Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
Drones: Industry & Defence
20AUG

Ondas buys Cyberhawk for $118.2m cash

1 min read
16:38UTC

Ondas Holdings closed its purchase of the British inspection and analytics firm Cyberhawk on 10 August, its second completed acquisition inside five weeks.

TechnologyDeveloping
Key takeaway

Ondas has bought inspection analytics in Britain rather than building the capability itself.

Ondas Holdings closed its acquisition of the British drone inspection and analytics firm Cyberhawk on 10 August for $118.2 million in cash plus 581,732 restricted shares 1. Cyberhawk works the analytics end of the business, turning survey flights over infrastructure into asset condition data rather than selling the aircraft that collect it.

This is the second close inside five weeks, following DZYNE and the $70 million of new orders the company booked in July . Ondas began the summer as a counter-drone and industrial hardware group. It ends the window owning a data product in Britain as well.

Buying rather than building is the common thread across the small-cap end of this sector this month, and timing explains more of it than ambition does. Capability bought outright arrives with customers already attached, which counts for a great deal when a tariff schedule and an export licensing regime are both about to reprice the hardware side of the same balance sheet. The exposure sits in integration. Two closes in five weeks is a heavy load of accounting for a company of this size, and nothing filed so far shows what the combined cost base looks like.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Ondas Holdings is a US drone company. It just bought Cyberhawk, a British firm that uses drones to inspect things like wind turbines, power lines and industrial sites, and turns the footage into data reports for clients. Rather than just selling drones, Ondas is building a business that also sells the inspection service itself, plus the software that makes sense of what the drones film. This is its second such purchase in just over a month.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

Buying an inspection and analytics firm rather than a drone manufacturer lets Ondas add recurring service revenue on top of hardware sales, a margin structure drone-only makers such as Unusual Machines and Red Cat do not yet have.

What could happen next?
  • Meaning

    Ondas is consolidating drone inspection services alongside hardware, betting recurring service contracts are more defensible than airframe sales alone.

First Reported In

Update #17 · Two walls close on the drone supply chain

US Securities and Exchange Commission· 20 Aug 2026
Read original
Different Perspectives
South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration
South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration
DAPA folded drone and roadside-bomb jammers into an 18-year, KRW 3.448 trillion K2 tank upgrade approved 11 August, rather than fund counter-drone kit as its own programme. Seoul is treating the threat as permanent enough to write into a platform's lifecycle, not urgent enough to buy ahead of it.
NATO Support and Procurement Agency
NATO Support and Procurement Agency
NSPA named five pre-qualified counter-drone suppliers under new framework contracts on 27 July, giving allies a purchasing route with no published budget attached. A framework without committed money is an instrument waiting for a spending decision, not a guarantee one is coming.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defence
Ukraine's Ministry of Defence
Ukraine's forces strike with more than 70 AI and computer-vision systems drawn from over 200 domestic producers, the ministry said on 18 August, a supplier base neither Washington's tariff fight nor Beijing's export licence touches. Kyiv is scaling capability faster than either government is writing rules for it.
A European drone-component manufacturer
A European drone-component manufacturer
A European manufacturer selling components into the United States faces the same 100 per cent tariff and 3 September deadline as any other foreign supplier, with the duty-free onshoring carve-out available only to firms building on American soil. That leaves it to absorb the cost, relocate assembly, or cede the US market rather than shop around a rival supply chain.
Chinese drone component exporters
Chinese drone component exporters
Exporters now need a case-by-case licence for each US-bound dual-use shipment after MOFCOM's 5 August order, with no published review clock. The same week Shenzhen logged nearly 200,000 domestic logistics-drone sorties and Hunan reported record spraying coverage, a home market large enough to absorb what the licence regime slows from leaving the country.
US drone manufacturers
US drone manufacturers
The onshoring carve-out protects Performance Drone Works' $820 million War Department loan, but the same 3 September deadline hits Red Cat Holdings and Unusual Machines, both filing over 500 per cent revenue growth on 6 August, on Chinese-sourced components with no qualified domestic substitute yet.