Soren Monroe-Anderson is co-founder and CEO of Neros Technologies, a drone manufacturer established in 2023 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. In 2025, Neros closed a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia. The 150-person company has recently moved into a new, 250,000-square-foot facility.

Neros manufactures first-person-view (FPV) drones for military purposes. Its flagship product, the Archer, was developed after Monroe-Anderson and his co-founder Olaf Hichwa visited Ukraine in 2023 to provide combat-ready hardware to be tested in battlefield conditions. In 2025, Neros was selected as one of the US Army’s primary FPV drone suppliers in the Purpose-Built Attritable Systems (PBAS) program. Neros is one of many American companies poised to benefit from the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion Drone Dominance initiative, launched via executive order last summer, which seeks to bolster the drone industrial base and procure hundreds of thousands of low-cost, US-made, attritable drones for the military by 2027.

I sat down with Soren to discuss his early immersion in FPV drones, the founding and growth of Neros, and his experience as a young CEO leading a growing defense company. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

CB: When did you first develop an interest in drones?

SMA: I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I was obsessed with building things and taking things apart. I was flying remote control airplanes and driving RC [remote control] cars. When I was 11, I started seeing FPV drones pop up online. This was pretty early, and it was a very small group of hobbyists online who were figuring out the technology. I thought it was super cool. My dad actually ran a mapping company and was interested in using drones for aerial photography, for map data. I would fly drones for his company because I knew how to fly RC airplanes, and he would get me drone parts in exchange. That’s how I got my first set of FPV goggles, for my 12th birthday. I started by putting a camera and video transmitter onto a DJI Phantom 1, the first ever DJI drone, and flying it around FPV. I kept crashing it because it wasn’t really made for that, so at 12 I built my first racing drone, and then from there, I got totally obsessed with it. It was more technical than other RC stuff; the building challenge was way harder. But to put on the goggles and feel like you’re flying was amazing. That was the thing that captured me.

CB: What did you build next?

SMA: I built a racing drone from a bunch of random parts. The way racing drones are generally built is that you buy all the separate parts and put them all together. You get motors, speed controllers, flight controls, and frames from different companies. It’s like this whole mix-and-match. I copied a build that someone else had done on YouTube, where they had this long series. I watched it three or four times, and I just tried to copy what they did.

CB: What are the attributes that make a drone better at racing?

SMA: The main thing is they have a really high power-to-weight ratio. What’s kind of amazing about the technology stack that enables this — modern batteries, modern flight controllers and modern motors — is that you can have a drone with a 10-to-1 power to weight ratio very easily. They accelerate insanely fast, and can go over 100 miles an hour, and get there really, really quickly. The racing drones are also different from other drones because they don’t put any limit on the angle the drone can achieve. Normally, if you buy a drone, you know it’s gonna limit you to a certain amount of angle — you can’t go past it. And then, when you let go of the stick, it’s gonna stabilize itself. With racing drones, you can do whatever you want: flip it upside down, roll it around. When you let go of the stick, it will hold the last input. You can put the drone on a 70-degree angle, and it’s gonna start going forward at 100 miles an hour. Then you can turn it upside down. That super agile, full manual control is one of the other main things that differentiates a racing drone.

CB: When did you decide to turn this hobby into an entrepreneurial endeavor?

SMA: I started going to competitions, and there were pilots who were racing on these sponsored teams. I saw people who were just a little bit older than me doing it and I thought it was incredibly cool. I set my sights on becoming a professional pilot and competing at the highest levels. After freshman year of high school, I stopped doing any school sports so I could practice drone racing more. It was around that time that I started flying professionally. Through high school, I felt like I was learning more from drone racing than from school. There was this interesting technical side of it that I was getting, and I was starting to compete at a very high level. I ended up starting a company when I was 16, selling parts for drone racing. I had my hands full, so I ended up taking more classes online so I could spend more time on drone stuff. I probably missed 50 percent of high school, when you combine all the time I was gone for drone races — and then Covid happened in the spring of my junior year. I was out for that whole spring, and then I didn’t go back in person for senior year because of Covid. I stayed remote, kept doing drone stuff, and graduated a semester early.

CB: How is it that DJI and China became such dominant players in the FPV drone market?

SMA: It’s a few different factors. Number one, China became dominant in all consumer electronics. That happened because America decided we didn’t want to do this dirty manufacturing at home. American corporations went overseas and literally taught China how to build these factories. DJI’s rise benefitted from the rise of Foxconn and the whole consumer electronics industry in China. They were really early in drones, but by the time DJI got going, China had by far the best smartphone industry in the world. They had the amazing advantage of the Shenzhen industrial base, where you can instantly source any part, everything is cheap, and there’s so many consumer electronics manufacturers.

Number two, they started very early in the drone space, and they had a really viable drone consumer product. That compounded because they had the highest volume, which made for bigger and bigger investments. They were also subsidized by the CCP. The CCP understood the strategic advantage of having the number-one drone company in the world. It was a totally unfair advantage for DJI, and no one is going to be able to compete with that outside of China. Over time, they built such an incredible technology stack that they actually absorbed multiple smartphone chip companies into DJI to make custom silicon for drones. This is kind of crazy. It took Apple a long time to make custom silicon for iPhones and for Macbooks, right? And DJI did that for drones, as a company, because they have this insane advantage bestowed by the Chinese government.

