Teledyne FLIR

FLIR Systems built its name on thermal imaging after its founding in Oregon in 1978, and by the time Teledyne Technologies bought the company for roughly 8 billion dollars in 2021, it had grown into one of the broadest sensor businesses in the country. The combined company, now branded Teledyne FLIR, still organizes itself around four customer groups: Industrial & Public Safety, OEM, Marine, and Defense, and the Defense side is where most of its national security work sits. The Industrial & Public Safety business sells handheld and fixed thermal cameras for firefighting, law enforcement, gas leak detection, security, and industrial inspection, along with test and measurement tools used across manufacturing and utilities. Marine covers thermal and navigation cameras for boats through brands like Raymarine. OEM supplies thermal cores and components to other manufacturers who build them into their own products.

None of that is small, but the Defense segment is what put FLIR on the Pentagon's radar long before Teledyne came calling. Teledyne FLIR Defense builds unmanned ground robots that grew out of its 2019 acquisition of Endeavor Robotics, itself a descendant of iRobot's military division. The PackBot family and its successor Centaur handle explosive ordnance disposal, reconnaissance, and hazmat work for the Army and allied forces, and the company delivered its 1,000th Centaur to the Army in 2023 under the MTRS Increment II program. Smaller ground robots like the SUGV 325, Kobra 725, and FirstLook round out that line. On the aerial side, the Black Hornet, now in its fourth generation, is a nano-drone small enough to fit in a soldier's palm that gives infantry units personal reconnaissance without waiting on a larger ISR asset.

Star SAFIRE turrets, including the 380X-HD, provide long-range electro-optical and infrared imaging for manned and unmanned aircraft, and the Griffin G510X extends that sensor line further. Detection is its own category inside Defense, with systems like CheMSense Protect built to sense chemical threats and other products covering biological, radiological, and explosive detection, often mounted on the same unmanned platforms the company already builds. The defense unit also holds sustainment contracts to maintain the fleet of ground robots already fielded across the US military and federal agencies, work that keeps existing PackBots and Centaurs running rather than replacing them outright. As part of Teledyne Technologies, a diversified NYSE-listed instrumentation and imaging company, FLIR no longer trades under its own ticker, but the Defense business continues to compete on its own for Pentagon contracts in unmanned systems, EO/IR sensing, and CBRN detection much as it did as an independent company.