Hello and welcome back to another video. And on today's video, we're going to be doing an interview with Eric Brock, who is the CEO of Ondas Holdings. If you do enjoy the video, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more content like this. And drop down below in the comments section your favorite part from this interview. Enjoy. Right, Eric, thank you very much and welcome back onto the show. I appreciate you taking your time out of your day to join me today.
It's a pleasure to be here, Jay. Thanks. Thanks for having me again.
No worries. Thanks, Eric. And just before we start as well, just want to say thank you for the appeal as well. It's been well taken on the market, hasn't it? Everyone was loving the merch very much, wasn't it?
Yeah, it's great. This is a lot of fun and it is a good way to communicate. So, thanks for the opportunity.
No, I appreciate it. So, first question, Eric. You built a strong relationship with retail investors through transparency and accessibility. As Ondas scales, how important is it for you to keep maintaining that connection with shareholders?
Yeah, sure. A great place to start. So, I'll give you the short answer: engaging with all shareholders is critical, of course, and anybody who invests in Ondas is going to be important to me. And that's particularly true of individual investors. You know, I've thought about this a bunch and my orientation here really comes back to the first day of business school. I went to the University of Chicago going back to 1995 and at Chicago it's well known they have all these Nobel laureates, particularly in economics, and they sort of give you the big picture at the outset. So really on day one, and this tenet from Milton Friedman has always resonated with me, who said, and he wrote a paper on this, it was published in New York Times back in 1970, that the duty of a company is to perform for its investors. That's the first duty. And really, if you pull it back, it's the only duty of a company. And of course, as chairman and CEO, that puts me in the spot that I am in. So, it's one of the most important tenets of business. It really resonates with me and I do believe it in the deepest parts of my soul. And at the end of the day, it's not really a hard concept to grasp, but if you can wake up every day remembering this, it makes everything else a lot easier.
The other thing I would say, Jamie, is I hear this a lot, the term retail investors, and there's nothing wrong with it, but you'll see that I very rarely use it. And not to be overly ideological. I prefer to call them individual investors, and it is semantic, but as investors, you don't go to the store and pick up stocks off the shelf. You're not going to Amazon and seeing what's on sale. So I think you get my point. I'm a bit of a stickler on this. But all investors matter. I do have to admit that individual investors are even more special. I really can relate. The money you entrust in me and my team is important. It's hard-earned and we need to deploy it productively. It's critically important. So we're going to continue to be very transparent. We want to communicate with investors. It's really important for you to know what we're doing.
And then of course, what we're really doing is putting out our targets and objectives. And this is a way for us to be accountable. It's important for management teams to be accountable and if we're telling you what we're going to do and if we don't deliver on it, then we have to sort of explain why we haven't. So I think that's a really important way to build trust because we have to do this together. Let me make one other point. It's great to have this engagement we have with individual investors. At the same time, it's really important for us to deepen and broaden our investor base and as you're well aware, we've been doing that. What I'm talking about specifically is building the institutional investor base and so you've seen that grow over the course of the last three to six months and I think you're going to see even more of that. That's important, to get those long-term investors to provide the base for the company. And we're going to be very transparent with them as well. It's the same communications, really.
Yeah. And I think like you say, you're very different to most CEOs with how you deal with individual investors because you'll take so much time out of your day to talk to people like myself, people like a lot of people on X. I know because I know it can't all be sweet talking because I can imagine there's a lot of people that are sending you messages all the time and it can probably get overwhelming, can't it? Because there's probably not just three or four of us. I can imagine there's hundreds of people messaging you now and I can imagine it gets a lot.
There's quite a bit and it's fine. You know, like I said, I do enjoy doing it and it is important. But what I find, Jay, is that as a chart goes up and down, the kind of the tenor of the DMs I get changes. I do find that can be a contraindicator. So when the stock's down a bunch, you know, people are concerned. Maybe people are saying not such nice things, but that's okay. I can handle that. And I have the context as a, you know, I understand it. Sort of they say the narrative follows price. And you're never as good as your best day, you're never as bad as your worst. We just have to wake up every day and focus on delivering the plan. And if we do that, our investors will be happy.
And let me make one more point on that. We're really building the company for investors, not traders. And traders are great, right? They have a role to play in the financial markets. We want to create opportunities for them. But at the end of the day, it's really about building a substantial equity value in our company.
Yeah. No, I agree. And I can imagine some of, I see some of the stuff, so I can imagine what you have to talk to people about. So I can imagine what you receive. Yeah. So into some of the juicy stuff then, Eric. What are the top drivers that you need to happen for Ondas to achieve that $370 million revenue in 2026?
