Neros Technologies is the only company on both leaderboards the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program posted this week for Gauntlet II, the second round of the Department of War’s $1.1 billion contest to buy cheap one-way attack drones by the hundred thousand. Neros won the close quarters battle mission outright with 88.1 points and finished third in deep strike with 69.8. Nine other companies placed on one board or the other.
Perennial Autonomy, the company former Google CEO Eric Schmidt started as White Stork to build drone interceptors for Ukraine, topped the deep strike board at 80.1. Skycutter, the British firm that won Gauntlet I in March with 99.3 points, finished fourth in deep strike at 66.6 and did not place in close quarters at all.
The department plans to buy about 60,000 drones from the ten companies, roughly $300 million of orders. Testing ran at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August, and the results went up on the program’s leaderboard on Tuesday, September 15.
Neros Won Close Quarters And Placed Third In Deep Strike
Neros took first in close quarters battle with 88.1 points, ahead of ORQA US, XTEND Reality, Vector and ModalAI. In deep strike it finished third at 69.8, behind Perennial Autonomy and Hyperscale. No other company appears on both leaderboards, so Neros alone is in line for two production orders.
The program’s April Request for Solutions set the order ladder for each mission area at 8,000 drones for first place, then 7,000, 6,000, 5,000 and 4,000 for the next four, Aviation Tech Today reported in July. On that ladder Neros would collect 8,000 close quarters drones and 6,000 deep strike drones, though the program has said quantities are fixed at contract award rather than by leaderboard position.
Neros is also the Gauntlet I winner with the cleanest delivery record. By July it had delivered and secured acceptance of all 2,400 Archer drones from its March order, according to the program’s own status tracking as reported by Aviation Tech Today. The company delivered its first Army PBAS kits ahead of schedule the same month, and I profiled founder Soren Monroe-Anderson’s path from drone racing champion to defense contractor when DroneXL covered the Gauntlet II field in June.
Perennial Autonomy Won Deep Strike Four Months After Its $500 Million Counter-Drone Deal
Perennial Autonomy led the deep strike board with 80.1 points, more than nine ahead of second-place Hyperscale at 70.9. Its Merops interceptor already defends U.S. forces against Iranian Shahed-type drones, and the deep strike win adds the offensive half of the same cheap-drone math to its Pentagon business.
The lineage runs through Ukraine. Schmidt stood the venture up as White Stork in 2023, renamed it Project Eagle in February 2024, and rebranded to Perennial Autonomy this year. In May, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 handed it a three-year counter-drone contract worth up to $500 million, the largest the U.S. military has signed, covering the Merops, the Bumblebee quadcopter and the Hornet midrange strike drone. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told lawmakers in April the service bought 13,000 Merops in the opening days of the Iran war at roughly $15,000 each. Perennial is now positioned to sell the Pentagon both the drone that shoots down cheap attackers and a cheap attacker of its own.
Hyperscale in second is the board’s blank spot. Inside Unmanned Systems could describe it in July only as a newcomer still in stealth mode, and my searches this week found no founder, location or airframe attached to the name. The Pentagon is preparing to order about 7,000 drones from a company that has told the public nothing about itself.
Skycutter Fell From First To Fourth In Six Months
Skycutter won Gauntlet I at Fort Benning in March with 99.3 points, 12 clear of Neros. At Fort Carson it scored 66.6 in deep strike, fourth behind Neros, and its close quarters entry did not make the top five. Swarm Defense Technologies rounded out the deep strike board at 66.0.
The drop comes with a production footnote. As of July, Skycutter and Napatree, the Gauntlet I champion and third-place finisher, were the only two March winners the program listed as neither ramping nor shipping their ordered drones, Aviation Tech Today reported from the program’s status page. The program has said Gauntlet II rankings rest on mission outcomes and operator ratings, and it has not said whether a vendor’s delivery record against an earlier order figures in. So the leaderboard does not answer whether the production stall cost Skycutter anything beyond the order itself.
When I wrote up the March results, I called the 99.3 the story and a real performance signal. Six months and one harder test later, that number reads as a Fort Benning score, not a ranking that travels.
Every Long-Range Drone Reached 15 Kilometers Under Jamming
Operators flew 1,858 sorties across 23 platforms from 19 companies at Fort Carson, the Defense Innovation Unit said, and every one of the 11 platforms evaluated at long distance reached 15 kilometers (9.3 miles). In Gauntlet I, only 24 percent of drones made it to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).
