RCAT Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Operator (AI Assigned): The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ankit Hira, Investor Relations. Thank you, Ankit. You may begin.

Ankit Hira (Investor Relations): Good afternoon, and welcome to Red Cat's Q1 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us are Red Cat's CEO, Jeff Thompson, COO Christian Ericson, and CFO Christian Morrison. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today will include forward-looking statements for our future events at Red Cat's business strategy and future financial and operating performance, including Red Cat's target revenue. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict and may cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by those statements. Certain of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are discussed in Red Cat's SEC filings, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other SEC filings.

Ankit Hira (Investor Relations): These forward-looking statements reflect management's beliefs, estimates, and predictions as of the date of this live broadcast, 7 May 2026, and Red Cat undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available in the investor relations section of the company's website at ir.redcatholdings.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jeff.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Thank you, Ankit. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Red Cat's Q1 2026 earnings call. Secretary Hegseth last week at a hearing on the Hill announced that Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, DAWG, will have a $54 billion budget for drones, Drone Dominance, and counter, but also said it would be closer to $74 billion, and added that announcing a new unified command that would add to this $74 billion and is made in US only. This is 2027 funding, which is only 4.5 months away. On top of this good news, the DOD has stated they intend to spend the 2025, $156 billion reconciliation bill related to defense in fiscal 2026. It's not gonna go over three years now. Only $30 billion has been obligated through April. Fiscal 2026 also ends in 4.5 months.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): The funding has finally been turned on in a big way for 2026 and is magnitudes higher for 2027, specifically for UAVs and USVs. These are great tailwinds, let's get started. I am pleased to report we delivered record quarterly revenue of $15.5 million, representing an 849% increase compared to the same period last year. This is remarkable growth considering the government shutdown at the end of last year. I'm going to review our opportunity pipelines that tie into our target revenue with our multi-domain family of systems. We'll start with FANG and Drone Dominance, then FlightWave TRICHON, of course, the Teal Black Widow, and then finally the Blue Ops fleet. Then Christian Ericson will review operations. Then Christian Morrison will review financials, and then we will take your questions. Let's start with FANG and Drone Dominance.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We are gearing up for Gauntlet 2 in August. We have been working with the DDP and believe this will be a much smoother and realistic competition. FPV drones, which are called shooters, need a sensor to complete the sensor shooter kill chain. We believe we are the only made in USA company with a Blue UAS approval sensor, Black Widow, successfully deployed in Ukraine and other theaters. We believe that 350,000 FPV drones would need between 10,000 and 17,000 Black Widows, depending on ratios of sensors to shooters. Red Cat is integrating our targeting from the Black Widow into FANG and other FPV partners. This gives us tighter integration into the kill chain and a competitive advantage. FlightWave. Our first demo TRICHONs are being delivered in a few weeks. The features on this new version are stunning.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): The demand for the Edge 130 has always been significant, as you know, it is too fragile for warfighters. We'll be updating the street in the upcoming months, believe this can be a winning drone in sweeps this year. On to the Black Widow. We could spend an hour on what we've been doing with the Black Widow. The Black Widow is currently in 3 theaters. Word spreads fast when you have a combat-proven capability and the scale to produce them. This led to an invite to the Pentagon to share lessons learned as a successful platform in the most contested battlefield in the world. Most importantly, we want to bring these capabilities back to the US warfighter. The Black Widow is EW proven and capable, proven in GPS-denied battlefields, flight time of 52+ minutes and over 10 km range.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): These features have positioned the Black Widow with a large opportunity pipeline for 2026. This pipeline consists of the US Army with our final LRIP contract soon and the OTA, Marines, Air Force, Drone Dominance, Ukraine, Japan, Philippines, and Taiwan. We currently have the supply chain and inventory to build $220 million worth of Black Widows and can step on the gas if needed. As we reported last quarter, the Ukraine opportunity could be for over 100,000 Black Widows. We are completing the final integrations actually this week and hope to have them tested next month in theater. Let's talk about the Blue Ops fleet. The Valdosta factory is operational. We have started 3D printing the 5-meter boat. We have approximately 145 fiberglass hulls to be built this year, and we will have approximately 100 3D-printed boats.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): That's a potential of approximately $150 million in USV sales this year. The Variant 7 has received a lot of attention recently, with President Trump talking about the machine gun that is mounted on the Variant 7. The machine gun is made in US by our partners, ACS. This combination is very powerful. The Strait of Hormuz has been a great example of the need for this type of weapon system. Our team is in the region now by invitation, and we believe we will be a very valuable partner in the Arabian Peninsula. We have also been invited to INDOPACOM next month and will be participating in the RFP for the 1,300 USVs in Taiwan, which will be awarded Q1 next year. Look forward to your questions, and we'll hand it over to Chris.

