Hello, and welcome to Needham's 27th Annual Growth Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the networking and space sectors here at Needham, and I'm really thrilled to be joined today by BlackSky, who's in the Earth observation space. We're joined by CFO Henry Dubois. How are you, Henry?
I'm doing well, Ryan. And yourself?
I'm super. It's been a great conference so far. We'll let you get going, Henry, on your presentation, and we'll circle back with some Q&A toward the end.
That sounds great, Ryan. Well, hello, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today on this webcast. I'm Henry Dubois, as Ryan said. I'm the CFO over here at BlackSky, and I've been in this sector for quite some time, having been with a number of Earth observation companies, learning the business back as far as 25 years ago and how it's evolved since then. As you may or may not know, BlackSky is a data and analytics company that has a constellation of satellites. We've got about 12 satellites operating at the moment that are circling the Earth, such that wherever you might be listening to this, we probably could get a picture of your office building or wherever you are during this conference, because we can see pretty much any spot on the Earth about once every hour across the time of the day.
Some of our key highlights is because of the ability to see the spots on the Earth on a daily basis, once every hour, we can provide that real-time space-based intelligence for our customers who need to know what's going on as it's going on, so that they can take actions and be able to respond to whatever is happening. That high-resolution constellation that I've mentioned, we can get down, and we can see. We can identify vehicles and ships and cars and things like that, road networks. I see a couple of examples there to the right on this screen, and we're able to provide that information within about or less than 90 minutes.
We typically average a lot less than 90 minutes, probably closer to 30-45, but we're certain that from the time we take the image and get it down to you, going through the space, going through our processing, it is there within a near real-time basis, and that's important when you think about the information that we're providing. We're providing what is happening on the ground so that, as you said, so that actions can be taken. As you can see on the next bullet there, we've had a lot of success in winning contracts over the last number of years. We've currently been awarded contracts that have values up to about $2.3 billion. The largest contract is our EOCL contract that we won back in 2022. That's a 10 year contract with the NRO.
We call it our EOCL contract, which stands for the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contract, and that's a $1 billion contract over that 10 year period. That's for our current imagery coming off of our Gen 2 satellites and constellation, and will also be for our imagery and analytics coming off of our Gen 3 satellites as we get them up in the near term. We believe there's a very large market for our imagery measured in the tens of billions of dollars per year, and that's increasing our opportunity to not only deliver the imagery, but I've also talked about how we can deliver the analytics alongside the imagery. So you're not just looking at a picture, but you can count cars, you can count things that have moved, you can kind of see patterns of life, et cetera. We also have a proven business model.
As you'll see, we've had four consecutive quarters of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Looking back from fourth quarter of 2023 through third quarter of 2024, we have not yet released our fourth quarter results, but as you know, when we did our earnings call back in November, we were guiding towards continuing to be profitable through that fourth quarter as well. We feel really good about where we are, and we'd be in a position to really grow from here forward. Let me go on to the next slide. When we take a look at BlackSky at a glance, we've been growing quite nicely. In 2020, we had $21 million of revenue. We're about five times that on a trailing 12-month period, going to $107 million. What we've got there going on is we've got a lot of growth, a lot of utilization of our imagery and analytics.
You can see our revenue split there between U.S. government and foreign governments on the last trailing 12 months from September 30th back through October 1st of the year before. About 54%-55% of that revenue comes from the U.S. government, 43% from other foreign governments. We really like that capability, and then a little bit comes from the commercial sector, where we're highly focused on the international and domestic D&I community because they have the historical use of it, and that's also what's helping to drive our adjusted EBITDA growth. As you see, we were basically break-even through the end of 2023. For the first nine- months of 2024, we were about $4.2 million positive adjusted EBITDA, and then therefore on a trailing 12 months, we're right around that $14 million.
We were founded in 2013, I'm sorry, 2014, and we've got a lot going on as we continue to grow our business. So what drives the demand for our capabilities? Well, the three main things are, when you take a look at global conflict, we know a lot that's going on right now around the world. We've got Ukraine, we've got the Middle East, we've got all the issues up in Northeast Asia. A lot of countries want to know what's going on, be prepared for it, see how things are going, et cetera, et cetera. In addition, you've got economic uncertainty that is happening, and we're in a situation. Hold on one second. When you've got economic uncertainty, you've got people wanting to understand where things are going. You may recall when there was that cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal.
