Manufacturing 1 million drones a year | Olaf Hichwa, Neros

Olaf is Co-Founder & CTO of Neros.

They just moved into a new 250,000 sq ft factory, expect to hit a 130,000-drone annual run rate by the end of the year, and plan to scale to 1 million drones a year by 2028.

Neros: https://neros.tech
Olaf on X: https://x.com/OHichwa
Ti on X: https://x.com/ti_morse

Timestamps:
0:38 Redesigning a production line from scratch
1:15 Building 1,200 drones per week
1:43 Drones cause 70% of casualties in Ukraine
3:10 China sells millions of drones to Russia
6:40 Focusing on operators
9:12 Archer AI
11:18 Building for users, not the government
14:13 Creating multiple products in parallel
16:24 Bandit — drone interceptor
20:46 Why it’s important to build weapons systems
23:30 Russia is targeting civilian infrastructure
29:23 Manually shooting down drones
31:43 Learning from operator footage
34:21 Consumer photography drones
36:51 Choosing what to vertically integrate
39:33 Reality forces the Elon algorithm
41:32 The different levels of scale
45:31 Learning from Starlink
46:33 Engineering faster
48:00 Mass production vs prototyping
50:58 Working with the US Government
54:59 Manufacturing 1 million drones a year
56:56 Learning from Chinese drone companies
1:02:58 Taiwan