Yeah. So that's obviously a big step function change in our growth here. And the simple answer is we have to execute the plan. And you've seen us spend a lot of time and energy building out the infrastructure at Ondas Autonomous Systems and that's going to be critical. As I'm sure you know, but I'll say it anyway, the leadership team led by Oshi Lagosi, we've put that number up and of course there's various people with various responsibilities to build up, whether you're at Centrics, Robo Team, or Aerobotics, etc. We all have our objectives and we have to deliver and execute. I'll say this: the team is really energized to do better. So let's see where we can take this. But the key thing will be for us to continue to put the leadership and the infrastructure for growth. And what we're really doing at OAS is building a platform to handle much higher revenue levels and business activities than that $375 million. We're building it to be able to build a substantial company over a three to five year period. We're going to keep making those investments.
And I guess on the back end of that, what do you think like the biggest risks to executing that type of revenue for 2026 targets are? Like how is yourself and management mitigating those type of things, for instance, like geopolitical stuff that's going on, etc. and stuff like that?
Yeah. So I don't see the geopolitical element as a risk. In fact, it only adds to the opportunity both, particularly in the near term, and we are seeing that demand. There's more urgency in certain areas of our business to deliver for customers. So that's obviously good from a financial standpoint. And we have to make sure we're delivering for customers because when they need something urgently, that has real implications. At the same time, the geopolitics here only reinforce this massive investment cycle that we've talked so much about. You're starting to see that evidence, of course. So that's actually in motion. From a risk standpoint, it really is about how we execute and deliver on the customer requirements. And again, it comes back to putting together that infrastructure at OAS and the leadership team, and then executing. So it's really that simple. All aspects of the business have to come together and we've done a lot of work to prepare. We feel really good about the outlook for that stake in the ground we put in there for 2026.
No, I think that's fair enough. And you ended 2025 with a $68.3 million backlog and you said backlog should increase significantly in Q1. How much of that outlook do you expect to convert into 2026 revenue and what are the biggest factors playing into that do you reckon?
Yeah, so the backlog that we ended last year with grew substantially. But at the same time, we've seen a strong order cadence in Q1 and I think that's going to persist. So that's going to add to the backlog and of course we've made some significant acquisitions so we've grown our portfolio. And I think we were quite clear on the call that the backlog would grow significantly in Q1 and we weren't able to because Q1's not over to give you that number. And a lot on how and when we close these deals that are pending, the definitive agreements we have. But we think most of them do come in probably early in Q2. So we'll be able to talk about a backlog that's at least multiples of what we ended 2025 in with. And that really gives us tremendous visibility for the year. The bulk of the backlog we had at year end will be pulled through revenue this year. We're going to try to get as much as we can in the first and second quarter. And then as we build the backlog, you'll see some of the programs are multi-year and we've already got orders. Because the only thing in the backlog that you see us report are actual orders, not necessarily program wins.
So when you win a program, we'll often announce that and say, hey, this is, you know, we won this business to be delivered over a period of time. And then the customers will give you orders, purchase orders against that program. So it's really those orders that turn into backlog and that can pull through revenue. Then once you finish that order, there's a sequencing where the customer says, okay, there's another phase or there's an expansion, then you get a new order, then that goes in the backlog. So the point is, we've said it, I'll just say it again: we do have quite a bit of visibility on the goals for this year.
No, I think that's, thank you very much. And how has your acquisition framework changed over the last year in terms of target quality, valuation, discipline and integration planning?
Yeah, so in terms of process and objectives and criteria, nothing's changed. We've been building up, this acquisition program really started in August. But we've been planning and had a vision of how the market would organize for three or four years prior. So what we did is we staffed the team beginning at the beginning of 2025. Then we've been deepening it. So we have expertise across finance, legal, technology, customers and end market requirements. We bring all that together and that team just gets stronger. We've actually added to it, which I mentioned on the call, the PMI activities. So post-merger integration, that's going to be critical to the successful execution of the operating plans we have when new companies come in.
But in terms of criteria, I think it's the same thing: we're looking for transactions that add strategic value, they add customer roadmap, the system-to-system benefits as we've talked a lot about, and we get operating leverage. The companies that come in, when we plug them in, they should be growing faster than the models we underwrote when we made the deal. So that's that compounding of accretion that we argue for and I think you're already seeing it and I think we're going to get rewarded for that. So that's some context. The last thing I'll say, Jay, is that we are seeing that the quality is one word to say. So the maturity of the businesses that we're starting to see coming in our pipeline is improving. And I think we're able to do that because now we have scale. We certainly have the financial resources and the counterparties. Whenever you make an acquisition, somebody has to be willing to sell their company to you. The management teams have to want to join the platform. And as we've built that credibility that we can execute both on an integration but also on the growth plan, and we've created a model for compounding equity value, that's what these companies, when we're acquiring a company, they came together at some point prior, they put a lot of capital, a lot of sweat equity, they wanted to build a business, they wanted to generate incomes, they also want to generate equity upside. And when we're offering that to them in a compounding model, the interest is actually, as I thought, increasing dramatically. So it is, for lack of a better term, the quality of what we're seeing: more mature companies, bigger companies, that really actually under the Ondas umbrella are poised to perform even better. It's really good to see.
