Hey, good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us at Fireside Chat on the second afternoon, Tuesday afternoon of the 38th Annual Roth Conference. I'm Scott Searle. I'm the communications, AIoT, and edge compute analyst with Roth. What we try to do in our Fireside Chats are identify companies and highlight companies where there's something transformative that's going on with the business, something that's not really recognized by the institutional community, and really kind of flesh that out in our conversations. With that in mind, very, very excited to have Inseego presenting as our next Fireside Chat, and presenting on behalf of the company is Juho Sarvikas, CEO. So Juho, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. I can't believe it's been a year.
Well, I was just gonna get to that. You've been here a year. There's been a two-year transformation, right?
Correct.
In terms of balance sheet and otherwise, and when you came in, tremendous change in terms of go-to-market and product strategy. Let's start with why. Why Inseego? What brought you here? What's kept you here?
You know, I think the big thing for me may be twofold. First of all.
Mm-hmm
If you look at the market opportunity for wireless broadband, where Inseego has been leading now for over 25 years. We actually just rang the bell in November to celebrate the anniversary. The market is expanding rapidly, and the key insight that I have is that I don't think you have a player in the industry who's really positioned to enable that scaling, where the market will, in our view, take place and where the rapid growth will be experienced. Then the technical capability of the team. So we have some-
Mm-hmm
...of the best modem RF engineers in the world. We're right next to my former employer, Qualcomm. Technology partnership is a very foundational element of it. Huge, vastly expanding market opportunity. Company that when I arrived at the beginning of last year financially in a great position, but underrepresented in the market with a very unique capability. I thought that it would be a great opportunity to create something unique and a lot of value.
That's a great place to start. Now the balance sheet has been completely recapitalized. Before CFO Steven Gatoff came in, had almost $200 million in net debt. Today you've got under $40 million of net debt. A completely different company. Twelve months ago, the product strategy started to evolve pretty dramatically. Take us through what you've been doing over the last 12 months, what's important, what we need to highlight, and then we're gonna dive in on some other stuff.
Maybe the really important thing to understand is that we did a lot of work on the underlying capability for the company. While from an engineering skill set standpoint of view, perhaps best in the segment, our cost structure, our procurement, how we were operating the business needed to have a massive overhaul. I've done a lot of renewal in the leadership team. We've done significant work in, I'll call it reconfiguring the value chain. How do we develop? Who do we partner with? How do we go to market? That platform in itself for the company, super valuable. The go-to-market platform, which I'm sure we'll talk about more, is another big area where we needed to make sure we have the right focus.
Then really on the technology side, we've invested a lot of time and effort in our cloud and our enterprise solution, which is a key differentiator for the company. Those were some of the big-ticket items that we've brought to bear. Then if you look at, like, so what? Like, how does this matter? What have we accomplished on the back of that? The company used to have three products across two carriers. Here a year later, we have six products across all three. Maybe the single biggest accomplishment is that the company had not been doing business with AT&T for the past decade. Now we've have not one but two products with them.
The initial big task, which really was to drive capture the big TAM with the large guys, we've done a good job in executing on that.
Well, good. I wanna get down into the weeds on some of the products and the customers, but let's take a step back. You mentioned TAM, right, as one of the attractions here.
Yeah.
Could you talk a little bit about that market opportunity in terms of broadband wireless, why it's got you so excited?
Yeah
Why it's gonna continue to grow?
Excellent question. If you look at the broadband wireless, just like set aside the enterprise for a second. We'll layer that on top as a net market. Wireless has been used as a corner use case, a niche when it comes to wireless broadband, especially in the enterprise segment. It really was a cable or a fiber mainstay, and then you have a cellular failover. You had fairly boutique players operating to a complex two-tier distribution. Fast-forward to today, 5G now from a performance standpoint of view is definitely better than copper, more reliable, better performance than cable, and it's at a point where it can challenge fiber. Now as we go into 6G, I'm going to claim that it will overtake fiber as well. The future in itself is wireless, and the opportunity is rapidly expanding.
If you look at enterprise segment in this, like the enterprise wireless broadband, or as we talk about it, the enterprise wireless edge, whether it's mobile hotspot, which is a category that we invented a little over a decade ago, or if it's the Fixed Wireless Access or 5G router, that enterprise edge, the projected growth rate is at 27% CAGR between now and end of the decade. It's clear that there's a lot of energy, a lot of focus getting now by all of the big players in the industry, but overall from an enterprise end demand standpoint of view, moving towards wireless from the legacy solutions available there. You know, the reasons are really super easy. Reliability, cost of deployment is a significant benefit, and then the manageability.
