Funding rounds, partnerships, layoffs, and the market math underneath the drone headlines.
HYFIX Spatial Intelligence is rolling out its H1P Positioning, Navigation, and Open-Compute Module for small unmanned systems, with samples and evaluation kits available immediately. The Santa Clara, California company is showcasing the H1P at AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit this week, booth 34005. It’s the first product built on the company’s H1 Autonomous Systems Chip,…
A group of ninth and tenth graders at a North Las Vegas charter school are spending their electives doing something most drone enthusiasts wish they’d started earlier: flying, crashing, troubleshooting, and doing it again. They’re not playing. They have a certification to chase, as Las Vegas Sun reported. The Class That Started With Code Richard…
A Chinese research team has flown what it calls the world’s first fixed-wing drone built largely from bamboo. The tilt-rotor UAV took off from a field in Tianjin, climbed, transitioned to forward flight, and came back down on its own rotors, as reported by China Daily. More than a quarter of its airframe is made…
European Commission opens consultation on new EU Aviation and Aeronautics Strategy through May 21, 2026. Drones, counter-UAS, anti-jamming all in scope.
Skydio closed a $110 million Series F on Thursday at a $4.4 billion post-money valuation, with CEO Adam Bry framing the modest raise as the real headline. The San Mateo drone maker was oversubscribed. Existing investors wanted to put in substantially more. Bry turned most of them down. “The most significant fact in our Series…
The Federal Aviation Administration is quietly developing an AI-powered air traffic management tool that would let controllers deconflict flight paths up to two hours before a collision risk emerges, according to reporting from The Air Current published April 17, 2026. The program is called Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories, or SMART. Three companies are…
A Santa Clara startup called Hyfix Spatial Intelligence just pulled in $15 million to build an American-designed system-on-a-chip that folds flight control, high-precision positioning, secure communications, and onboard compute into a single piece of U.S.-manufactured silicon. Craft Ventures led the round. The pitch is that this will be the American brain for drones and robots…
A Ukrainian company called PAWELL has figured out how to take battery cells designed for electric vehicles and stuff them into fixed-wing drones. The result: operational range jumped from roughly 19 miles to 122 miles on a single charge, as Euro Maidan Press reports. One of those upgraded drones has already destroyed a Russian Buk-M1…
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