Hey, good morning, everyone. This is Joe Cardoso from the Hardware Networking team at J.P. Morgan. For our next section, we have Josh Isner, President of Axon. Josh, thanks for taking the time joining us today.
Thanks for having me, Joe. Appreciate it.
Yeah. So I just wanted to kick you off. We've been asking kind of these introductory questions to most of the companies in our coverage at the conference today, just kind of 3 topical questions. You know, the first one just being, and this is more of a crystal ball question, you know, over the next 12 months, how are you thinking about the markets that you serve? Where are you feeling more optimistic? Where are you thinking that the markets are, or you're more hesitant about the markets?
Yeah, ultimately, we feel really good about what we're doing across our 4 major markets, which are state and local U.S., federal, U.S., international, and enterprise. And they're all at different places, but I think for our business, the kind of tagline is, we have to do 2 things really well at once. Number 1, we have to build new products to sell to our existing customers, and there, we're really talking about state and local U.S. And then in other markets, we have to do a good job of selling existing products into those newer markets. And if we do those 2 things in parallel, I think we've, we're gonna see the same types of results we've seen in past years at Axon, and, ultimately, each of those markets is in a different spot.
Our state and local U.S. market is our most developed market, but that's where we have the most new product opportunity. And then the other three, especially international, I'm starting to get more and more excited about, and part of that's the arrival of our new CRO, who's based in Europe, and will be driving a lot of the future success of deploying the cloud into some of those major European police forces.
Yeah. Got it. That's great. And then maybe the next two questions I'll combine into one, and obviously, it's a very topical question, and it's around AI. So maybe just bifurcating the two questions, you know, how is Axon today or going forward, leveraging AI for internal use cases to basically improve operations, efficiency, et cetera? And then how are you guys leveraging AI for your products?
Yeah, internally, I think there's a lot of opportunity to kinda disrupt a lot of the process around administrative work and historically the hiring intensity that's had to come with that. Things like quoting, for example, quoting and invoicing. We spent a lot of money on kind of a new system to what we call opportunity to cash, and we continue to try to perfect that motion, but we think AI could really disrupt the need to hire more and more people in that space, as opposed to get way more leverage out of the existing folks that we have. And so, you know, and I think we see that same dynamic with our customers externally.
I think the products that we're first really looking to introduce into AI are ones that take a lot of administrative work from, you know, police officers and automate that. And we just launched a product three weeks ago called Draft One, and we think that's kind of the first example of that, where the idea that a police officer spends 20%, maybe 25% of their time writing reports, that equates to a day a week. And we think with some of our new AI offerings, including Draft One, we can drive that way down, and they'll pick up at least an hour a day of time where they can be doing what they do best, which is fighting crime and not having to sit behind a computer doing data entry work.
So maybe when we take a step back and we look at Axon, historically, you guys have been characterized as being a hardware company, but now you have roughly, like, 40% of your revenues coming from cloud and services, 50% of gross profits coming from that category. You know, so maybe just take... Like, how do you think about Axon today versus yesteryears? Do you still view yourself as a hardware company, or are you increasingly thinking of yourself as a software company? And has that changed how you approach your product development or pursue different opportunities in the market?
Yeah, ultimately, in our market, I think we view ourselves as a connected device company. I think our hardware sales really precipitate the need for more and more softwares and software and drive a lot of the software buying cycles. And so you think of the body camera being kind of the on the front end of that, capturing content, but that's ultimately what creates the need to manage all that content, and it creates the opportunities in terms of, you know, all the administration of that content. And so, you know, one of the things we're really proud of is we manage about 30 times the amount of content as the entire Netflix library, and yet that's all driven by our hardware products that are pumping that content into Evidence.com. So we like to be at the intersection of hardware and software.
So when you think about the move towards more and more software, part of the attach rate of the hardware, like, how are you guys driving that? Like, anything that you can point to in terms of, like, the mix of R&D investments that you're spending or headcount around software engineers?
