Enterprise drone large Pink 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 resembling Teal Drones, this week introduced an funding in Firestorm.
Firestorm is a U.S.-based firm constructing a modular drone that can also be 3D-printed and payload agnostic. Pink Cat supplied few particulars on the funds, except for that it’s “a materially important funding.”
The funding is prone to propel Pink Cat’s different subsidiaries ahead — significantly Teal, which is most well-known for its Golden Eagle surveillance drone, and likewise just lately launched what’s known as the Teal 2 drone.
“We imagine that our Teal 2 drone and the Firestorm UAV may very well be a fantastic mixture for the warfighter,” mentioned Pink 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. The truth is, Pink Cat has already crammed an order from U.S. Customs and Border Safety for 54 models of the Teal 2, and the corporate mentioned it has just 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 strategy that permits them to scale manufacturing in an elastic method. ”
The drones have especially-long vary, and also can loiter for longer durations, making them extra environment friendly and cost-effective.
With the Pink Cat funding, Firestorm will get a leg up in a myriad of how, together with getting access to Pink Cat’s manufacturing facility in Salt Lake Metropolis which may assist it ramp up manufacturing.
Pink Cat’s passion days are over
Pink Cat at one level owned a spread of drone corporations together with well-known names like Fats Shark, which is maybe finest identified for its position 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 nowadays, Pink Cat, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq inventory change, calls itself “a army know-how firm that integrates robotic {hardware} and software program to supply 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 just lately partnered with Tomahawk Robotics and Reveal Expertise.
However so far as among the extra hobby-focused corporations go, they’re gone. On the finish of 2022, Pink Cat introduced that it might dump 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 popular inventory). These corporations 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 permit us to focus our efforts and capital on army and protection,” mentioned Pink Cat CEO Jeff Thompson.
Although hobbyists and racing people needn’t fear. Rotor Riot remains to be alive and properly, together with its lively YouTube channel.
