Nine Drone Startups Split a Pentagon Order for 60,000 Aircraft Under a Hard No-China-Parts Rule

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Perennial Autonomy, founded by Eric Schmidt, topped the deep-strike leaderboard and Neros topped close-quarters battle in the Pentagon's Gauntlet II results, with nine startups splitting orders for roughly 60,000 drones. A month earlier most competitors failed the same no-Chinese-parts specification, collapsing a $300M round. The rule now proving enforceable at 60,000-unit scale turns supply-chain provenance into a bid-eligibility gate for every follow-on tranche toward the program's 200,000-drone target.