... Yeah, we're only gonna build hardware products where we think there is not, you know, the readily available, you know, presence of those already in the market. So for us, it's ruggedized body cameras. You see a lot of GoPro-type cameras in the consumer markets, but those aren't fit for purpose for police or the TASER itself, or in-car video for police. Like, those are the places where we'll invest in hardware, and then, you know, the rest of our investments will be how to make the most out of the content that that hardware is contributing. Like, you know, we talk about our records management business. One of the concepts we talk a lot about there is the idea that video is at the heart of the record.
So if you have this account of what happened that's, you know, driven by the officer wearing a body camera, that should set you up nicely to be able to, you know, run the records management side of that workflow because, you know, everything that you're doing on the records management side is focused on what actually took place and what the incident was. And so, you know, it's a good example of how some of our hardware, you know, customers turn into, you know, our biggest software customers.
No, makes sense. And then just last one here on this is just, you know, as we think about cloud and services in the mix, like, as you talked about it, a lot of it's associated to, hardware attached, right?
But how are you thinking about your ability to drive software sales without hardware? Like, where does that stand today, and how you're thinking about pursuing that more going forward?
Yeah, I think our team's done a really good job of this over the last 10 years or so, and so we do have some standalone software products. You know, records management, I mentioned, was one, computer-aided dispatch being another one, which is where, you know, you call 911, all the routing of a police officer to the crime, that system is known as CAD. That's another place where, you know, we have a new offering. And then, more so than anything, our digital evidence management platform, called Evidence.com, is hardware agnostic. So of course, our devices contribute content in, but then you think about things like CCTV or drones, those are also growing sources of digital evidence, and so Evidence.com is the platform where, you know, all of those different hardware products plug into.
And so in a lot of our early customers in Europe and, you know, in international, where maybe they're not quite ready to adopt body cameras yet, they still have petabytes and petabytes of digital evidence, and Evidence.com is a very competitive product in that space.
Yep. Clear, very clear. You know, one of the questions or one of the areas where investors are super focused on more recently is your recurring revenue.
Yeah.
Obviously, strong growth there. I think it's up more than 50% from a year ago, 4x the level you guys were running at in 2020.
Yeah.
You know, when you look back at the portfolio and go to market, what has been the major driver of this strong growth and accelerating growth rate?
Yeah, we try to do two things really well at Axon. We try to build the best R&D organization we can and complement that with the best sales team we can. And for us, you know, our founder, Rick, is the visionary behind a lot of our new product development, but to pay that off, we need a really, really strong sales team across the market. And so we spent a lot of time and energy over the last seven or eight years building a team that can really scale in our go-to-market approach, and we've had a lot of success there. And now we're replicating that approach in some of our newer markets, like international and federal.
So, you know, the marriage of having really good products that customers want to buy with a team that can service those customers and help them be successful for the long term, that's really, you know, kind of the first principles approach that we take to growing ARR.
Maybe the second prong to that question is the sustainability of recurring revenue-
...and the growth rate that you're seeing. And maybe here, can you just dive into the different levers Axon has to pull to increase either share of wallet with existing customers as well as new customers? And maybe just tag on, like, how are you thinking about the competitive landscape and Axon's specific differentiation there?
Yeah, the really nice thing about our business is, you know, when we're successful selling a product in, we often have several opportunities to create more value for the customer after the case. So when you think about our Evidence.com business over the last 10 years, started with body camera sales, as I mentioned, then it was the basic, like, how do I view and share the content on it? And now it's more about, hey, how do I redact the content in an automated fashion so it can be released publicly or go through the courts? How do I have multiple synchronized video feeds on the same screen that are kind of recounting the incident? How do I do license plate recognition? How do I live stream this content?
So each of those creates an opportunity to upsell and create more value for the customer for the long term. And so for us, it's about not only thinking about how our installed base of hardware and enterprise software can help on day one, it's... You know, we know in a market that's small, like public safety is, we have to be really good at thinking through the third and fourth order effects thereof of how we can continue to grow the business, and it really starts with the installed base.