Christian Ericson (COO): Thank you, Jeff. Good afternoon, everyone. Our operational performance in Q1 2026 reflects the strength of our execution capabilities and our ability to scale efficiently in response to unprecedented demand. We achieved remarkable operational metrics by supporting the $15.5 million in quarterly revenue, while simultaneously improving our gross margin to 13%. The increase in margin is a testament to our operational discipline and process optimization while significantly scaling our manufacturing footprint more than 500% year over year. We expect our margins to continue to improve through 2026, moving us closer to our ultimate target gross margin of 30%. Now, as a point of emphasis, please note our current manufacturing footprint is specifically designed for growth and efficiency and can support well over $1 billion of annual revenue between our UAVs and USVs.

Christian Ericson (COO): The operational landscape has evolved dramatically with customers demanding faster delivery cycles and enhanced performance specifications. We've responded by investing strategically in our supply chain resilience and manufacturing capacity, enabling us to meet accelerated delivery timelines while maintaining the rigorous quality standards essential for military applications. Our inventory and prepaid inventory position of $62.7 million demonstrates our proactive approach to securing critical components and positioning ourselves for continued growth and acceleration. During the quarter, we successfully navigated several operational challenges, including supply chain complexities associated with specialized drone components and temporary disruption caused by the federal government shutdown. We addressed these challenges through diversified supplier relationships, strategic inventory positioning, and enhanced production planning. Our team's agility in adapting to these conditions while maintaining delivery commitments underscores the robustness of our operational framework. We are committed to continuous innovation and next-generation platform development.

Christian Ericson (COO): These investments have yielded significant product enhancements across our drone portfolio, with particular focus on extending flight endurance, improving payload capacity, and enhancing autonomous navigation capabilities. Our engineering teams have successfully integrated advanced sensor technologies and improved communication systems that provide superior situational awareness for operators in the field. The Black Widow platform continues to set industry benchmarks with its exceptional reliability and versatility in diverse operational environments. Recent enhancements include upgraded imaging systems with enhanced low light performance, extended battery life providing up to 52 minutes of flight time, and improved weather resistance capabilities that enable operations in challenging conditions. Just this past month, the Black Widow became the first Group 1 UAS device to successfully integrate with Anduril's Lattice platform. We have integrated the Black Widow with SignLink, Ukraine's battle-proven satellite-free GPS-denied positioning network system.

Christian Ericson (COO): The SignLink integration completes the development phase, and birds will be delivered to Ukraine at the beginning of June for validation testing and the final step to start replacing hundreds of thousands of Chinese-made drones in Ukraine. These improvements directly address customer feedback, operational requirements, and strengthening our competitive advantage and customer satisfaction levels. Our newly acquired Apium Swarm Robotics capabilities represent a quantum leap in coordinated unmanned operations, enabling multiple drones to operate autonomously as a unified system. This technology provides unprecedented tactical advantages, allowing for complex mission profiles, including coordinated surveillance, area coverage, and synchronized data collection that would be impossible with individual isolated devices. Red Cat's unique value proposition lies in our integrated ecosystem approach, combining best-in-class hardware with sophisticated software solutions and comprehensive support services.

