Aviv Shapira signed the closing documents for XTEND’s merger with JFB Construction Holdings at about 2:30 pm Eastern on Thursday, a minute or so before he joined a video call with me from New York, where he had flown in from Tampa the night before. The combined company, XTEND AI Robotics, is set to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange at 9:35 am Friday under the ticker XTND, with a bell-ringing ceremony planned for Tuesday, September 8.
The last hard condition fell earlier in the day. XTEND said Thursday morning it had received the $60 million in cash the merger agreement required. When I checked the JFB quote at 3:12 pm, the stock was at $5.02, a dollar above the $4.00 line that would have halved the exchange ratio for every shareholder on both sides.
What has not changed since I wrote about this listing on Tuesday is the Pentagon’s silence. The Department of War flew Gauntlet II at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August and has published no results. Asked how his STRIKER drone performed, Shapira gave me five words and moved on.
XTEND Signed the JFB Closing While Its CEO Was on a Press Call
XTEND’s all-stock merger with JFB Construction Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed Florida contractor, was set to close September 3 once the $60 million cash condition was met, and Shapira told me he had signed the closing documents. The combined company, XTEND AI Robotics, Inc., lists on the NYSE as XTND on September 4.
The mechanics are the ones DroneXL laid out on Tuesday in XTEND Hits the NYSE Friday Before the Pentagon Scores It. Each JFB share converts to one XTND share and each XTEND ordinary share to about 1.36, provided JFB closed at or above $4.00 on Thursday. At 3:12 pm the stock was at $5.02, a dollar clear of the line, and the official closing print had not been published when this article was written. Former JFB stockholders end up with 19.20% of the economic interest and 10.35% of the voting power, down from the 30% they were promised in February, because XTEND raised private money before the close and every dollar of it came out of the construction company’s side.
Shapira said the reverse merger cut the time to a listing roughly in half compared with a conventional IPO, and that the pairing was less random than it looks. JFB builds factories, and XTEND is building them: Shapira told me the company now has two in the United States, though only the Tampa-area XFAB appears in its releases. The two companies met on a school-security project, in which XTEND drones sit on the ceiling and can be flown remotely when someone enters the building. JFB describes itself as a general contractor that has worked in 36 states.
“This puts to rest one of the final closing conditions and strengthens our balance sheet,” said Tal Horesh, XTEND’s chief financial officer, in Thursday’s release. Shapira becomes chief executive and board chair. Joseph F. Basile III, JFB’s CEO, becomes executive vice president of construction operations. Markets are crazy, Shapira told me, and this is the time to go public.
Shapira Says ‘I Think We Did Good’ at Fort Carson
XTEND flew STRIKER, an indoor attack drone running its XOS software, in the Department of War’s Gauntlet II at Fort Carson in August. The program site still lists Gauntlet II as in progress, with no leaderboard. Shapira said only that he believes the company performed well.
“I think we did good,” he said, then turned to a part of the program that is already decided. XTEND’s X-Strike lethality package, a US-made electronic safe-and-arm device paired with a warhead, was accepted into Drone Dominance on August 20 and holds limited approval from the Army Fuze Safety Board. Five other companies won the program’s lethality challenge in May, and in Shapira’s account those packages still have to be validated as safe while XTEND’s already is. He expects X-Strike to earn revenue on its own, whichever airframes win.
He also put the prize in his own terms. Drone Dominance is one of 40 to 50 programs XTEND is competing in worldwide, he said, but he called it one of the largest, with each winner taking somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 drones. Against the 25,000 systems he says XTEND has fielded in seven years, a win adds about a sixth to the installed base in a single order. Every one of those drones would ship with the XOS marketplace on board, where he counts about 40 downloadable applications, from GPS-denied navigation to swarming.
The record before Fort Carson is public. XTEND Reality Inc. was on the roster of 25 companies invited to Gauntlet I at Fort Benning and was not among the 11 that took orders for 30,000 drones in March. It requalified at Camp Grayling in June, one of 19 companies out of 49, and had to build 120 armed units in about five weeks to stay in. Shapira said the program forced XTEND to build another factory and that, for his company, it has done nothing but good.
Shapira Counts 25,000 Systems; His Own Press Release Says 12,500
XTEND’s fielded-systems count depends on who is talking. Shapira told me twice on Thursday that XTEND has about 25,000 systems in the market across 30 countries, while the company’s release the same morning, like the boilerplate on its recent releases, says more than 12,500 systems in more than 30 countries.
The gap is not explained by the Atlas acquisition, the Riga-based robotics company XTEND bought this year and finished integrating on July 27. Atlas brought 4,200 deployed systems and four ISR platforms, which would take the total to roughly 16,700. Nobody has said where the other 8,000 come from, and XTEND has not put a new number in writing. That figure is what the Drone Dominance math above is built on, and the company should say which one it is listing on.
Replay Technologies and a Drone Arcade Became a Defense Company
XTEND began seven years ago in Tel Aviv as a gaming company, with software that let anyone fly an FPV drone by telling it where to go. In 2019 and 2020 Israeli soldiers used the same headset rig to intercept aerial threats over Gaza. Shapira puts that count near 3,500.
