Exark: Heavy-Lift Drones for Defense Logistics and the DARPA LIFT Challenge

By Akshay Akula · October 10, 2026 · About Exark Industries

Exark started as a hackathon project and won 1st place at the 2025 DC National Security Hackathon. The idea: a heavy-lift VTOL drone with AI flight control, a modular airframe, and an optimized 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) pipeline for perception and simulation. It has since become Exark Industries, which builds heavy-lift platforms for defense and military logistics in the United States.

The problem: moving heavy things where trucks and runways can't go

Forward positions, disaster zones and remote terrain often have no roads or runways, and contested airspace makes crewed aircraft risky. Exark's platforms are built for that work:

• Contested logistics and resupply: deliver critical supplies to forward positions, with autonomous navigation in denied airspace.
• Austere payload movement: move heavy equipment across remote terrain without infrastructure.
• Rapid reconfiguration: swap mission modules in the field as requirements change.

Design principles

The platforms aim for an industry-leading weight-to-payload ratio. AI-powered control software allows a simpler airframe with fewer moving parts, and the systems fold down so they can be deployed from storage without manual assembly.

The DARPA LIFT Challenge

Exark competes in DARPA's LIFT Challenge, which pushes heavy vertical-lift aviation toward drones that carry more than four times their own weight. That target shapes every part of the design, from the airframe to the control loop.

Swarms and Gaussian splatting

The same perception work fed a related project, enel (edge-network environment lattice), which turns a drone swarm into a rapid 3D Gaussian splatting digital-twin system for mission planning, simulation and critical operations. We presented the swarm in Washington, DC.

Exark is part of NVIDIA Inception and works with government buyers as a Carahsoft partner through Vonar.ai.