AeroVironment, Inc. provides a defense technology that delivers integrated capabilities across air, land, sea, space, and cyber.
The company develops and deploys autonomous systems, precision strike systems, counter-UAS technologies, space-based platforms, directed energy systems, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities. The company operates a national manufacturing footprint to deliver proven systems and capabilities, whose markets offer the potential for significant long-term growth.
A...
AeroVironment, Inc. provides a defense technology that delivers integrated capabilities across air, land, sea, space, and cyber.
The company develops and deploys autonomous systems, precision strike systems, counter-UAS technologies, space-based platforms, directed energy systems, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities. The company operates a national manufacturing footprint to deliver proven systems and capabilities, whose markets offer the potential for significant long-term growth.
Acquisition of BlueHalo Financing Topco, LLC (‘BlueHalo’)
On May 1, 2025, the company closed its acquisition of BlueHalo, a Delaware limited liability company, pursuant to the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of November 18, 2024 (the ‘Merger Agreement’), by and among the company, Archangel Merger Sub LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (the ‘Merger Sub’), BlueHalo, and BlueHalo Holdings Parent, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company and sole member of BlueHalo (‘Seller’).
Segments
Effective May 1, 2025, the company operates its business in two reportable segments: Autonomous Systems and Space, Cyber, and Directed Energy.
Autonomous Systems
Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (‘UAS’)
The company’s family of uncrewed systems includes Group 1-3 UAS, which are deployed globally and provide multi-mission capability, autonomy, versatility, reliability, and ease of use, providing the warfighter with critical situational awareness.
Small UAS (‘SUAS’): Small UAS in Groups 1 and 2 are designed for reliable operation at low altitudes, offering real-time observation and communication capabilities, with easy transport, assembly, and quiet electric propulsion. Products include Puma LE, Puma 3 AE, Puma VTOL, P550, Raven B, and VAPOR 55 MX. Systems within the SUAS portfolio utilize the company’s common and interoperable handheld ground control systems, as well as an array of spare parts and accessories.
Medium UAS (‘MUAS’): The company’s Group 3 solutions include the JUMP 20, JUMP 20-X, and T-20. All are field-deployable and deliver extended endurance and increased payload capacity to unlock a broader set of uncrewed missions.
Kinesis Command and Control Software: The company’s Kinesis software is an advanced command and control platform designed to enhance the operation of its diverse uncrewed systems, including UAS, ground vehicles, and maritime vessels. Kinesis integrates seamlessly with its product suite, offering a scalable and intuitive interface that centralizes the control of multiple assets and provides real-time situational awareness. The software’s interoperability and automated mission planning capabilities reduce operator workload, improve decision-making, and increase mission success rates.
Counter-UAS (‘C-UAS’) and Precision Strike: Precision Strike includes the company’s family of loitering munitions solutions (‘LMS’) that deliver actionable intelligence and precision firepower, which modern warfighters need to achieve mission success across multiple domains. C-UAS includes its family of radio frequency and kinetic C-UAS products, which, when combined with its Directed Energy C-UAS solution, provide a comprehensive suite of counter-drone solutions with rapid deployment and advanced threat detection and defeat, as well as the company’s Electronic Warfare (‘EW’) solutions, which provide critical tactical communication, geolocation, and cyber effects capabilities, utilizing modular architectures and open standards.
Precision Strike: The company’s Switchblade family includes the Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600, which are loitering munitions solutions and provide portable, low-signature, precision strike capabilities against static or mobile targets, and Blackwing, which provides intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (‘ISR’) capabilities. In addition to these loitering munitions products, the company recently launched a One Way Attack offering called Red Dragon. The Red Dragon family of products offers an autonomous capable, GPS-denied, precision-strike, one-way attack UAS engineered for scalable production and deployment. Designed to operate in disrupted, disconnected, intermittent, and low-bandwidth conditions, it delivers unmatched resilience against advanced electronic warfare threats.