Yeah. Great. Maybe before I switch gears here, let me just pause and see if there's any questions in the room. If anybody has a question, please feel free to raise your hand.
Just wait for the mic real quick. Sorry. We just wanna hear you.
Thank you. You guys can hear me. Yeah, the shareholder letter talked about the Axon Week and, you know, the user conference. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the highlights in your own mind, and then maybe an update on TASER 10. Thanks.
Sure. So, starting with Axon Week, that's our big user conference. We actually feel really lucky to be able to do that 'cause there aren't many vendors in the public safety space that can say, "Hey, we're throwing an event for a week," and you expect 2,000 of your biggest customers to show up to it, and that's exactly the dynamic of Axon Week, where we put on a kind of a show that not only highlights our technologies, but the future of where policing is going and where disruptive technology is going. And it's humbling that our customers are willing to give us their undivided attention for a week and come and learn more about, you know, what we have to offer and where we think the space is going.
And so that's certainly a big generator of a pipeline for us. It's a great kind of opportunity to build further relationships with the customers, and it's a great opportunity for us to position ourselves as the preeminent technology company in this space, where we invite a lot of our partners in. They actually pay us to come to our conference, and so we're able to subsidize the cost of the conference just based on how many partners show up and would like access to our customer base. And so it's a great week. It's one that's kind of modeled after Dreamforce, and we very much want to be that in public safety, where this is the tech conference of public safety. And we're really proud of our marketing team and all the effort they put behind that.
And then on TASER 10, it's our new TASER device. It's 10 shots. It is effective up to 45 feet, and these are major departures from our previous TASER weapons, and we're seeing that in sales. TASER 10 adoption is growing at twice the rate TASER 7 grew over the same timeframe, which was its predecessor, and so very excited about where that business is going. I think for the first time, our police customers see this as like, "Hey, we can see the light in terms of displacing the firearm in policing." You know, we're still a couple generations away from being able to do that at a large scale, but we think TASER 10 is a major step in that direction.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Any other questions in the room? Okay, so maybe just piggybacking off of that last response around TASER 10, for maybe folks that are not familiar with it, like, I've been able to shoot TASER 10. I've had the privilege. It seems game-changing, at least from my opinion. Maybe can you just talk about that for a bit? What's differentiated versus the legacy offering of TASERs, including yourselves, as well as maybe some of your competitors, and then talk on the customer reception today?
Yeah, sure. So, our TASER business started with, you know, the first couple versions, the M26 and the X26, were one shot. And so when you shoot one TASER cartridge, two darts come out, and the name of the game is getting those darts connected to the human body, and then they conduct electricity between them at a similar waveform that your brain sends to your muscles. And so essentially overtakes your neuro, you know, muscular system. We call it neuromuscular incapacitation or NMI, and that five seconds of time where that's taking place is what allows a police officer to take the suspect into custody and get them in handcuffs and so forth.
Well, it's really hard to hit a moving target with two probes, especially when they're, you know, wearing heavy clothing and so forth, and so our next couple models were two-shot models. The TASER X2 and the TASER 10 gave the officer a backup shot, and there we started to see rates of effectiveness creep into the eighties and so forth. Well, you can imagine with 10-shot... And both of those weapons only worked up to 25 feet. Now, TASER 10 is 10 shots at 45 feet.
So you think about, you know, the performance and the difference there if you're a police officer and you don't have to engage, you know, in close range with a suspect in terms of keeping the officer safe and keeping the situation from escalating in the event that you miss with a probe, and then all of a sudden, your only option is lethal force. You know, that's the kind of value add for TASER 10, where distance equals safety for both the police officer and the suspect.
And so, ultimately, you know, when we get to more shots and increased range and increased effectiveness, how well the darts are at penetrating clothing, those are the types of things that really drive, you know, a police officer to think, "Hey, this becomes a more suitable alternative to a firearm." And at the end of the day, we believe we're on this, you know, multi-decade journey to disrupt the firearm in policing, and, and to do that, we need the TASER to be able to, to work 100% of the time, just like you would expect a bullet to, to penetrate, you know, 100% of the time.
