All right, looks like we are ready to begin. Welcome, everyone, to Red Cat's Investor and Analyst Day. Thank you so much for being here. I'd like to thank Nasdaq for hosting us and for their support team for refreshments that were there earlier, and we'll be here again in a little bit. I also want to give a shout-out to Palantir for our special guest. Rob Imig is going to be speaking a little bit. Just a quick shout-out to Todd Barrish, who is a representative of our PR agency called Indicate Media. He's in the back here, and he'll be kind of hobnobbing with everyone later on. Let's just get the disclosure statement out of the way. I have it up here for just a few seconds. Take a picture. We're all good. Okay, just quick agenda.
Short opening remarks going to Jeff Thompson, then we'll give our Red Cat corporate overview with our 2025 guidance. I'll be filling in for Jeff Hitchcock, who's currently with the Army working on the production contract. I'll be going through our domestic and international market opportunities. By the way, I'm Stan Nowak, VP of Marketing for Red Cat, if you guys didn't already know. We will be going into Brendan Stewart, our Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, who will go into our regulatory tailwinds. Rob Imig from Palantir will be here to go over an overview as well as integration efforts between Red Cat and Palantir. We'll bring Jeff back up for closing remarks, do some Q&A, and then we'll have some refreshments so you guys can all mingle together. We're going to start off with Jeff Thompson. Welcome.
Oh, I had a clicker and everything. Okay, I think I might be able to handle that. Well, I can hear a little bit louder up here. All right, thanks everybody for coming. I'm sure we got a lot of people signed up, way more than we had seats for, so hopefully they all will make it in time. But we've got a lot of interesting stuff to do today. The good news is you're going to actually get to hear from other people in the company instead of me. You're probably sick of hearing from me. So we're going to go through a lot of different things and go into some real detail because even someone that deals with the Department of Defense every single day, the way you get money out of them, the way you get contracts is super confusing.
We're going to try to clear up any misconceptions on how it works and give you some really good detail on how we get these contracts. The one scary part of Red Cat is almost every single one of our customers is from the Department of Defense. There's continuing resolutions going on. It's very scary when your great big customer is based in the government, but it's great when these continuing resolutions aren't working. I'm going to talk a little bit about tailwinds. Everybody understands that drones are definitely the future, the future of warfare. I could print you 30 stories just from the Wall Street Journal alone about how drones are changing warfare. I just put a couple of examples up there.
I also just put some Q&A that was just released a couple of weeks ago from Elon Musk when he was at West Point with General Reeves. And he went through this 40-minute conversation for the cadets. And I just took out a couple. And when General Reeves said, "How do you see warfare transforming in the future?" Elon Musk replied after a pause, "The biggest factor will be drones and AI." And when we say drones, most people think of all the stuff they've seen in TV, movies where the guy's flying in out of Utah and in a container and they're big, huge reapers over some country. That's not drones anymore. Drones are what you see back there. Those drones back there are actually more capable than those drones you saw in the movies. So another question later in that session was, "How should the U.S.
Leverage technology to further our national defense?" And another long pause. And the answer was, "We need to invest in drones." So if you look at where we are from the president to the SecDef to the guys at DOGE, everyone understands that drones are the most important part of defense right now. And everyone's concerned about defense being cut because people aren't reading the whole article. Defense hasn't been cut. Defense is taking funds and actually moving it to other parts of the Department of Defense. Drones is one part that's specifically been cut out to make sure that they don't lose any money if they do any cuts. And just two days ago, Congress passed a new budget plan that's for the continuing resolution. And they added the additional $150 billion to the defense budget that the Senate passed down to them.
Defense is going to go from $800-something billion to $1.04 trillion. Now, it's funny because we're literally talking about 2025 still. Actually, Brendan's going to go through some of this in great detail. He's the person that goes and discusses all this stuff. We have spent a great week on the Hill and had some great meetings with the folks in Congress. But the other thing I just want to kind of mention is that Red Cat is probably the best-positioned company I've ever been in. I've had four startups that I've taken public. When you look at startups, use Grok because no one uses Google anymore. If you Google what's the most important thing, it'll always say timing. Startup guys, usually we're all early. I started in the drone industry in 2015.
I was taking FPV drones, putting them together in my attic, had a few fires, my soldering gun, everything. When I flew them, I flew them horribly and set the drones on fire. 2015 was a little early, but I started seeing the use of what these small drones could do as the time passed. I literally left my old company, which Todd and I rang the bell on in June 2007, right before everything collapsed. I left my own company that I founded in 2015 because I got hooked on drones, resigned from my own company, and said, "I'm going to do something in the drone industry." But again, a little early, but early and wrong can really be pretty much the same thing.
Most startups have really bad timing, but this company has currently, we have some of the best timing out of any company I'm looking at across the globe. Drones, like the ones you see back there, are the most important category in the war in Ukraine. And that is being passed on to the U.S. now. We understand how important drones of that size compared to big drones like Reapers, which can be shot down very easily, and to make the warfighter a much more lethal and safer warfighter. So I think we all know that drones, as continually they say, are changing the world and changing warfare. I'm going to get into a little bit of the product. I'm going to kind of breeze through it because we got some much better updates from the team over here.
Stan is the person that comes up with all of these crazy names. So we have this complete family of systems, which consists of the Edge 130, which later this year it's going to be called the Trikon. Once we put in the electronic warfare capable radio and a better camera, it's currently the best flight time on the Blue UAS list. We also have the Black Widow, Fang, which is an FPV drone, those drones I was telling you I was building in 2015 in my attic. And then the Webb, which was a great surprise for us this year, and I'll go into detail when we get to that. So when I say that the Black Widow is one of the most capable drones the Army's ever fielded, it's completely true.
You've never had a drone that has artificial intelligence, visual navigation, which we're going to see an incredible demonstration of today, and lethality that fits in your rucksack. The warfighter can take this out of his rucksack, look around that hill. If it sees something that it wants to kill, it can use a kamikaze, or we also have a drop mechanism. And it can actually use artificial intelligence for object detection, centerfield coordinates. And then it's doing all this while it doesn't even need a GPS because there's not a battlefield in the world where GPS actually works. So you're going to see a lot of stuff in the Black Widow. So we're going to kind of move on to a little bit more important stuff that's so crucial. One of our competitors has a drone that can't handle EW. I won't mention their name.
But every drone has to use some form of visual navigation now. There's no way you're not going to; you can't fly a drone in a battlefield using a GPS whatsoever. If you look at M-Code, the military-grade GPS was supposed to be the solution for the Army. We had to deliver a few M-Code drones to the IOT&E test in May. They're really expensive. They're very flaky. They don't work well. And they're actually jammable now. That's a very expensive upgrade for the SRR program. I had a meeting with the Army two Fridays ago before we went to the Hill, making sure we're aligned on what we're asking from Congress. Their biggest problem that they said is we need to be able to operate in GPS-denied locations. That was one of two items that they gave me. This is very crucial for any drone in the industry.
And then we have some other tricks that we can do in stealth mode where basically everything's just turned off. So these drones are very capable for a battlefield because we actually brought them over and brought them to battlefields, and we're hopefully bringing them back soon to do some further testing. The Edge 130, you've probably heard me start talking about this drone a lot more. I was at the factory last week. They're off to a good start. It is very exciting that Red Cat now has two factories that are churning out drones. That's very exciting and diversifies our sales. But this drone is very sought after. Why? Well, it has the longest flight time. If you get a chance, go look at it. It can fly over 65 minutes.
We think we can get that to about 90 minutes with just some software upgrades and some battery enhancements, which they didn't have the capital to actually improve over the last few years. It's a VTOL. What does that mean? Vertical Takeoff and Landing. It snaps together very quickly. Even I can do it, and I'm not very good at snapping those things together. It's three pieces. You can get into the air within about two minutes, and you can go from vertical flight to horizontal flight in less than five seconds. I've done it. No other VTOL can do that. The other unique capability with this very long flying drone is that it can hover. I can't find a fixed wing. If someone can't find it, send it to me. They can actually hover, and it's a tricopter. So very unique capabilities.
We have a quadcopter called the Black Widow. There's a lot of quadcopters in the industry. There's a lot of quads across the board. Everyone's doing that. They have to rely wholly just on thrust. With a fixed wing, you get that four-to-one ratio that helps give you that better flight time. So whenever we deal with a lot of our customers, we get the same. I'll use the Border Patrols as an example, every year. What do you want for enhancements for next year? We want better camera features, longer flight time. Okay, great. Next year. Hey, guys, what do you want? Oh, we want better camera, more flight time. It's just relentless. Payload and flight time is great. So the good news is the Black Widow's going through some brand new battery enhancements. And we think we're going to have the longest flying quad. Stay tuned.
