EP 122 — AEVEX's Manan Patel On The Modular Drone Strategy That Won Army Launched Effects-Short Range (LE-SR)

Manan Patel deployed to Iraq as a civilian engineer and mission commander on airborne ISR platforms, then left the government lab with no business plan to start Special Operations Solutions. A decade later, private equity merged his company with two others to form AEVEX, which went public on the NYSE and has delivered over 6,000 autonomous platforms.

As CTO, Manan explains how AEVEX's CompassCore hardware-software stack runs across every platform size and domain, enabling mass production by design. He breaks down ForgeX, a 3D printing capability that lets operators build and fly drones in the field without AEVEX personnel.

Topics discussed:

- Deploying to Iraq as a civilian engineer on ISR platforms

- Founding Special Operations Solutions and scaling to PE acquisition

- Designing Atlas for the Army's launched effect short range program

- Building CompassCore as a common stack across all platforms

- Operating autonomous UAS in GPS denied and comms degraded environments

- Forward-deployable drone manufacturing with ForgeX

- Separating kinetic and surveillance payloads with modular nose cones

- Scaling from prototype to full rate production

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