We were able to take images of that, see what was going on, allow people to start planning as the traffic started to kind of build up around it, and be able to understand how they had to kind of manage their way through that, and then this also plays into national security, which obviously is related to global conflict, but people want to know what's going on in their neighborhood and how to go about planning, so what makes us unique? Well, we've got a couple of competitors who are primarily looking at it from a static mapping perspective. They want to provide a map of the Earth on a routine basis, and in order to do that, you want to be getting images that you can stitch together quite easily.
Therefore, to do that, you'd be like that gray satellite there coming around the top, coming around the poles from North to South, and being in a position such that you've got all the sun angles as you take the imagery are all roughly the same. You're going to cross the equator usually at 10:30 A.M. or 1:30 P.M. so that you can stitch that together. As you know, if you're trying to monitor something, not everything happens at 10:00 A.M. or 1:00 P.M. It happens throughout the day. We, on the other hand, we fly our satellites in those inclined orbits going between 55 degrees North and 55 degrees South, countercyclical to the Earth's surface, so that we come around the Earth a lot more quickly relative to the individual spot.
And as we do that, we're able to pick up the imagery or be able to see pretty much any spot in that area, in that band, as we highlight, about once an hour because the satellites are coming around that frequently. With that said, you also have the benefit of events happen throughout the day. Nefarious actors act throughout the day, and if they knew exactly when you're coming over, people can hide things. With us coming around frequently, it's harder to do that. So we are able to get that real-time image, that real-time information to the people who need it as they need it when they need it. And here's an example of that.
Here we're taking a look at a situation where we're monitoring this location, and with our ability to kind of go and see it roughly kind of every hour now, as you see here, they may get to smush together a little bit here or there, but it's usually here. We've got that BlackSky monitoring, and you've got that three, six, nine, 10 shots between 6:30 A.M. and 3:40 P.M., whereas if you're doing a traditional imagery, you'd only get those two shots earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon. So this is an example of how many times you'd be able to kind of monitor or see something, or if something happens in the middle here, you're able to get that information out to the parties as they need it when they need it.
So when you take a look at it from a solution perspective, now you've got the imagery as in when you need it. What else are you going to be able to do? Well, when you take a look at it from a responsive tactical ISR for ISR information surveillance and reconnaissance, you're able to get that information down on the ground as quickly as possible. What's going on in a port. You can monitor it in there. We've identified the vessels that have been coming into port there. That's all automated in our processing, and it's part of the service. I mean, we charge for the imagery and the analytics, and we provide that information to our customers so that they can kind of see what's going on. And then if you take a look at the right-hand screen, you've got indications and warnings.
When you take a look at Broad Area Search, you could identify these things in a large area and be able to identify where you need to act, how you need to act, et cetera, et cetera. When you look at it from a perspective of what we're going to be doing, it also allows us to go sift through a lot of information in advance of personnel and individual analyst sitting down so that we're able to focus them as to where they need to look. A new market that we're also starting to get into, and we've had some contracts, as you know, through our press releases, North of seven digits for Space Domain Awareness, where we can actually take images of other satellites and other things sitting out there in space. We've got Moving Target Capabilities.
If this screen were live, those areas, those things that you see, the dots that you see in red, we can capture them through our satellite by taking a series of pictures as we come over and take a picture of that airport, take a series of the pictures so that you can actually see the direction and the momentum of the various vehicles, airplanes as they move on the tarmac. And again, in certain circumstances, that can really give a lot of information to the people as to what's going on on the ground underneath them. And then you can also, on the right, you get into the Activity-Based Intelligence, so you can actually see as things are happening what needs to. We'll shade colors to show kind of where flooding might be or where activity might be that needs to be addressed.
We talked a little bit about Broad Area Search a moment ago, and here's an example from a real customer project. We were able to kind of, with our AI infrastructure, and we were able to go through 2 million observations from multiple sources, not just our own proprietary data sources, but also from governmental sources or other commercial data sources to identify various things that have changed, change detection, et cetera, and be able to process that back. An individual would not be able to do that, and we were able to do, as we say, show here, analyze that 2 million observations over seven years of data and provide information back to the customer within a four-hour period of receiving the assignment.