Christian Ericson (COO): Our platform delivers a unified client experience from initial deployment through ongoing operations, with intuitive control interfaces, real-time data analytics, and seamless integration with existing military command and control systems. This holistic approach reduces training requirements, accelerates deployment timelines, and maximizes operational effectiveness, creating substantial value for our customers while building long-term partnership relationships that drive recurring revenue opportunities. With that being said, I'll now turn the call over to Christian to discuss our financial results.

Christian Morrison (CFO): Thank you, Christian. I'm pleased to present Red Cat's financial performance for Q1 2026, which demonstrates steady improvements, strong operational leverage, and the scalability of our business model. For Q1 2026, revenue was $15.5 million, representing an increase of 849% from $1.6 million in the prior year period. This performance was primarily driven by continued drone deliveries under our US Army Short Range Reconnaissance program, deliveries of our Black Widow drones to a European NATO ally, and deliveries of FlightWave Edge 130 drones. These deliveries reflect increased order volumes, enhanced manufacturing capacity, and an expanding geographic footprint, coupled with diversified product offerings. We believe these results validate the strength of our core business as we move into a significantly larger phase of growth.

Christian Morrison (CFO): Our gross margin performance was also impressive, improving from negative in Q1 2025 to positive 12.7% in Q1 2026. This improvement into positive territory reflects the operational leverage inherent in our business model, improved manufacturing efficiencies, and better cost management as we scale our production volumes. The positive gross margin improvement marks a significant inflection point, demonstrating our ability to generate profitable revenue growth. Our strategic investments in future growth were substantial during the quarter. Operating expenses increased to $29.3 million, driven by investments in personnel and infrastructure to support the scaling and volumes required to achieve the significant revenue growth we expect in 2026 and beyond. We continue to focus on research and development expenses, which increased to $8.0 million during the quarter, reflecting our commitment to innovation and next-generation platform development.

Christian Morrison (CFO): These investments are critical to maintaining our technological leadership and expanding our addressable market opportunities across military, government, and commercial applications. Capital expenditures totaled $6.8 million during the quarter, which primarily included manufacturing equipment and facility improvements at our Blue Ops USV division in Georgia and other company-wide infrastructure to support our production scaling requirements. Our balance sheet strength and liquidity position provides a solid foundation for executing our growth strategy and capitalizing on the significant opportunities ahead. As of 31 March 2026, we maintained exceptional liquidity with net working capital of $190.6 million, this representing a robust current ratio that ensures our ability to meet operational obligations and invest in growth initiatives without financial constraints.

Christian Morrison (CFO): Our cash position of $131.9 million reflects our strategic deployment of capital to support rapid business expansion and inventory positioning for anticipated contract fulfillment. The substantial inventory and prepaid inventory balance of $62.7 million represents a strategic investment in securing critical components and positioning ourselves for accelerated delivery capabilities. This inventory build reflects our proactive supply chain management and confidence in our contract pipeline, ensuring that we can meet customer delivery requirements in an environment of strong demand while mitigating potential supply chain constraints. Looking ahead, we are confident in our ability to deliver strong financial performance for the remainder of 2026. Our target annual revenue for the short to medium term is expected to be between $150 million and $180 million, representing significant growth compared to 2025.

Christian Morrison (CFO): As revenues materialize over time, we expect gross margins to approach 30%. Several key factors are driving our target revenue. First, the resolution of the federal government shutdown has cleared the path for accelerated contract execution and payment processing, eliminating some temporary headwinds. Second, our strategic inventory positioning ensures we can meet aggressive delivery timelines without supply chain delays. Third, our Blue Ops division is trending ahead of schedule in its production capabilities of USVs with increasing demand signals. In addition, our recent acquisition of Apium Swarm Robotics and our pending Quaze Technologies acquisition expand our addressable market and enhance our competitive differentiation in high-value segments. It is important to note that we expect increased revenues as we anticipate our Blue Ops and FlightWave divisions will begin to provide meaningful revenue contributions.

