Guys here. Please go right ahead. Thank you very much.
All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate you spending your time with me this afternoon. SoundThinking, I'm Alan Stewart, I'm the CFO. I'm going to be talking about the company today. It's, again, only 25 minutes, so we'll try to get moving here. I do, of course, have to show you that we are going to be carrying and talking about some forward-looking statements. Of course, you've all read these a 100 times with other presentations. If you do need to look at things, please look at all our SEC filings. We'll get you some more information. SoundThinking, some of you may know the company. We went public in 2017. At that time, we were a one-software product company. Since then, we've expanded quite a bit. We now have what we call the Safety Smart Platform.
In fact, we were originally called ShotSpotter was the name of the company. Once we moved from just the one product into two, three, and four, it no longer made sense to call the company ShotSpotter, so we changed it to SoundThinking. We now have a Safety Smart Platform. You can see over here right now, really what we do is bring software solutions and data to help law enforcement, civic leadership, and other people do better things to help them protect their communities. You can see down here, and I'll go into each one of these a little bit more, but instead of being just one product company, which was the ShotSpotter, we now have six. It's taken us a bit of time from 2017 to where we are now.
If you look or you know about what's going on in the police agencies around the United States specifically, since the Defund the Police and COVID, they've had a lot of problems and challenges trying to keep the actual officers there. A lot of them are retiring, getting harder people to stay there. It's starting to improve a little bit now. There's no longer a Defund the Police movement, but there's still a lot of law enforcement agencies that don't have the people they used to have. What do they have to do? They have to use technology and software like what we provide to help them become more effective. This is a summary of where we are right now. I'll just go over sort of from the left is where we started with to the right, which is our latest acquisition.
The ShotSpotter is the gunshot detection solution. Those of you who know what that is or do not know what that is, we put sensors on buildings, light posts, about 25 sensors per sq mi. We listen for gunshots, pops, booms, or bangs where you can hear that it is an actual gunshot. The sensors, based on the time difference of arrival of that actual gunshot, can triangulate to mathematically calculate where that gun is being fired. We do all that within about 30 seconds from someone shooting a gun. We get that information to the police within 45 seconds, no longer than a minute. Our service law agreement says a minute. That is still about 65% of our revenue. When we went public in 2017, it was 100% of our revenue. That is still growing.
It adds somewhere between $7 million and $9 million in ARR every year, adding about a new 100 mi that we have or deploy. That is something that we still love doing, but it is growing high single digits to low double digits. Some of the other acquisitions that we did were to add more software solutions to our Safety Smart Platform. Resource Router is something where specifically, if you are an agency and you are trying to figure out where you used to have 100 and now you only have 60, how do you effectively use those? We help them manage those patrols using a whole bunch of information. For police agencies, they have things called CAD, RMS, which is the information about past crimes, things like that. We have AI algorithms built into the Resource Router.
What that does is it takes the information police have, also builds in things like the location, where are the schools, where are the bars, what is the weather doing? All this kind of information is built into the algorithms to help them to know where to go and where to send their officers to be more effective for the communities. Plate Ranger is relatively new for us. This is actually a partnership with a company called Rekor. You may know Rekor. Rekor has been around for a while. They're also public. We're a reseller of their ALPR, the license plate readers that are going around in cities right now. We just started this at the end of last year. It'll be our first revenue ramping up in 2025.
This is a significantly large TAM, though, in terms of the adjustable market because cities started doing license plate readers maybe five or six years ago. Now they're ready to replace those because the cameras in those, they've gotten so much better and improved. A lot of cities are now improving those, replacing those license plate readers with new solutions. Rekor has produced and builds a very good one that we're now reselling. Cities are also going thinking they used to be like maybe 15% of their city. Now they want to cover like 40% of their city. It is a lot of surveillance that's tied to some other things that we do that we're expecting to be a significant growth area for us going into 2025 and the next couple of years. Case Builder was tied to an acquisition that we did in 2020.