We're going to get you some details on that, hopefully in a couple of weeks, but I think the FlightWave, and I've said this, and I like having the competition between FlightWave factory and the team at Black Widow. I think the FlightWave could outsell the Black Widow next year. It is that unique and sought after. Okay, so this is. I didn't do a full slide on Fang, which is our FPV drone, but you can see one here, and this is a partnership we're doing with Mjolnir. How do you say it, Stan? Mjolnir.
Mjolnir. I can never say it properly. I just call them MMS. So this is a very safe drop or kamikaze mechanism. In that nose cone, you can do five different safety features. And if you don't meet all five safety features, it won't blow up. It could drop on the ground and it won't explode. This is very unlike when I was in Ukraine watching them tie wrap and duct tape RPGs to drones. We can't do that for the DOD. They need safety features. So we've been working with the U.S. Army on a special contract called SRR. And that has been to put this drop mechanism on the Black Widow. So we think we have a really good head start. So next-gen SRR, you're probably all sick of waiting for us to get the contract from the last five years. Next-gen SRR starts in, I think, September.
So we're already moving on to the next rev. It's basically a Black Widow or an SRR requirements drone with full strike capability. We also have put a special feature into this drop mechanism, specifically for Alex Karp. We put inside that drop mechanism piss-laced fentanyl to put on bad analysts that don't cover them properly. I don't know if you saw that Andrew Ross Sorkin interview, but he requested he wanted a drone with piss-laced fentanyl to be able to drop on bad guys. So we can do that for him. So the Webb, the Warfighter Electronic Bridge, this is a pretty exciting thing for us. And wow, you have to have a controller no matter what. But when we went into the final testing of SRR in last May into June, we weren't supposed to bring a controller. They told us it's only for aircraft.
The contract's only going to be for aircraft. And about three months before we were going in to do this, they said, "Oh, you got to bring a controller." I was like, "What? You hate our controller. Our old controller is like this big. No one likes it except for the Border Patrol because they actually have the real estate. When they're in a car flying, they can relax. But a warfighter doesn't want something this big that's heavy." So we asked them for their requirements, and they gave us their requirements. And we literally built the Webb exactly to their dimensions, the button layouts. Everything was basically what they asked for. And it was pretty interesting after IOT&E test in May, a person from the Army called up and said, "Hey, by the way, man, everyone really likes the controller." And I'm like, "It's yours.
You designed it." But that's an extra, I think, $12,000 per system now that we weren't expecting from the SRR program. We're also hearing that we also could be the controller for MRR because we've been told to integrate with the MRR team. So that's also an additional win that we were not planning for a couple of months before IoT and ETest. The future initiatives has been something, again, this was kind of pushed upon us, and the Army and the other departments of defense really like what we're doing here because we have an open platform. A lot of companies don't have an open platform. And a person that we actually ended up hiring from USSOCOM, he would say, "Hey, the Army wants you to work with this company. You should probably go integrate with them." So like, "Okay, who's this?" It was like Reveal, Primordial.
All these companies you saw here were basically suggested by the DOD on stuff that they're working on with these vendors. And we got them to integrate into the Black Widow and soon into the Edge. So we can give you whatever you want. Marines might want something different than the Army. The Navy might want something different. They all have different missions. And we want to help them solve their missions. So the Red Cat Futures initiative is a really good platform to do that. And we've got some pretty interesting partners coming on soon. So guidance. I should have just gone to this because we're here in Wall Street. All you care about is the last slide. Where's the financials, right? So I want to dig in deeply because people get super confused by, and I don't know why.
I want to make sure that everybody understands how we got here. We're going to reiterate where we are on our guidance. In September, which we were hoping to find out if we were downselected, the previous four years we were downselected for prototype contracts. We were not downselected. When we reported in September, we gave out guidance for 2025 calendar of $50-$55 million without any military SRR contracts or programs of record from Europe. Before you guys ask that question, Stan will talk to you about that later because he's replacing Jeff Hitchcock. That was basically a thumbnail of about $25 million, which is 500 Edge 130s and $25 million of Black Widows and $5 million of Fang. That's where we were last September.
And then we said we'd update guidance once we got to an SRR contract if we had an SRR contract, which we got downselected for in November, which was a few months late. So we upped our guidance there to the SRR specifically is $25 million-$65 million. Very wide goalposts. Why? How come so wide? So there's a lot of information out there from a really bad person that I hopefully can use that Mjolnir drop on. Although I don't think you would want urine. I think he likes snow or something we heard when he got arrested. So the goalposts are actually his number is correct on the bottom. When we talked to the Army over the last few weeks, they say we've got $20.5 million, which you can see in a bunch of documents from the president's budget last March.
$20.5 million they have in the bank, and that's for SRR currently for 2025, which ends in September. And then you get about anywhere from 20%-50% in spares and repairs. And that comes from a completely different bucket. That comes from sustainment. There's three buckets in the Army. There's readiness, there's modernization, and there's sustainment. So we took the 20% and we used, so that's where we got the 25 on the low end. Very simple math that some people can't seem to get. And then the other 40 is basically, we'll walk through this here. So the additional features, which we mentioned in our town hall, when we finished IoT and ETE, they had a few features that they wanted us to add to the Black Widow after testing it for weeks.
That's going to be a few million dollars that we're probably going to sign, and it could be signed now, I don't know. It's going to be signed momentarily. Then sometime in March, we're hoping to get the LRIP contract, which we said back in November. We don't know exactly how much that number is going to be. It could change. We know that the LRIP they want to do is like 1,300 systems, but that's not confirmed yet. Then you go into full-rate production, like we said in November, in the second half of 2025. So the guidance, $25 million-$65 million. Okay, we know that we got $25 million no matter what. That's there. It's in the bank, as they say. But we also get a full quarter of our calendar year on their first quarter, which will be the first year of full-rate production.
So we just kind of thumbnailed it on what full-rate production will hopefully look like. And you're going to hear some great information from Brendan on what we think the POM, which now we're a program of record, will become part of the POM, which is a five-year budget process. We weren't before. So that's how we went from 25 to 65. The 25, like I said, is in the bank. We'll be making those drones for LRIP. We've got the additional features for, I think it's a few million, whatever it is. And then we get that full quarter of full-rate production in our calendar year, which is their first quarter of 2026. I pounded through that as quickly as I could. And we'll do Q&A. So I want everyone else to get through their stuff because there's some really cool stuff coming on here. So who's up next?
Thanks, Jeff. I'm filling in for our Chief Revenue Officer, Jeff Hitchcock, who's with the Army currently. So bear with me on these slides. I'm just going to give you guys a little bit of an insight into our little bit of forecasting and the markets that we're going to be going into over the next couple of years. Just at a glance, we definitely know that there's going to be increasing defense requirements, right? The military, especially Department of Defense, they want things now attainable, cheap, but they want the highest capabilities possible, right? And so Red Cat is well positioned to be satisfying those requirements. As we all see, just with ChatGPT and other AI-driven autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, that's exactly what they're looking for, right?
It's back in the day when we saw single-point solutions where you had warfighters on the front lines, basically heads down looking at hours and hours of footage. Those days are gone. Now we're looking at autonomy driving those systems and basically alerting the warfighter when there's something to look at, a target or what have you. Shifting warfare strategies, right? We're going now from a Ukraine type of environment potentially to an Asia-Pacific environment over the next couple of years, right? So that shift right there is going to change how the battlefield is going to be extremely dynamic and how, again, Red Cat is well positioned to satisfy those very extreme requirements that are going to happen in a very different environment in the world. And then prioritizing those investments for ISR, right?
We're going to, and Brendan will go into this a little bit, see the government start to reallocate money from other funding streams to get into what we do, which is the small tactical ISR drone systems. A little bit of market overview, global market size projected to reach about $10.5 billion by 2028 with an average growth of 12%, right? That's just, and I'll have a chart coming up in a little bit that kind of talks about each region of the world, but these numbers, percentages are always going to continuously go up. That's also based on conflict. That's also based on border security measures, counterterrorism, stuff like that. Just DOD spending for FY25, $1.5 billion just to UAS programs alone, right?