You don't need to worry about what branch is on a cable over there, fiber over here. You just ship a router.
Yeah.
I would prefer it to be an Inseego router to all of your branch offices, plug and play, central management. The ease of deployment and the manageability is a key argument in favor of wireless for sure.
Now historically with the company predating the existing management team, it used to be new products drove product cycles with maybe one, two carriers.
Yeah.
Now, as you articulated, you've got six products across three carriers. Take us through how. I know we've talked about good, better, best strategy, but it's early days as well in terms of getting penetration, getting this.
Yeah
... new product diversification into those customers, and then driving share on top of it.
I think there's two distinctly different dynamics. If you look at mobile or the hotspot category, that operates in typical carrier buying cycle, where we're now talking with all of the guys on first half of 2027 roadmap. What do you guys need? Well, how would I coach you on technology selection? Where should we expand from where we are today, which is already a great platform? So that operates around the standard laws of physics and how the carrier business model procurement process works. It's very different as we look into the enterprise FWA. There really has been only two options up until we arrived to the market. One, you can have a white label consumer-grade router, which you can basically call an Asian ODM and have drop shipped on your door.
It doesn't have any of the security, any of the manageability, even the basic features that a small branch office would need. Let alone if you think more upmarket. The second part of the market has been these very cumbersome and complex systems that are not cellular first. It's more players who come from enterprise networking and attach a 5G module, not as an afterthought, but that's not the DNA of the company. The price points are very high to drive cost of acquisition for the carrier. Our job is to be the sweet spot where we are 5G first, so we'll be a release or two ahead of the game in terms of any other viable alternative in the segment, better network efficiency, better performance. Look, if you're a carrier, your job is to monetize your network.
That is super important. You have the enterprise-grade solution that can cater for upmarket but has the ease of use of an SMB. Super easy for a carrier sales team to go and sell. The go-to-market resource to go and support that. We'll train, we'll incentivize, we'll co-sell, and we'll go to your branches and explain how it all works, what are the use cases, what is the relevance for your customer. That part of the business is very different. In my view, we are creating the market. That is something that is a direct engagement with the senior leadership team at the carrier in their business segment to tailor the next solution, configure our go-to-market to match exactly what their sweet spot is, and how to drive success out there in the field.
There are a lot of other tangents we can go into, and we'll go in a minute with recurring revenue.
Yeah
... that you can drive off that. Before going there, the channel go-to-market, you've got a new channel team in.
Correct.
You talked about upgrading the C-suite. Basically, I was joking and calling it the wireless dream team, broadband wireless dream team in terms of what you guys have brought in from across the industry.
Yeah.
How is the go-to-market evolving and the channel strategy evolving also with the products then to support it?
Maybe a couple of words on the leadership team since you brought it up. I think it's really important that we have a team where we have senior leaders from the industry, wireless industry, who know how to operate at scale. I come from that background. I had the opportunity to spend multiple years in Asia, supply chain, competing against the fiercest competition in the world, which is the Chinese OEMs and Samsung and all of that in the mobile space. I'm very familiar and comfortable in going to that environment. Our Supply Chain Officer, Lawrence, he was previous Chief Procurement Officer at Vantiva, shipping some 40-50 million consumer CPEs to the carriers.
To your point, we have Donna Johnson, who joined us from Cradlepoint, the former CMO, our Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Product Officer at Sierra Wireless. It's really a combination of people who know what it means to deliver value, extract that ARR, which I'm sure we'll talk about, go upmarket, go into the high market segments, but it does have a lean, mean fighting machine and drive unprecedented scale in the industry and in the segment. That has been a key tenet on how I think about the team structure. What was the second part of the question?
We talked about the channel.
Channel.
Yeah.
Go-to-market. Yes. Thank you. The carrier, I know I've been using that word a lot.
Yeah.
That was the immediate big go win. I'm actually very happy. I'll give the team an A+ in winning every opportunity at the large carriers. However, we have opportunity to expand. There's other segments, as I look at the portfolio, more opportunity to broaden our wireless edge platform with the carriers. But equally importantly, as I look at the broader market, broader go-to-market opportunities, the MSOs, like the cable guys, the Charter, Comcast, or the fiber players of the industry, there's a lot of really relevant 5G use cases where we can be the best partner with everything that we've already built. Of course, you have the two-tier distribution with the large value-added resellers.
