The race to build more capable American-made drones just got another major boost. California-based SiFly Aviation has raised $20 million in Series A funding, giving the company fresh capital to ramp up production of its long-endurance Q12 electric aircraft and continue developing its DronePort autonomous drone infrastructure system.
The funding round was led by Shield Capital, with participation from Qudit, BBK Capital, Alumni Ventures, and several other investors.
For drone operators, the biggest takeaway isn’t just the funding; it’s what SiFly claims its aircraft can do. The company says the Q12 flies four to five times longer and up to 10 times farther than today’s leading enterprise multirotor drones, all while carrying payloads of up to 10 pounds. If those numbers hold up in real-world deployments, operators could cover larger areas with fewer launches, fewer batteries, and fewer aircraft.
SiFly says those claims aren’t just theoretical. The company has completed thousands of test flights and accumulated hundreds of flight hours while validating the platform. One of those flights even earned a Guinness World Record after the Q12 stayed airborne for 3 hours, 11 minutes, and 54 seconds, setting the mark for the longest flight by an electric multirotor aircraft in its weight class.
According to founder and CEO Brian Hinman, the Q12 was designed to bridge the gap between traditional drones and fixed-wing aircraft. “Most multirotor drones were designed for short flights close to the operator,” Hinman says. “We built the Q12 to combine the agility, precision hover and vertical takeoff and landing of a multirotor drone with the efficiency, range and speed of a fixed wing aircraft.”
The new funding will help SiFly expand manufacturing in the United States, strengthen its supply chain, fulfill its growing order backlog, and begin delivering aircraft to customers.
The company is targeting industries where longer flight times can significantly reduce operating costs. Public safety agencies could use the Q12 for wider-area emergency response and longer overwatch missions. Utility companies and infrastructure operators could inspect more miles of power lines or pipelines in a single flight, while agricultural users could survey more acres without constantly swapping batteries or repositioning crews.
SiFly also sees its DronePort system playing a key role in future autonomous operations. Designed to support fleets of drones, the infrastructure could enable more advanced Drone-as-First-Responder (DFR) deployments, allowing aircraft to launch automatically and respond to incidents much faster than traditional manual operations.
Shield Capital partner Ray Rothrock believes endurance is becoming one of the industry’s most important competitive advantages. “For drone operators, greater endurance translates into faster response, broader coverage and lower cost per mission,” Rothrock says, adding that SiFly could reshape how drones are used across public safety, infrastructure inspection, and agriculture.
The announcement also comes as demand continues to grow for US-designed and US-manufactured drones, driven by geopolitical tensions and ongoing supply-chain concerns. Government agencies and commercial operators have increasingly looked for domestic alternatives that can compete with established global manufacturers on both performance and price.
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