No, that's great and that's fair as well, Eric. And as Ondas keeps expanding, are larger defense and technology firms increasingly becoming partners and distribution channels, or are they becoming more competitive threats? Now, I know obviously when we see likes of Palantir, people like that, those are really big relationships to have. So I know that's easy self-answered a little bit, but yeah.
This is a really important point, Jay. The whole thesis around our model is building scaled operations and that leads to operating leverage, means we can grow faster, we can expand margins faster and be more profitable, and we can service customers better. So across the ecosystem everybody wins. And the really important part of scale, and Palantir is a great example but we have others, we've been building relationships. Some of them have come through the core and others we're acquiring. So you've seen some logos, to highlight a few: we have Lockheed Martin as a distributor and a partner in the field. We have Dedrone, an Axon company. Androl is a systems integrator taking some of our capabilities. And there's others. We see partnerships and engagement with supply chain folks, contract manufacturers, Flextronics for example. And what you see is as Ondas builds scale with all those folks, we become a more attractive counterparty.
So take Palantir: Palantir has a view around layered ISR and of course their AI tools are enabling this for customers. But for AI to be valuable for customers, you need data, right? So you need all these layers. Worldview is a great example. And so for Palantir to go work with dozens of small companies is very difficult. They don't get scale in their business, it means they have to put together, the customers have to go do all the work to agree to be a partner. So if you have a drone and you're the US Army and maybe you want to have all these different layers and say there's ten layers, you have to go to ten companies. That means you have to go do due diligence on ten companies, you have to do testing, you have to do integration, all that is very laborious, it has risks, and it slows things down. So if you can put the layers together for the customer, for folks like Palantir, everything happens more efficiently at higher quality.
So one thing to think about, Jay, is that the Palantir-Worldview relationship: Palantir introduced Worldview to Ondas. And why is that? Well, Ondas had the layers, other valuable layers in that stack or domains. We also had the roadmap to add other critical edge capabilities around ISR and we had the financial platform to do it as well. So we present ourselves as an outstanding counterparty to Palantir and that's true of the other partners. And you'll see even more partnerships like this as we move forward because we're becoming a scaled operator with really valuable capabilities.
Yeah. And I think as Ondas gains more institutional support and anticipates addition to the Russell 2K and other indices during 2026, should investors expect the pace of acquisitions to slow down over time with more focus shifting towards scaling and integrating the existing portfolio, or do you still think that Ondas is firmly in acquisition mode?
Yes. So the short answer is we're going to continue with this strategy. But it's not either we're going to just focus on the core or we're going to focus on the acquisitions. They both have to come together. So I really emphasize this: this is a core plus strategic growth program. And one reinforces the other. The core can grow faster when we bring other capabilities, make us more relevant to customers, more relevant to industry partners in the ecosystem. We get the scale benefits from a financial standpoint. It just makes it all the more powerful. So we're going to do them both in parallel. And I think as we're executing this, it's validating that the thesis around how the industry is going to organize is the right one. And again, I'll say this, I'll repeat it: the industry will only organize once. We've spent the better part of a decade or more in certain places building that technology stack. We've matured the technology stack. We're also maturing the operational stack, the regulatory and policy stack. All this is really critical. And the fact is, this cannot continue to be a cottage industry of a bunch of folks building technology. It has to be brought together and it's an exceptional opportunity. So we're going to continue to execute.
Yeah. No, that's fantastic. And a couple on Capital. So Ondas Capital announced its first investment in DFG, or Drone Fight Club, in December, but we haven't heard as much since. How are things progressing over there? Should investors expect to see more updates on Ondas Capital in the coming quarters?
Yeah, so let's recall Ondas Capital and define it. So first I want to say it's doing a great job. We are supporting the ecosystem. Ondas Capital, a lot of our activities, particularly as you see us marketing and building brand and awareness. They got a good team over there. It's a great team and they're doing really important work establishing relationships and building awareness that we can leverage everywhere at what I'll call beyond the mothership. So it's really important.
