Wildflower International – a small, woman-owned firm in Santa Fe – is one of six companies included in a multiyear $975 million U.S. Department of Defense contract to help fight global terrorism through intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance services with unmanned aircraft systems.

Earlier news stories, including one in Saturday’s early edition of the Albuquerque Journal, incorrectly reported that Wildflower was the sole contract awardee.

When first asked about the award last week, president and CEO Kimberly deCastro told the Journal she expects Wildflower to win “the lion’s share” of the $975 million at stake in the DOD contract. But Wildflower will face stiff competition on future task orders under the multi-party contract, which only offers the six awardees a right to bid on DOD requests for products or services.

Wildflower, a homegrown company that deCastro launched in 1991, provides information technology products and services to government entities.

In 2018, the company expanded into drone surveillance and data collection services. It competed against some major corporations like Boeing for inclusion on the DOD contract.

“We were the dark horse, the odd person out – a small, woman-owned business that no one would have expected to be on the list of winners,” deCastro told the Journal.

Since 2018, Wildflower has acquired a fleet of unmanned aerial systems from Arizona-based UAS engineering firm SpektreWorks. It’s hired and trained pilots and personnel, growing its workforce from about 80 in early 2019 to 111 now.

Wildflower pilots are expected to deploy to global hotspots to collect data under future task orders for the DOD’s Special Operations Command, deCastro said. Most Wildflower managers will coordinate missions from a company flight operations center in Santa Fe, but deCastro plans to directly deploy, at least initially, with pilots in the field, something she’s never done before.

Competition for the contract was stiff, and deCastro was one of only three women among some 150 participants at the initial DOD presentation for bidders in November 2018.

“It was a brutal process throughout,” deCastro said. “We’re just a small Santa Fe company, yet they chose us to help protect vital U.S. interests.”

The multiyear contract includes some very large competitors, such as L3Harris Technologies, a global aerospace and defense company with $18 billion in annual revenue and 48,000 employees.

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