Eric Trump-backed Space-Eyes to go public via $638M SPAC merger
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley
Eric Trump-backed drone-defense startup Space-Eyes is going public via a $638M SPAC deal with McKinley Acquisition Corp. The kicker: it only makes about $1M a year in revenue right now.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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Space-Eyes, a Miami-based counter-drone and geospatial intelligence outfit, is heading to the Nasdaq through a merger with blank-check company McKinley Acquisition Corp. Reuters pegs the combined entity's value at roughly $638 million, a striking number for a business that four people close to the deal say brings in only about $1 million a year. The gap between valuation and revenue is the story here, and it says as much about investor appetite for anything tagged AI-plus-defense as it does about Space-Eyes itself.
Eric Trump, the president's son, is now the company's third-largest private investor and will stick around as a strategic adviser once the deal closes, reportedly bringing prospective board members with him. His pitch, according to one source, is connections and 'intelligence' drawn from White House-adjacent security experience — not code or hardware. That's a notable thing to lean on for a company whose entire premise is technical: fusing satellite imagery, radar and radio-frequency sensors into two flagship products, SeaWatch for maritime tracking and Morpheus for spotting and mitigating drone threats.
The business itself is thin but growing. Existing contracts total somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, covering jobs like watching for drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, supporting defense clients in the Middle East, and stopping drones from dropping contraband into U.S. prison yards. Space-Eyes is now negotiating roughly $35 million in contracts over five years, and it plans to lean on third-party manufacturers to scale fast enough to chase government work across multiple countries plus commercial clients like data centers and cruise lines.
The model Space-Eyes is chasing openly is Palantir, which posted an adjusted operating margin above 60% last quarter, dwarfing the single-digit margins typical of legacy defense contractors. That comparison is doing a lot of work in justifying the price tag, since software margins at scale look nothing like hardware margins today. Once the merger closes — expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending shareholder and regulatory sign-off — the company will trade under the ticker CUAS, shorthand for counter-unmanned aerial systems, and pull in about $251.7 million in gross proceeds from McKinley's trust account and a PIPE financing round.
SPACs have a rough track record since their 2020-2022 heyday, with plenty of hyped mergers failing to hit growth targets once public markets started asking harder questions. Space-Eyes is betting that drone warfare, AI-driven threat detection and a politically connected adviser are enough to buck that trend.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A $638 million valuation for a company doing $1 million in revenue isn't an investment thesis, it's a bet on access — and everyone involved seems fine saying that out loud. Slapping a Palantir comparison on a pre-revenue defense startup has become the laziest shorthand in tech finance, and pairing it with a president's son as adviser is basically a tell that this deal is selling connections, not counter-drone tech. SPAC investors who got burned in 2021 apparently needed only a few years to forget why.
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