This tech startup is putting drones in soldiers’ backpacks

Matt Higgins was at ground zero within hours of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Higgins, who was at the time working as Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s press secretary, saw the rubble—and the rebuilding—firsthand. 

Twenty-three years later, Higgins gets that same feeling of unease when he looks at the war in Ukraine. Russia is developing new combat drones at record pace, bringing the state of technical warfare to a new frontier. Through his company, Performance Drone Works (PDW), Higgins aims to help Ukraine fight back.

“Ukraine raised the stakes dramatically, because it became a real-time display of the asymmetrical power of a sophisticated drone fleet,” Higgins says. “Bad actors are taking notes.​​”

Cofounded by Higgins, Ryan Gury, Nicholas Horbaczewski, and Trevor Smith, the Huntsville-based company developed the C100, a backpack-size drone that incorporates anti-jamming radio technology and AI tracking features to stay safe from interference. They’re domestically made, a relative rarity for an industry that was previously export dependent. It’s this mission that has scored PDW multimillion-dollar deals with the Department of Defense, a star-studded board including former director of the CIA John Brennan, and on-the-ground deployment through the U.S. Special Operations Command. 

In the battle to create the most advanced combat drone, PDW has emerged as a serious player.

‘We really had to take a leap of faith’

While the U.S. was the first country to develop combat drones after 9/11, it was China that took the lead in quadcopter innovation. DJI, the Chinese manufacturer which received investments from state-backed entities, dominated the space. PDW wanted to bring this growing industry into domestic hands.

“We really had to take a leap of faith that this is where the world was headed,” says Higgins, who invested almost $50 million in PDW with his business partner Stephen Ross. “There’s a lot of consensus now, at every level of the U.S. government, that we need to cultivate our own domestic drone industry.”

The space has since become flooded with competitors, with the North American combat drone market soaring to an estimated $1.59 billion in 2024. PDW aims to stand out from the pack with its C100, which is especially notable for its compact size: At just 24 x 15 inches and 21.4 pounds, the drone can easily fit inside a soldier’s backpack.  

“​​That’s a pretty game-changing element, and that’s what we see happening in the Russia-Ukraine war: single units deploying their own air support,” says Gury, who previously led the Drone Racing League alongside Higgins and Smith. 

The C100 also incorporates multiple anti-interference elements. The machine’s radio system moves beyond the standard sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum used in mass-market drones. And, when the GPS signal is jammed—as has been happening around the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean—the drone’s AI software can track the ground to make its way home.

“What makes us different is that it’s a product of a decade of know-how,” Higgins says. “It just takes so much R&D to create what we’ve created. When I see all the other competitors sprouting, I take that as confirmation that the space has now matured, and the pieces are being put in place to justify a domestic drone industry in the U.S.”

‘We better get good at it’

Gury and Higgins are elusive about the conditions about the lengths of the C100s usage. Gury notes that PDW works with “all branches of the military,” and that they are deployed with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), where chairman of the board Tony Thomas was once the 11th commander. While PDW declined to share details of contracts, federal databases show a $6.74 million deal between PDW and SOCOM signed in February 2024. 

Of course, combat drones innovation isn’t the most universally beloved field of tech. Some fear about the state of surveillance under a more complex UAV system, while others say investing in drone warfare will lead to more violence than may be necessary. Thomas, for his part, was on the ground in Mosul, Iraq, when ISIS launched about 70 DJI quadcopters; he says that, while he understands the anxiety around drones, such concerns are ultimately misguided. 

“The ship has sailed,” Thomas says. “This is how we’re going to fight in the future. We better get good at it.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91146326/performance-drone-works-putting-drones-in-soldiers-backpacks?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss