Exclusive: Poseidon snags $11 million to build unmanned cargo aircraft

Driving the news: Egret and Heron are both mid-build. Flight testing is expected in 2026.

• Both are about 50 feet across and designed to carry up to 2 tons of whatever: food, medical supplies, ammunition, missiles.
• Egret, specifically, is meant for short takeoffs and landings on runways. Heron, on the other hand, is a seaplane. (Both are applicable in the Indo-Pacific.)
• "We're in an absolute sprint to deliver these capabilities and get them in the water and in the air as quickly as possible," Zagaynov said. "Anything that fits we will fly."

State of play: Poseidon is almost 2 years old and employs 18 people, including Amazon, L3Harris Technologies and Lockheed Martin alumni.

• The company is headquartered in California, where it does — for now — most of its manufacturing. Its other facilities are in Washington and Maine.

Follow the money: Tamarack Global led the seed round. Other backers include Drover Ventures, Draper Associates and Starship Ventures.

• "Air cargo is fundamentally a legacy industry where little has changed over decades," Jamie Lee, a managing partner at Tamarack, told Axios.
• "Poseidon is one of the few teams with the ambition to rethink it from the ground up and the execution ability to make unmanned air freight practical in the near term and the status quo in the long term."

What we're watching: If and when the robo-logistics conversation overtakes first-person-view-drone mania.

Go deeper: U.S. military gets "smart" on warehouses