Christian Morrison (CFO): The timing of our Short Range Reconnaissance program deliveries, combined with the letter of request from the Armed Forces of Ukraine and our ever-growing international contracts that include NATO and INDOPACOM allies and other opportunities in the Middle East represents significant growth opportunities. Market conditions remain exceptionally favorable, with global defense spending continuing to prioritize unmanned systems and our ability to continue to unlock substantial international opportunities. The increasing urgency around drone technology adoption, demonstrated by accelerated procurement cycles, supports our expectation of continued strong demand through 2026 and beyond. With that, we're now happy to answer your questions. Operator, will you please open the line for Q&A?

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand icon, and I can give you permission to unmute your line. One moment, please, while we poll for your questions. Our first question has come from the line of Mike Latimore with Northland Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): All right. Excellent. Thanks very much. All right. Can you hear me?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yes.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): [crosstalk] Yeah.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Okay, perfect.

Christian Morrison (CFO): We can hear you now. You went blank for a little while.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): All right. Thanks. Great. Maybe just a little clarification on the guidance. You guided to a certain range, you know, very strong growth relative to 2025. You said short to medium term range. Can you just sort of clarify what that means a little bit?

Christian Morrison (CFO): Our target revenue of $150 to $180 is, you know, it says it right there, annual, so short to medium term. We are, you know, we've spent, you know, the last almost 8 months in Ukraine, you know, working on the Black Widow to get it to where it is. It's very interesting because we're one of the only people that are doing this. Everyone says they're not gonna use stuff in the US Army or any other of these contracts in the US unless it works in Ukraine. If you looked at our competitors, specifically in this range of drone, they're making crap that hasn't changed in 2 years. Our drone changes every 3 weeks.

Christian Morrison (CFO): With that, we have been able to build an amazing opportunity pipeline for just the Teal is close to, like, $700 million. Now that the funding has been unleashed, we are, you know, we are ready to perform. We have everything we need to start shipping. We are proven. Everyone likes the equipment. Everyone likes what we're doing. We also just got I don't know if you saw the announcement by the Air Force about the F-35s working with the Black Widow, displaying our screens there. That target revenue of $150 to 180 million, we are very comfortable with, considering again, the opportunity pipeline just for the Teal Black Widow is almost $700 million.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Got it. Okay. Nice. Jeff, you gave some numbers on the production volumes for the USV this year. Can you just mention those again? I didn't quite get them passed by then.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Is that going to go into inventory? Is that to support programs, or is that like? Maybe a little more clarity on that.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah. you know, as you know, Blue Ops did not exist and seven months ago, eight months ago now. A lot of you on this call have been to our location during, you know, innovation day. That location is filled with potential customers every week now, from every branch, from every agency. We got invited to an exercise recently, and I can't talk about it, but we are crushing it. The demand and the opportunity for Blue Ops is massive. As I mentioned, we were invited to the region of the Strait. That wasn't us, we were invited by some very important people. We do have some hard constraints when you're building boats.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): They're much bigger and larger than, you know, than what Mitch is building for the Teal Black Widow. I mean, Mitch could turn it up.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): From $220 million to $500 million very rapidly and very easily. He's gonna be building $221 million no matter what this year. But with the boats, we, you know, because we only had one mold, now we have two molds. We're limited by molds and tooling to make boats. We can't make the tooling go any quicker. They're hard to make, and they take time. Our first year, we're making more than we said earlier. We're gonna make 145 fiberglass hulls. That is, and we believe they're all going out the door. And then on top of that, we just started printing this week the 5-meter, more Kamikaze style-5-meter 3D-printed boats.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Now, you notice that I said that's about 245 boats altogether. I only said, you know, it's only $40 million probably, if we sell all those plastic boats, and about $90 million if we sell all of the fiberglass boats this year. We can sell the plastic 3D-printed, 5-meter Kamikaze boats very inexpensively and with still great margins. Now, as Christian talked about earlier, as we, you know, the Teal 2 went from -10% to 10% to 20%, then to 30% gross margins. We believe we can replicate that with the Black Widow.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): That, that gross margin that we're trying to get to in Q4, you know, just trying to close in on that 30%, would change dramatically if we sell more boats. If we sell all these boats, you know, that margin would go up. And we haven't put anything in from any of the software from Palantir, which is still moving along. We actually have another meeting with them tomorrow. People are now starting to want to look at visual navigation. As we're in multiple theaters, we're getting a lot of interesting demands for that software.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Got it. Great. Last on the, you talked about the FAANG opportunity, Drone Dominance, and the need for the Black Widow and better sensors in that program. If they bought these Black Widows for the Drone Dominance program, would that come through the funding for Drone Dominance, or would that be a separate allocation?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Well, this has been a discussion with all the people that are involved there, and we've been trying to help them. So, I think what Drone Dominance is about $1 billion, if I'm correct. So if you're gonna buy 350,000 FPV drones, they're useless without a sensor, which I mean, the way they're used, and we're in theater every single day, is a drone like the Mavic 3, typically from DJI, finds the targets and then tells the FPV drones where to go. They don't just go out and search for them because they have horrible cameras in their analog. It's like driving through snow.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): The way they're used in Ukraine has a sensor, which is an ISR drone similar to the Black Widow, and we're hoping to replace all them. If you buy 350,000 drones and don't have a sensor, those 350,000 FPV drones are actually useless. People are starting to get that. They're gonna start having ways to have a sensor shooter in the Gauntlet. If you look at different ratios, we did a low ratio, we did a medium ratio. We didn't even do a high ratio. That's 10 to 17,000 Black Widow style drones. You can't get around that. If it's not us, it's gotta be someone else. By the way, our competitors, their drones, they don't work. They're crap.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): They haven't changed them since 2024. We change ours every, you know, 3 weeks. You know, they're a requirements document. That's what they do. They go to requirements, and they build crappy drones. You know, Sorry, I digress.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Got it. No, that makes sense. Very good. Well, that covers it for me right now. Appreciate it.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Great. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Latimore (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Thank you.