This is a company we now basically call a technology solutions division. What they've done is they've done work for NYPD for decades from prior companies. This was called Leeds when we acquired it in 2020. It's a solution that helps manage cases. You solve cases is what it does. So it's a case management solution. We just got a very large contract with the Department of Correction. You may know it's Rikers Island near here where we're going there. It was sole source to us. No one else even competed for it because of what we have done for NYPD over the last decade. That is a six-year contract, over $18 million. It is an example of one of the first things that we're doing with a case management solution. We're excited about that. There's a lot of things you can do over the years.
It does not even have to be police agencies or even prisons like this. It can be trucking companies, insurance companies. They all have to manage cases. We are technically not going over verticals like that right now, but it is a potential for us in terms of growth. Crime Tracer is basically a platform. It is a database. There is some competition out there. This would be like LexisNexis, that other database. FBI has a database that they put out as well. DHS has a database. This is information that has over a billion actual data records that we go to agencies and we share them. If you are going into, like, just pick a city, Atlanta, and you have got a lot of communities around Atlanta, you might have Atlanta signing up for a contract, and then four or five of their local agencies might all share the information.
CrimeT racer is behind what's called CJIS. It's Criminal Justice Investigative Service. I can't even get in. I can't get in the database. If you went in there and said, "Tell me about Alan Stewart," it would say, "Alan's been married to Jennifer, 36 years. They live here. They have two kids that live over here and here. Alan has a heart-shaped tattoo on his back." I don't, but it would say that kind of thing, that kind of information about to be able to find the criminals that are out there. That's very interesting. It's growing nicely for us, and we're investing a lot for that. I saved sort of the best for the last. The best because when I said ShotSpotter is 65% of our revenues, this right now is only about 2% of our revenues. It's called SafePoint. It's a weapons detection platform.
For those of you who are looking at what's out there, there's a company called Evolve, which does this. They do it for stadiums. They do it for HOAs. They do it for other things like hospitals as well. We're cheering them on because this is a relatively new market. It's a new market for companies that have to realize they have to do something related to the weapons detection and notification if someone's coming into their building or their facility. So that's what Evolve does. We do it a little differently. Theirs, it's more like sort of going into the TSA where you know you're going through, you're getting tested, and they might need to wand you if you get an alert. Ours is covert. You don't even know that you're going through a weapons detection system.
There is a camera that also shows so that when we get an alert, based on the magnetic movement of that gun that they're bringing in, we send that alert to the customer, and then they get a picture with a camera, and then they can go search that person. People are walking in this through this between what we call the bollards. I'll show you a picture of those when we get there. It is something that is a growing relatively new market. Evolve's doing quite well. They're growing rapidly. It is also something you could have four or five, maybe 10 different Evolves that are doing this because it's such a large market, like north of $20 billion in terms of what we believe can be achieved.
The other kind of cool thing about this weapons detection thing, if you live in California, they put out a recent bill that says that the hospitals in California have to have a weapons detection system installed by March 2027. If you think about that, that's something that all of the competitors out there are going to try to do. There's at least 400 different hospitals of the size that are requiring California to do that. Once California does that, there might be other states that are forcing that to be done. It's something we're really excited about. Even though it's only a couple million of our revenue, this year will be north of $110 million in revenue, going from $2 million to maybe $4 million to $10 million to maybe $50 million to maybe $100 million. This is something that is a significant growth area for us.
We're really excited about that. We're moving a lot. We're actually investing a lot in that right now. I can talk just a little bit because when you talk about everybody's talking about AI, we've been an AI company for a long, long time. Started with the ShotSpotter, we actually use AI algorithms to help build the data source that we have. We have the world's largest data source of sound noises, gunshots and non-gunshots. What we use is the AI algorithms to help build that into the ones that sound like might be a gunshot but actually isn't. It might sound like a helicopter, which might sound like a machine gun, but it's really a helicopter. Once you build that through your algorithms, you reduce the ones that have to get reviewed by like 20%.
