Michael
Norcia

Skip the Moonshot. Build the Thing That Works.

In a hangar that once sheltered US Navy blimps - 110,000 square feet of corrugated steel at the old Alameda Naval Air Station - Michael Norcia runs the only company that has ever received FAA certification for a fully autonomous commercial electric aircraft. Not a prototype. Not a demo. A product that spays crops for Dole, operates in four countries, and just received a firm order for sixty planes.

Norcia graduated from UC Davis in 2014 with a degree in Applied Physics. He had been obsessed with remote-controlled airplanes since adolescence - the kind of obsession that gets you laughed out of career counseling but funded by Y Combinator. At Davis, he played ultimate frisbee and lived in communal housing on 2nd Street. He and friends bought an old school bus and retrofitted it into a traveling home. None of this predicted that he would eventually be handing autonomous aircraft to the United States Air Force.

Between UC Davis and founding Pyka, Norcia worked at Zee Aero (the secretive Google-backed flying-car lab), then Joby Aviation, then Kittyhawk and Cora - leading firmware development and power systems engineering on electric VTOL aircraft. He watched the VTOL space closely. He drew a conclusion that made him unusual in early-2017 Silicon Valley: the race to build an autonomous electric air taxi was the wrong race.

In 2017, Norcia co-founded Pyka and joined Y Combinator's Summer batch - the S17 cohort that also produced Brex, Monzo, and a collection of software unicorns. Pyka was something different in that crowd: a hardware company building actual aircraft, targeting the $20 billion annual aerial application market, where farmers spray pesticides and fertilizers from manned aircraft that require a licensed pilot, a full airstrip, and the attendant risk of a human body inside a crop duster navigating low-altitude obstacles.

The insight was almost brutally simple. Autonomous flight was technically possible. The FAA certification path for unmanned aircraft, while complex, was navigable. And the agricultural market had a pain point - labor, cost, risk - that a sufficiently capable autonomous aircraft could eliminate without needing passengers or urban airspace. Norcia decided to go there instead of chasing taxis.

The Pelican Spray, Pyka's flagship agricultural aircraft, weighs 1,125 pounds fully loaded. It carries 540 pounds of spray liquid and covers up to 240 acres per hour. It takes off in 150 feet - roughly half a football field. It has no pilot seat. When the FAA authorized it for nationwide commercial crop-dusting in 2023, it became the largest commercially-approved unmanned aircraft system in the United States. The certification took years. Most competitors gave up.

In February 2025, Pyka unveiled the Pelican 2 - an expanded model with a 300-liter payload, FAA authorization already in hand, a work rate of up to 90 hectares per hour, and a starting price of $550,000. The International Agri-Center named it one of the year's top 10 new agricultural products. Major customers now include Dole, SLC Agrícola (one of Brazil's largest agricultural producers), Heinen Brothers Agra Services (North America's largest aerial application provider), and Skyports Drone Services.

The pragmatism extends to platform design. Pyka's Pelican Cargo - the freight version of the aircraft - shares 80 percent design commonality with the Pelican Spray. Norcia built a platform, not just a product. The same airframe logic that lets automobile manufacturers build a sedan and an SUV on a shared chassis applies here: most of the engineering investment compounds across variants.

Then Ukraine changed the conversation. Norcia described the before-and-after candidly: in the old days, investors and potential defense customers dismissed fixed-wing unmanned aircraft because they couldn't hover. After the 2022 invasion demonstrated what long-range autonomous fixed-wing platforms could do in a real conflict, Pyka's phone started ringing differently. The US Air Force enrolled Pyka in its Agility Prime program; Pyka delivered three aircraft. In October 2025, Norcia unveiled DropShip - a hybrid-electric defense UAV platform built in partnership with Sierra Nevada Corporation, configured for precision airdrop, ISR sensors, communications suites, and mothership support. Inaugural flight is scheduled for early 2026.

"Things don't need to have perfect functionality and perfect features," Norcia said. "They need to exist and be easy to modify." It's a line that sounds like common sense until you see how rare it is in aerospace.

Pyka's Series B - $40 million, closed in September 2024, led by Obvious Ventures with participation from Piva Capital, Prelude Ventures, Metaplanet Holdings, and Y Combinator - brought total funding to $95.43 million. The stated goal is scaling manufacturing. The 110,000-square-foot Alameda hangar, secured in early 2024, is the foundation. With 120 employees and a firm order for 60 aircraft from Synerjet, the question is no longer whether Pyka's approach works. It's how fast the factory can build them.