically, and I wrote then that finishing magnets in California does not fix a refining choke point in China. HYFIX brought its H1P positioning chip, launched at XPONENTIAL in May as a US-designed replacement for the imported GNSS modules on most small drones. The list says only “Obsidian,” and the reading that fits the room is Obsidian Sensors of San Diego, a thermal imaging sensor maker with the Department of War among its investors. Teledyne FLIR and GoPro covered cameras, and uAvionix of Montana covered avionics.
Three entries I could not pin to a single company. “Elevon” matches both ElevonX, a Slovenian VTOL maker, and Elevon Aerial Ag, an Illinois dealer for Chinese-built spray drones; “Vantage” most plausibly means Vantage Robotics of San Leandro, California; and “AND” matches nothing I can name. The White House list gives names, not addresses, and I have not guessed where it does not say. Two entries are trade associations rather than manufacturers: AUVSI, and CDA if it is the Commercial Drone Alliance. AUVSI’s chief executive Michael Robbins was on his way out to the semiconductor lobby, an exit DroneXL reported the same day as the meeting.
Delivery, Ag And Public Safety Filled Out The Rest Of The Room
Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline, the three largest drone delivery operators in the United States, were on the list, along with the public safety and agricultural manufacturers whose customers are losing DJI hardware. The commercial half of the industry was in the room after all, in numbers.
The public safety bench had Skydio, BRINC, SkyfireAI, WISPR Systems of Batesville, Mississippi, and, if my reading of the entry is right, Vantage Robotics, which the Army has selected to advance in its Short Range Reconnaissance program. Hylio of Texas and Exedy covered spray drones. Petrel Technologies of Florida, which started out towing advertising banners over Miami Beach and now sells the Army a Group 3 aircraft that launches FPV drones in flight, was there, as were Firestorm and GreenSight. So was Hoverfly, the Orlando tethered-drone maker whose motors come from a Korean partner.
Two counter-drone companies made the cut. Perennial Autonomy, the company Eric Schmidt started as White Stork after meeting Ukrainian officials, holds the $500 million Pentagon interceptor contract awarded in May, and Powerus sells the Guardian-1 interceptor to the Air Force. Albacore, the Philadelphia company building attack drone submarines in a former marble showroom, was the only underwater name on the list.
What the commercial companies got for showing up is less clear than what the defense side got. Emil Michael promised the room that more Office of Strategic Capital deals would follow within two weeks. That window closed on September 1. DroneXL has found no drone-related commitment announced since; the most recent on the record are Sila’s and a magnet loan to Niron Magnetics, both dated August 7, eleven days before the meeting.
DroneXL’s Take
I wrote three weeks ago that the guest list was the policy. Now that I have read it, I would sharpen that: the guest list is the policy, and the policy is components.
Eleven of 40 seats went to companies that make the parts, not the aircraft. That is the right instinct. Every American drone maker in that room, Trump-linked or not, buys the same Chinese cells and the same Chinese magnets, and a $5,000 attack drone built from $4,000 of imported parts is not dominance of anything. Sila’s $1.4 billion loan and PDW’s $820 million are the first money in a decade aimed at the layer of the problem that actually matters, and both borrowers were in the room. I have argued since the first Gauntlet that buying finished drones without fixing the parts bin is theater. This list suggests someone in the West Wing agrees.
Then there is the other pattern, and I will not pretend it is a coincidence of alphabetical order. Every company in the Trump family’s drone portfolio was invited. One of the eleven companies that earned Pentagon orders on merit at Fort Benning was. I do not think the White House rigged a guest list; Skydio and Zipline do not need the president’s sons to get a seat. My read is simpler and less flattering. The invitations went to the companies the administration already talks to, and the administration talks to the companies its family knows. Skycutter finished first at Gauntlet I with a score of 99.3 and holds an order for 2,560 drones. It was not in the room. Powerus, whose 10,000-drones-a-month claim I could not make add up in March, was.
There is a fair counterpoint. Skycutter and ModalAI may simply have declined, or been busy at Fort Carson, and a list of who attended tells you nothing about who was asked. I would take that argument more seriously if the White House would publish the invitation list next to the attendee list. It has not.
The four foreign names bother me less than they will bother some readers. Helsing is spending $50 million in West Virginia and XTEND is building near Tampa, and the tariff order itself carves out allied countries at 15%. A drone dominance program that only admits companies incorporated in Delaware would shut out most of the companies with Ukraine-proven hardware. Fair competition includes allies. What it does not include is calling the result an American industry before the parts are American, which is the test the component bench in that room exists to pass.
Two things to watch. Emil Michael’s two-week promise of more Office of Strategic Capital deals ran out on September 1, and the next borrower’s name will say whether the lending program reaches past the arsenal to the survey pilot whose Mavic doubled in price on September 3. And the Gauntlet II leaderboard, whenever the Department of War posts it, will show whether the companies that were in the room on August 18 are the ones that can actually build.
Sources: attendee list provided to DroneXL by the White House press office; Breaking Defense; U.S. Department of War; Sila; Helsing; Wingtra; EGI Battery; Westmag; The White House
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