So you did a good job at articulating the difference in capabilities of TASER 10, but maybe can you talk about the monetization opportunity with TASER 10 and how that's different from legacy products, and maybe touch on VR training, TASER-
Sure
... actual cartridge consumption, and anything else that you think is applicable?
Yeah. So, the first thing I'll say is we're a mission-driven company, and we think if we create products that save lives and make people safer, the economics will always follow that. And so, you know, we never start a TASER development project saying, like, "How do we make the most money here?" We start, like, saying: "How do we solve the biggest problem?" And we think TASER 10 does that. But, you know, obviously, with 10 shots instead of 2, you know, the cartridge consumption will go up. So, you know, the economics of that are interesting to us, but we're really where the big kind of departure from previous models is the availability of VR training.
And so, you know, police training is really, really hard on agencies logistically. You think of an agency the size of New York Police, you know, 40,000 officers, having to get all those officers through in-service training, and not only get them through training, but make sure the training was worthwhile and that they retained all of the information, and so forth. You know, it's really hard to do that and, you know, after a couple hours or 6 hours of in-service training once a year, to expect police officers to fire a TASER at an expert level with maximum accuracy and maximum comfort with the device, it's just a stretch to think that's enough training.
And so when you have VR, and you can literally put a headset on and be practicing firing a TASER in VR every day, and the controller is an actual TASER 10, or it's the same weight and feel of a TASER 10, and the aiming is the exact same as you would see in the field, all of a sudden, you can get way more proficient in using the weapon. And we think that is a very, you know, interesting way to, to, you know, further monetize the device when you're talking about maybe disrupting the training business as a whole in public safety. And, you know, we're building this platform to be able to engage with all use of force tools, not only TASERs.
We think that TAM here is actually bigger than our TASER market in terms of, you know, when this thing hits scale. We're excited about it.
Then maybe can you just touch on the cartridge opportunity there as well? If TASER 10 gets more widely adopted and the capabilities of it, like, how do you think about cartridge consumption going forward?
Sure. You know, we obviously, with 10 shots versus 2 in the field, you know, there'll be more cartridges fired, more cartridges fired in training. And so, you know, we do sell cartridges as part of a package on a recurring basis. So, you know, every year, when you buy our TASER 10 plan, you know, all of your training cartridges and your duty cartridges for that year ship automatically on the one-year anniversary of your purchase. So, you know, certainly a nice, stable, recurring revenue stream associated with the cartridges. And, you know, with our new design of the cartridges, we think, you know, we're gonna see, you know, better gross margin at scale. They're made in an automated fashion. We don't have the gas capsules in the cartridges anymore.
That was one of the highest BOM items in the cartridges, and it's, you know, it was one of the limiters to the actual size of the cartridge. Now, we've replaced that with a new mechanism, and that'll not only drive the cartridge down but will continue to allow us to offer more and more shot, shots as part of, you know, the offering to the market.
Maybe you just repeat the question. The New York PD, I mean, how many TASERs are shot every week?
Please repeat the question.
Repeat the question, sir.
Oh, sure. Yep. So the question was, you know, at an agency the size of New York, how often is a TASER shot? Usually, you know, and it varies wildly depending on the availability of them and the training and where it is on the use of force continuum, but you'd expect a police officer to deploy his or her TASER at least once a year on average.
Thank you.
Any other questions in the room before I move on to...? Yeah, we got one right up here.
So you've built some great customer relationships. You have a fantastic distribution business, and you've talked a lot about R&D, but have you talked about any of your inorganic growth or merger and acquisition strategies?
Sure, great question. So, over the last 10 months, we've announced 3 acquisitions, which is a major departure from us. In the last 5 or 6 years, we've had a couple more, like, acqui-hire-oriented acquisitions, but, we've become far more acquisitive over the last year, starting with our Sky-Hero business, which is an indoor drone company. We think that's gonna be the platform for the TASER drone, in a few years. And, you know, we haven't announced a timetable for that yet, but it's something that we're interested in and we think will save a lot of lives when you don't have to put humans in the middle of these highly tense, and dynamic situations involving, you know, use of force and, and weapons.
