Hi, everyone. My name's Ted Tedla, Managing Director of Investor Engagement at Water Tower. Our next company's Ocean Power Technologies, ticker symbol OPTT, and presenting will be Bob Powers, Chief Financial Officer.
All right. Thanks, Ted.
Sure.
All right. We have a small group here today, this can be a little more intimate than a typical presentation. Are you guys familiar with OPT at all or? Not so much. Not so much. Okay. As Ted mentioned, I'm Bob Powers. I'm the CFO. OPT is an ocean data infrastructure company, and the way I like to frame it is, as most of us know, over 70% of the Earth is the ocean today. The bulk of that ocean is not persistently monitored, and that's where we come in. There's currently a significant transition going on in how the ocean is monitored. Traditionally, it's been done through manned vessels. Very expensive applications. Think helicopters, think Coast Guard cutters, ships, that kind of thing. We provide more of an autonomous unmanned solution.
Part of the transition that's happening today, if you think about a lot of what's going on in the news, you see naval choke points, the Strait of Hormuz every single day, undersea cables, drug trafficking, human trafficking, that type of thing. As I mentioned, historically, the way most governments, and that's primarily what we are. Probably 70% of our pipeline is government. Think Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Navy, and really any allied nation for the U.S., has monitored those areas with very expensive manned vessels. OPT is part of the shift to an unmanned, persistent infrastructure, and we have three different platforms that I'll get into in a second. A wave energy PowerBuoy, a marine drone, we also have an AI software application that ties all that together. That's where we sit. That's the disruption that we're part of.
It's where we see the industry going. OPT as a company has a secret clearance with the U.S. government. I personally have a secret clearance as well. Our CEO, Philipp Stratmann, has a secret clearance, as does our chairman. I've participated in a number of meetings with the Navy down in D.C., and one of the consistent themes that you hear from those meetings, you'll hear the word attritable a dozen different times, and that's where the Navy is moving. They're moving away from high-cost applications, more towards the products that OPT provides, specifically the drones. I can show you in a second. On my left here, that's our drone. We call it the WAM-V. It comes in three different sizes, eight foot, 16 foot, and 22 foot.
They range in price from anywhere from $125,000 for the smallest drone, up to about $400,000 as a base model. In Navy terms, that's relatively inexpensive. They can send these drones out, and to be honest, if something happens to them and it doesn't come back, it's not the biggest loss in the world to them, compared to million-dollar bombs and missiles that they're sending out. All the way to the right there is our PowerBuoy. That's the persistent data collector that I mentioned. It generates power through the movement of waves, as well as you can see, there's solar on top of it, and a little bit of wind as well. There's batteries at the bottom of that buoy. These buoys are huge.
It's tough to appreciate how large they are from this picture, but they're about the size of a school bus. These are not the recreational navigation buoys that a lot of people think of. Whenever I do a tour at our facility in New Jersey, we have a 60,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in New Jersey. People are always astounded by how large these things are. About a third of the buoy sits above the water, two-thirds below the water. The power that's generated through waves, through solar, and through wind is used to power just about any type of sensor that you can think of placing on the buoy. Think radar, think sonar hanging from the bottom. You can listen for anything from whales to submarines. Heat-sensing cameras. Anything environmental, that type of thing.
This is the stationary platform that is used to collect data, and it works in conjunction with our mobile, autonomous, unmanned drone that's here as well. I have another slide I'll get to in a minute about a contract that we just signed with DHS this past January. The largest contract in our company's history, $6.5 million to install four buoys off the coast of San Diego. We've already installed three. The fourth one goes in next month. That's a 15-month lease. The expectation is that this is the first contract in what will hopefully be many. The buoys have been installed for a couple of months. They're already gathering data for the Navy. Based upon the very positive performance over the first couple of months, we've already begun discussions on a follow-on contract.
From a coverage standpoint, you can think of the Navy and DHS as using the buoy as to establish a digital fence way out in the ocean, much further than you can see from the shore. This particular contract is in partnership with Anduril. If you're familiar with Anduril and some of their contracts that they have with the Navy and DHS, they have a software that they use called Lattice. Our buoys are gathering all of the data out in the ocean. They're pumping it through Starlink to the shore, to towers that Anduril has. They are gathering that data, using it in Lattice, and then analyzing it for DHS. This is just another example of our buoys in action. I show this one will give you a little bit of perspective as to how large the buoys are.
