All right, everybody, thank you. I'll kick off the next presenter in Fireside Chat. My name is Shawn Severson, CEO and Founder of Water Tower Research. W e have Ocean Power Technologies here, OPT, trade ticker OPTT. And we have Philipp Stratmann, CEO. And I guess we can start, Philipp. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the company? And I also wanted to put in front of investors, I've known the company for a long time. It's gone through some tremendous transitions over the years. So, I think for the benefit of anybody who maybe knew the old OPT, I think to talk about the transition of the business first and what brought you there and then what you've done since you've gotten there.
That's a fun question.
I know. I know. I'll try to unravel it as I go along.
So, OPT nowadays, provider of platforms for ocean intelligence gathering. That's the easiest way to put it. We provide persistent, resident, and autonomous systems that can be out there for short periods or exceptionally long periods of time to get you whatever you need to know from seabed all the way to the surface and then into the sky. That obviously has obvious use cases when it comes to defense and security, obvious use cases when it comes to critical energy infrastructure, oil and gas, pipeline monitoring, and so on and so forth. So the way we got there, let's go on to the next bit. So my background is I'm an ex-military naval architect. I worked in defense shipbuilding, moved into oil and gas, and then was appointed CEO at OPT, I want to say, about just over four years ago. OPT back then really had the buoy technology.
We looked at what OPT had, where the use cases were in the market, and what you could do with it. So we bolted on the autonomous vehicles. So we've got the USVs that we provide. We looked at what could we do with the buoys. And the buoys really lent themselves to being persistent nodes, so to speak, that you put out there in the ocean. Once you get more than 15 mi away from the shore, radar doesn't reach that far from the shore, cameras don't see that far, and you're relying on either hundreds of thousands of dollars of manned assets or satellites that give you very spotty ideas of what's going on. We all know what goes on.
We know anecdotally what goes on in the ocean, but we have to know where it is so we can solve the find-and-fix problem so that you can then utilize your manned assets to do and keep your oil and gas platform secure, to provide the energy we all need, to stop drugs being smuggled into countries. That's the position we took. We retooled the management team. At OPT overall, we're just under somewhere between 20% and 30% veterans across the board. The company has a facility clearance at Secret level so that we can work on classified projects, and it's been a complete about-face. The other change that we did over the last 18 months, we took, Bob can correct me if I get the number wrong, it's around 40% of overhead that we took out of the business by retooling ourselves and focusing on how we go to market. I hope I addressed all five of your questions.
That kind of leads into the next one, but let's talk about the customers. Let's talk about the application. So obviously, you have DoD. You have a little while that you talk about it. But if you look at how it's being used today and deployed, I think people understand you had the initial buoy technology. You found ways to use it and really build markets out of it. But give some examples of how it's being used today, what's being used.
Yeah. I think to give some concrete examples, and I think that's another one that distinguishes OPT from some of its competition, we have commercially available and commercially deployed technology that we can provide today. This is on paper exercises. One example is we have a buoy out for the Naval Postgraduate School right now off California in Monterey Bay that's got an AT&T 5G mast on it. So that is to do for the Navy to do testing on 5G HC secure mesh networks to enable underwater, surface and aerial drones to all communicate wherever that communication needs to happen. Because we can't rely on cloud infrastructure if you're in somewhere like a weapons engagement zone. We have a buoy currently in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi, that's equipped with surface surveillance sensors. That's designed for rapidly deployable intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance and sort of protection of assets.
On the vehicle side, we have several vehicles right now working with one of our customers in Taiwan where they're doing unexploded ordnance detection. They're looking for old mines from World War II in an area where there's a big offshore energy infrastructure being built out. Nobody knows exactly where all these mines are, but you don't really want to drive a pile into one of them. So, you can use autonomous vehicles to find them first. We just finished a deployment in the Baltic Sea as part of a U.S. delegation to NATO for Task Force X, where we utilized our systems to work on GPS jamming detection, looking at seabed warfare. We've all seen the news about what happens with internet cables and so on before.
It is an overlay of really knowing, using our systems to know what's going on out in the ocean and communicate that back to whoever the customer is to help them then deploy their systems and bigger manned systems to do the interdiction, interrogation, and if need be, whatever they need to do with it.
