AeroVironment

AeroVironment started in 1971 as an aerospace research shop under Paul MacCready, the engineer famous for human powered flight, and it spent decades building solar aircraft and other unconventional airframes before the US military became its primary customer. Today the company, which trades as AVAV on the Nasdaq and now goes to market simply as AV after its 2025 merger with BlueHalo, organizes itself around five domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. The air business is still the core of the company and the most recognizable. Puma and Raven are small hand launched reconnaissance drones that have been carried by infantry units for close to two decades, and JUMP 20 is a larger runway independent system that can loiter for hours over a wider area. The Switchblade family turned AeroVironment into a household name in defense circles.

Switchblade 300 is a backpack sized loitering munition meant for anti personnel and light vehicle targets, while Switchblade 600 carries a warhead derived from the Javelin anti tank missile and can knock out armor at much longer range. Both systems have shipped to Ukraine in large numbers and to allies including Taiwan and Lithuania. The 2021 acquisition of Germany's Telerob brought a land robotics line into the company, and its telemax and tEODor ground robots are now sold worldwide for explosive ordnance disposal, hazmat response, and CBRN reconnaissance. AeroVironment's 2023 purchase of Tomahawk Robotics added the Kinesis software behind its Tomahawk ground control system, an AI assisted common controller meant to let one operator run drones, ground robots, and sensors from a single interface rather than juggling separate proprietary boxes for each platform. Counter drone work sits under the Titan line, which detects and defeats hostile small UAS using radio frequency and other sensors, a capability that has become urgent as cheap drones show up on battlefields and near US installations alike.

The biggest shift in the company's shape came from the BlueHalo deal, a roughly four billion dollar all stock transaction completed in May 2025 that folded in space communications, directed energy, and cyber capabilities AeroVironment did not previously have in house. That business now handles laser and RF satellite communications terminals, high energy laser systems, and mission software for space, cyber, and electronic warfare customers, and AeroVironment has talked openly about linking that comms technology to its existing drone and loitering munition lines. On the civil side, AeroVironment's engineering legacy shows up in an unlikely place: it built Ingenuity, the small helicopter that became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet during NASA's Mars 2020 mission, a program run out of the same design culture that produces its military systems. With deployments logged in more than fifty countries, the company has grown from a niche drone maker into one of the broader unmanned and directed energy suppliers in the US defense industrial base.