Deployment

The Teal Black Widow is a soldier-borne ISR rucksack quadcopter made by Teal Drones, a subsidiary of Red Cat Holdings (NASDAQ: RCAT), and is recorded in the aerial form factor as the US Army Short Range Reconnaissance program drone. A hand-launched, foldable Group-1 quadcopter for single-operator short-range reconnaissance, it carries a Teledyne FLIR Hadron 640R+ electro-optical/infrared payload, an AES-256 frequency-hopping Doodle Labs radio, and a Qualcomm RB5 AI-capable compute module running FLIR's Prism AI stack, with about 45 minutes of endurance and roughly five miles of link range. It is primarily a manually piloted ISR drone with assistive autonomy such as forward obstacle avoidance and a radio-off stealth mode, so the registry frames any autonomous-drone characterization as an overclaim. Its load-bearing fact is verified: the Black Widow won the US Army Short Range Reconnaissance Program of Record in a production selection announced November 19, 2024, displacing the incumbent Skydio. The registry cap-flags the contract scope, however: the actual low-rate initial production contract is about 12.9 million dollars per a US Army FOIA disclosure rather than the larger figures used in management framing, and the often-cited 5,880-systems number is the Army's stated five-year objective, explicitly subject to change, not an obligated quantity, with a reported Tranche 2 expansion to about 35 million dollars. The common framing of the Black Widow as a Black Hornet alternative is corrected here: it is a different and larger class than Teledyne FLIR's roughly 70-gram Black Hornet nano-UAV and replaced Skydio on the platoon-level SRR program rather than replacing the Black Hornet. Red Cat is a cash-burning small-cap reliant on dilutive financing, with fiscal-year 2025 revenue of 40.7 million dollars driven by SRR deliveries against a 72.1 million dollar net loss, and the registry records the maturity as low-rate production.

Teal Black Widow by Red Cat Holdings · Catalog entry · 1 source · not yet field-verified