And again, we're going to start to see some reallocation of funding from larger programs like helicopter programs to funnel back into small ISR assets. Increased focus on swarming technologies, autonomous ISR, and counter-UAS capabilities. Again, Red Cat is well positioned. We're handling each one of those in our roadmap when it comes to swarming, autonomy, and counter-UAS capabilities. And technically speaking, Black Widow is going to be really well positioned for even doing counter-UAS based on our Doodle Labs technology that we have in there. And then international, each one of those specific regions, they are all focused on, like I said, border security, counterterrorism, and then modernizing the frontline warfighter. One of the greatest perks of my job, and a lot of you that follow maybe us on LinkedIn, you'll start to see that I basically pop up all over the world. That's by design.
One of the best aspects of my job is to be able to sit there with customers and shake their hands and realize what their needs, wants, and desires are and funnel that information back into our company, which then goes back into the drones. So from a marketing perspective and support of BD, it's gold when you start to hear that information from the end users. Key market drivers. So tactical ISR, target acquisition. Again, going back a few years ago, we were looking at single-point solutions, closed-loop solutions. Those days are over. Now we're looking at the U.S. DOD, the global military markets. They want drones that can not only do the ISR that they're required to do, but also start to look and identify targets and then prosecute those targets, right? So what we call the portable kill chain, right?
So we are moving into an era where we have a suite or a kit that the warfighter can actually use that Red Cat can provide the entire kill chain in a small backpackable form factor. Autonomy, AI, increasing emphasis on AI-powered systems. Like I said, autonomy and AI and even Palantir is here today, so they can speak to you a little bit more as well. But it's all about that force multiplication, right? How do we create something from a squad to be able to operate at the level of a battalion based on the technology that they have in their hands? Back in the day, they used to have to call assets in, right, which would take minutes, and those minutes could result in loss of life, so now they're given the tools.
We can provide those tools, and they can shorten that gap to be able to prosecute targets. Swarm technology, as Jeff said, we're working with a whole bunch of companies, one of them being Sentien Robotics that produces a Hive system. So they've already done demonstrations with Teal 2. Now we're moving on to Black Widow. So imagine a drone vending machine, right? Something that can be anywhere from 12 to 80 drones in a specific area. And not only to have fleet management software operating each one of those drones where they're going out and coming back and charging, but then also doing swarm missions beyond that, again, to be able to identify targets and then prosecute when they need to. EW resilience. This is one of the biggest hot buttons. Obviously, we've learned a lot from Ukraine.
What's interesting about EW is that you don't want to be in step with EW. You want to be ahead of it. So again, Red Cat is well positioned to be looking at those systems to integrate into our drone systems, working with Doodle Labs, having frequency stepping, frequency hopping to stay ahead and have that what we call tactical overmatch over our adversaries because the battlefield is dynamic and moving so fast that just because you're EW resilient today doesn't mean you will be tomorrow. But again, we're positioned to be able to handle that moving forward. And you'll hear this big term, MOSA, Modular Open System Approach.
That is a big deal in the fact that not only do we have to have our systems talk with other systems on the battlefield, meaning air assets, ground assets, sea assets, but then you translate that into the global market, right? How do the protocols, what are those in place for us to be speaking with military organizations globally, right? Because not all these systems actually talk to each other. So we're working on all those protocols as well. U.S. DOD procurement outlook, you're at Short Range Reconnaissance. Obviously, that's one of the biggest programs of record, if not one of the biggest for small drones in the history of the military. Blue UAS is going to continue to focus on securing U.S. manufacturers' UAS for DOD operations. Again, we've been able to hit all of those strict requirements, and we're going to continue to do that moving forward.
A lot of that has to do with just having the base of engineering and knowledge within our company that can, again, have that kind of forward thinking. We're always not designing for today. We're designing for tomorrow. And then we're going to actually be looking to outside of the U.S. Army, right? There's going to be a lot of other programs that kind of come up, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, that have similar type of programs of record that, again, we are well positioned to satisfy a lot of those strict requirements. Just again, at a glance, international market opportunities. So when we're looking at the significant growth around the world, NATO is obviously E.U., NATO, those are going to be some of the biggest hotbed for drone procurement from a Red Cat perspective. Then we go into Indo-Pacific, Asia-Pacific.
As we start to escalate or as that conflict potentially starts to escalate over the next couple of years, you're going to see a lot more demand. Again, it's a completely different operating environment. We're looking at littoral environments. We're looking at island chains of thousands of islands. And small drones are going to play a huge key. They're going to be key players in that. And a lot of those partners that we're working with, again, for instance, Ocean Power Technologies, an unmanned surface vessel company, we're working with them to not only carry our stuff closer to the fight, but then provide drone swarming to be able to launch off of those USVs from a naval battle group, right? That's really going to be the future of where we're all headed from a future state perspective.
NATO, EU, like I said, enhanced ISR, force projection capabilities, again, modernization of the warfighter, Asia-Pacific. That's going to be growing from maritime security, border surveillance. So we're going to be looking at a lot more maritime demonstrations coming up over the next year. We just signed a CRADA, actually with NOAA, to start operating our equipment off of one of their vessels in Santa Barbara just to do just for maritime testing. So we're going to take it very, very seriously because our customers are taking it very seriously. Middle East and Africa, very much border security and counterterrorism there. Again, I was just in United Arab Emirates a couple of weeks ago or within the last week and a half, and the demand for small UAS is gigantic. It's a massive market for us.
And versus about a year and a half ago when I was in Saudi Arabia for the World Defense Show, seriously, there was a line from our booth for people that wanted to see both Black Widow and Edge 130 and its capabilities. And then Latin America, right? Drug interdiction is obviously a huge deal down there. And our stuff, because it's backpackable and very mobile, it lends itself to drug interdiction, DEA, and those types of missions. So this chart I threw in here just because it really does show kind of a percentage level of the growth from now until about 2030. And so you'll see every single region of the world, and we're going to be completely focused on this. We're building out our business development team.
Literally, every month, we're adding more and more folks to that team just to be able to handle the demand that's happening around the world. But if you start to look at, again, Asia-Pacific, it is going to be the fastest growing regional market, probably out of all of these, with a 15.4% growth rate. So a lot of that, again, has to do with some potential escalation happening in that area. Okay, just to kind of finalize this channel, obviously, this isn't going to be easy, what we're talking about, everything that we're doing. The biggest misconception that I see when I'm out there in the field is, "Oh, you guys are dealing with small drones. It must be easy." It's actually completely opposite. The smaller you get, the harder it is because you're trying to jam so much capability into a small form factor.
Size, weight, and power are critical. It's not easy at all. So obviously, there's going to be some challenges, right? Supply chain vulnerabilities. I think what worked great, especially with Jeff Thompson at the helm. We're all about redundancy. We're all about looking at multiple vendors to be able to satisfy supply chain and any deficiencies that would happen, right? So we're positioning ourselves for that. Counter-drone threats, right? How do we integrate more systems into our drones that can provide counter-UAS solutions, right? So sometimes it's not just about ISR. Sometimes it's about how do I take down that other drone that's in the air? And again, we're taking steps to be able to do that. Interoperability and standardization.
This goes back into those protocols I was talking about with being able to play nice not only in a multi-domain environment, meaning air, sea, and land, but also with those international governments and get those protocols and standardizations in place to make it basically a seamless integration across the board for any conflict that comes up in the future. Our strategic recommendations, we're going to keep enhancing those partnerships with the Department of Defense. Our entire business is solely built on the strong relationships that we have in the military. Again, a lot of our business development team are former SOF, are former combat controllers. They understand those needs, wants, and desires, and they meet with the military on a daily basis. So we take it very, very seriously.
Invest more into AI and autonomy, and that's going to come through organically and also through partnerships, potential acquisitions in the future. Expand export compliant offerings. Right now, we have somewhat of an advantage because our stuff falls under EAR 99 and not ITAR. So that makes it a little bit easier when it comes to compliance and being able to do export control. Strengthen counter-UAS capabilities. I mentioned that earlier. And then leverage dual-use commercial applications. So the idea of being able to not only support the military, but also, let's say, local law enforcement or fire safety and management, you start to build things that can satisfy both markets, and now you're starting to bring your cost down across the board. Again, we'll have a Q&A later, but if you guys have any questions for that.
But I'm going to bring up Brendan, our Vice President of Regulatory Affairs.
All right. Thank you, Stan.
All right, everybody. It's good to be here with all of you. Thank you for taking the time to hear our presentation today, learn a little bit more about our company and what we're about. It is unusual for me to be in a room with not a single congressman in it, but I appreciate you bearing with me as we talk a little bit about our regulatory prospects. Let me set this up first by explaining our mission. This is bigger than me. It's bigger than Jeff. It's bigger than Stan and Chelsea. This is about our national mission as a company to secure America's industrial base in the next conflict. I don't need to tell you that American manufacturing has been waning for four decades. I don't need to tell you that we're behind China.
