Baykar Technologies

Baykar began in 1984 as a machine shop in Istanbul turning out CNC precision parts for the Turkish automotive trade. Drones came later. The company built its first mini unmanned aircraft in the early 2000s, and by the time the Bayraktar TB2 entered Turkish service the firm had moved from subcontracting to designing whole aircraft, ground control stations and the network centric software that ties them together. Baykar describes itself around unmanned aerial vehicle systems first, with command, control, communication, computer and intelligence work sitting beside it. Its central command and control products let one crew supervise several aircraft at once. Payload systems, avionics and subsystems are designed in house rather than bought in, which is a large part of why the aircraft are affordable for air forces that could never fund an American equivalent. Vertical integration is the strategy, and it shows up in the price.

The product line runs from a hand launched Bayraktar Mini UAV up to the jet powered Bayraktar Kizilelma. Between them sit the TB2, the larger Bayraktar Akinci, the folding wing Bayraktar TB3 that took off from and landed on the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu in November 2024, and the Bayraktar Kalkan DIHA. Baykar builds its own munitions too. The Kemankes 1 and Kemankes 2 are mini cruise missiles carried by the larger aircraft. Export agreements cover 36 countries for the TB2 and 16 for the Akinci, and the company reported 2.2 billion dollars of exports in 2025 with the large majority of revenue earned outside Turkey. That position was earned the hard way rather than in a brochure, through use over Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine, where inexpensive airframes carrying light precision munitions did work that had previously required manned strike aircraft and a much larger budget.

Simulator systems and payload and UAV operator training are sold with the aircraft, and after sales services keep exported fleets flying in places with no local depot. Artificial intelligence work feeds the autonomy on the aircraft and the swarm behaviour Baykar has demonstrated in public trials. Two ventures point past aviation. Fergani Space, the group affiliated satellite arm, put its first spacecraft in orbit and has an orbital transfer vehicle planned. The Cezeri flying car is a single seat electric vertical takeoff demonstrator rather than a product on sale. In Europe the company bought Piaggio Aerospace out of extraordinary administration in 2025 and set up LBA Systems, a fifty fifty joint venture with Leonardo that has begun building drones in Italy for an Italian customer. Roughly 8,000 people now work for a firm that was a family machining business inside living memory, and its founders have topped the Turkish corporate tax list five years running. Unmanned aircraft configured to spot and monitor forest fires are sold on the civil side using the same airframes and the same ground segment, which keeps the production line busy between military orders.