My name is Mark Haley. I'm with Centri Consulting. We're a non-audit accounting consulting firm. We do a lot of capital markets work. It's my pleasure to introduce Red Cat Holdings and Stan Nowak.
Yes. Can everyone hear me okay? All right. Thank you so much, really, for having me here. As you can tell by my suit, I'm not the IR guy. I'm the marketing guy. It's really a pleasure to be here. Jeff Thompson had another opportunity he had to go chasing after. For this talk today, I'm going to walk through our solutions, where we're at with the business. If you guys do have specific financial questions, again, I'm going to tell you right now I'm not the guy. Just to let you know, we are going to be having an earnings call November 13, around that time frame, middle of November. That'll have all refreshed financial information for you. I'll just go ahead and start. For me, if you guys have any questions throughout, just raise your hand, and I can try to address it right then and there.
Real quick on the disclosure, put that up for a minute just to get screenshots, and we'll move forward. Like I said, we're going to talk a little bit about some of our subsidiaries, all the work going on with there, this idea of all-domain. I really want to hit that point with you guys on positioning Red Cat as an all-domain company and what that means. We'll go into specific drone solutions, some of the uncrewed surface vessels solutions that I'm sure a lot of you may have questions on. I'll start talking a little bit about developing an all-domain ecosystem, which is really where we're positioning Red Cat to be, and then how we're utilizing some of these strategic partnerships to get us to that goal. I started the company about three years ago.
That's just around the time that we divested two commercial-based drone companies called Fat Shark and Rotor Riot over to now a very strong partner of ours, Unusual Machines, who is now supporting us in our FANG program, our development program there. You fast forward to now. Now we have three main divisions: Teal Drones in Salt Lake City with our flagship product, the Black Widow, which I'll go into a little bit; FlightWave Aerospace in Carson, Carlifonia. They develop the Edge 130 tri-copter, which again, I'll go into a little bit. Now we announced recently our new maritime division called Blue Ops. I'll be honest with you, there was probably a lot of head-scratching going, and why is Red Cat going into the boat-building business? I'll get into that in a second as well. I put the other thing on here, this idea of future acquisitions.
We are as strong as our partners, and so we really believe in partnerships and lots of acquisitions moving over a period of time. That's how we're aggressively able to hit the market as fast as we have been and aggressively accelerating our technology forward through these partnerships. All-domain. It was definitely a concerted effort when I was brought on. I've been in the industry about 25 years, defense industry, security. The majority of that was actually at AeroVironment, now known as AV. I was specifically brought on to start positioning the company to be all-domain. What does that mean? A domain is land, sea, air, cyber. We've been able to, through not only partnerships with acquisitions and the announcement, obviously, of this new division, start to tackle that as an ecosystem.
When you look at the maritime domain expansion, one of the reasons why we decided to go in that direction was that right now we all know about Ukraine. We know that it's very much a land force battle. There is some naval stuff happening there, but it's very much a land force battle. Where is all this headed? We're starting to look at what is the next great conflict, which could be in the South China Sea. We're looking at thousands of island chains. We're looking at distances of hundreds and hundreds of nautical miles. Our small drones do have limitations. The limitations are endurance and range. How do we get our stuff closer to the fight? How do we get it to the folks that actually need it on the front lines? It's going to be through what we call marsupial deployment.
That's going to be through things like uncrewed surface vessels, as well as we announced some recent partnerships with AV and Edge Autonomy to allow us to integrate our small drone technology into their long-range reconnaissance drones, the P550 and the Stalker. That's where we actually have an advantage to start to partner with some of these other echelons within the Army, meaning medium-range reconnaissance and long-range reconnaissance. We can actually position our short-range reconnaissance drones into these larger marsupial deployments. When you look at the boats, those are going to be vessels that hold stuff. That could be munitions. That could be a variety of sensors, and as well, that can be swarms of drones. Now we're starting to look to a future where you have swarms of boats deploying swarms of drones and then allocating missions and co-ops to each one of those drones in the swarm.
That's the thought process on why we started going into the boats, as well as to align with the current administration's focus on the Maritime Action Plan, knowing that there's going to be funding available for bringing American shipbuilding back to the United States. We opened up a facility and are ramping that up in Valdosta, Georgia. What's interesting about that, that was actually previously a commercial boat facility. It already has the infrastructure in place to account for boat building. We're actually looking to rehire a lot of those folks that were laid off from the previous boat-building company. What's nice is that we're going to be, again, bringing back U.S. jobs into those areas in these small towns. Now, we look at multi-platform launch capabilities. Swarming is going to be a big topic. I'll talk about that in a little bit.
