Morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in our virtual public safety conference today. We have an exciting group of companies and sessions that we are looking forward to. Before we begin with Axon, I am required to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures is available at our website at www.williamblair.com. We are excited to have with us Jeff Kunins, the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Axon today. Axon is a leading provider of modern technology that enables law enforcement agencies to more safely, efficiently, and effectively operate. They're known for their Taser weapons, body and fleet cameras, drones, and public safety software. Our format today will be a fireside chat, where we'll level set the story and dig into better understanding the opportunities and risks ahead in the public safety markets.
We also will take questions from the audience via the Zoom interface, so please don't be shy about submitting those questions as we go through our chat. We will try to answer as many of those as we can as we receive them. Jeff, before we begin, can you give us a little bit of a background on yourself and maybe your current role within Axon?
Sure. Thanks so much, Jonathan, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be in the world. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today. A s Jonathan said, my name is Jeff Kunins. I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer here at Axon, which basically means I look after all of our global R&D. So all of our hardware, software, product design, AI science, all that stuff across R&D for all of our products globally, and it's just a privilege and honor to do so. A little bit of a background on me. I've been, you know, in tech, both some of the largest companies in the world, like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as a series of startups and acquisitions, for more than the last 30 years.
I came most recently to Axon 4 years ago when I joined from Amazon, where I had been a Vice President for 5.5 years, both in the Kindle business and then in the Alexa business. I began my career in the early 1990s, like so many, as an intern at Microsoft, working on early versions of Microsoft Office, and then many, many twists and turns, including helping lead a startup called Tellme Networks. That was, among multiple interesting things, both... if there's a direct ancestor to today's modern voice assistants, Tellme actually was really that company.
We happened to be one of the world's first SaaS Companies before the word SaaS even had been coined, and that company was acquired by Microsoft back in 2007. So, I had never, before coming to Axon, had any direct connection to public safety, but I'd always cared a tremendous amount about working on businesses, where what I'm building can align with my values. And over the years, you know, I've had the chance to work on things that are more or, or less of that at different times.
And prior to Axon, Kindle was really the best of that for me because I could wake up every day and say, "Every minute that I can get someone to be reading a book and not, you know, playing Candy Crush, or if it was now watching TikTok, that's good for the universe." And it was phenomenal to get to work on an incredible technology business product area that was also genuinely good for the world. And Axon is that times a thousand. And I truly believe that Axon is one of, if not the best, examples on the planet of truly being tech for good in the purest sense of the word, combined with incredibly disruptively fun products, tech, and business model, and that makes it just such an incredibly unique place to be.
My entry into Axon really, you know, coincided, and again, just a privilege to have been able to be a part of it, with really, the early innings of what we like to call the third age or the third era of Axon's development as a company. Axon, as you know, some of you may know, was founded also, ironically, just over 30 years ago, by Rick Smith, who is still our, you know, founder and CEO to this day. When he was in grad school, 2 of his best friends from high school were shot and killed in a road rage incident.
That moment, as well as being inspired by his long love of science fiction and being an innovative technologist, even as a young man, he really came to believe that the fact that human beings still accelerate lead slugs at each other as a way to resolve conflict should be a solvable technology problem. Technology should be able to help address even what was then a plague of gun violence, both in the U.S. and in many places around the world. Well, he founded Taser with the mission to use tech to help ultimately obsolete the bullet and simply protect life. And so the first era of Axon, which was originally Taser, was Taser.
The first almost 20 years of the company was, Rick building a business, a product, a mission around the TASER, and he actually went and found the retired NASA scientist, who had come up with the idea of a TASER but had not successfully been able to commercialize it, and joined forces with him in literally a proverbial garage. And they ultimately were able to successfully build, ship, and commercialize, the world's first TASER connected energy weapon. T hen in addition to that built, and we'll come down to the history of the business, they also then created a successful, deep, high-trust channel of sales and relationships into this incredibly challenging market of public safety.
The first 10 years of the company was inventing a whole new class of product that did not exist before, convincing an incredibly challenging market and customer segment that they should buy this thing they had never bought before, and then building the high scale, high trust, high stickiness sales channel with which to distribute and grow that Taser business. That built the company, and was the backbone of everything that came to the future. The second era or second age, if you're thinking like Middle-earth, the second era or age of the company was body cameras and cloud-based digital evidence management. Sort of like Kindle wasn't literally the first e-ink reading device, but Kindle really defined the category.