To clarify, so you have the buoy, right, which is the power source. But talk a little bit about the autonomous vehicles, the use of instrumentation, for example, on the buoys, what the PowerBuoy is used for, and then the WAM-V product.
Yeah. So if you look at the buoy itself, it's a self-recharging steel column. That's probably the best way to put it. That you put out wherever you need it to be in the ocean. It uses solar, wind, and depending on where you are, a combination of wave power to constantly recharge its battery. And that gives us the ability to fuel a whole range of sensors. In the standard configuration, it's a communications node, which is short-range radio, long-range radio, Starlink, Silvus point-to-point, which is an encrypted military standard. And then we have cameras, electronic signature detection, and radar systems on there. That's kind of the base version. And what it does, it constantly triangulates the electronic signal that a ship has sent and compares that to the radar return to look at whether somebody is pretending to be something that they're not.
There's really four, what in the maritime industry is known as dark vessel detection. Either vessels that are moving around and aren't sending a signal, but you can see it on the radar, or vessels that are pretending to be something totally, entirely different. Generally, both are really good indicators that you may want to go and further interrogate what's going on. I'll speak about the mast that we can, the 5G mast we've got on in California. Other use cases and work that we've done in the past is you can put a power cable down to the seabed, and you can power a whole bunch of seabed sensors. That could be hydrophones. It could be active sonar, so you can use that for anti-submarine warfare, so figuring out whether something underwater is coming into an area that you are concerned about.
If you take New York as a specific example, we've got FIFA 2026 coming up. Nobody's going to go and close down the Verrazzano-Narrows just because there's a soccer game going on, but you kind of want to know that there's nothing coming in underwater like small robots, so part of the use cases that we demonstrated, we did a demonstration for the Navy, I want to say it was earlier this year in San Diego, where we used one of our vehicles with a towed sonar array behind it to detect micro underwater robots that they had deployed out in San Diego in the port there to spot any threats that might be coming in, so that same threat detection you can use in a civilian application. We've got oil and gas customers that are using it to survey their pipeline.
Because you can use a vehicle for a couple of thousand dollars a day. The alternative is to use a boat. That's going to cost you at least $30,000-$40,000 a day. So they really like the fact that these are autonomous systems, forward deployed, and you can do what you can do with a larger asset, but at a fraction of the OpEx.
I think that's an interesting point because it really, I know we talked about this before, but it doesn't require adding to budgets. So when people look at defense budgets or programs or projects, this effectively is replacing much higher expenses inside the current use cases and the current budget, right? So you don't have to send a ship out. You don't have to send a warfighter out or anything. So this becomes a good ROI spend if you want to look at it that way for both civilian and defense applications.
Yeah. If you're looking at a metric like dollars per square nautical mile per hour surveyed, it is a complete game changer. I think in one of our last investor decks, we compared cost per day to have a buoy out versus cost per day to have a Coast Guard cutter going out, cost per day to deploy a helicopter to then see something. And then at the very bottom of the list, everybody's going, "Well, we've got a Navy with loads of assets." And I was like, "Well, cost per day to put a DDG out there is about $150,000 a day." And that's after you've paid for the thing.
So just in terms of fuel cost and manpower on those things, if you want to go and use those highly valuable and definitely required assets in the best manner, you want to solve the find-and-fix problem with other assets that can be out there at a very low cost point for long periods of time.
I guess if you look at the business opportunity, let's talk a little bit about the numbers, right? How does this translate into a revenue model? Actually, before we get to that, we touched on it a bit, but what is the WAM-V? If you talk about that for.
Yeah. So the WAM-V is sort of the USVs, unmanned surface vehicles, essentially drone boats. That's probably the best way to do it. They're autonomously driven or remotely controlled boats. We distinguish ourselves in the news all the time. The Ukrainians have used them very successfully to take down Russian assets. Where we distinguish ourselves, we're really a pickup truck of that world. We don't have the fastest, the meanest, the darkest painted one. We don't have the biggest weapons on it. But we can carry huge amounts of payload. Our larger one carries at least 600 lbs of payload. It's independently moving hulls. So you have a super stable payload tray at the top. And that enabled us earlier this year at an exhibition in Washington, D.C., we integrated some of Red Cat's drones.
We built a landing platform over the top of ours so you can go out there with one of our vehicles and then launch an aerial drone, so it becomes that force multiplier of being the workhorse of that type of industry, and we're at the smaller scale of that side, which makes them easily deployable, makes them easily movable, and that's sort of also garnering the attraction we're seeing and the uptake we're seeing in the Middle East, for example.
