I hope you are kidding. I am cringing if you are being serious that not having patents is a strength. Every single industry leader has recent patents. When you do create something brilliant you protect yourself. Else someone else can copy it. Even patent it. They do not go around the world demoing their product without protection. If you are interested in learning we could have a discussion on why.
For a practical example other drone company that Peter James chairs UUV is being sued for the right to use the technology they are selling. If they owned the patent they would not be having this issue.
Other evidence. All of the industry leaders have patents. Anduril, Ascent, SRC file for patents regularly and often get them in 1 year. They have also won $20-100m+ contracts with US and British Armed Forces. Rafael has patents on the technology it uses to protect Gatwick. It sold 6 units to Gatwick for 4.75m aud each. Or maybe you want to point to which of the leaders are not using patents to protect their ideas and their advantage?
I suspect that the reason that DRO does not have patents is that
DRO did not invent most of the technology and would not be granted a patent. I suspect DRO figured it was better to use someone else’s technology stack as their core.
There are many companies offering substantially the same solutions as DRO. Look at
DRO of course, but also Aartos, Skylock (both wearable and dome look exactly like DRO), Qiniteq, Indra, Roshel, Fortem and there are probably at least 20 others. They are all selling very similar products while the leaders have differentiated products. That is the leaders have won big military contracts and these have not. Now they all probably overlay a bit of their own technology. DRO is calling it their AI but most of the players have been doing this for years.
None of this means DRO will not sell product. I invested anyway. Or that DRO can not be valuable. They can sell where the market is more relationship based like the Middle East. Or in Australia where we support our own.
But it does mean the competitive advantage is not the technology. Nothing exclusive that just we have. In my opinion. And all of this is my opinion. It is critical to understand the patent situation to the potential market size, longevity of DRO and ultimately its potential value.
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