Axon wasn't the first body camera, but for all intents and purposes, we defined and created the category. And to this day, while there are many great competitors and participants in that market segment, you know, we're proud to be the number one provider of body cameras and cloud-based digital evidence in the world. T hat expanded upon, from a market standpoint, us from being a one-product company to being a two product and two market company. I t also internally began to transform us as a business and as a team and our capability for what would come next. D oing body cameras and cloud-based digital evidence turned us into a software company. It turned us into a SaaS company.
It turned us into a hardware company beyond just the weapons, and it turned us into a multi-product, multi-business company. i t was still... You can think of it as one big new product and one big new category on the back of what was, at that point, already a decently mature business. C lassic playbook of ultimately explosive growth of big, elite, A-list tech companies. Think of the history of Microsoft, of Google, of Amazon, and, you know, those are the companies that we, you know, admire and aspire and to role model over time.
We also made big, huge decisions, again, this long predates me, to bet on the cloud as what would be skating to where the puck was going at a time when no one in public safety would even consider anything other than legacy on-premise ways of deploying technology. Rick and the team made a pretty prescient bet that the power and flexibility and capability of the cloud would ultimately carry the day, and by combining them from day one with the way we built our cameras, that would be an extraordinary differentiator, not only for the body camera and cloud-based digital evidence market, but ultimately would be the backbone for an entire wider ecosystem of what they couldn't even imagine yet would be to come.
That is what leads the bridge to the third era, that we're still in the early innings of now. And so with the, on the back of the huge market success of both TASER and body cameras, plus digital evidence management, plus or minus 6-7 years ago, however you want to measure, begins what we'll call the third era or the third age of the company, which is, again, just like great tech companies before us, that we are humbled to be in the same company of. You know, that success earned us the right to try to play into what I'll call the kind of Cambrian explosion of additional market opportunity, and of us very quickly going after a rapidly expanding set of opportunities on 3 vectors simultaneously. Kind of what we sell, who we sell it to, and where we sell it.
Or said another way, more products, and really going after trying to reinvent the entire technology stack, top to bottom, that underlies modern public safety, especially for the state and local customers that we already had such a strong socket with, from our two existing businesses. Number 2, expanding where we sell. We already were a global company, even then, selling TASER in dozens of countries around the world, but we were extraordinarily early on international, and this earned us the right to, you know, set our sails on being a truly global company for all of our product lines. T hen number 3, whom we sell to. Y ou know, the classic 2 by 2 of, like, new products, existing products, new markets, existing markets.
The way to think a bout market development in the simplest terms is you have the products you already know that have product market fit and the customers you already know how to sell to. As you expand, you have the right to build new products for your existing customers, or you can try to extend and expand your existing products to new customer channels. But the thing you never want to do is be like a rock climber, taking multiple limbs off the wall at the same time and try to build a thing that you've never sold before to a customer segment you've never sold anything to before, at the same time. S o that sort of intentional expansion across those vectors at the same time is the heart and soul of our ecosystem strategy and our continued development to pursue growth.
That has served us really well over the last five or six years to our current state, you know, of both revenue, market cap, and trajectory from where we go here. I have been honored over the last four years to really help transform the team, our talent, our mechanisms, our approach, and try to bring the best of what those big companies have, combined with the continued hustle and grit of a startup that defines Axon's culture.
Excellent, excellent. I really like sort of the mission-driven culture and, you know, sort of the strategy that you've laid out as well as the history. This is an excellent overview, and, you know, as you can tell, we're both technical guys, and so we're gonna have a little bit of a deeper technical discussion-
Great.
You know, throughout this conversation. Y ou know, maybe starting out with what you were talking about in terms of the right to win. You know, Axon's position as this collection point for critical digital evidence, can you help us understand, you know, what's the strategic importance of owning the DEMS, and what does this allow you to do going forward? You know, like, what, what can you do with this video that you've collected? What can you upsell, cross-sell? What are the other types of systems that then feed into the DEMS?
That's right, and thanks, Jonathan. A gain, love, love going technical, so we can go as deep as you want. I think, you know, with starting at the top, I think, you know, for us, right, just like in, you know, many other segments, you know, asking that question, right, is a combination of data sets, you know, and, and workflows and experiences and how all those things, you know, build upon each other. DEMS, the DEMS is one of those, you know, incredibly strategic assets because it serves as both of those things.
