AeroVironment

AeroVironment, which now brands itself simply as AV, is a publicly traded US defence-technology company (Nasdaq: AVAV) headquartered in Arlington, Virginia and run by Wahid Nawabi. Founded in 1971 by Paul MacCready , the Caltech engineer behind the first sustained human-powered aircraft, the firm spent decades on solar planes and research craft before becoming one of the Pentagon’s mainstay drone suppliers — a niche it now defends against newer entrants like Anduril .

Its product line splits between reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions. The hand-launched RQ-11 Raven is the most-fielded small UAV in US Army history; the larger RQ-20 Puma — fitted with a GPS-denied autonomy kit shaped by Ukrainian front-line feedback on Russian jamming — handles longer-range ISR, alongside the miniature Wasp III and the Group-3 vertical-takeoff JUMP 20. On the strike side sits the Switchblade family: the backpack-portable Switchblade 300 and the heavier, anti-armour Switchblade 600, with roughly 6,000 units deployed across 55 customer countries. The US has supplied Switchblades to Ukraine in growing tranches since spring 2022, and that war has both validated and stress-tested the design against electronic warfare.

The company’s recent push is autonomy. The Switchblade 600 Block 2 adds onboard AI/ML automatic target recognition with EO/IR sensors, and in February 2026 the Army placed a $186 million order under a $990 million contract. Red Dragon, unveiled in May 2025, goes further: a software-defined, fully-autonomous-capable one-way attack drone with a 400-plus-kilometre range that needs neither continuous operator input nor satellite navigation, picked up by the Army in March 2026.

The defining shift came on 1 May 2025, when AV closed its roughly $4.1 billion all-stock acquisition of BlueHalo, a firm built on directed-energy weapons, space communications, counter-UAS and electronic warfare. The deal turned a small-drone house into an “all-domain” defence company of more than 3,750 staff, and lifted fiscal-2026 revenue guidance toward $2 billion.