Radio Frequency (‘RF’) and Kinetic C-UAS: The company’s Titan family of solutions provides comprehensive C-UAS RF capabilities deployed across two core products. Titan C-UAS offers advanced threat detection and rapid response, deploying within five minutes to identify and intercept hostile drones. This autonomous system, powered by artificial intelligence (‘AI’) and machine learning (‘ML’), defeats Group 1 and 2 drones, providing non-specialist operators with comprehensive situational awareness and defensive capabilities against UAS threats. Titan SV delivers comprehensive 360° surveillance, efficiently localizing malicious SUAS. The company unveiled its latest Titan offering, the Titan IV, offering a smaller, lighter, and more powerful RF-based solution to detect and defeat Group 1 and 2 drone threats. Also included is the company’s newest C-UAS kinetic interceptor, Freedom Eagle (‘FE-1’). This next-generation C-UAS drone and air defense missile system provides enhanced lethality at range against Group 3 UAS and other large aerial threats, while seamlessly integrating with existing infrastructure and command and control systems.
Electronic Warfare Systems: The company’s EW Systems are designed utilizing sensor open system architecture (‘SOSA’) and modular open systems architecture (‘MOSA’) standards, as well as AI/ML technologies for RF signature analysis and automated detection and identification of out-of-band signals, enhancing system interoperability, modularity, and resilience to enable operational advantage across contested domains. This approach ensures seamless integration with existing defense infrastructures and allied systems, enabling cohesive and collaborative operations. Key products include the SharkCage Tactical Chassis, which is an expeditionary command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (‘C5ISR’)/EW chassis, environmentally sealed to withstand the elements associated with land, air, and sea operations, as well as the extreme temperature changes associated with airborne missions, and BlueFin Angler SDR, which supports multiple signals of interest and third-party waveforms.
Other
Included in ‘Other’ is MacCready Works, the company’s innovation engine where autonomy, AI, and advanced platform technologies converge to deliver next-generation capabilities; Unmanned Maritime; Uncrewed Ground Systems (‘UGV’); and High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites (‘HAPS’).
Autonomy, AI, and Advanced Platform Technologies: In the company’s MacCready Works organization, it develops solutions, such as ACE, SPOTR-Edge, and ARK, to enable robotic systems to perform complex missions in complex environments requiring advanced AI/ML and autonomy. The company’s most recent One Way Attack offering, Red Dragon, was designed and developed in MacCready Works.
Unmanned Maritime: Unmanned Maritime provides effective surveillance, reconnaissance, and mine detection in contested waters. The Defender is a robust Remotely Operated Vehicle (‘ROV’) designed for precise control of the vehicle position and orientation, heavier payloads, and demanding intervention, such as rendering unexploded ordnance safe or searching and retrieving evidence. The Pro 5 and Ally are modular underwater systems for diverse operational needs, combining speed, power, efficiency, and agility.
UGV: The company’s UGV systems support complex explosive ordinance disposal (‘EOD’) operations through multi-axis manipulation and integrated tool exchange capabilities. The company’s UGVs have proven themselves in a variety of dangerous applications, including EOD and improvised explosive devices (‘IED’), hazardous materials handling (‘HAZMAT’), chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (‘CBRNE’) threat assessments, and special weapons and tactics (‘SWAT’) team operations. Products include tEODor EVO and Telemax EVO.
HAPS: HAPS are long-endurance UAS maintaining geosynchronous orbits, providing low-latency communications, and operating over large areas of interest. HAPS can carry a variety of communications and sensing payloads that are easily installed, upgraded, and swapped based on mission needs.
Space, Cyber, and Directed Energy
Space and Directed Energy
As space becomes a more contested domain, investments in satellite operations and communications, missile warning systems, and space-based ISR ensure dominance and resilience in potential conflicts. Directed energy C-UAS systems use high-energy laser systems paired with AI/ML-enabled sensing technology to track, identify, and defeat targets.
