Interview on 3/30/26 with the CEO of Unusual Machines (UMAC), Dr. Allan Thomas Evans, PhD

White Diamond Research (WDR): You did a pretty big raise overall, $150M, what are you going to use that money for?

Dr. Evans: We’ll invest, it’s all for scale and capital. Because we’re scaling so fast, I have to order $70M in parts in 2 weeks. We just need a huge working capital stake, bigger than we had before. We don’t lose money. We just cap-ex scale, working capital faster. We need about a years worth of forward looking revenue to do it. We didn’t need the money today but we needed it by the end of the year. So we saw an opportunity to take it and put ourselves in a position to keep scaling faster.

WDR: And your going to put the money in like a 4% return money market fund?

Evans: Yeah, that’s what we do with the other cash for the liquid perspective.

WDR: OK, your not gonna buy ETH or anything?

Evans: Oh no no, that’s too complicated. I think that would water down what we look like from an investor perspective.

WDR: OK, compared to if we didn’t attack Iran, how much more revenue would the Iran war give the company?

Evans: We’re running max rate. We don’t have any of our parts in stock. We are scaling as fast as we can. War in Ukraine, war in Iran, starting or stopping won’t have a positive or negative effect on our revenue for the next 18 months because we’re scaling as fast as possible.

WDR: But aren’t your customers going to make more drones because of the Iran war?

Evans: What I’m saying is, we are selling as many parts as humanly possible. Just the drone dominance program and some of the other programs swallow all of the shit we can possibly make as we scale as fast as possible. We’re not demand limited, we’re supply limited. So you can assume infinite demand for the next 18 months as we scale as fast as we can.

WDR: But with the extra money you got, you can buy more parts than you could before, right?

Evans: None of this is instantaneous. We raised the money so we could scale faster, but you can only spend the money so fast.

WDR: I’m having hard time understand “infinite demand”, so your saying you can’t get more customers now because your already at capacity?

Evans: Yes. And we’re scaling capacity as fast as we possibly can.

WDR: Wow. Wow!

Evans: Yes, I’m expecting functionally infinite demand for the next 18 months.

WDR: Can I quote you on that in a tweet?

Evans: sure, no problem. If you just look at Drone Dominance, they need 250K drones for just that program, in just 2027. That’s 1M motors. That’s 250K cameras. That’s 500K battery packs.

WDR: Even if there’s a recession, it wouldn’t slow you down?

Evans: No.

WDR: And what percentage of your parts go to the military?

Evans: Our parts go to drone manufacturers that sell to the military. So about 80-90%. But again, that one program (Drone Dominance) which isn’t supplying Iran or anywhere else, and is already fully funded, we have to scale as fast as possible just to service that single program and there’s way more programs than that, there’s counter drones that use our products, there’s other programs like PBAS, there’s a ton of other demand. The demand from that one program is a $250M revenue potential in 2027. We’re just scaling as fast as we humanly can.

WDR: Are you increasing space in your factory?

Evans: We keep adding space. We have 70,000 sq ft now, I expect we’ll be 100,000 sq ft by the end of Q2, bigger by the end of Q4. We keep getting new buildings and adding new stuff to each of those buildings as fast as we can go.

WDR: You keep renting new buildings?

Evans: yes, all in the same area.

WDR: How many buildings do you have right now?

Evans: 5 in Orlando.

WDR. Interesting. That’s good to know. Someone could just fully invest in your company and do extremely well. What if I said I want to put all my money in Unusual Machines?

Evans: Yes. It’s a hedge on the drone industry, half the companies in Drone Dominance are customers of ours. We don’t lose now.

WDR: Well, you do lose money, you aren’t profitable yet.

Evans: We aren’t profitable but if you look our cash burn is real low. All our losses are equity comp. It’s not cash loss. So we aren’t going to cash zero. From a GAAP perspective we lose money but we don’t burn cash.

WDR: And everything we’re talking about now I can publish? It’s all public info?

Evans: Yeah, it’s all public info. And you’ll see more jobs posted on our site. We keep hiring, we keep scaling. That’s why I’m kinda shocked I’m like “ok we’re way down.” We’ve raised $230M above the current share price.

WDR: And I didn’t see other drone companies doing raises. So you had good timing because if you didn’t do that raise at $17 per share, your stock price would probably be down here anyways right now if you didn’t do the raise. So it’s a good thing you did it.

Evans: Yeah, it would be. And we brought in a lot of long term, significant holders. We’re rolling our retail base into an institutional investor base. That’s part of setting up for the long term. I’m really not worried about it, yeah the stock is down but the company is, like we’re firing on all cylinders. We’re scaling as fast as possible and we just can’t keep anything in stock.

WDR: Do you think you might put a pause on the stock comp and just give cash to employees for now?

Evans: We might be but it’s a pain in the ass to change it due to SEC rules.

Evans: I’m super optimistic. Everything is going great. And it’s just going faster than we were going before, because it’s going faster than I expected.

WDR: It’s crazy how volatile your stock is. I’ve been watching it over the past 6 months, and it goes up and down 50% within a week. I mean it could go back to $15 next week.

Evans: yeah I don’t understand why it’s so volatile. But at the same time we’ve done a good job of working within that volatility to allow people to make money.

WDR: I guess the reason why I think it’s so volatile is drones are still a fairly new technology. And people are unsure about the growth rate of the industry.

Evans: Agreed. And so you see a lot of swings based on what vibes people have at any given time. And that’s fine and it’s in a growth segment. When you have a downturn, people exit in mass. But what people don’t realize is we’re going to be on the Russell 2000 too. We’ve never been there before so we’re going to see institutional accumulation. Just from the Russell Rebalancing.

Evans: When the stock was at $23, I was in an open trading window for a million and a half shares. I didn’t sell any. I could’ve sold equity. In fact I cancelled my 10b5-1. I didn’t even sell shares to pay taxes when we were at $20 per share.

The discounted cash flow analysis says the stock is worth $30 per share.

We were in an open window, I cancelled my 10b5-1, and you saw the other 10b5-1 filings hit. And I had 1.5M shares, a lot of them unlocked, I didn’t sell a single share. Instead I wanted to raise money because I saw it going faster. If I was worried at all, wouldn’t I have cleared generational wealth? I would’ve made $20M by just selling a chunk of my position, because we had the liquidity that would’ve supported it. That’s the choice I made.

So you can see all that and assume he has reasonable confidence. And I do, I feel really good about what we’re doing, we’re in a very good spot.

WDR: Do you feel good about other drone companies too or you just don’t know enough about the other drone companies? Like RCAT.

Evans: I don’t know enough about their specific dynamics.

WDR: XTIA came back down below $2.

Evans: I think they are wildly undervalued. I don’t know why they go up or down but I think they are in a really good position. They are a great company. I think they’ll report soon. And I think their filings and some of their consistency will show people what they really are. Once earnings come out, people will know what it looks like and what the merger looks like.

WDR: What are you able to do now after doing the raise that you couldn’t do before?

Evans: As an example, for Drone Dominance, in a few weeks we have a $70M order for raw materials. That keeps stacking up as we keep scaling. So that allows us to maintain credit terms and material flow. So this cycle we could’ve afforded but next cycle it will double again so we’ll get a $150M order in September or October. So this let’s us not get jammed up.

Evans: The stock is one thing, and I can appreciate it. But the business is another thing and the business is doing great.