Swarming is not just a single problem-solving idea. There are a lot of facets to it, and we're actually tackling it from a bunch of different angles. Really what this is all boiling down to is this unified ecosystem. We all know Apple. The strength of Apple is not only just the one device. It's how all these devices are working together. You can think about that. I like to call it the internet of battlefield things. How are all these things connected on the battlefield? We're already working on the ecosystem that's going to support that type of warfighting in the future. Let me just go through our drone technology. This is much of an eye chart. For those who don't know, Black Widow, again, program winner of the Short Range Reconnaissance program with the U.S. Army. We've already started fielding drones.
How these programs work, you deliver in tranches of drones. We've already delivered a tranche, and there's going to be more happening down the road. We are still in low-rate production. That's the thing. When we start to move to full-rate production, you're going to see exponential hockey stick in the amount of drones that we're deploying based on need. What happens is you get those drones to the Army, and then they disperse them out to different units, whether it's in the United States or abroad. We're prime position. Manufacturing facility. We're doubling in Salt Lake City to an additional 25,000 square feet to meet demand as far as manufacturing. Just some basic, 45+ minutes flight time. That's kind of the conservative number. We've actually gotten almost 52 minutes of flight time off this drone for a drone this size. That's actually pretty unheard of in the industry.
We're getting that energy density of the battery more and more optimized as time goes on, as well as the weight of the aircraft. You can hold other, what we say, stuff. The stuff is usually defined by the end user. It could be anything from a blood bag to, yes, munitions. We are not a munitions manufacturer. It's the end users that define that. We've made it flexible enough to be able to accommodate those types of things, as well as being extremely modular. Going into the design of this, we wanted to make sure that the end users, those frontline warfighters, can actually not only operate it, but inevitably, you're going to take a hard landing. If something breaks, like a motor arm or a gimbal assembly, the warfighter can fix it on the spot. They don't have to send it back to us.
If they do have to send it back to us, that means they're without their tools that they need. We don't want that. We want them to be able to fix it. That's a differentiator for us. As I said, program winner, tranche two. We're in the LRIP contract right now, which was awarded back in July. We are looking at full-rate production to hit by the end of this year. Again, you're going to start to see a ramp up based on need from the U.S. Army. That being said, we also have the entire Department of War. It's not just about the Army. We have the Marine Corps. We have even naval assets, Air Force. You're going to start to see more proliferation of Black Widow throughout Department of War. We just announced a few weeks ago. Now we're talking from the international front.
Getting into that NSPA catalog was a critical step for us. That's a hurdle that we had, a barrier to entry. In order to even sell to NATO, you have to be on this list. The fact that we were able to accomplish that and satisfy a lot of the requirements that was being put on us by NATO, that is the first step to be able to sell to NATO. You have to be kind of listed in this catalog. Now that we are, you're going to start to see us actually open up to a lot more RFPs and tenders all throughout Europe. I'm actually headed to Poland tomorrow to go meet with NATO forces, a conference called Future Land Forces next week for this specific idea on how do we procure Black Widow systems into NATO.
As well as from the manufacturing side and quality side, we were able to get a certification for AS9100. That just shows you the amount of growth that we're having over a very short amount of time, that we're really ramping up for high scale and high rates of manufacturing, as well as then hiring Mitch McDonald. He's 15 years of manufacturing leadership. He's been able to come in and really kind of change the manufacturing line overnight to be able to scale. Edge 130, like I said, produced by FlightWave Aerospace in Southern California. This is a tri-copter. We're going through a whole optimization plan with this aircraft. The idea is that it's a very, very lightweight system. This idea of how do we make it robust enough to not only hold things, but also then tie into that ecosystem I was telling you about before.
This idea of incorporating the Doodle Labs network that we have in the Black Widow, it being able to fly off the web controller, which I'll show you in a second, all that takes time. We're going through an optimization plan to get this aircraft, which will then evolve into what we're going to call Trikon. Trikon will then be the name as part of the family of systems. FANG. FANG, now we've had some news on this recently. FANG is our FPV drone. As you guys probably heard that just based on reports coming out of Ukraine. This is our low-cost FPV technology that we've collaborated with, with Unusual Machines. We've just purchased, and I think we put this on a release, like $800,000 worth of components to be able to then assemble those into FANG systems to deploy.
