Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you have joined us for our AI technology conference. Our next presentation of the day is from Volatus Aerospace. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Glen Lynch, Director, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Volatus Aerospace, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol TAKOF and on the TSXV under the symbol FLT. Welcome back, Glenn.
Hey, Greg. Thanks very much for having me, and thanks everybody for dialing in and joining today. My name is Glen Lynch. I'm the CEO of Volatus Aerospace, and Volatus is an aerial intelligence and logistics innovator. We won't talk a lot about logistics today, mostly because that market's probably still 2030 before it becomes a material part of our revenue, but we will stay focused on talking about the intelligence side, which once upon a time was called remote sensing, basically the accumulation of information from flight. Before we start, I want to bring your attention to that photo that's in the right-hand side of this slide.
That's our operations control center in Toronto, which has its triple security access controlled building that actually allows us, with 20 operator stations, to control as many as 200 drones simultaneously, and we operate now on a daily basis with drones that are more than 2,500 mi away from the pilot operator. Just jumping straight in, our company is, as I mentioned, we focus on aerial intelligence. That doesn't call us a drone company, although most definitely that's where we primarily exist. We're actually an aviation company that includes piloted aircraft and helicopters as well as drones, with the piloted aircraft and helicopters contributing about 30% of our revenue. Diversified portfolio of customers with no single customer representing more than 4% of our total revenues, and we have a global operations center, which is what you saw earlier, which is probably one of our biggest competitive advantages.
A key point, we're the only company in this space that's both a commercial aviation company, or at least we started as a commercial aviation company, continues to operate commercial aircraft and helicopters, but is accelerating the penetration and development of the drone industry, which is our largest sector. Our business model has three verticals: Volatus Drones, that's our equipment sales and distribution solution sales. We have distribution in Toronto for Canada, in Syracuse, New York for the United States, and in Emsworth, just outside of London, and that covers the U.K., Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We also have Volatus Academy. That's a key and growing part of our business that recognizes the fact that we're coming, we're in a nascent industry where regulations in multiple jurisdictions are changing quickly at different rates, and in fact, the technology curve is moving quickly.
Training is a requirement both for us and for industry colleagues, which has turned it into a solid revenue business unit for us. As you can see on the right, our biggest sectors are oil and gas and energy utilities. 1.7 million km or a little over a million mi of pipeline right of way every year, doing integrity monitoring on critical infrastructure and tens of thousands of transmission and utility tower inspections in power utility. I mentioned that cargo is a small but growing part of our business. What I want to point out is it's small on the revenue side because they're small drones, small unit economics, but we do a lot of it. These are our target markets. We've talked about energy utilities, public service, and emergency services. Mining exploration is a growing section for us, and construction engineering is core.
Border security and defense is the fastest growing by far. I think if anybody wants to understand that, any of the national newspapers will help with that one. While remote cargo delivery is a small part of our revenue picture right now, I'd like to draw your attention to that aircraft that's located there. That's a 1,000 lbs gross takeoff weight, seven-foot tall, 29 ft long remotely piloted helicopter, so a drone, capable of carrying about 400 lbs for as much as 125 mi, and that's actually a Volatus Technology. Serviceable obtainable market of $1.8 billion. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that because that focused largely on oil and gas, power utilities, and infrastructure, but failed to recognize either forestry, wildfire, which is significant, agriculture, and most specifically now defense, which is by far the fastest and growing and most intense market.
In a competitive mode, at history, I want to start out by saying we were founded in 2018, really started ramping up in 2019. We're a highly acquisitive company, having completed as of yesterday. Last evening, we announced our 20th acquisition. 50% of our revenue growth has come out of acquisitions, and the other 50% comes out of a very large sales and marketing team. As a matter of fact, they're all in Canada right now for a global sales summit. Our team, there were 30 people packed in our boardroom there yesterday. They've developed an active sales pipeline only on the industrial commercial side of $600 million with a little north of $20 million in annual recurring revenues. That's long-term contracts with power utilities and oil and gas.
