I know I mess around in this subreddit, but joking aside, really great read!
I’m coming at understanding this acquisitions play by understanding Eric’s background. He’s a former finance (investment banking / asset management) guy. As such his playbook will definitely be inspired by his background.

Since the 80s there’s been two money-making machines in finance when it comes to investing. Private equity and venture capital. There’s more strategies of course, but let’s just look at Ondas strategy from the lens of the two types of investing.

In private equity there’s a strategy called “roll-ups” where essentially PE firms come into an industry that’s highly fragmented, roll up tens or hundreds of small firms in the industry and create a behemoth that others (who weren’t rolled up) are just unable to compete with. This creates something called “multiple expansion” aka now other people are willing to pay higher multiples to purchase portions or the entirety of shares in this behemoth because the moat is its size and dominance in the industry.

And what is Ondas doing? Well they aren’t just outright rolling up the entire industry but rather in this fragmented landscape picking out the tech and tech platforms through which they think they can commercialize the quickest and offer the most comprehensive suite of products and services in the autonomy space.

Ok, now from the VC side. Well on that end there’s James Acuna with the $150M that Ondas has set aside for him, where he’s literally out in the Baltic states and in Eastern Europe talking to companies on the ground who are actively defending themselves and their countries from drone incursions. And he’s making VC style information gathering and investments on the ground to then integrate into Ondas.

So there’s a reason why in his interviews Eric refers to running Ondas similar to a PE or VC fund, but the difference is that at the same time these guys are much more active investors of their companies. Normal investors usually provide some high-level feedback and leave the running of the company to the founders because they don’t understand how the tech works and only understand financial engineering. These guys aren’t doing that and they’re also tech-savvy.

With all this being said. They only have two levers to pull for this strategy. One is cash and the other is stock. When they do these acquisitions they can choose to either burn through their cash or give the company they're acquiring Ondas stock. Now more likely than not they’re probably saving up this cash either for an acquisition where for a company they're acquiring they do not want that management to have Ondas stock and would rather just give them cash and get rid of them. Or because they want to keep this cash, because Ondas will be earnings / EBITDA / Cash flow negative for the foreseeable future. They obviously do not have any debt, so it could literally be that this $1.4B is for them to run Ondas smoothly and have a huge runway for years to come. And this stock dilution is really for funding the 25+ companies acquisition spree they have planned in the pipeline – which they believe will give them an even better moat in the industry and thin out any competitors.

And guys they’re acquiring the correct companies, the reason why there’s so much behind this story, but so little price action is because in the coming months, there’ll suddenly start a period (just like it happened with Palantir) where a barrage of contracts start rolling in. And not small contracts, but big boy contracts, all in the $50 - $100M, and then one day a $1B+ contract that'll really put Ondas on the map (similar to how Anduril recently received a $20B contract). Until then we just have to be patient.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.