Anthony Pompliano
Ondas CEO Eric Brock: a dual-purpose unmanned-systems platform, layered counter-drone defense and accretive acquisitions
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Research summary
Framing: Anthony Pompliano interviews Eric Brock, whom Pompliano introduces as CEO of the company (transcribed "Andes"; Brock says "Ondas"). Pompliano says he is an investor in it. [1:38:26][1:43:04] The views below are Brock's unless attributed otherwise.
◆ Scope: unmanned systems across domains
Brock says the company describes its markets as unmanned, not as drones alone. [1:39:03] He lists high-altitude balloons in the portfolio and says the stratosphere is a new domain for the Department of War. [1:39:38][1:39:43] He says the aim is to put robots ahead of soldiers and law enforcement officers so they are protected. [1:40:09]
◆ Why a dual-purpose platform
Brock calls Ondas a dual-purpose company. [1:40:56] He argues that the widest and broadest market lets a company share development and supply-chain costs and bring unit economics down. [1:41:52] He adds that a single drone, however good, cannot be underwritten by an investor. [1:42:08] He says platform companies are the way to scale these capabilities and that it is "a game about scale". [1:43:36][1:44:30] He also says America needs to be re-industrialized and that this cannot be done with "a cottage industry". [1:44:47][1:45:12] He says the Nasdaq is going to be a critical conduit for scaling the unmanned sector. [1:45:39]
◆ Counter-drone and domestic deployment
Asked what daily life will look like, Brock says the technology is "happening in real time" and that safety cases are being proven as it matures. [1:46:16][1:46:22] He says one reason the company is getting permissions from the FAA and other regulators is that it is also able to protect. [1:47:57] He says the continental U.S. needs protection for population centers, public gatherings and critical infrastructure, and that nobody should be flying a drone at Yankee Stadium. [1:47:49][1:48:05]
On the technology, he describes layered defenses. [1:48:47] He says risk that cannot be seen cannot be defended against or mitigated, so detection matters. [1:49:54] Detection tools he names include radars enhanced for lower skies and a passive RF sensor that finds the link between drone and operator. [1:50:03][1:50:34] For mitigation he cites a capability he calls "cyber over RF" (the platform name "Centrix" is as transcribed and unverified). [1:50:49] He says the company cannot jam and spoof on the continental U.S., for two reasons. [1:51:03] The first is that doing so can interfere with commercial aviation avionics, which he calls "not allowable". [1:51:06][1:51:11] The second is that jamming a drone over a crowd can hurt someone. [1:51:16] He also says the company has kinetic systems designed against next-generation Shaheds. [1:51:39]
◆ Capital and acquisitions
Asked about the balance sheet, Brock says "it's just under a billion". [1:52:11] He says the company uses both cash and stock and is sensitive to its cost of capital. [1:52:38] Recent deals have included some all-cash and some all-stock transactions, and he says every acquisition has to be accretive. [1:52:53][1:52:56]
He says that many companies he is seeing are profitable, including EBITDA positive, but that they have not built a business as the company has. [1:53:29][1:53:33][1:53:35] He describes this as an arbitrage and says the company is buying these companies much more cheaply. [1:53:39][1:53:51]
Asked why the market has been tough, Brock says interest rates are up. [1:54:41] He puts the addressable market in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. [1:54:18] He says the sector is at an inflection point on an S curve where leaders are being determined now. [1:54:31]
◆ War, autonomy and the sector's durability
Brock argues that if the war ended tomorrow, adversaries would still be building their missiles. [1:54:53] He says "We will be building an unmanned sector" for commercial and military markets; the transcript does not specify who "we" is. [1:55:07] Asked about humanoid robots in war, he says it is not so much the humanoid as the robots. [1:55:35] He says everything has to be autonomous, with soldiers placed in the back. [1:55:48][1:55:50] He says all of this is connected to a kill chain. [1:56:20]
◆ Guidance and team
Asked whether guidance will keep being raised, Brock says he cannot say explicitly, and that his answer is not about Q3 or Q4. [1:57:50][1:57:56] He says the company does not have to be heroes when it gives targets, and that it aims to meet or beat them, with never a guarantee. [1:58:04][1:58:15] He says acquisitions are accretive on day one because of the cost-of-capital difference. [1:58:43] He also says acquired companies join a scaled platform and that the company is outperforming the models it underwrote. [1:58:48][1:58:56]
On the team, he says the company has 2,000 plus people. [1:59:43] He cites a strong position in Israel that is moving into Europe and the Asia Pacific. [1:59:25] He says the corporate development team includes legal and financial experts, plus subject matter experts, so the company is "not just bringing money to the table". [1:59:57][2:00:08]
Session of the Silvia Investor Summit 2026 livestream. Transcript: Whisper large-v3 with voice-based speaker identification. Every quote is checked verbatim against the transcript and linked to its timestamp in the stream.