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you so much. Our next questions come from the line of Austin Bohlig with Needham. Please proceed with your questions.

Austin Bohlig (Equity Research Analyst): Can you guys hear me?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yes.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah, we can hear you now, Austin.

Austin Bohlig (Equity Research Analyst): Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just first one, just wanna go back to kinda like the new updated guidance. I think historically you guys have provided some like granularity on like what's Black Widow, FlightWave, USV. Would love any additional color of how we should be thinking about the different buckets driving this outlook.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah. Well, that's a great question. As I was mentioning in our opportunity pipeline, we've got I'm not gonna give exact numbers for each customer. You know, with the Army, you got LRIP, which we're working on our final contract for that, so that'll finally be over with. We go into OTA, which we've been simultaneously negotiating, but it's very linear with them. We also have other branches in the armed services that are, to be frank, some of them are bigger than SRR. The SRR is such an antiquated program.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): It's really hasn't kept up with the numbers compared to other branches that are now getting their funding and looking for ways for their soldiers to get products that actually work in battlefields. Drone Dominance is another bucket. I'm just talking Black Widow right now, Austin Bohlig, for your models. Drone Dominance is also, we believe, is gonna be a pretty good bucket for us for the end of this year and into 2027. We've got Israel is gonna be a part of this. The Air Force, which they put out their own announcement about the Black Widow working with the F-35s. We don't know how big that's gonna be. I think there's about 500 of those.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Then Ukraine, we didn't even put Ukraine fully into our opportunities pipeline because the opportunities pipeline would go from like $700 million to $2 billion immediately. We're giving some caution around Ukraine until we get through next month. That has actually been our focus. Ukraine You know, if you own a business and, you know, everyone's asking, Hey, OTA, OTA. I'm like, Did you guys not listen to the last call? We could replace hundreds of thousands of drones in Ukraine, and they want them, and they need them. We talk to them every week. That should be the focus.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): To be frank, the Army probably won't make it into the top three of customers on revenue this year, even though they're gonna be a great staple and a great platform. Ukraine's another bucket. Japan, we announced recently, they're continuing to buy. We have an incredible trip, to, you know, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan next month. We'll hopefully be able to update the Street on some of those adventures. That's just the bucket for Black Widow for your modeling, okay? When you go into Blue Ops, we are physically limited, by the amount of boats we're gonna make of about, you know, 245 boats made this year, which is phenomenal.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Going into 2027, we hope to get to that 650 to 1,000 at least, you know, production numbers that we can get to. Blue Ops, if you capped it at, you know, mostly V7s, but there are gonna be some V5s. We're making V5s and V7s with the 3D printing, so we can use that to listen to customer feedback as we're doing that. That one kind of has a cap, unlike, you know, Mitch McDonald, the president of Teal, can step on the gas from that 221 that he's building this year, in a month, and change dramatically how many drones we can deliver.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): FlightWave, we still have that pinned at around $40 million in production this year, in H2. You know, if you put all that, just the production that we can do that we're gonna do no matter what, it's $388 million in 2026.

