Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us during the Lytham Partners 2024 Investor Select Conference. My name is Adam Lowensteiner, our Vice President of Lytham Partners. Before we begin, for those not familiar, Lytham Partners is one of the country's leading investor relations firms. With more than two decades of corporate access experience, we have built one of the industry's most diverse and effective platforms for connecting small cap companies with high quality and focused institutional investors, while creating a framework of best practices in all aspects of investor relations. Today's discussion is hopefully yet another example where we can bring value to multiple constituents. Our next presentation comes from Spire Global, ticker symbol SPIR, that is Sam, Peter, Indiana, Romeo on the NYSE. Presenting from the company today is its Chief Financial Officer, Leo Basola.
Today, I've asked Leo to briefly run through the slide presentation, and we will then engage in a fireside chat-like Q&A session. Also in attendance is Ben Hackman, Director of Investor Relations at Spire, and Sergio Heiber of Heiber Research, who'll be co-moderating the fireside chat discussion. We'll dive into the discussion in a moment, but one final item I want to remind everyone that Spire Global is available for one-on-one meetings. If you've not already signed up, please send me an email at lowensteiner@lythampartners.com, or visit lythampartners.com/select2024. From there, you can click on the Investor Registration button to make your one-on-one selections. With that said, let me now turn the presentation over to Leo Basola, CFO of Spire Global. Leo, please proceed.
Adam, Sergio, great to see you. Thank you for having us. Let me start by saying that Spire is a company that leverages space to solve the most critical problems on Earth. But Spire is not simply a satellite manufacturing company. At our core, we are a global data and analytics company, and we own hard-to-acquire proprietary data obtained from the ultimate vantage point, space, to really solve the biggest issues on Earth. Let's go to the next page, Ben. And, as just a quick reminder, we are a public company, and we're going to make some forward-looking statements. So please, if you could read through this carefully, that would be great. Now, before we go into the Spire details, I want to take an opportunity to speak briefly about satellites. And why do we do this?
Well, you know, when if I were to talk to you about transportation, for example, you would your mind would go quickly to asking me: "Okay, are you talking about a car? Are you talking about a train, an airplane, or a ship?" I think satellites is a relatively new, and space is a relatively new industry, so we want to spend a bit of time dissecting for you how we think about satellites. We think about satellites in three categories: the looking, the talking, and the listening categories. Let me decompose this a bit further. Looking are those satellites that have payloads with imagery capabilities. They take pictures, they film the Earth from space, and you probably have seen some of these pictures.
I have one in my background, you see one in the background of my presentation, and you have heard about companies like BlackSky and Planet. And you know, you've seen Nat Geo and other documentaries with these products. We also have the talking satellites, which are the likes of Viasat and Starlink, and what they do is they have payloads that allow data to go from one location to another. And then we have the talking satellites. And then we have the listening satellites, sorry. So the listening satellites are those that capture the sound of Earth through the capture of radio frequencies, particularly those emitted signals by ships and aircraft and global navigation satellite systems, so GNSS constellations that we call GPS or Galileo, okay?
Why we talk about these three is because we don't compete across segments. I get this question a lot. I mean, will Starlink or SpaceX go into your turf, or do you compete with Planet? And the answer is simply no. We are more complementary of each other, so we compete within the segment, and you can see some of our competitors listed there. We believe that Spire is a strong leader in that segment. But for example, when we find something through listening to radio frequencies that we're interested in, we may reach out to Planet and ask them for a couple of visuals, pictures, right, that could enhance our understanding of what we're seeing. And for example, we have some illegal trade on the maritime side, or illegal fishing, or GNSS jamming devices.
So as we use our technology to identify where those locations are, we may complementary use some, you know, looking imagery to get those reports enhanced with some pictures. Okay? And just a quick description also of our satellites. Our satellites orbit the Earth in Low Earth Orbit. They basically travel at very high speeds, 25,000 km/h , so 17,500 mi/h And they orbit from north to south, the polar orbit. So think about our satellites circumventing the Earth and the Earth underneath rotating. So every 90 minutes we do one orbit, so we cover this thing 16 x a day. And during that journey, as the Earth rotates underneath, we are able to sound different locations, right, within, you know, the path of our constellation.
