Built to deter. Ready to prevail.

In the summer of 2023, Soren Monroe-Anderson recruited his friend and former drone racing competitor Olaf Hichwa to develop FPV drones in support of the defense of Ukraine. They built 30 prototypes and hand carried them in suitcases to Kyiv to distribute to Ukrainian soldiers.

While there, they demoed these prototypes to Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, and the feedback was blunt: he admired the high performance of the drones, but said the minimum order quantity they could accept would be 6,000 units. To make a difference, the drones had to be built faster than they were burnt.

This was the founding realization of Neros — that technology alone wouldn’t create the deterrence needed to safeguard a country’s sovereignty, and that manufacturing scale would be the deciding factor in a country’s ability to defend itself from invading forces.

The duo quickly learned that building a drone industrial base in America would require building a supply chain and manufacturing muscle from zero to one. When off-the-shelf components proved prohibitively expensive, they developed their own. When military-grade chips were hundreds of dollars a piece, they used $1 chips designed for parking meters instead. When government requirements mandated they not rely on China for components, they found alternative suppliers in allied countries that wouldn’t be disrupted in the event of global conflict. That persistence built the Archer — battlefield proven, supply-chain resilient, and designed for mass-manufacture. Because individual systems don't create deterrence. Production at massive, uninterrupted scale does.