The great defense tech rollup is well underway, and Ondas ($ONDS) is quietly leading the charge.
This morning, the drone and counter-drone roll-up announced that it’s acquired California-based drone company DZYNE Technologies for a whopping $875.8M, forming a new business unit with fellow Ondas portfolio company World View (acquired in April) that’ll be focused on “persistent ISR, counter-UAS, autonomous effects and mission intelligence.”
- DZYNE is majority-owned by PE firm Highlander Partners, and investors will receive $200M in cash and roughly $675M in stock.
Shopping spree: Ondas isn’t the flashiest company, but they’ve quietly built up quite the global portfolio of drone, C-UAS, and sensing companies spanning the US, Europe, and Israel. That includes:
- Rotron Aero, a UK-based company making long-range drones, loitering munitions, and other strike systems.
- Sentrycs, an Israeli-based C-UAS company focused on Cyber-over-RF (CoRF) and Protocol-Manipulation drone-downing tech. Ondas bought Sentrycs last November.
- Iron Drone, which makes fully automated interceptor drones designed to take out small drones without using GPS or RF jamming.
- World View, a company specializing in stratospheric intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and high-altitude remote sensing.
And business is booming for Ondas and its companies: In the second quarter of this year, they’ve booked over $110M in orders, more than doubling their Q1 revenue, and are on pace to bring in $525M in revenue this year, up from $390M in 2025.
- They’ve also been active backers of drone companies we know and love, like PDW (Ondas led their $110M Series B in March) and Firestorm, through their $150M investment arm, Ondas Capital.
Hitting the ground running: With DZYNE, Ondas is adding a pretty mature drone company with some serious contracts under its belt. DZYNE is expected to generate $191M in revenue this year and $300M next year and, according to Ondas, is “EBITDA positive with a strong and growing margin profile.”
- The company is best known for its long-range UAS, particularly ULTRA and ULTRA Turbo, its flagship Group 5 ISR drones. ULTRA offers 70+ hours of endurance (60+ for the Turbo variant), 450-lb payload capacity, and a 25,000+ ft ceiling (30,000+ for Turbo). DZYNE snagged a “multi-million dollar contract” with the Air Force Research Lab for the ULTRA Turbo in April.
- DZYNE also unveiled an expendable and man-portable Group 1 drone called Blitz in May.
Combo deal: Along with the DZYNE acquisition, Ondas also announced the formation of a new business unit called Ondas Sentinel, which combines their latest family member with World View to create a new org “built to support larger, more integrated defense programs” and focused on “persistent ISR, counter-UAS, autonomous effects and mission intelligence.” Always nice to see siblings get along.
Ondas Sentinel, according to Ondas’ statement, will be focused on building out three core offerings:
- A multi-domain ISR architecture, by integrating DZYNE’s ULTRA and Group 4 LEAP ISR aircraft with World View’s Stratollite persistent sensing, comms relay, and stratospheric intelligence platform;
- Counter-drone systems, by bringing DZYNE’s IonStrike autonomous kinetic interceptor into Ondas’ suite of C-UAS platforms;
- And precision strike, by scaling up DZYNE’s “family of unique, low-cost, attritable autonomous systems,” including its new Blitz Group 1 drone.
“DZYNE brings exceptional technology, world-class engineering talent and mission-ready systems across long-endurance ISR, counter-UAS and autonomous effects,” Ondas CEO Eric Brock said in the statement. “The combination with DZYNE accelerates Ondas’ build-out of the next-generation autonomous defense platform—not through a single breakthrough product, but by integrating complementary, mission-proven technologies into a scaled operating platform.”