With China boxed out, Unusual Machines’ CEO sees clear skies for his drone supply company

In December, the US government effectively banned all drones and drone components from foreign companies. A ruling by the Federal Communications Commission said that foreign-made drones and related components created an “unacceptable national security risk.”

The leading drone maker is Chinese firm DJI, which enjoys a worldwide market share of more than 90% of nonmilitary small drones. DJI is now frozen out of the US market, limiting options for drone buyers, which include hobbyists, first responders, the real estate industry, and agriculture. 

The Trump administration has made supporting the nascent American drone industry a top priority, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) says that US agencies can only buy American-made drones and drone components with US taxpayer dollars. The problem is that the supply lines for drones are similar to that of smartphones, which almost exclusively come from China, and the small number of American drone companies have not yet been able to scale to create a domestic alternative. 

One company that is trying to build this supply chain is Unusual Machines, an Orlando-based company that manufactures nonmilitary drone components like motors, flight controllers, and first-person-view headsets.

Sherwood News caught up with Unusual Machines CEO Allan Evans to hear how his company is responding to this unique moment in the US drone industry.  

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Sherwood News: What does your company do?

Allan Evans: We make drone parts for small drones in the US.

Sherwood: Could you just give me a lay of the land, for the domestic drone industry in the United States as you see it right now?

Evans: Let’s segment it a little bit. 

Drones come in all kinds of sizes. We specialize in the small size, like the wedding photography kind of size, the size of a laptop. So a lot of the bigger, more famous US companies that have been doing drones for a long time, they do like the airplane size or bigger.

When you get to the smaller drones, the marketplace was super dominated by a Chinese company called DJI. If you’ve ever been to a wedding and seen a wedding photographed or taken videos of or whatever, it’s almost assuredly a DJI drone. And it’s because they make awesome products. They competed about 10 years ago with two other companies for the marketplace, and there was the competition with 3DR and GoPro. All three companies were trying to launch a consumer drone. This is when DJI launched the Mavic. It turns out that DJI ended up winning in the marketplace.

What you see, then, in the small drone category, the only company that really emerged significantly in the space between was Skydio. And you have a few others doing public safety. You have Brinc that came along to do public safety, so Skydio and Brinc are there. At Red Cat Holdings we acquired Teal Drones, and Teal Drones has scaled up some.

And then you have a bunch of the other, more defense-oriented companies that have been building drones for the Department of War for the last five years, companies like Performance Drone Works. So the landscape is pretty segmented right now. There’s not a single dominant US company.

Sherwood: It seems that the regulatory conditions have made it a very good time to be an American drone components supplier.

Evans: Yeah, it was a good time to decide to start a few years ago, so that worked out for us. The recent FCC news was really surprising to us, where they sort of banned foreign drone components. So yeah, we’re in a really good spot, moving to three shifts on our motor factory in Orlando for instance, and scaling to hopefully provide all the US drone companies with the parts they need.

Sherwood: It seems like your focus is on being a components supplier, but you do sell drones as part of your overall business, correct?

Evans: A little bit. What we do is we’ll take all the parts you want on a drone and put them together for you, but being a drone vendor is not our priority.

Sherwood: So you have no plans to become a big defense contractor that is supplying drones to the US military?

Evans: Never. We don’t sell anything to the US government directly. I think what the US government wants — not just the military — is a company like ours to help sell to light show drones, home inspection drones, and delivery drones — when that emerges — so that the commercial and enterprise applications sustain domestic capacity in case it has to be reallocated.

We only look at the current energy from the Department of War as the government boosting capacity so we get the flywheel spinning, but we really feel like we have an obligation to serve the commercial and enterprise markets long-term. We see those as the next markets once we get through this current demand cycle.

Sherwood: I see that you sell a lot of NDAA-approved drone components. How far down the supply line can you say that these components are all from the United States? 

Evans: It totally depends on what it is. In a lot of cases, not every single part needs to be from the US. There’s almost nothing that’s all from one place. So if you think about it all the way down, like we cut a steel shaft for our motors, where does that steel come from? That’s probably blended, and then where’s the iron ore mined, or the recycled material for the steel? It’s really tough to trace it all the way down, but we don’t focus on 100% US sourcing. We focus on being competitive, and not sourcing from covered countries. For instance, anybody making a camera has at least one component almost always from Japan, because Sony and Panasonic make the best CMOS sensors for cameras.

Sherwood: Looking back at your stock’s recent history, it seemed that when Donald Trump Jr. joined your board, it really pushed your stock up quite a bit. What does that proximity to power look like for Unusual Machines?

Evans: I think looking at it that way is a little inaccurate. All the drone stocks jumped after the election all the way through January. So if you look at like Red Cat Holdings or AeroVironment, or several of the others, you’ll see similar trajectories, and that was riding the language and the perception of the administration and of Hegseth early on saying they wanted to move to drones. 

The decline that came after that was in large part due to the longstanding government shutdown. I think now you’re seeing a delayed realization of sort of the interest at that time. So in terms of proximity to power, we don’t mix with the government very much, and we’re just trying to build parts. Trying to stay out of anything that would interfere with us scaling the production domestically.

Sherwood: What does your next year look like? What are your biggest goals for your company?

Evans: Just the Drone Dominance program is looking to buy 90,000 drones in 2026 — that’s 400,000 motors. So I would like to scale to build parts to be sure that none of our customers are late on their shipments. I think that looks like us hiring people, adding equipment, and adding space as fast as we can in a controlled manner. That’s really what we’re looking for — can we scale into this market demand to be a really good vendor for our customers, as this instantaneous, very large wave of demand hits everybody?

Sherwood: Are there any other things you’d like our readers to know about your business?

Evans: We were able to be globally competitive, in terms of pricing. You know we have a great staff in Orlando. It’s a great place to put this together. We’re creating a bunch of jobs. 

I think a lot of that gets overlooked as part of it, that when you bring manufacturing back to the US, and you utilize some automation and some Western creativity, you can build a manufacturing company that can be globally competitive.

I think it’s also important that people often overlook that we’re actually ultimately interested in serving the commercial market. We don’t overcharge. Everybody’s like, “Oh you can get more margin — it’s the government!” and we’re like no, we’re not going to do that.

So I think we operate in a way where we don’t lose money, we don’t have to overcharge, and we sit in this place where we recognize that it’s only through the government action  — which ultimately means actions of everybody who votes — that this market opportunity exists.

We care a lot about transparency, but it’s also part of why we’re a public company. We don’t want to see any value gains be captured by rich VCs or anything. We think it’s great that there’s an opportunity for people to see value opportunity, from something that is created by their own government.