Perfect. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today. This morning, I've got SoundThinking, formerly known as ShotSpotter, as our next presenting company. They're traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol SSTI. SoundThinking is a leading public safety technology company that delivers AI and data-driven solutions for law enforcement, civic leadership, and security professionals. Here to tell you more about the company are SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark and CFO Alan Stewart. Take it away.
Great. Yeah, thank you very much. It's good to be with you all here, and thank you very much for attending our investor presentation to learn a little bit more about SoundThinking, formerly known as ShotSpotter. Just a really quick disclaimer I'll let you briefly read through. Great, and now that we've done that housekeeping business, so really excited to be here and be working with this incredibly talented company known as SoundThinking. As was introduced to you, we're a leading public safety solutions company, really focused on providing technology and solutions to law enforcement professionals, and now commercial security directors to help them be more efficient, effective, and equitable in terms of how they co-produce public safety outcomes.
We started the company as ShotSpotter, and we're mostly known for the acoustic gunshot detection technology, but we've been very intentional about expanding our footprint into other adjacent solutions, all designed to help law enforcement professionals and security directors drive public safety outcomes. We put those solutions onto the SafetySmart platform. I'm gonna go through each of these relatively quickly, and we're gonna come back and spend a little bit more time on the ShotSpotter solution and PlateRanger and SafePointe. You'll see ShotSpotter there. That's our leading acoustic gunshot detection technology. This is a technology that was invented over twenty-five years ago by our founder, Dr. Bob Showen. It uses sensors to be able to detect, locate, and alert on instances of gunfire.
And the reason this solution is so critically important to police departments is that 90% or so of gunfire events are not reported in via traditional nine one one calls for service, which means that police are missing the opportunity to get to the scenes of gunshots and be able to intervene with life-saving care, oftentimes, when they find a gunshot wound victim. We also have a solution called ResourceRouter, which is a patrol management solution. So think of that as like Waze for cops. We're ingesting a bunch of information into a risk terrain model, and we're able to direct law enforcement resources to areas to have a preventative aspect on crime.
There's a concept called the Koper Curve, which suggests that if you can direct a law enforcement professional to a specific location during a specific time window, and they're there for about fifteen or so minutes, it's almost as though they were there for two to three hours, which, again, prevents crime and is found to be a very important solution that many police departments are using, given the diminution of policing resources we're seeing out there. We recently announced a reseller arrangement with a company called Rekor to resell their license plate reader solution. We're rebranding that on the SafetySmart platform as PlateRanger.
I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that solution later, so I'll just move over to CaseBuilder, which is a leading investigative case management solution that was really forked over from some work that the company we acquired had been doing with NYPD, with an on-prem version of their investigative case management solution known as CrimeCenter. They built a cloud-based commercial offering that we then have taken over and rebranded as CaseBuilder and have been selling it out in the marketplace to not only police departments, but also department of corrections customers, and even a couple of state-level investigative agencies that are doing casework.
So a very exciting opportunnity's ity for us there to again provide solutions to not only law enforcement professionals, but also Department of Corrections and investigative resources that sit at the state level, say, for the Department of Justice. CrimeTracer is our Google for Cops solution. That solution is basically aggregating over 1 billion CJIS records behind the firewall, data that usually sits in siloed databases of each individual police department. We're able to ingest all of that data, normalize it, index it, and make it searchable by any police department here in the United States. And what makes this so critically valuable to police departments is that we know criminals don't tend to operate in one jurisdiction. They tend to have their activities be cross-jurisdictional.
Someone, you know, engaged in nonsense in San Francisco is likely to be engaged in nonsense in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, et cetera. Being able to do link analysis with respect to having all those agencies present all their data into one pane of glass is incredibly helpful in accelerating investigations because now an investigator in Oakland can have access to data from San Francisco, Berkeley, Richmond, et cetera. The last solution that I'm gonna spend a little bit more time on later is SafePointe. It's our intelligent weapons detection solution. Think of it as an AI-based metal detector that is able to covertly screen individuals carrying concealed weapons without the friction of having them walk through a metal detector.
This is just a snapshot of the security market landscape in TAM. You'll see that acoustic gunshot detection and our other adjacent investigative solutions are really representing a $2.5 billion TAM, combined with, you know, gunshot detection, investigative search, case management, patrol management, et cetera. So very large TAM opportunity, super under-penetrated. When we add the Rekor PlateRanger solution, that's targeting a $2.5 billion TAM that's growing 15% CAGR, so very, again, attractive solution. A little bit more penetrated there, but there's a pretty significant replacement opportunity there for the folks that are participating in that market. And then the monster TAM opportunity is in the concealed weapons detection space. That's over a $20 billion TAM.