Full transcript
[1:38:22] Anthony Pompliano: right? I was pretty impressed with them that they figured that out. All right. Awesome. I'm very excited. We have the CEO of Andes coming up here, Eric Brock, next. I think he's a fascinating company. We're talking a lot about drones and some of the autonomous technologies. So thank you very much for coming. He's like, what's under my seat? All right. Let's talk first. I think that defense tech in general has become obviously a huge theme, drones in particular. One thing that you said to me early on that made me think differently about this entire market is when I think of drones, I think of the things that fly in the air. You said to me, well, what about the ones on land and sea?
[1:39:01] ?: Explain. Right.
[1:39:03] Eric Brock: So we describe our markets as unmanned. Unmanned systems, and that is, as you're saying, that's drones, which are a generic term. We typically are thinking about quadcopters, right, the things you see on the battlefield or you're seeing for inspection, or even hobbyists, right? That's where we think about a drone. At the same time, a fixed-wing drone, Group 4 or 5, and we can probably touch on our portfolio as we're having a conversation because we are represented across all of these categories. You know, those have a very specific purpose and they're built for purpose. At the same time, we have high altitude balloons. So we're operationalizing the stratosphere. The stratosphere is a new domain for the Department of War between space and air. Then, of course, we have unmanned vessels on the water. That's USVs, we call them, unmanned surface vessels, and ground vehicles. And there's been a tremendous amount of investment in these systems, unmanned systems, over the last 10 plus years. And generally speaking, what we're seeing is the maturation of that tech stack, and they all have relevance, and it goes even further. As we're trying to put the ground vehicles, the surface vessels, the aerial platforms to their best use, what we're really doing is trying to put the robots before the soldiers, before the law enforcement officers, so they're protected. And we have to do that because the adversaries are making significant advances as we're advancing our cause.
[1:40:30] Anthony Pompliano: When you think about these technologies, I think that the battlefield is changing, which is fairly well covered. I find it very interesting that there's a lot of commercial applications for this stuff. Stadiums, local governments, different businesses. Talk a little bit about that market compared to the defense side. And do you see these as equal size, one bigger than the other?
[1:40:53] ?: How do you kind of view? Yeah, this is important.
[1:40:56] Eric Brock: And we describe Ondas as a dual purpose company. And we do that not only because the technologies are useful and they're big markets, but it really fits a scalable operating and financial model, which is really important. As investors, you're thinking about the sector. If you have the best drone in the world. The best drone. It's beautiful. You've worked five, maybe ten years as an engineering team to get it to be hardened and make it work in the field. You also made it useful. And that's not a small feat. These are complex technologies. Making them unmanned and reliable is extremely hard work. And then, of course, your customer loves it. And you say, okay, after this ten-year journey, we won. Show me the money, right? But then you realize you have to put the business together and actually start to deliver and sustain in the field, right? The field operations, the supply chain is all incredibly complex. The bottom line is for you as investors, what does that financial model look like? And having the widest and broadest market to share the OPEX on development, on supply chain scale, getting your unit economics down, the ability to install, deliver, install, train in the field and sustain in the field all takes a tremendous amount of capital. And you realize very quickly that just one drone, as good as it is, you can't underwrite that as an investor. So for Ondas, we've designed our strategy in around Thank you. Thank you very much.
[1:43:04] Anthony Pompliano: So I'm an investor in on this and probably the single most interesting aspect of the business is you explain this idea of early stage startups. Are really good at innovation and R&D, but they're not very good at commercialization. The big companies are really good at commercialization, but they're not as good as R&D. Describe kind of your maybe business strategy of marrying those two things together and how you've kind of built the company so far.
[1:43:31] Eric Brock: Yeah, sure. So, you know, we really, we're using the term operating platform. We think platform companies are the way to scale these capabilities, which are critical across military, home and security, public safety, critical infrastructure, industrial markets. And it has to be a platform company because of what I was just saying earlier. It's really about driving the efficiency of operating capital. To have relevance in the supply chain, you have to have real revenue, you have to have real volumes. Thank you. Thank you. Quickly you realize it is a game about scale and we're never going to be able to deliver these critical technologies without operating platforms. We think the operational and financial model of companies like Andas is the winner and it just all comes down to that scale. Do you get the unit economics? Now, there's another aspect of this is critical. You open the newspaper every day, social media feeds, wherever you see, you realize that we need to re-industrialize America. And what does re-industrialization mean? We need the supply chain, which of course we know is in China. And I'd also add that we're seeing our adversaries, Russia, Iran, with the help of China, building industrial capabilities around the technologies I'm talking about. So it's really essential that we're going to be building this capability in the United States. We can't do it with a cottage industry. If we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unmanned systems players, we're never going to get the scale so the component suppliers, the contract manufacturers, the other service providers can engage with each company. So really what we're doing, Anthony, is moving from a really productive cycle of venture-backed technology development. To building businesses, and that's where growth capital comes into play, and that's where the investors here come into play. The Nasdaq is going to be a critical conduit to scaling the unmanned sector, but also re-industrializing America.