Then just the economics on this. How does this translate into a revenue model for the company?
Yeah. So if you look at the vehicles, I mean, obviously, somebody can purchase the vehicle. If they're purchasing a vehicle, we make gross margin on us making it, providing it. We then generate additional revenues on a train-the-trainer program. We'll do maintenance on it, upgrades, updates, obviously, all the software that goes with it as well. There's life cycle upgrades that will occur. But a lot of our customers don't want to buy these. They don't need it for five years. What they're looking at is, "Hey, I've got this job I need to do.
Talk about the buoys or the WAM-V.
This is the WAM-V.
The WAM-V.
On the WAM-Vs, our customers are going, "Yeah, I want this for three months. I want this for six months." If you're doing that, we'll charge a day rate. We'll provide the operators, and like any good offshore asset, if you're looking at comparable metrics like Oceaneering or other people that provide marine assets in that industry, after somewhere between 200 and 300-ish days of utilization, cash on cash payback on one of these assets is achieved. But they have a useful economic life that way exceeds five years. So you start seeing that free cash flow generation flywheel kicking in after a certain period of time as you build up the fleet. On the buoy side, slightly different. People generally want the buoy because they need to monitor something for two years, three years, five years. They've got an oil and gas field.
They've got a border, whatever that might be. Again, we would sell them the buoy. And that's the thing. We make that uplift there. Then we'll provide monitoring services. We'll provide value-add services by integrating the edge software with their shore-based operation center. We'll maintain that for them. We'll do the maintenance and upgrades and updates on the buoy. We'll work with them to get the system installed. And sometimes people saying, "Hey, I only want it for two years." It's fine. We'll charge you for the two years. We'll take it back. We would then upgrade it, and it then goes back into our fleet. And if you're looking at the buoys, they're 10 plus years lifetime. Again, you look at that free cash flow flywheel that starts kicking in once you have sufficient numbers out there. That's where the value-add kicks in.
And then the third bit is what we're starting to layer in right now. And we've called it Merrows, which is the sort of integrating overarching AI-capable software system that combines buoy with our USV and allows you to put in additional sensors. So now you could have a scenario where you have half a dozen buoys out in the ocean. Some of them may in the future have docking stations attached to it. Think about it like a Tesla supercharger for the ocean. Then you put USVs out there, ideally our USVs. They're sitting there waiting for something to happen. One buoy finds a threat. That buoy alerts the nearest buoy to that threat. The software tasks the vehicle that's attached to it to go out there, look at the threat, and then provide that actionable intelligence back to an operator to then go and act on it.
You know what that enables us to do is to then play nicely in the sandbox with all the other people out there because you're going to need a whole range of USVs. This whole topic of collaborative autonomy is really starting to come to the fore, but I sat there on a panel earlier this year. I was hosted by the venture capital community over at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. All of these USVs all need comms nodes. That's where the buoys kick in. It's all great. Everybody's saying, "Yeah, I've got this." I'm like, "Yeah, but first thing that's going to go off is your cloud-based internet provision if you're actually finding yourself in a fight with somebody." What you need is local secure mesh networks for all of these systems to communicate. I think that's the differentiator we bring into the industry with the buoys as opposed to being just roaming.
Any questions, audience? I have one more to take. I mean, if you look at, it's an interesting topic, but private companies out there. I know we've discussed this a little bit about some of the valuations that are happening. Speaking to VCs, okay? When you look at some of the private rounds that have been done on, I'm going to call them competitors, but similar companies, some cases competitors, what's your take on that? The numbers are pretty staggering when you look at it. This is obviously of interest to investors. When you're looking at private company transactions and valuations versus OPT, there's quite the discrepancy here.
Yeah, I'd say it's been an interesting development. So you asked me at the beginning, we pivoted into this defense tech world because a lot of us come from it three-ish years ago. In the last 18 months or so, it is like a brand-new industry. When we were pivoting, yeah, it was us and maybe one or two. Anduril was really starting to scale up. Palantir, but they're really on the pure software side. In the last 18 months, we've had like 10 + new competitors or entrants into our space. Oftentimes, they're not really direct competitors because a lot of them are more on the faster, more lethal side, not on the pickup side of the industry. But you look at how they're being valued, it is a completely different metric. We have to do quarterly earnings calls.
