Ondas Acquires American Robotics to Leverage Autonomous Drone Tech

Wireless broadband company Ondas Holdings has acquired drone company American Robotics in a $70.6 million deal.

Founded in 2016, American Robotics brings its Scout drone system to Ondas’ portfolio—the first drone system to receive FAA regulatory approvals for autonomous flight. “This gives the company an exclusive first-mover advantage to unlock the commercial drone market by overcoming the need for costly visual observers to be on the ground during every drone flight,” an Ondas statement noted.

For Ondas, the acquisition will help integrate its technology platforms and increase automation, data collection, and AI-powered analytics in industrial markets to improve maintenance, monitoring and operation of critical infrastructure.

American Robotics’ Scout System will be integrated into Ondas FullMAX platform, a networking solution data communications solution for field area operations.

The company plans to use the Scout System as a mobile data gathering application for wide field area operations in industrial, agricultural and governmental settings. The system includes:

• Scout, a fully autonomous drone with advanced imaging payloads;
• ScoutBase, a ruggedized base station for housing, charging, data processing and cloud transfer;
• ScoutView, American Robotics’ analytics and front-end software package.

“We are excited to bring American Robotics into the Ondas fold,” said Eric Brock, Chairman and CEO of Ondas.

“At the end of the day, the drone industry’s product is data, not aircraft. The drone is the ultimate data gathering edge device for mission critical operations, solving a huge pain-point for Ondas’ industrial and government customers and ecosystem partners. American Robotics’ full stack IP portfolio is a complete system enabling Ondas to turn these pain-points into growth opportunities fueled by more rich data collection.”

“It’s the perfect time for American Robotics to join forces with Ondas as we bring Scout System to the market and scale customer deployments,” added Reese Mozer, co-founder and CEO of American Robotics.

“Ondas’ deep experience and relationships in our target customer markets in addition to its next-generation industrial networking capabilities will be incredibly helpful as we penetrate the large markets we address. We see substantial customer demand and are ready to deliver systems across an impressive pipeline of blue-chip industrial customers in addition to new customer relationships via Ondas.”

Earlier this month, AUVSI named American Robotics a finalist in the Xcellence in Innovation category. Winners will be announced at AUVSI Xponential on August 16-19, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.