Inside Neros’ Factory Built to Make 1 Million Drones a Year

0:00This is our Millennium One facility. This is the factory that we moved into a few months ago. We sized this building to be big enough to do a million drones per year. In our previous facility, we had 100 people and manufacturing in 15 ,000 square feet. We were just fighting to even get drones out the door. The newest version of the Bandit Interceptor. Still a pretty rough prototype, honestly, but this one goes about 40 kilometers an hour faster. We're doing about 300 kilometers an hour with this drone right here. We wanted with this facility to not have to have multiple sites, not have to move.

0:33We've got all the space we need to actually vertically integrate everything and then get to that million per year target. Amazing.

0:50We're here at Nero, so we're gonna do a little factory tour with Soren. Sorin, thanks for having us. Absolutely. Let's do it. What are we going to see today? Okay. So this is our Millennium One facility. This is the factory that we moved into a few months ago. We sized this building to be big enough to do a million drones per year. And so we're going to see a lot of stuff from engineering to production and then also empty space that is way get filled. So a lot of fun stuff. We'll try to check out the engineering labs first. What are we going to be looking at over here? Okay, so we are coming up on the flight test teams area here.

1:26So we have a team of 10 people right now that is constantly out in the desert every single day testing our products. So you can see there's a bunch of drones on these racks that are at some point in the testing process for engineering development. So we'll see flight tests, our end of line flight test later on, which is for production. This is all for development purposes. but one of the things you can check out here is one of the interceptor prototypes. So this is the V1 of the bandit interceptor that we've been flying out in the desert. We have a newer version of this now that hopefully we'll get to look at too.

2:06One of the other things here is the Archer AI drone. So all of this stuff has been just getting beat to hell out in the hot desert and surviving. So that's the goal but really we're just trying to push everything to its limit and see where it breaks. How far in the desert do you go? We're like two hours away from here. Okay. Yeah. And we usually have two teams out every day. So in two different locations. Cool. Okay. So one of your friends thought it would be good for me to ask you why you don't 3D print these in the battlefield. Oh, I see. I think I can guess which friend. Yeah. So really we are focused on mass production.

2:513D printing is generally good for making a few of a thing, making like lots of different things. We are mostly focused on making a lot of one thing or a really consistent process. So like there's an idea that you can go and 3D print drones in the battlefield. Generally factories are really efficient when they are large and centralized and 3D printers can be very useful for adapting drones to various mission sets but you'd only be 3D printing like the airframe or a payload adapter. What we're trying to solve for is the really like core components and manufacturing process. So you're not going to be 3D printing your circuit boards, your motors, your radios, any of that stuff out on the battlefield.

3:31So it does not solve the supply chain problem in the ways that maybe are claimed in some of the posts today. We were at Anderil and we went into their R &D building. It's huge. Yeah. And Matt Grimm showed us the castings that they have for their drone bodies, which seem a lot heavier. Yep. So what's the main difference between using something like that versus what you're using? So our airframes right now are mostly made out of carbon plates. So carbon is really light and really strong, but it doesn't have some of the advantages of what they were doing with those metal bodies is that you get to use it as a heat sink.

4:14so we actually do this on our drone now where the bottom plate is a an aluminum plate and we we contact the motherboard and the radios with thermal interface material when we close out the drone with that bottom plate and so that acts as a big heatsink but we're still using it's just a flat plate that's cut into a shape in 2d versus having to be cast or cnc'd which is just a lot cheaper for for mass manufacturing got it okay what are we doing now okay so we're walking past the engineering labs or engineering spaces. So everyone, as you can see, has a lot of stuff at their desks. They have hardware, they have test equipment.

4:52It's really just whatever they need to be most effective at their workstation. And then right next to them, they have a bigger lab area. So as an example here, this is our electronics lab. So this is where we're doing bring up on new boards, doing testing of various things. And really what we want to be able to have for each engineering team is just the ability to iterate extremely quickly and do as much of this in-house as possible. It's so cool you have all of this under one roof. Yeah, I mean, this is like the advantage of having a facility this size is that the engineers here are sitting right next to production and the teams that are sitting close to production are the ones who are most impactful to production.

5:36So we have the mechanical engineering team, the manufacturing engineers, the supply chain team. They're sitting close to the line and also sitting interspersed with each other. So there's really good communication between the full, you know, all the teams for the full life cycle of the product, not just design, which is where a lot of things tend to get left and just thrown over the fence if you don't have this really close collaboration.

6:02following along with you here so this is a 250 000 square foot facility if we didn't mention that already it's pretty big yep so this is the mechanical engineering department here there's a couple fun things that we can we can look at running away yeah it's okay um so this is actually the the newest version of the bandit interceptor you can see it's a lot more sleek than the previous prototype. Still a pretty rough prototype, honestly, but this one goes about 40 kilometers an hour faster. So we're doing about 300 kilometers an hour with this drone right here. Oh my god. And this is just a couple months of development so far.

6:43So really excited about where this is going. How fast do you want them to get? So 300 is actually a pretty good spot for taking out like typical shot head drones to go after jet powered shot head drones we need to be closer to like 400 miles 400 kilometers an hour so that would be kind of the ideal end state how do you make it faster bigger motors bigger battery uh more aerodynamic this one got a lot more aerodynamic but there's still a lot of places that we can improve on that okay this episode is brought to you by brex my favorite you become what you spend on and i I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist.

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8:51I made sure to wear my sneakers. So right now we are in the in-between engineering to production. So you can see this is all boxes of drones that are getting shipped out. And then we have the line here. So on the left side is the drone assembly line. On the right side is the ground station assembly line.