CB: Tell me about your Thiel Fellowship. How did you apply successfully?

SMA: I had an interesting experience, because Thiel Capital actually backed Neros a few years ago. So it wasn’t my first interaction with the Thiel universe. I’d known about the fellowship for a long time and decided to apply right at the end of when I was age-eligible. I can’t speak to the specifics of the process, but I found it extremely valuable. The group of people they select is phenomenal. I’ve made some very close friends through the program. Neros was a little bit later-stage than most of the fellows’ companies, so I had a slightly different experience where we were already up and running.

CB: In developing the Archer, can you walk me through the testing process?

SMA: Product development is heavily based on real-world feedback; this is something we’ve focused on since the beginning. When we started Neros, the first thing we did was build 30 drones, bring them to Ukraine in our suitcases, and start getting actual feedback. Doing that type of thing is what has accelerated us to having an extremely useful, battle-proven, mature product that we’re really confident in and that users really love. It sounds kind of obvious, but most American defense companies don’t actually do this. They don’t prioritize getting their stuff into real-world combat at scale. I think that’s what’s differentiated us the most — that we made it a priority and did so many iterations based on that feedback. We also have a very rapid testing process internally where everyone on the flight test team is a world-class pilot and trained as a scientist. They’re out in the desert every single day, pushing our gear to its limit, doing brand new development, testing or qualifying an upcoming product. It’s that constant cycle that makes it possible.

CB: I read that one of your primary goals at Neros is to secure the supply chain so you can build FPV drones at scale with little to no Chinese input.

SMA: From that first trip to Ukraine, what we saw was companies building at the scale of tens of thousands of drones per month — but everybody was doing it on Chinese parts. When we started in 2023 you could not buy an FPV drone that didn’t have Chinese parts. It was literally impossible. We knew that if we’re going to scale this technology — which we had learned about from the battlefield in Ukraine and from our deep connection with users — but to actually scale it, we had to go and make all the components ourselves, going down to the really deep levels: the chip level, the material level, on components — to eliminate China from the supply chain. We saw that as a necessary thing for using these drones in defense applications. We started on that problem earlier than most did in America, and now we’re able to do high-rate production — at least the highest rate in America — while also maintaining that secure supply chain. That’s because of the work we’ve done over the last two and a half years.

CB: What specifically are those components?

SMA: The major components are motors, sensors, all the electronics, the flight controller, the radios. We spend a lot of time on radios, especially building something that’s jamming-resistant. You have radios on the drone side and on the ground station. The ground station is a system people kind of overlook. Then you have the airframe of the drone, small things — antennas, stuff like that. For all of those electronics, there are so many different components that traditionally would come from China. You have to go and kind of re-engineer everything around a different set of microcontrollers, since traditional ones come from China. We’ve done all of these things from the ground up. We control what microcontrollers and other components are going into these drones, so we can ensure a secure supply chain through all of that.

CB: What are the battlefield lessons of Ukraine? I would break that down into two categories: the tactical role of the FPV drone, and the evolution of countermeasures that are used to stop those drones. How did you convince the Ukrainian forces to take their time to give your drones a test?

SMA: We got in contact with a group doing pilot training in Ukraine, and the message was, “Hey, this is who we are. How can we help? Tell us the problems you’re having.” We found these groups were really excited to talk to us and try out the hardware. There were a lot of things they liked and a lot of things they didn’t. We always found a strong percentage enjoyed talking to us and working with us. That became the way the company operates. We have a team dedicated to working with the military units that receive our drones. Over time, it’s grown. I’m in Ukraine very frequently; it’s just part of what the company does now. And we built those relationships, and we have units that really love our product. It’s been a natural evolution, and totally critical to our development.

CB: On the tactical front, what have been the biggest developments over the last few years as you’ve been watching the conflict?

SMA: The biggest thing that FPV drones deal with is electronic warfare. Radio systems have evolved a lot and been a really big focus. How you avoid jamming is one of the key questions. This is also why fiber-optic drones have become a really big deal: optic connections can’t be jammed by a traditional RF jammer. That’s been one of the biggest shifts, is this sort of cat-and-mouse game of new radio, new jammer, or fiber-optic drone. Now you need a different way to counter that drone, and then you’re left with things like shotguns and nets. That’s really primitive, but it is the last line of defense. We’ve seen that constant evolution of UAS and counter-UAS.

We’ve also seen the ranges of drones and targets get much longer. In ‘23 you could very often see a five kilometer effective range, because there were all these valuable targets across the front line. Now, because there are so many drones across the front line, there’s a 30-kilometer-wide zone where almost nothing can move. If you try to put a tank into that zone, it’ll be so quickly destroyed by a horde of drones that it doesn’t really work anymore. In that zone, you either have literally, soldiers on foot — Russia’s new tactic is sending soldiers on foot or on motorcycles in small groups to try and break through this line — or you just have drone-on-drone warfare, where there are a lot of drones flying over and then you have interceptor drones going after them. That’s the biggest shift, I would say, is the fact that this zone is widening, all because of drones. If you want to strike a valuable target, you are probably going 30, 40, 50 kilometers in to hit something like a logistics line.