Just announced today that this was now certified Blue UAS just within the past couple of weeks. That's just like the NSPA catalog in Europe. That now opens us up to government sales in the U.S. A lot more to happen with FANG as we move forward. Now we get into the USVs. There's going to be a whole family of these uncrewed surface vessels. The reason for that is that each size vessel, starting from a 5 m all the way up to an 11 m, are going to have a variety of different mission sets. We're starting with this Variant 7. This is technology that we've licensed from a European company. We're actually hitting the ground running. We're not having to spend time on R&D. Things are already designed. We're basically applying that design now to U.S. manufacturing, like I said, in Valdosta, Georgia.
With that package that we are licensing come these four different sizes of boats: 5 m, which will basically be a kamikaze one-way; the 7 m, which will kind of be a hybrid and will hold a variety of sensors, as well as potentially even drones; another form of hull called a W hull, which will be a 6 meter; and then all the way up to an 11 m style boat, which will be like a mini aircraft carrier. This goes back to what I was talking about before. If we're looking at the next future conflict, where is this all headed? I see, and Red Cat sees, deployment of boat swarms deploying then drone swarms. All of this integration is really what's happening right now. We're looking at five prototype systems that we're currently developing with our partners up in Maine.
They're called Hodgdon, which in the United States, they've been around for almost, I think, over 100 years of boat building. They're producing the prototypes for us. We're going to stage those prototypes throughout the country. The reason for that is to be doing continuous evaluation and testing with the U.S. Navy because there are different areas around the country. We can meet with them, listen to their needs, wants, and desires, just like we did with Black Widow in the Army. Through that, we'll be able to sell even internationally through potentially the U.S. Navy with FMS contracts. You're going to see a lot more growth happening in this as we expand the portfolio of the vessels.
Like I just said, USV prototypes are happening now, and then the 155,000 square foot Valdosta, Georgia facility and hiring from the local workforce there, as well as a West Palm Beach headquarters, which is going to be run by our President for that division, Barry Hinckley. Let's get into the ecosystem I was mentioning before. This is our web controller. It's called the Warfighter Electronic Bridge. Ergonomically, we went through, I think, 37 different iterations of this hand controller. We were aligned with the Army along the way. They had feedback. They held it. They wanted to see the buttonology, as well as the Samsung Phone S23 Tactical that's in there. Through this development. There used to be a program called SRoC, which was a specific controller program of record. That actually went away.
Through the Black Widow process, through the SRo process, we learned that the Army really liked this controller. They basically said, listen, just bring your own controller. We designed this in a very short amount of time, and they absolutely love it. Where this is going is that we're one of the only companies that uses ATAC. If you guys don't know what ATAC is, it's a battlefield management system within the U.S. military, as well as NATO forces. What it does is a common operating picture. What you can do with ATAC is that we worked with Booz Allen to develop a UAS tool, a command and control system in ATAC to be able to fly Black Widow. The idea is that we're going to now apply that to FANG, to the Edge 130, potentially even to the uncrewed surface vessels.
What that helps us with is not only to proliferate in the U.S. military because they're already using ATAC on all of their displays that are chest mounted, but also to NATO. They're also using ATAC. For us, that was a visionary thing to make sure that we're aligned with that, to have kind of this common operating picture, which is not easy to do. Again, like I said, we're one of the only companies that's doing that right now. Just a little bit more on the form factor of web. What I want to show you is this. This is where really we're headed. This is the future roadmap. Again, we're not there yet, but this is what we're working on behind the scenes.
This idea of this one controller, all domain, utilize or being able to command and control not only previous, like Teal 2, which is a legacy product, our Black Widow, the Trikon, like I said, which is Edge 130, our FANG product, as well as ground robots. When you start to see all this stuff being deployed then from uncrewed surface vessels, your mind starts to piece all these dots together that really, truly, all domain is where it's headed. That it has to be. The idea of NetWarrior, ATAC connectivity, plug-ins, and making our software as open as possible to accept third parties. We have the Red Cat Futures initiative that we started last year, which is an industry consortium. The idea behind it is that Red Cat knows what we're good at. We're good at the drones. We're good at the hardware.
We're good at the delivery systems of applications. Now what we do is we just partner with software companies, and we give them a seat at the table when we're meeting with government on a regular basis. What that does is that keeps our technology from being stale. The U.S. government, NATO allies, even Asia-Pacific, they're all going to be getting the latest and greatest technology on a regular basis based on these partnerships that we have. Just to talk about some of those capabilities, we have a very strong relationship with Palantir, and we just announced recently that we just did a new test of their VNav software, visual navigation. To our knowledge, it's one of its first of its kind for a program of record drone for Palantir to be able to support us on this.