[1:45:46] Anthony Pompliano: How does this look like in our everyday lives, right? You know, if I go to the Yankee game tonight, is there going to be drones flying over my head five, ten years from now? When I walk through New York City, should I expect, like, robot dogs policing the streets? Like, kind of, you're very close to the technology. You know the capabilities. You also know what the commercial law enforcement and military is talking about, what they want to do. What does my life look like, you know, maybe a decade from now?
[1:46:10] Eric Brock: So, you said five or ten years from now. You're actually talking about it today. Geez. No, this is happening in real time. So as I said, technology is maturing. We're also seeing, and this is not a surprise, that as we're maturing the technology, we're proving the safety cases, we're seeing regulations and policies
[1:46:31] ?: start to support this as well. So what does that mean?
[1:46:33] Eric Brock: The FAA in particular, as well as other regulators, are now... We're also improving that these are critical technologies adding value to the economy. Thank you.
[1:47:25] ?: Thank you. Thank you.
[1:47:37] Eric Brock: Most of the people think about counter-drone technologies as being on the battlefield because you see what's happening in Ukraine, you see what's happening in the Middle East, and of course that's an important part of the market. We're playing there. There's sorts of kinetic or hard-kill systems. On continental U.S., we need to protect population centers, public gatherings, critical infrastructure. And as we're deploying these technologies, there are risks, and one of the reasons we're getting permissions from the FAA and other regulators is because we're also able to protect. So, you know, 99.9% of all drone activity is going to be productive, but nobody should be flying a drone at Yankee Stadium, which is... Very literally, a no-fly zone, but people either are pretending not to know or they don't know, and it can cause problems, so we're protecting from that as
[1:48:23] Anthony Pompliano: well. So talk a little bit about that technology, right? Is that like, I understand that there's drones that can shoot like a net and catch it, there is a way to like take over the drone electronically, you could shoot it down, like... What is the way that this technology works? And the reason I say that is I don't know if I feel even safer if I'm standing in a stadium and all of a sudden drones start falling out of the air.
[1:48:45] ?: It might be scary too, right?
[1:48:47] Eric Brock: Exactly. So we talk about layered defenses in and around counter drone technologies. And those defenses are architected versus what the threat is. So when you go to Yankee Stadium tonight, you're not going to be worrying about a Shahed. Right. That's that's far away, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't think that's that's not the threat we're trying to solve for. What we're trying to solve for at Yankee Stadium is what we call the clueless and the careless, but also the bad guys. And you don't know when they're going to come. In fact, I'd say most of the people in security business up and through the FBI and counterterrorism officials in the White House, you know, they consider a terror threat in and around using a drone, a small drone with a warhead, which is incredible. Thank you. Thank you. And then there's the mitigation. Now, you can't defend or mitigate the risk that you can't see. So that's why detection is important. And again, these layers are architected for the use case. So detection are things like traditional radars that are being enhanced for lower skies, not missile defense or air traffic control. That's really high, big stuff in the sky. We're talking about finding small drones at lower skies. We can buttress that with other technology around thermal sensors, optical sensors. So we call that EOI. Thank you very much. There's other systems we have that we call passive RF sensor where we can sniff and we can find the link from the drone in the air to the operator on the ground. So depending on what the threat is, you're going to use all sorts of, and sometimes more than one tool on the detection side. And then a mitigation, we have in our Centrix platform, which we call cyber over RF, and this is probably going to be the state of the art in commercial civilian infrastructure in terms of protection because that's soft, soft kill. As you said, we... We can't jam and spoof on Continental US for two reasons. Firstly, we can interfere with commercial aviation, the avionics. That's unacceptable. That's not allowable. And then secondly... As it relates to jamming, you don't want to jam a drone over a crowd because it can hurt someone. And that's where your question was. So there's all these different layers and mitigation tools that are going to be tailored for the environment. When you're in Ukraine or in the Strait of Hormuz, you're not so worried about the niceties around jamming and spoofing. And you're also using kinetic systems. And we have those as well. We have kinetic systems that have been designed to defend against the new Shaheds, the next generation Shaheds.
[1:52:00] Anthony Pompliano: Talk about you guys at one point had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.
[1:52:04] ?: Is that right? You still have a billion dollars?
[1:52:06] Eric Brock: Yeah, if you do the math, we're deploying the capital on behalf of building the business. So we have a very strong balance sheet, but do the math, it's just under a billion.
[1:52:16] Anthony Pompliano: Okay, and how do you think about using equity versus cash in an environment like this where you're essentially going out, you're looking for what is the latest, greatest technology that you can go and acquire, you're then going to be... World class at going and striking these business development deals. So you're kind of playing market connector between the need and the person who's got the technology. You got to do the deal. So like, do you do with equity?
