If you own Zena, sell now, if you don't and are thinking about buying after the recent 30% spike, don't.
ZenaTech started as a traditional drone company, but with no top talent or moat. They then pivoted to a Drone as a Service model. Their strategy now is to aggressively dilute shareholders to fund acquisitions of businesses like land surveying and similar services, where they can integrate and deploy their drones.
There are many red flags about the company:
* Glassdoor. The reviews don't paint the picture of a company with exceptional leadership. They mostly make it sound like an okay place to work, but management has a reputation for being messy and not really knowing what they want to do. Compare that to a company like Anduril. People there complain about the workload, but they also praise management and feel like they're building something important. That's a completely different type of company.
* Then I looked at the patents. I couldn't find anything that made me think they have a real technical edge. Most of the patents are useless patents, some were made by the CEO and bought from his previous company which is sus on it's own. Patents about how the drone looks, aren't the kind of patents that win in the drone industry. The valuable ones are around navigation, autonomy, vision systems, control software, things that are actually difficult to replicate.
* After that I tried to find the engineers. I looked through LinkedIn, patent filings, and their website. Honestly, I couldn't find much. They list one chief engineer, but that's about it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it stood out to me. Companies that are serious about drone technology usually have engineers with visible track records, patents, or research behind them. I just couldn't find that here.
* The CEO's track record also doesn't inspire confidence. His previous public company lost around 99% of its value. That doesn't automatically mean he'll fail again, but it's not exactly the history I'd want to see.
* Another red flag is their subreddit, I think it's controlled by the company and is just used to pump the stock, any hard question or negative thread gets deleted.
The biggest red flag is the cost of operating the company; yes their revenue jumped over 600% yoy, but the cost of operating the company is higher than their earnings.