Now, I say only industrial commercial because we don't report our defense pipeline, mostly because they're very large numbers and highly distortive. Mostly, if you think about it, everything is new. Conversion rates are impossible to predict, and while we're excited by the opportunity, the reality is we don't know how quickly or even if these contracts can convert. Everything has got enough uncertainty that we stay focused on the financial side on our commercial and industrial business. We have 180 people that are scattered across actually six countries, but operating in four. We're operating in four countries and three continents. I'm going to show you that in a minute. 21 aircraft and helicopters against a backdrop of almost 100 drones, and we've done more than 10,000 remotely operated flights from our remote operations center in Toronto.
Key point I want to make is that we're a technology-agnostic company focusing more on customer stickiness and the generation of revenue, ultimately long-term, rather than the sale of any specific technology. That said, R&D is part of our DNA. As you can see, we have 14 North American drone-related utility patents, a bunch more pending, and so a very active engineering department as well. Where it says SFOCs, that's Special Flight Operating Certificates that are specific to Canada. We also have waivers in the United States that allow us to work outside of a regulatory framework, and I'd like to draw your attention to the right side there.
In the early days of drones, when they started having tens of thousands of these working all over the countries all over the world, but we'll talk specifically in North America, they started interfering with public privacy and operating around airports and all kinds of things that were causing nuisance. Regulators around the world got control of this by basically restricting the altitude, weight of the drones, and ensuring they were operated within the visual line of sight of the operator. 25 kg, about 55 lbs, just to give you an idea.
In Volatus's case, because we're a commercial aircraft operator and have been operating large aircraft for some time with a regulatory team, our regulatory team was able to get special waivers that allow us to fly above 400 ft, up to 1,000 lbs, and beyond visual line of sight in Canada, if I use that as an example, right across the country. We've virtually eliminated the regulatory barriers through specific flight operating approvals. Now, what I'd like to talk on the next one, we're going to talk about financials in a minute, but I'd like to start by pointing out some of what we did in 2024, which are the numbers behind the numbers. You can see we flew about 4,200 missions, accumulating 12,500 hours of flying roughly.
On top of that, we did another 750 commercial flights, representing a fair number of mi, let's say north of 1,500 mi of travel. A key point, I mentioned Volatus Academy. By the way, Volatus Academy, since its beginning, all of our training organizations cumulatively add up to more than 145,000 person training events in our history. Last year alone, we trained almost 3,300 people in a combination of online and in-person training activities. This is our global footprint. We cover all of Canada, all of the United States. We have an office in Lima, Peru, serving defense and mining. The U.K. is our single biggest or our second biggest operation, and we have an office in Norway giving us access to the European economic zone. The green areas you can see are developing opportunities for Volatus at various parts of the world. This is our execution history.
What we're looking at here is what we've actually done. On the left-hand side, if you're looking at a dot, green, white, yellow, gold, or a red line, that's actually jobs that we're doing, have done recently, or about to do. I want to draw your attention just for representation to the red. If you look at the red blotch in the northwest corner of the screen on the left-hand side, that's actually pipeline that we actually survey, about 650,000 kilometers or, excuse me, segments of licensed pipeline. You can see that we operate pipeline that goes right from Kitimat, BC, and Vancouver all the way out to Montreal, down into southwestern Ontario, and then from North Dakota all the way down to Houston, Texas. A key point here is in Canada, there's only 500,000 mi of pipeline. There's 2.5 million mi of pipeline right away in the United States.
The fact that we've now broken into the U.S. market, you can see there's significant opportunity for growth just in the oil and gas sector alone. On the right-hand side, you can see a similar distribution across the U.K. We also have operations in Germany, Cyprus, and those are some of the other locations that are not shown there. We're going to continue to scale both our top-line revenue and our gross margin by leveraging automation, the capabilities of our remote operations center, and that ultimately will drive both top-line and gross margin, leading into things like surveillance as a service. This is an example of a video that we show to public safety and border surveillance agencies. On the left-hand side is a video feed. On the right-hand side is actually a thermal feed with our algorithm identifying people. They're identifying people, cars, boats, animals, and so on.