There are big network effects that come from both having that socket of the workflow and attention and time spent socket by end users, and the dataset that underlies it being repurposable and extensible and leverageable in, you know, many other adjacent, you know, product segments. T ruly, in the modern world, you know, digital evidence, not just the evidence that's coming from body cameras, which is, of course, you know, the largest, you know, set. J ust to set context, you know, we to the best of our knowledge, we are, you know, Microsoft Azure's single largest cloud storage customer in the world. We actually ingest more video every year than YouTube.
Obviously, they have more views than we do, but in terms of the volume of ingestion, it's just massive, and we're the, you know, humbled to be the secure custodian of that data on behalf of our customers. D igital evidence really is at the core of incidents. In today's world, that notion of capturing truth and that physical digital, meaning that asset of that media is central to being the preponderance of information that underlies a case. And it is used continually over and over again.
If you think about the entire arc from sort of capture to courtroom, and everything that goes along with that, including, you know, with the press, with, defense, with prosecution, with other agencies, collaboration and interagency incidents, you know, over time, re-leveraging that data to help solve, you know, other things later. That repository of digital evidence of all kinds, both things like body camera footage, but also things from CCTV cameras, things from, you know, cell phone records that have been collected through companies like Cellebrite, which I know you're going to talk to later today. You know, myriads of other sources of digital information all being together as the core of what underlies an investigation, but also underlies this growing knowledge base that can be tapped and leveraged by agencies over time, within and across incidents.
I don't even like saying the word owning, by being chosen by a customer to be their trusted repository and workflow engine for that thing that's the heart, and is really the hub with so many spokes off of it, of their core workflow, that not only allows us to give them a fantastic experience for that, but it gives us the opportunity to make that be fundamentally integrated with every other product that we then expand into. W hether that's the records management system space, or whether that's the CAD space, or whether that's other real-time communications things, you know, being built right into our cameras, whether that's ultimately things like VR training, whether that's, you know, the connection between TASER weapons in the field, all of those things work together.
As you know, and I've lived growing up, you know, in the Microsoft world and the Amazon world, the power of ecosystems is doing the best possible job of both integrated, vertically stacked first-party experiences, combined with open, flexible APIs in every layer of that stack to facilitate choice and the best possible end-to-end combination of things across a mix of first and third-party hardware, software, and services, but all bound together by the highest quality, unified backplane that you can. The DEMS absolutely serves as that backplane, that it has enabled us to build a winning set and ever-growing set of other technologies that we've been grateful to have customers choose to adopt on the back.
Excellent. i t seems like you've had the ability to lay the foundation and not to use any more Microsoft analogies, but then you can sort of build the office on top of that once you start to build out that full suite of solutions and expand into other areas.
That's right. T hen just like Microsoft or just like, again, Google or just like Amazon, it's that the, the beauty is, I think, you and I have lived and grown up in these ecosystem-style things.
I've been an operating systems guy, I've been an applications guy, I've been a services guy, you know, and I've worked for decades within ecosystems where you are simultaneously cooperating and competing, you know, healthily with a range of other companies to help do your collective best, to do what's right for customers, and to make it, to put in customers' hands the choice of what they want to choose for each layer of the stack, while doing your best to provide to them a cohesive whole that, as often as possible, has them choose your parts of that stack, while giving them the flexibility to use whatever they want and whatever is right for them in every part of that mesh. Because you're never gonna deliver yourself every single piece of everything.
It takes a very diverse and wide range of things across so many layers to deliver the value that customers need.
Excellent, excellent. M aybe just to dig into the RMS systems a little bit. Historically, we've seen customers in many situations taking their legacy software and just putting kind of a new front end on a system. So if it's a COBOL system or if it's based in Visual Basic, you know, they just sort of take what they have and then re-skin it with, you know, maybe a modern web interface. You know, how do you think about, like, reimagining, you know, what can be done from a business process perspective? You know, what are some of the advances that Axon brings to these types of systems?