What I will tell you is that we have an incredible opportunity to not just catch up, but to supersede. American innovation has brought us incredible technologies that we use every day. Anybody familiar with the program from the 1976 NDAA called NavStar by a show of hands? We got three people. I'm impressed, actually, that you know what NavStar is. Well, we all have the result of NavStar in our pockets today. NavStar was a program of $12 billion in today's money of federal spending to launch the first GPS satellites. Now GPS is a ubiquitous, free service that every single one of us can take advantage of until we're in war and it's jammed. ARPANET, similar story. ARPANET laid the foundation of the internet. It would be impossible for many of us to do business without that government program.
This is what I'm about, and this is what we're about at Red Cat. We're creating the future as a defense mechanism for America. We know it's going to be hard. We're faced up against an adversary that is not playing fair. The Chinese government has state-sponsored investment funds. We don't. We don't have a sovereign wealth fund in America yet. My job, my role in our regulatory focus is to level the playing field with China. Quite frankly, if our adversaries are not going to play fair, I'm not going to play fair. So what does this look like in terms of regulatory affairs? I like to view this as a dual mandate, kind of like the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate. We do two things. We level the playing field, and we create opportunities for funding. Leveling the playing field includes things like country of origin bans.
Anybody ever heard of the Countering CCP Drones Act? Show of hands. We just got it passed. We got a negotiated version of it passed in the 2025 NDAA. Working on tariff programs. We know the new administration is going to propose incoming tariffs. It's important that those tariffs. It's important to us that those tariffs are targeted to protect American businesses and protect American interests, and also product compliance. We want to be able to make our drones the most capable in their class through product compliance to allow them to fly beyond line of sight, fly over crowds of people, fly swarms of drones from distant terminals. On the funding side, we've got incredible opportunities to chase funding allocations. Those would be like RDT&E funding, research, development, testing, and evaluation. That's the government's mechanism for doing research that is funded by the government.
RDT&E funding was what launched the first GPS satellites and what created the backbone of the internet. There's also other opportunities for grant programs for the end users as public safety agencies adopt our technology, Border Patrol, and others. We can utilize funding through DHS's Stone Garden programs. There's over $1 billion of funding that was made available in fiscal year 2024 for individual agencies to acquire those drones. Also, we look at plussing up some of our programs like SRR, which I'll talk about momentarily, and I'll tell you my holy grail, the thing that keeps me up at night that I would love to see happen, that we're working on very aggressively, is I would love to see direct investment into this industry, like a CHIPS and Science Act for drones.
Anybody that remembers the CHIPS and Science Act and looked at NVIDIA's stock chart between 2021 and 2023 knows exactly how impactful that legislation has been to allow America to maintain a leading role in AI technology development. So let's get into the weeds on trade policy. Over the past couple of years, we've passed two major bills as part of the past two NDAAs focused on trade policy and competitiveness with China. The first is called the American Security Drone Act, passed in the 2024 NDAA. The American Security Drone Act prohibits federal dollars from being used to procure, operate, and maintain drones manufactured in the PRC at any level of government. And we were careful about that wording, procure, operate, and maintain, right? So if you're a government agency that's already flying DJI drones, you got to get rid of them.
You can't use your funding to maintain them. If you're a public safety agency that's running your DJI drone program on grants, you're going to kiss those grants goodbye. Those grants are going away as of this year. Massively expansive to set the standard for secure, tested American drones in federal and state government and any government that uses federal government funding, which include ancillaries all the way down to the local level. The second, and here's the big one, the Countering CCP Drones Act, a negotiated version of which was passed in the 2025 NDAA under Section 1709, and you can look that up in the 1,100-page bill if you want. We were very excited about this one. How many of you, by a show of hands, have a Huawei or ZTE phone on you? How many of you own a Huawei or ZTE device?
Not a single one of us, because Huawei and ZTE are on the FCC's entity list. DJI and Autel and their affiliates. DJI has this habit of spinning up affiliate shell companies to try and avoid tariffs and fencing product through Malaysia. We closed that loophole. We've also added DJI, Autel, and its affiliates. We will add them to the entity list. We've created a structure to add them to the entity list now. There's a year timer that is going on right now. The government has a year to make a determination by the FCC to add them to the entity list. If they do not make a determination by the FCC to add them to the entity list, they'll be added immediately. The bottom line here is that our trade policy actions massively expand Red Cat's addressable market.
Just like all of these other technologies like GPS and the internet, we've started in DOD, we've done our development in DOD, and now we expand into the civilian market to reach ubiquity. So what does this funding look like? Well, we've got two opportunities for funding specifically in DOD right now. We've got a $5 million research and development line for swarming. Frankly, DOD is not prepared to counter drone swarms. They've told us this. We've partnered with USA Special Operations Command to develop an RDT&E line item to force swarming. DOD is going to need these capabilities in place by 2027 to counter potential activity in the South China Sea. Is anybody familiar with the Davidson Window? I could get really nerdy with this. The Davidson Window is the window of oceanographic conditions that make the most sense for a seaborne invasion of Taiwan. We know this.
The Chinese government knows this. DOD is rapidly preparing. It's going to require rapid iteration. Funding is now set aside specifically for us for that rapid iteration. The second is a line item specific to SRR. Now, I know there's been a lot of consternation about how much funding is available for SRR this year, next year, and into the future. Our ask is very simple. We've asked for a total amount of $120 million over three years. Why is that? This technology is attainable, and this technology does not have a lifespan of 20 years like an airplane or a helicopter. The goal is to get our drones in the hands of the warfighter immediately and allow them to train on it, deploy them in the field rapidly. We do have a very unique opportunity as well. The reconciliation bill is not finalized for 2025.
We have asked for an additional $100 million plus-up in reconciliation for 2025. Now, I can't guarantee anything. We did have a congressman submit that reconciliation request last week when we were in DC. Can't guarantee anything, but I'm feeling pretty confident about it based on the responses that we've received. Additionally, and this is important for me to point out, there's funding available in RDT&E for next-generation SRR, so when next-generation SRR comes around, as Jeff was mentioning, we don't have to necessarily go out of pocket to develop to that. We can use government money to develop government products. It's a critical advantage for us, and additionally, we know that next-gen SRR is designed around a three-year procurement cycle, so it makes perfect sense that we ask for first-gen SRR to operate around a three-year procurement cycle to meet DOD's future expectations.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. DJI holds about 85% of the U.S. drone market outside of defense. When they're gone, because of the Countering CCP Drones Act, it's going to leave a massive void. The numbers that I have are from 2021. I don't have newer numbers from DJI because state-affiliated Chinese defense and aerospace manufacturers are not particularly interested in sharing their numbers with competitors. But what I do have is DJI's annual revenue from 2021, which was $3.83 billion. I'm going to go ahead and assume that their revenue has grown between 2021 and 2025, considering they're still operating and putting out new models. Bold assumption, but we'll start at $3.83 billion. Now, based on CBP estimates, about 25% of that is projected to be U.S. business.
We have good CBP estimates because CBP was actually blocking DJI drones at the Port of Los Angeles. And they were blocking them based on the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act violations, which is a whole nother story, but we can talk about that on the sidebar if you're further interested. Based on that 2021 number, we believe that there's about $950-$960 million of annual addressable market that DJI is selling into here in the United States. When they're kicked out, that's going to leave a major void. DJI's price point, that's about 200,000 drones a year, or based on the price point of our previous model, Teal 2, it's about 64,000 drones a year. That's pretty amazing. We're very excited about that. And that's in addition to how our SRR appropriations will increase sort of volume, right?
Why did we come up with that $120 million a year number? The goal is to reach full operational capacity in three years. Next-generation SRR expects that we reach full operational capacity in three years. So we believe that first-generation SRR should reach full operational capacity in three years. These aren't helicopters. As a matter of fact, the Army has canceled their future attack reconnaissance aircraft program, which is the replacement to the Apache attack helicopter. They know this. Our incoming Secretary of Defense knows this. We are very much aligned on this path forward in the future. There's also, as I mentioned, a possibility to include the first tranche of that $120 million funding in the 2025 reconciliation bill. That's possibly the only benefit of stretching budget negotiations out this far as we have an opportunity to get an additional bite of the apple.