That becomes really important, again, as things are evolving and changing, and the ability to kind of hone in on what is important and where we need to go becomes the key. So who are our customers? Well, here's a sample of the various parties that we work with: a number of U.S. agencies, the NRO up there to the left. We talked a little bit about the EOCL contract that we have with them for $1 billion over 10 years. We work with NASA. We work with NGA. NGA, we've just announced or announced in the fall that we're a part of the Luno A contract, which is a five-year, $290 million IDIQ contract that they're starting to issue RFPs for various delivery orders under.
And it was just announced last night by NGA, and we'll have a press release later this afternoon that we're also on the Luno B contract as well. We had a press release out about a week or so ago on some work we're doing with the Air Force and those other parties that are ones that we work with all the time as well with the U.S. government. Internationally, you can see a number of those, the flags. We don't often talk about who our customers are, but they're all, as you can see, allied nations and people that are highly respectable. Again, talking a little bit about the contracts, here's a little bit more detail on them. The billion-dollar contract up there that I've mentioned a couple of times.
Also, we have a $150 million contract with an international Ministry of Defense that we're doing some initial work to do to integrate our output into their workflows and their data streams. That is something that we announced back in 2023, and as we move that, as we complete the integration work, they'll flip over to a subscription agreement contract for imagery and analytic services such that that becomes a nice recurring revenue stream similar to the EOCL contract. I mentioned Luno A a moment ago. Now we'll be able to update that for Luno A and Luno B. Mentioned the Air Force and other international ministries of defense and related governments, and then NASA, we do work with them. That's also an IDIQ contract that we announced last fall. It's a five-year contract as well with about $476 million as the upper value for the IDIQs.
We've talked about the market and where we think we're able to go and play. We believe the overall market has been growing quite nicely at about a 12.5% CAGR, and we see it growing into the $140 billion-$150 billion mark by the time we get to 2028. We've got growing demand for imagery and analytics as we go into here, and that's the revenue stream that currently makes up about 70% of our revenues, and we would expect that to grow. That one, because it's all reliant on our constellation and the data that's coming down from there, that we have a very high gross margin associated with that when you don't include the depreciation and amortization, and I look at it from a perspective, what's our contribution margin coming from that relative to the cost?
Because the capital expenditure, that's a different set of analyses that we do when we justify it and when we decide to make the business decision to invest in it. And so when you look at our contribution margin on imagery and analytics, we can get north of 90% contribution margins because there's very little additional cost to deliver every dollar of revenue. And we do expect that geospatial intelligence demand for this is going to continue to grow. We are a very value-conscious. We've got a very strong value proposition to our customers in order to be able to monitor things. We're an easy way to see globally. We're a one-stop shop in that regard. And so we believe that we've got a really strong opportunity ahead of us. So just to kind of summarize on the investment economics, we've got high visibility on our revenue.
As of September 30th, we had about $250 million of funded backlog, and then we also had the EOCL contract, which is a committed contract, but as you may recall, the U.S. government only typically funds one year at a time. We just announced earlier this week that we received the funding that will take it from June of 2025 through June of 2026, and now we've got 18 months visibility on the revenue stream coming from them for our Gen 2 satellites, and we do believe that long-term, across all our customer base, that we should be able to achieve 20%-30% annual revenue growth. We've talked about the high margin of imagery and analytics. As you read through our financial statements, you'll see that the cost associated with our imagery and analytics revenues on an annual basis is about $16 million or so.
So every dollar above that drops to the bottom, pretty much to the bottom line. I mean, we will have a little additional cost for processing or transmission, but it's nominal compared to the value of the imagery that we're delivering. All of that gives us strong operating leverage so that we're able to drive the business. And we think long-term that we should get to EBITDA margins north of 40%, which will provide us with a very strong return on the capital that we deploy. Our satellites, compared to other Earth observation satellites, are economical. Our Gen 3 satellites will have a cost of about $15 million a copy, and they would have a life of about, we believe, about five years.