Sure. First, I'll say again, thanks. That's great for teeing up that mental model shift, because it is a thing that different companies choose to do differently. I think, you know, the best companies, you know, I think, choose to go after it the way that we have tried to in this space. I think, you know, again, I've lived... you know, one of the things I mentioned earlier that Tellme, this startup, was one of the world's first SaaS companies.
You know, what we did is we were in the enterprise, you know, IVR, CRM system space, and we similarly, back in circa the year 2000, made a choice to be cloud-based, you know, SaaS-based services to completely reinvent from the ground up the mental model for how companies, you know, went after those kinds of systems. I t earned us the business of everything from Merrill Lynch and, you know, Merrill Lynch, Capital One, Delta Air Lines, et cetera, to American Express and UPS, and to every wireless and wireline carrier in the U.S. Because we fundamentally said, we're not gonna just skin legacy services, we're actually going to reinvent from the ground up and take this moment of a technology shift to reassemble the pieces from their base part in a way that's skating to where the puck is going.
I think it's easy in enterprise software spaces to kind of like grow just by acquisition and kind of like, you know, kind of almost like cobble together a set of piece parts, put either, you know, a brand veneer over them or little bits of integration. U ltimately, that ties your hands to your ability to build the right end-to-end experience from the ground up, because the back end is every bit as much part of what shows up in the front end as the front end. I think Axon made a strong choice predating me, but then we've like leaned into it and turned it into, I think, some really nice momentum and success so far, even though it's still early days.
Our RMS approach was to start from scratch and to imagine, starting from our DEMS-centric world and video at the heart of the record, how would you build a modern, cloud-based approach from the ground up to how to conceive of a flexible, dynamic, and extensible, you know, records management system if you weren't beholden to, to legacy ideas of how to do it? At the same time, and, you know, it's equally true that when you're seeking to disrupt a preexisting enterprise software market, which is very different than DEMS or TASER, when we were the market creator, you absolutely have to play the table stakes and be able to be a, you know, fit-for-purpose, drop-in replacement.
Nailing the combination of what are the elements of the modules, the interfaces, the workflows, the functionality that have been built up over decades, you have to be able to simply drop in because it is a lift-and-shift replacement, no matter how you think about it. The art of being a disruptor in these kinds of legacy enterprise software markets is how do you combine building the new so that they're actually making a choice to switch for active, new reasons for something different, while also making sure you've done enough of melding yourself to the old to be an absolute fit for purpose, drop-in and replacement.
And f or us, the things that make it unique and new are placing the video at the heart of the record, having dynamic forms from the ground up that automatically simplify the workflow by having officers just have to fill out what they need. Having the integration points with the DEMS so that things like TASER logs are automatically integrated and built right into the thing. Use of force reporting can be simplified by automatically being supplemented by things coming from field data like signal and TASER logs. The ability to have the transcription of body camera footage seamlessly flow in to help jumpstart the record-setting process. And in addition to that, a host of other connections that allow the workflows within records to be natively seamless within the rest of those pieces that are coming from the DEMS and elsewhere.
Yeah. No, that's excellent. I mean, maybe just very quickly, you know, when you sort of show this vision to a customer and it... You know, I envision these sort of, you know, government agency types that have been, you know, using the same system for 30 years, and then now you're suddenly showing them something that's fundamentally different. Like, what's the reaction? How do you—How, you know, are they... Yeah, are they sort of blown out of the water? You know, do they sort of push back and say, "No, this is too different?" Like, how do—and how do you get over some of those concerns?
Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, I think first, you know, the number one thing, it starts with trust. You know, I think these customers tell us all the time, you know, we're excited about even more than anything that's in the product. We're excited about doing this with you because we trust you. We have come to believe and know that, you know, Axon's a company that, you know, puts everything it has into everything it does, and will be there and stick by and obsess about customer satisfaction, and customer success, on a journey. Because every one of these systems is always gonna be a journey.
And , yes, they might be super excited about X, Y, or Z aspect of the flow on day one, but what they're really buying is the journey, and they're buying the trajectory that they have confidence that they already like what it is right now, and they believe that we will be there, beside them for decades to come, because we obsess about them as customers. And frankly, far more than any single piece of technology, that is at the heart.
You know, and now, even though we're still-- we've only been in this record space for, you know, a handful of years, we're proud that we already have over 90 agencies representing nearly 32,000 sworn officers live on at least one module of our Axon Record solution, including over 20 that have already fully replaced their legacy records management system entirely with ours. A gain, it's a very big market, and it's a long time for us to get from where we-- or journey from us to get to here to being truly number one.
