Judy Warner (00:01) Hi, Olaf, so great to have you today. I can't wait to share you with our audience. So before we get started, let's jump right in and tell our audience a little bit about who you are and who your company Nero's is. Olaf (00:14) Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm Olaf, co-founder CTO here at Neros, and Neros is a drone company here in the States building unmanned superiority at scale. And so that means is we are really focused on mass producing defense systems so that America can maintain her dominance in the world theater. The way we're achieving that right now is through FPV drones, racing drones that have a purpose in defense applications as well. So So far in about 18 months since our initial trip to Ukraine where we deployed some of these systems, we've been able to produce a vertically integrated drone that includes custom US-made electronics, including radio systems that are optimized around anti-jam specifically, and really produce that at scale. We actually recently closed a 6,000-unit production contract, making us the highest rate producer of UAVs in America. And we're doing that all right here in sunny Southern California in El Segundo based on our in-house designs for custom flight computers, BLDC motor drivers, ground stations, airside radios. The whole gamut of electronics is done here at Neuros. Judy Warner (01:31) That leaves me with a lot of questions. So one, how did you get here? I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna clean up this whole first part, okay? I love it. You went really tight and I feel like we just practiced. So I'm gonna ask you again, give us a brief overview of how you went from professionally racing drones to world theater, unmanned. Olaf (01:41) Perfect. Judy Warner (01:59) drones for the military here in the U.S. Olaf (02:02) Absolutely. Yeah. So I did my first drone when I was 12 and I'd say my EE addiction started then. I just wanted to make the drones faster. Best way to make them faster was to design circuits. So I started designing boards in easy EDA, then emailed some core Altium rep every day until they gave me a student license in high school and started designing in Altium from there various drone components. a small business in high school making these drones work. when my future co-founder, teammate from drone racing came to me with this idea of, let's take that experience, building drones for professional racing and building those custom PCBs to make the drones faster, apply that to national security by building a bunch of drones, throwing them in our suitcase and bringing them to Ukraine. I was intrigued by the idea and found myself in his parents' basement, soldering together some boards to make our first prototype, which we built 30 of and... brought to Kyiv and handed out to various individuals there to kind of learn more about the Ukrainian drone ecosystem and see, first of all, how we could help since we both felt very strongly about supporting Ukraine. And second of all, also understand how we can kind of apply to some of those tactics that Ukraine has developed so well to the US defense industry. Judy Warner (03:22) So how did that first visit from Ukraine bring you back to the states and specifically launching Neiros? Olaf (03:30) Yeah, absolutely. So like in Ukraine, I was shocked to see, you know, people walking along the streets, know, average people had drone racing shirts on from popular YouTube channels that out drone racing, like learn how to make drones. And I bought a cookie at a bake sale in downtown Keev and a soldier's wife had made a bunch of cookies in the shape of drones because the soldier had a favorite drone they wanted and it was like $500 and they were raising $500 to buy that racing drone. So really saw this like entire country rallied around this technology that formerly was just a hobby, very, very niche hobby technology. I actually had the opportunity of sitting down with deputy prime minister Fedorov who surprisingly had a FPV racing drone on his desk. Never thought I would be in a politician's office with an FPV racing drone on. Judy Warner (04:14) Wow. Olaf (04:22) on his desk. So that was like kind of the realization that this was a world changing technology. Coming back to the States and thinking more about it, FPV racing drones could be a replacement for artillery. They completely change the way war is fought. And I view them like the Manhattan project of our generation. They completely changed the nature of warfare. I think you're going to see a lot of replacement of human war fighters with FPVs. Eventually you're going to see drones. running into each other and actually you can actually already see that happening in Ukraine. There's a lot of counter UAS, UASs, drones to take out drones. There's videos of drones blowing up other drones and we could look back in 30 years from now and think, wow, that was a crazy, crazy time 30 years ago where we sent humans to the front. We could replace all those humans with drones and perhaps more importantly, if we don't develop this drone technology, I think America will lose her edge. think that. drones are so lethal, so effective that without mass manufacture of drones here in America, we won't be able to maintain our dominance on the world stage like we've had the luxury of doing for so long, for my entire lifetime. So Neuros was founded under the belief that small drones and mass-manufacturable defense systems are really critical to maintain America's unmanned superiority. when we came back from Ukraine, we talked to some venture capitalists and raised our seed round of funding that was in late 2023 to build the factory that now sits behind me today that is producing these large quantities of drugs. Judy Warner (05:55) What