Skydio chief executive Adam Bry said that Skydio will outsell DJI to US civilian customers in 2026, according to DroneXL (Haye Kesteloo, 10 November, 10:05 p.m. ET). DroneXL summarizes an hour-long interview hosted by Ti Morse on his Relentless YouTube channel, published on 8 November under the title “Outcompeting DJI | Adam Bry, Skydio”. According to DroneXL, Bry rests the claim on the best available public data plus Skydio’s own numbers and gave no unit, dollar or market-share figures. Lens did not watch the interview, found the claim only in DroneXL’s account, and found no published sales data that could test it.

What Bry said, as DroneXL reports it

  • US sales: Skydio will sell more to US civilian customers than DJI this year, which Bry described as a staggering fact. He said DJI still sells and competes in the US although it cannot launch new models there, and told his host: “This is not broadly understood.”
  • Why: Bry said Skydio has almost no consumer sales and that he understands most of DJI’s revenue is consumer, that customers strongly prefer to buy American, and that Skydio invested early in docks when they were deeply unprofitable.
  • Operations: The factory will triple its output this year, and non-military customers fly about 40,000 flights a week, a figure that doubles year over year. These are Bry’s figures and cannot be checked from outside the company.
  • DJI and imitation: Bry said DJI copied a large number of Skydio’s features, including its fisheye, vision-centric drone design, and that Skydio showed a dock before DJI announced one; he said the two companies’ products now look similar and that he shrugs it off as the way things go. DroneXL notes that Skydio unveiled its 2 Dock in October 2019 and DJI announced its first Dock in March 2022, and that DJI launched the Phantom 4, marketed with advanced computer vision, on 1 March 2016, two years before Skydio’s R1 shipped.
  • Battery swapping: Bry said swapping helps only if it is free and perfectly reliable, and that the extra mechanism adds cost and reduces reliability.

Sanctions, batteries and supply chain

Bry said that on the day Beijing sanctioned Skydio in October 2024, Chinese officials shut down its battery supplier and seized equipment, leaving Skydio with one battery per drone. Replacement cells from the US and allied countries added a couple of minutes of flight time, he said, without a figure. He described Skydio’s supply chain as having zero dependence on China but still fragile, and said that internally one camp wanted to broker a deal with the US government while he argued for cutting China out faster. DroneXL reports that Skydio plans to spend about $1 billion with US suppliers over five years, part of a $3.5 billion US investment it announced in April, and that the FCC added DJI and other foreign drones to its Covered List on 22 December 2025.

Related coverage

Lens covered Axon’s $1.2 billion investment in Skydio, announced on 5 November, in an earlier post.

Sources and notes

Source: DroneXL (Haye Kesteloo, 10 November 2026), read through a summary; the interview itself was not watched or transcribed, and the one quotation above is a sentence DroneXL reproduces, with the rest paraphrased from its account. DroneXL says it uses automated tools for research and source retrieval. The claims about US sales, flights per week, output and supplier spending are Bry’s or Skydio’s and were not independently verified; Lens found no Skydio statement or published sales data on the claim.

Image: A Skydio X10D drone hovering during a counter-unmanned-aircraft training exercise at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Bavaria, Germany, 13 February 2025. Photo: US Army, Pfc. Brent Lee (DVIDS), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped. Stand-in image of the military variant of the X10 in a training exercise; it does not show a civilian sale or the interview.