The next generation of that is going to be where they actually monitor and categorize the behavior of those targets, so we know ultimately what's a target of interest versus what's simple noise, people moving around. Now, I mentioned that we're technology-agnostic. That's less and less true as time goes by. What you're looking at here are technologies that we've added to our portfolio. These are our own technologies. The aircraft in the bottom left-hand corner is an 18 ft wingspan, battery-operated aircraft that can fly for more than six hours. The center, we've talked about that already, is our thousand-pound helicopter, and you can see some of the other technologies we have, including software platforms that are our own.
Our flight software, which is a complete ecosystem for cargo delivery, and then our AIRS platform, which is an advanced information reporting system, ingesting about four terabytes of data, monitoring about 30,000 anomalies in the pipeline infrastructure on a daily basis. We also, last night, after markets closed, announced the acquisition of some new technologies that we've acquired from the U.K., and we're moving to Canada for manufacturing. These are, I would say, very unique drones. They're medium-altitude, long-endurance drones that fit a bit of a niche. They basically come together where technology and capability meet affordability. More on those, and if you're interested, I'd strongly suggest having a look at our press release that went out last night. These are a couple of the urban cargo medical delivery projects that we have going.
I won't dwell too much on those, and one of the things that makes us interesting, because we have product distribution, we also have dozens of OEM partners, which gives our customers access to one of the biggest technology portfolios in our industry, both in civil and defense. When you look at docks, there's a sample of Canadian, foreign, and American technologies in the docking section there. That's basically permanent infrastructure that we can locate somewhere and operate from our operations control center or from a more localized operations control center without having any human beings on site. Turning to our financial highlights, quarterly revenue right now is about, this is for Q2, a little better than $10 million for the quarter, which is a 49% increase over the same period last year. Gross profit, likewise, about $3.3 million, with a 32% gross margin.
That's a 35% improvement over Q2 2024. Our normalized EBITDA, we're approaching break-even, big gains over the year before, so just over or just under a $300,000 EBITDA drain compared to a $1.8 million drain previous year, 85% performance improvement. Cash at the end of June was about $6 million. We raised a bit of capital between then and here, sitting with August 30, approximately $20 million on our balance sheet. Our revenue mix continues, and this has been historic, current, and likely going forward for a little while. It's about half and half between equipment and then our services and training. Looking at our cumulative revenue, in 2024, we did about $27 million in revenue for the year, and as mentioned earlier, right now our quarterly run rate is about $40 million, $10 million a quarter. That'll continue to grow.
I think the analyst forecast for next year is around about $60 million, and we're not arguing too much with that. Our product mix, you can see that it fluctuates a little bit between equipment and services. Last year, our equipment volume was down a little bit, and we went through a period where we had some capital constraints that impacted our ability to carry inventory, and that impacted our equipment sales. That's pretty much recovered since then, and you can see that our normalized EBITDA, there's a representation of Q4 2023 versus Q4 2024, so some big improvements in that area. These are our comps. You'll notice that our comps are all, one difference is they're all traded on major exchanges in the U.S. Dragonfly, for example, is showing Canada, but DPRO is actually a NASDAQ ticker, and predominantly in the defense sector.
The big thing I'd like to point out here is that the average companies or the medians here for 2025 estimates are trading at 17 x, whereas Volatus is trading at seven and a half times. When we do a comparison against these companies, these companies are almost entirely defense-focused, whereas Volatus is very much focused on both civil and defense markets. We've actually grown into the defense markets from the civil space. This last slide, before we turn to questions, actually talks about our cap table. What I really want to bring everybody's attention to here is the fact that approximately 23% of the company is still held by insiders. That's myself, our Chairman, our CFO, and our leadership team. Despite the fact that our stock has had some great performance this year, not one share has been sold since we went public in the open markets.