We cover basically the Earth more than 100 x, fully, with our fully deployed constellations. Our satellites are fairly small. Their bodies are basically the size of a bottle of wine to a case of wine. And then, of course, you have the solar panels expanding to the sides. And most important piece is that our satellites are also software-defined. Our antennas can capture multiple radio frequencies and be repurposed for different uses. So the most important thing I wanted for you to take away from this page is that we have a fully deployed constellation that is fully operational and scalable. So the next page will give you a little bit of our ideas on the stats, right, for us. Spire, we're called Spire Global, and global is not only in our name.
As you can see from this picture, global is really who we are. We were founded in 2012, we listed in the New York Stock Exchange, 9 years later in 2021, and as Adam said, we trade under the Spire, SPIR, ticker and name. Over the last 11 years, we went from a very, I'd say, humble beginning in the typical San Francisco garage, where we were designing our brand-new satellite form factor, to building, testing, assembling, and launching over 170 satellites in 35 campaigns on 10 different vehicles. This is equivalent to a space heritage of over 600 years, and today we have a fully deployed constellation covering the Earth more than 100 times per day.
We have over 30 ground stations with over 70 antennas in 16 countries that help us manage the constellation and also downlink information from our satellites, to then upload them into the cloud and turn them into data that we can resell multiple times. We have over 400 employees that come from 50 different countries and nine offices. We have over 800 customer solutions in 65 countries, and we will deliver over $105 million in 2023 revenues. We guided to 107 and 105 as a minimum, right, during Q3. All of our infrastructure is really scalable, and that's what we have been focusing over the past few years.
In the next page, I will basically talk to you briefly about our technologies and how we apply them to the markets. And this, I'm going to spend a bit more time on this page because I think this is the meat of my presentation, okay? As I mentioned earlier, our satellites receive radio frequencies from signals from the maritime industry, the AIS signals from the ships, from the aviation industry, the airplane signals called ADS-B. And a bit of background here, these signals were developed for example, the maritime, for safety reasons. So the ships emit a regular, at a regular interval, signals of where the vessel position is and their heading, and they were originally designed to, you know, reach 50 mi, a 50-mile radius.
We capture all of these signals from 350 mi in space, right? So think about 500+ km . And, and when you do that, you have to cleanse and dedupe all of that information and turn all of that, let's say, radio frequency noise into clear data sets that you can then productize. And that's a little bit of the secret sauce of what we have done. Similarly, on the weather side, back in the 1970s, the Mars and Venus NASA missions devised a method to profile the atmosphere composition of those planets. So they effectively shipped two satellites, one emitted a signal, and the other one received the signal.
So as the signal, and similar to our GNSS radio frequency signal, those signals goes through the atmosphere, they bend, and as they bend, you can do math to define what is the temperature, what's the pressure of the composition of the atmosphere as the signal goes through the atmosphere and bends. So we're talking 1970s. Okay, in 1990s, NASA and ESA put some work together to prove out that that could be applied to Earth, and that today we call those profiles radio occultation profiles or ROs. And Spire is the biggest producer of radio occultation profiles daily that then get used and sold for, forecasting, right? So when you think about all of this data, we don't only sell to the maritime and aviation companies, right? We sell into a full ecosystem that uses this data.
We sell to port authorities, we sell to traders, to insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, you name it. There's a multiplicity of uses for this, even in the aviation industry, I mean, there are companies that want to track maintenance of the airplane, so we have customers like that. On the weather side, we sell our ROs to NOAA, to NASA, to EUMETSAT, for example, and we have also use of this in our own forecasting. So Spire has developed high-resolution forecasting with this data that we produce. And that's why this model is so scalable. At the end of the day, it's the same data that we can sell again and again, and of course, we make good profits from it.
So over 65% gross profit, and we're aiming to get to 70% gross profit as our revenue traction get us there. And that covers basically sales of data of the top three segments that you have on the left-hand side on this page. The fourth segment, which I think is the accelerator, even on top of what we have in terms of potential, is space services. Here we took a little bit of a, of a play from the AWS playbook. So with all the installed infrastructure that we have and our space heritage, we decided to become a satellite-as-a-service provider. So how does this work? Well, a customer comes and describes to us a mission. They usually bring together a payload that they need for their own mission.
