Global Director of Strategic Communication & Partnerships
Holger has helped shape how businesses and IP professionals understand and leverage patent data for strategic advantage. He has held key marketing leadership roles at LexisNexis and PatentSight, where he has built and led global branding, product marketing, communication, and partnership programs. Before entering the IP domain, Holger spent many years as a leading consultant and Managing Director at a subsidiary of the world-renowned advertising agency network BBDO.
A decade ago, flying drones was mostly a hobbyist’s toy. Today, they inspect power lines, spray crops, deliver packages, patrol borders, and film feature films. As drones enter commercial deployment, patent records show exactly when that shift began and who is positioned to lead the next stage. To find out, we used our LexisNexis® PatentSight+™ platform to analyze the drone-related patent assets of both established players and privately held companies and to rank the 10 start-ups whose intellectual property positions them as future industry leaders or acquisition targets.
The stakes for patent leadership in the drone space are high. Teal Group estimates the civil unmanned aerial systems (UAS) market will be worth $150 billion between 2023 and 2032, with a parallel military UAS market worth another $187 billion over the same period.
The results of our analysis point to a much more open competitive field than the consumer drone market itself would suggest. One company built an early and commanding patent filing lead, but rising competition has eroded it. The country that now files the most drone patents is not the one with the strongest patent portfolios, on a quality-adjusted basis. And the start-ups best positioned to shape the next decade are working on problems well outside aerial photography, from fruit picking to forestry to secure package delivery.
Here are some key findings from the analysis:
Global drone-related patent portfolios stayed below 1,000 in every publication year through 2015. From then until 2025, that total passed 7,500, and the growth was not gradual. It accelerated sharply around 2014 and 2015, then held at a much higher level.
Several developments explain the timing of this accelerated innovation. Initially, smartphone-driven component costs made flight hardware dramatically cheaper to build. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration issued its first commercial drone exemptions in September 2014 under Section 333, then replaced that case-by-case process with the broader Part 107 rule in August 2016. In China, Shenzhen’s manufacturing base enabled hardware companies to move quickly from prototype to mass production, and the Made in China 2025 plan designated drones as a strategic technology and backed the sector with research funding and tax incentives.
The number of companies holding drone-related patents tells a similar story: a market that has broadened well beyond its early leaders. Corporate patent holders grew from roughly 1,100 in 2016 to nearly 9,700 by 2026, a nearly ninefold increase in less than a decade.
Figure 1: U.S. vs China, comparing the share of global patent volume in drone-related technologies.
Raw patent counts indicate how many patents a company is filing. They say nothing about whether those patents are worth defending. The Patent Asset Index methodology closes that gap by combining portfolio size with the measured strength of each individual patent family, using the following components:
The Patent Asset Index is the aggregate Competitive Impact across an entire portfolio.
For much of the 2010s, the industry-wide Patent Asset Index rose faster than portfolio size, and by 2018, the quality-adjusted curve stood at roughly twice the level of the industry’s portfolio-size curve. By 2026, the two had nearly converged, a sign that the technology field had matured and attracted a much larger population of fast-following competitors.
Figure 2: U.S. vs China, comparing the share of global patent quality in drone-related technologies.
That one company is DJI Innovations. At the end of 2018, DJI alone accounted for roughly 24 percent of the entire drone industry’s Patent Asset Index, more than the combined share of the other nine companies in the top ten, even though its share of raw portfolio size was only about 5 percent. Its aggregate patent strength, in other words, was wildly disproportionate to its patent portfolio size.
That position has since declined drastically. In 2026, DJI holds about 4 percent of the industry Patent Asset Index, roughly level with Boeing and barely ahead of Amazon and Alphabet. DJI’s own portfolio metrics show a sharp peak from 2019 to 2021, followed by a steep decline: Patent Asset Index fell by more than two-thirds, and its active portfolio shrank by roughly half. Annual filings, which once numbered in the hundreds, fell 99 percent from their peak to just three in 2024.
The filing-jurisdiction view adds context. Through 2018, DJI filed broadly in China, the U.S., and through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). U.S. and international segments contracted first, followed by a sharp decline in Chinese activity after 2021. Since patent applications typically publish about 18 months after filing, the visible publication pattern lags the underlying change in filing.
Figure 3: DJI Innovations portfolio size trend by publication year and filing jurisdiction.
The patent data does not establish why DJI’s filing activity declined. Possible contributing factors discussed in the market include tightening US government restrictions on drone imports, deliberate portfolio pruning to protect only the strongest defensive patents, and a possible strategic shift toward protecting certain technology as trade secrets rather than through patents. Whatever the mix of reasons, the effect on the competitive landscape is clear: a field that one company’s patents once dominated by strength, not just by product sales, is now wide open.