At the same time, it's very difficult, right? Taking small companies, bringing them in to globalize their businesses, and we want to do it the right way. You have to work inside regulatory and policy frameworks and they're doing that. So we're making progress and I think it's going to be very impactful in many ways that are visible to you as we're moving forward in 2026. At the same time, Ondas Capital is more than that. You've seen us make some important investments in companies like PDW, and they just announced they closed their Series B, which we had anchored. We funded that in late 2025. But we've made investments in Rift, that's an important strategic partnership, Firestorm, and others. And we've made a handful of public market investments that have relevance to our ecosystem, really strengthening relationships and supporting the growth of our sector, which I think is important. So we're going to continue to do that. And you can kind of think of Ondas Capital as a corporate VC firm. However, I don't want to be labeled. We want the flexibility to do whatever is smart and is accretive to the business. And a lot of these are long-term investments. But I can tell you it is already adding tremendous value to the enterprise and some of that's intangible. Some of it is tangible and we do think, to be very specific, one of the critical criteria is every investment we're making, we're expecting a substantial financial return in addition to all the strategic benefits.
Yeah. No, thank you very much for touching on that. Like I say, obviously there's some more stuff that I'll touch on, but I touched on stuff with James last year and James is an incredible piece of that puzzle and there's some great people over there for sure. With Worldview and the Palantir partnership, when do you expect this platform to begin generating meaningful revenue and what milestones should investors watch for as proof of traction?
So the short answer is immediately. And we do think there's going to be a relatively quick close on Worldview. So that means the revenue will be accruing to Ondas as we consolidate. But they're already engaged with Palantir. And one of the great things about Palantir, many great things, is that the technology integration and that development, the development cycles are rapid. And so Worldview has been working with Palantir, and Ryan has talked about this on some of his public interviews. Ryan Hartman, the CEO, from design to functional product and service is very quick. So within three months, he's got actionable services he can deploy for important customers.
The other thing about this relationship with Palantir, it is very substantive. This is not just us leveraging the technology, there's go-to-market benefits. So Palantir is very interested in helping us penetrate markets, and of course that helps them in their broader business. So we're very aligned there. And as I already told you, with Palantir the benefits are also strategic. So Palantir again, they introduced us to Worldview and that's a very important point. So if we're working together to build that multi-domain layered ISR, I think we've got huge advantages and a lot of the things we have on our roadmap will be accelerated. So I expect the financial impact to be significant and you'll start to see that in Q2.
And I think that goes back onto this next question. So even since our last interview you always use the term like system of systems and you've spoken about building a full stack from low earth orbit all the way down to surface and land. Why is that approach strategically more powerful than focusing only on the individual products like before, Iron Drone, Optimus, etc.?
Yeah, it's great. So listen, all of our technologies are designed to perform standalone. So you can deploy Optimus at a military base, you can deploy the Iron Drone system at an airport or other critical location, you can have a stratospheric balloon just for ISR. But at the same time, we know that the markets are going towards this layered ISR and the integration and the real leverage you get from autonomous systems and the intelligence which ultimately lead to decisions. When you can shorten that by integrating them, you're really adding a lot of value to your customers. You're making them more effective at a lower cost even.
But it really boils down for defense, military, homeland security, protection of critical infrastructure. It's all about securing that and doing it for the customer is incredibly valuable. And it's very hard if you got ten people who have to come together and either try to work with each other with all your internal interests or you just give the customer, hey, here's our drone or here's our ground vehicle or here's our command control software, you put it together. You don't get anywhere. So I see this as a really important part of accelerating the market and all the value that these systems can provide.
Then I'd also add, that's for the go-to-market and interfacing with customers and partners. For us to do this, there's a huge financial benefit. We're going to have faster revenue, bigger programs, and we're going to be able to deliver to them at lower unit economics. So our opex per revenue dollar is going to be much greater improved if we're selling a broader system of systems.
Yeah. And I think that touches back on the back end of this next question that I prepared, which basically was at what point does a system of systems architecture become self-reinforcing, where customers begin to buy the stack rather than individual point solutions?
Yeah, it happens immediately. And you're not necessarily locking in customers because you need to be modular. And in this environment we need to be able to work with all command and control architectures, for example. So that ecosystem is really important. But in the real world, if you can deliver these solutions, it's a lot easier for the customer to say, hey, we need this capability and they go to us as opposed to say, hey, let's find somebody else to develop it. So this is all kind of part and parcel with the thesis around how the industry is going to organize. And the thesis really started with the customers need, they need these scaled operators who can deliver these capabilities and integrate them for the customers. They work better, they're more effective, they're more cost effective as well. And it's just the way the world's going to work.
