Tampa-based drone maker XTEND has landed a coveted invite to compete in Phase II of the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program, a marquee effort to rapidly ramp up U.S. production of small autonomous drones. The company says it will put its XOS autonomy stack through its paces this summer at Camp Grayling in Michigan, where the Defense Department will test systems built for longer-range and contested missions. The nod puts a hometown manufacturer in the thick of a nationwide push to field vast numbers of small unmanned aerial systems.
XTEND announced the invitation in a press release last Thursday that also highlighted a pending business combination with JFB Construction Holdings that would take the merged company public on Nasdaq under the ticker XTND, according to XTEND. The Phase II qualifier itself is expected to unfold at Camp Grayling later this summer, local reporting by the Tampa Bay Business Journal noted. For XTEND, the invite follows several contract wins and an ongoing push to bulk up its U.S. manufacturing footprint.
How The Phase II Qualifier Will Play Out
The Defense Department has invited roughly 49 companies and plans to run about 79 unique drones through two mission lanes at Camp Grayling: long-range strike and close-quarters tactical assault, Inside Defense reported. The Drone Dominance effort is an approximately 1 billion dollar, multi-phase program built to procure more than 200,000 small UAS by 2027 as a way to shore up a resilient domestic supply chain, according to the program website. The qualifier is designed to stress-test autonomy, mission performance, and manufacturing readiness before any winners advance to production trials.
“Modern operational environments require autonomous systems that can scale rapidly, operate reliably in contested conditions, and help keep operators out of harm’s way,” XTEND co-founder and CEO Aviv Shapira said in the company’s announcement. XTEND says its XOS operating system will be used to demo human-guided autonomy across multiple airframes during the Camp Grayling exercises.
What It Could Mean For Tampa
XTEND opened a U.S. headquarters and manufacturing hub in Tampa last year as it geared up to scale production, a move covered in April when the company snagged a 1.67 million dollar Israeli defense deal. Company filings and the pending S-4 registration tied to the JFB combination lay out the proposed Nasdaq listing and suggest local production could ramp quickly if larger government orders come through, according to public filings…