Again, significantly under-penetrated, solving a really important problem that we're seeing with respect to workplace violence. So we're pretty excited to be participating across the security market landscape, and very attractive TAM opportunities that give us significant opportunities to grow the business. So this is SoundThinking at a glance. I'll let you kinda take in some of these interesting numbers. For me, the most important numbers in this particular chart are the ones that sit in the middle, when you think about the efficiency by which we're able to do the work that we do, and I'll start kind of from your right to your left. It really kinda starts for us at with our Net Promoter Score.
This is really important in the market that we serve because that NPS really drives a very low CAC. That $0.52 to create $1 worth of annual contract value, that's pretty world-class in terms of the efficiency by which we're able to discover, create, and customers. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have such a strong reference base of, you know, rabid fans, I would say, with an NPS of 64, that they effectively act as our sales force in helping us drive solutions in the marketplace. I think typical SaaS recurring revenue models, they're typically spending north of $1, $1.25, maybe $1.40, as much as $1.40 to create $1 worth of ACV, and we're spending well less than half of that, so that's pretty attractive.
Then, when you compare that to the gross retention rate, we're able to drive a 99% gross retention rate, which then is reflected in a very high LTV. You put those two things together, and that's how you see the profitability of the company. Doesn't cost a lot of money to create a customer. Once we create a customer, we essentially do have that customer for life just because of the stickiness of the solution, and all that spins off of the Net Promoter Score. So we offer very differentiated solutions. We have very strong competitive moat around what we do. It really does start with, you know, strong intellectual property. There's over 34 issued patents, mostly around our acoustic gunshot detection space. That's a category that we created and effectively own.
It would be very challenging for someone to offer an acoustic gunshot detection solution that works at the same level of efficacy and efficiency as ours. We've seen a couple people attempt it. They've never really been quite successful because this... the work that we do is extraordinarily hard and difficult, and we've solved a lot of core technology problems. And you apply the experience curve benefits that we've had just deploying this technology and operating this technology over kind of twenty-plus years. We've learned a lot of things about edge cases. So when you think about deploying edge devices out in the wild, you have to think about weather, you know, storms, salt fog. You have to think about the terrain which you're deploying. You're dealing with hills, you're dealing with ambient noise, you know, you know, building reflections.
I mean, all that stuff, and we've learned a lot, and we're able to apply it every single time we deploy a system. Our trusted relationships, we have a very strong brand affinity with the market in which we sell, the buying centers. We do really do approach our solutions in a very consultative way in terms of how we go to market, and that breeds trust, and trust is really, really important in this particular vertical because, again, our customers don't compete with one another the way they typically do in a commercial environment. They actually collaborate. So when you build a great relationship and reputation with the chief of, say, you know, I'll pick Oakland, for example, that translates to the chief of Berkeley, San Francisco, et cetera.
So there's a bit of this virtuous cycle that we're able to get by really approaching our go-to sales, our go-to-market capability with a consultative sales approach. And again, the total addressable market provides a little bit of a competitive advantage for us as well because that market is contained enough to make it maybe less interesting, particularly around acoustic gunshot detection, for a big company like Motorola to wanna jump in, especially given the amount of time and energy it would take for them to do that, just to go after a $2.5 billion market. So I'll just spend a second or two on acoustic gunshot detection, since that's the core of what we do. It's about 65% of our business.
The way we bring this technology is about, we'll deploy about twenty-five or so sensors per sq mi. These sensors are about the size of a two-slice toaster, and they're basically designed to ignore ambient noise, but to recognize and timestamp impulsive noise, and so when a gun is fired, that pop, boom, or bang sound will emanate out, and if it hits three or more multiple sensors, we're able to timestamp that and then take the relative timestamp from each of the sensors that participated in that particular location to be able to derive the exact location from where that pop, boom, or bang happened. And then we'll go through a couple of filtering steps to knock down the pops, booms, and bangs that aren't, in fact, gunshots, and then publish the ones that are...
We have an Incident Review Center where not only are our system kind of knocking down the noise, but we have real-time reviewers that are listening to and looking at these events in real time and making the final determination before publishing the event. This all takes place typically within 30-45 seconds of the trigger being pulled. You can imagine the game-changing capability that a solution like this is versus, say, the 9-1-1 call that doesn't happen 90% of the time, and even the 10% of the time where you do get the 9-1-1 call, it typically happens after a minute or two of reflection. Was that a gunshot? Was that not a gunshot?
