Mr. Smith, you may begin, sir.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Rick Smith, and I'm the founder, CEO, and the director of Axon Enterprise. I'd like to welcome you to the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders. If you are only listening over the phone, please go to investor.axon.com, scroll down to Events, and access the link to see us on Zoom. Turning to the formal portion of the meeting, I would like to introduce our directors and executive officers who are attending the meeting today. I'll start with Michael Garnreiter, Chairman of our board of directors, Adriane Brown, Dr. Richard Carmona, Julie Cullivan, Caitlin Kalinowski, Dr. Mark Kroll, Hadi Partovi, and Dr. Mark Kroll. Executive officers who are present today, President Luke Larson, Interim Chief Financial Officer Jim Zito, and Chief Product Officer Jeff Kunins. I'd like to also introduce Scott Davison, partner with Grant Thornton, our independent registered public accounting firm.
If you have any questions for our management team, you may submit them using the Q&A feature in the online virtual meeting at wwwvirtualshareholdermeeting.com/axon2022. I'll read that one more time. This is one word, no spaces, periods or hyphens. It's wwwvirtualshareholdermeeting.com/axon2022. Today's meeting will be in two phases. First, we will conduct the formal part of the meeting to consider each of the proposals listed in the notice of annual meeting of stockholders dated April 8, 2022, and to conduct any other such business as may properly come before the meeting. The second part of the meeting will be a management presentation, followed by a Q&A session. The second part of the meeting will be conducted via Zoom only. Now we'll move to the recording of the minutes and the inspector of election.
Isaiah Fields, our Corporate Secretary, will be recording the minutes of this meeting, and Robert Driscoll has been appointed to serve as the Inspector of Election. He has signed the oath of office, which has been filed with the minutes of the meeting. I will now call on Isaiah Fields to establish we have met the necessary corporate requirements to begin. Isaiah.
Thank you, Rick. We have proof that notice of this meeting and related proxy materials was mailed or made available around April 8, 2022 to all shareholders of record as of the record date of March 31. Based on that, this meeting is duly called with timely and proper notice. As of March 22, 2022, the record date for the meeting, there were 79,995,368 shares outstanding. We have 63,398,787 shares present by person or proxy at this meeting, which is over 89% of the outstanding shares and constitutes a quorum permitting the transaction of business. Each share entitles the holder to one vote on each matter which may come before the meeting.
A list of registered stockholders entitled to vote is available for examination by stockholders. The polls for matters to be voted upon today are now open and will close immediately after I present the matters to be voted upon at this meeting. If you have not previously voted or you wish to change your vote, you should do so now online at www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/axon2022. The first item of business is the approval of amendments to the company's certificate of incorporation to elect each director annually. The board recommends a vote for this proposal. The second item of business is the election of directors as nominated by the board. The three nominees for election as Class A directors are Adriane Brown, Michael Garnreiter, and Hadi Partovi.
If the declassification amendment and proposal 1 passes, each of these directors will serve a 1-year term until our 2023 annual meeting, or until their respective successors are elected and qualified. If the declassification amendment and proposal 1 does not pass, these directors will serve a 3-year term until our 2025 annual meeting or until their respective successors are elected and qualified. The board recommends a vote for each of the nominees. The third item of business is the approval of an advisory resolution on our executive compensation. The board recommends a vote for this proposal. The fourth item of business is the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton LLP as Axon's independent registered public accounting firm for 2023. The board recommends a vote for this proposal.
The fifth item of business is the approval of the Axon Enterprise, Inc. 2022 stock incentive plan. At this time, the polls are now closed, and we will take any questions that have been submitted via the virtual shareholder meeting platform. These questions are to address the formal matters being voted upon today. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask general business questions during the informal portion of the meeting using Slido at www.slido.com. While we wait to see if any questions come in, I wanna remind anyone who is listening in over the phone that you can go to investor.axon.com. Again, that's investor.axon.com. Scroll down to Events and access the link to see us live on Zoom. That will allow you to watch the company presentation following the formal portion of today's meeting. We'll now take a moment to see if any questions have come in.
Hey, Isaiah, just point of order. Are we looking for questions from Slido or from the investor portal at this point?
These are questions relating to the formal investor meeting via the investor portal.
Great. For shareholders that are online, while we're waiting, if you go to Slido.com, that's where we'll have the Q&A for the presentation portion. You'll need to put in a code. That code is Axon, A-X-O-N, when you go to Slido.com. You may wanna write that down. Back over to you, Isaiah, for the formal questions.
Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Yeah, no questions have been submitted, and that concludes the matters to be voted on as outlined in the notice of the annual meeting. In accordance with our bylaws, I hereby declare the polls for voting at our 2022 annual meeting closed. I've received a preliminary tabulation from our Inspector of Elections, and based on that tabulation, I am pleased to report that each of the three director nominees were elected and each of the management proposals was approved. The final voting results of today's meeting will be reported on a Form 8-K filed within four business days. That concludes the formal business, and I now declare the formal portion of this meeting adjourned. If you wish to continue on to our investor update, please join us via Zoom. You can find the link at investor.axon.com.
I will now turn the meeting over to Andrea James, who runs Axon's investor relations.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to our annual shareholder presentation. As you can see on the screen, go to Slido.com and use Axon as the code to submit questions. We will take them at the end. Yep, thanks. Safe harbor. During this presentation, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made today are pursuant to and within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today and are not guarantees of future performance. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, and these risks are discussed in our SEC filings.
Okay, we're super excited to take you through our business today, as we do every single year, and we will be taking questions from you at the end. Before we jump into some of the content, we wanted to give you a virtual tour of our headquarters. We used to do these at the headquarters, these meetings, but now we're just gonna take you through virtually, and you can do this from the comfort of your own home.
Welcome to TASER versus Zombies. I'm Rick Smith, CEO of Axon. I'm here to walk you through the zombie apocalypse.
Welcome to Axon. Let's talk VR for a minute.
I love that video. We really hope you get a sense of who we are and the just intense passion and creativity that our people bring to the table. Before we dive in deeper, I'd like to take a moment to thank Dr. Richard Carmona. He's retiring from Axon board after 15 years of service, and Dr. Carmona has been a tremendous contributor to Axon, helping us shape strategy and positioning us as Axon evolved from a single product company known as the TASER to where we are today. He is just a wonderful human being. We're incredibly grateful to him, not only for his 15 years of service, but also for the way he helped us to design our future. Turning to Axon and our mission, maybe like many of you watching it this year, as I watched the bloodshed in Ukraine, I had a troubling thought.
Have we backslid into a world that accepts warfare as a way of achieving political ends? Simultaneously, the Internet, which we all believed would enlighten the world with shared knowledge, is being perverted to undermine the very concept of truth. In light of these times, our mission to protect life, capture truth, and accelerate justice are as important and relevant as ever. The history of civilization is that when evil rises, we all must rise to defeat it. As Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas said, "When evil men destroy, good men must build and bind." We have cause for hope for humanity. If the world's economic force, combined with the heroic Ukrainian self-defense, proves effective in stopping this Russian aggression, this conflict might be remembered as the moment when the world rejected wars of choice as acceptable. Now, all this is very relevant to Axon and our mission.
At their core, our products are designed to strengthen trust in the rule of law. We directly support several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including to foster peace, justice, and strong institutions. Public and personal safety is foundational for a modern society, and our product ecosystem ties together body cameras, fleet cameras, drones and TASER devices and third-party sensors with a growing suite of software capabilities. We're not only serving customers, but we're saving lives while promoting truth and really preserving transparency. In parallel, our work helps to improve fairness and efficiency in the criminal justice system, especially through our new justice software category, which will save attorneys time and shorten the time that people are jailed awaiting trial.
We hear stories daily about customers using our products to save lives and protect their communities, and we believe our problem-solving approach to these major challenges will continue to drive our growth. Our products work, and they're going global. In Brazil, our body cameras translated to such a dramatic improvement in lives saved, about five lives saved each month, that the customer agency moved to a wider deployment just months after their initial adoption. Let's hear more about this from the customer.
Nós somos a maior polícia hoje do Brasil, o maior inclusive da América Latina. Hoje nós temos 83,000 homens e mulheres, prestam serviços aí de polícia ostensiva e preservação da ordem pública. O processo licitatório para aquisição do sistema de bodycams na Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo, ele foi longo, né. Pouquíssimas empresas tiveram capacidade técnica de desenvolver um sistema como esse em tão pouco tempo. Isso só mostra a competência, a capacidade da empresa Axon em desenvolver soluções pra segurança pública. Nós adquirimos uma tecnologia pra Polícia Militar, aquela que fosse mais avançada e aquela que proporcionasse aos nossos policiais um recurso eficiente e confiável. A TASER esses dois.