As you've heard me say for the last four years, we're very confident that we are on pace to do that because customers value the transformative stuff they see in the experience, they believe in the cloud-centric integrated approach across our ecosystem, and they believe that what we will ultimately do, and I'm sure you'll ask some AI questions after this, that what we'll be able to do by leveraging the datasets that we are already the custodian of them for, we'll be able to bring transformative improvements to ultimately help save them time, which is the number one commodity for that is the most precious for them.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you're absolutely right, no conference can happen on the sell side without an obligatory topic, you know, discussion of AI. mean, first off, yeah, can you talk a little bit about how AI enhances your products today, and then maybe go into where AI, you know, can be used in the future?
Sure. Absolutely. A gain, I think one of the many things I think Rick, you know, one of the many things that defines him as a founder is he's, you know, willing to take lonely positions, and he's willing, you know, as like Jeff Bezos likes to say, "Willing to be misunderstood," for a long time. T hat is, you know, one of the things that I love so much, and it's a privilege to get to work, for and with him, every day, and... 'cause he is willing to make bold bets long before, other people later say, "Well, of course, we did that. Of course, we should have done that." And AI was really one of them.
Long before anyone was really talking about AI and Public Safety, he began setting up an AI team for Axon and began investing there. And you know, obviously, the technology has started to explode and evolve, but he began that journey early. And then the second thing that I think defines both, you know, Axon's approach, and certainly my approach to things, is also being practical. Again, it's an obligatory question at conferences also because, you know, it's one of those, you know, topics where everybody, frankly, can be, like, running around like a, you know, a chicken with its head cut off, trying to sort of almost do AI for AI's sake.
In the same way that back when social networks first came out, everyone was trying to, like, paint their existing little cutesy product with a social, you know, paintbrush, and, "Oh, we're doing some social," or sort of take your pick. And the key is finding the practical, genuinely useful, genuinely, appropriate uses of this ingredient, of this technology, in ways that are gonna drive leverage and practical results for customers, and not just, you know, distracted by, by shiny objects. F or Axon, its very first AI-powered product was relatively straightforward and simple, and it was a redaction assistant.
That's a simple AI-powered tool to help when they're managing videos to automatically, like, blur out faces and other personal information to speed the workflow of doing redaction, and that's a very time-consuming task that every department has to do, and that's still a very successful, but, you know, fairly basic, you know, product for us. The second big AI-powered thing that has been incredibly successful for us and we're really proud of is ALPR, License Plate Recognition. W e came out with our approach to ALPR with our Fleet Three camera system, you know, a couple of years ago now, and it's just had, I mean, unbelievable customer feedback and success, and is every day helping to solve crimes in the field at a faster and a faster pace. And what differentiates...
ALPR has been around for a really long time, of course, but what we did is we were, you know, able to, you know, traditional ALPR systems in cars are extraordinarily expensive, so departments can only afford to have a few of them because they're very specialized, you know, big iron kind of camera rigs and stuff like that, so they're expensive. And frankly, the traditional vendors that were the leaders in ALPR tended to do a lot of things that didn't take the best approaches to responsible handling of of data from a privacy and other perspective. There's, like, reselling of data and, not necessarily the best auditing and controls over sharing of data and things like that.
We really wanted to solve both of those things and make an ethically responsible approach to ALPR be extraordinarily high quality at a price point that could be deployed in every single police vehicle, and that's what Fleet Three does. The Fleet Three ALPR system is affordable and able to be deployed fleet wide for an agency, which gives them, think of it as an active, pervasive mesh of ALPR, capability across their entire fleet, so that every officer, when they're going about their normal beat and just driving down the highway, even if they're not, you know, actively working on a particular thing, if a stolen car or someone with a warrant for a child abduction or sort of take your pick, drives the other way, four lanes across in traffic, boom! They can get that alert.
And mesh, think of it as almost like moving from big iron, you know, on-prem servers to a fleet of virtual servers in the cloud. That mesh of coverage for ALPR is transformative for the customers who are buying it, and we're able to pack that in using our approach to the AI models and to the actual camera system itself. Our Finland-based camera team, they're all a bunch of ex-phenomenal Nokia people, and they run the entire thing from the hardware and the optics to the firmware, the whole back plane of our camera systems, and they were intimately involved from the ground up with our AI team in building our pretty groundbreaking approach to ALPR that customers are just loving.