Digital beamforming technology: The company’s proprietary multi-band/beam software-defined antenna (‘MSDA’) tile allows simultaneous communication with multiple satellites across different frequency bands and provides agile, resilient, and modular solutions for next-generation space operations. This technology is deployed across the Badger product, providing agile, deployable multi-beam, multi-band antennas, offering a modular, reconfigurable digital phased array for satellite communications, telemetry, and EW missions, and the Wasp product, which provides next-generation technologies in satellite communications, telemetry, EW, and radar, employing multiple, independently steerable, simultaneous beams at diverse center frequencies and bandwidths, supporting seamless interface with both new and existing antenna reflectors.
Laser Communications: High-bandwidth, secure data transmission systems for modern space operations enable Low Probability of Intercept and Low Probability of Detect communications. The company’s payloads provide up to 100 times more bandwidth than RF for stable, resilient space communications.
Space-Qualified Hardware: The company’s trusted hardware delivered for mission-critical capabilities includes line of sight stabilization and control electronics in Low Earth Orbit (‘LEO’), Medium Earth Orbit (‘MEO’), Geostationary Earth Orbit (‘GEO’), and cislunar orbits. The company has over 260 systems currently on orbit, including angular rate sensors, fast steering mirrors, power system controllers, command and data handling, and spacecraft attitude determination and control units.
Phased Array Antenna Technology: The company’s PANTHER family of systems supports hypersonic telemetry and tracking, and other missile testing.
Directed Energy: The Locust Laser Weapon System (‘LWS’) and Locust TATS use advanced AI and engineering for an effective directed energy kill chain, tracking, identifying, and defeating targets with a high-energy laser system. Designed for roll-on/roll-off modularity and quick deployment, it is easily transported and integrated onto various platforms.
Cyber and Mission Systems
The company’s Cyber and Mission Systems provide specialized operational support, services, and technologies to execute critical missions within the national security community.
Cyber: The company’s expertise spans offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, Geospatial Intelligence (‘GEOINT’), Signals Intelligence (‘SIGINT’), Measurement and Signature Intelligence (‘MASINT’), as well as Open Source Intelligence (‘OSINT’) analytics. The company’s cyber solutions are engineered to empower national security and defense operations with advanced tools and capabilities in both offensive and defensive cyber operations, enabling full-spectrum warfare.
Mission Systems: The company’s HaloCortex OSINT Platform is an AI-powered OSINT Analysis product that leverages the largest data store in the world to provide unique insights and solve Department of Defense (‘DoD’) and commercial challenges.
Strategy
As a leading defense technology provider, the company’s strategy is to grow its business by delivering innovative, mission-critical, safe, and reliable multi-domain solutions tailored to its customers’ most pressing challenges. The company’s strategy involves introducing new solutions, or acquiring differentiated solutions developed by others, to enhance the value it provides to customers, while supporting profitable growth across both existing and emerging markets. Key components of the company’s strategy are to expand the market penetration of existing products and services; deliver innovative new solutions into existing and new markets; preserve its agility and flexibility; effectively manage its growth portfolio for long-term value creation; and stay engaged with its key defense customers.
Customers
The company sells the majority of its products and services to the U.S. DoD, serving branches, such as the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Special Operations Command, Air Force, Navy, Space Force, and Cyber Command; the intelligence community agencies; public safety agencies; allied governments and coalition partners through direct commercial sales or foreign military sales; and to commercial customers, supporting critical infrastructure protection, open-source intelligence operations, and advanced research initiatives.
During the company’s fiscal year ended April 30, 2025, prior to the acquisition of BlueHalo, it generated approximately 20% of its revenue from the U.S. Army, pursuant to orders placed under contract by the U.S. Army on behalf of itself, as well as for several other organizations within the U.S. DoD. For that same period, other U.S. government agencies and government subcontractors accounted for 27% of its sales revenue. Sales revenue to foreign customers, inclusive of foreign military sales made through the U.S. DoD, commercial, and consumer customers accounted for the remaining 53% of sales revenue during its fiscal year ended April 30, 2025, of which Ukraine accounted for 18% of its total sales revenue.