A gente consegue contar com 2 cartuchos de imediato na arma, ou seja, o nosso operador, aquele que está na ponta da linha, ele tem uma possibilidade ou ele pode efetuar um segundo disparo, em sendo necessário. A câmera é extremamente simples, objetiva, robusta, se adapta às nossas exigências. O que está por trás, o que nós temos hoje de certificação internacional, em termos de segurança, em termos de criptografia, não há nenhuma possibilidade de edição dessas imagens, desses áudios. Quando a gente efetua o disparo, não é o policial, o Capitão Wellington, que efetua aquele disparo, mas sim a instituição Polícia Militar. A gente tem que saber que ele vai realmente incapacitar temporariamente o agressor e permitir àquele policial realizar ali uma ação menos grave ou menos letal sobre aquele agente.
O que se percebe na prática é que o policial ganhou uma nova ferramenta de apoio, de suporte pra ele, né, que registra o que ele tá fazendo e serve pra confirmar e demonstrar o que ele fez quando se põe em dúvida a conduta do policial militar. A recepção desse equipamento pelos policiais foi a melhor possível, porque a hora que a gente entregou um equipamento de ponta, um equipamento de qualidade pra ele se sentiu valorizado. Os policiais do futuro que olharem pra trás, eles vão dizer que talvez essa tenha sido a implantação de um recurso tecnológico que mais tenha alterado e trazido benefícios à sociedade. A população tá tendo acesso ao verdadeiro trabalho heroico da Polícia Militar, ajudando, acolhendo as pessoas, intervindo num assalto, prendendo criminosos. Isso vai ser uma grande virada na questão de aceitação e de confiança da comunidade na sua polícia.
Vendo através das lentes das câmeras aqui da Axon a verdadeira polícia que está todos os dias servindo essa sociedade.
Our mission is strengthened by the fact that we are a public company. We're held accountable by shareholders and the market in driving us to build better products and services. Our results speak for themselves. In 2021, we achieved record revenue of $863 million and revenue growth of 27%. Over the past three years, we have delivered a 27% compound annual revenue growth rate. These financial results showcase our ability to deliver profitability while investing heavily in new technology. 2022 is off to a robust start, highlighted by growing global demand for our solutions. In Q1, we reported 32% revenue growth, net income of $55 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $49 million.
Our focus on building best-in-class subscription software has driven our annual recurring software revenue to $348 million, tripling over three years. President Luke Larson will now take you deeper into the product strategy that is driving these results. Luke.
Thanks, Rick. Hello, I'm President Luke Larson. Let's take a look at what we're building. If we break our business down into three main phases, we'd say the first 15 years of the company were getting TASER off the ground. This era took the company to about $1 billion in market cap. We entered the body camera era. We began investing in body cameras in 2008 when Ferguson happened. In 2014, we were ready. In 2015, body cameras began to take off. Within 2 years, we were the clear market leader. We entered the dashboard camera market in 2017 to augment our product offering. This brought the company to about $3 billion-$5 billion market cap.
The track record of solid execution provides a foundation for the next phase of rapid growth, which will be the result of leveraging our platform. Our next product growth drivers break down into three main categories. Number one, TASER, which are TASER devices, virtual reality, and training. Number two, our vast network of sensors. This includes body cameras, in-car cameras, and drones. Number three, cloud software. Our software fulfills three critical market needs, digital evidence management, productivity solutions, and real-time operations. Our products all work together to form a virtuous cycle. We build products and bundles that give our customers superpowers to ensure everyone gets home safe. This creates more users, AKA people and nodes, AKA devices on the Axon network that then creates more data that we can unlock more value with, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
We use that to create even more great products and bundles. The most frequent question we get from our shareholders is how we view the total market opportunity and where we are in capturing that opportunity. We are in the early innings of penetrating a $52 billion total addressable market. You might notice our market has grown since our 2021 annual meeting last May. In November, we updated our market size and penetration estimates for investors. In case you missed it, here's an 8-minute clip featuring Rick and our IR team.
Think of our TAM as what our annual customer payments would be if our hardware and software subscriptions were adopted by all potential users at a price we believe they'd be willing to pay. Our TAM has grown across three axes like a cube. One dimension of growth is geography or region. This means where we sell. This grows as we add sales channel to promote global product adoption.