Austin Bohlig (Equity Research Analyst): Okay. That's super helpful. I guess kind of like going down the P&L, it might be a better question for Christian. How should we be thinking about kind of OpEx throughout the year on a quarterly basis? Is what you guys did on an absolute a pretty good run rate? How should we be thinking about that?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): That's gonna go up a little bit in H2. It just naturally has to. It's within the realm. I'd probably flex it up maybe 15%, 20% for H2.

Austin Bohlig (Equity Research Analyst): Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for the questions.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah, you bet.

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you so much. Our next questions are gonna come from the line of Brian Dobson. Brian with Clear Street, please proceed with your questions.

Brian Dobson (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Hey, thanks so much. Thanks for taking my questions.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah, welcome Brian.

Brian Dobson (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Yeah, thanks. How important is the integration of Anduril's Lattice into your weapons systems? You mentioned that Black Widow is now in the system. Do you believe that's gonna be a gold standard for Pentagon procurement?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Well, I can take that because I've been involved pretty deeply with that. Thanks for the question, Brian. Nice to finally meet you. There was notice yesterday throughout the Army that we got that if you're not integrated into Lattice, you're not working with the Army is kind of the message. I just paraphrased that. It's not the exact wording.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): The event that we were at last a few weeks ago, we were the only people there from the SRR program and that had integrated and has actually integrated into Lattice, as Christian Ericson mentioned earlier. Yeah, I believe that if you're not integrated into Lattice, you're gonna have some problems, you know, going forward. There, you're gonna get forced to do it no matter what.

Brian Dobson (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Yeah, very good. I guess just shifting gears a little bit. On Blue Ops, you know, unmanned surface vessels, relatively new domain for the company. You know, maybe you could just give a little bit of color on what you see as the opportunity there over the next two or three years, and how you view demand evolving not only from the United States, but from our allies, when compared with, call it, air system demand.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah. The bottom line is Blue Ops could probably surpass all of the UAVs next year. The demand, you know, you know, let's face it, 70% of the world is, you know, water. We can launch our other products from this, but the market is massive, and there's not a lot of quality players.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We started as boat builders, and what we're seeing a lot, I can't give any details, we've been in a lot of situations where our competitors' boats are failing and ours are actually prevailing. Because we started as boat builders, and we build sturdy boats that can get smashed around and are very high quality, and then you put your tech stack on it. If they can't handle the ocean, the ocean eats everything. There's nothing it doesn't wanna eat. You have to make your boats super reliable, specifically when they're going as fast as ours go and when they have the capabilities that ours have. A human couldn't stand on that boat.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): They would get sick or get hurt doing the turns and the speeds that we're doing it. Now, add the payloads, which makes us super unique, you know, we're talking about the president talking about these machine guns from ACS. They are great anti-FPV and anti-Shahed killers. This is a very sought after combat weapon system right now all over the globe. We are over there now. And it's very important for us. And we think that our allies will be buying a lot of USVs. And we came out of this. The interesting part is drones had never been mass manufactured in the United States.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): The boat industry has been going on for hundreds of years, and we got the best boat builders, we believe, in the world. We started with high, high, high quality and based on a 3rd generation product that's already been in theaters. We had a kind of a head start, which put us at the front of the line, and now we're competing and we're proving everyone that we do have what we believe is the best USV out there. Now we can do different sizes. We went from, you know, whiteboard to floating in the water by December with our first boat. Now we can compress that down with 3D printing to weeks. We can try new models.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): And now our mold capability, we can actually start making our own molds in the next few months, so we won't have to rely on people to make our tooling. We'll make our own tooling. The opportunity for the USVs is massive. It also helps create a combined, you know, we can put our Black Widows on there. We can put the TRICHON™ on there. You know, we've partnered with ACS. There's so many payloads that wanna be on our boat right now. We are getting massive traction with the Variant 7 right now.

