Teal Black Widow

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.

Yes. Teal Black Widow is independently verified in real-world operation on the DEPLOY registry, confirmed at named deployment sites with primary sources: not a concept, render, or demo-only.

Teal Black Widow is made by Red Cat Holdings, based in Puerto Rico.

1 verified deployment of Teal Black Widow is on the DEPLOY registry, including at Salt Lake City.

Teal Black Widow is in commercial deployment and is sold to operators; contact the manufacturer to buy, and see the pricing section for any recorded price.

Teal Black Widow has 2 regulatory records on the DEPLOY registry: DoD Blue UAS approval, cleared; DoD Blue UAS approval, active. See the Regulatory filings section for each agency source.

On the DEPLOY registry, comparable aerial robots to Teal Black Widow include Wing Delivery Aircraft, Skydio X10, Zipline Platform 2 (P2), Prime Air MK30.

Teal Black Widow and Wing Delivery Aircraft (Wing · 35 deployments) are both aerial robots on the DEPLOY registry. Teal Black Widow has 1 verified deployment on record. Compare both records for specs, safety, deployments, and verified-vs-claimed autonomy.

On DEPLOY's intelligence score, which blends verified deployments, safety, adoption, media, and IP signals, Teal Black Widow ranks in roughly the top 66% of aerial models tracked by the registry.

Teal Black Widow is at the production stage on the DEPLOY maturity ladder (research, prototype, pilot, commercial, production). Production stage means high-volume manufacture and commercial-scale deployments are sustained.

Teal Black Widow has no incidents on record in the DEPLOY registry. This does not constitute a safety guarantee; it reflects the incidents DEPLOY has tracked and verified to date.