Performance Drone Works

Performance Drone Works (PDW) is an American defense technology company, founded around 2018 and based in Huntsville, Alabama, after its engineering team relocated there from Manhattan.

History and products

PDW grew out of the engineering team behind the Drone Racing League, where co-founder and CEO Ryan Gury served as chief technology officer starting in 2015; that team's work building custom radios and large fleets of expendable FPV racing drones carried over into PDW's military products. The company's board chairman, Tony Thomas, is a former US Special Operations Command commander. PDW's primary product is the C100, a backpack-portable multi-mission quadcopter it calls its "mothership," alongside the smaller AM-FPV attritable combat drone. PDW holds a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million from the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, announced 31 July 2026 to expand domestic drone-component manufacturing, and operates a 90,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntsville sized to produce hundreds of C100s and thousands of AM-FPVs per month. Customers reported in public sources include the US Army, the US Air Force's 93rd Air Ground Operations Wing, the US Coast Guard, the US Secret Service and Texas DPS.

Products on this site

The C100 is PDW's foldable, backpack-portable tactical quadcopter, offered in Defense and Public Safety configurations and certified under the US DoD's Blue UAS program.