If Silicon Valley-based drone start-up Sifly was planning to challenge DJI’s hegemony on the North American civilian drone market, they have chosen to come out of the closet at a perfect time.

Because reports coming out of several media in the US say president Donald Trump’s administration is allegedly planning several executive orders that could ban Chinese companies like DJI and Autel from selling drones in the US.

The orders could be signed as soon as this week, according to The Washington Post.

They will not include a flat-out ban, as the reports say, but the US intelligence community would be directed to accelerate existing reviews of whether Chinese drone makers pose national security risks.

In addition, the orders would reportedly require the federal government to invest in the US domestic drone industry, while also updating federal regulations about where commercial drones can legally fly.

The US has its own domestic drone manufacturers, Skydio, but while DJI doesn’t reveal sales figures publicly, its sales likely far exceed Skydio, according to estimates.

In a statement, DJI said it does not currently have any information about potential executive orders, but adds that, “DJI welcomes and embraces any opportunities to demonstrate our privacy controls and security features.”

The loss of DJI products will no doubt be felt among the end users, whose pleas to continue having access to drones from China have so far fallen on deaf ears.

As we write, drone users in the US have no direct access to the new DJI Mavic 4 Pro, because the manufacturer has chosen not to launch the drone in the US – partly because of the ongoing trade war, and partly because DJI’s existence in the US market looks to be on borrowed life.

And it is this confusion that SiFly wants to take advantage of, having introduced itself to the world by unveiling a fleet of drone platforms early last month.

The company says its drones are engineered to break through the endurance and range limits that currently constrain the $35billion industrial drone market.

SiFly’s all-electric, autonomous drones deliver over four times the flight duration and ten times the range of typical commercial drones — reportedly at a price point competitive with leading Chinese-made models.

SiFly claims on of its products, the Q12 drone, is capable of achieves four times greater endurance, ten times greater range, ten times quieter noise profile, and five times greater payload capacity than what the market currently offers.

The Q12 – which is scheduled to be launched in the fourth quarter of this year – offers two-hour continuous hover and up to three hours in forward flight, enabling a 90-mile operational range with the ability to carry up to 10-pounds of payload.

This breakthrough unlocks new operational possibilities for Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) drone missions that were previously out of reach, the company says.

“Commercial drones have long forced organizations to compromise between flight duration, payload capacity, and operational range,” said Brian Hinman, Founder and CEO of SiFly. “We eliminated those trade-offs. SiFly drones are transforming emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and logistics—delivering helicopter-class performance at drone economics.”

SiFly is also looking to disrupt the mid-range cargo drone market, with the introduction of the Q250, a heavy-lift drone capable of transporting 200-pound payloads with 100-minute endurance.

“Validated through thousands of successful flights, SiFly’s technology has already proven its capabilities in real-world operations, including deployments with Amaral Ranches in California’s Salinas Valley,” SiFly said in a statement.

“These partnerships demonstrate the Q12’s ability to deliver large-scale, real-time insights through onboard AI algorithms and cloud-connected data streams.”

SiFly’s innovations also create a new operational paradigm for Drone-as-First-Responder (DFR) programs.

Unlike traditional systems that require costly, complex networks of drone docks to compensate for short flight times, SiFly’s long-endurance platforms provide persistent aerial coverage—reducing operational costs by over 90 percent per square mile.

SiFly is currently flying and demonstrating its technology for public and private sector organizations across the United States and will announce multiple strategic industry partnerships in the coming months.

Founded in 2021, SiFly is led by serial entrepreneur Brian Hinman, known for scaling successful technology companies including Polycom, PictureTel, 2Wire, and Mimosa, with millions of units shipped globally. 

Logan Jones, Chief Business Officer, adds nearly two decades of aviation leadership experience, including founding and leading Boeing’s HorizonX venture capital group.

“We’ve been talking to people in agriculture, public safety, you name the market segment, and what is clear is that they really want a helicopter… but with the usability and economics of a drone,” Logan Jones recently told AgFunder News.

And this I something that Jones is confident his company will deliver on.

When it comes to ag spray drones, a market currently dominated by Chinese supplier DJI, the major barriers to adoption are cost and productivity, says Jones, who spent thirteen years at Boeing.

“The more time you’re in the air, the more productive you are,” he says.

“It’s a dollars and cents game. You can have the nicest, most whiz-bang piece of technology, but if it’s more expensive, you’re going to lose.”

According to Jones, “There are a couple benefits of our configuration that play out very strongly within agriculture.

“First, customers want removable batteries that last because they are the number one driver of cost.

“Second, we fly at roughly twice the speed of other systems. So we’re more productive, and we can cover more ground.”

Meanwhile, SiFly’s boom design, which deploys hydraulic nozzles and laminar flow rather than rotary atomisers, enables a higher degree of precision while spraying, he claims.

In simple terms, says Jones, if you match the speed that you’re pushing crop inputs out from the boom with the forward air speed, “you don’t get a bunch of drift.”

He adds: “That quality of laydown and the ability to vary it, is going to be a game changer in agriculture. We really view our competition as helicopters or ground rigs.”

But two core principles underscore the company’s drone models, Jones adds.

“The first is around how you manage energy. If you look at nearly every other multi-rotor [drone] out there, when they take off, 30-35 percent of their weight is their battery.

Ideally, that percentage is 66 percent, and we’re about 60-62 percent, which means we have twice the available energy on every flight to convert to endurance.

“We’re very efficient in how we produce lift. We have a low disc loading design [whereby the drone’s weight is spread over a big propeller area], which means we can use really energy dense cells (that hold a lot of energy for their size) rather than high power cells.

“And that has the benefit of really long life and a really favorable cost structure.”

The second core principle is around forward flight, where the key metric is the lift-over-drag (L-over-D) ratio, he says. This measures how much upward force (lift) an aircraft gets compared to the air resistance (drag) it faces. The higher the number, the more efficient the aircraft.

“If you look at helicopters,” says Jones, “they’re around 4, or 4.5 L over D. Whereas multi-rotors (drones) are 1.2, or 1.5, which is really bad.

“What we’ve done is bring that L over D much closer to what a helicopter would be, so somewhere around 4. So that’s by looking at things like the struts that go from the body to the motors, airfoils (propeller blades) that cut through the air really nicely, and offsetting rotors, so the drone’s natural position is to fly forward.

“We also have flatter blades like a helicopter. It’s about adding layers and layers of optimisation.”

Finally, he says, SiFly has patents around technology that it can “scale up into much larger systems that rival light helicopters. That is a very nice spot for the agriculture market.”

He explains: “The way that multi rotors produce lift today is through something called RPM (rotations per minute) control, whereby each independent rotor speeds up or slows down almost instantly to produce stability and to produce lift.”

If a drone is very light, he says, achieving lift via RPM control is not that difficult. But if you have to lift something much heavier, “there’s inertia and momentum.”

To counter this, SiFly has patented something called torque rotor design that changes the pitch of the blade based on how much twisting force it needs to produce instant lift rather than using fixed-pitch blades that control lift by changing rotor speed (RPM).

From a cost standpoint, he says, “We haven’t set pricing (for the Q250 model) yet, but we aim to be somewhere between the top end of the DJI market and what you see from the other Western suppliers, so we’d be talking about below $100k probably.”

For the Q250, the company expects to have a flying prototype next year.