The next one is transcription, and again, as we said, we're, you know, one of the largest instances in any industry of cloud storage-based video media in the world. H ow do you unlock the power of that? And as we said before, you know, you know, officers typically spend or waste up to, you know, 30% of their day doing paperwork. And we've had a vision for a long time that if you could take the audio from body camera footage, transcribe it into text, that asset creates a whole host of opportunities to do powerful, both time savings things, and then ultimately find needles in haystacks that are otherwise impractical because there's so much video nobody could ever look at every last bit of it comprehensively.
Those are just the tips of the iceberg, but those are the three main things that we have now. As you see us going forward, if you think about all of our lines of business, if you think in records management, you know, not just using the raw transcription to help someone get a jump start on things, but imagine what one can do with things like GenAI and other techniques, to help, really accelerate and simplify, what's going on there. In VR, you know, you've heard us talk about transforming police training with VR. One of the things that AI can bring to that is more and more interesting ways to simply get officers more reps, more practice, more time, having conversations with other people. Think about conversations with an NPC in a video game or many other things like that.
How can you use AI to do that? Also using AI in a sort of train-the-trainer model to observe how an officer is going through various training simulations to get scale. Nothing will replace a human trainer observing up close a person, but when you're trying to scale and get volume of reps, in the same way that a classic flight simulator that a pilot might be using, there's tons of opportunity for AI to be an accelerant and a complement to what a human instructor can bring to the fore.
Then last, and very far from least, in the whole space of, like, the real-time crime center and real-time communications, you know, we already have bits of this with, like, our Signal products that help automatically turn on cameras, you know, based on response to signals, like pulling a TASER or a gun out of a holster. Y ou, again, have so many cameras that are live and recording things, CCTV cameras, et cetera, and no one can ever possibly be watching all of those things at the same time.
There's huge opportunity for AI to be a complement to the human eye and a complement to the human hands to notice and be that first-level needle in a haystack to identify what things in that immense sea of signal that you could never have enough humans to look at all of it, to say, "Hey, I think you should look here. I think you should look here. You might wanna check this out." T o make what are otherwise intractable problems tractable by combining the power and scale of AI with human-assisted workflows.
That makes a ton of sense. We do have a couple of questions from the audience on the Fleet 3 products, and so, you know, one thing, I'll just try to aggregate these two questions together, but I think, you know, the gist of it is trying to understand, you know, sort of the relationship that you have with Fusus and Flock Safety, and then your future plans. You know, whether you'd like to build your own ALPR standalone on the ground, or whether you'd like to, you know, sort of, you know, identify customers, and sort of work together with them, in terms of, a broader platform solution.
Sure. I, I would say we, we do all of those things right now, which is great. A s I said earlier, like, we're real believers in the ecosystem and in, in partnering effectively and finding the right combination of what we build ourselves and where we partner very closely, and where we, you know, have things open to give customers choice. F irst, just to be clear, you know, what we build ourselves and ship and deliver 100% within Axon is we call it, like, the mobile ALPR camera within fleet cars. So that entire stack, soup to nuts, from the physical hardware to the ALPR models, to the ALPR system, that's all us, 100%.
We very consciously chose to partner early and closely, and to invest, and I'm actually on the board of Flock Safety, so they're very, very close partners of ours. They took a very similar approach that we did, but to the fixed camera space. There are differences in both the hardware and the underlying, you know, models. There's also some similarities, but that's a place where we, we both chose to collaborate, and we are very focused on that mobile case and that real-time and then they're focused on the fixed poles, and our products work closely together. We actually, very actively, we help resell Flock, so we sell a lot of deals that combine both of those together. They also sell independently on their own, and the products work seamlessly together.
In fact, an agency that has both kinds of cameras can use the Flock dashboard experience to easily and seamlessly search across both sets of data. T hat's a perfect example of us leaning in together and, you know, being thoughtful and conscious about where can we be better together with a partner? Very similar, but a little earlier, you know, is Fusus. Fusus is a incredible, groundbreaking company focused on the real-time crime center space, and giving agencies the tools to bring together, you know, the signals from a very wide range of CCTV and other signal sources in the context of their real-time crime sharing.
