Skydio sells the Army one-soldier, two-drone targeting after a $52 million order as its police deals shrink
One week, one company: Skydio's ISR Command launched at AUSA to multiply a soldier's targeting reach while St. Paul residents demanded the release of a $300,000 police drone contract the city will not publish.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
A 2.14-kilogram drone is now the smallest aircraft claiming to deliver strike-grade target coordinates to F-16s 12. Skydio launched ISR Command on October 13 at the Army's AUSA show: software that lets one soldier fly two X10D drones from a single controller, hand off target custody automatically when a battery dies, and push precise grids over Army networks to everything from one-way attack drones to fighter jets 12. CEO Adam Bry calls it breaking the "1:1 pilot:drone ratio" 1. The same day, residents rallied outside St. Paul City Hall demanding the release, and cancellation, of the same company's roughly $300,000 police drone contract, a contract the city still has not published 3.
The Army buy-side and the city shut-out moved on the same day, and that is the story.
The Army order is about 27 times Skydio's largest disclosed US police deal
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Army X10D order, Mar | $52M |
| Reno drone line | $1.9M |
| St. Paul contract | $0.3M |
The bottleneck is pilots, and software prices it
Army Col. Gregory Merkl, director of Drone Dominance, said in September that hardware is no longer the gap; trained pilots are 1. ISR Command is built for exactly that shortage: objectives arrive over the Army's Team Awareness Kit (TAK) network before the drone is powered on, one operator manages two aircraft, and a second X10D relieves the first on station without losing eyes on the target 2. The X10D's coordinates ride embedded video metadata out to 3.1 miles, and Skydio claims it feeds the Army's next-generation C2 layer alongside Anduril's$123.86B — Anduril, private, latest valuation $123.86B Lattice 12. Behind it sits scale: the Army ordered more than 2,500 X10Ds in March, a $52 million-plus order Skydio called the largest single-vendor tactical drone buy in Army history 1.
The domestic floor is giving way
Minneapolis already rejected a Skydio first-responder contract. St. Paul's council withdrew a $200,000 federal drone grant on September 9 after public outcry, and protesters at the Oct. 13 rally faulted Skydio's sales to Israel and its 2020 pledge, still on its website, that it "will not put weapons on our drones," even as soldiers dropped live grenades from an X10D in 2025 tests 13. Reno is still buying, but look at the receipt: Skydio drones enter as a $1.9 million line, the smallest visible piece of an eight-year, $21.8 million Axon bundle negotiated 51% below list 4.
Skydio drones are the smallest line in Reno's Axon bundle
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Officer Safety Plan | 10.9 |
| AI package | 7.3 |
| In-car cameras | 2.9 |
| Skydio drones | 1.9 |
| Fixed ALPR cameras | 0.31 |
The exposures are priced in Axon, Anduril and Palantir
Investors cannot buy Skydio. The exposures around it are priced: Axon+2.49% — Axon, up 2.49 percent as of its last quote carries the police attach, as a shrinking line inside an AI-surveillance bundle worth about a third of its value in report-writing software alone 4; Anduril and Palantir−0.02% — Palantir, down 0.02 percent today hold the network layer Skydio claims to feed 1; defense-drone rivals face a consolidating Army franchise. If the Army follows March's order with another award, ISR Command's scarcity pitch is winning the budget; if St. Paul publishes, then cancels, the $300,000 contract, the domestic floor keeps eroding. Either read starts with the documents the two sides have not yet released 3.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
