Redwire at Jefferies Virtual Space Summit: Strategic Moves in Space and Defense

On Tuesday, 24 June 2025, Redwire Corp (NYSE:RDW) participated in the Jefferies Virtual Space Summit, presenting a strategic overview that highlights both promising growth avenues and evolving challenges. The company’s Chairman and CEO, Pete Canido, outlined Redwire’s history, acquisition strategy, and its recent pivot into defense technology. While Redwire is expanding its reach into European markets and defense, it remains focused on maintaining its competitive edge in the space sector.

Key Takeaways

• Redwire has achieved a 30% compound annual growth rate, driven by strategic acquisitions and market expansion.
• The company is transitioning into defense tech with the acquisition of Edge Autonomy, enhancing its multi-domain operations.
• Redwire is focusing on high-growth areas like Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) to leverage its competitive advantages.
• The commercialization of microgravity manufacturing technologies, such as Pillbox, is a priority for Redwire.
• Redwire’s drone business, acquired from Edge Autonomy, is currently operational in Ukraine.

Financial Results

• Redwire has maintained a 30% compound annual growth rate over recent years.
• The acquisition of Edge Autonomy has introduced a transactional drone business with higher gross margins.
• The company is currently profitable, selling subsystems and components for spacecraft.

Operational Updates

• Redwire operates seven platforms, including five space-based and two airborne platforms.
• The company has completed eight acquisitions in 18 months while private, leading to its public market entry.
• Redwire manages 9 to 11 payloads on the International Space Station at any given time.
• Hundreds of drones are deployed with the Marine Corps, Special Operations Forces, and in Ukraine.
• New technologies, such as the industrial crystallizer for manufacturing crystals, are under development.

Future Outlook

• Redwire aims to prime selectively in high-growth areas, particularly where it holds a strategic advantage.
• The company plans to expand multi-domain missions, integrating space and airborne assets.
• Redwire is targeting the European market, capitalizing on its growing investment in autonomous space capabilities.
• Partnerships are being formed to bring Pillbox technology to market, focusing on microgravity manufacturing.

Q&A Highlights

• Redwire is moving up the value chain from a merchant supplier to priming opportunities in strategic areas like VLEO.
• Edge Autonomy’s drones are actively deployed in Ukraine, demonstrating operational success.
• The Mason program is part of Redwire’s involvement in civil space initiatives, focusing on lunar infrastructure.
• Redwire’s acquisition of Edge Autonomy brings technical, operational, and financial synergies.

In conclusion, Redwire’s strategic initiatives and market positioning were comprehensively discussed at the Jefferies Virtual Space Summit. For detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies Virtual Space Summit:

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: Space Summit. I’m Greg Conrad with the aerospace and defense equity research team at Jefferies. Very excited to have Pete Canido, chairman and CEO of RedWire with us today. Thank you, Pete. Maybe just to start, if if you can give us a little bit of background on RedWire, its history, you know, up to the closing of Edge Autonomy acquisition earlier this month.

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Absolutely. And, thanks for having me, Greg. It’s great to be here, with you and the folks from Jefferies. Yeah. So Redwire, started a little over five years ago, and, it started out as a thesis in a private equity company, AE Industrial, who’s, extremely active in in the space industry now.

But at the time, they weren’t. At the time, they were mostly, commercial aerospace. And I happened to also be an operating partner at AE Industrial, and I was at that time. And I sat down with now one of their managing partners, Kirk Konark, And we said to ourselves, let’s take a look at where the puck is heading in terms of aerospace. And although it seems like it’s pretty obvious now at the time, there weren’t a lot of people who were talking about space.

As a matter of fact, we were right in the middle of COVID. It was 2020 and that’s what most people were focused on. But we recognize that space was becoming more important than ever in the commercial, civil and particularly national security domains. And so we decided at that point to build a purpose built middle market space company to kind of fill that void somewhere between the really large primes and the more smaller niche, many times venture backed pre EBITDA, but in some cases, pre revenue startup companies. So and that’s how we that was the whole genesis behind the RedWire start.