They've worked very, very hard on an ethics-first approach as well, to having the right kinds of controls and permissions, et cetera, so that everything is opted in by businesses, opted in by the departments, and gives them access. W e already similarly resell Fusus to customers. Our products integrate seamlessly together. So, for example, they were one of the first companies for us to exchange mutually, kind of think of it as our dots on their map and their dots on our map, so to speak.I f a customer is using Fusus as their real-time crime center solution, they can see right there not only the fixed CCTV cameras, but they can see fleet cameras and body cameras, the locations and access to the live streams.
Those seamless integrations are a perfect example of, I think, our ecosystem at its best.
Excellent, excellent. You know, just one question that, that's been sort of top of mind for, for myself is: you know, when we think about the addition of two-way communication capabilities, you know, on the Axon Body cameras, you know, and now with 5G capabilities, you know, what does this allow you to do as an agency? And, you know, does this start to potentially threaten things like software-defined radio or more traditional voice-oriented technologies?
Sure, absolutely. A gain, I think, you know, first, I think like with so many things, you know, just like, you know, even to this day, you know, Taser, a Taser is a complement, not a replacement for a gun for, you know, many, many agencies. You know, we believe and, and, and it has become an indispensable all-day, every day part of the toolkit, without forcing an agency to choose one versus the other. It's what I like to call a classic. It's an and, not an or. And I think that's the right way to look at these emerging technologies relative, you know, to the traditional, to the traditional radio.
It is a massive complement that brings tremendous things that are simply not possible, and certainly not great with traditional radios, and adds into the overall equation without forcing an agency to choose. F or example, fundamentally adding to a voice, you know, to the body camera really adds in a number of key things. First and foremost, it gives like, you know, hands-free, eyes-free ability for them to have an interaction with someone who's watching their back from behind in a way with the high quality of modern, you know, both audio and video at the same time.
Number two, it allows this ability to have this notion of, like, literally having someone watch your back and have more facile coordination and control across the large numbers of groups that have to often collaborate in a real-time incident. L et me just give you, you know, one example. You know, I'm an officer, you know, and I'm heading into, you know, a not an entirely known situation. Now, with the new Watch Me button capability, as well as two-way voice and Axon Respond, that officer can simply push a quick button on their body camera, sends out an alert to either their supervisor or whatever the group of other officers the agency decides should have it.
That's basically saying, "You know, Officer Mary is requesting people to watch her back right now." T hen those people can tap into that live stream and see and hear in high fidelity what she is seeing as she's going, without her needing to have to think about it. She's still hands-free. She's going about her thing, but meanwhile, people can have her back and be observing and notice things. And the perfect example of this is, you know, and Rick has had this on stage before, Texas Medical Center Hospital System, which has a large police force as part of their security, is one of the first agencies to go all in on having dispatch live stream 100% of every call.
That has been transformative in cases where they've helped enhance officer safety in ways that simply wouldn't have otherwise happened. So there's a great anecdote of an officer who was, you know, turned out, was, got attacked and blindsided in the stairwell of a parking lot, and before they could even voice something or were able to voice it over the radio, because that dispatcher was watching that incident in real time, they were able to notice what was happening far faster than they otherwise would have known, and were able to radio for backup to come.
Then that backup was able to tap in and know what was happening and have far better situational awareness by the time they showed up, and they were then ultimately able to safely get their fellow officer and safely apprehend the suspect without anybody getting hurt... In addition to that, it opens up huge potential coming back to time savings and shifting how and where law enforcement gets best deployed is about think about things like surrounding services like mental health or translators. You know, everyone wants to have better and more access to specialized resource like mental health, translation, et cetera, but not only is there not enough of them, you can't physically get them to every scene on time.
The power of two-way comms with video built right into something like the body camera is. It allows an agency to begin to bring in those wraparound services right there, even when they can't be there in person.
Absolutely. Just one last one. You know, we love talking about drones as well, and so, you know, it's a growing area of investment. You know, what's the strategy here, and what do you think, you know, can happen with the technology as you start to shape, you know, this narrative in the public safety area?
Absolutely. A s you've seen from our investments and from our acquisitions and, you know, everything, you know, we're huge believers, and I'd say we fundamentally believe that if you—like, 10 years from now, you know, there will probably be more drones and other, you know, and other robotic vehicles than even officers. Like, we're—this is not gonna be a world where it's like canines or bicycles, where it's, you know, one to n, it's gonna be n to one.