9:19We what you'll see is that a lot of the stations are manually operated, but there's a lot of work to be done to make it easier for the operator. So like as an example, you see, you know, all the parts are preloaded into these bins and then fed in from the back. And so then they're perfectly accessible for the operator. There's a lot of tooling. There's a lot of drivers with preset torques, things like this that should make it relatively easy to operate each station. We also have manufacturing software deployed across the line that does a few different things. One is we're tracking the serial numbers of all the critical components as they go into airframes.

9:57We're also keeping track of the station time. And we're able to see across stations, like, where are we losing time? What is the bottleneck? And then that tells our team where to go and focus. How are you tracking time? So if you see over here, the tablets on the stations, every time they complete a drone, they're just tapping it and then that resets it and that data then goes back to our database. How hard is it to automate some of these tasks? Right now, this would be pretty difficult to automate because this version of the drone was not designed around automation. and it really to get to an automated line it takes a pretty significant redesign of the product itself so that's something that we will be going towards with the the ground up redesign but for the rate at which we are iterating it actually makes a ton of sense to have manually operated stations is this how fast they actually produce this or do they know that we're here no no this is this is normal rate.

10:59We're doing a little over 250 drones a day right now. That's crazy. So when do you outgrow this space? We don't know, which is a good thing. If we knew when we were outgrowing, then we'd be sad because we really tried to get a big enough facility to not have to move for a long time. You'd have to get a bigger American flag. Yeah. This one I think is 30 by 60, which is as far as I know the largest in the South Bay that was really important to us but yeah next facility needs to have higher ceilings so we can go even bigger do you have the largest flag in South Bay that is as far as I know yeah as far as you know as far as I know all right let's keep going you can come on into our testing room cool so right now we are flight testing every single drone that we make Yeah.

11:53So before this station there is an automated test station and that screens for a lot of the issues that previously we would catch at flight test but today we're still doing a hundred percent flight test and so what they're doing is putting a payload on the drone and then basically just trying to stress the drone as much as they can in a relatively short flight. Just a just a mass simulation. So you can see they really really whip the drone back and forth. Wow. And that's all manual? That's all manual. When are you going to automate that? It's really a process of collecting a ton of data here and collecting a ton of data at the previous test station and then trying to get to a point where we don't have to flight test all of our drones because we know, you know, typically like there'd be such a high rate of catching any issues at the test station that we'd just be sample testing.

12:47So we're probably still a little ways away from that, but it is what we're trying to get to in the future, and we're collecting all the data to get there now. We've been to a couple different drone companies. Most of them are commercial or consumer use, not defense-based, but they all have wind tunnels. Why don't you have one? You know, we do, so for our types of drones, you know, these quadcopters, they're much less affected by wind than a fixed-wing drone. We do a ton of testing in very windy conditions, but we've never needed to specifically put something in a wind tunnel and simulate an exact wind profile.

13:30We just do a lot of real-world testing and get our information that way. Do you see yourself going into fixed-wing drones? It's possible. It's not something that we are working on today, but it is an area where I think a lot of the same stuff that's been figured out in FPV, like we can make lower cost systems that are really effective. Like that applies in fixed wing too. And that is what Neuros wants to build. So at some point. All right. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com.

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15:28Is this just more like scale out space? So I guess the last thing we'll walk through here first is the new product introduction line. So we looked at the main production line. This is where we develop process for new products. So before anything goes to the main line, it has to go through an extensive NPI process and we figure out how to build it. So this is what we're doing right now with the Archer AI product before it goes into main production later this year. So one of the things that... This has never been seen before. Is that what you're saying? Never been seen before. And it's one of the things that we have been enabled to do by having this new space where in our previous facility, we had 100 people and manufacturing in 15 ,000 square feet.

16:13So we were just fighting to even like get drones out the door. Now we are able to do things like having an entire production. Like this is bigger than our old production line just dedicated to new products. So it's a big upgrade. And then, but what you can see beyond this is massive open space. So our plan and what we're starting to do this year is do component manufacturing in-house that then feeds into our systems. So we wanted with this facility to not have to have multiple sites, not have to move. And so we've got all the space we need to actually vertically integrate everything and then get to that million per year target.

17:01And so you guys are scaling rapidly. You're hiring new roles. We mentioned this in our longer form interview, but what are you hiring for? Yeah, I mean, we're hiring for every engineering discipline. We're hiring for supply chain. We're hiring for pretty much every department at the company, but especially hardware engineers and engineers who are really capable of being like full system responsible engineers and really can take on just a ton of accountability. So the name Niros is an old wise tale, isn't it? Where does that come from? The name Niros? Yeah. I don't think it's an old wives tale.

17:42I don't know I say it's up to the up to the viewer to figure it out. You should all figure it out. Hold a mirror up to the logo. See what you can find. So now we're going to the super secret facility that has blackout curtains all around it. Yeah yeah this is surprisingly the most secretive part of the nearest facility. By the way you don't see this but there's people scootering and skateboarding in the background. Well you got to be able to get around this place.

18:19This looks pretty intense. Oh my god.

18:27So yeah, this is one of our employee benefits. You guys have your own Equinox. Yeah, right? It's a little more powerlifting focused, but it's a lot of powerlifting. It's a nice thing to have. This is awesome. Do you guys do group workout classes here? We don't do classes. Maybe we should start. You should. But usually in the morning, there's like three to five people in here, like jamming out to music, lifting. So it's pretty cool. Not much cardio. Hey, there's a bike. Oh my God. Okay, so as we close out, Soren, I have to ask you, what is your hottest take right now? My hottest take right now?

19:08hmm

19:13this is a hard one

19:17I think the one that maybe upset a lot of people is what we talked about in the long form interview but I would say yeah maybe my hottest take is that a lot of the defense tech maybe the majority of defense tech products that are being put out right now by startups are not very effective and maybe even like completely useless. They're fake. They're fake. Damn. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Cool. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews.

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