We've been doing that with ShotSpotter for a ton of time. I already mentioned about the Resource Router where we're adding a lot of AI. The SafePointe AI algorithms that we use are the ones that, because it's an overt or rather a covert solution, when people aren't going through the solutions that we have into this, it just listens for the magnetic movement of the metal object that's going through there. For example, if you're at a hospital and you are going into the emergency room and you have an ambulance going by, that is a very large metal object that might have a specific sound to it. If they're going through the emergency room and they have metal doors that open like this, those might be scratching in the bottom and it's a metal sound.
These are things that we're using to change the algorithms for what might be like this, where every time you hear some kind of a metal object, we can remove the ambulance going through so it goes more like this. That allows us to give higher performance in terms of the actual weapons detection solutions itself. Just to go into this, and I'm going to have to probably speed up on some of these things. I want to show you some pictures. We started over here, and hopefully you can hear me all right. We started over here with just the gunshot detection solution and about a $1.5 million TAM. That's small enough that most companies do not want to try to compete with you. At that point, there we go. Thank you. We really have no competition in the gunshot detection solution.
There are a couple of companies out there that are trying to do it that say they do it. Most of them, we don't lose business to them. We hardly ever see them in an RFP, but that is something that was relatively small but has grown. You add some of the other solutions, the investigative search, the case management, the patrol management, that added another certain amount to the TAM. When you start adding the license plate readers, that's about $2.5 billion TAM by itself. Now there's some competition in some of these. It's not like the ShotSpotter where there is no real competition. The other ones, we just have to make sure that we have a better solution for the solutions that are needed. The largest one is the last one I've been talking about with the SafePoint.
That's about a $20 billion for weapons detection. 10x where we were, but in terms of the potential revenue growth, it is significant. That's one of the reasons we're really more excited about that than some of the others. We're also investing significantly in the AI algorithms we're building. In fact, we probably added about seven new people from AI engineers in the last 12 months on this alone. We'll continue to add more because the more of those models that we can build, the more effective the solutions become. Just some highlights here at a glance. In terms of the revenue, we went from about $81 million to $92 million to $102 million. This year the guidance is $111 million-$113 million. We're growing about $10 million a year.
That's a little less than our goal, which would be 15% a year. We do believe that once the SafePointe starts ramping up, like we know it's going to, we'll go back to that 15% plus per year in terms of top-line revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA this year should be north of 20%. Last year was about 14%. It was 15% the year before. As revenue continues to grow, adjusted EBITDA is also growing. That's because we are able to add less in our operating expense, all three categories, less on a percentage basis than the revenue is growing. All that flows down to the bottom line. Just a couple of other really kind of key points. We're big net promoters in terms of net promoter score, 66%. That's almost world-class. This is things like if you've heard USAA, if anyone knows USAA, very well-performing.
That's a very high net promoter score, especially for anyone whose main customer is police agencies because honestly, they don't like a lot of vendors. Having them give you a good high score is really good. We don't spend very much money at all versus other SaaS or software companies, $0.63 of sales marketing spend per dollar. That is really low. In most SaaS companies or software, it's north of a dollar. It could be north of $1.40 or $1.50. Our retention rates are significantly high at 98% +, which obviously means the attrition rates are 1%-2%. That's because once we get the customers in, we tend to keep them for a very, very long time. I don't need to talk too much more of the other ones. We deal with a lot of patents.
Just in terms of the competitive advantage, I think there are a lot of things that we have. The patents are very important. Most of those are tied to the ShotSpotter gunshot detection solution, but we also have patents with the other solutions as well. We've been doing this for a long time with a lot of customers that we have. This is the ShotSpotter number of customers, over 170. New York City, we've got about over 90 sq mi of the ShotSpotter covered. All five boroughs are covered here. If you go to some of the other cities, like we're in San Francisco, we're in Detroit, we're in Albuquerque, we're a lot of the big ones. We did have one large customer, which is Chicago. The mayor decided to not continue using SoundThinking ShotSpotter solution.
