Ondas to accelerate American Robotics, Airobotics combination

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American Robotics, which will soon be combined with Airobotics, offers an autonomous drone system called Scout. | Source: American Robotics

Ondas Holdings announced that it plans to accelerate its integration plan for its drone segment, which includes American Robotics, ahead of the close of its acquisition of Airobotics. 

The company hopes that it will close its Airobotics acquisition by the end of this month. Its integration plan for American Robotics and Airobotics includes developing a streamlined product roadmap strategy and customer support plans as well as a reduction of personnel at American Robotics. Ondas did not give details on how many employees it planned to lay off, but Eric Brock, the Chairman and CEO of Ondas, tweeted that the headcount reduction would be “substantial.”

These plans included a substantial headcount reduction at AR. We are grateful for the significant contributions of our colleagues. We wish them the best and will provide any support we can as they find new opportunities.

— Eric Brock (@CeoOndas) January 11, 2023

Ondas hopes to focus on securing revenue growth quickly and a return on its investment. It expects that its integration plan can results in $18-20 million in annual savings compared to operating the two companies as separate businesses. In the short term, Ondas expects the plan could save them $500,000 in Q1 of 2023. 

“We are confident that accelerating our integration plans will position us for success as we move forward with the acquisition of Airobotics, focus on near-term revenue generation and work towards profitable growth for Ondas,” Brock said in a release. “While the decision to reduce personnel at American Robotics was difficult, we believe it was necessary to shrink our operating costs and eliminate anticipated redundancies within the future combined operations. On behalf of the executive team and board of directors, we thank all members of the American Robotics staff for their contributions in driving AR’s success to date.”

Ondas plans to hold a virtual investor event in February 2023 to give more details on the business acquisition and combination. It first announced the acquisition in July 2022. The deal is intended to accelerate American Robotics’ technical development and regulatory roadmap and expand the breadth of applications, use cases and vertical AR targets.

Airobotics’ Optimus System is an autonomous unmanned aircraft system that focuses on high-value applications within the industrial, homeland security and smart city services market. The system includes an industrial-grade drone-in-a-box and the Optimus Airbase, which allows for robotic battery and payload swapping. 

The Scout System from American Robotics includes Scout, a fully-autonomous drone, ScoutBase, a weatherproof charging and edge computing station and ScoutView, a fleet management and analytics software. Scout is intended for industrial, agricultural, and defense markets. 

American Robotics was acquired by Ondas Holdings in May 2021 for $70.6 million. The company recently added seven additional sites of operation approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its automated beyond visual line of site (BVLOS) drone technology. It was the first company approved by the FAA to operate automated drones without human operators on-site.