Firestorm Labs

Firestorm Labs was founded in San Diego in 2022 around an unglamorous problem. Small drones break, spare parts travel badly, and a unit far from a depot waits. Chief executive Dan Magy, who previously founded the counter drone firm Citadel Defense, built the company with chief growth officer Chad McCoy, a special operations veteran, and chief technology officer Ian Muceus, who came out of the additive manufacturing industry at Stratasys. The pitch is that the factory should travel with the force. Lockheed Martin Ventures led a 12.5 million dollar seed round, and in 2025 New Enterprise Associates led a 47 million dollar Series A with Lockheed Martin Ventures, Decisive Point, Washington Harbour Partners and Booz Allen Ventures alongside. Staff numbers have climbed past 190. The company moved out of a 15,000 square foot shop into roughly 60,000 square feet in the Miramar district, next to the Marine Corps air station of the same name.

The product that makes the rest work is xCell, a production line packed into two expandable 20 foot ISO containers. Inside are industrial HP Multi Jet Fusion printers, power, climate control and secure communications, so the unit runs off grid at a forward base or on a ship deck. A complete airframe comes off it in nine to twenty four hours, and the company puts sustained output at up to 50 aircraft a month per cell. The same printers turn out spare parts and mission specific components for platforms Firestorm did not build, which is the sustainment half of the business.

Payload integration and a software layer for mission planning and swarming sit alongside the hardware as their own listed lines, though Firestorm names no products in either. Three airframes are designed around that printer. Tempest 50 is the flagship, a modular system under 55 pounds with a 1.8 meter fuselage and a 2.1 meter wingspan, carrying about 4.5 kilograms of payload and reconfigurable in the field through quick connect joints for surveillance, electronic warfare or one way attack. Later reporting puts its reach near 400 miles on six hour sorties with a 10 pound payload. El Nino is the small end of the family, a backpackable airframe cruising near 100 miles per hour. Squall is a printed first person view quadcopter for close fights.

Government money has followed the containers rather than the aircraft. In January 2025 the Air Force awarded a contract worth up to 100 million dollars running through December 2031, tying Firestorm into AFWERX work at Eglin Air Force Base on swarming and autonomy. In May 2026 the Department of War added an award of up to 30 million dollars under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program, covering five xCell microfactories and more than 200 Tempest aircraft for the Indo Pacific, the company's first delivery outside the continental United States. Proof came that August. Firestorm ran an xCell aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Essex during a two week transit to RIMPAC 2026, printing more than 1,000 parts and assembling a dozen flight ready Squalls in seas peaking at state five, after which Marines of the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion flew them as adversary drones in a counter drone exercise at Makua on Oahu.