was the inflection point that made you and your co-founder decide to do take a vertically integrated approach and keep that all here in the US? Olaf (06:05) Yeah, so I mean, look at what I guess two big reasons. Look at like who succeeded at mass manufacturing these kinds of systems. It's mostly people in Asia, mostly China. And these Chinese companies are not afraid to design hardware. You know, there's a lot of startups in the US that are software only and they will do anything not to, you know, place a single resistor. They just want to write code and code school code changes the world. Software eats worlds, but our read software, I think, and I think a lot of the innovation that's happened out of China has been enabled by hardware engineering, we were not scared to spin custom boards, right? We spun boards before we had any investment. And that's continued through our relentless approach at vertical engineering and designing custom circuits to power our drones. Additionally, I think that this focus on manufacturing from the start has been really important. From day one, we've had a production line in-house and engineers are... right next to the production line. They are very focused on making the system more manufacturable and making sure they build something that ships. Judy Warner (07:07) What I love about what you're saying as a person that has both worked directly with engineers inside OEMs and military OEMs, and then also I joke that I'm going to die of heavy metal exposure from walking around board shops for half my life. Right? Right. Yeah, there's a saying that says I have solder mask in my veins. So I really get what you're doing. It's just so rare these days and it kind of baffles my mind when you can get boards from Olaf (07:21) You and me both, eating solder too young. Judy Warner (07:37) places like JLPCB is such a great cost, how you compete. But what I love is you are serving up an environment where the engineers on your staff really can't understand that end to end, design for manufacturing, design for performance, for everything, all under one roof. And I think that is such a huge... You know, to not separate the engineers from the manufacturing space has got to be a huge win for you. Just how do you compete price-wise? Olaf (08:12) Yeah, keeping the engineers involved with manufacturing is really, really important. I mean, you look back at when I was designing my first printed circuit boards, JLCPCB only offered like two, four and six layer boards, no SMT. You could only get boards in green, right? They wouldn't give you any other solder mask colors. You could only, you know, use their like fairly coarse like trace space tolerance saying they had a bunch of like very stringent requirements. And that's because JLC's vision, as far as I know. was to just streamline the manufacturing process into one line and then condense a ton of orders into that one manufacturing process, take advantage of economies of scale. You see a lot of defense tech, right now, defense technologies, as an example, designing an SDR, you'll order 10 of those or 100 of those over many years. And they're super complex boards, they're HDI, they're really marvels of modern engineering and they often are... really bespoke, they're not copy pasted along a production line like JLC's boards are. So we designed our system from the ground up to use, mean, we have like our main board is six layers and it's pretty wide trace space. So we've designed from the beginning to be kind of in line with that like original JLC PCB motto of just like one type of line, one very simple product. And that sticks across from boards to the... actual drone itself. try and have a lot of commonality between different units want different functionality. How much can we squeeze into one drone platform that is all very similar, maybe just a few items at the end that are different. And yeah, just from the start optimizing around DFM. Judy Warner (09:49) That's amazing. I've been telling engineers to go to their board shop and learn manufacturing for like 15 years old. And I love that you are doing it. It sounds counterproductive and it sounds inefficient, but it's the opposite of, I always used to say, if you slow down, you can speed up, right? Like if you take the time to onboard it, you will go three times as fast. And you're basically saying that out loud and creating that right under your own roof. So you talked about software. Olaf (09:55) Yeah, yeah. Judy Warner (10:18) design radios and why not just use commercial off the shelf components and kind of put this thing together rather than vertically integrating. Olaf (10:30) Yeah, so think a lot of the commercial off the shelf radios themselves are not DFM'd, really, is the core of the problem. look at the radios available in the drone industry and the defense space that aren't made in China. They're usually thousands of dollars and not available at quantity or there's long back orders. So by taking that DFM first approach and doing it ourselves, we've actually not only lowered the cost significantly because the radio is well, very much targeted toward our Judy Warner (10:36) Okay. Olaf (11:00) low data rate anti-jam application, but also enable much higher manufacturing capabilities. Judy Warner (11:10) It's incredible. sounds very counterintuitive, but it sounds like you already have a substantial backlog of orders and sounds like there's more on the horizon. So what are some of the challenges and opportunities facing you right now as a company? And let's start with the challenges. Olaf (11:29) Yeah, absolutely. think, you know, from day one, we've been very interested in shipping product. There is a, you know, I've worked at companies where I've never actually, my engineering never