Red 6 — Training & Simulation · fobi

Red 6

Red 6 creates augmented reality training systems for fighter pilots, projecting synthetic threats into real-world flight using AR headsets. Raised $70M+ total; Air Force contracts for ATARS (Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System); Red 6's tech reduces training sortie costs and accelerates proficiency.

Transforming pilot training with AR to reduce cost and increase readiness by enabling live-fly training against synthetic adversaries anywhere, anytime.

red6.com Training & Simulation

United Statesprivate

At a glance

Total raised

$100M

last round series b

Headcount

51-200

approximate · public range

Headquarters

Orlando

United States

Founded

2018

8 years active

Status

Private

Training & Simulation

Latest valuation

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Date	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead investors
Jun 1, 2023	Series B	$70M	$350M	RedBird Capital Partners
Jun 1, 2021	Series A	$30M	$130M

AI bull / bear

Bull case

Red 6 has locked in the U.S. Air Force as a marquee customer with its ATARS contract, a direct revenue stream that validates the technology against real military requirements. The value proposition is straightforward and enormous: a single F-35 flight hour costs roughly $36,000, and Red 6's AR overlay lets pilots run mission training against synthetic adversaries in the air without needing an actual adversary aircraft airborne. That cuts sortie costs dramatically while increasing training frequency and realism. At $70M+ in total funding, the company has enough runway to navigate long defense procurement cycles and keep iterating. First-mover advantage matters here — Red 6 is the only company fielding wide-field-of-view AR for maneuvering fighter aircraft, and the switching costs for the Air Force are high once ATARS is embedded in training pipelines. If Red 6 expands from the USAF into allied nations' air forces, the addressable market grows substantially from a narrow but deep defense niche.

Bear case

Red 6 is a single-customer company. ATARS is a U.S. Air Force program, and if the Air Force's budget priorities shift toward drone swarms, space-based assets, or next-gen simulators, funding for AR-in-the-cockpit training could stall. Defense acquisition timelines are notoriously slow — a contract award does not guarantee follow-on production orders or scaled deployment. On the technical side, projecting stable, low-latency AR symbology into a pilot's helmet under sustained high-G maneuvering is an unsolved reliability challenge, and any safety incident during live-fly testing could halt the program entirely. Competition is also mounting: traditional simulation primes like CAE and Lockheed Martin are investing heavily in mixed-reality training, and they have decades-deep relationships with program officers and existing integration into training systems. Without a second major customer or a commercial aviation application, Red 6 remains a binary bet on one military branch's appetite for a niche technology.

Generated by deepseek-v4-flash · June 2, 2026Refreshes quarterly · see disclosures

Red 6

At a glance

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Funding history

How they make money

Founder backgrounds

Daniel Robinson

AI bull / bear

In the news

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Leadership

Products

ATARS (Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System)

Ground ATARS

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