Enterprise drone big Crimson Cat is doubling down on its concentrate on making drones for the navy. The Puerto Rico-based navy tech firm, which owns notable enterprise and navy drone firms similar 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, apart from that it’s “a materially vital funding.”
The funding is prone to propel Crimson Cat’s different subsidiaries ahead — significantly 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 imagine that our Teal 2 drone and the Firestorm UAV might be an incredible 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 navy focus at its forefront. In reality, Crimson Cat has already stuffed an order from U.S. Customs and Border Safety for 54 items of the Teal 2, and the corporate mentioned it has lately been visiting NATO international locations to debate how Ukrainian forces may use the Teal 2 to counter Russian forces significantly 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 method that enables 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 the way, together with gaining access to Crimson Cat’s manufacturing facility in Salt Lake Metropolis which may assist it ramp up manufacturing.
Crimson Cat’s passion days are over
Crimson Cat at one level owned a spread of drone firms together with well-known names like Fats Shark, which is probably finest recognized for its function making FPV goggles for drone racing (although it additionally makes different merchandise like an all-in-the-box FPV drone racing equipment. The portfolio additionally included drone life-style and racing model Rotor Riot, in addition to distant inspection firm Skypersonic and Dronebox, an analytics platform for cloud-based flight intelligence.
However today, Crimson Cat, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq inventory alternate, calls itself “a navy expertise firm that integrates robotic {hardware} and software program to offer crucial 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 Know-how.
However so far as among the extra hobby-focused firms go, they’re gone. On the finish of 2022, Crimson Cat introduced that it could dump its shopper 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 notice of Uncommon Machines, and $10.5 million in Sequence A convertible most popular inventory). These firms had been all about FPV, drone racing and different aspects of leisure and passion drones.
“The sale of Rotor Riot and Fats Shark Holdings will enable us to focus our efforts and capital on navy 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 lively YouTube channel.