Here's another thing to be excited about. The civilian drone market has largely been small since 2016 when Part 107, the enabling regulations, were passed. The reason for that is under Part 107, a pilot has to be within visual line of sight of their drone at all times. My vision's not awesome. I've been a pilot for 10 years, but I can see a drone the size of Black Widow maybe a half mile away. So it's very limited. What's changing in 2026 is rulemaking for beyond visual line of sight. For the first time, with the exception of limited waiver programs, drones are going to be able to fly miles over the horizon by rule in a standardized way. That's going to open up linear infrastructure owners, power utilities, railroads, telecom companies to implementing this technology in a much more scalable manner than previously available.
That's going to increase market demand. So what's next? In 2026 and beyond, we've got a lot of opportunities. The first, of course, is strategic engagement in NDAA negotiations. We're not letting off the gas. We're going to continue asking for funding in 2026, 2027, and 2028. When next-generation SRR gets approved and downselected, I certainly hope it's us, we're going to start that process all over again and ask for appropriations the following three years. The thing that I'm really excited about, I know I said this before, but a direct investment program for small UAS would change this industry overnight. Just as CHIPS and Science Act changed the valuation of NVIDIA overnight, this is my holy grail program. That's one thing I've been advocating for a couple of years. There's other opportunities as well.
Manufacturing tax credits is something we look at, non-dilutive capital through the Office of Strategic Capital, where we have a $58.5 million federally backed loan pending in the application process, and also Part 108 that I just mentioned about the beyond visual line of sight rulemaking and something called MOSAIC, which is the modernization of special purpose airworthiness certificates. MOSAIC is particularly interesting because now it expands the addressable civilian market to drones bigger than what you see on that table back there. MOSAIC will allow the certification of drones above 55 pounds, up to the size of airplanes, so there's an opportunity for us as we expand the market there to be less limited about the regulations as to what we can sell into the civilian world. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Robert from Palantir to continue our conversation.
All right. That was great. I learned some things there too. All right. Well, thanks for Red Cat for letting me be here. My name is Rob Imig from Palantir. I've been an engineer at Palantir for 13 years. So I've seen it all. I lead engineering for our defense R&D group right now. So we have three focus areas: edge computing and edge AI. So the first area, which obviously comes into play here, mixed reality, so leaning into augmented virtual reality capabilities, and then drone technology. I'm going to talk about some of our partnership with Red Cat, which we're really excited about. Here's the contribution from my legal team to this presentation. Okay, great. So three things we're going to cover. First is visual navigation, which we're really excited about partnering with Red Cat on.
That is active engineering that's ongoing with some of my team and some of Jeff's team that we're building out together right now. We're going to geek out a little bit, and I'm going to go sort of into the weeds on what exactly that is and the importance of it. We're going to talk about Warp Speed, which is a new thing we just signed with Red Cat and we're partnering on, and then some of the future-looking Maven integration. So we'll go ahead and start with visual navigation. Okay, so I think we've heard a little bit about this problem throughout these presentations already, but I'll just hit it again. GPS is no longer reliable in modern warfare. We've seen this in Ukraine. We've seen it in the Middle East.
You can read about it in the news everywhere: Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, and we think in future wars this is going to happen. Basically, GPS immediately starts to get jammed. It gets denied, and these drones either start falling out of the sky or, in some scary cases, which I think you guys might have read about with Iran, they start landing in the wrong places, which is very scary because the drone thinks it's somewhere else. So that's the problem. That's what we're going after here. Okay, cool. So how do we do that? What is our approach for this? Visual navigation. I like to start here with always thinking the Sally mode, which is how would I explain this technology to my mother? So let's start there. Sally is the name of my mother.
Okay, so when you guys leave from here, I'm sure some of you live in New York, some of you traveled in, but for the folks that live here, when you walk home, you're likely not going to pull up Google Maps or pull up a GPS and actually navigate your way home. You're going to look around. You're going to look at buildings. You're going to look at your surroundings, and you're going to walk home because you know how to get there. You have a visual map loaded into your brain. You're going to look and take context around you with your eyes, your ears, and navigate home, right? That is basically what we're doing. So we are taking in the IMU, which is the accelerometers. We're taking in the visual camera.
So we can either do the primary payload, or in a lot of cases now, we're putting on belly cameras. That's just a straight down-looking camera. And then we're loading on maps. And one of the things Jeff was really excited about when he partnered with us, we have a great partnership with a bunch of satellite companies where we can get the latest and greatest maps on there. So if we know exactly where we're flying, we can literally task satellites if we need to to get the freshest imagery loaded and then put it on board into memory on this drone and then go fly. Now, we're not loading the entire world. We're loading small sections. And you can imagine all of Eastern Ukraine could fit on some of these drones here. Oh, sorry. Accelerating already. Cool.
So when you go under the hood of it, there's three sort of aspects, three approaches to this. The first is the telemetry and motion model. So basically, we get the IMUs. We understand, obviously, the telemetry of the aircraft, the point of the camera. We get roll, pitch, yaw. We get all those sorts of nitty-gritty details. And we build out basically a model of how this aircraft is moving. Okay, that's sort of the first thing. That's not perfect. That has drift. These sensors are not perfect on these drones. There's errors. Those errors compound. You can very quickly start drifting off your path. So we have to do some other methods. The second method is Optical Flow, where basically we're looking at the camera. Again, think of a belly camera that's looking straight down at the ground. You're looking at relative movement.
Like my eyes, when I start moving left, I see that wall drifting. My brain knows that I'm moving left, right? That's the same thing we're doing. When we're looking straight down, we are seeing the relative movement frame to frame of that video, and we're adjusting our model based off of that, right? So that's a second. That's also not perfect, though. That has some drift. So then we go into the third, which is the really powerful one, which is reference imagery matching. That's actually comparing the image that we are seeing against the satellite imagery that we have loaded on board. This is what allows us to get a lock and get a fine-tuned match of where exactly we are and then update the other instruments on board and basically provide a completely alternate GPS source. This is what's called APNT, alternate position navigation timing.
So we have some videos over here that kind of show this is sort of our debugging panel of really what's going on under the hood. This is a piece of software that loads onto that drone, and it goes completely headless. So there's no real UI for it. This is just our testing infrastructure to show you how this works under the hood. We can do this against visible, infrared, or multispectral, hyperspectral data. This means we're starting to work on things so that this works at night. This works in clouds and other capabilities that are typically not there. So you can see, I won't go into super detail here, but on the right, we're basically showing the expected flight path based on the instruments versus our flight path of how we're correcting those things.
In the past one, you'll see these lines drift a little bit, and then it'll snap back because it gets that reference imagery. The sort of star pattern there going on on the bottom right, the purple dots and stuff, that's basically if we don't get a perfect match, we have an algorithm that basically starts jumping around and looking for where we might be, and then it snaps back. That's a thing we're constantly optimizing and tuning. That obviously takes time, which is part of the reason why we're running these things in parallel and running three different approaches. It's a little expensive to do that every frame to do that computer vision process, but we do it every now and then.
Based on the other models that are running, the first two, the optical flow and the telemetry model, those are much more faster paced because those are mostly math and physics-based, so it's very quick calculations, but then the actual reference matching runs usually a few times a second sort of behind the scenes. Great. We can jump into questions there later on that. Okay, switching gears a little bit. Palantir has made a big push recently into empowering builders of America like Red Cat, so my boss, our CTO, is very excited about this, and I'm excited about it, but we're partnering with a lot of small companies to basically, like Red Cat, for example, partner with them to implement Warp Speed, and I'll go into what Warp Speed is, but to help scale their manufacturing efforts, so Red Cat just got a big deal.
They're going to build and deliver a bunch of drones to the army. We want to make sure that they can help hit those deadlines. So this is the same flagship platform. Foundry is what this is based off of. And we're going to deploy it for Red Cat to help them make these goals. This is the same platform that's used across a number of Fortune 500 companies to really accelerate their manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, etc. There's an AI-powered platform. Basically, it integrates a bunch of different data, but American manufacturing really requires sort of a modern operating system to run your business and to run your manufacturing so you can really get to scale. Scheduling, logistics, the supply chain. We also do some really cutting-edge capabilities in the factory.
We're excited to partner with Red Cat to roll this out, which should be happening soon, which is great. Okay, final thing, Maven integration. So if you haven't heard about Maven, Maven is the DOD's program to basically bring AI to the warfighter. This has been a program running for probably the past five to eight years. Palantir is a major software partner as part of that program. It's now a program of record, works across a bunch of different services and through the Pentagon. A lot of this right now is focused on basically running different AI and computer vision algorithms across satellite imagery, drone video, and other modalities that we can't talk about. Palantir orchestrates a lot of that, as well as sort of this middle screenshot here, which is what we call target workbench.
