Israeli drone maker XTEND cuts 10% of staff after losing 75% of its value since a $1.5B NYSE debut
What's the deal? Israeli drone maker XTEND is laying off about 10% of its roughly 267 staff, two months after it started trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a $1.5B valuation. Its market value has since fallen to about $350M, a drop of more than 75%, Calcalist's Ctech reports. Bizportal says the shares slid from a $6.19 close on the first trading day, 4 September, to about $1.30.
Belt-tightening at the top. CEO Aviv Shapira and three other senior executives have agreed to a temporary 15% pay cut from 1 December, which will be reversed once the share price recovers enough or the company raises sufficient capital, according to Bizportal. XTEND said the restructuring will streamline costs and focus its robotics work, its XOS autonomy software and production on delivery.
How it listed. XTEND did not do a classic IPO. It went public in September by merging with JFB Construction HoldingsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Florida construction company already listed in the US, and raised money from a group of private funds instead of the public. That investment was planned at $152M but cut to about $100M. At the time, DroneXL and Bizportal questioned the $1.5B price, which came from the private placement rather than from public-market trading.
The business. Revenue is growing fast, but so are losses. XTEND made about $20M in revenue in 2025 with a $27M net loss, and its Q1 2026 loss more than doubled to $11.5M on $5.8M in revenue. Preliminary figures put nine-month 2026 revenue at $24.5M to $26.5M, and its robotics backlog at about $84M, helped by a $40.5M order for 6,000 STRIKER drones under the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program. Full Q3 results are due on 16 November.
The signal: Defence tech is one of the hottest corners of venture capital, but public markets are pricing drone makers on delivered revenue, not on Pentagon programme hype. XTEND's slide is a warning for defence startups weighing a quick route to a listing through a merger.
Read more: Ctech by Calcalist, Bizportal (Hebrew), Ctech on the September listing
Image credit: XTEND