So let's say a camera or a sensor, some sort of equipment that we then integrate into our own form factor or bus of the satellite. That integration then turns into manufacturing a satellite, testing it, helping the customer launch, and then eventually we operate that satellite. So we commission the satellite, it is ours, but the customer funded all of this investment early on, and then we turn that satellite asset into a data subscription for the customer. So for the next three or four years, the customer gets access to that data. In some cases, we have payloads that we share, so that satellite may produce some data that we can use. In some cases, we can get access to summarized data or non-critical data.
So as you can see, I'm talking a lot about data because really our business model is about data. I mean, we get the data proprietarily from space, and that's our technology, but effectively we are a data company. So we, as you can see on the left-hand side, estimate our addressable market to be $100 billion, and we have had a consultant give us, you know, the 100+ applications that we can, that we can turn this into. If you think about the math of our customers and how many we have as potential customers, we currently have over 800 customers, and we think this is in the 150-200 thousand customers that would be interested in this. So the growth opportunity is really, really strong.
Now, I think the most compelling data point is our revenue growth. So we started really productizing and selling this in 2017, so it took us about six years to get to a full constellation and data provision and so on. And then from 2017 onwards, we grew the company from $1 million to what will be $107 million for 2023 per our guidance in Q3. So that is a compounded growth rate of 118%. But if you even chop it earlier, I mean, our growth has been in the +30% every quarter for the last few quarters. And that's what we anticipate for the near future, our growth to look like, right, in terms of our business opportunity. So, with that, I'll go to the next page.
The next page really talks briefly more in detail about the datasets and how we think about data. If you think about the three or four segments of data, the first thing that you capture is all of the data from the satellites. That's the raw data that we then turn into something that is legible. So this may be all the math and the soundings from the GNSS RO profiles, right? Turned into effectively an RO profile, temperature, pressure, humidity for a particular area of the atmosphere. And the ADS-B and the AIS signals, as I said, beacons of signals that come, we turn those into clean data, right? That we can store over time, accumulate, and sell as raw data. There's a lot of sales attached to that type of product provision.
Then on top of that, we turn that into smart data. So we integrate that proprietary data with third-party data assets. This is very clear, for example, when you think about maritime industry. Close to a port, there's so much activity that it is worth to buy terrestrial AIS signals, right? That enhance our provision of satellite AIS signals. So we can track the ship very clearly when they're in open waters 'cause there is not a lot of noise. We do a much better job if we integrate terrestrial AIS data in a port where it's very congested, right? And, effectively, that then turns into smart data because we can do some trending and historical data and so on and so forth, so that has, again, more value to it.
Then we put all of that historical data through our proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms, and then we turn that into what we call predictive analytics, and that effectively are almost solutions, right? That we could sell. I would say that that is a journey for us, and we have done a fantastic job selling these kind of solutions in the maritime and the weather applications, much less on the, I would say, aviation section. But we have our own forecast. We have our own high-resolution forecast on the weather section that we're, that we're selling very well into the industry. And then on top of that, we have basically what I would call prescriptive or solutions, right?
Where we effectively create a like a red flag or like a an early advisory, you know, proposition for the customer. So in this case, it's not only about predictive analytics, but just prescriptive, what should you do now that you know that this may happen, right? And for that, we sometimes partner with other vendors that would create a user interface or integrate our data into their solutions, right? So our data gets sold in many different ways. And as I said, as a data company, this is highly scalable, and we have a lot of opportunities to continue to grow. So on the next page, you will see our financials, and briefly, we-- I think we always talk about these inflection points. Over the past quarters, we have been.