[1:52:38] Eric Brock: Do you do with cash? There's the short answer is we use both, but we are sensitive to our cost of capital. We have cash on the balance sheet, so that's giving us a tremendous amount of flexibility. And you've seen in the last couple of quarters, you know, we have used a mixture. We've done at the same time some all cash deals and some all stock. And it really depends. The bottom line for us is that every acquisition we make has to be accretive. And one of the things we're seeing is that getting back to the observation I made earlier, if you built a drone, And it works. The customer wants to buy it. That is exceptional. However, you haven't won anything, right? Now you have to build a business. And what we're seeing is that there's quite a number of companies now in that category where they're finally getting through the valleys of death. And now they've got the product that's got market fit. It's got demand. It's got backlog. Increasingly, these companies are actually that we're seeing are profitable in themselves, right? EBITDA positive. But we're at the same time, they haven't built a business like we have. So there's an arbitrage. We trade even with the depressed shares because we can talk about the market. It's been difficult. You know, there's a multiple that we're trading at in terms of our cost of capital. We're buying these companies much more cheaply.
[1:53:54] ?: So they are very accretive.
[1:53:56] Anthony Pompliano: Why has it been a tough market?
[1:53:58] Eric Brock: Well, I mean, you and Jordi probably know better than me. I used to be in that business, but that's a long time ago. But I do think it's, if you look not just in the defense technology realm, but you're talking about emerging growth businesses, where we're in an investment phase. We're investing to build a platform company that's going to capture a market. And the market I'm talking about is in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of addressable market. And that's because we're dual purpose, right? We're just at that inflection point on an S curve, and the leaders are being determined now, right? And we're positioning Ondas to be one of those companies so we can let that tailwind work with us. So, but getting back to it, interest rates are up.
[1:54:45] ?: There's short-term fears. Wow, the war is going to end.
[1:54:47] Eric Brock: What does that mean? And by the way, that is the shortest-term view I've ever seen because one thing is for real. If the war is ended tomorrow, if we had world peace, our adversaries are still building their missiles.
[1:54:58] ?: They're still building their drones. They're industrializing it.
[1:55:01] Eric Brock: And this is not about the White House.
[1:55:04] ?: It's not about Republicans and Democrats. This is about national security.
[1:55:07] Eric Brock: We will be building an unmanned sector for both commercial markets as well as, of course, military.
[1:55:14] Anthony Pompliano: That's the opportunity. There's companies like Saronic, et cetera, where we've seen these unmanned vessels in the water. What does the future of war look like? Are we just going to send humanoid robots to go fight this stuff? How do you see that? Drones, I think we've talked about, but how do you see the rest of war?
[1:55:33] Eric Brock: So the short answer is absolutely. I don't know if it's the humanoid as much as it's the robots. It's the aerial platforms. It's the ground vehicles, the surface vessels. I think what you're going to start to see is we talk about autonomy at the outset. Everything has to be autonomous. So you're putting the soldiers in the back. They're command and control. There's a command and control center. They've got screens. We're fusing those screens together. Maybe I'll briefly mention what we're doing at Palantir on this front because all of those platforms, you have a drone, you have a ground vehicle, you have a surface vessel. They have payloads and sensors and pulling that all together. They increasingly need to work together. So you're seeing something in the sky, you're tasking a surface vessel to go investigate or more. All of this is connected to a kill chain because precision strike is, okay, if the UAV is seeing something, the surface vessel is approaching, you realize that this threat is something, and I say you, I'm talking about CENTCOM or INDOPACOM or SOUTHCOM, that this is something we need to deal with kinetically, the warhead goes. And that's the way, that's not the...
[1:56:59] Anthony Pompliano: You have a huge tailwind in the need in the market. You've got a lot of capital. You guys have been very good at acquiring what I think are good businesses, and you've been able to show you can commercialize them.
[1:57:10] ?: What keeps you awake at night?
[1:57:15] Eric Brock: What keeps me awake at night? Nothing, because I work 24-7. The team works 24-7. You really think you found a home here with all these people, huh? I sleep well, but I don't sleep a lot. And I think we have got the right operational financial model.
[1:57:36] ?: We have an exceptional team. And we're just getting going.
[1:57:38] Eric Brock: It's an exciting time.
[1:57:41] ?: You've raised guidance.
[1:57:43] Anthony Pompliano: A number of different times over the last 12 to 18 months or so. Should that be the expectation going forward as you'll continue to do that?
[1:57:50] Eric Brock: Listen, of course, you know, I can't say explicitly other than...
[1:57:55] ?: See me as a public company CEO?
