Buying guide
HX-2 (and HF-1) vs Teal Black Widow in 2026
Comparing 2 humanoid robots across availability, pricing, capabilities, and verified deployments. Current as of 2026.
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Helsing | Red Cat Holdings |
| Form factor | aerial | aerial |
| Maturity | production | production |
| Autonomy | — | — |
| Availability | internal-onlyenterprise | internal-onlyenterprise |
| Price | $18,000 (analyst estimate) | Not announced |
| Capability claims | — | — |
| Brain | — | — |
| Verified deployments | 1Ukrainian Armed Forces | 1Salt Lake City |
| Privacy practices | — | — |
| Sources on file | 6 | 9 |
Editorial summaries
HX-2 (and HF-1)
Helsing's HX-2 is an electric X-wing precision-strike munition (about 100 kilometers range, 250 kilometers per hour, up to 5 kilograms payload) with onboard AI for electronic-warfare resistance, built at the company's southern-Germany Resilience Factory at a stated capacity above 1,000 per month; the related HF-1 is a plywood-fuselage AI loitering munition with GPS-independent navigation made with Ukrainian industry. Helsing, founded in Munich in March 2021 and chaired by Spotify's Daniel Ek, reached a roughly 12-billion-euro valuation in a June 2025 Series D. DEPLOY records the drone line at production maturity on a verified fielding anchor: a German-underwritten 4,000-unit HF-1 order with 1,950 units delivered to Ukraine. The larger 6,000-unit HX-2 order announced in February 2025 is ordered, not yet verified-delivered, and DEPLOY holds that distinction rather than counting it as fielded. It is defense procurement; there is no consumer price.
Teal Black Widow
The Teal Black Widow is a soldier-borne ISR rucksack quadcopter from Teal Drones, a subsidiary of Red Cat Holdings (NASDAQ: RCAT). It is a hand-launched, foldable Group-1 quadcopter for single-operator short-range reconnaissance, carrying a Teledyne FLIR Hadron 640R+ EO/IR payload, an AES-256 frequency-hopping 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 military procurement, not a consumer product, so there is no consumer price. Several aggregator framings are corrected here. The product is the Teal Black Widow, not 'Teal 2'. Its load-bearing fact is verified: the Black Widow won the US Army Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record in a production selection announced November 19, 2024, displacing the incumbent Skydio. But the scope is cap-flagged: the actual low-rate initial production contract is about $12.9M per a US Army FOIA disclosure, not the larger management-framing figures, and the often-cited 5,880-systems number is the Army's stated five-year objective (explicitly subject to change), not an obligated quantity. The common 'Black Hornet alternative' framing is also incorrect: the Black Widow is a different and larger class than Teledyne FLIR's roughly 70-gram Black Hornet nano-UAV, and it replaced Skydio on the platoon-level SRR program rather than the Black Hornet. On autonomy, it is primarily a manually piloted ISR drone with assistive autonomy (forward obstacle avoidance, FLIR Prism, a radio-off stealth mode), so any 'autonomous drone' characterization is an overclaim. The registry records it at low-rate production maturity; Red Cat is a cash-burning small-cap reliant on dilutive financing.
Common questions
- What is the difference between HX-2 (and HF-1) and Teal Black Widow?
- HX-2 (and HF-1) and Teal Black Widow are both aerial robots on the DEPLOY registry. They differ in maker, maturity, price, verified deployments, and how much of their autonomy is independently verified. See the table above for the full head-to-head; each figure is sourced.
- Which has more verified deployments, HX-2 (and HF-1) or Teal Black Widow?
- HX-2 (and HF-1) and Teal Black Widow each have 1 verified deployment on the DEPLOY registry (confirmed at named sites with primary sources).
Recent coverage
- Red Cat Q1 Earnings Call Highlights - The Globe and MailTeal Black Widow · Google News · 2026-05-08
- Earnings call transcript: Red Cat Holdings Q1 2026 misses forecasts - Investing.comTeal Black Widow · Google News · 2026-05-07
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