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In a world where DJI Innovations is no longer the leader, who will be next? To find the private companies best positioned to shape the field going forward, we applied a deliberately strict set of eligibility rules for this analysis. A company was qualified to be featured only if it was:
So what was out of scope? Companies building passenger electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft were excluded, as were governments, government-controlled entities, patent aggregators and academic institutions. The age requirement also excluded several well-known but longer-established drone companies, including DJI Innovations, Guangzhou XAG, Yuneec and Ishikawa Energy, none of which were founded within the qualifying window.
The remaining companies were ranked by their portfolio’s Patent Asset Index. Among the top ten companies that were identified, four are based in the United States, two in China, and one each in Japan, Israel, Switzerland and Sweden, a spread that suggests drone innovation is not concentrated in any single regional ecosystem.
Ranked by Strength of Related Patent Assets
Source: LexisNexis® PatentSight+™
Autel Robotics tops the ranking with a portfolio spanning multi-rotor and electric vertical takeoff and landing platforms, along with flight control, communications, networking, gimbal stabilization, long-endurance performance, imaging and autonomous operation. It is one of the few companies in the ranking with meaningful patent activity across both multi-rotor and tilt-rotor aircraft designs.
Skydio builds autonomous drones for public safety, government, utility and enterprise customers, and its ranking reflects a substantial portfolio centered on autonomous flight and artificial intelligence. The analysis identifies it as the leading US-based drone manufacturer in the group.
Valqari holds the smallest portfolio among the ten ranked start-ups, yet stands out on Competitive Impact. Its patented hardware and software center on secure autonomous delivery, including a landing vault, protected payload handling, chain-of-custody controls, and software connecting the broader delivery ecosystem.
Aeronext operates an intellectual property and technology licensing model, while its sister company, NEXT DELIVERY, runs drone logistics services. That structure sets it apart in the ranking: its patented technology is central not just to aircraft design, but to how the business itself is organized.
Zero Zero Robotics focuses its patent activity on embedded artificial intelligence, machine vision and high-precision flight control. Its V-Coptr Falcon uses a distinctive V-shaped, dual-rotor propulsion system, a bicopter design the company presents as a way to extend flight time well beyond conventional consumer drones.
Anduril develops autonomous systems for defense applications, controlling product development from research through manufacturing to sale rather than relying on the traditional defense contractor model. Its presence in the ranking underscores how much drone innovation now sits entirely outside the consumer market.
Tevel applies flying autonomous robots to fruit harvesting. Its systems use computer vision to identify, grade and pick fruit, while its software records data such as quantity, weight, color, ripeness, size, time and location, tying its patent portfolio to a specific agricultural labor challenge.
Flyability designs drones for confined and hazardous industrial spaces. Its Elios line uses a protective cage, modular payloads and autonomous capabilities to collect data in environments such as energy infrastructure, wastewater systems and mines, reducing the need to send people into dangerous inspection sites.
Zipline designs, manufactures and operates automated delivery aircraft supporting medical and retail delivery, including in locations conventional logistics networks struggle to serve. The company describes its operation as a large automated delivery network built around robotics and autonomy.
AirForestry is the youngest company in the ranking. It is developing an autonomous, electric multi-drone system for forestry operations, and the analysis highlights its comparatively high Competitive Impact in the agriculture, forestry and inspection peer group despite a small portfolio.
The Technology Cluster view in PatentSight+ uses a sunburst chart, essentially a hierarchical pie chart with nested rings, showing how the entire drone-related patent portfolio breaks down by technology. This shows why “drones” cannot be treated as a single consumer product category. Transportation is the largest broad domain, covering airframes, multirotor and fixed-wing designs, fuselage components, propulsion systems, plant protection equipment, and drone stations for landing and charging. Information technologies cover flight control, radar, object detection, and image-based measurement. Electronics spans telecommunications, sensor components, and a distinct arms-and-defense cluster. Together, these clusters connect consumer aircraft to agriculture, logistics, automotive systems, industrial inspection, infrastructure, and defense.
Figure 4: Global drone-related patent portfolio grouped by technology cluster.
The breadth of these technologies is evident in the companies that hold these patents.
When we consider every drone-related patent owner, not just the private start-up population, the current top ten by Patent Asset Index are as follows:
Raw portfolio size produces a different order entirely. State Grid holds around 1,000 drone-related patent families, compared with 539 for DJI, underscoring again how volume and quality-adjusted strength can point to different leaders.
As new technology fields emerge, IP teams should revisit how they define and monitor them. Build patent landscapes around the technical capabilities that make the field possible, not only around familiar keywords or product labels. Use custom classifiers where the field is too complex, niche, or application-driven for standard classifications alone. Combine portfolio size with quality, concentration, and business relevance using patent analytics tools such as PatentSight+™. Our customers use these insights continuously, not just for one-off reports, but as part of everyday IP strategy, competitive intelligence, partnership evaluation, and innovation planning.
Learn how to leverage trusted patent data and our proven portfolio valuation metrics to benchmark portfolios, compare competitive positions, and identify emerging competitors. Explore LexisNexis® PatentSight+™.