I want to point out a key point that I'm proud of: Volatus full-time employees are all participants in our stock option plan, which aligns their interests with the interests of all of our stakeholders, and the only person that doesn't take additional options or RSUs is me. We try to incentivize and align the interests of our employees with all of our stakeholders. Going forward, we're going to continue to focus on profitability, converting our pipeline to revenue, and commercializing our core programs. The biggest thing is really moving towards how we expand in the defense market. That's the end of the organized presentation. What I'd like to do now is look towards any questions anybody might have. We've got a few here.
I'll start out with: What do you see as the most significant external risks to Volatus growth and profitability over the next two to three years, and how is management mitigating those risks? I would say the biggest thing is making sure we keep our eye on the ball and making sure that we don't allow our performance as a company to disappoint any of our customers. That's probably the most important thing. Make sure that we continue to execute. Fortunately for me, we've got a very, very strong organization. I get to take credit for an awful lot of stuff I don't do, but I would say we mitigate the risk of service performance by supporting our team and making sure we have the best people available.
The other thing is, I would say, shiny object syndrome, chasing things that are not necessarily there. It is one of the reasons that we stay very focused in our financial projections around our commercial business, because we understand it, we understand the stability. It's not really been impacted by the geopolitical changes in any fashion other than positive. The defense industry, for example, is a significant area of growth, but we're doing that in such a way to make sure that we do not lose focus on our commercial business. Manufacturing, that's an expansion of our mandate, not a change in our focus, and that's really meeting the demands of the Canadian government moving forward. Next question we have is, what would you consider the biggest operational challenge in scaling remote aerial operations, and how have your recent earnings informed your strategies going forward?
I think the key thing here is making sure that we stay ahead of, as much as possible, the regulatory curve through the applying for and receiving waivers that allow us to continue to move closer and closer towards where larger aircraft are. As drones are getting bigger, they're becoming more capable, and they become disruptive to current aircraft, commercial aircraft, and helicopters, and that's the place we want to be ultimately. The bigger challenge is making sure that as we do that, we continue to keep up with the training that's required, the training and the operational support to make sure that we're operating literally as an aviation company, and also that we're leveraging the full potential of automation and remote scaling.
Key point, if we're doing large-scale inspections, let's say in a previous project, to have five drones out doing work, that might mean sending out five pickup trucks with a pilot and observer in each, so ten people with five drones and five trucks. Now we can send out one truck with one person, a launch and recovery technician, and five drones, and operate them all remotely from a single center. That's actually allowed us to continue to leverage or scale efficiently. The other thing I want to point out is we're moving towards an environment where one operator can operate many drones or many operators operating even more many drones. In the pending regulations, it's proposed to be ten to one. That's probably a lot at the moment, but that's definitely the direction that we're moving towards.
How do we differentiate ourselves in markets such as oil and gas, utilities, and what are the barriers to entry for potential competitors? The one thing, oil and gas power utilities, very conservative, right? Risk averse. You walk in the front door with a drone alone, and they're going to give you a hat and a pen and escort you out the back door because no procurement guy ever got fired for buying IBM. A lot of it is legacy means, which is why we actually have piloted aircraft and helicopters. One of the competitive advantages, aside from the fact that we're large scale, is that we have proprietary software in the oil and gas sector particularly, where we're literally tracking years of data. It gives us the ability to give trend analysis and historic data to our customers.
On top of that, we introduce this with a technology roadmap in one of the most advanced and capable companies in our industry. I would say that's our biggest competitive advantage and barrier to entry for many others, because to establish what we've been able to establish by accumulating all these technologies and capabilities over the years is both costly and time-consuming. How do the recent technological innovations or patents give Volatus Aerospace Inc. a sustainable edge, and how are these innovations being commercialized? That's a really great question. I'm going to touch on why we're doing a lot of this stuff. The geopolitical changes that have happened in the world, I'll call it a trade reset, have really caused us to re-evaluate the way we're doing business. In the United States, it's America first.
