Airobotics

The idea: a drone with no pilot and no operator

Airobotics was founded in 2014 by Ran Krauss and Meir Kliner, and operated from a site in Petah Tikva. It was aimed at industrial sites: factories, mines and refineries, where fences need to be patrolled, facilities inspected and areas measured again and again. Instead of a drone flown by a person, the company built a system in which a drone called Optimus takes off from a docking station the size of a dumpster, carries out a pre-planned mission and returns to it. Inside the station, a robotic arm swaps the drone's battery, and sometimes also a camera or sensor, ready for the next mission. The site team defines the missions and follows them, but does not need to fly. Ondas describes these systems as AI-based automated drone systems, and in 2018 it was reported that the company planned to give the drones the ability to decide on an action by themselves in certain situations, for example to alert the security team when they spot an intruder. A similar "drone in a box" product for industrial sites was developed by Percepto, also founded in 2014, whose teams work in Israel and the United States.

Funding and the shift to data services

In 2016 the company announced it had raised $28.5 million in two rounds, led by BlueRun Ventures and CRV. By the end of 2018 it had reportedly raised $101 million, and its customers included Intel and BHP. In early 2021 it was reported that total funding had reached $132 million, and that the company had moved from selling drones to industry to mapping and data services, including flights over cities. In Singapore, for example, the police used its drones during the COVID-19 period.

The Tel Aviv IPO

In January 2021 it was reported that the company planned to list its shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and raise $50 million at a valuation of $240 million. Krauss confirmed the plan to go public but not the numbers. Later that year the company began trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and, as Globes described in hindsight, the share price collapsed after the IPO. The gap between the valuation discussed before the IPO and what happened after it made Airobotics an example of the wave of tech IPOs of that period.

The acquisition by Ondas

On 23 January 2023, the American company Ondas Holdings, traded on Nasdaq, completed its acquisition of Airobotics. The deal was a share exchange: each Airobotics share was converted into 0.16806 Ondas shares, and Ondas issued about 2.8 million shares to the shareholders. According to a later Globes report, the deal was worth about $15 million. Ondas combined the company with American Robotics, its earlier autonomous drone company, and described the Optimus system as the first autonomous drone platform to begin commercial fleet deployment in an urban environment, a description that comes from the company.

After the acquisition: the first link in a chain

Airobotics was Ondas's first acquisition in Israel. According to Globes, it was followed by a series of further acquisitions in the country, most of them in the defense field, the largest being Sentrycs and Bird Aerosystems. In May 2026 an agreement to acquire Omnisys for $200 million was also reported. Meir Kliner, one of the founders of Airobotics, later became one of Ondas's senior executives. In May 2026, Globes reported that Ondas's revenue in the first quarter jumped 12-fold because of the acquisitions, and that its market value, about $50 million in 2024, had reached about $4.8 billion. The Airobotics website now shows drone-in-a-box systems alongside drone interception systems.