Ondas Technology Stack

My pleasure. It's great to be here.

Yes, sure. So let's unpack this a bit. Firstly, maybe looking at the layers of counter-drone technologies and where we're playing, and then I also want to come back and talk about how the market's evolved in terms of deployments of these capabilities to protect the lower skies. So firstly, as you're well aware, counter-drone systems are layered, and the first layer is detection. That detection is typically going to be ground radar. It could be optical or thermal sensors. It could be RF sensors, even acoustics. We're seeing more and more interest in technology developers around acoustic sensors. And that layer of detection is obviously trying to figure out where the threat is, because you can't mitigate or defend against something you can't see. So that layer is very important. And then you think about mitigation. There's really two forms: soft kill or hard kill. Soft kill are things like the jamming of radio links or spoofing of GPS. Soft kill is the cyber over RF, like Centrix, which I'll come back to. Then there's hard kill. The hard kill has two forms. You have the fully kinetic, and that's where you're exploding on things, and then there's the soft kinetic — a net-based interception system like we have with our Iron Drones. So we'll talk about where our systems fit, but I think your question is spot on. We have a very valuable stack that is not just valuable, but it's also built for purpose with the requirements which we'll talk about. And operational — so it works, and that's always a challenge when you're introducing new technology, to get them to a point where not just they're valuable, but when they get deployed, they're reliable.

So we're really proud of that, and we think we're well positioned, and we think this counter-drone boom is really just getting started. So if I'm thinking about that on the counter-drone side, let's think about the evolution. Literally over a span of the last two years, the counter-drone market has had an urgent requirement to protect the lower skies. Up until then, if you were a security professional — military, homeland security official, if you were charged with protecting critical infrastructure, or even if you ran an NFL security outfit or an amusement park like Disney World — you knew that this was a threat and you wanted to make sure we had roadmaps. If you were an investor, you didn't care about counter-drone because I don't see the drones. What am I worried about? What am I investing in? Well, all of a sudden that changed dramatically. It changed when Hamas invaded Israel, a little over two years ago, and then it also changed very dramatically at around that same time when the Ukraine-Russia conflict became a war conflict — a drone war conflict. So the first deployments you saw on counter-drone technologies was jamming and spoofing. Why? Because it was on the shelf. That capability had been developed for a while and there were folks who had ready-to-go technology, and that was in the first cycle. They did very well. It was really important because in the battlefield you needed to deploy these technologies. Now, if you fast forward to where we are today, those are becoming less effective — still an important part of the layer, but the enemy designs around those threats. So now we have fiber optic drones, for example. They build more capabilities around navigation without radio links, like optical sensors and optical navigation. But that's on the battlefield.

I'd also say that in the battlefield, getting back to the hard versus soft kill, we've now seen the very fully kinetic systems — those are definitely being deployed and scaled more effectively on the battlefield as well. You think about the big opportunity today. That's a huge market, important market, but the real big market is protecting critical infrastructure and borders, military bases, ports and airports, data centers, oil refineries, nuclear power plants, stadiums — it's just a massive vulnerability of these critical locations, and we have to protect them. You can't do that with jamming and spoofing at scale, anyway, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, in populated areas when you start jamming and spoofing, you interrupt public safety communications. You also interfere with avionics — we have a very important industry around aviation and we just cannot stop that. And you've seen isolated instances where these technologies cause problems. So that's a constraint, and that's where, in the soft kill, the cyber over RF for Centrix becomes really critically important. Because we're using a passive RF sensor just to find the threat, so we can see the radio link between the drone that you're concerned about and the operator. We know where both are. That's very valuable to law enforcement. But not only do we identify it in a geofenced area where we've deployed Centrix — at an airport, if the threat comes into the airspace it's not supposed to, we can go with our cyber protocols, override the autopilot, and take control of the drone. It becomes ours. We then safely land it. We're not dropping it on anybody. We're not jamming it, interfering with any other radio networks. We're just safely landing it. Now it's our drone forensics and crisis management.

It is. It is. I think the only thing that maybe a lot of people don't realize is with Centrix the ability to actually know where the drone operator is. I mean, there's ammunition, there's weapons, but then there's someone behind it, and you really need to be able to mitigate that threat because they could have 10 drones, 15 drones, but if you get the operator, the threat's neutralized. Exactly. So that's maybe the best form of counter defense — make sure the bad guy isn't out there with a drone. So when you're able to identify that threat, we can point to many situations where we've been able to do this. Law enforcement or sometimes in a military context, the soldiers can go out and apprehend the threat. Now, let's be very candid about this or really think about the threats. There are folks who mean to cause harm, and those are very serious threats. There's other folks who, call it the clueless, who the drone's a toy, they might be doing it at an airport, like, 'hey, this is really cool.' They don't know the regulations, they don't know the safety implications of the drones. And very often the law enforcement officials will go visit them because we can tell them where they are. They say, 'hey, what are you doing?' And I think that's valuable. The intelligence awareness that we need for our safety officials — Centrix is a huge tool.

If I could just finish the idea on our portfolio and how the Iron Drone comes into play, I think that's also relevant for homeland security and critical infrastructure protection. So getting back to the fact that jamming and spoofing — not only is it the networks you're interfering with, avionics or public safety — there is a reality that we can't at all these critical locations have somebody sitting by just waiting for a drone to come so they can jam it. It just doesn't scale. So Centrix can be a really good solution, but the soft kinetic for Iron Drone — again, on hard kill, you can either have a munition or warhead and blow up, and that's one way to neutralize a threat. You don't want to do that in an NFL stadium, right? But when we deploy our system fully autonomous, we can go out and hunt the threat. We capture with a net, the net has a parachute, so there's lower collateral impact when it lands. It's a much safer application. And I believe that if you think about how these systems, these technologies, layers of counter-drone get deployed across the United States on homeland — US soil — I think the preference is going to be cyber over RF with a layer of the soft kinetic like Iron Drone, either or, or sometimes both, depending on the asset we're trying to protect.

You hit the nail on the head, and it's fascinating because we talked to officials, public safety officials, FBI even — they know this threat is real. Some at the most senior levels of these organizations have called it the 9/11 event that we can predict. Right, because when you drop a weaponized drone — anybody with a few thousand dollars — it's shockingly easy. And, you know, if you were to do that, say, on a Sunday at an NFL stadium, that's the nature of terror, right? It changes culture immediately. And Sundays are important, right? There's football season, and if the next Sunday nobody goes to a football game, you've really had a major impact on our society. That's unacceptable. So I do want to give them credit, because it's a challenge to mature the technologies, to identify the layers and the use cases, and then to deploy them safely and reliably. It is a big challenge. We're going through it very methodically as an industry and the customer as well. And I want to just commend them. You will see significant deployments here, and I think we're really in the first inning, or the start of a multi-year, probably a 10-year infrastructure buildout with these technologies around critical locations.