In Canada, it's Canada strong, where really we're trying to develop more domestic industries, develop less reliance in every country on other countries, right? That's what the Americans are doing. That's what Canada's attempting to do, and that's what countries like Southwest Asia are attempting to do. Our objective is to rapidly scale the capacity within Canada to be able to meet the growing demands of the Canadian armed forces and the growing demands of Canada at large as we develop our resource base better and continue to expand our trade corridors across the country. That's particularly important now when our Prime Minister has announced a $9 billion increase in spending this year and a promise to meet, so that meets our 2% requirement this year, but also promise to meet the 3.5% and 5% requirements by 2035.
He also pointed out that $0.75 of every dollar leaves our country when it's spent on defense, and a desire to repatriate those dollars into Canada. Lastly, Minister Joly has stated that the key target of Canada from an industrial development standpoint is to build capability and capacity right in Canada, which is why you saw us announce partnerships with a battery company, Volt Explore, not long ago. That's all about their capabilities for developing batteries that are capable of operating in minus 45 degrees Celsius temperatures like the Canadian Arctic. We announced the development of our manufacturing facility right in the center of Montreal's aerospace cluster, and yesterday we announced the acquisition of new technologies, and that's ultimately how we're targeting. We've also included a lobby firm in Ottawa that's helping us reposition ourselves with the Canadian government, and we've reinforced our defense sales team out of the U.K..
How reliable is the conversion rate for pipeline deals, and what has been the trend historically for moving opportunities into closed contracts? It's a great question. I want to preface the answer by saying things are changing rapidly. The analyst that covers us, or one of the analysts, refers to our opportunity pipeline as elephants. The elephants are getting bigger. They're migrating, so there's continuous changes in our industry and adoption rates and so on. Historically, we've converted 19% of our pipeline, but that's been on the civil side. On the defense side, it's just too early to tell. In terms of pipeline and those sorts of things, that's a little bit more stable. Those are typically contracts where you go through a six-month procurement process, and then you announce contracts that are typically multi-year contracts. Three to five years would be standard. I had somebody say, "Love the company.
Flight has a lot of growing revenues." Appreciate the shout-out there. What is contributing to the drop in share price and the recent drop of 20%+ ? Unfortunately, I'd love to be able to answer that in an intelligent way, but the reality is I can't. Fundamentals of our company are continuing to move in the right direction. I think trade uncertainties, I think there's people waiting to see the budget drop next week in Canada, which we're super excited about, but to be honest with you, I don't think I'm qualified to answer that question much beyond that. I try not to get distracted by it as much as possible. When do we expect cash from operations break-even? Are you fronting capital to build equipment or aircraft or building as contracts are signed? A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.
I'll answer the first part of that question. At $10 million, we're approaching EBITDA break-even. At $13 million, we're profitable. At $16 million in quarterly revenues, I'm talking now, so $10 million, $13 million, $16 million. At $16 million quarterly, we're generating Free Cash Flow. There are a lot of programs to help us with the development of the aircraft, but ultimately, we're also chasing contracts simultaneously. I think I've got time for one more question here. What is Volatus Aerospace's most defensible market advantage compared to other aerial intelligence solutions companies, and how do you anticipate regulatory changes affecting your positioning?
Canada, if I use Canada as an example, because it's where we started and where the regulations are moving fastest, in November, literally next week, new regulations come into effect that raise the minimum or the maximum weight of drones up to 150 kg, so north of 300 lbs, and create an environment where beyond visual line of sight on large scale is more possible. To do that, you have to be a certified or certificated ARPAS operating company, and we already have those. We continue to move forward in that space, and I think I'm almost out of time, so I want to thank everybody very much for dialing in, for supporting Volatus Aerospace, and encourage anybody that has any questions that are unanswered, send them to our investor relations page on our website, and we'll be happy to do our best and get back to you.
Thanks very much, and we'll look forward to next time. Thanks again, Greg, and OTC Markets.