WASHINGTON — Autonomy firm Ondas Inc. has finalized an $875.8 million deal to acquire drone and counter-drone company DYZNE, Ondas executives told reporters today.
The acquisition, hammered out last week, “fundamentally changes the scale and earnings profile of Ondas,” said CEO Eric Brock. As a result, the company is now raising its revenue projections for 2026 from $390 million to $525 million.
Brock said the expectation of “substantial growth” is driven by “two major product franchises,” both of them built by DYZNE.
The one already in widespread service is the Ultra long-endurance, high-altitude recon drone. Ultra boasts a three-day flight time at 25,000 feet and has “tens of thousands of operational flight hours” with US and allied forces, Brock said. It’s currently in transition to an official Air Force program of record.
The “other hero product” from DYZNE, Brock said, is a newly developed low-cost drone-killing drone, the IonStrike interceptor, intended as an affordable defense against the Iranian-developed but widely copied Shahed-136 attack drone. It was field-tested by the Army in May. Although no sales have been announced yet, Brock said, “we’re responding to a significant number of RFIs, RFPs to field that.”
Between the Ultra high-altitude drone, its middle-altitude stablemate LEAP, and DYZNE’s low-altitude Blitz strike drone, execs said, the acquisition fills a gap in Ondas’s prior stable, which had stratospheric surveillance balloons and ground robots.
The DYZNE deal caps a two-year spree of at least seven acquisitions by Ondas, mostly in the unmanned systems business. Now the much-larger Ondas — known until January as Ondas Holdings — will focus on knitting it all together. The vision is a single unified business, running largely on Palantir software, that offers a comprehensive portfolio of drones and counter-drone defenses “from the surface to the stratosphere,” as the head of Ondas’ Technical Division, Ryan Hartman, put it.
“Expect us to moderate the acquisition pace in the second half and focus on driving growth and operating leverage across the company,” Brock said on the media call.
That effort relies heavily on a partnership with Palantir, announced in March. Ondas will use the Palantir’s Warp Speed and Foundry systems to unify its expanded manufacturing and logistics operations, executives and releases explained. Palantir will also help Ondas develop its own command-and-control system to coordinate frontline operations, SkyWeaver.
“SkyWeaver is a joint development program between Ondas and Palantir,” Hartman told reporters today “On the Ondas side, we’re responsible for both the hardware development and the command-and-control architecture, whereas Palantir is bringing the ontology and the connections to Warp Speed, Foundry, and ultimately the ability to integrate with Maven” — the widely used, AI-enabled software suite that’s become increasingly essential to US military operations.
SkyWeaver is still under development, but Ondas plans a series of demonstrations this year, followed by deployment across its own products. But given the Pentagon’s increasing desire to avoid being “vendor locked” into incompatible systems that can’t share data, the ultimate objective is to connect with products from a wide range of other manufacturers as well.
“The last thing we want to do is to create a proprietary closed architecture,” Hartman said.
Palantir also served as matchmaker for Onda’s April acquisition of Hartman’s former company, World View, which makes ultra-high-altitude surveillance balloons it calls “Stratollites,” a portmanteau of “stratospheric” and satellite.” World View and DYZNE will together form a new aerial surveillance unit within Ondas with over 500 employees, Sentinel.
“We first met World View and Ryan via Palantir,” Brock told reporters. “Palantir is also supporting Ondas with on many instances with revenue capture, program capture, so engaging customers.”
However, the new SkyWeaver command system will be “100 percent an Ondas product,” Brock said. “We’re funding the development.”
The long-term ambition with SkyWeaver is to create a comprehensive recon-strike package connecting large numbers of affordable unmanned systems, Brock and Hartman explained. That capability, they believe, will position Ondas to ride a new wave of Pentagon and allied investment.
“The future of defense belongs to autonomous systems, software-defined warfare, affordable mass, and persistent intelligence,” Brock said. “We are in the early stages of a massive adoption cycle around unmanned and autonomous systems. … Our objective is not simply to participate in that transition. Our objective is to lead it.”
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