Honey, call, please." "No, I'm not gonna call." "Please call." "Okay, I'll call." Then they call, and they says, "Okay, I think I heard gunshots." And then the call taker will ask the question: "Well, where did they come from?" And the person, oftentimes, because most gunfire happens at 2:00 A.M. in the morning, at midnight, they heard it from indoors, they have no idea where the gunshot came from.
So they say, "Hey, I think it happened out there." Out there is a really difficult place to dispatch, a difficult way to dispatch an officer to say, "Hey, gunfire happened out there." So what happens, unfortunately, in those limited situations where there is a nine one one call, and if you do ride-alongs with officers, they'll tell you it takes them about ten to 15 minutes to close out a nine one one shots fired call, because literally, they just have to drive around blocks and see if they see anything. They're not getting out of their car to potentially aid a victim, recover physical forensic evidence in the form of shell casings and the like. So that's why this technology really is a game changer in helping police departments better respond to violent crime. So I'll take up SafePoint here a little bit.
So it's another bit of an edge solution here. Here, we're deploying sensors that are completely covert. You'll see a picture of our bollards there that are basically sensors. It's using a physics principle called magnetic moment, where there's basically a set of magnets that have a XYZ orientation in each of those bollards. And what it's designed to do, when a ferrous object passes through its field, they get excited, and guns tend to excite these bollards in a way that we're able to capture a gun signature versus, say, keys, a laptop, and the like. And what's really cool and interesting about this is that you could see that you could walk by those bollards, and you'd never even know it.
So you're not going through a traditional metal detector, even a fancy one like Evolv, where you have to kind of slow down and then just have that experience around going through a metal detector. And I think in certain industry verticals, this is really key. Say, for example, casinos, you don't want your clients going through metal detectors. Hospitals, same thing. So to the extent that you can do security and do it covertly with very low friction, that's what you're looking to do. So this is a chart here that kind of describes, in our frame of reference, kind of the security dilemma, and the two extremes are, you think about, you know, do nothing, right? So you have very low...
You have a very low security posture, but an amazing visitor experience, but that's not acceptable for a lot of industries. In certain situations, you have to do everything, where you have very high security, but then you also have a very low customer or visitor experience. So think about TSA. It slows you down. You have to divest yourself of keys, laptops, and the like. Take off your shoes. Not a great experience at all. So what we're looking to do is provide a high level of safety with a great visitor experience where it's almost frictionless. A person literally could walk past those bollards all day long and not be stopped for any reason, unless, of course, they're carrying a concealed weapon, and they should be stopped. So a very attractive business.
A lot of similarities to our ShotSpotter business in terms of us having to have full telemetry to these bollards and maintaining them, and that's sold on a recurring revenue basis as well. So that's just a couple examples of what the alerts look like. Here, let me push that out. So, PlateRanger, this is our license plate reader and vehicle recognition solution. So think of it as a AI-based solution that can not only scan the license plates but the type of vehicle as well, and then also be able to tell aspects about what that vehicle is doing. The integration opportunities with our other solutions are really quite interesting. If you think about combining a ShotSpotter alert with PlateRanger, so shots are fired, ShotSpotter detects it at a specific location.
You're then able to go to your PlateRanger solution and be able to say, "Okay, what cars came in that area, like, two minutes before shots fired, and then what came out, like, thirty seconds after?" And that can really kick off a really interesting investigative process now, where you're then taking that data, you're putting it in a CrimeTracer, and then you're doing the correlation. Okay, I see this automobile with this license plate. Who's it registered to? Where do they live? Who else lives in that house? Have they been involved in any other criminal activity, and the like? So really, really interesting synergy possibilities with PlateRanger and CrimeTracer and ShotSpotter. So a moment on our growth strategy. We're definitely about acquiring new customers and then cross-selling our solutions to those existing customers.
In the case of ShotSpotter, we definitely look to see our customers expand their footprint. About 40% of our customers, after they deploy ShotSpotter, will expand at least once. There's a subset that expand multiple times. In fact, Albuquerque is a great example of that. They started relatively modest, and I think they've had about four expansions, and now they're, I think, our third-largest customer behind Chicago, ShotSpotter customer behind Chicago, New York, and Detroit. We'll continue to innovate on the product side. These solutions are getting better, cheaper, faster for us, and that's good, and we're able to pass along some of those benefits to our customers.