We have to disclose our revenue. We have to disclose our backlog. We disclose our pipeline. My competitors will send a 10-page pitch deck to their investors going, "I have this TAM, and that will be my SAM." And before you know it, they're going out and saying, "Great, we just raised another $200 million at an $800 million post-money valuation." That's it. They're going, "You don't even have a product in the water yet." I mean, it's great because it gives a lot of credence that this is an industry that is rapidly growing. But when I think actually at this conference last year, Bob, we put out a slide that compared anonymized private valuations that we pulled out of PitchBook and other sources compared to the one or two companies that are in the public space in this area.
It's an order of magnitude differential on very similar backlog and pipeline numbers and very similar approaches. Nobody's giving me $800 million to buy some shipyards. I think it is a massive opportunity for our shareholders. If they want to have that certainty of an audited and well-governed public vehicle that is building in that same space as where the VC hype cycle is in, we are one of those opportunities that exist out there.
Yeah. Definitely take a look at some of the private company valuations and what they're doing. I think you'll be surprised because it certainly is an area that's at the top and forefront of people's minds and attracting a lot of investment capital. But there are some great companies like OPT in the public space, especially again with the story transitioning. I think that's some of it too. The company has a longer history. The last few years have made a change in the business model, and now it's really hitting home, and it's fitting right into one of the biggest investment cycles out there in the private side right now. So yeah, I'll open it up for any questions. So, we've got a couple of minutes left. Yeah.
Both. The drones, obviously, they've got their own propulsion systems, and they will operate at between four and six knots, so seven-ish miles per hour with the payload deployed. They have a burst speed of closer to 20 knots, so about 24 mi-25 mi an hour. The buoys are moored and depending on where you are, the buoys are either on a single-point mooring if it's shallower water and you're just doing some ISR work surface, or they're sitting on like a three-point anchor system if it's deeper water, and particularly if you're doing underwater detection because you want whatever you are putting down below the surface, you really want that fixed point so you can find out what's going on below the surface. The ocean is a pretty noisy place below the surface.
So, you need that long-term monitoring because what you're trying to do is detect the pattern of life so that you can then subtract that. And then you're only left behind with what would be a noise signal that hasn't been there for three months consistently. The submarine, unmanned underwater assets, and you're seeing obviously the extra-large unmanned vehicles are starting to come up. So yeah, anti-submarine warfare is a very strong play in that area, and particularly in a world that is going increasingly hostile and national border focused.
The mooring design we have is currently good for about 3,000 m water depth. So call that, take 12,000 ft. That doesn't get you into one of the trenches. Yeah. But you can go deeper than that. It requires a willpower of the customer to realize that this is really where they're trying to go.
Those would be moored. You could put drones out there at the same time. The thing is with drones, again, they're roaming. So if you're trying to really get, you need both. You need the fixed point to find stuff, and then you need the drones to additionally interrogate what you've seen around those fixed points.
I guess to leave with the idea, this revenue is there. The backlog is there. It's building. This isn't a concept or an idea. And maybe just touch a little bit about, to leave investors with the financials. Things have started to build. Backlog has started to build. So this isn't an idea that's trying to be sold out there in the marketplace. This is now a commercialization part of the company's evolution.
Yeah. So I think when current management came in, the company was doing give or take about maybe $1 million in R&D grants a year. I think last year we closed at just under $6 million revenues. Our backlog sits at around $15 million at the last published numbers. And backlog is contracted POs. So these are contracts that will be pulled down and converted to revenue over the next one- to two-year cycle. Pipeline, which is qualified opportunities. So, this customer is where we have NDAs, and we're discussing actual projects as opposed to TAM SAM calculations, sits at just over $130 million. So it is a materially growing market. We feel comfortable with the backlog we've built, and we see the opportunity of converting more of that pipeline down into backlog.
And if you want to find out more about the company, you can access our website as well, www.watertowerresearch.com. All of our research is open access. So, you can see our fireside chats, the research, podcasts, everything we've done. So, if you want to learn more about it, please take a look there. Feel free to reach out to me. Or obviously, both Philip and Bob are here today as well. So hopefully you have a meeting with them. But wrap it up, and we'll go on to the next presentation. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.