International has been growing fast. The latest in Q3 was that the Scottish Government and the province of British Columbia, through PRIMECorp, chose Axon as its nationwide digital evidence management software provider. We are also seeing further product adoption in major markets such as Brazil and India.
Exactly. Yes, we are now selling into markets you barely heard us talk about even two years ago. Our second dimension of growth is through product research and development. This means we are adding to what we sell. Thirdly, we are unlocking new customer segments or markets. This means who we sell to is growing beyond municipal public safety.
Makes total sense. There are so many types of customers in the early days of Axon product adoption. U.S. federal law enforcement, corrections, fire and EMS, enterprise security, and consumers. Wouldn't that mean the cube is still missing some squares? For instance, we sell body cameras to law enforcement in Latin America, but we aren't selling to commercial enterprises there.
Yeah. What you're picking up on, Angel, is that we have optionality to grow our TAM as we invest in new markets, unveil new products, or expand either of these axes into certain geographies. For instance, our $27 billion TAM considered Fleet to be a product sold only into English-speaking markets, but we're actually shipping more broadly now.
Okay, Justice is new. We've never told investors about that one before. Should we talk more about that?
Good catch. Justice is a software category that we are bringing out of stealth mode. Axon CEO and founder, Rick Smith, can explain.
When we say Justice, we mean software to help the court system, such as prosecutors and defense attorneys. We believe we can streamline the discovery process, and we're joining forces with the justice system to make it more effective, fair, and efficient. Not only is our goal to save attorneys time, we will also shorten the time that people sit in jail waiting for a trial. This fits right in with our mission. Axon's mission is to protect life, capture truth, and accelerate justice. To do this, we must optimize discovery. You're probably noticing the line between the virtual world and the physical world continues to blur. As people increasingly live in an online realm, more digital evidence is created. People are even committing crimes in the metaverse, like fraud and theft. Where does Axon come in?
More than a decade ago, we entered the digital evidence management category to make body cameras affordable and feasible for all agencies. Each body camera generates hours of police videos every day. If you think about it, an agency with 10,000 officers can easily generate 40,000 hours of video after just one 24-hour period. We needed to help agencies manage all of that video. Developing a cloud-hosted solution was step one. Step two unfolded as we grew to help agencies manage more types of digital evidence, such as documents, CCTV video, and mobile phone footage. We've invested heavily to make Axon Evidence a category leader. Public safety agencies feed all this evidence into the justice system. Step three is to help the justice system deal with mountains of digital evidence, which has created mountains of work for attorneys.
A typical case used to be a police report, maybe a few photos, and some physical evidence, like bullet casings or bloody clothing. Today, the case will include dozens, if not hundreds, of cell phone photos and hours of body camera and in-car footage, all of which must be cataloged and reviewed. Highly trained attorneys are telling us they're spending a third of their day on clerical work. We are enthusiastic to share more about this software category in the coming months. Stay tuned for a product launch and customer announcements.
We'll finish up by showcasing our growth runway. AJ, one thing I've noticed is that our investors frequently ask us about TAM penetration. How should they think about it?
It's totally a fair question, and it's best answered with data. When you think about our $52 billion TAM, we are less than 2% penetrated globally. This is simple and perfect math. We're approaching $1 billion in annual revenue, and our TAM is more than 50 times larger. If we do a deeper analysis, breaking it down by product and by region, and consider the potential user base, you can see how we think about the opportunity. Product growth driver number one is TASER. We believe the rest of the world is 10-20 years behind the U.S. in terms of TASER device adoption, and you see that in the penetration rates here.
Okay, why is TASER penetration under 25% in the U.S.? TASER is an iconic brand. It feels like our devices are everywhere.
Yeah. You are totally right that TASER is highly penetrated among municipal law enforcement in the US, but the rest of the domestic market for professional users is largely untapped. For instance, federal law enforcement and corrections are still in the early stages of adoption, and we're also seeing opportunity in enterprise-level private security. Globally, we believe we have room to more than quintuple the professional TASER install base, and we believe that future devices will kick off new waves of adoption. Let's hear again from Rick, who founded TASER in his garage in 1993.
In my 2019 book, The End of Killing, I laid out our moonshot. Before this decade is out, we will deliver a non-lethal weapon that will outperform a traditional handgun in terms of reliable stopping power. In 2020, we accelerated development of the next Taser device to deliver upon that vision sooner. Every week, I engage with our customers on the front lines of public safety. They tell me that they desperately need better tools. We're proud of how we have made non-lethal Taser technology mainstream, but our customers are still forced to rely on their firearms all too often with tragic consequences. We knew we needed to move faster, and I can tell you we're making exciting progress.