As of today, since they shut it off in November, they've had 44 people get shot, and over half of them died that used to be in the ShotSpotter coverage area, but no one called 911. You think about that. We provide value. We help save people's lives. It is something that's why our retention rate is as high as it is. Once we're there and they realize the value we provide, it's very hard for them to shut it off, although some people can and do do that. I'm going to get through a couple of these real quick. This is a picture of what the ShotSpotter looks like, where you can see the sensors that are out there. That gunshot that gets fired, each of those sensors hears that at a slightly different time.
That's how we're able to mathematically determine within about 80 ft exactly where that gunshot is. The people that do call 911, that's only about 20% of the time, 80% of the time plus. No one calls 911 at all. Why do you think that is? It's because it's the gangs that are doing the shooting, and they don't want the gangs to know that you're the one that called 911, so no one calls. What happens if someone gets shot? If there's not a ShotSpotter alert sending the police somewhere, no one knows that someone is there possibly dying or bleeding out. It's something that we're very proud of what we do. It's also why we really have no other competition that competes against us. That's just an example of what you would see.
In this particular, this might be one beat that a police officer gets. That is in a smartphone. You can see that he had six different events here, one gunshot, seven gunshots, 10 gunshots. Let's say they select the 10 gunshot one, they could say that is in 3552 Miller Avenue, and then it is only 80 ft. They go there. If someone does call 911 and say, "Hey, they shot someone shooting a gun out in my neighborhood, what is your address?" "I am not telling you my address." "Okay, what neighborhood are you in?" They tell them the neighborhood. A police will go there, drive around 20-30 minutes trying to find where that was because sound bends. It is really hard to know where an actual gunshot occurred. That is something that we do incredibly well. This is the patrol management.
This basically helps them determine where to send the officers to help them become more effective. If you think about it, it's like a couple of these are just great quotes. I'm not going to focus on them, but it's talking about the positives that we provide to the police officers, the donors, the people. They need to add technology to help them deal with things right now. This is another Case Builder management solution. This is an example of one where in this particular case, you could figure out using all the information that you have and might be used by a detective in a police agency. They have a bunch of information. Right now, what they're doing is they're either putting Excel spreadsheets, they're writing in notebooks. They don't have an effective software solution to help them do that. That's what we do with the Case Builder solution.
CrimeTracer is the data as well. This is one. This is actually pretty interesting when I'm kind of running out of time. In Oakland in California, a former officer had retired, was going to a gas station, and three people came up to try to rob him and were shooting him. He ended up with like 21 bullet holes. He shot one of them. Two people got away. They used CrimeTracer based on the one that was there to figure out which gang was he involved with, who were his associates. They ended up finding the other two people. I think one was in Berkeley and one was down in Houston. Using CrimeTracer, after ShotSpotter got the police there to save the guy's life. It is like two different solutions used in that one particular case.
I want to make sure that I get to this because this is something I think is incredibly important. We're focused right now on casinos and hospitals. As I talked about, like 400 hospitals in California have to have something like this in 2027. When you're here, you aren't going through like a TSA. You're not going through an X-ray machine. You're not going through a metal detector. You're going through these two bollards. This is two lanes. Inside those are magnetic coils that are testing for the magnetic movement of that gun that you're carrying as you're going through those. Once you go through those, then you get the information like this. In this particular one, see the red box around there? That's a high-degree alert. That person's carrying a high-capacity weapon that we're bringing in. They get that within like 10 seconds.
They can then report that's going on and basically get there very quickly. In this particular one, this is a yellow one. That guy has a gun, but that's their security officer. They know that it's not a red alert. It's actually a yellow alert because it still has a gun that they're going through with that. That's what the bollards are actually looking for. If you think about it right now, it's only a couple million for us in 2024. It'll be double that in 2025. Significant amount in the out years as it continues to grow, especially if more states start adding things like what California did with that bill. Plate Ranger is a license plate reader. That's something for the vehicle recognition. It's incredibly capable. Vehicle, make, model, color, vehicle type, class, category, direction of travel, the plate number.
