Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. (KTOS): Who It Depends On
Kratos designs and builds unmanned aerial target drones and tactical UAS (BQM-167, MQM-178 Firejet, XQ-58 Valkyrie), satellite ground systems, microwave/RF electronics and solid rocket motors, and it is unusually vertically integrated for a defense supplier, owning its own composite-airframe, antenna and microwave-electronics manufacturing. Its real bottleneck sits upstream in propulsion: for its highest-growth programs it leans on a small number of outside partners for jet engines and large hypersonic-class rocket motors it cannot yet build itself at scale. On the revenue side, the dependency is squarely on Washington: Kratos discloses that roughly two-thirds of its revenue comes from U.S. Government customers in aggregate, spread across dozens of individual contracts with no single one exceeding about 6% of revenue.
Supply-chain dependency
Companies KTOS relies on to design, manufacture, package, and assemble its hardware.
Under a 2025 teaming agreement, GE Aerospace is co-developing and manufacturing the GEK800 and GEK1500 small turbofan/turbojet engines for Kratos's next-generation unmanned aerial systems and collaborative combat aircraft. Kratos builds its own airframes and rocket motors but cannot yet match GE's jet-engine design pedigree and high-rate production capability, making this partnership central to its future drone propulsion roadmap.
Kratos has issued letters of intent to L3Harris for dozens of large-diameter Zeus 1 and Zeus 2 solid rocket motors used in its MACH-TB 2.0 hypersonic test-launch program. Kratos manufactures smaller rocket motors itself, but the biggest hypersonic-class motors are capital-intensive to produce and currently come from L3Harris's merchant motor business.
Williams International's small turbofan engines (including the FJ33) have powered Kratos's subsonic aerial target drones and the original XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrator, giving Kratos a long-running reliance on this niche engine maker for legacy and in-service target and unmanned systems. A private company with no public ticker.
Through the Prometheus Energetics joint venture announced in 2025, Kratos partners with Israel's RAFAEL to build a U.S.-based merchant supplier of solid rocket motors, reflecting that even Kratos's push toward domestic propulsion capacity depends on outside energetics expertise it doesn't fully own alone. A state-owned Israeli company with no public ticker.
Customer concentration
Companies that make up an outsized share of KTOS's revenue - who KTOS relies on to buy from it.
Kratos discloses that U.S. Government agency customers in aggregate accounted for roughly 67-69% of revenue in recent fiscal years, spanning the Air Force, Space Force/Space Systems Command, Space Development Agency, Missile Defense Agency, Army, Navy, NASA and DARPA programs for target drones, Valkyrie, satellite ground systems and rocket motors. Kratos says no single contract exceeds about 6% of revenue, so the concentration is in Washington broadly rather than any one program. Not a single company.
Foreign military sales of aerial target drones (BQM-167, MQM-178 Firejet), satellite ground systems and defense electronics to NATO and allied nations make up a meaningful, if undisclosed in exact size, slice of Kratos's order book beyond the U.S. Government. Not a single company.
Kratos names commercial customers including satellite operator Intelsat, Microsoft (Azure Orbital cloud ground-station services), Amazon, Siemens, Rolls-Royce and Boom Supersonic for satellite ground systems, cloud-based ground network services, and propulsion/hypersonic test support. Not a single company.
The percentages shown are editorial estimates based on public research (company disclosures, earnings commentary, and industry reporting) meant to illustrate relative reliance, not precise or audited figures. Companies without a proper, reliably tradable ticker on this site are shown without stock/earnings links. This is not financial advice.