I believe that our next generation device makes a giant leap toward our moonshot, and I see a path to TASER devices becoming an officer's primary defensive weapon, especially in international markets where firearms are not readily available to the general public. Our mission was born of an all too common tragedy after two of my friends were shot and killed, their lives permanently ended. The person who pulled the trigger is now spending his life in prison. Bullets ruin lives, and we aim to obsolete them.
That's so exciting. We are all about more effective and reliable personal protection. Let's get back to our runway.
Sensors includes our body cameras, which offer GPS and live streaming. You can see we've been strongest in the U.S. and English-speaking Commonwealth, where there is yet still opportunity to grow, not to mention the rest of the world. As our Chief Revenue Officer puts it, there is more ground to be won than has already been won in body cameras. Our latest Fleet in-car camera with live streaming and automatic license plate recognition, which began shipping this year, also drives Sensors growth.
That captures our hardware penetration rates. Now, investors know that our SaaS business has grown over the past five years from nearly nonexistent to now approaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue. You might wonder if there is still room to grow. Let's take a look. Oh, AJ, wait a second. Software penetration seems low given our growing user base.
Yeah, it's a good call out, Angel. Before on hardware, the data presented showed user penetration. What percentage of potential users have our products? For SaaS software, what we're showing you here is dollar penetration. What percentage of potential dollars we are capturing? This is because new users tend to grow their annual dollar spent with us over time as we grow the platform and deliver more value. We frequently see our customers double, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple their annual software contracts to upgrade to new features. There's room for us to continue moving our customers up the value chain, and the investors can see the effect of this in our strong net revenue retention rates on the SaaS business. You can think of our SaaS software as belonging to three categories today: digital evidence management, productivity, and real-time operations, and there's more to come.
Great video. Okay, that's right, there is more to come. One of the products that we're most excited about in our TASER category is virtual reality. Axon's VR team is transforming public safety by making training more accessible, relevant, and affordable. This is one of our fastest-growing new categories. We are actually privileged to have a VR expert on our board. Let's hear directly from Caitlin.
My name's Caitlin Kalinowski. I'm on the board of Axon, and Axon is using VR training modules to teach officers how to de-escalate in different situations. I joined the board of Axon because Axon's at the crossroads between several different things I care a lot about. I care a lot about policing and community engagement. I also care a lot about using VR to make a world a better place. What Axon needed was an understanding of where VR was going in the future, but also somebody who had hardware experience to help them with their future products. There was a really good mix for me where I could take my history building hardware and understanding hardware and the last few years of building VR, actually, and try to help Axon in both those areas while also furthering the efficacy of VR training.
The way that our community engagement training works is you actually take officers in real time through VR that appears to be happening live. When you're in VR, you really believe that you're somewhere else, and what it allows you to do is get the sort of adrenaline and sort of the heightened feeling of a situation that might be dangerous. But it also allows you to practice, you know, body memory, body mechanics, figuring out how to respond to sort of difficult situations. We have modules around de-escalation on autism, on hearing impairment, on schizophrenia, and you actually let officers practice, working through situations that might actually be tense or even dangerous in real life and learn how to de-escalate those situations.
Sir, are you okay?
Leave me alone. This isn't your problem.
One of the ways it does that is it can actually not only show officers how to respond, but it can even show officers what it might feel like for that person, experiencing what they're experiencing in addition.
Can't hear you, man. What's going on?
I said it's not your problem. It's too late.
I also think that any really complex, step-by-step process that you have to be able to remember that involves physical movement is a great candidate for VR training. You can actually imagine, say, an aircraft mechanic solving a really difficult problem and remembering each step through the way how to service a difficult part of the aircraft, for example. That could be a really good opportunity, I think sometime in the future for VR training. Because what it does is not only does it make you feel like you are in the situation you're training for, but it also allows you to interact with items, in real life, that are brought into VR. I think that's gonna be something that we do more and more in the future in the field.
Theoretically, what you could do is actually have something that's trackable from the real world that you bring into VR. As we get better and better technology, you can actually train. You'll be able to train in six degrees of freedom in the future, so you'll actually be able to interact with others. Axon's really excited about this medium of training because it allows both police officers and communities better outcomes, and in the end can protect life.