Before XTEND there was Replay Technologies, which Shapira co-founded with his brother Matteo. Replay’s freeD format reconstructed a stadium in 3D so a broadcast could show a play from the quarterback’s eyes, which is how it reached Super Bowl coverage. The company won two Emmys for broadcast technology, in 2013 and 2015, and Intel bought it in 2016 and rebranded the product Intel True View. Shapira, an aerospace engineer with a master’s in rocket propulsion who spent years at Thales and similar companies, told me it was the second company he had sold. Rubi Liani, who ran Israel’s drone racing league, joined the brothers to start XTEND. Soldiers called the early system an Iron Man suit.
The idea Shapira kept from Replay is telepresence. XTEND’s drones fly indoors, in tunnels and under bridges without GPS, using cameras and laser sensors to hold position, but he argues the airframe is not the product. Each carries an Nvidia Jetson and a clip-on payload hub rated for 1.1 to 11 pounds (0.5 to 5 kilograms) depending on the platform, and the operator taps a window or a doorway on screen and the drone goes there. The same interface runs XTEND’s fixed-wing aircraft, boats and ground robots. He described XOS as an operating system with a marketplace, like a phone, and said XTEND has put it on top of Lockheed Martin UAVs and Quantum Systems aircraft rather than replacing their software. Auterion looks like a competitor on paper, he said, but sells differently.
Eric Trump Holds His XTEND Stake Through American Ventures
Eric Trump is not a direct investor in XTEND and holds no board seat, Shapira said. His exposure runs through American Ventures, which backed the JFB combination in February alongside Unusual Machines, Protego Ventures and Aliya Capital. Unusual Machines has Donald Trump Jr. on its advisory board.
I asked how a company competing for Department of War contracts keeps that separate, given that ethics experts have raised the question. Shapira’s answer was that there is, legally and practically, no connection between XTEND and Eric Trump, whom he described as someone he met during due diligence, who flies drones for fun and wants American companies to fill the gap DJI leaves in the US market. Bloomberg valued the Trump family’s drone holdings across XTEND, Powerus and Unusual Machines at about $750 million in March; the White House and the Trump Organization have denied any wrongdoing.
XTEND Plans Acquisitions, Then Germany, Japan, the UAE and India
XTEND plans to buy companies whose hardware can run XOS and join its marketplace, then open subsidiaries in Germany, Japan and the UAE, with India after that, Shapira said. It has six today. They are in Israel, the United States, Mexico, Singapore, Latvia and one he could not immediately recall.
Shapira has already bought two drone companies, Atlas among them. Taiwan, he said, has too many drone makers and too little market for XTEND to open an office there; the plan is to put XOS inside some of those companies’ products instead. On the US industrial base, he pointed to Unusual Machines’ motor and battery production in Orlando as the layer everything else depends on, and said the lesson of Ukraine is that a country cannot rely on anyone else for components. The Section 232 tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones point the same way, and so does the Drone Dominance rule barring Chinese motors and batteries in Phase II.
He was blunt about why the West is behind. Ukraine is at war and the United States is a peacetime army, he said, and a peacetime army does not carry the urgency of one where people die. Israel got that urgency after October 7, when XTEND’s drones had to become GPS-denied and comms-denied capable in a hurry; he also claims XTEND built fiber-optic controlled drones before they became standard in Ukraine, a claim I could not check. In Europe he pointed to the Drone Coalition, the Latvia- and UK-led group of 20 nations supplying Ukraine, which XTEND takes part in through Atlas. When the Pentagon bought AI-guided attack drones from XTEND in January 2025, that was the first US order DroneXL covered for this company. On Friday it lands on the Big Board.
DroneXL’s Take
I came off this call impressed, and I do not say that about many reverse-merger CEOs. Shapira has sold two companies, holds two Emmys for a broadcast format that put viewers behind the quarterback at the Super Bowl, and turned a drone-racing arcade into a defense company because Israel needed something to knock threats out of the sky over Gaza. The factories in Tampa, Swindon, Riga and Singapore were up before the tariffs and before Drone Dominance made a non-China supply chain a condition of entry. That is not luck. It is a company that read the market early and is collecting on it now, the way any company would.
That is also why I am not spending this Take on the last name in the cap table. The facts are in the article: Eric Trump’s stake runs through American Ventures, Unusual Machines is an investor, Shapira says there is no legal or practical connection to Department of War procurement, and ethics experts have asked the question anyway.
What I wrote on Tuesday still holds, and the call sharpened it rather than softened it. The price runs ahead of the record. Shapira told me 25,000 systems, twice. His press release says 12,500, and the one acquisition that could explain the difference accounts for 4,200 of it. A company listing at $1.5 billion should not have a factor of two on its headline number depending on who is speaking. Then there is Fort Carson. Five words, “I think we did good,” are the entire public record on how STRIKER flew, and the valuation sits on that sentence until the Department of War posts a leaderboard.
Shapira wants the story to be software, XOS riding on other people’s airframes. I believe that is where he thinks the margin is. He also did the arithmetic for me without being asked: a Gauntlet II win is 4,000 to 8,000 drones, a sixth of everything XTEND has ever fielded, in one order, and he called it one of the largest programs on his list himself. Software may be the pitch. Fort Carson is the number.
Friday at 9:35 tells us what the market thinks of a construction stock turning into a drone stock. Tuesday’s bell is the party. The leaderboard, whenever it posts, is the story, and it decides whether $1.5 billion is a valuation or a bet. We will be covering XTEND either way.
Sources: JFB Construction Holdings and XTEND, September 3, 2026; DroneXL interview with Aviv Shapira, September 3, 2026; Drone Dominance Program
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
