Founded to advise on something no one was advising on.
Fabius Group was founded in 2026 at the epicenter of the effort to build out the drone industrial base in the United States.
The gap we were formed to close
We recognized that no single entity was properly serving or advising all of the parties involved in that build-out. Drone startups. Airports. State governments. County governments. The federal government. Real estate brokers. Investment bankers.
Each of those parties has its own advisors, and each set of advisors is good at its own half of the problem. What none of them has is a mandate that runs the length of the deal. The aviation consultant does not underwrite the tenant. The investment banker does not read grant assurances. The site selector does not know what a pilot-optional platform needs from an airfield. The economic development office cannot tell a real aerospace company from a well-funded one.
The result is predictable. Projects that should take nine months take twenty-seven. Airports sign letters of intent with tenants who cannot finance the building. States commit incentives against production volumes nobody stress-tested. Deals die quietly in the space between two competent advisors, and everyone involved concludes the other side was not serious.
Why this is genuinely new
Industrial site selection is an old profession. So is airport consulting, so is defense advisory, so is real estate capital markets. What is new is the specific problem: a national push to stand up drone and autonomous-systems manufacturing at speed, on airport land, financed against a federal demand signal that is real but not yet contractual.
That combination did not exist five years ago, and the advisory market has not caught up to it. Fabius Group was formed specifically to work on it — not as an extension of an aviation practice or a real estate practice, but as the whole practice.
How an engagement runs
Four phases. We are engaged by the party that owns the outcome — usually the airport or the authority — and we hold the deal from feasibility through close.
Technical and site feasibility
Can this platform actually operate here? Runway, airspace, test corridors, hangar geometry, power, RF environment, land-use compatibility. We answer this before anyone signs anything, because it is the question that most often should have killed the deal.
Structure and compliance
What can the airport lawfully sign? Grant assurances, rates and charges, through-the-fence arrangements, ground lease versus build-to-suit, and who carries entitlement, construction and residual-value risk.
Incentives and approvals
State incentives, county entitlement and permitting, workforce programs and site-readiness funding — sequenced so that one approval does not invalidate the terms of another.
Capital and close
How the building gets paid for, and whether the tenant survives the lease term. PropCo/OpCo structures, ground-lease financing, bonds, venture debt and equipment finance, underwritten against an honest read of the demand signal.
Where we sit
We work for one side of the table at a time. In most engagements that is the airport, the authority or the economic development agency — the party that owns the land, carries the compliance obligation and lives with the outcome for thirty years.
Knowing how the other six parties think is not a conflict. It is the service. An airport that understands what a drone manufacturer actually needs, what a lender will actually underwrite and what a county will actually approve negotiates from a different position than one that does not.
Bring us the deal that is stuck.
Most of our conversations start with a project that has been sitting at the same stage for six months. That is usually a solvable problem.
Contact Fabius Group