- Firestorm Labs secured a $30 million APFIT contract, boostable to $50 million, to deliver five xCell microfactories, 200-plus Tempest drones, and operator training to an Indo-Pacific customer.
- Approximately $26 million has been obligated across five task orders, with deliveries already underway, marking Firestorm's first deployments outside the continental United States.
San Diego drone startup Firestorm Labs has secured a $30 million contract under the Pentagon’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program to deploy its 3D-printed Tempest Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and the containerized microfactories that produce them into the Indo-Pacific, the company announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic.
The APFIT award, boostable to $50 million, funds the delivery of five xCell mobile manufacturing units, more than 200 Tempest drones, and operator training to an undisclosed customer in the Indo-Pacific region.
Approximately $26 million has already been obligated across five task orders, according to the company, and deliveries have already begun — the first outside the continental United States for Firestorm since the company was founded in 2022.
The Tempest UAV at the center of the contract carries a 400-mile range, six-hour endurance, and a ten-pound payload capacity. It can be configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions or for one-way attack operations, giving the customer flexibility in how it employs the system depending on the operational requirement. But the drone itself is almost secondary to what Firestorm is actually selling, which is the ability to produce it — and repair it — wherever it needs to operate.
The xCell platform is a drone manufacturing microfactory housed in two standard shipping containers. It can operate entirely off-grid, travel by trailer on roads, be airlifted inside a C-17 or C-130, sling-loaded beneath a CH-47 Chinook, or moved by sea. The system can produce combat-ready drones in under 24 hours, according to the company, which means a forward-deployed xCell unit does not wait for a supply chain stretching back to a factory in California — it runs its own. Firestorm CEO Dan Magy has said the United States lacks the expeditionary manufacturing base needed for distributed operations at modern conflict scale and tempo, and xCell is the company’s answer to that gap, per the company’s statement.
Firestorm co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Chad McCoy put the Indo-Pacific logic in direct terms when speaking to Tectonic. “The Indo-Pacific has what military strategists call ‘the tyranny of distance,'” McCoy said. “If, god forbid, things go kinetic against an adversary like China, we know that they have a large quantity of long-range weapons, which are going to make it very difficult to freely move from [the continental US] and Hawaii and Guam into the first island chain.” McCoy added that the company sees its technology as providing assurances that operations can continue even under blockade conditions. “We think we’re a unique solution for INDOPACOM — it’s a really hard problem, and there’s not a lot of solutions in the theater,” he told Tectonic. “[The technology] provides assurances that when the lights go off and the blockade happens — if it happens — the machine doesn’t stop.”
The repair parts dimension of xCell’s value proposition has emerged as at least as commercially significant as the drone production capability itself. McCoy told Tectonic that customer interest in printing repair parts has been substantial, describing it as “probably a bigger market than just doing drones.” The xCell platform can print replacement components for Firestorm’s own Tempest aircraft as well as for other drone types, giving forward-deployed units a logistics resilience capability that extends beyond any single UAS platform. “It’s not as sexy as air vehicles that go boom,” McCoy told Tectonic, “but when we differentiated the business with xCell, it allowed us to focus on repair parts for our birds [and other birds] when they break.”
The APFIT program that funded the Firestorm award was introduced in 2022 specifically to help small businesses cross the defense acquisition “valley of death” — the gap between a working prototype and a fielded military capability that kills more promising technologies than any technical challenge. The program has awarded over $1.4 billion in contracts ranging from $10 million to $50 million to more than 75 non-traditional contractors since its inception, per Tectonic’s reporting. The Pentagon announced over $400 million in APFIT contracts using fiscal 2026 funds in December but did not release company names at the time. Winners have been disclosing their awards gradually in the months since, with Darkhive revealing a $49.7 million contract — the largest APFIT award to date — and Seasats securing $25 million for unmanned surface vessels.
Firestorm’s APFIT award is its latest in a run of defense contracts that has accelerated sharply since the company’s founding. The company previously secured a $100 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with the Air Force, a Strategic Funding Increase award for its UAS last March, and an $18 million ceiling Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract for xCell microfactories last November, per Tectonic. The company also closed an $82 million Series B funding round the week before the APFIT announcement, giving it private capital alongside its government contract revenue to scale production and development simultaneously.