We've also acquired Fusus, which, we think is a really exciting market opportunity, not only in public safety but in enterprise. This is essentially the technology that can take any fixed camera and integrate it in with law enforcement. So, you know, when you have privately owned cameras, you install this, Fusus CORE into the camera, and all of a sudden, all the codecs and so forth translate, and you can play those back live in Evidence.com. So you can think about the alternative without that. You're chasing down kind of, disparate footage everywhere. You need all of this software just to decode the, the feeds coming from the CCTV cameras.
As I said, we think that's an interesting play, not only to connect more cameras into public safety but to seed the market and enterprise with a product where then we can go back and sell our additional products into those customers. Then the third one is what we just announced a couple of weeks ago, which is Dedrone, a two-pronged business. Number one, they do all the drone mitigation and defense. So they take drones out of the sky that are harmful enemy drones. They track all drone traffic in the air. You can think about targets like stadiums or government facilities, correctional facilities. Those are the places that are deploying Dedrone to protect their infrastructure.
Then Dedrone also offers what we think will be hugely valuable in the future, which is a product called Beyond Visual Line of Sight for drones. So right now, there's an emerging part of public safety called DFR, which is Drone as a First Responder. So 911 call comes in, you dispatch a drone first and get all the live video of what's going on at the scene, so as the officer arrives at the scene, they have more situational awareness. Well, the problem with doing that today is a person has to literally be watching the drone from start to finish, so they're passing it off on rooftops. You've got humans set up on rooftops, watching a drone fly until they can't see it over anymore, and then the next person takes over watching the drone.
It's kind of humorous that that is the workflow right now for this use case. Well, Dedrone, because they monitor all of these drones in the sky, can actually apply and get a waiver to do DFR using Dedrone instead of using, you know, a human's line of sight. And so we think, you know, offerings like that will accelerate the pace at which drones are adopted and widen the use cases for which they're used in policing. So, very excited about Dedrone as well. All of these teams, I think, really are entrepreneurial. They have a lot of the same kind of cultural values that Axon does, and we think they're great fits as part of our business. And so, we're excited about what the future holds, you know, for those three portfolio companies as well.
Thanks.
Any other questions in the room? So maybe, I'll come back to TASER, but you mentioned Fusus-
-and you obviously had, I don't think it, NYPD had an announcement, or New York had an announcement about, a contract with you guys and Fusus. Maybe can you talk us through that announcement real quickly? And then, more importantly, can you talk about how you think about that opportunity and how big that opportunity can go... be going forward?
Yeah. I'd probably shy away from talking about any specific customer's use case. I think, you know, they're generally similar place to place in the larger markets. Obviously, Fusus can have a larger impact. If you think of a major city, like a New York or a Boston, think about just how many stores, you know, line the sidewalks here, and all of those stores have their own private CCTV in there. And so if you think about something like, you know, the Boston Marathon bombing about 10 years ago here, you look at it and say: "How do you collect all that footage?" You literally would have to go store to store, and like I said, to you know, use you know, a decoding software to just be able to see the feeds from those videos.
Now, all of those customers are able to participate in the Fusus network, and send their data straight into police. Now, it's not something that, you know, is going 24/7. If the user doesn't want it to, they can decide if this is pushed to the police once a crime happens or if this is constantly monitored. But it really accelerates a lot of that workflow in terms of getting video to the police in any kind of, you know, incident. When you think about what's happening in retail loss right now, theft is up. You see major retailers closing stores over theft and workplace, you know, like, retail workers getting abused by customers and so forth.
We think this could be a major value add, and it's proving out to be. You know, they've had a lot of success even prior to the Axon acquisition. And so, you know, when we, we take that, and then we combine it with this opportunity to go in there and say, "Hey, you're already using Fusus. You know, would you like to use evidence.com? Would you like to put body cameras on your retail workers?" Which is kind of a growing trend in the U.S. "Would you like to use license plate recognition in your parking lot? Do you want to secure your facility, you know, from any kind of drone attacks with Dedrone?" Like, these are all opportunities that stem from having this Fusus installed base.