[1:57:56] Eric Brock: Now I know what to ask. I think, so this is the way we look at it, and this is not about Q3 or Q4, but we have massive tailwinds. The organic growth in tailwinds, this adoption cycle, these S-curves are very powerful, so we don't have to be heroes when we give our targets, firstly. And secondly, so everything we do, we aim to meet or beat. Never a guarantee. There's never a straight line. This is a very difficult business, and we're really... Bringing complexity. We're fixing the complexity of the business real time with you to build that platform that is scalable, repeatable. But I think we've got, you know, cushions because the growth is so strong. And then, of course, we're layering in accretion. The accretion on the acquisitions is twofold. Firstly, day one, it's accretive because of the cost of capital difference I tried to articulate just a moment ago. But secondly, when companies join on to us, they're joining a scaled platform. So when we're underwriting a deal, we're... We're showing is that we're outperforming the models that we underwrote. So that's a compounding benefit.
[1:59:02] Anthony Pompliano: When you look at this business, the team is not really that big in terms of the core team compared to the size of the company.
[1:59:09] Eric Brock: Talk about that a little bit. Well, it's bigger than you think. So we've got Andas Inc., which is the public company. And of course, you know, I'm very public facing. At the same time, we've built an exceptional operating team across the world, right? So we've got a scale platform here in the U.S. You know, we've got a very strong position in Israel that's moving into Europe and even the Asia Pacific. And that team is incredibly talented and senior. From development and product delivery, supply chain, capture, services, etc. So the team, we're 2,000 plus people now. And we're adding. This is a growth platform.
[1:59:50] Anthony Pompliano: But how many people are working on the acquisitions?
[1:59:52] Eric Brock: Oh, the corp dev team, this is a huge competitive advantage for us. We've got legal, we've got financial experts.
[1:59:59] ?: There's three people here in New York. You'll find me, where do I live?
[2:00:04] Eric Brock: I live in a Marriott. But I'm obviously part of that team. But even more powerful than that is we have subject matter experts. So we're not just bringing money to the table.
[2:00:13] ?: We understand technology. We understand autonomy.
[2:00:16] Eric Brock: We understand customer use cases. We understand supply chain, everything about the business.
[2:00:21] ?: And that's where we win. Makes sense to me.
[2:00:24] Anthony Pompliano: Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Andas?
[2:00:27] Eric Brock: Where? Well, yeah, I mean, we do have a social media presence. So I'm at CEO Andas and X, but Andas.com. And we're very transparent. We like to lay out what we're doing. We actually feel like at this point in the cycle, there's a lot of expertise in the private markets around unmanned systems and their applications and use cases. We've been pioneers in terms of trying to educate investors about what the market opportunity is, how we're capturing it. I love it.
[2:01:02] Anthony Pompliano: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have George, the CEO of Grindr.
[2:01:22] ?: George, that means you got to come up here. I'm coming. Come on. It's a hard one to follow. You know, I'm not defending the country.
[2:01:29] Anthony Pompliano: From drones to the gay app. Let's go. That's what I mean.
[2:01:33] ?: All right.
[1:39:01] ?: Explain. Right.
[1:39:03] Eric Brock: So we describe our markets as unmanned. Unmanned systems, and that is, as you're saying, that's drones, which are a generic term. We typically are thinking about quadcopters, right, the things you see on the battlefield or you're seeing for inspection, or even hobbyists, right? That's where we think about a drone. At the same time, a fixed-wing drone, Group 4 or 5, and we can probably touch on our portfolio as we're having a conversation because we are represented across all of these categories. You know, those have a very specific purpose and they're built for purpose. At the same time, we have high altitude balloons. So we're operationalizing the stratosphere. The stratosphere is a new domain for the Department of War between space and air. Then, of course, we have unmanned vessels on the water. That's USVs, we call them, unmanned surface vessels, and ground vehicles. And there's been a tremendous amount of investment in these systems, unmanned systems, over the last 10 plus years. And generally speaking, what we're seeing is the maturation of that tech stack, and they all have relevance, and it goes even further. As we're trying to put the ground vehicles, the surface vessels, the aerial platforms to their best use, what we're really doing is trying to put the robots before the soldiers, before the law enforcement officers, so they're protected. And we have to do that because the adversaries are making significant advances as we're advancing our cause.
[1:40:30] Anthony Pompliano: When you think about these technologies, I think that the battlefield is changing, which is fairly well covered. I find it very interesting that there's a lot of commercial applications for this stuff. Stadiums, local governments, different businesses. Talk a little bit about that market compared to the defense side. And do you see these as equal size, one bigger than the other?
[1:40:53] ?: How do you kind of view? Yeah, this is important.
[1:40:56] Eric Brock: And we describe Ondas as a dual purpose company. And we do that not only because the technologies are useful and they're big markets, but it really fits a scalable operating and financial model, which is really important. As investors, you're thinking about the sector. If you have the best drone in the world. The best drone. It's beautiful. You've worked five, maybe ten years as an engineering team to get it to be hardened and make it work in the field. You also made it useful. And that's not a small feat. These are complex technologies. Making them unmanned and reliable is extremely hard work. And then, of course, your customer loves it. And you say, okay, after this ten-year journey, we won. Show me the money, right? But then you realize you have to put the business together and actually start to deliver and sustain in the field, right? The field operations, the supply chain is all incredibly complex. The bottom line is for you as investors, what does that financial model look like? And having the widest and broadest market to share the OPEX on development, on supply chain scale, getting your unit economics down, the ability to install, deliver, install, train in the field and sustain in the field all takes a tremendous amount of capital. And you realize very quickly that just one drone, as good as it is, you can't underwrite that as an investor. So for Ondas, we've designed our strategy in around Thank you. Thank you very much.