When you take a look at the revenue stream that we will be generating off of that versus the cost to deploy a constellation, we believe that we're in a very compelling situation. From our revenue trend perspective, you can see we've had some very nice growth. In Q4 of 2023, we had a little bit of an anomaly because we signed a contract with the country of Indonesia, which allowed us to accelerate the revenues into that quarter because we'd already been doing some work on a couple of satellites that we were going to use for ourselves. But in order to help speed up the delivery timelines, we shifted them from work in process for us to work associated with that contract so that we maintain the timelines.
As a result of that, when you're looking at contracts on a percent of complete, it had a little bit of a spike, probably been in the neighborhood of about a $7 million-$8 million out of period revenue number in that Q4, but that was the way we need to do it. Other than that, we've got very strong growth. We're looking forward to getting our Gen 3 satellites up. A lot of opportunity to continue that there, and we believe that the strong global demand will continue to drive the need for our intelligence solutions. Adjusted EBITDA, as you can see, we had a stated objective in 2023 to get to adjusted EBITDA positive by the end of 2024, by the end of 2023. As you can see, we did achieve it. We did get a little bit of a boost because of that Indonesian contract.
But even in the absence of that, that number would have still been positive. As you can see, we are continuing to maintain positive Adjusted EBITDA here as we go through 2024. And the guidance that we provided back in November was that we would be positive again, continue to be positive through fourth quarter and beyond. That gets to our point on when we look at our growth, we want to grow our revenues as rapidly as possible, but we don't want to. We want to be prudent on that. It's not all cost to grow ahead of that game. So with that, as you know, we're publicly traded. Here's our information there. And Ryan, I'd be open to take questions.
Super. Yeah. Really interesting. Great to get the update there, Henry. As it relates to your analytics capabilities, that's something you guys have been working on for a while. Can you expand on how you're moving up the value stack there, what sorts of partners you use, and where you want to take the company as it relates to kind of cloud and analytics type products?
Sure. I mean, as we look moving up the analytics stack, a lot of what we're doing there is internal development of object identification, the speed with which we get the information back to our customer base, and really tailor that for the individual customer's needs. When you've got these nine-digit contracts, they've got some very specific needs that they want to be able to identify. And we work with them and get paid for working with them to develop those capabilities. And the benefit of that is, as we develop those analytics that do the identification of the various objects, we can use that same capability and offer that to other customers as well.
Gotcha. Great. And with regards to most of your contracts, can you maybe outline the general consumption model, how you price it? I'm assuming it's based on these are volume and usage-based types of deals?
They're volume and usage-based. Now, what we typically do is we structure them as subscription services. We work with our customers to identify how much information that they need, when they need it, how frequently they need it, the speed, the prioritization, the analytics associated with it. And we work with them to get to a value pricing model. And then once we set that in, it's usually based on, for example, with our EOCL customer, that's a contract that's in the neighborhood of about $35 million-$40 million a year at the moment. And we recognize that on a subscription basis in the neighborhood of a little more than $3 million a month.
Nice. Great. And you talked a little bit about Gen 3. Can you give us a little preview of what you've been communicating to investors about the capabilities of Gen 3 and your general timing? It's based on capital raising or maybe walk us through some of the mechanics there.
Sure. No, we're really excited about getting our Gen 3 satellites up. We believe we've got the capital to deploy our baseline constellation of 12 satellites. We're looking at getting the first Gen 3 satellites up sometime in the next month or so, month or two. We're really in the final stages of kind of testing and pre-ship reviews and things along that nature. We'd be looking to be able to drive that out there. And then the real benefit of that that we're excited about is it's going to bring our resolution from about 70 cm resolution down to 35 cm resolution.
It's kind of the difference, if you think about it, between looking at a pixel the size of a card table versus a pixel the size of home plate. The additional information that you get from that is basically four times. You're able to do better additional object identification. You're able to do additional monitoring-type services as you kind of measure movement and things along that nature. So that's a real key differentiator between Gen 2 and Gen 3.
Great. Yeah. Excellent. Great to hear that. Well, super. Appreciate you joining today, Henry. It's great to have you and great to get the update on BlackSky. Anything you wanted to say in closing up?
No, we appreciate everyone's time here. Ryan, I appreciate the invitation to come and speak here, and the main thing is we believe we've got a great company here, great opportunity, and we've got a fair number of tailwinds behind us at the moment.
Very exciting. Thanks so much.
Right. Appreciate it very much. Thank you.