Ukraine's US supplier of attack drone technology turns to producing UAV hunters VIDEO

US drone manufacturer Neros Technologies, best known for supplying Ukraine with low-cost attack drones, has announced it is developing a new aircraft designed for the opposite mission: hunting and destroying enemy drones in flight.

The company released footage on July 10 showing the early testing of Bandit, a counter-unmanned aircraft system (c-UAS) interceptor drone.

"Follow along as we rapidly develop and launch Bandit, our c-UAS interceptor drone," Neros wrote in a post accompanying the video, adding that future development updates would be shared on the company's YouTube channel.

According to defence analysts, the move marks a significant expansion for Neros, which built its reputation producing inexpensive, mass-manufactured first-person-view (FPV) attack drones for Ukraine and US military customers.

Early successes in Ukraine

Founded in 2023 by former professional drone racers Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, Neros developed the Archer, an 8-inch FPV quadcopter designed to be affordable, expendable, and free of Chinese-made components. The latter has become a key selling point as Western governments seek alternatives to commercial drone supply chains dominated by Chinese manufacturers such as DJI.

The Archer is capable of carrying a 2 kg payload to ranges exceeding 19 km. Since beginning production in a garage, Neros has rapidly expanded manufacturing, with reports indicating output reached around 2,000 drones per day by December 2025.

Around two-thirds of that production has been delivered to Ukraine. Neros supplied 6,000 drones under a contract with the International Drone Coalition, while the remaining production has gone to US military customers, including the Marine Corps, which awarded the company a $17 million contract for 8,000 Archer Strike drones, as well as the US Army and US Special Operations Command.

Bandit represents a notable shift for a company whose products have until now focused almost exclusively on one-way attack drones rather than defensive interception.

The transition is not entirely new territory for Neros. The company has previously partnered with counter-drone specialist CX2 Industries to integrate its Vadris radio-frequency seeking payload onto the Archer platform. That system is designed to detect and locate the radio signals of an enemy drone's operator rather than intercept the aircraft itself.

Modern warfare tactics' reliance on anti-drone tools

Bandit appears intended to fill that capability gap by physically engaging hostile drones in the air. The requirement for such systems has grown increasingly urgent as drone attacks become more frequent and conventional air defence systems—designed primarily to defeat larger, faster aircraft—struggle to counter small, inexpensive unmanned systems.

According to the defence blog, Neros is entering an increasingly competitive counter-drone market. In 2024, the US Marine Corps awarded Anduril a $200 million contract to integrate its Anvil interceptor drone into the MADIS Mark 2 counter-UAS system. That was followed in March 2025 by a separate $642 million contract for base defence systems that also included Anvil interceptors.

Meanwhile, the US Army's fiscal year 2026 budget request includes $111 million to procure 6,000 Coyote Block 2 interceptor drones and 700 Block 3 variants, along with hundreds of associated launchers and radar systems.

Neros' key advantage may be its existing manufacturing capability. Unlike many competitors, the company has already demonstrated it can produce drones at high volume and relatively low cost through its Archer production line.

As analysts caution, it remains uncertain whether that manufacturing model can be successfully adapted to an interceptor. Unlike one-way FPV attack drones, which are flown by human operators into largely stationary or slow-moving targets, interceptor drones must reliably detect, track and engage fast-moving aerial targets. That generally requires significantly more advanced onboard sensors, autonomous guidance, or extremely rapid operator input—a technical challenge that has proven difficult even for established defence contractors with decades of experience developing guided weapons.

By Nazrin Sadigova