[1:43:04] Anthony Pompliano: So I'm an investor in on this and probably the single most interesting aspect of the business is you explain this idea of early stage startups. Are really good at innovation and R&D, but they're not very good at commercialization. The big companies are really good at commercialization, but they're not as good as R&D. Describe kind of your maybe business strategy of marrying those two things together and how you've kind of built the company so far.
[1:43:31] Eric Brock: Yeah, sure. So, you know, we really, we're using the term operating platform. We think platform companies are the way to scale these capabilities, which are critical across military, home and security, public safety, critical infrastructure, industrial markets. And it has to be a platform company because of what I was just saying earlier. It's really about driving the efficiency of operating capital. To have relevance in the supply chain, you have to have real revenue, you have to have real volumes. Thank you. Thank you. Quickly you realize it is a game about scale and we're never going to be able to deliver these critical technologies without operating platforms. We think the operational and financial model of companies like Andas is the winner and it just all comes down to that scale. Do you get the unit economics? Now, there's another aspect of this is critical. You open the newspaper every day, social media feeds, wherever you see, you realize that we need to re-industrialize America. And what does re-industrialization mean? We need the supply chain, which of course we know is in China. And I'd also add that we're seeing our adversaries, Russia, Iran, with the help of China, building industrial capabilities around the technologies I'm talking about. So it's really essential that we're going to be building this capability in the United States. We can't do it with a cottage industry. If we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unmanned systems players, we're never going to get the scale so the component suppliers, the contract manufacturers, the other service providers can engage with each company. So really what we're doing, Anthony, is moving from a really productive cycle of venture-backed technology development. To building businesses, and that's where growth capital comes into play, and that's where the investors here come into play. The Nasdaq is going to be a critical conduit to scaling the unmanned sector, but also re-industrializing America.
[1:45:46] Anthony Pompliano: How does this look like in our everyday lives, right? You know, if I go to the Yankee game tonight, is there going to be drones flying over my head five, ten years from now? When I walk through New York City, should I expect, like, robot dogs policing the streets? Like, kind of, you're very close to the technology. You know the capabilities. You also know what the commercial law enforcement and military is talking about, what they want to do. What does my life look like, you know, maybe a decade from now?
[1:46:10] Eric Brock: So, you said five or ten years from now. You're actually talking about it today. Geez. No, this is happening in real time. So as I said, technology is maturing. We're also seeing, and this is not a surprise, that as we're maturing the technology, we're proving the safety cases, we're seeing regulations and policies
[1:46:31] ?: start to support this as well. So what does that mean?
[1:46:33] Eric Brock: The FAA in particular, as well as other regulators, are now... We're also improving that these are critical technologies adding value to the economy. Thank you.
[1:47:25] ?: Thank you. Thank you.
[1:47:37] Eric Brock: Most of the people think about counter-drone technologies as being on the battlefield because you see what's happening in Ukraine, you see what's happening in the Middle East, and of course that's an important part of the market. We're playing there. There's sorts of kinetic or hard-kill systems. On continental U.S., we need to protect population centers, public gatherings, critical infrastructure. And as we're deploying these technologies, there are risks, and one of the reasons we're getting permissions from the FAA and other regulators is because we're also able to protect. So, you know, 99.9% of all drone activity is going to be productive, but nobody should be flying a drone at Yankee Stadium, which is... Very literally, a no-fly zone, but people either are pretending not to know or they don't know, and it can cause problems, so we're protecting from that as
[1:48:23] Anthony Pompliano: well. So talk a little bit about that technology, right? Is that like, I understand that there's drones that can shoot like a net and catch it, there is a way to like take over the drone electronically, you could shoot it down, like... What is the way that this technology works? And the reason I say that is I don't know if I feel even safer if I'm standing in a stadium and all of a sudden drones start falling out of the air.
[1:48:45] ?: It might be scary too, right?