This, again, is a contract that we have with the Navy. This is a buoy that, again, is off the coast of San Diego today, working with the Naval Postgraduate School. The interesting thing about this particular buoy is we have a partnership with AT&T. This buoy is acting essentially as a cell tower out in the middle of the ocean, and that's part of what the Naval Postgraduate School is using it for. To my knowledge, we have the only cell tower of this nature in the ocean today. In terms of our value proposition, I mentioned some of the conversations that we've been having in D.C. and where the defense industry and you'll see the term MDA, Maritime Domain Awareness, that's the area that we focus on, where that's headed from a cost perspective.
You can install one of our buoys for less than $3,000 a day. If you compare that to the incumbent solutions today, you can see the cutters that I mentioned are at least $40,000 a day. Helicopters run anywhere from $70,000-$90,000. Once you get up into the destroyer class, they get even much more expensive. It's a relatively easy sell when we're having these conversations with the Navy and the Department of War and other governmental agencies from a cost perspective. They're super interested. What is the challenge? Our technology is a disruptive technology, right? There really isn't another competitor that's doing what we do on the buoy side. On the marine drone side, there's lots. Every day, there's more and more competitors entering the market for the drones. Where we differentiate ourselves is having the buoys and the drones work together.
You can think of a use case, if I go back to the DHS contract for a minute, where your buoy has spotted something out in the ocean through its radar or through one of its cameras that you want to take a closer look at. You send out our marine drone to do just that. You can get up close and personal and interdict however you want to. That's a big difference between what we're offering. That's why I describe OPT as an infrastructure company. There's really not a lot of other companies out there that are combining the monitoring and the interdiction in just the way that we are. We are a technology company, too. Even though I think today we function very much like a startup, we've been around for a long time. We've been public for over 20 years.
I would say for the first 15 years of our existence, we functioned primarily as an R&D company. We transitioned to the commercial company that we are today about four years ago, around the time that I joined the company as CFO, and our CEO, Philipp, joined as CEO. We are a technology company, and a lot of that R&D has resulted in over 70 patents today. Here's another cool piece of our technology. In addition to all the functionality that I mentioned that our buoys provide from a data gathering and analysis perspective, they also serve as charging stations out in the ocean. We just were awarded a patent last year for docking and charging. You can pull our drone up to the WAM-V, up to the buoy, and charge. Today, it's a somewhat long charging period.
Again, if you think of a use case where you send out our drone, what we call the WAM-V, send out the WAM-V for a full-day mission. It's battery-powered, it can work all day, bring it back, and charge overnight. I would say in the relatively near term, we will be reducing that charging time to two or three hours. Currently, that's just for our drones, but in theory, you could do the exact same thing for anybody's drones. It's not just marine drones, it could be aerial drones as well. That brings me to a partnership that we have with Red Cat. Some of you may be familiar with Red Cat and their aerial drones. We do have a partnership where you can launch Red Cat's drones from our marine drones.
It's a little bit difficult to see, but you can see we have a platform here and right there, that's the Red Cat drone. Again, if you go back to that use case that I just described where your buoy has spotted something, now you're sending out our drone to take a closer look at the surface level. If you want to get an aerial view of whatever that item is that you want to take a look at, again, you can launch a Red Cat drone from there. Internally today, we have a fairly significant sales team. We have a handful of internal sales employees, but we also have significant sales partnerships throughout the world. A big part of our expansion today is in the Middle East. Again, I mentioned Philipp, our CEO.
For the last year or so, Philipp has spent probably a week every month, or every other month, over in the Middle East, think Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai. There's a significant pull in that area. We have two partnerships with distributors and resellers in the Middle East. We expect to be growing even more. We have a couple of contracted salespeople there today as well. Our strategy is working. I mentioned the DHS contract that we announced in January. That's our biggest contract ever. That's a $6.5 million contract to install four buoys off the coast of San Diego. With that, OPT has kind of a funky fiscal year. Our fiscal year runs from May 1st to April 30th. We just started our fiscal 2027. We're coming into our fiscal 2027 with our largest backlog ever of about $20 million.
That's significant to us. About a quarter of that relates to this DHS project, but we also have significant POs that we received in Latin America, as well as the Middle East. The strategy is working. If I look at our pipeline, we've got about $160 million in our pipeline today. The way we define our pipeline is it's a qualified pipeline, demonstrated need, demonstrated fund, and these are customers that we've spoken to, that we believe have a good chance of closing. There's at least three or four contracts in that pipeline, same size or scope or bigger than the DHS contract that I mentioned. Our expectation is that in the next 60, 90 days, I'm going to have something to go public with on those contracts. Watch our press releases with regard to that.
