Allan Evans

Overview

Six days ago, Allan Evans put his own money into a different company’s future. On September 24, 2026, the chief executive of Unusual Machines personally led a $1.25 million private investment into Brightline Interactive’s SpatialCore platform — an interoperability layer meant to give autonomous systems and sensors “a shared way to understand the physical world,” in his words — with the financing documents explicitly noting the deal was “in his personal capacity and is not a corporate transaction between Brightline and Unusual Machines” (ACCESS Newswire). It is a telling move for a man whose public image is usually painted by other people’s headlines. Evans is a Michigan-trained PhD engineer with 47 pending or issued patents who spent the 2010s building augmented-reality headsets, then spent the 2020s moving through every rung of the American drone industry — Fat Shark, Red Cat, and now Unusual Machines, the Orlando-based drone components maker whose stock, Pentagon contracts, and advisory board keep dragging him into political coverage he did not choose (BabyBoomer.org; Bloomberg).

The engineer before the CEO

Evans’s career starts in laboratories, not boardrooms. He holds an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and graduate and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan (InsiderTrades). In November 2012 he co-founded Avegant, a company developing next-generation display technology for augmented reality, and served as chief technology officer through 2016 — leading the design, development and initial production of the Glyph head-mounted display and overseeing the company’s technology research and patent strategy (BabyBoomer.org). His inventor’s record runs from implantable medical devices to mixed-reality headsets, and academically his work carries an h-index of 15 and an i-index of 28, cited in more than 1,000 publications (BabyBoomer.org).

The hardware turn came in 2017, when he became CEO of Fat Shark Holdings, the company behind the FPV (first-person-view) goggles that let drone pilots fly through ultra-low-latency video feeds, and also took a board seat at Ballast Technologies, a location-based entertainment technology company; he held both through 2020 (InsiderTrades; BabyBoomer.org). From January 2021 to November 2023 he was chief operating officer of Red Cat Holdings, the drone company, before being appointed a director of Unusual Machines in November 2023 and becoming its chairman and CEO in December (BabyBoomer.org; ACCESS Newswire).

The Unusual Machines reshoring bet

Unusual Machines is a U.S.-based drone and drone components manufacturer — NYSE American: UMAC — built around a diversified brand portfolio that includes Fat Shark, the FPV goggles leader, and Rotor Riot, the e-commerce store retailing small acrobatic FPV drones and equipment directly to consumers (ACCESSWIRE). Its stated ambition is to become the dominant Tier-1 parts supplier to the fast-growing U.S. drone industry (ACCESSWIRE). That ambition is fundamentally about reshoring: the company exists to replace Chinese-made drone components with American-made ones — a mission that, as the Trump Jr. announcement release noted, followed the release of its Brave F7 FPV Flight Controller (ACCESSWIRE).

Evans has laid out the manufacturing logic in unusual detail. In an interview on the White House’s June 2025 drone executive order, he described 3D printing — additive manufacturing — as the bridge that lets reshoring move faster than legacy tooling would allow: using HP’s Multi Jet Fusion technology for parts that don’t justify expensive tooling, like GoPro camera mounts, producing high-quality prints “quite economically” in middle volumes of a few thousand units, and refining the part’s design before committing to full tooling (3DPrint.com). The company’s endgame is a drone motor factory on U.S. shores — with a planned start date of September 2025 — because, as he put it, “you’re not going to build your own drone motor at the edge. That would be ridiculous”: the vision is distributed supply chains where users print frames at the frontline and drop in American-made motors, batteries and components (3DPrint.com).

His market read is equally distinctive. Where most defense-adjacent CEOs talk only about military demand, Evans argues the commercial side will win out: the consumer and enterprise segment — roof inspections, agricultural monitoring, wedding photography, food delivery, cell-tower and pipeline inspection — “has opened up an enormous market, people just haven’t necessarily noticed it,” he said. “I think it’s one of those things where you don’t see it, you don’t see it, you don’t see it…and then suddenly you see it everywhere” (3DPrint.com). The Department of Defense, in his telling, “is going to be the big injector of capital into U.S. producers over the next couple of years, but long-term, I think the commercial market is going to be much bigger, even, than the defense market” (3DPrint.com). He is also candid about the road: American efforts to catch China will create “intense competition in a classic capitalistic sense,” the market “will very quickly pick winners,” consolidation is coming, and within three to five years the survivors “are going to be very competitive on a global scale” (3DPrint.com).

The Trump Jr. appointment and the Pentagon deal

On November 27, 2024, Unusual Machines announced that Donald Trump Jr. — described in the release as “a globally recognized business leader, best-selling author, and investor in the Company” — had joined its advisory board (ACCESSWIRE). Evans’s own quote set the terms: “Don Jr. joining our board of advisors provides us unique expertise we need as we bring drone component manufacturing back to America. He brings a wealth of experience and I look forward to his advice and role within the Company as we continue to build our business” (ACCESSWIRE). Trump Jr.’s statement matched the reshoring theme: “It is also obvious that we must stop buying Chinese drones and Chinese drone parts” (ACCESSWIRE).

Less than a year later, the company landed the largest U.S. government order in its history: a contract to supply 3,500 drone motors and other components to the U.S. Army, with the Army signaling a possible additional 20,000 parts the following year — the deal’s value undisclosed, but enough to send the shares up as much as 18.6% intraday and lift the market capitalization to about $370 million (Bloomberg). It is here that Evans’s record is clearest and most consistent. When asked whether Trump Jr. helped with the deal, Evans said he did not; Trump Jr.’s spokesperson told the Financial Times that “Don has never communicated with anyone in the Administration on behalf of Unusual Machines or about the contract in question,” adding that his advisory role “has nothing to do with interfacing with the government” (Bloomberg). The FT also reported that Trump Jr. held 331,580 shares — then worth roughly $4 million — making him the company’s second-biggest shareholder (Bloomberg).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Evans’s net worth; the only published estimate comes from a single lower-tier aggregator using a narrow methodology (Red Cat shares only) and is deliberately not repeated. It does not claim whether Unusual Machines’ planned U.S. drone motor factory has opened — the 3DPrint interview described it as planned, and no confirmed-opening source was read. It does not assert the company’s 2026 revenue figures or the exact share-price reactions to the 2024 Trump Jr. announcement, since available numbers vary across sources. And it treats characterizations like “recognized leader in the drone industry” as the originating outlet’s description, not an independent finding.