And so what we did is we moved out and we acquired eight companies in eighteen months while we were private. And we were far enough ahead of the curve that we were able to pick them up at really decent multiples when you look at historically. After we built that up, we recognized again the generational opportunity in space as it makes its way over the next five to ten years towards a multi trillion dollar market and recognize that to really there was a strong opportunity to be one of the major players, especially on the pure play middle market side of the house, which is they really weren’t with the acquisition of Orbital ATK by Northrop Grumman, you had seen most of the middle market players had kind of gone away. So we went public, and that was a key transformational milestone for us to be able to tap into the capital markets and make investments on scaling. We’ve over the years had 30% compound annual growth rate.

So we were growing really fast and fast growing companies need capital. So going public was really exciting for us. We continue to do acquisition. We made a major play right after we went public into the European markets because we also recognize the opportunity not only for growth in space in The United States, but we felt like the outsized growth in Europe was a really good opportunity. So we made a major acquisition there, did a few more.

And then most recently saw that in addition to space, there’s tremendous opportunity in defense tech. Again, space as a warfighter domain has been very transformational. But, when we started moving out on VLEO, very low Earth orbit with our SabreSat platform, people were referring to it as an orbital drone. And that’s when we had the idea of that, well, there’s really no line between space. People think that you’re in the atmosphere and then all of a sudden you’re not.

It’s not like that. VLEO actually operates in a smaller degree of the atmosphere. So we started looking at it and we say, well, we the airborne platforms are doing a lot of the same missions that we’re doing in space and they operate very similarly. So we made this transformational move into becoming a multi domain company. And that’s where we find ourselves today.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then, you know, I I think a lot of the the roots are as a merchant supplier. But how do you decide where to prime versus maybe where it makes sense to be a supplier of key technology given kind of the the current mix of your business?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a it’s a it’s a great question, and and you’re right. RedWire’s when we were going public, our bumper sticker was when space wins, RedWire wins because we’re a merchant supplier to so many key performers in the industry. I think you had a couple of them on today, intuitive machines, VAST as examples of customers and partners that RedWire has.

And that continues to be foundational. It really was a stability strategy. One of the key aspects of RedWire that I like to say is, there’s no leap of faith that has to occur for RedWire to execute on its plan. We’re not raising capital and then putting that capital exclusively into a major technical achievement. We’re actually funding those achievements.

But we have been executing a strategy over the last year, year and a half, what we call moving up the value chain where we have been priming more, especially now that we have collectively seven platforms, five space based platforms and two drones, airborne platforms. So we’re selectively priming and where we select the prime opportunities is where we have a strategic advantage and particularly in an area where there aren’t many folks already operating. And that was really the genesis behind Sabersat and our Veleo platform in The U. S. And Phantom, our Veleo platform in Europe.

As we looked at it, we said, well, there’s a lot of companies that are operating in LEO, fewer but some operating in GEO, but VLEO was Greenfield. So we made an internal investment on some technology and bid some emerging opportunities out of the U. S. Government and Europe, such as the SkimSat program over in Europe. And now we’ve established ourselves as a major player in Vyleo and that was really entering a market where we felt like we had a sustainable strategic advantage and there wasn’t a lot of competition.

So that’s what we’re going to do going into the future. We’re looking at areas like dynamic geo or multi domain vertically integrated capabilities where space and airborne assets are working together. Those are differentiated areas and new emerging markets where we have some sort of intellectual property where we could differentiate ourselves. And that’s where we choose to prime.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And that’s actually a good transition to the next question. I mean, we have seen a real push into satellites. You mentioned LEO. You know, there’s LEO, GEO, MEO. Some of that’s organic.

Some of that’s, inorganic. You know, how do you think about the competitive positioning on the satellite side given, I think, you pretty much are covering AirBee Orbit? You know? And and how has that heritage as a a mission enabler, you know, strengthened that offering?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. It’s all about having some advantage that others don’t to limit the competition, right? Whether it be working in national security where we have security infrastructure that is challenging to develop over time. But based on our deep customer relationships and of the history as a performer through a lot of our legacy entities or whether it’s a piece of intellectual property like what we’re developing for the V. LEO markets or the heritage of what we’ve done.

As you know, you’ve been covering space for a while now. Flight heritage is kind of the coin of the realm and whether that’s on something like putting rollout solar arrays on the International Space Station or developing next generation satellites, customers want to work with people who have been there, done that, who understand the harsh and unique and challenging environment of space. So I think all of our heritage, whether it comes from our legacy providing subsystems and components or some of the heritage that we have, particularly in Europe, where we’ve been offering satellites for decades, plays into good positioning and future work for us.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then, I mean, you touched on edge autonomy a bit in the beginning, but the move to multi orbit in space to adding airborne, how do you think about the advantages to have offerings across domains? How interrelated are the systems? And how do you think about potential customer technology overlap as you integrate that business?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great question. And so if you you think about airborne and spaceborne assets, it may not be intuitive to people initially. But if you break it down to their functional decomposition and say, what are the technology involves and what are the missions that are being performed?

You start to see that an autonomous AI driven airborne platform is not as different as you might think from an autonomous AI driven spaceborne platform. So we don’t call satellites or spacecraft uncrewed spaceborne systems the way people call drones uncrewed airborne systems. But essentially, that’s what they are, right? They use similar technologies. There’s some sort of power element.

There’s some sort of structure involved. There’s some sort of navigation that has to occur. They’re usually carrying either an optical payload or communications payload. They’re driven by AI software or autonomy, avionics. So whether they’re you’re doing it, in the atmosphere, or in space, it’s a lot of the same technologies.

Now from perspective, they’re actually operating and conducting a lot of the same missions, most notably intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. You have drones that are doing, ISR, from a certain altitude, and then you have spacecraft and satellites, whether it’s VLEO or all the way up to GEO or even in cislunar, they’re doing some sort of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance as well. When you look at communications relays, whether it’s airborne or spaceborne, you’re doing that multilayered communications architecture. And so where our customers are going, because they recognize that, quite frankly, when they’re conducting their missions, it’s irrelevant, in terms of, whether it’s, in the atmosphere, or in the vacuum of space. What they care about is getting, the information.

There’s a lot of commonality there. Now when you blend these into a multi domain architecture, you start to see how they’re very complementary as well. So you can see how if you’re closer to the earth with an airborne asset, you have higher fidelity. If you’re in space, you have a wider field of view, and they can share information for like tipping and queuing. And of course, the future of war fighting, whether you look at something like Golden Dome, Golden Dome is inherently going to be multi domain.

It’s going to have not only airborne and space based assets, but it’ll have land and sea aspects as well. And that’s where our customer is headed. So when you have at least two aspects of it, the airborne and the space borne, if you will, capabilities into a single vertically integrated company that that provides a strategic differentiation. And and that was kind of the logic behind the deal.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then maybe just transitioning to opportunities around the exploration and the commercialization of space. I mean, thinking about the International Space Station transition to private space. I mean, how do you think about RedWire playing in that market? You know, what what do you view as maybe the the biggest opportunities in that transition?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. Well, core to the it’s a great question. But core to the red wire theme is we don’t have to choose. Right? So we have many paths to victory, starting with being a merchant supplier across commercial, civil and national security space.

The we we sell what we call the fundamental building blocks of space. So because they’re fundamental building blocks, they’re relevant to all those missions. But as you see, whether it’s the evolution to a permanent presence on the moon or whether it’s going to Mars or whether it’s happening here inside The United States or whether it’s happening in Europe, in all cases, it’s all of the above, a red wire is positioned, right? We have major manufacturing sites developing capability in Europe as well as The U. S.

We’re building we’re on many programs for civil space to include our Mason program, which is looking at how do you build permanent structures like berms and landing pads on the moon or in Europe, where we were recently awarded a study from ESA on the light ship program that looks at sending a spacecraft and how we would architect and build a spacecraft ultimately to go to Mars. So we have many paths to victory across all these different trends. And even as you mentioned, the ISS, we currently operate very actively at any given times. We’ll have nine to 11 different capabilities, payloads operating on the ISS. But we’re also partnered with the VaaS and the Axioms and the Orbital Reefs and everybody on the future of commercial LEO destinations and commercial space stations as well.

So I always like to think that if you provide the rollout solar arrays for the International Space Station, that positions you really well to be a power and subsystem provider for commercial space stations, in addition to all the payloads that we offer that will be leveraged on these space stations as well. So we’re covering a lot of ground, in space today and where the trends are headed.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then maybe transitioning to space manufacturing and specifically the success you’ve seen with PillVox, can you maybe describe the technology? How do you think about now versus the future? And what are the catalysts for PillVox market to really accelerate? And I think you’ve talked about it before, but that path to further monetize technology and market.

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. That’s right. So the, so the pillbox is an extraordinary technology and just underscores, the importance of, the decades that we’ve been operating, through our legacy entities on International Space Station, right? Because there’s kind of a barrier to entry in terms of things that a lot of people don’t think about such as being human rated, the ability to have a payload, there’s a set of requirements that NASA has, ability to understand how these things work in space. What is exciting about Pillbox is it has gone from millions of dollars in investment from NASA and Redwire over many years through the experimentation and really the research and development phase and is now actually hitting a phase where it’s not about an experiment, it’s about real production.

And therefore, a business model that can close, where there’s a lot of people who are still in that research and development phase of things like manufacturing crystals for pharmaceuticals in space. We’re beyond that right now. It’s works. We’ve already demonstrated that it works. And now with we’re focused on new technologies like our industrial crystallizer, which we announced recently that allows you to do it reliably and at scale.

So RedWire, while many are still in the research and development phase in terms of microgravity manufacturing, we’re moving into the production and commercialization phase, and that’s super exciting. So what does that look like? Well, we’ve made a number of announcements where we’re partnering with the who’s who of pharmaceutical companies to start taking these crystals and feeding them into their pipeline, so that we can commercialize the technology. And we’ve talked about, I think on our last earning calls, two specific business models for that. One is just folks paying us to send these capabilities up to a space station, whether it be the ISS or a commercial space station and manufacturing the crystals for them or in some cases, flying the crystals on our own, retaining the IP and licensing that technology.

So we’re in the early stages of commercialization. We’ve announced some great partnerships recently. We have a history of partnering with companies like Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb. And so we’re now taking something that works and is ready for production and commercialization and forming the partnerships necessary to bring it to market. And that’s super exciting because that’s what the industry has been waiting for a long time.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then maybe rolling it all together, I mean, do you think about the outlook for defense and national security versus commercial versus civil? And where are we in terms of the evolution of those markets and what leads going forward? And kind of tacking one more onto that, how does Europe play into that given the local exposure to that market?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. Yeah. Well so I’ve never been good at making predictions, particularly about the future, as Yogi Berra would say. But and that’s why we have a strategy that lets us be agile and pivot as required. When we first went public, commercial space was all the rage.

You had a number of companies out there that were talking about refueling commercial satellites and building huge constellations like OneWeb and others. And that has settled down, although I think you’re going to see it start to come back, but from the it started to settle down and national security and civil space started to emerge with the Artemis program. And then, of course, space is a war fighting domain. So because we’re involved in all those markets, we just it wasn’t really a pivot. We were there, you just focus on where the growth is occurring and we were able to do that effectively since we play across all those civil, commercial and national security.

