Powerus says it plans to acquire Ukrainian drone tech to sell to the U.S. military.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, are backing a new drone company that is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon and fill a hole left by the administration’s ban on new Chinese drones in the U.S.
Powerus, a drone roll-up company based in West Palm Beach, Fla., is merging with a publicly traded golf-course holding company backed by the Trumps, Powerus executives said. The reverse merger will result in Powerus, which was formed last year, trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming months.
Investors in the deal include one of the Trumps’ investment vehicles, American Ventures, and Unusual Machines Inc, a drone components company where Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member, the company said. Powerus is also a customer of Unusual Machines.
The Trump brothers-backed investment bank Dominari Holdings, which has been involved in the family’s crypto deals, is also involved in the transaction, the company said. Separately, asset manager the Korea Corporate Governance Improvement Fund has invested $50 million.
Drone makers advanced in premarket trading on Monday. Unusual Machines up 8%; Red Cat up 6%; Airo Group up 2%.
The deal brings deeper involvement by the Trump family into a multibillion-dollar sector that has new opportunities for growth following changes imposed by the Trump administration. Those include the Pentagon’s emphasis on large-scale, rapid adoption of small drones, and a national ban on new models of the Chinese drones that have for more than a decade dominated the consumer and commercial markets.
Powerus Chief Executive Officer Andrew Fox said the reverse merger for Powerus would provide access to the public capital markets to give the company the funding it needs to scale manufacturing and acquire more companies. Powerus, which sells aerial and maritime drones after acquiring three small companies in the past six months, said it was working toward building more than 10,000 drones each month. That quantity is more than almost any other U.S. drone manufacturer produces and far more than the Defense Department has historically bought.
New initiatives such as the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance, an initiative to spend $1.1 billion to procure hundreds of thousands of U.S. systems by 2027, aim to encourage more domestic manufacturing in a sector China has long dominated. The U.S. drone market is highly fragmented with small companies that are mostly competing for a sliver of defense purchases and have little revenue.
Powerus will become public after merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings Inc., a holding company for golf courses in Florida, whose shareholders include the Trumps’ American Ventures and Dominari Securities, according to securities filings. Aureus’s stock recently recovered from trading below $1 per share.
The drone market “is certainly going to grow faster than, say, golf courses are,” Fox said.
Fox, an entrepreneur who spent close to three decades managing a building services company in New York and said he has no prior drone experience, added that Powerus has drones designed for putting out wildfires and carrying up to 1,000 pounds.
Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich, a U.S. Army special operations veteran who has advised drone companies in the U.S. and Ukraine and is a regular commenter on cable news shows, said Powerus is working on deals to acquire Ukrainian drone companies or license their technology and build and white-label it in the U.S. He declined to share details.
Ukrainian drone manufacturers face numerous hurdles in exporting their drones, and the U.S. military, while it is pursuing technology from Ukraine, has requirements for American-made weapons that make direct purchases from overseas tricky.
“There does need to be an American face in front of it or behind it,” Velicovich said.