But that's managing basically the full Kill Chain, which is everything from once you spot those three tanks in Ukraine that are sitting out in the field and you think those are Russian tanks, there's a human analyst typically, or there's automated processes that evaluate that, and then it moves it into conducting a strike. You're building a mission plan. You're making sure that you actually took out those tanks, which is BDA, and then you're sort of finishing off. But it's basically like a Kanban board, which is why this looks like this, where you're moving things across the Kill Chain, across that process. You can see some in the bottom right here from satellite imagery where these things start. That is sort of a lot of our work there.
The really cool next step of this, kind of like Jeff said, this has worked on some very big legacy drones, like those MQ-9s, MQ-1s that are still flying, but we think in sort of future conflicts, it's going to look a lot more like these things where you're flying small sort of swarm-constrained group one, group two aircraft out there to go do these missions. So that battlefield is evolving. The tech is evolving with it.
The really amazing integrations that you can start to do here is once you spot basically your different targets or your different points of interest from maybe some very sophisticated satellite, maybe some other classified source, now to be able to autonomously basically construct a flight plan, hand that off to a drone like this, and then have it actually go get a second stage verification that that tank is actually sitting out there and then go do the next part of the mission, that's the aspirations here, and that sort of kill chain and that process that I talked about is actually very reachable, and we're excited to go after that together. Great. That, I think, wraps up my section. So I guess I stay up here and we do Q&A. I'm not doing all the Q&A, but.
Yeah, now we can just open up for Q&A.
Thank you, Robert. Jeff, if you wanted to take the stage and we could kind of do a Q&A session. Sure. We can just stand up. Yeah, we can make this really informal. I mean, Chelsea, give me the other side. If you guys want to be handed a mic, just let us know.
Yeah. I still learn every time I watch that. Hello. Hey, how are you guys? Andre and Jeff from BTIG. I wanted to ask, back early this month, the DIU announced that they're looking to expand their blue list with about 23 incremental systems. I mean, how should we think about that? Does that eat into your potential, Tam? I mean, how do you, yeah, assess the, I guess, the competitive dynamics around that?
I'll probably give you a little bit on that, and then Randy might have a little more, but they actually culled the list quite a bit. The list was much larger, and I think they brought it down to 23. But there's not many that are in our class. And if you look at our drone, it's probably the closest to what a DJI Mavic looks like, which is the most popular drone over in the Ukraine to do ISR, right? So almost every company was put out of business by DJI. So for us, there's still not a lot of competition. It takes a long time to mass produce drones. It takes years to stand up a factory, and you're not going to be good on your first rev.
So even though Eric Schmidt's building FPV drones now after going to Ukraine a bunch of times, I think everyone's finding out how hard it is to make an aircraft. It's very difficult to make it reliable and to do all the features that the warfighter needs. So I think we're pretty unique in the Black Widow space. But I'll say quads. There's a lot of quads out there, and quads are quads. In the Edge 130, that is such a unique bird. It has the longest flight time on the Blue UAS list, and we're actually expanding that flight time. So that's also got a great spot that I don't think has much competition coming behind it because a fixed-wing drone like that's very hard. FPV and going to be a ton of competition. Well, we need so many FPV drones.
If there's 20 companies making them in the United States, it's probably not enough companies. I mean, they're making millions of them in Russia. They're making millions of them a year in China. They're making millions of them in the Ukraine. And some of our numbers right now are from 2014. For the SRR, it's like 14,000 drones. That's a joke. And that's why Brendan's asked for $120 million each year for 2025 and 2026, 2027. So I think we're good with that blue list currently. May I ask a follow-up, or? Sorry. Yeah, I figured I'd just throw one in since I'm here. And you also mentioned that MRR could be an opportunity on the controller front. I mean, is it too early to size out what the revenue impact of that could be, or? Yeah. I mean, so there's three programs under that same one roof.
There's LRR, MRR, and SRR. LRR and MRR are years behind a production contract. They're kind of where we were two years ago at least. So we don't know what that is. I mean, we're all learning that budgeting from the government's a little difficult to gauge. So I have no idea what that would be.
Hi. Mike Latimore with Northland Capital. In terms of the SRR opportunity, you list 25-65 this year. And then there was another slide that talked about 120 per year for SRR. So should we think about 26 being in that 120 range? And then separately, Jeff, you had said that maybe FlightWave could be bigger than SRR next year. Maybe you could just elaborate on that a little bit. Yeah. So there's been some, I don't want to call them rumors.
It's probably the wrong thing, but to field all of the 14,000 systems for SRR, typically, as Brendan was mentioning, they like to do this in three-year cycles and get it into the warfighters as quickly as possible. That 14,000 number of drones, as we were just on the Hill a couple of weeks ago, every congressperson laughs at that number because it was written in 2014. Our numbers, we've been educating Congress, and they all have heard the numbers of 10,000 drones a month from The Wall Street Journal and such things. Currently, we're asking for about $120 million. We're asking for another $100 million for 2025, which is an interesting blessing from a continuing resolution because last year, all the forms for 2026 have to be into 2027.
Actually, today, for 2026 budget, we were on the Hill to make sure that we got our request, and we saw them go in for 2026, which starts on October 1. Because of the continuing resolutions going on so long, we got a new administration. Brendan's been able to go in and ask for another $100 million for 2025. And that is on top of the $20 million-$65 million that we gave for this year. That could be like a bluebird that just comes in out of nowhere. We're not guaranteeing it. We don't know the chances of that. So we expect, specifically with DOGE and this administration's focus and Secretary Hegseth's focus on drones, we expect drones like ours to get a lot more funds from this administration.
And not just Red Cat, anyone that's in this sub-big aircraft type of world that's really important for the warfighter right now. Great. And then just one tech question. So a lot of talk about AI and autonomy. Maybe can you just sort of summarize kind of where we've been with that category, where we are today, and where it's going to evolve to and what you can organically develop yourselves? I'm going to hit some of that and then push a little bit to Rob, but autonomy was part of the requirements for the SRR program of record. So we have some of our own autonomy that we've been using for years.
Artificial intelligence, we're not going to be able to compete or have the teams of actually really one of the only companies in the world that's actually generating revenue from artificial intelligence is Palantir to have their artificial intelligence on our drone is perfect. And we're never going to be able to compete with the Palantir and even some of the smaller startups that are looking at AI. I don't think why recreate that when we don't have the funds to do that.
Yeah, I can add maybe a little bit to that. I like to, when people ask about autonomy, I like to split it into two things, really, for drones like this. There's flight autonomy, which is basically keep the thing in the air, fly from waypoint to waypoint, right? And Red Cat is doing that, right? They have that.
And there's open-source things out there and a lot of tooling to help with that. But that is basically moving your rudders, firing your different whatever actuators on there to basically make the thing fly, stay in the air, and hit those different waypoints, right? Palantir doesn't even really do that part, right? Because it's mostly a solved problem for these drone companies. And then there's mission autonomy. Mission autonomy now is really where we're focused. And that's like, how do you take all the data that you have on the battlefield? Where's the good guys? Where's the bad guys? Where's the threats? Where's the SAM sites? Where's the RPGs typically at? And now actually construct that mission, so provide those waypoints, and then hand it off to a system like theirs. That's where I think our partnership is really going. And we do that elsewhere.
We've done some initial versions of it. We're excited to deepen our visual navigation partnership to really provide that level of autonomy where you can, and that's sort of the Maven integration that I was hinting at. It's basically that is already a platform program of record of basically understanding the battlefield to a deep level from the data perspective, right? If you can now take that and load specific capabilities or integrate that with the drone that's actually going to go fly that mission, that's a game-changing capability, so. Yeah, what he said.
Hi. You mentioned earlier this week on one of the platforms of some contract updates. Is there any updates that you are able to share right now on? Well, I think we're just standing by exactly what we said during our town hall that we expect to get our features.
I mean, he's with the Army right now. We were with him last week. The Futures contract will be signed any day. LRIP is still on track, we think, for March, which is what we said in November, and the mass production in the second half of this year, so those contracts haven't changed. There has been some stuff, and you might want to talk about some of the NATO stuff, Stan, because you deal with the sales and marketing team all the time. A bunch of people are saying Skydio won a thing in Poland. From what we know, it's about 20 drones for some police, but that's not what they stated on there, and I could be wrong, but that's what we heard, and then something in Spain, and that was also a small order.