We haven't changed our tack on this, and we have been delivering on our plan. We are heading towards profitability and cash generation. So in Q4, we told the street that we would be cash flow positive from an operating standpoint, that we would have Adjusted EBITDA positive in the first quarter or second quarter, and then Free Cash Flow positive in the second half of 2024. And this is the trajectory that you can see. Our growth is really fueling our ability to turn profit and to turn cash, and we're, you know, on a very good path to really become fairly independent, okay, from a cash generation standpoint. So that's my presentation. Hopefully, you enjoyed it, and thank you very much. So I'm ready for our Q&A.
Great. Thanks, Leo, for the overview. Let's expand on a few topics. You did a great job of discussing your proprietary technology that you have and how it works. What's the competitive landscape like? Can you discuss that a little bit and how you compete?
Yeah, so again, I told you across the segments, right, that I described, there isn't really a lot of competition across the segments, but within the segments, we have a very strong leading position. With over 100 satellites in operation, we effectively are the biggest provider of the RO profiles that we have, and that basically shows on the market share that we have on those RO profiles for NASA and EUMETSAT and how we, you know, distinguish ourselves in quality and quantity, right, when it comes to winning these deals.
Similarly, when you think about applications on the security side, we basically have a very strong position on radio frequency geolocation, which has become super relevant in this particular period, where there's a lot of security and, you know, defense issues brewing. You can see we recently published a Red Sea white paper, right? Where we say, hey, how our solutions can provide a significant amount of value to the maritime industry, to decide what they're gonna do, whether avoid that, you know, Red Sea route and then add a lot of, you know, Cape Horn transit or. We basically have a lot of good information that we use for that data set, and we're certainly a comfortable number one on the maritime AIS, you know, production.
So again, from a competitor standpoint, I think we have a few good competitors, but we have a leading position in those two, I'd say segments. On the aviation side, I'd say that we're still in early stages, right, of you know, growing. Our data is a bit less valuable to the aviation industry because our latency is a bit longer than they need for air traffic control. But as you probably have seen from the news, we were awarded, you know, by ESA, a contract to basically allow us to, and the contract is called EURIALO, to develop an inter-satellite link enabled, I'd say, capability.
The capability we have, we need to prove to them that we then want to deploy 100 satellites or so to get this going, where we would have a redundant, I'd say air traffic control with independent geolocation validation of all the air traffic that you have. And we're in the midst of working on that, and in the next few months, you will see a significant amount of growth coming from, from that solution. Yeah.
So you mentioned a little bit about the Red Sea. There's a lot going on geopolitically, especially in the maritime industry.
Yes
Is that affecting your business at all, at all? And if you can elaborate on some of the verticals you're involved in and how the visibility is strong for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, so the secular demand growth that we see comes from these two big drivers, right? So it's weather, and it is the security issues that we're having, right? And how defense and how the governments react to this. It is driving, of course, growth, but we believe that growth is going to be there for the long term. There is always conflict in the world, and because we are a global company, we have data from across the globe, there are going to be always interest in intelligence around the things that we mentioned. So one of our latest offerings that we developed, you know, actively during 2023, was the Radio Frequency Geolocation. So there's a lot of, I'd say, activity around interference and jamming of GPS signals.
So you know, the GPS signals are used for defense purposes. If you disable the GPS signal, then you get less capability in terms of applying your defense infrastructure. So there's a lot of emphasis and desire to buy some of those solutions, and that's where we see a large vector of growth for 2024 and 2025, because we have a relatively moderate position, right, currently with intelligence agencies. So that's going to be a big chunk of our growth. I also think that if you think about the four segments that I mentioned, right, maritime, aviation, and weather, those three have secular drivers, right? So weather is going to impact significantly aviation and maritime. We have solutions that combine our weather forecasting with the AIS and ADS-B tracking solutions that we have.
So the full suite of solutions where we can optimize, you know, a route for a ship to avoid a storm, to improve on their greenhouse gas emissions, that's really where we see the growth coming from, is the deployment of that data into a suite of predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics to improve on these performance issues. Now, for us also, the application of all of this skill and technology and know-how to the industry for the satellite as a service provision, that is a big driver for us. McKinsey said it in one of their publications. The companies, like, you know, maybe 20 years ago, people are thinking about the internet as something that they need to be in.