CB: Any interesting breakthroughs in kinetic interceptors?

SMA: What’s been interesting to me is watching the evolution of Shahed interceptors in Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has been utilizing what was originally the Iranian design, the Shahed drone, and then they set up the domestic production of these drones. They use them to bombard Ukrainian cities. It’s always been a big problem, but about nine months ago, interceptor drones started working as a counter to Shaheds — and it’s all happened in the same way that FPV drones did. Someone in Ukraine has an idea and starts trying it. It doesn’t work at first, but you keep iterating, and eventually you get to a solution that can work. Now Ukraine has gotten really good at using these small, cheap interceptors to go up and take out Shahed drones. Where you used to need a very expensive missile to take out one of these drones, you can now use a drone way cheaper than the actual Shahed itself to take it out. With what’s happening in the Middle East, America is looking at this and realizing that we have to have this technology too — and so does every other country in the world. FPV drones are going to be a ubiquitous tool, and I believe that cheap interceptors will be as well.

CB: Tell me about the products you currently have in development at Neros.

SMA: Right now, all of our drones that you can buy today are manually piloted. We are working on an autonomous variant of the product. We’re really focused on making autonomous features that are extremely useful to the human operator without trying to replace them. The question we’re asking is: how do we give the human operator leverage? What I’m most excited about is some of the stuff we’re doing there, and the autonomous drone, the first version of which will be coming out this year.

We’re also continuing to go deeper and deeper into the supply chain and the whole FPV ecosystem. We’re going to own the entire FPV stack end to end and figure out how to build it all without China’s supply chain. Right now, we’re focusing most of our efforts on getting that full ecosystem done and making sure we do that the absolute best we can before we get distracted by other product lines.

CB: What’s the impact of the Drone Dominance initiative, and where are we as a country in fulfilling its objectives?

SMA: The goal is to provide a clear signal to US industry — clear demands — and help kickstart this process of scaling manufacturing. I think it’s doing a very solid job of that. When you have something as high level as Drone Dominance, coming down from the Secretary of War, saying “one of the most important things to the Pentagon is scaling small drones, and here is $1.1 billion to back it,” it really creates a sense of urgency within the industry.

I think what’s going to be very interesting to see is, I think a lot of companies that got selected for the first round of Drone Dominance will struggle to deliver the volume of drones — even though it’s a really small volume of drones. I think a lot of those companies will struggle to deliver. We’re gonna start to funnel down to the companies that can actually deliver. And I think for the second gauntlet, which hasn’t happened yet, we’ll be going into that with the context of who is successful in delivering Gauntlet 1. That is going to be, is going to be very interesting,

CB: Where are you in your growth journey and funding journey as a company?

SMA: We just moved into this new facility. It’s 250,000 square feet. We sized the facility to be able to do a million drones per year. The goal that the company is working towards right now is being the first American company that can build a million drones a year. We care about that because at that scale, we start to have some impact on credible deterrence for the country. We want to start to move the needle in terms of deterring conflict.

On funding, we did our Series B last November. To date, we’ve raised about $121 million. The company has about 150 people right now, and we’re growing. We are hiring. This year is going to be an amazing year of growth in terms of team size, production, and building out the factory. It’s a really exciting time for folks to jump on board.

CB: How old are you?

SMA: I’m 22.

CB: How do you approach managing people who have more years on you or more experience in different categories?

SMA: Almost everyone at the company has more years of experience than I do. I only try to make an executive call or hold a really strong opinion on a small number of things. Most people know most things at the company better than I do, and I should often defer to the experts. I also think that my intuition and direction have been pretty good so far and have gotten Neros to where we are. But I’m informed by all the expert opinions around me.

CB: What have been your most valuable sources of mentorship as you’ve built Neros?

SMA: A lot of mentorship has come from the backers of Neros. We have a pretty amazing cap table. I’ve learned a ton from Shaun at Sequoia, John at Vy Capital, who was our first-ever investor. We have some amazing folks behind us and have gotten a lot of mentorship from them. I also try to learn from the incredible people at the company every day. Everyone here is excited to learn from each other, and that’s a really important aspect of our culture.

CB: If someone’s reading this who might be interested in joining Neros, how do they find out what you’re looking for, and how do they get a hold of you?

SMA: We have a bunch of jobs posted at neros.tech/careers, and there’s a role for almost anybody up there. But if they don’t see a perfect fit, reach out to info@neros.tech, or to me personally on LinkedIn. I may or may not see it, but we’re always looking for unique individuals and high-agency, high-performance people. People can come prove they’re the best in the world here. And that’s exciting for a lot of folks, so I highly recommend reaching out. And even if there’s not a role, we will probably find one for you.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity