Redwire just acquired military drone maker, edge autonomy, and a nearly $1 billion deal.

Pete Canito, Redwire's CEO, says it nearly doubles the size of the company and expands the portfolio beyond space infrastructure.

By combining the space-borne assets associated with Redwire Space and the airborne assets associated with

edge autonomy, we become one of those middle market agile kind of new flavor of defense

tech contractors that bring the multi-domain capabilities vertically integrated into a single

company. So both on the financial operational side

in terms of scale, as well as on the technological side in terms of having these multi-domain

platforms all in one agile middle market company, it's pretty transformational. Investors are on board.

Redwire's stock has doubled since the start of April, and those shares are up about 160% from a year ago.

Redwire was stood up through investment firm A.E. Industrial Partners, which is still the largest shareholder.

Kirk Conert, A.E. Industrial's managing partner, who oversees a portfolio that also includes

Firefly Aerospace and York Space Systems, began investing in commercial space

and defense tech companies years ago. A niche corner of the startup market is now one of the

hottest places to invest, both in public and in private markets.

Now you're seeing companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital,

redware included, to take advantage

of this market opportunity. So it's really exciting to see. I know Anurl top the CMBC, top

disruptor list. You know, I would say Redwire is a version of Anurl that's maybe more space-focused, but also profitable.

So I think we have a really unique company in redwire space.

But a industrial broadly, we think this is one of the best opportunities and best capital

from an institutional perspective.

On this episode, Canito and Conert on the state of space where defense is headed

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