That has nothing to do with the very large tenders that we're looking at. Maybe you can touch upon that, Stan, because you've been over there a lot recently.
Yeah. Again, kind of what you've been seeing in the news during the pandemic related to the tender that we're responding to. A lot of the RPs, again, this is kind of maybe a credit to Red Cat, the requirements that are being drafted for those RPs are actually specific to Black Widow. So I'm not saying that we're going to win them. I'm just saying that that's a good kind of leap forward that we have an advantage there that they're starting to build those requirements based on Black Widow requirements, so.
Thank you. I'm glad you went there. That was going to be one of my questions, and it tied into my last question. I appreciate it.
I was wondering if the current status of production had interplayed with what was taking place in those NATO countries. So are you able to comment? Are we currently producing Teal 2 or any Black Widow in Utah? And is there any product being produced for the Edge currently?
Yeah. So I was just at the new factory at FlightWave. They've done a great job standing that place up. I was very proud when I walked in there. I didn't know what I was going to see. The team's been doing a great thing. So FlightWaves are going to start shipping their first shipments in March, which is pretty exciting for us. It won't be a massive number, but it's going to be growing every week. We've increased their supply chain. We've increased their capability to build.
That fuselage that you see right there is very, very hard to build, and it's a competitive advantage the way they do it. To make it fly that long, it has to be that light. So there's some incredible technology that Trent and his team has done at FlightWave. So they're starting to ship next month. So it's nice to have two factories up and building. We've built a bunch of Black Widows, mostly for partners and people like Palantir and some other things we're working on with Palantir. Our sales team is out there now, going to be flying all over the place, all over the globe right now. We're pegged for demonstrations for months. But yeah, I think we made all the rest of the Teal 2s. We got some extra parts.
I think we saved about 200 Teal 2s right now because there's a lot of activity with Sentien and some groups I can't talk about on some pretty large swarm projects. So we've kept, and that runs on the Teal 2 currently. We want to make sure we can support the Sentien Hive, the 80-drone hive. I mean, they did some really interesting stuff. I'm not going to say where, how, and what, but we used the big 80-drone vending machine, as Stan put it. We kept 20 drones continuously in formation and went off and did mock missions, and we always kept 20 Teal 2s in the air. Really cool. Now, I got to hand it to Sentien because when we used to do, we had a product called the four-ship, which was multiple Teal 2s. We did some testing in the desert.
We could only get 16 drones with that radio that Teal 2 has in the air before stuff started dropping and falling off out of the sky, and they've been able to reliably do 20 of the Teal 2s. Now, we don't really care that much about the Teal 2. It's not our future, but the Black Widow is going into that hive next, so yeah, we're starting to work on the Black Widow now. We're getting ready for LRIP. We're getting ready for a lot of other contracts that we hope to be getting to you folks soon, so yeah, both factories are making stuff now. We're builders.
Hey, Glenn. Hey, Jeff. So curious. Stan talked a bit more about Asia than Europe, and I'm just curious about the temperature between the two markets and which you think would be more likely to be additive this year and in the near future and perhaps Replicator and what you can say if there's an opportunity to get involved with that.
I'll take NATO and hand to Stan the Pacific area. So NATO, I am still very, very bullish on. We woke up the other morning, and I thought all the defense stocks were going to crank before they all crashed again. It seems like that's what they've been doing a lot lately because Germany announced how much they're going to be putting into their 2% of GDP. Rheinmetall over there was taking off like crazy.
I got a great report from Goldman Sachs on the % of GDP of every NATO country what it's going to be over the next five years. And since that report's out there, people have reiterated that it's going to actually probably be much higher than that report, which isn't that old. So NATO defense spending is going to be pretty robust for quite some time. And Stan was recently in the region, so we'll have him hit up on the Indo-Pacific opportunities.
Yeah. So I was just in Malaysia and Korea just a few weeks ago, and I think one of the biggest takeaways was Korea is going to be a huge market. We're also looking at Korea as being potentially a great parts supplier for us. We're looking at non-Chinese parts to get things NDAA compliant and Blue UAS certified for the future.
We were there meeting with Samsung, right? We use their S23 phone right now. They introduced their S25 phone. So we're already starting to create pathways to continue that innovation with them and integration with them. When you start to look at more of the south part, Malaysia, Philippines, you guys, I'm sure, have already seen that there's reports of Philippine ships getting boarded by Chinese. All of those areas are going to become a hotbed, and it's going to be the small tactical drones. They're going to be able to be kind of from a shipboard and from littoral environments. They're not going to want the large drones that take a huge infrastructure to use and stuff like that. So it's going to be the small tactical drones, which is exactly, obviously, our market.
So yeah, I mean, to me, Asia-Pacific is going to be big within the next two years.
Just one follow-up. I was curious from Rob's perspective on the Warp Speed. I know you're more engineering side, so I don't know how much you're involved with the operations, but what you've seen as far as there's been some surprise that this company has got so many big contracts so fast and their ability to deliver on those, so what Warp Speed can do to help and what you've seen from the outside looking at.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of our commercial business does that every day, basically, where it's like, how do we partner with builders that are building things like this, right? That's not our business, but we know from the software perspective how to really organize that process and make it super efficient.
So that's what we're excited with. I think it's a perfect time to do this because you guys just got a big order. That's obviously going to scale. That's not easy to do. Everybody, I think, in this room knows that they're going to have to make some changes and having the robustness of Palantir software behind that. And it's hard to really communicate and have you appreciate really what that platform does, but it does integrations across the factory and business, right? And that is sort of Palantir's bread and butter, right, to really do that. So that we can do, we literally go into some factories, and within a day, we have a whole line item integrated, and all of that's now tracked in our system. So we can do that with them.
And then once you do that and then start tracking it, then it's like, okay, how do you add gas to that and really optimize it and, yeah, fuel it? Yeah. Just to add a little bit to Warp Speed on that. So we've been having, when I was in Long Beach, we were actually going through some of the stuff with Palantir on trying to get this implemented at the very beginning of this factory, which is really exciting for us. And when we had to do, I was talking to someone earlier, we had to use SAP in the past for parts, and you basically have this massive piece of crappy software that you have to lop parts off and take a leg, take an arm to try to make it fit to our stuff. And it's the complete opposite of what we're doing.
When we leave these meetings, the engineer's like, "I can't wait to get this implemented." Very different than our experience with SAP, so. Quick question. Just clarifying, when you guys are saying $120 million a year in funding, is that orders or? Well, we already have a program of record we have to fill for 14,000 drones. The Army and us are aligned on what we want to do with those 14,000. We want to get them fielded as quickly as possible. So I mean, it could be more than $120 million if we tried to field them all in the first year. So the demand is already there because we won the down selection for program of record. So that's not the issue.
Now, I posted actually this article, not an article, a printout from the NDAA last year from Congress that asked the Army to. The tone was basically, "Get your butt in here and tell us why we haven't fielded all of the SRR drones already." The Army went and had a response and said, "We would love to do that, but you haven't given us the budget to do so." So it's like they yelled at them and told them to come in there, and they're like, "Well, we'll do it immediately. Give us the money." But a couple of items that was in that ask from the Congress, from the Armed Services Committee, they said, "We not only want them fielded for all Army soldiers because we heard our soldiers don't have small drones, which they need.
We want every other branch to get this drone." It's very clear language. So the demand is not the issue right now. It's more about funding.
Okay. Thank you. Question back to Warp Speed. Rob, you mentioned the software support, the AI expertise, excuse me, there and all you're doing for Red Cat. Is there anything Warp Speed, whether it's Red Cat or anyone else, from a financial perspective, support there and supporting the American builders that you spoke to?
For sure. Yeah. I mean, Warp Speed is an implementation of our Foundry platform, which is used across a bunch of different industries, including the financials. So we do integrate. If Jeff and the team would want to go even a step further and do the financial part of it, we do that as well, and modeling and tracking and the accounting piece, that's a very robust use case.
Yeah, for sure.
Hey, this is Akshay from Endeavor Global. Quick question. Beyond SRR, as you think about the rest of FY 2025, what are some opportunities that you're most excited about? I think in the last sort of earnings call, you mentioned a lot of NATO contracts were looking forward to you guys winning the program of record for SRR and then kind of going down the pipe of down selection. So what are some opportunities beyond SRR that you're hoping to see crystallize this year?
Yeah. So a lot of people are frustrated on us not receiving NATO contracts yet, so let's just get that out of the way. We can't control large countries. I wish we could. If I could control large countries, I wouldn't have to make drones for a living.