We're launching for the first time programs now with the CDWs and SHIs of the world, where again the legacy market or the incumbents are extremely strong. I see the opportunity of coming from this disruptive model with the carrier arriving at the higher margin two-tier distribution, where you need to invest and do a lot of manual work in winning the sale through the sales rep, and then also expanding into other segments or other verticals. That category.
Another high-level question, right? If you look at Fixed Wireless Access connections today in the United States, when you look at consumer and enterprise, you're in the ballpark of 10 million-ish.
Yeah. Fair.
How big can that opportunity be? Then I'll fold some of your other comments into that as well. AT&T, we've talked about a little bit, but they just paid about, what, $17 billion for spectrum.
Yeah
... in the 3.4-3.5 GHz band.
Uh.
Seems like it's really targeted for Fixed Wireless Access. Do we see that get really aggressive? You mentioned the MSOs as well. They have had some broadband wireless fallback strategies, but it seems like there's more percolating within the industry to drive more Fixed Wireless Access connections in those bases.
You know what's the exciting thing about the 10 million? It used to be 80% consumer, 20% business or enterprise. It's projected to be 50-50 this year. My theory is that it's going to tilt in favor of enterprise or business end market.
Again, just to emphasize.
Maybe next year.
the business and enterprise opportunity, that is where you guys reign because of the features and functionality.
Correct. Our mobile portfolio also participates in consumer, but we have really strong enterprise differentiation, which is a key reason for us doing what we've been able to do, which is securing those three carriers and three wins. The enterprise FWA will be a lion's share of the 10 million, if not next year, then the following. It's simply laws of physics. You have limited network capacity, which we'll talk about next, and you wanna use your scarce assets where you get the highest ARPU. Because you have to serve your mobile user, your consumer FWA, you're competing against cable, very low ARPU, high data consumption. The enterprise has the polar opposite consumption profile, high profitability, and it consumes less to begin with.
That's some of the dynamic as I look at the 10 million and think about it top-down.
Okay, very good. One other question before moving into the competitive landscape. This comes up when we talk about broadband wireless, it's almost impossible not to talk about satellite.
Yeah.
I'm wondering if you could just address both competitively, where that fits into the landscape, and how that potentially fits or doesn't fit into your product portfolio evolution?
Look, I view satellite as an excellent opportunity for us. The first disruption, which we've now delivered to marketplace, is really this FWA device that has the enterprise-grade manageability, security, everything that your IT manager requires, but with an SMB ease of use at a price point that can be mass deployed. The next disruption that I see is that if you used to have cable or fiber as primary-
Mm
... cellular as failover, now it will be cellular primary and satellite as failover. You can have dual active scenarios. I see a great opportunity in our router or our FWA product to become the compute appliance or the SD-WAN appliance at the edge that makes sense of these multiple WAN links, whether it's satellite, two active SIM cards, even fiber or cable in the mix. That logic, the intelligent application traffic steering, enabling the end user to decide what traffic gets to go where, and how do you deliver the best connectivity experience for your business need, whatever that might be.
Since you hit on edge AI and edge compute, let's dive in just for a second there. Right, we keep seeing the evolution to the edge, right? That's not news at this point in time. But how does that fit into your product portfolio? You guys work with Qualcomm and uncertain. It's got a lot of TOPS at the edge. How does that position you guys in the marketplace and for competition and how you see the edge continuing to evolve over the next 12 or 24 months?
The first uplift that we're going to get from AI is really the need for lower latency, for more dynamic workloads, more uplink. It's going to pull the latest and greatest on 5G, for sure. That's going to drive renewal cycle. That's going to continue to emphasize the importance of our technology leadership. The other aspect is maybe already now, but even more so going to 6G, there will be a logic on how orchestration, on how AI workload gets done within the edge. I listen to Jensen Huang talking here about physical AI. So I don't know if you can call a robot a UE, but the robot will do independent decision-making. You will need to have something at the edge as a compute hub. Why not the FWA? To your point, we can easily implement that. Then the cloud.
You need the orchestration layer, which is the thing that has not necessarily come together today. As a part of the 6G standard, the network will have pervasive AI implementation in just managing the network all the way from the FWA router to the core.
Okay.
There's also the opportunity of distributing compute resources. We can think like a box that our FWA having 100 TOPS. We can do a lot of the inferencing locally and the training in the cloud, and then anything that's even more latency sensitive or needs to be done at the autonomous unit can do it themselves. I think that future, that architecture will emerge between now and the end of the decade, which to me is another great reason to drive scale at the enterprise wireless edge, because then we'll be in an excellent position to drive, be a key part of the solution, and drive some of the integration efforts.
