Overview
- Divergent Technologies and Mach Industries announced on Feb. 17 that Venom, an autonomous strike prototype, progressed from concept to first flight in 71 days.
- Defense leaders publicly tied the effort to rapid acquisition priorities and the SECWAR’s ‘Drone Dominance’ vision through OUSW(R&E) and ODASW(P&E) sponsorship.
- Divergent used its Adaptive Production System to 3D print large monolithic airframe structures—wings, fuselage sections, skins, and control surfaces—reducing part count and tooling.
- Mach led the system architecture with a modular open-systems approach, reusing flight-proven avionics and simulation to enable parallel hardware–software development.
- The partners tout plans to scale to mass production and note a recent Mach production contract, but they have not disclosed range, payload, autonomy, or unit cost details.