Companies now probably need to think through about space and satellite in data generation as something they need to be in, right? So we see a lot of demand for expertise around a person that can or a company that can provide a white glove kind of approach to generating this data from space, and this is really what we're offering with the satellite-as-a-service offering.
Great, thank you. I think Sergio has a couple questions that we'll take.
I have two questions, Leo, and I'm gonna ask my questions, and then I need to take care of a family responsibility, and I will leave it up to Adam to conclude the Q&A. But can you describe the selling cycle? Can you tell us about your sales team, how the sales team operates, and how you attract new customers? Do you tend to do land and expand to get somebody in the door and then expand those services?
Yeah, great, great questions. And look, we have 45-50 salespeople, and then on top of that, another 20-25 people on the marketing side. We have direct sales for most of our sales. We sell through some partners, but generally speaking, it's a direct sales type of approach. On the data side, it's a relatively shorter cycle, so from a lead to a contract, it could take anything between 2-3 months. On the space services side, where the customer comes in with a mission, and we need to, you know, design a new R&D solution for them and so on, those sales cycles could take anything between 9 to 14 months, 16 months. We have some that span really, really long periods of time.
But we have a good order book, and we have, of course, a significant amount of pipeline to justify the guidance that we've put forward. And what you could see also is that our net recurring revenue is fairly high, above 100%. So if you want to do an LTV computation on us, you're gonna get an infinite value because we effectively have less attrition than what we can achieve through renewing and upselling and increasing our prices on our subscriptions at the moment for existing customers. So it is really fantastic, and from a modeling standpoint, our data provision is seen as very valuable data, and as I said, above 100% in the recurring revenues that generates a significant amount of value and very predictable revenues also when you think about our subscription business.
I think the one piece where we could be a bit less predictive, and we stated this in our 10-Qs and 10-K risk factors, is when you think about pre-Space on the Space as a Service provision, there are things that don't depend from us. So if a launch gets delayed and we have revenue attached to a particular milestone on the launch, and the launch moves from December to January, like what we're gonna see now with NorthStar, and the launch that Rocket Lab is providing for us towards the end of January, of course, there's some revenue movement from December to January, right? But generally speaking, our revenue is fairly predictive, and that's why we have been able to hit all of our guidance and for the past few quarters. So yeah.
My second question is about data, and you, as you said, you're a data company. Can you tell us more about how much of the data is proprietary? Do you use third-party data provider or AI companies or machine learning from other sources than Spire?
Yeah. So most of the models that we have, we have developed ourselves, right? So we have our own weather team that developed our forecasting models. And of course, there are some things. Like, when you sell the data to NOAA, NOAA being a government agency, they want the data to be available for the benefit of the globe. So once we sell it to NOAA, a month later, they make it available to everybody, right? So that's the design of the RO profiles. Now, we can use the RO profiles, and there's a bunch of RO profiles that don't qualify for what they want from a quality assurance standpoint. So we have a bunch of data that is proprietary to us, that we use in our own models when I think about ROs.
But then we sell also specific ROs to EUMETSAT, as I said, that are not in the NOAA compound, and so on. The RO piece, I think, is very important because we're currently selling at a level of, you know, 6,000-7,000 ROs per day, right? When we can effectively improve our forecast up to 20,000 ROs. So we believe that both the agencies and even our own forecast would benefit from higher number of ROs per day that we incorporate into those models. It's taking a bit longer than we anticipated to get to those numbers, but that's a portion of how we're gonna grow only on that data provision. We own, except for the ROs that we sell to NOAA, and then they make available to everybody. But they only sell the RO.
They don't sell the underlying data. They don't sell it. They make it available. So we give to them all of the data, and the RO profiles are made available to the rest of the world if they get through the NOAA QA piece. The rest of the data is proprietary. We own it, and we are not giving rights to the data unless there's a significant benefit of doing so, right? So in some cases, some partners want to use that data for derivative products and so on. So we allow them to do that for a price. But as you know, and my background working with Equifax taught me how to really profit from proprietary data, and that is the main value of this company long term, right?
Yes, we own that data fully, and we keep rights to it, okay? And we're able to really monetize it in many, many different ways.