Great video, and, thank you, Caitlin. Another area of the business that we're really excited about is sensors, and they're a growth driver for us. While you're probably familiar with the success of our body cameras, we thought we'd take a few moments and share about our leadership in dashboard cameras. Check out this video from our Fleet 3 launch last June.
This was an ambitious project from the start, and so we joined forces with some of the best partners in the industry to help bring it to reality.
In Axon, we found a partner that has a very similar stance on how we make communities safer, and we do that through building great technology and integrating it together to allow law enforcement agencies to solve crime even faster.
We've linked arms with Flock Safety to provide a fixed ALPR system that complements our mobile ALPR system.
Be it both mobile and fixed, we're able to provide even more evidence that's truly actionable. Working with law enforcement agencies, we know that speed is super important, and so by consolidating all of the evidence from both the Fleet 3 ALPR and the Flock ALPR into one place in the Evidence.com system that Axon provides, it allows them to search all that actionable evidence very quickly without having to go to three or four different tools.
The feedback that we've been getting from officers has been very positive.
There's a lot of scary stuff that happens out there, and we see it every day in the media, and the opportunity to help solve a crime, be it a kidnapping or a shooting, knowing that we've been able to help is why we do it, what we do.
All right. Awesome. Moving to software. We are so proud of the stable and growing cloud business that we built, and it's just getting started. Axon Evidence is the world's largest cloud-hosted repository of law enforcement video data and other types of electronic evidence. We are the global leader in digital evidence management. Our productivity suite of tools reduce time spent on paperwork, and it includes Axon Records, Axon Auto-Transcribe, and Axon Standards. Our momentum with records is just starting to accelerate. We just had a major city launch in Tucson, which brings us to more than 25 agencies with nearly 11,000 sworn officers live on Axon Records, including nine that are already using it to fully replace their legacy records management systems. We remain excited and confident in our long-term trajectory. Meanwhile, our short-term focus is on driving customer success one deployment at a time.
Finally, real-time operations is another exciting software category for us. In February, we appointed Ran Mokady, or Modeki, sorry about that, as SVP of Real-Time Operations and Site General Manager for our first European R&D office in London. The London R&D hub is Axon's fourth after Seattle, Ho Chi Minh City, and Scottsdale, Arizona. We're proud to recruit the top software talent in the world who write code and save lives. Before I turn it over to our interim CFO, Jim Zito, I just wanna thank all of our employees on the call who have built this amazing company, and also give a shout-out to all of our shareholders who have believed in us. Now over to you, Jim.
Thanks, Luke. Hello, everyone. It's great to be joining you today, especially at a time when the business is demonstrating tremendous momentum. I'd like to share some of my background and the role I've played over the past nearly five years at Axon, building a strong culture of financial rigor and discipline. I joined the company in 2017 after previously serving as the global controller of GE HealthCare Digital, a nearly $2 billion global software company inside General Electric. I spent the first eight years of my career as an auditor at PwC, seeing the insides of Fortune 500 companies and how they operate at scale. These experiences prepared me to have an impact at Axon from the moment I arrived.
I've helped to build out our accounting and controllership organization, enhancing our internal controls and overseeing the implementation of stronger processes to drive operating rigor to improve our financial results. I partnered with our SVP of FP&A, Arvind Bobra, and other cross-functional leaders across every part of our company to lead the creation of the internal plumbing necessary to enable our culture of rigor and discipline to succeed. You've seen that translate to our results. We've established an impressive track record of execution at scale with cost discipline and strategic capital allocation, and we remain confident in our ability to continue to deliver accelerating growth, profitability, and cash flow. I'm energized by this opportunity to support the company as interim CFO. This is a natural transition given my role over the past nearly five years.
I'm honored to lead our world-class finance team, and I've already hit the ground running. At Axon, we are driving four pillars of our financial strategy. One, grow the top line at more than 20% while driving operational discipline. Two, sell subscriptions to create a powerful recurring cash flow engine. Three, invest in R&D to maintain our status as the innovator in public safety, delivering the most value and helping to drive strong margins. Four, maintain strong liquidity and abundant operating flexibility. In February, we introduced adjusted free cash flow targets to our financial strategy, and we have started to deliver already. In the first quarter, our operating cash flow of $44 million supported $32 million in adjusted free cash flow. ESG is a core competency at Axon and is integrated into our business strategy. ESG is made up of three components. Environmental, social, and governance.
