Draganfly

Overview

Draganfly is one of the oldest names in commercial drones, and in September 2026 it became one of the newest names in the Trump family’s orbit. Unusual Machines — the Florida drone-components company that counts Donald Trump Jr. as a member of its advisory board — teamed up with an unnamed U.S. asset management company to invest $10 million in the Canadian drone maker. (Reuters)

The two investors are putting in $5 million each, buying 1,869,159 common shares at $5.35 apiece — the company’s closing price on September 25 — in a registered direct offering that was expected to close around September 29 or 30. (Reuters; Draganfly) Draganfly said it would use the money to speed up development of advanced strategic capabilities and to fund working capital. (Reuters)

“America and its allies are entering a period in which the ability to manufacture drones, components and autonomous systems at scale is becoming a strategic capability,” said Dr. Allan Evans, chief executive of Unusual Machines. “This investment into Draganfly allows us to support their production growth and deepen our supplier relationships.” (Draganfly)

The deal has drawn the kind of scrutiny that now follows most Trump-family defense investments. Reuters noted that the family’s stakes in several companies have raised conflict-of-interest questions, particularly in defense firms that compete for government contracts. Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric Trump have also backed the Israeli drone-maker XTEND and the company Powerus. (Reuters)

What the company does

Draganfly develops and manufactures unmanned aircraft systems and related software for defense, public safety, agriculture and industrial inspection markets. (Reuters) Its work has skewed toward public safety and government customers: it has supplied drones to Ukraine, where its systems have been used for mapping, humanitarian and other missions. (Reuters)

The company sits on four revenue streams. The first is contract engineering, largely for tier-one U.S.-based military contractors. The second is original systems manufacturing — fixed-wing aircraft, ground robots and specialized payloads, along with software design for other companies’ drones. The third is managed services, where Draganfly effectively acts as a client’s data-collection arm. The fourth, still emerging, covers data analytics and management. (VentureBeat)

The drone in the Smithsonian

Draganfly’s most famous aircraft is not on a battlefield; it is in a museum. On the night of May 9, 2013, Corporal Doug Green of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police flew a Draganflyer X4-ES over a wooded area in Saskatchewan, looking for a man who had walked away from a car crash with a head injury into subfreezing weather, wearing only pants and a T-shirt. Ground teams and a helicopter crew with night-vision gear had failed to find him. The drone’s thermal camera — a 260-gram forward-looking infrared unit — picked up his body heat where the helicopter’s night-vision goggles could not. (Smithsonian)

It was the first known instance of a small unmanned aircraft contributing to saving a human life. The RCMP’s own account confirms it was credited as the first human life saved by a drone, and the aircraft itself was donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (Transport Canada)

A 1998 founding story

Draganfly was founded in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1998 by Zenon Dragan and Christine Dragan. Its early products included the “Flying Saucer,” a helium-filled indoor blimp marketed for UFO conventions, before the company released what is widely recognized as the world’s first commercialized quadrotor UAV in 1999 — nearly a decade before the consumer drone boom. In 2001 it released the first multirotor platform with an integrated camera system, and in 2009 it received one of the first FAA Certificates of Authorization for unmanned aircraft operations, issued to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. (Thomas Chang)

Chief executive Cameron Chell has called it “the oldest commercial drone manufacturer in the world.” The company is headquartered in Saskatoon, with offices in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Raleigh, North Carolina. (VentureBeat)

In July 2015 the company was acquired by TRACE Live Networks, a U.S.-based technology firm, and continued operations under TRACE co-founder Cameron Chell. In 2021 it began the process of up-listing its shares to Nasdaq, where they trade under the ticker DPRO alongside listings on the Canadian Securities Exchange and the Frankfurt exchange. (Thomas Chang)

Defense positioning and the money trail

Draganfly has spent the last few years moving closer to defense work. In September 2023 it opened a new manufacturing and production facility in Saskatoon, which Chell called a “pivotal moment” for meeting demand for its UAV systems and components. (Draganfly) In September 2026 the company was selected for all five capability streams of Canada’s new Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace, a pathway for qualified Canadian technologies to progress through research, prototyping, testing and limited acquisitions toward potential production contracts. (The Manila Times)

Money has been flowing in to fund the push. In February 2026 Draganfly raised $50 million through a share offering to fund growth plans, working capital, deals and development. (Reuters) Even so, its New York-listed shares had fallen about 23% so far this year through late September, while Unusual Machines’ shares had surged about 89% over the same period. (Reuters)

Specialized work, not consumer drones

Draganfly has never chased the consumer market. While cheap consumer drones from the likes of DJI and Parrot became popular, none of Draganfly’s revenue comes from consumers. It designs specialized gear — batteries that operate in colder weather, specialized sensors, payloads, gimbal attachments and software integrations — and its preferred work is highly specialized contracts for clients such as the U.S. Marshals Service and the Border Patrol, built on a North American supply chain. (VentureBeat)

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the company developed and tested what it called “pandemic drones,” meant to assist public-health monitoring by analyzing crowd data and detecting physiological indicators from the air. (Thomas Chang) That health work extended into a telehealth platform built around remote detection of respiratory symptoms, with the company citing 23 issued and one pending fundamental UAV patents in its portfolio. (Thomas Chang)

What this profile does not claim

It does not claim that Donald Trump Jr. personally invested in Draganfly; the investment came from Unusual Machines and a U.S. asset management company, and Trump Jr.’s connection is his advisory-board role at Unusual Machines. It does not identify the unnamed U.S. investment fund, because neither the company nor Reuters named it. It does not confirm the founders’ identities beyond the self-published company analysis cited above, and it does not give a current employee count or CEO status beyond what the cited sources state.