That's what I see really driving OPT in the relative near term here. If you followed us in January when we did the DHS announcement, we had a pretty good, I would say, market reaction. There's a lot of eyes on the stock. I had one day where I traded 44 million shares. That's a lot for us. Typically, we do 4 million shares in a day. That was January. It's a few months later. We've come back down a little bit since then. I think the market is really looking at OPT and saying, "Okay, awesome. That was a great one contract. Now prove to us that it wasn't a one-off. Where's your second? Where's your third? Where's your fourth?" That's why I speak about the pipeline, and I expect that to be coming.
That's really what our focus is on right now in terms of our strategy, closing those significant contracts. I'm not talking about a one buoy deal. I'm not talking about a one marine drone deal. These are multiple, 10, 20, that type of thing. I talked a little bit about the Strait of Hormuz. What's interesting with everything that's gone on in the Middle East in the last year or so is it's opened up brand new opportunities to OPT. I've talked about the applications that our drones and our buoys are typically used for. With everything that's been going on in the Middle East, we're actually getting inbound calls for applications that we're not even really actively selling. We'll get calls from insurance companies that are insuring tankers that are going through the Strait of Hormuz that have been damaged in one way or another.
The insurance companies are coming to them saying, "You know what? This area is too hot right now. We don't want to send out a manned vessel to take a look at it. Do you have a drone in the area that you can send out and assess the damage?" We're like, "Yeah, of course. Absolutely." I've got multiple assets in the Middle East right now. That just shows the opportunity for our platforms. Oftentimes, when I have investors come out to Jersey to see our buoys and the WAM-Vs being made and then see them in person, the wheels start turning, and they can say, "Okay, what are all the different applications that you guys aren't even thinking of?" It's not that we're not thinking of them today, it's that some of those applications are very capital intensive.
If I had $100 million today, I know how I would deploy it. We'd have a fleet of buoys that OPT owns all throughout the ocean gathering data, and I could sell that same data to multiple customers multiple times and have a real recurring data stream, right? Today, that's not really how it works. I mentioned DHS. The DHS is kind of a one-off contract. We sell the buoy and the data to DHS, and that's it. If you think about any type of as a service model, our product and our data really lends itself very well to that. It's just a matter of capital, quite honestly, at this point. The buoys and the drones are very profitable. We have two primary revenue streams, so I can lease them or sell them outright.
If I sell them outright, my margins are in the 30%-40% range, sometimes 50%, the leasing model is super profitable. A buoy has a useful life of 10 to 12 years, and a drone has a useful life of 7 to 10 years. Typically, in the leases that we've done, I've gotten payback on those assets within one year. You can do the math. They're really generating free cash flow after one year. What's the issue that I have? Why don't I do that more? It's capital. Like any leasing model, whether you're Hertz or OPT, it's expensive to build out that fleet, right?
Again, a lot of times investors talk to me, and they ask me, "If you had $20 million, what would you do?" If I had an extra $20 million today, I would spend a portion of that building out my lease fleet, a significant portion, to set me up for longer term. Right now, I kind of need to sell them outright, get the cash, build more, and have that flywheel going. That's where I see OPT going in the future. What else do I have here? That's the team. That's it. Happy to answer any questions that anyone may have.
You've just done an equity raise?
We raised $10 million last week.
That's completed?
Completed. Yep, got the cash yesterday. Yep.
That actually gets you a pretty good jump on what you just-
It does. $10 million is great, especially for a company the size that we are. Obviously, we're a micro-cap company. That's great for us. In the grand scheme of things, if I'm talking building out a fleet of 100 buoys and 100 WAM-Vs, we could use $100 million. Some of the companies that we're competing with are talking about raises in that range. What else?
Yes. Is it a difficulty to get government grants?
I mean, we've moved away from that a little bit. When I first joined OPT, almost all of our revenue was grant revenue. We've moved more commercial. Now, the way the government has moved as well, if you've seen any of the announcements that the Navy has put out, they're not funding quite as much as they used to.
Under Trump's government, they're actually, as opposed to just giving you money and saying, "Build this," they're actually making investments in companies. They're not giving you money free and clear quite as much as they used to, which we're open to as well. That type of funding hasn't been significant for us recently. How we doing on time? We all done? You have one minute. One more minute. Any other questions? All right. Thank you all. I'm here if anybody wants to grab me. Happy to speak one-on-one.