Unmanned aircraft-marker Swarm Aero has secured a $10 million government contract that will be primarily executed at its new Fayetteville research and manufacturing facility.
As part of the contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Swarm Aero will preform research and development of its high-rate manufacturing process to manufacture aircraft parts for the U.S. Air Force.
In mid February, Swarm Aero opened its Fayetteville Advanced Manufacturing Center in 80,000 square feet of industrial space once occupied by Key Tronic Corp. The company said its Fayetteville operations will eventually have the ability to produce thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles and will create up to 600 high-skill aerospace jobs over the next five years.
"We're focused on the advanced manufacturing techniques that we intend to use for the future, and so this contract will be largely spent in Fayetteville on research happening right there," Spencer Rodriguez, vice president of operations and finance, said in a phone interview Tuesday.
He said the Fayetteville operation employs about 10 workers with plans to add more soon, with hiring continuing to grow as operations scale up. Rodriguez said the Fayetteville facility will eventually be the center of Swarm Aero's primary operations.
Last month, Fayetteville's City Council approved an ordinance detailing how it will handle non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in part because of concerns over a non-disclosure agreement made between the city and Swarm Aero. In May, City Council members said they received threats online and through email after a 5-3 vote by the council allowing Swarm Aero to remain in its Fayetteville location, overruling an earlier decision by the city Board of Adjustments that the facility did not fit the property's zoning.
Founded in 2022, California-based Swarm Aero, which makes large, unmanned aerial vehicles, has secured nearly $60 million in funding from various sources, the most recent $35 million in Series A financing lead by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures in March.
The company has said Swarm's manufacturing approach extends well beyond a single platform, giving it the foundation to develop additional aircraft for defense, civil, and commercial customers.
"Since our first engineering hire, Swarm has invested in manufacturing and design in tandem. We are not designing or even building one aircraft only to then start thinking about how to manufacture it at scale. We have designed our manufacturing processes to enable us to deliver aircraft at the scale our customers require," Peter Kalogiannis, chief executive officer and co-founder, Swarm Aero, said in a statement Tuesday.