That kind of tees up as well the competitive landscape question, right? As you and I have talked about in the past, the FWA landscape is thinning, the mobile hotspot landscape is thinning, due to a couple reasons, both China and exclusion. We had some more additions from the FCC the other day. As well as just competition not investing in the right places. Hearing you talk about the evolution to 6G, it just continues to sound like you guys differentiate, you evolve, and stay ahead of the competition. Maybe just some thoughts on the competitive landscape and how you expect share gains to roll for you over the next couple of years.
Look, what we've seen already in hotspot, which is a mature segment, I think it's fair to say, there's been significant consolidation where a carrier used to carry five or six product, it's now down to three.
Yeah.
With that, each product captures more volume. In FWA, we really are the sweet spot for consolidating that growth with the large carrier customers. I think that that segment in itself will perform really well. The China dynamic is interesting, and yesterday's news on consumer router, consumer Wi-Fi routers, and the manufacturing location. I find it to be interesting that I think we all agree that having a Huawei or Chinese infrastructure in the U.S. mobile network is a challenge.
Yeah.
For some reason, when you look at the CPE or the FWA, it's a free-for-all. That actually, I would argue, is as good, if not better control point for a bad actor than the network was. The news yesterday and all of the momentum that was building up before the shutdown later last year, it will be interesting to see how that materialize. That would change the vendor landscape significantly.
It sounds like there could be some additional, we'll call it FWA CPE changes from addition to the exclusion list potentially as we think forward into 2026 or 2027.
It's very difficult to speculate on that. Look, we're a San Diego-based company. All of our critical IP is in San Diego. We're TAA compliant. Should that scenario play out, both in mobile and in FWA, we would definitely experience a very strong tailwind.
Let's shift over to recurring revenue. I think what people don't realize is you basically have about $50 million in recurring revenue, very high gross margin, and you're talking about a lot of other things that can either enhance the feature set, get you paid more, or increase attach rate. Kind of take us through the recurring revenue strategy and how that's gonna evolve over the next couple of years.
Great question. We have two really important components of our ARR strategy. I'll start with the one that's attached to our wireless broadband portfolio, Inseego Connect. If you're deploying an FWA as a business in more than one location, I would argue even in one location, you cannot do that without unified manageability or for the device, for the network. Even simple stuff as configurations, availability information, but it goes much deeper than that. We see high attach already now with Inseego Connect, maybe even more so on the back of the investment that we've done over the past year. From a feature set standpoint of view, from a user experience standpoint of view, I'm very proud of where we've arrived over the past year. We've also developed APIs.
If you prefer to consume with headless and integrate us to your single pane of glass, however you're managing your IT shop, or as a managed service provider, we now enable that. That's a key part of it. If you look at industry standard numbers, a good ARR just for the device management capability in the cloud would be 10%. If you sold the router at $400, you should pick up $30, $40 on a year for the duration that the device is out there in the field. We're also looking at security and other areas where we can expand. A typical FW2000, which is our new product, we do offer it without the cloud.
I don't want to force you in a corner, but most buy a two or three year bundle. Removes the friction. The best user experience is through the cloud, which is exactly how we've been building the whole experience. I'm very bullish on the attach rate and the capitalization opportunity on ARR just with our router portfolio, and it's an install-based game. If you take a longer view, say 3-5 years out, it's going to be a meaningful contributor on our P&L, and that's something that we've been building towards, and I think we'll do a great job in executing.
Hey, can I just quickly follow up on that? 'Cause it hasn't been a growing portion of your revenue streams. The absolute dollar's been running $12 million or so a quarter.
Yeah.
You've been building this product for the last 12 months.
It's been more of an enabler.
Yep
rather than driving the sale or the ability to capture the value.
Yeah.
Now what we've done is that we've built the Inseego Connect to a point where it can command the price point, it can command the attach, and there's so much more value for the end customer. The second part, which I would say is a well-kept secret, we made some announcements around this in MWC, like, you know, Inseego Subscribe. That is our business support solution. It is a full subscriber lifecycle management solution for an operator or for an MSP for that matter. Let's say that you run a wireless practice like our lead customer does. They're a large one of the large MNOs in the U.S. They have a huge business customer pool. They use our portal to sign the customer up, develop the catalog, customization, rate plans, billing, expense tracking, everything.
From a customer acquisition cost standpoint of view, it's super helpful because the enterprise can self-serve. We're particularly strong in the Fed and SLED segment, so think like Navy.
