ABZ Innovation opened a €7 million ($8 million) factory extension in Szentendre, Hungary on September 17, 2026, and its CEO told Bloomberg the same day that the company will start building drones in the United States over the course of next year. The Hungarian plant is rated for 2,000 heavy-duty agricultural and industrial drones a year on one shift and 3,500 on two.

The US plan is not a footnote to the Hungarian one. ABZ’s L50 spraying drone holds one of the Department of War Conditional Approvals that exempt it from the FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones, and since July 21 those approvals last only as long as the holder follows the onshoring plan it filed. When I covered ABZ’s funding round in January, the US angle was a distributor deal. Nine months later it is a factory.

ABZ lost 1 billion forint ($3.2 million) in 2025 on the cost of scaling up, and CEO Károly Ludvigh says break-even is a few years out.

ABZ Targets 3,500 Drones a Year From 11,400 Square Feet

The new Szentendre facility is about four times the size of ABZ’s previous site. At 1,060 square meters (11,410 square feet), it is what ABZ calls one of the largest dedicated civilian drone factories in Europe. ABZ targets a threefold production increase in 2026 and a further doubling in 2027.

The €7 million came from the funding round ABZ closed in January, led by Germany’s Vsquared Ventures with Hungary’s Day One Capital and US investor Assembly Ventures. I covered that round the day it closed, 24 hours after Drone Nerds added ABZ’s L10 V2 sprayer to its US catalog. The square-footage figure comes from Ludvigh’s July interview with DroneLife, which put full-capacity staffing at 40 to 45 people.

Ludvigh told Reuters the site matters because “before this there was almost no existing capacity to manufacture these kinds of drones” in Europe. ABZ builds four lines there: L-Series sprayers, S-Series spreaders, C-Series high-pressure cleaning drones, and M-Series cargo platforms, sold through distributors in more than 40 countries. Sales are concentrated in the US and Europe. Gergely Kis, a drone adviser at Hungarian consultancy eNET, told Reuters that slow progress on unmanned traffic management is holding back civilian drone growth in Europe.

Ludvigh told Bloomberg the order backlog is what justifies the second shift, and a company that lost 1 billion forint against a €7 million round needs that backlog converted into deliveries quickly.

A US Factory Is What Keeps ABZ’s L50 Off the Covered List

The FCC exempted ABZ’s L50 from its Covered List on June 12, 2026, in Public Notice DA 26-585, after the Department of War granted the sprayer a Conditional Approval. It originally expired December 31, 2026. A July 21 National Security Determination removed the date and tied every approval to an onshoring plan.

The wording in the FCC’s July 21 notice is specific: approvals remain effective indefinitely so long as the entity abides by the onshoring plan outlined in its application, and terminate, with the equipment restored to the Covered List, if it does not. ABZ’s application is not public, so what it promised the Pentagon is not on the record. What is on the record is Ludvigh telling Bloomberg on September 17 that non-military drone production in the US begins over the course of 2027, and telling Hungarian daily Világgazdaság, as relayed by Hungary Today, that a US plant would also blunt the effect of any tariffs. Nothing published so far names a state, a site, a partner, or which product line moves first.

The exemption covers one aircraft. The FCC’s Conditional Approval list names ABZ’s L50 and nothing else from the company. The L10 V2 that Drone Nerds sells in the US is not on it, and neither are the cleaning, spreading, or cargo lines. That gap got sharper on July 21, when the FCC proposed banning the import and sale of foreign-made aerosol drones that dispense “economic poison” under FAA agricultural rules, along with thermal, LiDAR, docking, swarming, and 55-pound-plus drones, for any buyer outside the federal government. Drones holding a Conditional Approval, a Blue UAS listing, or Buy America status are carved out. A Hungarian-built sprayer without one of those three is exactly what the proposal targets.

A US assembly line solves the second problem as well as the first. Drones assembled in the US with at least 65 percent domestic component value qualify for the Buy America exemption, which the July 21 action extended to January 1, 2028. Whether ABZ can hit 65 percent is the question I put to the company in January, when I asked where its flight controllers, motors, and battery cells come from. “European-sourced” was the answer its investors gave then. A factory in the US will have to answer in percentages.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the FCC drone ban working the way its defenders say it should. A five-year-old Hungarian company with €7 million submitted to a national security review, cleared it, and says it will move production to the US to keep the door open. ABZ is the case the agency will cite when it denies protectionism.

The eight of nine DJI-linked brands that ignored FCC letters of inquiry make the contrast for it.

I still don’t think it settles the argument. The problem with the ban was never that no foreign company would ever qualify. It was scale and price. ABZ’s Hungarian plant tops out at 3,500 drones a year across four product lines and 40 countries, on a double shift it has not yet run. A Michigan State study I covered in November counted roughly 5,500 FAA-registered agricultural drones in the US by mid-2025, in a spray market the same study put at about 80 percent DJI. One US-approved sprayer from a company that lost $3.2 million last year does not replace that fleet, and the only pricing Ludvigh has offered, to DroneLife in July, was “the same or similar level as the Chinese,” with no figure attached. My read is that ABZ wins a real niche, the operator who has to certify country of origin for a government or utility contract, and that the American farmer buying on price is no closer to an Agras substitute than he was in December.

The number to watch is 65 percent. If ABZ’s US line clears the Buy America threshold and ABZ says so, in component percentages rather than in “European-sourced” language, the niche gets a lot bigger. If it opens the plant and stays quiet about the parts, the Szentendre press release will have told us more than the American one.

Sources: Reuters, via Global Banking & Finance, Bloomberg, ABZ Innovation press release via RoboticsTomorrow, FCC DA 26-585, FCC DA 26-761

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