Skyeton, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Ukrainian long-endurance UAS manufacturer Skyeton Holdings, will open its first flagship U.S. manufacturing facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Gov. Josh Stein announced July 27. The company will invest more than $3.1 million to convert a 28,500-square-foot former Black+Decker plant near Fayetteville Regional Airport into a production site for its composite UAS, creating 162 jobs.
Skyeton, headquartered in Las Vegas as Skyeton Holdings’ U.S. arm, builds the Raybird family of long-endurance fixed-wing platforms, which have logged more than 350,000 combat flight hours in ISR missions. Fayetteville was selected over competing sites the company had been evaluating in Nevada and Oklahoma, both of which remain part of its stated expansion plans.
Skyeton CEO Rigoberto “Quito” Sáez said the move is about “strengthening America’s defense industrial base, creating high-quality American jobs,” and credited state and local partners along with the company’s mission partners from the Department of Defense for supporting the expansion. Stein said the state was “proud to welcome Skyeton to a state with such a proud military tradition.”
A $500,000 performance-based grant from the One North Carolina Fund is backing the project, contingent on Skyeton meeting job-creation and investment targets, and matched by roughly $243,000 in combined incentives from Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
Part of a broader onshoring push
Skyeton’s Fayetteville plant is the latest in a string of Ukrainian UAS manufacturers standing up U.S. production. In June, Ukrainian Defense Drones — the U.S. arm of Ukrainian FPV manufacturer F-Drones — announced an $18.4 million facility in Holland, Ohio, expected to create at least 300 jobs after F-Drones became the first Ukrainian manufacturer authorized by Kyiv to export military drone systems to the United States. That project followed a Pentagon prototype contract for 2,000 FPV drones awarded through the Department of Defense’s $1 billion Drone Dominance program, which aims to procure more than 200,000 low-cost drones by 2027.
According to U2D2, a U.S. initiative supporting drone manufacturers, more than a dozen Ukrainian and Eastern European companies participating in Drone Dominance now collectively produce over 10,000 drones per day. The push toward domestic production comes as Ukraine and the U.S. work through a broader framework agreement on unmanned systems cooperation, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Trump scheduled to meet to continue those talks. Ukraine has separately struck production arrangements with the UK and Denmark as it looks to convert its wartime manufacturing base — which the country’s officials say has grown from roughly $1 billion to more than $50 billion since 2022 — into export capacity.