The missions ran at stand-off range and inside confined spaces, repeated at night and against counter-drone systems. To get to Fort Carson, the 19 finalists first survived a qualifier at Camp Grayling, Michigan, from June 8 to 19, where 49 companies flew about 79 drone designs, then each delivered 120 drones fitted with live payloads inside five weeks. The payloads came from five lethality providers the program picked in May: Bravo Ordnance, Kela Defense, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse and Northrop Grumman.
DIU said the Gauntlet II drones are “cheaper, more capable, and sourced from a supply chain more closely tied to the American industrial base” than the Gauntlet I batch, DefenseScoop reported from the unit’s posts on X. That sourcing line is the program rule I flagged in June: Phase II barred motors and batteries from covered countries starting in August, so every drone on these two boards flew on a supply chain that excludes China on paper.
Ukrainian Firms, Red Cat And Ondas Missed Both Boards
None of the four Ukrainian companies placed. UDD and Stellarion flew deep strike and finished outside the top five, and Grim Tech and Wilcox Cherry Defense did the same in close quarters, according to participant lists DefenseScoop pulled from the program site. Two publicly traded U.S. entrants missed too.
Teal Drones, the Red Cat Holdings subsidiary, competed in close quarters and missed the board. Ascent Aerosystems, owned by Ondas Holdings and a tenth-place finisher in Gauntlet I, flew deep strike and missed as well. Benzinga put Red Cat’s stock down 24 percent since August 25, just before Fort Carson testing wrapped. XTEND Reality, third in close quarters and publicly traded since a merger this year, is the only listed company on either board.
UDD’s miss lands three months after it chose Holland, Ohio, for its first U.S. FPV factory on the strength of its Gauntlet I order. Skycutter’s Gauntlet I entry was built with Ukraine’s Skyfall, so Ukrainian engineering did place, under a British flag. The program does not eliminate anyone between rounds, and all four Ukrainian firms can return. Gauntlet 2.5, a separate round for bomber drones, starts next month. Gauntlet 3 follows about six months after Gauntlet 2, and Gauntlet 4 closes the program roughly six months after that, on the way to the department’s target of more than 200,000 small drones by 2027.
DroneXL’s Take
The Skycutter result tells you more about this program than the winners do. A 99.3 at Fort Benning in March became a 66.6 at Fort Carson in August, on a course that added 15-kilometer stand-off, night runs and active jamming. On the program’s own description of the scoring, that means operators and mission results found a less capable drone the second time, from the company that also took a Gauntlet I production order and, by the program’s own tracker, had shipped none of it four months later. Both facts are bad for Skycutter and good for the program. A competition where the champion can lose is a competition, not a catalog.
Neros did the boring thing instead: it delivered all 2,400 drones from March, then showed up with something that placed on both boards. My read is that the delivery record and the double placing are the same story. The Pentagon has said from the start that the Gauntlets buy production capacity as much as they buy airframes. The two companies that have shipped at volume to U.S. forces this year, Neros with 2,400 Archers and Perennial with the 13,000 Merops the Army bought in the Iran war’s first days, are the two at the top of the new boards.
The four Ukrainian companies finishing off both lists is the part I like least. UDD, Grim Tech, Stellarion and Wilcox Cherry Defense, the successor to General Cherry’s Gauntlet I entry, bring Ukraine’s front-line FPV production experience to the field, and every one of them finished outside the top five. The program’s covered-country sourcing rule hit in August, and companies whose supply chains were built for Ukraine’s front line, not for a Buy-American motor list, had five weeks to convert 120 drones. That is a plausible explanation and the program has not given the real one, so I will not pretend to know. The Ohio factory UDD announced in July was premised on Gauntlet orders. If the scores hold through Gauntlet 3 early next year, that premise gets tested.
Hyperscale is the loose end. The Pentagon is about to place roughly 7,000 drones with a company that has not published a founder, an address or a photograph of its airframe. Good drones from unknown vendors are exactly what this program was designed to surface. They are also exactly the kind of vendor whose ownership and capitalization deserve a look before the order lands, and nothing public addresses either.
Gauntlet 2.5, the bomber round, opens next month. Watch whether Skycutter is on the entry list and whether its March order has moved off “not shipping” by then. That tells you whether the fourth-place score was a bad week or a business problem.
Sources: DefenseScoop, Aviation Tech Today, Benzinga, Inside Unmanned Systems, Drone Dominance Program leaderboard.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