Where this comes into play is, as we've seen in Ukraine, it's some of the most hostile environments when it comes to the battlefield. It's the jamming that's going on, the interference that's going on, contested environments all over the place. When we started to introduce Black Widow to that environment, we started to get regular data on a regular basis, and we're going to continue to go over there. That's the thing about when you're on the border of contested environments, it's a cat and mouse game with your adversary. It's not like you create a solution and all of a sudden it's fine forever. There's a dance that goes back and forth. You optimize, they optimize. You have to continuously do that. It's really much a game moving forward.
To have a trusted partner like Palantir to support us on this with their visual navigation, to be able to operate in those environments with no GPS, is a huge feat for, again, a drone our size. I'll quote Jeff Thompson here, is that at some point we're going to be at a point where we're not going to have GPS in any of our drones. We won't need it. Right now, GPS will become a redundant system, meaning as the operator is flying the drone along, you won't know if you're using visual navigation or GPS because you're going to swap back and forth if you're in a contested area or not. At some point, we could all see it headed where you're probably not going to have a GPS in it because you're going to be using visual navigation moving forward.
For those of you who don't know how visual navigation works, you use the IMU, the Inertial Measurement Unit, on the drone, which measures all the forces on the drone. Speed, everything like that. Combine that with data fusion of the sensor, and then what you're doing is that you have loaded maps on the drone on a global scale. For any of you, I was just explaining this earlier today, for those of you that live locally in the area, do you remember how you got here? Do you remember how you're going to get home? If you didn't have a map, could you? That's exactly what the drone is going to be doing. It's going to be thinking just like your brain.
Basically, using feature set mapping of various points of interest on the ground, whether it's a tree line or a vehicle or whatever, it knows exactly where it is in space. It doesn't need GPS. It knows its position. That's a huge feat, again, for something our size. Usually, this stuff is deployed on larger drones. This is really a huge thing for you. You're going to see a lot more happening in the future. On the flip side of that, from the manufacturing side, we're partnered with Palantir on their Warp Speed solution. This comes at the perfect time that we're starting this new division, starting this 155,000 square foot manufacturing facility for boats. Having Palantir as our trusted partner for scale manufacturing, efficiencies, all those things, we're going to start to look at them applying that and then across company wide.
I think the timing is perfect on this. We look at swarming. That's always a big topic. Sometimes people think of swarms, they think about kind of the replacement of fireworks displays. That's not really swarming. It's positioning drones in space, but they're not talking to each other. We're actually working on solutions where the drones themselves can completely operate in contested environments, talking to each other with very limited access to the end user. The second that you start to have signal go back and forth to the swarms, you give away your position. That's what you don't want to do. We're working on this with, again, trusted partners like Palantir and Sentien, and we're hitting it from all different sides. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a multifaceted problem. From the deployment of the drone swarms, Sentien Robotics has a Hive system.
Think of it as a drone vending machine. Anywhere from 12 drones- 80 drones can be launched at any given time, go out, perform missions, come back, get recharged, and then go out again. That can be deployed from a fixed position. It can be deployed on a mobile position, on the move. That's from a deployment, and that comes with fleet management software already. Then you get to the Palantir side. When the drones are suddenly deployed, how are they interacting with each other? How are they using data fusion on what's on the ground to suddenly decide in that moment, what do we need to do with, again, very limited throwback to the operator? That's where Palantir comes in. We're hitting it from a hardware and software side.
You're going to start to see additional relationships go moving forward on even more problem solving around the swarming aspect of it. Just kind of closing, just a little bit of our leadership team. We have some new members, like I mentioned, Mitch McDonald, President of Teal Drones, Shawn Webb, President of FlightWave, Barry Hinckley, now President of Blue Ops, Sandy Spaulding is actually now Senior Vice President of Blue Ops, and then Chris Ericson, our CFO. Geof f Hitchcock, who I've known for 20 plus years, again, former Air Force combat controller, he's our CRO, and then obviously Jeff Thompson. Any of the financial information here, I'm going to be completely honest with all of you. This goes back to June. Like I said, we are going to do an earnings call in the middle of November that will give you all fresh information.
