- Performance Drone Works has received a $820 million conditional loan commitment
- It is intended to foster domestic manufacturing of critical drone components
- OSC said it plans to give other domestic component producers similar loans
The Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital announced Friday that it has entered into a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million with Performance Drone Works to build out high-volume manufacturing capacity for critical drone components in the U.S.
“The Office of Strategic Capital is strengthening the domestic supply chain for critical drone components to ensure American manufacturers can deliver the lethal capabilities that our warfighters need,” said Emil Michael, under secretary of war for research and engineering and recipient of the 2026 Wash100 award.
How Does the Loan Initiative Work?
The loan initiative pairs OSC financing with additional private capital to create a new domestic supply source for components used across the U.S. drone industry. The components produced under the initiative are expected to support Group 1 and Group 2 unmanned aircraft systems built by PDW and other U.S. manufacturers. OSC said the financing is meant to help resolve component bottlenecks that have constrained the wider unmanned-systems sector.
Under the terms of the conditional commitment, PDW must complete a series of standard steps before reaching financial close, including satisfying financial, legal, technical and other due-diligence requirements.
“PDW will be one of several domestic component producers receiving OSC loan commitments in support of President Trump’s Executive Order 14307, ‘Unleashing American Drone Dominance.’ Expanding domestic component production will benefit manufacturers throughout the ecosystem and improve supply-chain resilience,” said David Lorch, director of the Office of Strategic Capital and senior advisor to Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg.
What Is Performance Drone Works?
Performance Drone Works is an Alabama-based company that evolved from the Drone Racing League. PDW was officially founded in 2018 after it began training special operations forces on high-performance first-person view drones. The company was backed by RSE Ventures and later raised more than $110 million in a Series B round to broaden its product line and scale up manufacturing of modular military drones.
The company has a 90,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama, built to produce its C100 and AM drone systems at scale for U.S. and allied defense customers. At full output, the plant is capable of turning out as many as 350 C100 units and 5,000 AM-FPV drones every month.
Engineers, operators, and production staff work side by side inside the facility, which PDW says lets combat feedback go directly into design changes without the usual lag between field insight and factory floor. The company also points to structural advantages built into the plant’s supply chain—vertical integration, sourcing kept largely domestic and redundant production lines—meant to keep output steady even under pressure.