Yeah.
Very complex, super difficult buying agreements. That specialty is something that we have in-house, and we purpose-built designed the platform for. That is a key part of the ARR story for us. I see an opportunity not only to continue, but see how we can do an even better job in helping the broader ecosystem to leverage the capability as they scale in wireless.
Let me wrap that into some numbers. Do we start to see in calendar 2026, calendar 2027 recurring revenue start to grow? Is this when we start to see the inflection now given all the feature sets that you're adding?
It will follow the FWA install base. If, like, you look at short term, you'll see meaningful mobile growth-
Yep
On the back of the new wins, and I think we'll do a good job in further expanding from there. FWA is really the key growth driver for the company if you look at it on a sustained basis. You'll see now with the two new carriers lighting up already meaningful uptake, the two-tier distribution, and then with the attach rate, the ARR will follow.
Maybe that's a good place to kind of wrap it up. You know, looking at the guidance for this year implies a larger second to fourth quarter of this year.
Correct.
What sort of level of confidence, visibility, and demand are you seeing from your customers that makes you feel good about that?
Look, the Q1 guidance that we gave was very straightforward. We had an execution delay in our new mobile portfolio, think like 6 weeks on average, which impacted the Q1 revenue. What I like about hotspot, it's like a light switch. You enter the market, you have a guaranteed volume pocket, and it the volume will start flowing in. Now the delay, the ramp is delayed impacting Q1, but we'll be in full swing in going into Q2, and I think you should expect further customer expansion and great news on the FWA side as well.
Very good.
We feel good about the year.
We've reached the end of our time, but any final thoughts or comments, what institutional investors, what I'm missing about the Inseego story?
Look, I think the big thing for us really is that the name has been around for a long time. Look at us as a 25-year-old startup. It's a completely new story that we've written with the new team over the past two and a half years. I would encourage everyone to take a fresh look, see what you think about the story, and then follow our execution throughout the year.
Well, perfect. That's a great place to wrap it up, Juho. Thank you so much for being here. Always appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Oh, okay. Hey, good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us at Fireside Chat on the second afternoon, Tuesday afternoon of the 38th Annual Roth Conference. I'm Scott Searle. I'm the communications AIoT and edge compute analyst with Roth. What we try to do in our Fireside Chats are identify companies and highlight companies where there's something transformative that's going on with the business, something that's not really recognized by the institutional community, and really kind of flush that out in our conversations. With that in mind, very, very excited to have Inseego presenting as our next Fireside Chat. Presenting on behalf of the company is Juho Sarvikas, CEO. Juho, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. I can't believe it's been a year.
Well, I was just gonna get to that. You've been here a year. There's been a two-year transformation, right?
Yeah, correct.
In terms of balance sheet and otherwise, and when you came in, tremendous change in terms of go-to-market and product strategy. Let's start with why. Why Inseego? What brought you here? What's kept you here?
You know, I think the big thing for me may be twofold. First of all, if you look at the market opportunity for wireless broadband, where Inseego has been leading now for over 25 years. We actually just rang the bell in November to celebrate the anniversary. The market is expanding rapidly, and the key insight that I have is that I don't think you have a player in the industry who's really positioned to enable that scaling, where the market will, in our view, take place and where the rapid growth will be experienced. Then the technical capability of the team. We have some of the best modem RF engineers in the world. We're right next to my former employer, Qualcomm. Technology partnership is a very foundational element of it. Huge, vastly expanding market opportunity.
company that when I arrived at the beginning of last year financially in a great position, but underrepresented in the market with a very unique capability. I thought that it would be a great opportunity to create something unique and a lot of value.
That's a great place to start. Now the balance sheet has been completely recapitalized. Before CFO Steven Gatoff came in, had almost $200 million in net debt. Today, you've got under $40 million of net debt. A completely different company. Twelve months ago, the product strategy started to evolve pretty dramatically. Take us through what you've been doing over the last 12 months, what's important, what we need to highlight, and then we're gonna dive in on some other stuff.
Maybe the really important thing to understand is that we did a lot of work on the underlying capability for the company. While from an engineering skill set standpoint of view, perhaps best in the segment, our cost structure, our procurement, how we were operating the business needed to have a massive overhaul. I've done a lot of renewal in the leadership team. We've done significant work in, I'll call it reconfiguring the value chain. How do we develop, who do we partner with? How do we go to market? That platform in itself for the company, super valuable. The go-to-market platform, which I'm sure we'll talk about more, is another big area where we needed to make.