Teal Drones Brand Guidelines: The Utah Drone Start-Up Folded Into Red Cat Aerial

From a modular consumer drone to a change of course.

Teal Drones was a Utah drone maker founded by George Matus. The Robot Report and the Deseret News, both writing in July 2021, give its founding year as 2014; The Drone Girl, writing the same month, gives 2015. The Deseret News reported in 2024 that Matus started the company while still a teenager, and The Drone Girl said he had received the Thiel Fellowship. The company was based in the Salt Lake City area: a 2020 Deseret News photograph shows Matus near its offices in Holladay, and later reports place its factory in South Salt Lake.

Teal began in consumer drones. According to The Drone Girl, it announced a modular drone called the Teal in 2016, pitched as a camera drone, a racing drone and an enterprise tool at once. The product reached the market in 2018 as the Teal One, a departure from that universal idea, while a pared-down racing model, the Teal Sport, was sold separately. The Drone Girl wrote that neither drone “really took off” as much as the early media attention suggested.

The company then changed course. The Drone Girl reported that in 2019 Teal was one of six companies sharing an award to design and build drones that met US Army requirements, and that the thermal-camera maker FLIR developed a dual-sensor drone module called Hadron in close partnership with Teal. The Deseret News described the move as a pivot from consumer drones to aircraft for business and government use.

Golden Eagle, Red Cat and the Black Widow.

The first product of that new direction was the Golden Eagle, launched in summer 2020, according to The Drone Girl. The Robot Report described it as designed for reconnaissance, public safety and inspection work, on an open and modular platform that other companies could build applications for; partners named in 2021 included Autonodyne, Tomahawk Robotics, Dronelink and Skyward. In 2020 the US Department of Defense selected Teal as one of five approved small drone vendors for the US government, alongside Altavia, Parrot, Skydio and Vantage, The Robot Report said.

In July 2021 Red Cat Holdings, a publicly traded drone technology group then described as based in Puerto Rico, agreed to buy Teal in an all-stock deal. The Deseret News reported that Teal would become the flagship of Red Cat’s portfolio, which already included Fat Shark, Rotor Riot, Skypersonic and Dronebox. Matus, Teal’s founder and chief executive, told the paper the aim was to “rebuild the American-made drone industrial base.”

Under Red Cat, Teal followed the Golden Eagle with the Teal 2 and then the Black Widow, which the Deseret News called the third generation of Teal’s short-range reconnaissance drones. In November 2024 the paper reported that Teal had won the final round of the US Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance programme, competing head to head with Skydio, with an acquisition objective of 5,880 systems over five years, each made up of two drones and a controller. Matus described the Black Widow as designed from the ground up, with a modular build that lets individual systems be upgraded without a full redesign. The paper said the drones would be built at Teal’s 25,000-square-foot facility in South Salt Lake, and that US Customs and Border Protection already used earlier Teal drones.

Other military orders followed. In July 2026, according to a Red Cat release, its Teal Drones subsidiary received a US Air Force order for Black Widow systems, so that the service could assess the drone as a possible successor to the Teal 2 fleet used by the Air Force Security Forces.

How drone makers present themselves.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A start-up name that gave way to its parent’s brand.

The Teal Drones name has now been folded into its parent’s branding. In August 2026 Red Cat promoted Mitch McDonald, until then president of Teal Drones, to lead both Teal in Salt Lake City and FlightWave Aerospace in Torrance, California. On 12 October 2026 Red Cat launched Red Cat Aerial, which, the company said, combines the teams and technology previously represented by Teal Drones and FlightWave “into one organization with one public-facing identity.” The new division unveiled a hand-launched VTOL tricopter, the Trichon, at the AUSA 2026 meeting in Washington, D.C.

The old tealdrones.com address now forwards to the Red Cat Aerial site. That site lists the Black Widow and the Trichon among its aircraft, and still offers the Teal 2 by name as a thermal-imaging drone for public safety teams, which it says is listed on the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS marketplace. Red Cat Aerial says it designs and builds its aircraft at its factories in Utah and California, and calls them “Made in the USA.” The Teal name lives on in the Teal 2, while the business that Matus started now trades as part of Red Cat Aerial.

For a design guide, Teal Drones shows how a start-up name can carry a company from a consumer launch to a defence programme and then give way to its parent’s brand. Compare Skydio, the American maker Teal competed with for the Army programme, and Parrot, another of the five approved vendors of 2020. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and warm sand with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Teal Drones’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.