We're gonna be looking to grow our international footprint much more significantly, especially for the non-ShotSpotter solutions, where those ShotSpotter solutions are basically limited to international expansion, where there's gun violence, and from time to time, as we have done in the past, we'll look at strategic M&A, and we'll always be focused on retention. This is our success formula. I talked a little bit about NPS and the importance of NPS, and the way we're able to drive that high Net Promoter Score is, you know, we focus on products that have an extremely tight product-market fit. We deliver high-quality solutions. We approach our go-to-market with a very consultative long-term greedy approach, I would say, and we're maniacal about customer success.
I mean, we have a whole organization that's really built on, now that you've acquired the technology, how do you use the technology to drive the outcomes that you're looking to do that? And if we're successful in doing that, then, you know, we have high NPS, which then drives, you know, low CAP, which we talked about, approximately $0.50 to create $1 worth of ACV, and very high LTV, which is a great model to build long-term, profitable growth. And I think with that, Alan, I'm going to turn it over to you to do some financials.
All right. Thank you, Ralph. Okay, just go through a couple of things here real quick for you. Just in terms of the, the history, we've continued to grow. We started out when public, which is one software solution, which was the ShotSpotter, and as you see, we now have six. Revenue continues to grow. This year, the estimated guidance is up from 92 last year to 104 to 106. This, it's a little bit of an eye chart here, but I'm gonna let you focus on a couple of key areas. I would take a look at the gross profit margins, and the gross profit margins, this is last year from Q1 for the next six quarters. So gross, gross margins are increasing from 55% all the way up to 60% now.
I'm gonna show you another slide that ultimately that 60% is gonna be closer to 70% or maybe even north of that. The other thing that's interesting is down at the very bottom in terms of the actual dollars and the Adjusted EBITDA, $2.9, $2.4 last Q1, Q2 of 2023, and you can see we're already back up closer to the $3, and this Q2 was over $5 million. This $3 million was actually a little lower because we had a very expensive all hands meeting that cost a little over $1 million, or that would have been north of $4 million as well. So this is continuing to go and increase on percentage basis as we go forward.
So a couple of things that Ralph mentioned in terms of the customer retention, north of 100% is something we're very proud of. The attrition that we've had in the last four years was, like, 1% or less. So in order that 1% or less, you know, you've got to have. That means 99% of your customers are staying with you or expanding. So, we're continuing to do this incredibly well for the net revenue retention rate. Ralph also mentioned about how effective we are, not just because of the NPS, but also because we're very effective about who we hire, how we hire them, and we're, you know, keeping that, that sales efficiency ratio down about $0.52 per dollar of ACV. That's very, very low, as Ralph mentioned as well.
So in terms of the operational leverage to improve, where we're going to get to, this year, we said the guidance for the adjusted EBITDA is, and we don't normally give mid-quarter guidance, but it's 18%-20% for adjusted EBITDA. We're gonna be getting to 40% adjusted EBITDA. And how are we gonna get there? We're gonna continue to increase the gross margin. Gross margin can improve from that 60% because as the revenue grows for all the solutions that we have, the cost of goods sold across all those is growing at a lower rate than the actual revenue. Specific examples for, like in the ShotSpotter alone, we have what's called an Incident Review Center. That Incident Review Center is the trained acoustic experts that listen to when they have an actual potential incident.
They listen to it before they send it out to the police or the dispatch. As we grow from, you know, $65 million revenue to $100 million revenue, the people at Incident Review Center might go from 25 people to maybe 30 people. So adding 5 more, that might be in the night shift, might be in the middle. We don't need to go and add 50% more in the Incident Review Center, so the cost of goods sold on a percentage basis goes down. We've also seen for the last decade, our actual telecom costs have gone down. It used to be where each sensor that we have, as Ralph mentioned, is about 25 sensors per sq mi, is about $11-$12 per month per sensor. That's now down around $3 per month per sensor.