That's because from a fundamental scale standpoint, the flexibility that these kinds of devices bring to bear to transform, basically being able to do more with less or to do more with the same, to help provide a better and better public safety and get the most value out of the human beings that we bring to bear in the thing. So it's gonna be absolutely transformative to the future of public safety, and that's why we've invested so much early and continue to do so in this space. Right now, today, there's sort of three broad categories to think about. One is tactical response.
Think like SWAT teams, so, like, actually bringing situational awareness and officer safety in close quarters, indoor kinds of situations where you can get a robot or a drone or whatever into tight spaces, around corners, into things that are unsafe or impossible for an officer to quickly get to but can be complemented with that drone.
Number two is the growing set of what we call, you know, DFR or Drone as First Responder, emblematic, most emblematically, you know, ground broken by an agency in California called Chula Vista, that today has published data that shows even right now, up to 25% sometimes of their calls for service, they're able to clear entirely without ever sending an officer on scene, because they can get a drone right there faster than a human can possibly be, and basically know, hey, is there... is the situation already over, and there's no benefit in bringing a live officer there right now, or can it be de-escalated just by virtue of the presence of the drone? T hat is a huge thing, again, about how to optimally leverage resources.
Then number three is functional things like after the fact, crime and disaster scene investigation, protection, and stuff like that. So on that first, of the tactical and the indoor, that's we acquired an incredible, small team and company called Sky-Hero out of Belgium earlier this year, that is the absolute leader in these indoor tactical SWAT drones. They're used by the FBI in the U.S., by many, military and government-level agencies and countries around the world, and a growing set of state and local as well. They're incredibly, like, ruggedized, relatively inexpensive, powerful drones that are completely targeted and focused at giving this safety, situational awareness, and complement to the, to the live people doing SWAT and other tactical operations.
That's a rapidly growing category that's incredibly important, and we're super proud to have the Sky-Hero team as part of our team now. The second is this DFR, and again, we, you know, the agencies like Chula Vista, help ground break there, and us, with a combination of our work with the Drone Sense software stack, with our own software stack, with all of the open set of drone hardware partners like Skydio, and others, we have a rapidly growing... In fact, the interest in DFR programs this year is 10x what it was last year, and we expect that to keep exponentially growing. And one of our other partners and investee companies, Dedrone.
One of the key limitations today with DFR is the FAA regulations around when you need a human observer on the rooftop of a building to make sure they have what's called line of sight to where the drone is for airspace safety. W e're in the middle, together with D-Drone, like some others right now, doing academic and other research to demonstrate that using the powerful sensor fusion technology, meaning the combination of radar and visual and sensor beacons and other things, that a system like D-Drone can bring to bear, can quantitatively and empirically and reliably do a better job than a human being of detecting airspace, you know, what you don't want is two things to collide in the air, and that's incredibly sacrosanct for the FAA, as it should be.
We're gathering the data to prove that these automated systems actually far outperform a human observer on a roof, which, if you think about it, that's actually not that hard to do, but it's important to have the data to prove it, to help move the FAA towards ultimately sanctioning more and more what's called Beyond Visual Line of Sight piloting, to help scale out these programs.
Then on the, you know, crime and disaster scene investigation stuff, you know, our partners like Skydio, you know, have some of the best hardware, and then that seamlessly integrates coming back to our ecosystem with Evidence.com and our DEMS, to be able to bring that evidence and bring those native file types and those visualizations to bear in a seamless end-to-end way, so that for dealing with crime, things after the fact, officers, detectives, et cetera, can have that holistic 360-degree view of all of the assets and all of the evidence, that are relevant to help solve, prosecute, you know, and ultimately succeed at doing, bringing... accelerating justice for the case.
Yeah. Well, Jeff, unfortunately, we've reached the end of our allotted time, and so I just wanted to thank you for spending time helping us better understand the opportunities and vision ahead for, for Axon. In 10 years, this will probably be conducted by ChatGPT, and we'll, we'll be largely replaced on our side, but, but I think you guys are, are doing some wonderful things. So take care.
You are irreplaceable, Jonathan.
That's what I tell my management, so take care.
Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you.