ZenaTech's 29th DaaS buy targets solar and rail survey markets

ZenaTech's acquisition of a 17-state land surveyor accelerates its drone roll-up into utility-scale solar and rail infrastructure.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Wed, 16 September 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

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ZenaTech (Nasdaq: ZENA) has completed its 29th Drone as a Service acquisition, folding Georgia-based Merritt Paul Land Surveying into its expanding DaaS platform. The deal adds a licensed surveyor operating across 17 US states, with an established client base spanning utility-scale solar developers, national rail operators, and municipal infrastructure bodies. It is a small but revealing move in a broader strategic pattern: a Nasdaq-listed drone company systematically converting analogue, regionally fragmented surveying businesses into nodes of a subscription-based, AI-augmented data network.

Merritt Paul, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Franklin, Georgia, specialises in topographic, ALTA, boundary, and as-built surveys, with a particular focus on battery storage and solar farm projects. Its founders bring more than a decade of experience serving major rail and airport clients, a credentials base ZenaTech says it intends to scale using its own ZenaDrone hardware and AI autonomy stack.

The market arithmetic behind the deal

The financial rationale rests on two intersecting growth curves. The drone solar inspection market, where thermal imaging identifies underperforming panels and wiring faults without manual walk-downs, is projected to expand from approximately $1.2 billion in 2024 to $6.8 billion by 2032, a compound annual growth rate of around 25% according to Verified Market Research. The broader infrastructure inspection drone market, covering rail and aviation as well, is forecast to grow from roughly $4 billion in 2025 to more than $12 billion by 2032, per Fortune Business Insights. ZenaTech's CEO, Shaun Passley, cited both curves in framing the deal: "The drone solar inspection market alone is growing at 25% annually, and we see similar growth trajectory opportunities across railroad and airport infrastructure as operators move away from manual survey methods towards AI automation."

Both figures are company-cited, forward-looking projections and carry the usual caveats about actual delivery against forecast growth.

Convergence read-across: energy infrastructure meets autonomous data capture

The deeper Disrupts story here is not a single acquisition but the structural collision it represents. The accelerating build-out of utility-scale solar across the US is generating a parallel surge in demand for precision inspection and survey data. Drone-based capture using LiDAR, photogrammetry, and thermal imaging can complete rail corridor and runway-adjacent surveys faster and more safely than ground crews, without disrupting live operations. That capability convergence, autonomous aerial hardware plus AI-interpreted sensor data plus subscription delivery, is quietly restructuring the economics of infrastructure asset management.

ZenaTech's roll-up model is a bet that the most durable value lies in owning the recurring customer relationship and the underlying data rights, not merely the hardware. By acquiring profitable but under-digitised service businesses, it inherits established client contracts and state-level licensing while overlaying its own technology layer. Across 29 acquisitions, that thesis is being tested at scale.

For cross-sector investors watching energy transition capital flows, the strategic read-across is significant. Every new gigawatt of solar capacity commissioned across the US Sunbelt creates a recurring inspection and survey demand cycle. Drone operators positioned inside that cycle, with multi-state licensing and AI-enabled throughput, are effectively infrastructure service companies with technology multiples. How capital markets ultimately price that hybrid identity, utility-services recurring revenue versus deep-tech growth story, remains the central valuation question for the DaaS sector as a whole. With ZenaTech also flagging drone swarms and quantum computing as longer-range R&D bets, the gap between the acquisitive near-term playbook and the technology ambition of the broader platform is one that investors and analysts will continue to scrutinise.