The “future of warfare” is being assembled on the factory floor of PDW’s newly opened Drone Factory 01 in Research Park.
The 90,000-square-foot manufacturing complex will deliver tactical drones at a speed and scale company leaders say is no longer optional, but a matter of national survival.
“This is the end of the exquisite. It’s the end of the slow aerospace, where single systems now should cost a fraction of today’s, where systems can be distributed and scaled to all individual operators on all front lines,.”
At full capacity, the Huntsville plant will produce 350 C100 multi-mission UAS and 5,000 AM-FPV attritable munitions per month, a build rate to meet what PDW calls the new realities of combat.
PDW co-founder Matt Higgins issued a stark warning when describing the importance of building America’s drone industry to meet modern warfare needs.
“The next 9/11 will not arrive by plane. It will arrive by a swarm of drones,” Higgins said. “And we need to make sure we understand every aspect of this technology and build the greatest drone companies in the world right here.”
Celebrity chef and entrepreneur Robert Irvine, a PDW investor, spoke at the event to praise the company’s mission.
“They see the greatest opportunity we have here is to give our fighting forces every conceivable battlefield advantage to win and win quickly,” Irvine said. “This is the future of warfare. There is no way to overstate what is happening here.”
Irvine, founder of the Robert Irvine Foundation, a nonprofit supporting the physical and mental well-being of U.S. service members, veterans, first responders, and their families, also highlighted the long-term significance of PDW’s work.
“The work PDW is doing will shape, and you can quote this twice, will shape the future of our world that we live in for years to come,” he said.
Designed for speed
PDW was built on speed, Chief Strategy Officer Trevor Smith, said “the story of PDW begins well before PDW ever existed.”
“Back in the days of drone racing, we were building the fastest, most agile drones in the world, not for the battlefield, but for the racetrack,” he said. “Along the way, we realized something important. That same speed, precision and resilience we engineered for sport could save lives on the battlefield and give our operators the decisive edge.”
Unlike traditional aerospace programs that measure progress in years, PDW says its new facility is built to collapse development and deployment timelines to months and in some cases, weeks.
“When we say built for speed, we mean it not just in our drones, but in our culture. From concept to field deployment, we’re collapsing timelines from years to months to weeks,” Gury said.
By uniting design, manufacturing, flight testing and delivery under one roof, Drone Factory 01 is designed to rapidly iterate and field systems at the speed of battlefield demand.
“Our flagship drone manufacturing facility here in Huntsville is not just a building, it’s a signal to our allies and to our adversaries,” Gury said. “America will not fall behind and PDW will continue to deliver mission critical systems rapidly at scale as long as they are needed.”
The C100, a modular reconnaissance drone, has already drawn Army contracts under the Medium Range Reconnaissance program and Transformation in Contact initiative. Its modular design allows dozens of interchangeable payloads, maximizing flexibility for surveillance, targeting and communications missions.
The AM-FPV, a low-cost attritable drone, reflects PDW’s bet that future conflicts will demand massive quantities of expendable systems.
Economic boost
The new factory will add more than 500 jobs and spur an economic impact totaling over $81 million per year, executives said.
“This isn’t just an announcement of a company, this is an announcement of a mission, deciding to put a flag in the ground in Huntsville and saying we are going to build a massive US domestic drone industry,” said Higgins.
Alongside fast-paced production lines and advanced quality engineering, DF01 features Lit Thinking’s Visium Far-UVC pathogen reduction devices, which provide 99.9% sterilization, making it one of the cleanest engineering facilities in the world.
A shift in defense philosophy
For PDW, the Huntsville launch isn’t just about opening a building. It’s about redefining how the U.S. responds to rapidly changing threats. The company’s leaders say the days of relying on a few exquisite, billion-dollar platforms are over.
In their place: swarms of affordable, agile, American-made drones designed to be fielded in numbers large enough to change the balance on the battlefield.
“Our whole paradigm is we need to build products that the government is even asking for yet. And we need to be able to withstand the pain of waiting for that market to come. That’s our specialty,” said Higgins.
“PDW’s growth rate will be exponential and we are committed to Alabama. We’re excited to be the new kids on the block in Research Park,” said Gury, highlighting PDW’s ambition to challenge established defense industry leaders.
“Companies like AeroVironment and Raytheon should be a little afraid, because we’re going to come for their markets.”