Intellectual Property
As of April 30, 2025, prior to the BlueHalo acquisition, the company had issued and retained 353 U.S. patents, as well as 103 pending U.S. patent applications; and numerous foreign patents and pending applications. In many cases, when appropriate and to preserve confidentiality, the company opts to protect its intellectual property through trade secrets, as opposed to filing for patent protection. The company recently filed trademark applications for its new stylized corporate AV logo incorporating a halo feature, as well as the mark All Domain Dominance. Further, the company has many U.S. registered trademarks, including those for AeroVironment, AV, Switchblade, Raven, VAPOR, Arcturus UAV, JUMP, Tomahawk Robotics, and Kinesis, and has several pending applications for trademark registration.
Upon the closing of the BlueHalo acquisition on May 1, 2025, the company obtained an additional 150 issued U.S. patents, with 60 patents pending, and numerous foreign issued patents and pending patent applications.
BlueHalo has many registered trademarks, as well as many pending trademark applications, including, but not limited to, the U.S. trademarks for its major products like TITAN C-UAS, LOCUST, UAS-MAX, Badger, WASP, NXTHEALTH, NXTTRUST, NXTAERO, NXTRF, NIQUIST, SCRAAWL, Protection from the Swarm, and several more.
Competition
The company’s current principal competitors include Elbit Systems Ltd., Quantum-Systems, Inc., Edge Autonomy, Teledyne Technologies, Inc., Sierra Nevada Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, The Boeing Company, Textron, Inc., Shield AI, Inc., Northrop Grumman Corporation, Griffon Aerospace, Inc., L3Harris Technologies, Inc., and Israeli Aircraft Industries.
Manufacturing and Operations
The company has instituted lean production systems and leverages its International Organization for Standardization (‘ISO’) certification for Quality Management Systems, integrated supply chain strategy, document control systems, and process control methodologies for production. The company’s ISO 9001:2015 + AS9100D certified manufacturing facilities focus on continuous improvement to increase acceptance rates, reduce lead times, and improve efficiency.
Seasonality
Historically, revenue in the second half of the company’s fiscal years (year ended April 30, 2025) has exceeded revenue in the first half. This trend is expected to continue in fiscal year 2026 following the acquisition of BlueHalo. The factors that affect the company’s revenue recognition between accounting periods include the timing of new contract awards, the availability of the U.S. government and international government funding, lead time to manufacture its systems to customer specification, customer acceptance, and other regulatory requirements.
Regulation
Due to the fact that the company contracts with the DoD and other agencies of the U.S. government, it is subject to extensive federal regulations, including the Federal Acquisition Regulations, Defense Federal Acquisitions Regulations, Truth in Negotiations Act, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, False Claims Act, and the regulations promulgated under the DoD Industrial Security Manual, which establishes the security guidelines for classified programs and facilities, as well as individual security clearances. Like most government contractors, the company’s contracts are audited and reviewed on a continual basis by federal agencies, including the Defense Contract Management Agency (‘DCMA’) and the Defense Contract Audit Agency (‘DCAA’).
Certain aspects of the company’s business are subject to further regulation by additional U.S. government authorities, including the Federal Aviation Administration (‘FAA’), which regulates airspace for all air vehicles in the U.S. National Airspace System, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission, which regulate the wireless communications upon which the company’s UAS depend in the United States, the Defense Trade Controls of the U.S. Department of State that administer the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which regulate the export of controlled technical data, defense articles, and defense services, and the Export Administration Regulations, as administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which regulate the export of goods, software, and technology, including items that have dual-use for both commercial and military applications.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expense for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2025, was $100.7 million.
History
AeroVironment, Inc. was founded in 1971. The company was incorporated in the state of California in 1971 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2006.
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