On environmental, we are so proud to have minimal environmental impact. Because we are not a heavy industrials manufacturer, we believe our scope one and two greenhouse gas emissions are relatively low. Because of this, we really lean into the S, which is our social mission, which you've already heard so much about in today's meeting. Finally, on governance, we've been listening to you, our shareholders. Axon directors and management met virtually with shareholders via an ESG roadshow from October of last year through January. We received feedback from institutions representing about 30% of shares outstanding at the time, as well as institutions that had not yet taken meaningful positions. If you are a shareholder who provided feedback during that process, we want to thank you for that input. Rick had touched briefly upon our financial results, and we have an expanded view here.
Our 5-year revenue compounded annual growth rate has been 26%. We aim to deliver at least 20% top-line growth and to deliver near term adjusted EBITDA margins approaching 20% or higher. Here you can see that we have been very successful in driving significant revenue from recurring subscriptions. The Axon flywheel that Luke talked about, where we bundle hardware and software, drives our hardware-enabled SaaS business. By the end of last year, 80% of our revenue was tied to one of our bundled subscriptions. To close, we are proud of our strength as a category leader. We have a powerful platform and ecosystem that are revolutionizing public safety and creating societal value. Our high-growth subscription model is demonstrating a track record of significant operating leverage.
We're addressing a $52 billion market opportunity and millions of users globally. We are building holistic software with AI-based solutions for the end-to-end public safety life cycle, from the incident all the way through the judicial process. Our management team has a proven track record of executing at scale and unlocking. Now we'll turn it back over to Rick and Andrea to take your questions.
Okay. Awesome. Are we in gallery view? Perfect. We do have some time to take some questions, and they have been coming in. Again, Slido.com. Put in Axon and submit your questions and we will get started. First question here from Amanda King, who would love to hear more on our vision with the recent Fusus strategic partnership, which you guys may have seen the press release we put out yesterday on that.
Well, the shareholders have heard a lot from me, so I'm gonna hand this one over to Jeff Kunins.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for the question, Amanda. We appreciate it. Yeah, we're very excited about the announcement of our Fusus partnership and investment yesterday. As you heard both Andrea and Luke talk about, one of the big pillars of our overall investment towards our mission is real-time operations. By real-time operations, we ultimately mean all hardware, all software, all services that combine together with the human beings and all the agencies we serve are put together to do what it takes to detect, respond, and efficiently get to safe resolution of events and incidents as they happen in real time. That includes everything from the 911 dispatch serving software to increasingly connected cameras and other sensors, and all of the other coordinating and communication software that's necessary to deliver on that mission.
Also, as you heard about in the fleet video, just like many other aspects of what we do today, we recognize that like any great platform, delivering on that mission requires a mix of what we do ourselves as first-party hardware and first-party software, and building a great platform that connects with incredible third-party partners on both the hardware and software side. You saw that with our partnership with Flock Safety in the ALPR space for dashboard cameras, and the same thing is coming to fruition in real-time operations.
While today we already have the Respond platform that allows real-time streaming and other great connected camera features off of our own body cameras as well as third-party drones, by partnering with Fusus, who is the leader in real-time crime center solutions that allows connecting massive networks of city-owned and other enterprise security cameras to give appropriate and secure but real-time access to help deal with unfolding situations. By partnering with Fusus, we will connect that with Respond and help advance our overall mission to lead and drive innovation in real-time operations.
Thank you so much, Jeff. That was great. Okay, our next question, we have a couple that came in on supply chain. I'm going to merge them. One is from Kamekia, who asks, "What effect do global supply chain issues have on Axon's ability to increase market penetration for physical products?" How is supply chain affecting our market penetration? Then the other one is, "When supply chain shortages do impact product availability, how do we prioritize fulfilling orders between existing and new customers?
Great. I'll go ahead and take that one. One of the advantages that we have in our business is, unlike, let's say, baby formula, where you need it that day, oftentimes we've got a 3-6-month view, and even sometimes 12-18 months on our customer orders. We're able to manage customer expectations with the supply chain that we have available. On our last earnings call, we communicated we've got line of sight to hit our mid-year guidance, and we feel really good about that through the end of the year. As we look to bring on new customers internationally, we don't see any issue with supply chain constraints that are gonna hold us from onboarding those customers.
Relative to other companies, I think Axon is really, really well positioned to handle these supply chain shortages.
