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Why settle for less when DJI’s most capable Mini drone bundle is now under $1,000? The Mini 5 Pro Fly More Combo with RC 2 has hit $979, bringing flagship-level imaging, smart tracking, and three batteries into one tempting package. If you’ve been waiting for a proper price drop, this is the kind of deal that makes putting off an upgrade a little harder to justify.

Beam Global is making a bigger bet on the drone industry, signing a definitive agreement to acquire Norwegian drone technology company ScoutDI in a deal valued at approximately $24 million. The move could give Beam a stronger foothold in the US industrial and defense drone markets, with domestic manufacturing at the center of its plans.

A drone can have all the range and capability in the world, but eventually it needs to land, recharge and get back in the air. Three US companies are now trying to remove much of that downtime with a single mobile system designed to keep drones operating around the clock.

The FAA is putting more money into the technologies it believes could help drones safely become a bigger part of the US airspace. The agency has announced $12 million in awards for 19 companies and organizations working on drone research and testing projects. The funding comes through the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Program, which supports commercial entities working with FAA-designated UAS Test Sites.

Bali is taking a small but notable step toward drone-powered delivery, with a new pilot project testing whether food orders can be transported by autonomous aircraft between two locations on the popular Indonesian island.

There’s a point where a drone deal stops feeling like a serious electronics purchase and starts feeling like something you could accidentally add to your cart. The DJI Neo has reached that point.

Public safety agencies increasingly rely on drones for everything from fire response to search-and-rescue missions. But getting a drone into the air is only part of the challenge. Agencies also need to manage pilots and fleets, stay on top of airspace requirements, and make sure live video reaches the right people without delay.

Flying a mapping drone is relatively easy. Getting consistently accurate, usable survey data out of it is a different story. That gap is what DJI is trying to address with its new Advanced GEO Products Training Services programme, which has now reached Europe’s Benelux region.

XTEND AI Robotics has secured a new US patent for a technology that could make drone payloads far more than passive tools. The company announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted US Utility Patent No. 12,743,960, covering an architecture in which a “smart payload” can send real-time instructions to the robotic platform carrying it.

Finding the right company or product in the rapidly expanding drone and mobile robot industry can be harder than it sounds. There are thousands of specialized suppliers, but knowing which ones actually fit a particular requirement can take considerable research. Drone Industry Insights (DII) is trying to make that process easier with ASTRA Intelligence, a new searchable platform designed to connect companies, products and services across the global mobile robot ecosystem.

Zing Drone Solutions and South Korea-based NUCODE have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and reached a preliminary agreement to explore the development and supply of compact wireless modules for drone identification systems. The partnership comes as drone manufacturers and operators face growing requirements around Remote ID, which allows authorities and other approved parties to identify drones in flight.

Sky Elements just gave America a glimpse of what a truly massive drone show looks like. The US drone show company has set two Guinness World Records titles after flying more than 71,000 drones across seven shows over three consecutive nights in Blue Ridge, Texas. The effort included an 11,000-drone performance that the company says is the largest drone show ever flown in America.

Lucid Bots is giving its Sherpa cleaning drone a new way to tackle tall buildings: instead of making the aircraft carry the full weight of its cleaning hose, a new rooftop system takes some of that load off.

Wildfires are one of the hardest environments for autonomous drones to navigate. Smoke can obscure cameras, terrain can change quickly, and a drone carrying a heavy load has little room for error. That is why Ouster and Seneca are teaming up to give autonomous wildfire-response drones a better view of the world around them.

Counter-drone defense is becoming a bigger priority for military forces, and Echodyne has just secured a significant path to put more of its radar technology into those missions.

Fortem Technologies is putting fresh money behind its counter-drone ambitions as demand grows for systems capable of detecting and stopping unauthorized aircraft. The Lindon, Utah-based airspace security company has closed a $50 million Series B funding round led by Lockheed Martin. The round also includes Unusual Machines and other strategic and institutional investors.

DoorDash has spent the past few years bringing drone deliveries to customers through partners including Wing and Flytrex. Now, the delivery giant is taking a much bigger piece of the operation in-house, developing its own aircraft, ground infrastructure, and delivery software through its DoorDash Air program.

Britain’s electricity networks stretch for thousands of miles, connecting homes, businesses and renewable energy projects across the country. Keeping all that infrastructure in good shape is a huge inspection job, and increasingly, drones are doing more of the work.

There’s a big difference between recording a place and actually being able to revisit it. A regular photo freezes one view. A video gives you a moving perspective. But what if you could capture an entire room, studio, exhibition, or favorite travel spot and later move around inside it from different angles?

Drone delivery has spent years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What happens when you want to move from a handful of pilot programs to thousands of deliveries every day? Matternet thinks the answer starts with taking people out of the loop.

Elroy Air is getting a much bigger financial runway as it prepares to turn its autonomous cargo drone into a production aircraft. The California-based company has expanded its previously announced private investment in public equity (PIPE) commitments to $175 million, with existing backers including Lockheed Martin Ventures and Inflection Point participating. So far, $75 million of that funding has been provided ahead of Elroy Air’s planned business combination with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. VII.

A drone can capture an entire crash scene or a packed event in seconds. Now, AI is getting better at telling crews what they’re looking at. SkyeBrowse has rolled out two new AI-powered workflows: Crush Analysis and Claims, designed for vehicle crash investigations and insurance work, and Crowd Counter, which can estimate the number of people visible in an aerial image. The latter is now available directly through the DJI RC Pro for enterprise drone operations.

Drone delivery has gotten pretty good at the flying part. The harder problem has often been getting a freshly prepared meal from the restaurant to the drone quickly enough. Flytrex is now trying to solve that bottleneck by putting the drones at the restaurant before the order comes in.

Skydio is making a pretty dramatic statement about where it thinks the drone industry is headed: not toward another pocket-sized camera drone, but toward fleets of autonomous flying machines that can respond to emergencies, inspect infrastructure, and patrol large properties with very little human intervention.