So that continues to go down. As that happens, our gross margin also goes up, as well as international sales. We're able to charge two and a half to four times as much per sq mi for our international ShotSpotter deployments. That is also gonna increase gross margin. From an operating expense side, we've already done a lot of the increase over the last couple of years. Sales and marketing, about three years ago, we were down around twenty-two people. We're now over 50 people. It makes sense to do that because we now have more solutions we're selling, but we also spent more on the customer success aspect of it, which, as Ralph mentioned, is incredibly important for us to make sure we have people that aren't necessarily doing the sales, but they're making sure that the customers are really happy...
and learning the best practices that other customers are using and doing. R&D, we have added more capability over the last, mainly the last year and a half. We pretty much have just about everything we need in sales and marketing and R&D. G&A isn't going to go up a lot other than things that normally would change as you continue to grow, things like insurance. Other than that, there's not a lot of other things that we have to add to get this, the next $50 million of revenue. So you might see there will be some increase in costs, but it's going to be a lot lower than the revenue growth. All of that's going to increase the Adjusted EBITDA. So that's basically where we're going to get to.
If you take a look at where we were, Q1, you know, revenue growth was 23% for the quarter. Gross margin was a little less than 59%. This year, we're going to be growing about 13% with a gross margin 60%. In the middle of the range, the guidance Adjusted EBITDA would be 19%. Long term, we believe, although it may be a little bit of flatness in 2025, we think longer term our model, because of the things that Ralph talked about, especially with the SafePoint and the PlateRanger, some of these are going to grow at a significantly higher rate. We believe that our CAGR is going to be about 15% going forward, with a 70% gross margin and a 40% Adjusted EBITDA.
When you think about a 40% adjusted EBITDA, if we're at around 160 million in revenue, so let's say we're not talking about a decade from now, we're talking about four years from now. So, the adjusted EBITDA is going to continue to increase over the next four years, getting to that 40%. And at that point, think about 40% adjusted EBITDA, what that does with your cash flow on $160 million in revenue. It's a significant amount of cash. We only have right now four million in debt. We spent about $70 million over the last five years buying companies that we've done the acquisitions and just doing share repurchases, and we still only have $4 million in debt.
By the way, our cash balance ended last year, ended 2023 at $5.8 million. We now have over $15 million in cash. We're continuing to generate cash along the way, as the business continues to grow, and even that is at the Adjusted EBITDA margin that we're talking about right now. I think that's the last slide. I think we have a little bit of time for Q&A, but not much.
Not much. Maybe one quick one, if anybody's got a burning question. If not, they're also around throughout the day.
Sure, sure. As far as I know, you mentioned acoustic is 65% revenue. Just from my reading, I know there's been some issues with a pushback from some organizations, even though the technology works, obviously. Where do you think your next big product is going to come from? And do you sell to police departments, or do you have to go through, like, the city? How does the selling actually happen?
Yeah, so I think it's really interesting. If you think about it, we went public with about 460 miles. We're now over 1,100 miles, so we've continued to grow, and that's just the ShotSpotter itself. In terms of continuing to grow, we're going to add about another 100 miles every year. That's pretty normal for us. We're going to add about probably 20 new cities this year. Last year, we added even more miles than that. International is one of the biggest areas that we're going to expand from the ShotSpotter side, but frankly, from the revenue that could get us closer to that 160 is most likely going to be the SafePoint in terms of the weapons detection. Very small. It was only $1 million last year.
This year, it's going to be multiples of that and next year, multiples of that. So that is something we're really excited about. With a $20-plus billion TAM and something that we believe is incredibly effective, you know, that's where a lot of the revenue growth is going to come from.
If I could just add on to that, I mean, it's a slightly different buying center. So yeah, I think I'm okay. It's a slightly different buying center, so with acoustic gunshot detection, we're selling to police departments. There's the politics involved, the funding streams, et cetera. With SafePointe, the verticals we're focused on are healthcare vertical, because that's where the number one place for workplace violence takes place, sadly. So different buying center. Also, casinos is a very important vertical for us, given the covert nature, by the way we do concealed weapons detection, and then also high-end financial institutions. We're already deployed in a couple of very well-known investment banks that you can probably figure out where they are by looking at their lobby. So these are different buying centers with different budgetary streams.
What we found quite interesting when we were doing our diligence on SafePoint in prior to the acquisition, and we're talking to some of the customers, although it's a different buying center, a lot of the folks that were very familiar with ShotSpotter/SoundThinking, they were the directors of security. Why? Because they'd spent 20 years at NYPD, and then they retire, and then they become the director of security for XYZ Investment Bank, or in the case of Sutter Health, Sam, Chief Somers was the chief of police in Sacramento. He's now the senior VP of security for Sutter Health. So a lot of ex-cops are directors of security, so much more attractive buying center, frankly, shorter sales cycle, but people that know us and are familiar with the brand.
That's it.
Perfect.
Thank you.
We appreciate all you guys' time-
Great question.
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