So we think it'll be a really interesting kind of foot in the door, as we grow our enterprise business over time.
No, that's great. So maybe taking it back to TASER-
and one of the areas... I mean, you talked about it, it was in the question, you know, we talked about police officers, but obviously, you guys are having tremendous amount of success branching out of that traditional customer base. Can you talk about that? Like, what's driving these non-traditional customers to adopt TASER 10? And then maybe if I could just tack on the second part of this question, which would be: obviously, there's barriers now to non-traditional customers, so how is Axon overcoming it?
Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, we are seeing use cases, for example, in hospital security and private security, for TASER really grow. These are folks that might not be trained in firearms, for example, or they might, you know, for whatever reason, not be carrying firearms. We think TASER's a great fit for those markets, and we're really seeing that business grow. And so, it is classified as a firearm, which I think you were alluding to, unlike our previous versions. I think in practice, it's not creating a major issue in the market. It's more kind of all the logistical checks and balances that have to take place internally. You know, for example, when you have firearms, you can't ship them by ground. You have to ship them express.
You know, that changes things for us in terms of how we have to charge for them. You know, when you have firearm manufacturing, there are all these controls about the physical space and who has access to it, and there's something called the bound book, which is how you track the movement of firearms to customers. And there's just a lot of regulation that, you know, it is costly for us, but it also is just part of launching the new weapon. And so, we've tried to get really good at that really fast and are pleased with the results.
But, ultimately, we don't necessarily see those same constraints being passed on to users who are already very comfortable managing their firearm inventory and being part of the public safety space in general.
Thanks. So maybe switching gears to the other area of your portfolio where you recently had a new product introduction is obviously body cameras. Specifically, you announced Axon Body 4 late last year. You also, early this year, did Body Workforce. So maybe can you walk us through those two products? Like, what's the differentiation relative to your legacy products as well as what you're seeing in the market? And maybe touch on, like, similar to TASER 10, like, what's the monetization opportunity that you see beyond just selling the hardware?
For sure. So Axon Body 4 is our most well-adopted body camera that we've ever sold. We've, you know, in our first six months, we shipped hundreds of thousands of units, which we're really proud of, and a high quality. The major, you know, kind of improvements there outside of just better battery life, better optics in the camera, better quality live streaming and connectivity, is we now offer two-way voice in the body camera itself. So we're seeing all kinds of use cases for that. For example, translation services. If you're a police officer, you come across someone who doesn't speak English, you can activate the two-way voice, and you can have someone in the command center communicating with, you know, the individual through the body camera.
You know, there's a lot of interesting use cases that supplement the police radio that can be done with this two-way voice functionality. We think, you know, ultimately, that'll be an opportunity to keep growing into that space, and we think Axon Body 4 is kind of the first vestige of that. And then Axon Body Workforce is essentially this motion I mentioned at the beginning of how do we sell existing products into new markets? We think retail is an emerging market for body cameras. Now, you don't necessarily need the same product that you sell to police, but, you know, it, it's not such a departure that it's a huge variant.
It's things like taking a little of the weight out of the product because you don't need as long a battery life because you're not gonna be recording for as long. Things around the touch and feel and the color of it, for example, make it more of an inviting product instead of more of like a militaristic, ruggedized product. But that is what Axon Body Workforce is. It's a lighter weight, you know, different-looking version of our body camera that is tailored for more enterprise use cases like retail, like healthcare. You know, we see nurses starting to wear body cameras, and, you know, we think this is a logical extension of where our business is headed, where you know, these cameras will demonstrate similar ROI that they do to police officers.
Yeah. Thanks. So, and then just switching to Fleet now, that business, or at least on a revenue perspective, has been a little bit choppy-
Given supply chains, and then now you're starting to see or you're back to kind of normalized levels. So, can you help investors think about how you're thinking about the growth rate there going forward, just given kind of the volatility we've seen over the past couple of quarters?