I think the takeaway of a slide like this is really how we're poised for significant revenue growth. Obviously, the Short Range Reconnaissance contract, like I mentioned before, we are now in low rate production. That's going to move into full rate production. You're going to see a hockey stick of deployment of those drones moving forward to the U.S. Army. That's just one customer. Now with NATO and the NSPA catalog, you're going to start to see more procurement into Europe. We still have to go through RFP processes, just like everyone else, but we're more poised because of the NSPA catalog to be able to win those contracts. Edge 130, like I mentioned before, full optimization plan to evolve that forward into a family of systems. FANG, now that it's been compliant not only NDAA, but now Blue UAS listed, we just announced that today.
You're going to start to see that feel that, again, as our low cost solution. Blue Ops, the ramping of that, like I said, we plan to be in a low rate production phase within the first, second quarter of next year. Right now, we're doing prototypes that are going to be stationed around the country, like I mentioned before. I like this graphic just because it really tells about kind of the expansion. The red dots represent our tactical UAS, which would cover Edge 130, Black Widow, even Teal 2 sales and FANG. We're looking at market opportunities all over the world, not only just the United States. Obviously, there are opportunities in Asia-Pacific, which is a massive market for us. Like I said before, where's the next great conflict going to be?
Working with those partner nations like Korea and Japan, working with them on indigenous content because there are usually requirements for us to be able to produce stuff there. Those relationships are happening now. Like I mentioned, NATO, EU, big market for us, and Middle East. I'm going to be in Cairo, actually, in the first week of December at a show called EdX, specifically to talk about everything that I've just talked about to you today so they can get more knowledgeable on, again, greasing rails and procurement of our drone technology there. Where this differs from the uncrewed surface vessels is that we're starting with the U.S. Navy first. We want to be able to deploy through the U.S. Navy, and we can get international sales through FMS contracts, foreign military sales through the U.S. Navy. That's why you see those leaps out to the other continents.
That's the strategy behind that. This goes back to a laundry list of folks, not just military and defense. We're talking about security, other government agencies, Customs and Border Protection. We're going to continue to support fire safety management, Cal Fire, law enforcement, which we're going to start to break into as well. The markets are all there. Investment tail ends, but like I said, some of this information is actually not necessarily 100% current. Any questions for anybody? I will try to answer to the best of my ability.
How do we make money?
I'm with you. It's all about the ramping up. It's all about this interconnected battlefield being our sweet spot versus what our competition is doing. We know for a fact that we are not in a closed bubble. We are not designing single point solutions.
We are really trying to connect them all together, as well as then connect with other folks. This idea of partnering with AV, partnering with Edge Autonomy, even partnering with medium range reconnaissance drones. They're able to deploy our drones too. You're going to start to see exponential growth in just partnering with other echelons within the Army. What I can say is, again, coming from AV, I was there for almost 20 years. Back in 2005 is when there was a big RPUAV contract for Raven, half a billion dollar contract. There's a bunch of us that were at AV that are now at Red Cat. I can tell you all that Red Cat is in the exact same position that AV was back in 2005. It's literally the exact position. They had just won a half billion dollar contract, just like we were winning SRR.
You just see where the trajectory is going. Now the technology is even greater than what it was before. From a marketing person, that's where I sit.
Can you talk about what part, if any, is sourced, created, IP manufactured internally versus outsourced, and how that, if there is, how that supply chain works? What that does to the margin or what plans you have for the future to maybe consolidate and so on?
Yeah, yeah. Again, our strength is going to be through partnerships and acquisitions. From a manufacturing perspective, again, we have a very strong supply chain. Now, just like a lot of other companies, we weaned ourselves off of Chinese parts. That's how we've been able to get NDAA compliancy and Blue UAS certification.
That being said, that's been part of our model since the beginning to have the robust supply chain because that's really the only way we're going to be successful is to make sure that there's redundancy. That's the other thing we've also done is that there's redundancy in parts now too. If you look again, recently I said $800,000 of parts from Unusual Machines, components that we can now assemble into FANG products. That's really where our strong sweet spot is.
Any compliance issues as far as sales go to certain countries?
Yeah.
Because you're dealing with the military?
Good question, yeah. The question is, can we sell to every country? Are there countries that we can't sell to? Yes. The State Department lets us know exactly who we can sell and not sell to.
There is obviously a short list of countries that we can't sell to, meaning China, Russia, Iran, and so on.
European operation in Poland, is this financed by NATO or the Polish government also?
That's a good question, sir. Let me get your card afterwards, and I'll get the answer for you. I'll be in Warsaw starting on Saturday. I'm Polish myself. Let's talk afterwards. I'll get your card. All right. Thank you everyone.