Skydio, Inc. is a privately held American drone manufacturer headquartered in San Mateo, California, with manufacturing operations in Hayward, CA. It was founded in 2014 by Adam Bry, Abe Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe, three former MIT and Google researchers. The company remains venture-backed rather than public; it closed a $110 million Series F in April 2026 at a $4.4 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to roughly $672 million. Employee counts reported by third-party trackers range from about 900 to 1,000. Skydio says it generates "hundreds of millions" in annual revenue with thousands of drones shipping monthly, and third-party estimates have put recent revenue near $180 million. Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Linse Capital, Next47, and NVIDIA.
Skydio designs, assembles, and supports autonomous drones built around its own onboard AI and computer-vision autonomy software, and describes itself as the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. Its platforms include the X10 and X2 enterprise/defense airframes and the Drone as First Responder (DFR) docked system; it exited the consumer market in 2023. Customers span public safety agencies, the U.S. military and allied governments, transportation departments, critical-infrastructure operators, and corporate site security. The company has announced a multi-billion-dollar commitment to expand domestic manufacturing.
Patent-litigation posture: operating company on defense. In the tracked data Skydio appears once, as a defendant, and never as a plaintiff — the profile of a product company being targeted rather than an active enforcer. The single tracked matter, Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Turing Video et al. (D. Del.), reflects a multi-defendant wave of filings.
Context: Cedar Lane Technologies is a Canadian non-practicing entity incorporated in 2019 that asserts patents acquired from Intellectual Ventures and related holders, and has filed hundreds of infringement suits that overwhelmingly end in settlement or procedural dismissal. Its October 2022 Delaware campaign named Skydio alongside drone and camera vendors including Turing Video, Brinc Drones, Boston Dynamics, and Vantage Robotics, targeting imaging-array and image-processing patents. The action against Skydio was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice in February 2023, before any answer.