Yeah. Coming out of COVID, you know, there was certainly a constraint around shipping these devices. We've now hit a rhythm there, and, you know, I don't... You know, when you're talking about police cars, you're not gonna see, like, explosive growth quarter over quarter, but I do think it's fair to expect, you know, over a longer term, incremental growth in that product line. We do have to install every Fleet system we buy, and so, you know, there's a little bit of a limiter on the professional services front and to how many deployments we can do in parallel and so forth, but we're very bullish on the product.
Well, you know, thinking back a little, you know, our first Fleet system was simply a body camera that was attached to a windshield by a suction cup, but we got enough feedback based on that to get our second version of Fleet to, like, parity in the market, where it did all the things the normal, you know, off-the-shelf products do. And then with Fleet 3, we really accelerated ahead with things like license plate recognition and better optics and live streaming and faster offload wirelessly and things like that. And so, you know, this has become the market-leading product in in-car video, and we're excited about, you know, the adoption curve we're seeing, not only domestically but internationally there.
We think this will be another one of those kind of, you know, nice gross margin products that opens the door to more and more upsell opportunities in the police car itself.
Yeah, that's great. And then maybe just rounding off the hardware side, and you mentioned it already, but the drone opportunity.
You know, maybe just starting off there, like, what role is Axon looking to play on both the hardware and software sides? You've done acquisitions on both fronts, so maybe you can touch on them a little bit, but you've already kind of talked on it. So just curious, high level-
Yeah.
like, how you're thinking about it.
Similar approach that I mentioned before, where we're only gonna build hardware when we think there's a vacancy and a need in the market that nobody else could fill. And so, you know, for us, the indoor drone space is interesting. I mentioned the Sky-Hero acquisition because to deploy the TASER drone, that is, you know, having an organically built product there will give us more control over our own destiny in that product line. But outside of that, I think we're really focused on becoming more of a software value add in the drone space. It's, you know, right now, it's a fragmented market. We're partnered with Skydio, which we think, you know, could be the eventual winner in that space or at least one of them.
But for us, it's about, hey, the piloting software, the live streaming software, the beyond visual line of sight mechanism that I mentioned with Dedrone, the retention of all of the evidence that the, you know, the drone takes in, in terms of video. Like, those are the places where we plan to be highly active in the market, and we'll probably wait to see how the drone hardware race kind of works out over the next few years as there are still new entrants and a lot of uncertainty in terms of, you know, which products the market will adopt for which use cases.
Got it. And then when you think about the drone opportunity and, like, barriers to adoption, how are you thinking about it? Is there any barriers on the technology side that you think are still very relevant, or do you think a lot of it ends up being legislation and kind of what we're seeing across state, like patchwork regulation, that kind of issues?
Yeah, a little bit of both, I would say. You know, for... We believe the most interesting use case in policing for drones is gonna be that drones as a first responder, market, where you can dispatch drones and sometimes in lieu of police officers to resolve, incidents. And there, you know, it's not rocket science, but, you know, it does. There are some requirements that can be cumbersome for drone manufacturers. The drone's got to be able to stay in the air for 30-plus minutes. It's got to be able to fly very high in the air and at high speeds, and it's got to have great optics. And right now, you have DJI, but then you have, you know, no one that's really emerged as, quite the exact comparison to DJI.
DJI being a Chinese manufacturer, there are gonna be limitations on being able to sell that into public safety. So, you know, we think Skydio is a pretty good bet there, but we're also betting that there'll be a few more that emerge, you know, in that process as well. But those kind of core specifications for that use case are very different than what you'd see for, like, accident reconstruction or, you know, a drone-in-a-trunk solution, which, you know, you have a crime scene, you want to fly a drone around just to take all, you know, digital evidence from the sky. Like, that's just a different need than what you would see in a, in a drone as a first responder use case.
Yeah, that's great. And, I think we're up on time here. So I wanted to thank everyone for joining us today, and especially you, Josh, for taking the time to be here. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone. Nice to-