But the demand for drones of that size that we see there on that back table, basically portable drones that can shape the battlefield, have a complete portable kill chain, are the future. They're not something that's like an old Reaper, which is easy to shoot down in that war. Not that Reapers are dead, but they wouldn't work in Ukraine right now. So I think NATO is still, other than SRR this year, I think some of the NATO contracts that we've seen that we're participating in trying to win and, as Stan mentioned, have based the requirements basically on the Black Widow, gives us a very high chance of winning some very significant contracts in the NATO region.
Now, in the middle of all this, we're starting to get a lot of asks and demand signals from a lot of different countries, including the United States, for Indo-Pacific. So I hate to say it, but it seems like there's no shortage of conflicts right now.
Just to add one more thing to that. The one thing to think about is, again, SRR does open a lot of doors because it does take actually the burden from a requirements perspective, airworthiness, all those things. So the international community can look at that and be like, "Yeah, if it's good for the U.S. Army, it's good for us." But that doesn't mean that the processes suddenly get shorter, right?
So that's one thing we have to keep in mind is that there's still a lengthy process with each one of these countries that still ultimately ends up in some type of either fly-off or demonstration event or something like that. So it's managing those expectations of time frames, right? Each one of those countries has a very specific type of time frame. But again, because we said before, we're well positioned to actually win a lot of those because a lot of them are based on the requirements on Black Widow.
Hi, Kevin Mack from Creek Drive. The $55 million guidance for non-SSR revenues, I'm wondering sort of what the basis for that number is. Is it sort of contractual backlog, or is it just sort of a sales funnel estimate? And can you have any thoughts on the variability on that 55?
Yeah.
I'll start with the FlightWave portion of it. Once we announced that we were acquiring FlightWave, we got quite a few orders from a lot of people that, like I said before, really liked that drone. One of them was the Border Patrol. I think we got about $13 million in FlightWave backlog. I'm not quite sure on that number, but it could have changed dramatically since then. We're halfway pretty much to the $25 million goal for FlightWave. It's basically traditional forecasting and projections from our sales force. Then for the $25 million for the Black Widow, other than SRR, I mean, we're in every branch of the service already with the Teal 2. The Air Force is actually our largest customer currently. The Air Force is a big customer now. We think the Border Patrol buys drones almost every year from us.
There's a lot of organizations just in the US. We think there's also some NATO stuff that's not programs of record. The stuff that we've been talking about previously, large programs. It's RFPs, whatever you want to call them, but they're very large-scale projects. A lot of them are actually, I'm not going to say names, larger partners brought us into these RFPs because everyone wants a drone the size of the Black Widow because that's the most successful drone in Ukraine, that format. So we get pulled along in some of those large NATO contracts by much larger companies, and they use us because every RFP says, "You got to have a drone of that size. You can't not basically fill it up." I mean, it's happening with the XM-30, which is now the Bradley tank replacement. That requires four SRR drones on each tank.
So I think there's a lot of opportunities to fill that 25 million of Black Widows that aren't SRR. I mean, even the swarming stuff we're doing that could end up being the Black Widows.
Rob Norwich from Goldman, you mentioned next year, Black Widow may not be the number one revenue driver. Can you speak more to that? What can you share? I'm just trying to get a little war between Salt Lake City and Long Beach. Well, I think there's such a need for, as you go into Indo-Pacific type of place, having something that can fly currently 65-plus minutes, possibly we think we can get it to an hour and a half. That puts that in kind of a, it can basically replace a Raven that was the most popular drone from AeroVironment. So they sold 18,000 Ravens over the years.
That program of record kept getting extended and extended and extended. Now, when the Raven had to start putting better cameras on it a couple of years ago, that 90 minutes for the Raven, which was a very liked time frame to fly, went down to like 45 minutes. So the reason I keep saying that the Edge 130 could do really well next year is because, again, it can do stuff a lot of quads can't do. So on the $80-120 million of revenue, any general guidance on gross margin, EBITDA margin that might produce?
Yeah. This is the part Wall Street's going to hate. We're trying to basically run as quickly as we can. This is a very, like I mentioned timing earlier.
This is a very unique time for a bunch of companies that are trying to make this technology, Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI, kind of the group of disruptors that are doing this, all these conflicts at the same time. We were building drones for SRR before Ukraine started. The good news is they compressed SRR because of it. So at this point in time, we're going to do everything we can to sell and make as many drones as we can. Now, we're not just going to be lighting money on fire like a lot of startups do, and I wrote a lot of checks myself for this company, and I'm the largest shareholder.
We did our modeling, and I've mentioned this a few times now. When we modeled the Black Widow budget before the end of last year, we were looking at how do we get to the material margins. You can't get over the material margins, right, in manufacturing. But you want to get as close to that as you start manufacturing. Our material margins are almost 50%. We're not going to get over 50% on the hardware yet unless we get deals on hardware and stuff like that. We think we can get there with four continuous quarters of building just the Black Widow in that factory. I'll give you an example of the Teal 2. We built the factory. We didn't make a single drone. We had fully loaded cost basis. We had negative 10% gross margins. Ouch.
The first quarter, we had $2 million in sales. We went to +10%-20% swing in two quarters. And then our next quarter was 30%, just making that same drone. And the Black Widow is based a lot on the Teal 2. So it's not like there's a million changes for our new production facilities, production lines. So we think we can, in four quarters, get to about the mid- to high 40s. And that's without our revenue share with Palantir and their software. So that's just pure hardware. So that's very achievable. And we get to a break-even per factory at around that 40-something% margins.
And just one on the regulations, the Beyond Visual Line of Sight, is that a definitive change that will happen next year, or is there still more things that have to happen? It will happen. Oh, he's got a mic.
Yeah. Thank you.
The notice of proposed rulemaking has yet to be published. The FAA has been given congressional intent in the previous FAA reauthorization bill to do it. So they have to do it. It's just a matter of time as to when they get to it. We believe it'll happen in 2026.
Since you mentioned it, Jeff, maybe a follow-up there on the Palantir revenue share. I know you mentioned it in the last earnings call. Could you give any more color there? I don't think we're ready to do that yet, are we, Rob?
Okay. All right. All right. No, we're ready to do that. Yeah, we're actually doing a 50/50 revenue share. We're not going to give the pricing away, though, so. Nope. That's perfect. Thank you. Yep, that was it.
Yeah, just one last quick one, Andrew, right? I don't know.
I just wanted to give you an opportunity. You sound like you were excited to perhaps expand on your speaking about the extra $120 million you went after and how you feel pretty good about it. I don't want you to say anything that you don't feel comfortable saying, but if you had more to share on that, give me the floor. Yeah, of course. Best way that I can capture it is we have an opportunity in reconciliation right now to add an additional $100 million to the $20 million that's already been appropriated for fiscal year 2025. Can't make any guarantees on that. It's actually a long shot, but we have another bite at the apple given the extension of the budget timeline. So we're going to take that bite at the apple.
We've already submitted for fiscal year 2026 an additional $120 million request for total funding for SRR, and we're going to continue that request going into 2027 and 2028.
I'll just add to that. A lot has changed since the budget was made in March 2024 for 2025. We have a new administration. They're pro-defense. They're extremely pro-drone. And everyone that we met with Congress was like, "What? How many are they asking you to make?" So I think, as you said, it's probably a long shot, but even the 20 to 65, 25 to 65 wide goalposts, as we now showed everybody, takes in some of 2026 first quarter. So that's why we're comfortable with that.
The army said before we left to go see the hill, they said, "If you get it, we'll spend it." Hopefully running has his third success after those two laws he got enacted.
We have a pretty good batting average so far, and we're confident that that's going to continue. Are you even able to give me more color on the status of the SRR contract being signed? That seems to generate a lot of, "Oh, nothing's been signed."
I've actually mentioned it a couple of times today, and nothing's changed. The contract any day, LRIP. I mean, that's why Hitchcock didn't come here because he's trying to get the LRIP squared away, which will be soon. And then mass production second half of this year. Absolutely nothing has changed on that.
Anyone else?
Well, we can all have some coffee now. Yeah.
So we're actually going to have some food brought in. You guys have plenty of time to just mingle, hang out. There's no rush to leave. But thank you so much for everyone for being here. Thanks for Jeff Thompson, for Robert and Brendan. And let's give it a round for Chelsea in the back who's been supporting. She's part of my marketing team. Thank you so much, everyone. Again, feel free to hop in. If you have any questions, feel free.