Great. Thank you, Sergio. A couple more here. We have a few more minutes, Leo. How should investors think about how large your business can grow, and how do you get there? I mean, the company has been growing very rapidly, as you mentioned, with 34% growth year-over-year in Q3, and it was the ninth consecutive quarter of growth above 30% on a year-over-year basis. I mean, can the company, y ou know, can the company sustain these levels of growth rates, and if so, why?
Yeah, yeah. So we haven't given guidance for 2024, so if you're listening to our earnings call for Q4, you'll get the guidance. But generically speaking, right? So 30%-40% growth is on an ongoing basis for the foreseeable future, so 2-3 years, certainly something that we can aspire to. If you think about it, our net renewal rates are basically a simple way to think about it. So we don't lose customers. We actually grow our existing base by either pricing or upselling to the existing customers that we have. We do have a little bit of attrition, so I'd say 5%-10% attrition. But then you have pricing and additional upselling that allows us to get to above 100%, net renewal rate.
The other piece is some of our revenues are is attached to the space services segment, and and in most cases, those start slow. So we may get a four-satellite order for a particular application. So let's say NorthStar, we're launching them at the end of the month, they have space observation, right? And four satellites is not what they want. They want a full constellation of 26 satellites to be able to cover the Earth. So when you think about our growth, yeah, this is the first order, and that created a significant amount of revenue, and then from there on, with these four satellites, a subscription plan. Well, that subscription plan will last for 3-4 years, and over the next three years, I'm going to add another layer to the cake that will increase my growth, right?
So it's a cohort, if you want, approach to my space services business. And we have multiple examples, GHG, North Star, a bunch of other companies that maybe don't want me to disclose their names, that are committed to not only doing a first iteration of a satellite, but really a full constellation of a satellite. So a lot of growth there. And then when you think about what I mentioned before, we have not expanded as much into the data and analytics and predictive analytics phases. I mean, we sell a lot of data, right? And we sell a lot of different types of data, but we haven't really made a lot of strides into data analytics. This is how we're gonna grow our next phase of growth.
And then, as I said, land and expand is really important for us. Thinking about a 10%-15% growth on new accounts or new customers is straightforward. Through pricing and expansion and the recurrence of our business, getting to 30%, 30%-40% is probably in the cards with a high, I'd say, level of confidence, okay, for the future.
So one more question here. You know, if you can execute on that, can you discuss a little bit some of the financial highlights, you know, investors should be looking out for? You know, also, specifically, can you discuss the company's capital structure at a high level and your plans to improve it over time, especially with positive cash flow and profitability within sight?
Yeah. So, as I discussed also during the third quarter, our milestones for 2023 and 2024 are cash flow positive from an operating standpoint in Q4, in Q1 or Q2, adjusted EBITDA positive, and in second half and from second half, free cash flow positive. And as we achieve these milestones, our goal is really to reinject some of that cash into the company for additional growth on the marketing side. And, of course, as I mentioned, our growth at 30%, let's say, as an example, no guidance yet, okay? We basically have a 65%-70% gross profit, so there's a significant amount of read-through of that growth into cash for our P&L.
So I will reinvest some of that cash, particularly to accelerate the growth, quickly to the $200 -$300 million over the near time future. There may be some opportunities for M&A. If they come, we will certainly talk to our shareholders and to our, you know, lenders, like Blue Torch Capital, to see how, you know, they think about that. We also have an important milestone for us to try to refinance the Blue Torch facility, and we have a $120 million facility initially. Now it's at $117.5 million. And we think that when we got that facility, our financials required a, let's say, cost of capital that was risk-adjusted much higher than what we could get now.
So a big chunk of what I'm trying to do during 2024-2025 is refinance that facility and get to a lower cost of capital for the company. That will and again, put another gear into our cash generation and our ability to continue to grow.
Leo, Ben, and Sergio, thank you very much for your time today. We greatly appreciate it. To anyone out there who's not already signed up for our one-on-one meeting, again, please send me an email at lowensteiner@lythampartners.com, or you can visit lythampartners.com/select2024 and click the Investor Registration button. We hope you all enjoy the conference, and thank you very much.
Thank you.