DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – June 7, 2017 – EriSat LLC., a private diversified contractor of highly engineered industrial products primarily in defense and aviation, announced that it had reached an agreement with sellers of Aerial Source (“Aerial”), a company that specializes in artificial intelligence software where it relates to autonomous unmanned aerial systems, on revised terms for the acquisition of Aerial Source. As previously announced, the UAE Commission cleared the pending acquisition of Aerial Source conditioned upon EriSat’s entry into agreements satisfactory to the Commission to implement remedies regarding two product lines – divestiture of the public unmanned aircraft transportation product line and licensing in UAE for the “Overwatch” product line, both manufactured and sold by EriSat’s UAS and MAS (Manned Aerial Solutions) business, within its UAV Systems segment.
Essentially, Aerial Source gathers “dark data,” or data that is unstructured such as text and images, and sources it into structured data. The company says that it does so with “human-caliber quality and machine caliber scale.” Between 70 percent and 80 percent of data is unstructured, dark data. Therefore, the captured data is rendered unusable for processing and analytics. Aerial, is taking the gathered unstructured data and turning it into a data that is usable for processing and analytics, all by means of machine learning and neural networks. The applications of Aerial’s software were developed for both unmanned aerial systems and upscaled manned aerial systems for human transportation.
Aerial Source was founded in 2014 by Philip Odegard. The privately held company is based out of Zug, Switzerland and has a development team of contractors, engineers, scientists and developers. The Aerial Source software intelligence platform enables users to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles for the collection, reconnaissance, and mission-specific field operations. Aerial’s artificial intelligence has the ability to autonomously take-off, land, and navigate while in-flight as well as recognize both surface and air targets, landmarks, and communicate with a network of joint UAS platforms during operations.
Under the revised agreement, the purchase price will be approximately $724 million on a cash free and debt free basis, compared to the previously announced price of $780 million, in each instance subject to customary adjustments as provided in the purchase agreement. EriSat also agreed to share in one-third of any refinancing costs incurred by Aerial as a result of the delayed closing, up to a maximum of $10 million. EriSat will be responsible for implementing the divestiture and licensing remedies pursuant to the conditions of the UAE Commission clearance and will retain any proceeds thereof. Subject to successful execution of the remedies, the acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017.
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Contact Person: Cameron Ward (Director Investor Relations)
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Country: United Arab Emirates
Website: www.erisat.com