All of that information helps them figure out if they had some kind of other burglary or something else going on or a ShotSpotter alert. They could figure out with the license plate readers who was going there, who was driving past there at that time. I'm going to get you a couple of things here real quick. I'll pass through these. It's the financials. That is the last couple of years. We continue to grow. Profitability gets a little better each year. This is our last quarter. If you think about Q1 2025 versus Q1 2024, $25.4 million up to $28 million. In terms of the actual net income, the actual loss was down, and the percentage in adjusted EBITDA also increasing. This year, our guidance is north of 20%. Here is where we're going.
We're ultimately going to have a longer-term model, about 15%+ in terms of the revenue growth. That's primarily going to be related to SafePointe. The gross margins are right now about 60%. We know that we can get them to 70% because as we continue to build the solutions, some of the actual costs of the cost of goods sold get reduced. The gross margin also improves. The other reason for that is we're expanding significantly internationally. Internationally, specifically for the ShotSpotter, we charge 3.5x-4x as much per mile. $70,000 a year here might be $200,000 a year in Brazil or South Africa or Bahamas. These are some of the other international locations we're at. All of that helps gross margin go up.
All of that helps our adjusted EBITDA go up because, again, our OpEx does not have to grow near as fast as our revenue's growing. We know that within the next four years or so, we'll be at 40% or plus of adjusted EBITDA as well. I have one whole minute left for Q&A in case there's other questions, or I can go back to any of the slides if you wanted to see any of those specifically. Yes, sir.
Yeah. I'm sorry. On ShotSpotter, 65% of your revenues, what is, I assume you've flatlined growth there in the U.S., or what's your kind of market share penetration rate at this point?
Yeah, it's a great question. ShotSpotter, we're at about 170 cities. There's about 800 cities that have four or more homicides per year.
We know that we're really only like the top of the third inning if you're a baseball fan in terms of domestically. We're also expanding, though. A long way to go in the U.S., but we're also expanding internationally. Brazil, we're going live in Brazil this quarter for the first time.
Is your contract, sorry, I'm kind of free. I like to interact.
Sure.
In Brazil, is it with the federal government or which of the states is your contract with? What's the length of these contracts?
Yeah. It's a city right now. Niteroi is the first one in Brazil.
What's it called?
Niteroi. It'd be near São Paulo.
Okay.
Okay. Not too far from that. What we know about Brazil is there's probably 100 different cities that have gun violence like St. Louis and Chicago.
You get one, some of the other cities start doing the same thing that the good cities were doing. We're really excited about that. That is not even SafePointe. That is back to the original ShotSpotter.
That's interesting. Is that your first client there?
We were in Brazil about 12 years ago with the first version of the ShotSpotter, but that was something where we charged about $1 million for a month.
You're charging in US dollars, I assume.
We are charging in US dollars. It's about $600,000 for 10 km. It is closer to $200,000 per sq mi versus $70,000 per sq mi here in the U.S. It is about 3x .
Your contribution margin generally on ShotSpotter in the U.S. is around?
Even if someone canceled in year one, we would make money because it costs us less than $70,000 to completely deploy it.
Year two, three, four, five, it's already deployed. We don't have to pretty much do anything, pay AT&T and Verizon for the actual.
so much after year one.
Closer north of 90%. It's why we generate, as a company, we generate a ton of cash. I acquired all of those companies. I have $4 million in debt that I could pay off today if I wanted to.
Yeah, that's what I was getting to. You're probably generating a lot of cash from ShotSpotter that you're utilizing to try to grow some of the other products.
Absolutely. We generated $16 million in free cash flow last year. This year will be north of $20 million.
That's generally or from ShotSpotter itself?
That was primarily from ShotSpotter because we're still.