got to see the light of day. There's a lot of startups that fail, of course, it's the nature of startups and then your product never ships. So from day one, we're like, what can we do to actually ship products? And that of course is a challenge, right? Our design cycles are super, super short. know, engineers have limited time to get product out the door. But that's also an opportunity, right? That's like, you know, engineers can dream up an idea at night and come to the office, cut it up in the morning, build it under the microscope, test it out in the afternoon, flight test it in the evening, and then hopefully ship it the next week. So really focusing on shipping product has been a core theme. And so far, we've delivered over 1,000 drones, a lot of them going to Allied forces or our partners in Ukraine, and making a difference over there. Judy Warner (12:25) So what are the opportunities to do this all here in Southern California, which sounds like a pipe dream, but sounds like you're doing it. So what are the opportunities do you think? Olaf (12:37) Absolutely. Yeah. So after closing this, you know, substantial production contract, we're growing substantially. We're looking to expand our team specifically in electrical engineering and firmware engineering. We're looking for people that are really interested in full stack ownership. you know, someone that wants to get handed a few requirements that aren't like silly government requirements, requirements based on like, Hey, when I was in Ukraine talking to this end user, you know, near the front, they said this happens. Like that's the requirement. And then take that requirement, bring it all the way to a functioning product. So that means, you know, do the initial trace study, see what's available off the shelf next. Okay. We're probably going to design it ourselves. Then, you know, do a schematic, initial block diagram, then a schematic, and then do a layout and then build the board and then do the firmware bring up and then hand it off to the manufacturing team, build the test jig and ship it. Like, you know, we want an engineer that wants to see One engineers that want to see their products actually come to life and see their hard work really count for something. So if you're one of those kind of crazy engineers that is willing to put up with the pain of being at a early stage, less than two year old startup that is moving quickly and doesn't wait for much, then I think you might be a fit. Judy Warner (13:56) Well, but you have orders, right? One, you have funding so you can pay for engineering talent. So from the model you're explaining then, you want engineers on site, you're all hands on deck, correct? Olaf (14:08) Absolutely. Yeah, so we're big believers in in-person work. We're all here in the lab. the EMI is causing issues, it's not fun to debug that over Zoom, right? When we're probes on analog traces, when we're debugging firmware issues that manifest themselves through hardware, it's really tricky to do that online. So we're all in on being in-person here, engineers under microscopes, under soldering. with probes in their hands. Judy Warner (14:41) That's amazing. I love it. Well, for our audience, if you are an engineer, a full stack, know, end to end, you want a lot of ownership, but the being that agile, that fast, please either reach out to me or reach out to Olaf because I certainly want to help him continue to build that. So I'll make sure that I put those links for you in the show notes. So how do you think you're going to be doing in like a year or two from now, Olaf? Olaf (15:12) Yeah, well, mean, the writing's kind on the wall about the drone industry, especially in defense. There's a ton of growth expected and actually already realized. think that Neurons is a really interesting opportunity in that we understand what it takes to mass manufacture these kinds of systems. We also understand very well from end users that have direct experience with these kinds of systems, what makes them effective. And we're ready to put that together and just continue producing these drones and continuing adding features and working towards these larger opportunities. Judy Warner (15:46) amazing. Well, Olaf, thank you so much for coming on and tell us about your amazing story and I hope we can send some engineers this way. You want to share a couple ways people can reach out to you and learn more about Nero's? Olaf (16:01) Absolutely. Yeah. So our website, neros.tech.tech is available. There's not much on there because we like to stay fairly stealth, but neros.techslashcareers is the best place to apply. And then I'm also on LinkedIn. If you want to shoot me a message, I'd love to connect and talk about printed circuit boards, UAVs, reindustrialization of America, bringing industry back here and making products that actually ship. Judy Warner (16:30) Well, Olaf, thank you so much. It's been so much fun to learn about you and Niros, and I hope some of our listeners will reach out to you if they're either in the LA area or they want to come and really be part of a meaningful journey with your team. Thanks again for joining us today. Olaf (16:47) Absolutely. Designing boards five miles from the beach is a good feeling, a great feeling actually. Judy Warner (16:51) It's not bad, it's not bad, it's not a bad gig. So thank you again for joining and for our audience, make sure you go check out the show notes. If you reach out to Olaf, please tell him that Judy sent you and or drop me an email at info at the ecosystem.com or Judy at the ecosystem.com and I'll make sure that he gets your resume if you're fit. thanks for being with us this week and learning from Olaf. We'll see you next week. Until then remember. to always stay connected to the ecosystem.