Brian Dobson (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Yeah. That's great. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think some of your boat builders came from Hinckley Yachts. Slightly different application, but impressive maritime heritage. Just one final one for me. You made some exciting tuck-ins during the quarter. You know, how do you see these benefiting the broader platform? And how are you thinking about M&A going forward, right? In terms of your desire to either develop tech in-house or go out and buy it.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We, you know, we've kind of been doing both because I mean, we built Blue Ops, as you, as you know. Thank you for, you know, noticing that, you know, we've got one of the best premier families. We're working with Hodgdon Yachts as our prototype shop, another premier boat builder. You know, we developed that entire tech stack in-house. There's other things that we will acquire. We wanna have a lot of vertical integration so that we own the entire boat, we own the entire drone, all of these things. We do a little bit of both. Now that we have Apium to be able to do our swarming, everyone keeps talking about swarming, but no one can do it reliably. We're pretty excited about Apium.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): None of the Apium's revenue is in our target revenue. Nothing from Quaze is in there. You know, we're excited to show our swarming capabilities, 'cause now it's starting to show up in all the requirements across the DOD. We are very happy that we're bolting that on. We can also swarm our boats with their technology.

Brian Dobson (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst): Thank you very much.

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you so much. Our next questions come from the line of Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please proceed with your questions.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Hello. Can you hear me?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yes. We got you, Jon.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Hey. I'm kind of brand new to this story, but the other questioners have been very helpful. Could you elaborate a little bit on what the shutdown cost you?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We don't have any details on that, but just the delays alone, you know, people are, you know, even though during a continuing resolution year, you're usually allowed to use an amount up to your previous budget. For the entire SRR program, it was only $70 million. That's not much for them to be able to say, "Hey, we got money to push around." We ended up getting $40 million out of that, you know, once the shutdown was complete. It's just delays. I don't think that it's going to cost us total. I think it's just got pushed out a month or two. We're just like everyone else that's in the defense industry.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We are all feeling the spigot turn on the last couple of weeks. The money's loosened up. There's a ton of it coming. All of that, you know, $130 billion from the that they released for defense, it has to be spent now if they're gonna do it for fiscal 2026 by the end of September. Then the budget, which was hundreds of millions of USD, is now $74 billion with whatever they're gonna add on with unified command for drones, counter drones, USVs, and Drone Dominance. The drone, which starts 1 October, just, you know, 4 months away. Now that we have budgeting on time, like the year before, we didn't have a budget.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): At least this year we have a budget, and next year we have a massive budget. I don't think there'll be delays, but you can never tell with government. We are hoping it stays smooth. The numbers are so large, you have to be able to produce. We can produce, so we're pretty excited about that. We don't see it as a loss. We just see it got moved to the right in the timeline.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Okay. I know you were ranting earlier about competition.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Is there a competitor you're worried about or respect?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Yeah, in the, you know, I would say more so in the boat space, 'cause I mean, we went in a down selection process. You know, there was a clear winner. Those are the Army's words, not ours. If you don't change your bird at all, if it's a two-year-old bird, that's not gonna make it, so that doesn't really scare me. Where we're in, we're in the front. We're ankle to ankle with the Ukrainian war fighters, you know, at the zero line, we're changing our birds all the time. We have some great team that's doing that for Red Cat. We're continuing.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We're already in three theaters now because of this method of showing our products to people is, Let's go to the front line and do that. Our product changes every three weeks right now. It's probably gonna go down to a week or days. We have an office in Ukraine now, and we're gonna be hiring some local coders. We're gonna be going really fast with the Black Widow, and our competitors are going really slow. In the boats, there are some, you know, people that have been around for a long time, like Kraken. I'm not gonna say the same types of things about them. Well, obviously, Saronic. I think they moved up to, like, the bigger boats.