Enterprise drone big Crimson Cat is doubling down on its concentrate on making drones for the army. The Puerto Rico-based army tech firm, which owns notable enterprise and army drone corporations comparable to Teal Drones, this week introduced an funding in Firestorm.
Firestorm is a U.S.-based firm constructing a modular drone that can be 3D-printed and payload agnostic. Crimson Cat offered few particulars on the funds, except for that it’s “a materially important funding.”
The funding is more likely to propel Crimson Cat’s different subsidiaries ahead — notably Teal, which is most well-known for its Golden Eagle surveillance drone, and likewise lately launched what’s known as the Teal 2 drone.
“We consider that our Teal 2 drone and the Firestorm UAV might be an important mixture for the warfighter,” mentioned Crimson Cat CEO Jeff Thompson in a ready assertion.
The Teal 2 drone was designed particularly for nighttime operations and has a army focus at its forefront. In actual fact, Crimson Cat has already stuffed an order from U.S. Customs and Border Safety for 54 models of the Teal 2, and the corporate mentioned it has lately been visiting NATO nations to debate how Ukrainian forces may use the Teal 2 to counter Russian forces notably after darkish.
What’s Firestorm?
Firestorm markets itself as “a brand new class of fixed-wing UAS with 30-day product iterations, a dedication to open-system architectures, and an additive manufacturing strategy that permits them to scale manufacturing in an elastic method. ”
The drones have especially-long vary, and may also loiter for longer durations, making them extra environment friendly and cost-effective.
With the Crimson Cat funding, Firestorm will get a leg up in a myriad of how, together with gaining access to Crimson Cat’s manufacturing facility in Salt Lake Metropolis which might assist it ramp up manufacturing.
Crimson Cat’s pastime days are over
Crimson Cat at one level owned a variety of drone corporations together with well-known names like Fats Shark, which is probably greatest identified for its function making FPV goggles for drone racing (although it additionally makes different merchandise like an all-in-the-box FPV drone racing package. The portfolio additionally included drone way of life and racing model Rotor Riot, in addition to distant inspection firm Skypersonic and Dronebox, an analytics platform for cloud-based flight intelligence.
However lately, Crimson Cat, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq inventory alternate, calls itself “a army know-how firm that integrates robotic {hardware} and software program to offer important situational consciousness and actionable intelligence to on-the-ground warfighters and battlefield commanders.”
It nonetheless owns Skypersonic, and it most prominently touts possession of Teal, which it acquired in 2021. It additionally lately partnered with Tomahawk Robotics and Reveal Expertise.
However so far as a number of the extra hobby-focused corporations go, they’re gone. On the finish of 2022, Crimson Cat introduced that it could unload its client division — which consisted of Rotor Riot and Fats Shark Holdings — to an organization known as Uncommon Machines for $18 million (consisting of 5 million in money, $2.5 million in a convertible senior observe of Uncommon Machines, and $10.5 million in Sequence A convertible most well-liked inventory). These corporations have been all about FPV, drone racing and different aspects of leisure and pastime drones.
“The sale of Rotor Riot and Fats Shark Holdings will permit us to focus our efforts and capital on army and protection,” mentioned Crimson Cat CEO Jeff Thompson.
Although hobbyists and racing of us needn’t fear. Rotor Riot continues to be alive and nicely, together with its energetic YouTube channel.