[1:48:47] Eric Brock: Exactly. So we talk about layered defenses in and around counter drone technologies. And those defenses are architected versus what the threat is. So when you go to Yankee Stadium tonight, you're not going to be worrying about a Shahed. Right. That's that's far away, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't think that's that's not the threat we're trying to solve for. What we're trying to solve for at Yankee Stadium is what we call the clueless and the careless, but also the bad guys. And you don't know when they're going to come. In fact, I'd say most of the people in security business up and through the FBI and counterterrorism officials in the White House, you know, they consider a terror threat in and around using a drone, a small drone with a warhead, which is incredible. Thank you. Thank you. And then there's the mitigation. Now, you can't defend or mitigate the risk that you can't see. So that's why detection is important. And again, these layers are architected for the use case. So detection are things like traditional radars that are being enhanced for lower skies, not missile defense or air traffic control. That's really high, big stuff in the sky. We're talking about finding small drones at lower skies. We can buttress that with other technology around thermal sensors, optical sensors. So we call that EOI. Thank you very much. There's other systems we have that we call passive RF sensor where we can sniff and we can find the link from the drone in the air to the operator on the ground. So depending on what the threat is, you're going to use all sorts of, and sometimes more than one tool on the detection side. And then a mitigation, we have in our Centrix platform, which we call cyber over RF, and this is probably going to be the state of the art in commercial civilian infrastructure in terms of protection because that's soft, soft kill. As you said, we... We can't jam and spoof on Continental US for two reasons. Firstly, we can interfere with commercial aviation, the avionics. That's unacceptable. That's not allowable. And then secondly... As it relates to jamming, you don't want to jam a drone over a crowd because it can hurt someone. And that's where your question was. So there's all these different layers and mitigation tools that are going to be tailored for the environment. When you're in Ukraine or in the Strait of Hormuz, you're not so worried about the niceties around jamming and spoofing. And you're also using kinetic systems. And we have those as well. We have kinetic systems that have been designed to defend against the new Shaheds, the next generation Shaheds.
[1:52:00] Anthony Pompliano: Talk about you guys at one point had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.
[1:52:04] ?: Is that right? You still have a billion dollars?
[1:52:06] Eric Brock: Yeah, if you do the math, we're deploying the capital on behalf of building the business. So we have a very strong balance sheet, but do the math, it's just under a billion.
[1:52:16] Anthony Pompliano: Okay, and how do you think about using equity versus cash in an environment like this where you're essentially going out, you're looking for what is the latest, greatest technology that you can go and acquire, you're then going to be... World class at going and striking these business development deals. So you're kind of playing market connector between the need and the person who's got the technology. You got to do the deal. So like, do you do with equity?
[1:52:38] Eric Brock: Do you do with cash? There's the short answer is we use both, but we are sensitive to our cost of capital. We have cash on the balance sheet, so that's giving us a tremendous amount of flexibility. And you've seen in the last couple of quarters, you know, we have used a mixture. We've done at the same time some all cash deals and some all stock. And it really depends. The bottom line for us is that every acquisition we make has to be accretive. And one of the things we're seeing is that getting back to the observation I made earlier, if you built a drone, And it works. The customer wants to buy it. That is exceptional. However, you haven't won anything, right? Now you have to build a business. And what we're seeing is that there's quite a number of companies now in that category where they're finally getting through the valleys of death. And now they've got the product that's got market fit. It's got demand. It's got backlog. Increasingly, these companies are actually that we're seeing are profitable in themselves, right? EBITDA positive. But we're at the same time, they haven't built a business like we have. So there's an arbitrage. We trade even with the depressed shares because we can talk about the market. It's been difficult. You know, there's a multiple that we're trading at in terms of our cost of capital. We're buying these companies much more cheaply.
[1:53:54] ?: So they are very accretive.
[1:53:56] Anthony Pompliano: Why has it been a tough market?
[1:53:58] Eric Brock: Well, I mean, you and Jordi probably know better than me. I used to be in that business, but that's a long time ago. But I do think it's, if you look not just in the defense technology realm, but you're talking about emerging growth businesses, where we're in an investment phase. We're investing to build a platform company that's going to capture a market. And the market I'm talking about is in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of addressable market. And that's because we're dual purpose, right? We're just at that inflection point on an S curve, and the leaders are being determined now, right? And we're positioning Ondas to be one of those companies so we can let that tailwind work with us. So, but getting back to it, interest rates are up.
[1:54:45] ?: There's short-term fears. Wow, the war is going to end.
[1:54:47] Eric Brock: What does that mean? And by the way, that is the shortest-term view I've ever seen because one thing is for real. If the war is ended tomorrow, if we had world peace, our adversaries are still building their missiles.
[1:54:58] ?: They're still building their drones. They're industrializing it.
[1:55:01] Eric Brock: And this is not about the White House.
[1:55:04] ?: It's not about Republicans and Democrats. This is about national security.
[1:55:07] Eric Brock: We will be building an unmanned sector for both commercial markets as well as, of course, military.
[1:55:14] Anthony Pompliano: That's the opportunity. There's companies like Saronic, et cetera, where we've seen these unmanned vessels in the water. What does the future of war look like? Are we just going to send humanoid robots to go fight this stuff? How do you see that? Drones, I think we've talked about, but how do you see the rest of war?