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): They're probably, you know, we haven't really seen them in theater yet with us. They're probably a good company. You've got BlackSea, which makes the GARC, which, you know, when we were at Portugal, I don't think they won anything there, I'm not sure about them. What you will see, I think, in the boat industry, you're gonna see us do really well by our performance as a boat builder.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): What's very, very unique, which I've said it a million times about the Edge 130 and now the TRICHON, it does stuff that no other drone does, and it had huge amounts of demand, but we did not wanna put a bad taste in people's mouths and ship them these drones, and they break in a couple of weeks. Actually, we brought them to Ukraine with our new radio systems in them just to test them. They loved our fixed-wing solution, the bird barely lasted a full day. That bird is probably the most unique with competitive advantage than our other products.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Okay. One question about the sensor you make for your drones. Do you make that sensor yourself, or is that outsourced?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Well, sensor's just kind of a term for sensor shooter. The sensor is the Black Widow drone. In, like, let me back up 'cause a lot of people do not understand how this works with FPV drones. They've never been to Ukraine. They've never worked with these people. When they have these teams that have a bunch of FPV drones with them, and they don't go out and just search for targets. They have an ISR drone. Typically, right now, it's DJI Mavics, which we're hoping to replace. They go through 350,000 of those DJI Mavics in Ukraine right now. The Mavics go out and find the tanks or the mortars or the human beings, and they tell the FPV guys where to go. Sometimes it's literally verbally. It's that primitive, but it's very effective.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): 80% of the deaths are from FPV. In Drone Dominance, if they just buy 350,000 FPV drones, they're kinda useless. Actually, they're absolutely useless. They're analog cameras, and they're very hard to see. You need a sensor. It's just a term. It's not like an actual sensor that senses stuff. The Black Widow has a bunch of sensors that gets it out there in contested environments and finds the bad guys and tell the FPV guys, the shooter, you know, what to go kill. It's basically a sniper rifle. You would never use a sniper rifle without a scope. We're the scope. They're the sniper rifle.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): That's all done electronically. No human intervention there?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Well, lots of times in Ukraine, because these are DJI drones, they're not going to interface with anything else. You can't call DJI and say, Hey, can you make our FPV drones integrate for targeting with us? We will. We will do that. We're doing it right now for Drone Dominance.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Okay

Jeff Thompson (CEO): We believe that the Drone Dominance Program is gonna need significant amounts of sensors, which are ISR drones. If not the Black Widow, it's gonna have to be some ISR drone.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Okay. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. I'll be in touch later, okay?

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Great.

Jon Hickman (Managing Director of Equity Research): Okay.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Sounds good, Jon. Thank you.

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you so much. This does conclude today's question and answer session. I would now like to hand the call back over to Jeff Thompson for any closing remarks.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Great. Thanks for coming. We are super excited about this year. It's gonna be, as you've seen with our target revenue, it's gonna be a great year. I wanna thank a lot of people. We've got a team of people going around the globe, working with these war fighters. We're in three theaters right now, because of that feedback gets back to our factories. I wanna thank all the factory workers in Teal at Salt Lake City. You guys are doing amazing jobs. We're getting orders, we ship them the next day 'cause we have so much production. The same with Valdosta, which I can't wait to get back up there hopefully next week. That factory is gonna be exciting when people get to see it. We're having a big ribbon cutting there.

Jeff Thompson (CEO): Everyone is really crushing it in our factories across the globe. The factory is the weapon. Look forward to seeing you folks next quarter.

Operator (AI Assigned): Thank you so much. That does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.