Teal

Teal Drones is one of the American manufacturers actually winning military drone contracts rather than talking about them. Founded by George Matus and now the drone-making subsidiary of Red Cat Holdings, Teal went from the consumer-adjacent Teal One to the US-made Golden Eagle, an approved Blue sUAS system, and then into full military production with the Teal 2 and today’s Black Widow.

Black Widow is the aircraft carrying the company. The US Army selected it for the Short Range Reconnaissance program in November 2024, and in July 2026 the Air Force signed a $2.49 million contract to evaluate it as the successor to the Security Forces’ own Teal 2 fleet, an unusual contest where the incumbent and the challenger share a corporate parent. In a DroneXL interview in August 2026, Divisional CEO Mitch McDonald said the entire Air Force order was built and shelf-ready weeks before the deadline, and revealed that the Army spent a day inside Red Cat’s facility assessing AiN, the three-camera Palantir-powered navigation payload that could put Black Widow into a second program of record. The Palantir partnership dates to December 2024, covering visual-based navigation and the Warp Speed manufacturing system.

The company’s operational posture is the part worth watching: build ahead of demand, hold finished stock, ship within 10 business days, and claim the capacity to replace a thousand-system fleet in a month or two. In an industry where Pentagon procurement is actively hunting for DJI alternatives, that is the pitch the government wants to hear. The feed below carries every Teal and Red Cat story as we publish it.