Just to tack on to that one, I think this is another of the great benefits of our bundled subscription offerings, is those subscription offerings are, you know, five, sometimes even 10 years out, which gives us great visibility to those hardware shipments ahead of time. We're able to plan out, you know, not just quarter to quarter, but year to year. We can plan and prioritize those shipments accordingly, and not really have as many surprises as a company that was more book and ship based.
All right. Great. Thanks, guys. Next question from anonymous: "What is Axon doing to tailor its products to meet the unique and critical needs of its corrections customers?
Yeah. I would say there, you know, I've been working with Josh, our Chief Revenue Officer, to really kinda set up key leadership across our different market segments and then teaming them up with people in Jeff's, you know, product org, as we're, you know, getting bigger, and we're really seeing a lot of momentum across our new market spaces. It's really just the same voice of the customer process where we have our key product leaders meeting with customers, and whether it's in VR, where we're now starting to create some VR scenarios, or looking at our various software offerings to understand the unique challenges and customer requirements.
In that respect, Corrections is really not all that different from how we approach law enforcement or federal or any of our other markets. Just not different in terms of the process, but I think we've got a really finely honed and really great team dynamic between sales and product. It's really with those people that are living and breathing in the market and in the product design that customer collaboration is happening.
Okay, thank you. Next one, what are our concerns with the possibility of a global recession? You know what? Actually, I'll merge it with the next one because somebody else is asking about how the current stock market environment affects our ability to drive the direction we want with innovation. I think anything sort of market downturn is probably related to one question.
Yeah. I take this one. I'm coming up on 30 years I've been in this space now, so, been through a couple of these. I think what we've seen in the past, you know, when the market turns south, that actually can create some real opportunities for companies that are both strong and adaptable. You know, we say internally, ice ages kind of favor the adaptable mammals, and that's where we really aspire to be to find opportunities. This is actually a time when first thing I'd point out is our business tends to not shift materially around, you know, recessions or not. You know, those really hit discretionary spending. We have found that if we create the mission-critical equipment our customers need, those demands can even go up sometimes when the rest of the world is turning south.
We aren't a company whose revenues really, you know, track economic cycles. I would say as well, like, you know, we're seeing other tech companies, especially those that, should we say, maybe don't have profitability, they've had to deal with historically are now starting to really trim back because they've got to deal with this environment. We still, we're leaning in and investing heavily. This creates opportunities for us to be recruiting. It might be a little less competitive, you know, we would hope, in this environment, or at least I would say that maybe we have some competitive advantages. The nature of our business is we're driving what I believe is the right level of profitability.
You know, some shareholders have asked, you know, "Hey, we just raised guidance for the year mostly on revenue and not as much on profitability." That's very intentional. You know, we have so many fantastic investment opportunities. We think it would be unwise for us to overly focus on letting extra dollars fall to the bottom line when instead we can invest those in very high ROI investments. At the end of the day, I would say, we also tell our people, "Look, do not focus on the stock price." That's a great way to get defocused from the things you can control, especially when the whole market is moving in ways that are largely disconnected from an individual company's performance. Don't get distracted with it. Stay focused.
If we deliver our results, and especially when the rest of the world is kind of going through maybe a little bit of a freak out, if we just stay focused on getting our job done, we've been through this several times before and we emerge stronger every time, and we expect that to happen again here.
I think one quick thing to add to that is with everything going on in the world, not only the economic environment, this is a time when more and more, highly sought-after tech workers around the world, more than ever, they care about aligning what they build with what their personal values are. We really believe that Axon is hands down the best place on the planet, to work on technology as a true force for good, combined with, as you've seen, our disruptively fun to work on products, technology, and business model.
Actually, such a great note to end on, and we don't have any more questions. Rick, do you wanna close this out?
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Andrea. Again, I am so proud and happy to work with this team. Just, you know, watching you and Angel in those investor, you know, related videos and the creativity of that drone video. It's just an awesome team to be a part of. To our shareholders, I wanna thank you for joining us today. I hope that you share our sense of pride and purpose and our responsibility to society. We're building important products and solutions, built with care to ensure that we maximize their utility and minimize the risks of abuse. We're building a business that's grown from a garage to the industry-leading enterprise that we've become today. Today is another milestone on a longer journey where we will solve even bigger problems, creating even more value for all of our stakeholders.
Thank you for being a part of our mission, and we look forward to seeing you all at our next quarterly earnings call. Have a great day.