Now some of the NASA budgets are down and national security is the hot thing. But on the civil side, also the hot thing is Europe starting to invest in catching up with The US and China and having their own autonomous space based capabilities, both on the civil side and quite frankly on the defense side as well. So that’s a huge growth trend. So where RedWire is trying to position itself by providing these foundational technologies with decades of flight heritage is to take advantage of wherever the trends are going. And as they evolve, we’ll be right there with them.

So there’s a lot of dynamics going on. I think national security is obviously really high right now. But even if that changes in the future, we’ll be ready to go and a participant in those other markets.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And I think you actually have a slide on this in one of your decks. But a question that we’re asking everyone today is how do you make money? I mean, how much is hardware versus software? What’s the subscription element? Just thinking about constellations, longer term agreements or some of the opportunities that might have replacement demand tied to them.

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. Right. And it’s an important aspect of who we are. One of the things that I like to point out is RedWire is a Space Now company. Right?

There’s no leap of faith that has to occur. We’re selling subsystems and components spacecraft. We have two European spacecrafts right now doing a first of a kind engineering achievement in flying in precision formation, creating an artificial eclipse so that scientists at EAS and around the world, quite frankly, can better study the coronal forces of the sun. This is happening now. These are two satellites that were built by Redwire in our Belgium facility.

They’re flying now. It’s working. We have some great shots. Of course, we were the provided the cameras for the intuitive machine lunar landings as well as the Firefly lunar landing. So we’re making money by profitably selling these things, these capabilities today and we’ll continue to do so.

Going into the future, there’s a lot of software associated with elements we’re developing. We do have a software based digital engineering capability that was is very effective and has been sold and is used by many customers to model out space based missions. We’re expanding that to model out multi domain missions with the addition of Edge Autonomy. We’re selling hundreds of drones right now. We have hundreds of drones that are currently fielded with the Marine Corps, Special Operations Forces.

And of course, we have hundreds of drones operating on the battlefield in The Ukraine. So this is all happening now. We’re selling these things. And as a result, we’re making money. We’re going to be increasing our economics over time through things like developing scale and continuing to grab market share in the areas where we can be highly differentiated, either through some sort of intellectual property or early mover advantage in areas like VLEO.

But yes, like you said, it’s pretty transparent. One of the interesting things about the Edge acquisition is I always say there’s three areas that I look at when I look at synergies for Edge. It’s the technical, the operational, but also the financial. In RedWire, we tend to be because this is how the space industry currently works. You tend to win these contracts and they’re large multiyear development contracts.

Whereas in drones, the technology is much more mature, so you’re really taking orders. And because you have a mature manufacturing base where you’re now taking orders for proven capabilities, it tends to be more transactional and have better gross margins. So certainly, in addition to all the things that I said, to pivot to going multi domain and expanding into defense tech, particularly selling drones, a real tailwind for our ability to make money as well.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And then maybe just to to wrap it up, I mean, what are three key takeaways that investors should walk away with, from today’s call?

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s there’s really three investment dynamics in Redwire that I believe makes us very attractive and gives us both resiliency and the potential for breakout growth. And those three are the merchant supplier model, where we’re well established and it gives us a strong economic foundation. The spacecraft, where we’ve moved up the value chain and we can now selectively prime in high growth areas, which gives us scale. And then the, what we call venture optionality, but really that next generational advanced biopharma capabilities and quite frankly, in space, like a permanent presence on the moon and everything that goes with the future of microgravity as a unique manufacturing area for the future.

So within Redwire, you get a lot of paths to victory. You got nice foundational merchant supplier, scale through priming as well as some of this venture optionality. And we think that’s a really exciting place to be because it’s still just, as I like to say, the first innings of spring training in terms of where the space industry is growing. And I don’t think anybody knows exactly what the future holds. So I think it’s important to be positioned for space as it evolves over time, to make sure that, you’re well positioned, for the long term, and I think we are.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: Cool. Peter, we really appreciate, the time today, and and we’ll leave it at that.

Pete Canido, Chairman and CEO, RedWire: Great. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate you having me.

Greg Conrad, Equity Research Team, Jefferies: Thanks.

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