[1:55:33] Eric Brock: So the short answer is absolutely. I don't know if it's the humanoid as much as it's the robots. It's the aerial platforms. It's the ground vehicles, the surface vessels. I think what you're going to start to see is we talk about autonomy at the outset. Everything has to be autonomous. So you're putting the soldiers in the back. They're command and control. There's a command and control center. They've got screens. We're fusing those screens together. Maybe I'll briefly mention what we're doing at Palantir on this front because all of those platforms, you have a drone, you have a ground vehicle, you have a surface vessel. They have payloads and sensors and pulling that all together. They increasingly need to work together. So you're seeing something in the sky, you're tasking a surface vessel to go investigate or more. All of this is connected to a kill chain because precision strike is, okay, if the UAV is seeing something, the surface vessel is approaching, you realize that this threat is something, and I say you, I'm talking about CENTCOM or INDOPACOM or SOUTHCOM, that this is something we need to deal with kinetically, the warhead goes. And that's the way, that's not the...
[1:56:59] Anthony Pompliano: You have a huge tailwind in the need in the market. You've got a lot of capital. You guys have been very good at acquiring what I think are good businesses, and you've been able to show you can commercialize them.
[1:57:10] ?: What keeps you awake at night?
[1:57:15] Eric Brock: What keeps me awake at night? Nothing, because I work 24-7. The team works 24-7. You really think you found a home here with all these people, huh? I sleep well, but I don't sleep a lot. And I think we have got the right operational financial model.
[1:57:36] ?: We have an exceptional team. And we're just getting going.
[1:57:38] Eric Brock: It's an exciting time.
[1:57:41] ?: You've raised guidance.
[1:57:43] Anthony Pompliano: A number of different times over the last 12 to 18 months or so. Should that be the expectation going forward as you'll continue to do that?
[1:57:50] Eric Brock: Listen, of course, you know, I can't say explicitly other than...
[1:57:55] ?: See me as a public company CEO?
[1:57:56] Eric Brock: Now I know what to ask. I think, so this is the way we look at it, and this is not about Q3 or Q4, but we have massive tailwinds. The organic growth in tailwinds, this adoption cycle, these S-curves are very powerful, so we don't have to be heroes when we give our targets, firstly. And secondly, so everything we do, we aim to meet or beat. Never a guarantee. There's never a straight line. This is a very difficult business, and we're really... Bringing complexity. We're fixing the complexity of the business real time with you to build that platform that is scalable, repeatable. But I think we've got, you know, cushions because the growth is so strong. And then, of course, we're layering in accretion. The accretion on the acquisitions is twofold. Firstly, day one, it's accretive because of the cost of capital difference I tried to articulate just a moment ago. But secondly, when companies join on to us, they're joining a scaled platform. So when we're underwriting a deal, we're... We're showing is that we're outperforming the models that we underwrote. So that's a compounding benefit.
[1:59:02] Anthony Pompliano: When you look at this business, the team is not really that big in terms of the core team compared to the size of the company.
[1:59:09] Eric Brock: Talk about that a little bit. Well, it's bigger than you think. So we've got Andas Inc., which is the public company. And of course, you know, I'm very public facing. At the same time, we've built an exceptional operating team across the world, right? So we've got a scale platform here in the U.S. You know, we've got a very strong position in Israel that's moving into Europe and even the Asia Pacific. And that team is incredibly talented and senior. From development and product delivery, supply chain, capture, services, etc. So the team, we're 2,000 plus people now. And we're adding. This is a growth platform.
[1:59:50] Anthony Pompliano: But how many people are working on the acquisitions?
[1:59:52] Eric Brock: Oh, the corp dev team, this is a huge competitive advantage for us. We've got legal, we've got financial experts.
[1:59:59] ?: There's three people here in New York. You'll find me, where do I live?
[2:00:04] Eric Brock: I live in a Marriott. But I'm obviously part of that team. But even more powerful than that is we have subject matter experts. So we're not just bringing money to the table.
[2:00:13] ?: We understand technology. We understand autonomy.
[2:00:16] Eric Brock: We understand customer use cases. We understand supply chain, everything about the business.
[2:00:21] ?: And that's where we win. Makes sense to me.
[2:00:24] Anthony Pompliano: Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Andas?
[2:00:27] Eric Brock: Where? Well, yeah, I mean, we do have a social media presence. So I'm at CEO Andas and X, but Andas.com. And we're very transparent. We like to lay out what we're doing. We actually feel like at this point in the cycle, there's a lot of expertise in the private markets around unmanned systems and their applications and use cases. We've been pioneers in terms of trying to educate investors about what the market opportunity is, how we're capturing it. I love it.
[2:01:02] Anthony Pompliano: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have George, the CEO of Grindr.
[2:01:22] ?: George, that means you got to come up here. I'm coming. Come on. It's a hard one to follow. You know, I'm not defending the country.
[2:01:29] Anthony Pompliano: From drones to the gay app. Let's go. That's what I mean.
[2:01:33] ?: All right.