Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. We're on the stretch, getting close to end of the day cocktails. Let's talk about drones. I'd like to tell you about our company. We are transforming industries with our drones. We actually have three business areas of ZenaTech. We design and manufacture drones, AI autonomous, multifunction drones.
The second area of our business is we are developing a drone-as-a-service business, where we're providing turnkey solutions for business and government using our drones for land surveys and inspections. We're basically digitizing and innovating many services that are ripe for drone innovation in that business area.
Finally, we have an enterprise SaaS software business that we've had for quite a long time, since the beginning of our company, really 2017, 2018. We have a number of different software brands in that company, and that provides us a recurring revenue and also really important skills that we that we apply to throughout the rest of our company. We have sales and operations in North America, Europe, Asia, and we actually manufacture in three areas of the world: in near Dubai, Taiwan, and we're building a facility in Arizona for our drones under our drone company, which is ZenaDrone, fully owned subsidiary.
I guess we went public a year and a half ago now. We did a direct listing on NASDAQ. I'd like to tell you about some of our investment highlights. Basically, I don't need to tell you about the massive growth in AI automation that we're going to see, AI-driven drone automation that we're going to see moving forward. What we're building is really a vertically integrated, scalable AI autonomy platform through our drone-as-a-service. What we're doing is combining the hardware, software, and services into a recurring revenue platform. We are positioned for defense markets.
That's a very important market for us, a little bit longer timeline that we've been focused on for some time now. Through our drone-as-a-service, we're doing a roll-up strategy of land survey engineering companies, a really interesting business that is pretty fragmented, kind of ready for drone innovation. A lot of the technology is that total stations, as they're called, was developed in the 1970s and 1980s.
We're really integrating our drones into the workflow, and we're doing centralized data analysis and reports. That's how we are growing our margin and will be expanding services as part of drone-as-a-service in that roll-up strategy. Our enterprise SaaS business, as I mentioned, pretty high margin, recurring revenue.
Here's our cap table. This is a little old now. We now have a price that's lower than $2. I won't go into details. We actually raised $25 million just on Friday, and that's going to be fueling our growth and fueling this platform, and this business that we are building that we are growing, manufacturing facilities and growing to be able to roll out our defense business and the acquisitions moving forward. As I mentioned, been around since 2017.
We've come a long way from a private company, that was focused mostly on software to a NASDAQ company and with a full range of drone solutions that I will tell you more about, pretty geographically dispersed. Our revenue models are no surprise. Enterprise SaaS, we're all familiar with. Drone-as-a-service, we're really gonna be selling this as a annual subscription model and usage-based to make it easy for business and government to be able to secure these drone-based services for inspections and surveys. Then there's our defense business where we are selling our drones directly to We want to sell our drones directly to U.S. defense agencies.
Most recently, we've added to our product line counter-UAS solutions. We now have goals to go beyond that to NATO and U.S. strategic partners as well. 2025, our results there, our revenue was almost $13 million, and this was a 558% increase from the year before. We did make a lot of progress. Which $10 million of that was drones and our drone services. We really turned the corner last year from a software company. We had only $2 million of revenue in 2024 that was all software, to a drone company. Even our software business grew as well by 45% last year.
We ended the year with $15 million, and our total assets, of course, expanded also to almost $100 million. Again, it was a transformational year for us. We've now done 22 acquisitions of land survey engineering companies, a power washing company, a cell phone tower inspection, maintenance, and design company, and most recently, we just acquired a Brisbane-based land survey engineering company that's gonna get us into the mining sector with three locations in Queensland.
We're building our defense business, and we've been focused on that for a while from pilots that we did with the Navy and the Air Force a couple of years ago. We've been really actively working with program managers and finding those opportunities for demos and pilots within various Defense Department and other government departments. Just recently, we have announced that we're going to be working on counter-UAS solutions. All of our manufacturing facilities continue to grow. R&D is important as well. We have 20 people that are focused on wildfire management solutions.
They're focused on drone swarms and using drone swarms in a variety of different applications. The real-time data that drones can take in means that you have to look at quantum computing. That will be important moving forward in the future. Our teams are all looking at that. Our Zena AI division, which we established in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is going to be focused on those military AI applications, and we're just staffing up that facility right now. We've done a lot of engagement with program managers, and we've also been engaging with members of Congress just to make sure they know who we are.
Blue UAS, that's very important. We are in the process of getting that certification that will enable us to be on the procurement lists for for the military. We just announced gave an update today on where we stand with that with that process. There are a lot of tailwinds we're able to take advantage of, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, as far as upcoming FAA regulation that is opening up the the skies and air traffic control to the world of drones, including BVLOS, which we're expecting later this year or early next year, rules for that beyond the visual line of sight.
We also recently announced that we are going to be manufacturing and testing our drones in Ukraine, and that will help facilitate our counter-UAS drone solutions. The drone market, of course, is very large and growing as well as the tailwinds that we have from policy directives. There's also tech innovation and batteries and that's all really making this a point of inflection for the drone industry. Of course, American-made drone makers. ZenaDrone is our drone company in the U.S., and we're very focused on being an NDAA-compliant drone maker, and we're just building up that facility now.
We wanna be on the list of Blue UAS certified or Blue UAS cleared, as it's called. That's a rarefied list of only 31 manufacturers right now, that's very much something we're focused on. Our drones, we have a whole series of drones. I guess the largest is our ZenaDrone 1000. This is a 7-by-12-foot drone. It's called a medium, size to heavy-lift cargo drone, and it can carry up to 40 kgs or 88 lbs. This drone we plan to use for a lot of military applications like inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance. Also, it has cargo capabilities, we think that, you know, blood and medical supplies in the field and military are going to be a great application for that.
These of course we're at the trial and the pilot stage with customers. That's how the sales cycle works. At the end of these successful pilots, then of course the contract comes after that, and sometimes even written the terms of it and discounts for a customer can be written right into the pilot, the paid pilot. Our other drones are the IQ Series, starting off with the smallest one, the IQ Nano. That's an indoor drone. We're doing security applications for that. Inventory management, it reads the barcodes. It can also work with RFID signals, and takes inventory, improves the speed, it streamlines inventory management, and it's safer as well.
IQ Square is a larger version. That's our outdoor inspection drone. Recently, we launched the IQ Quad. This is a specialized land survey drone, and built for that. The IQ Aqua, which is a underwater drone that can be used to spot mines and for various underwater applications. That one's at the prototype stage right now. The other drones are at the testing and the pilot stage. Counter-UAS, we are doing two interceptor drones. One is loosely based on our ZenaDrone 1000 drone, the other one is we're planning to do a one-way interceptor, a small one-way interceptor drone that we plan to sell for less than $5,000.
The IQ Glider is going to be the launch station and the refueling station for this integrated defense system that we're building. A lot of it is going to be marine-based, and sort of think of, think of, I guess we have asymmetric warfare that, you know, we're certainly all aware of, that we have multi-million dollar missiles that are shooting down $10,000 drones. This is the whole idea around counter-UAS as a far more cost-effective and efficient solution for that. I'm not going to go through our competitive differentiation to say that we certainly differentiate through our drone-as-a-service, where we've got our vision for that, and the rollout of drone-as-a-service certainly makes us different. Our indoor drone is pretty unique.
You know, I won't go too much into detail that. I do wanna talk about drone-as-a-service in that, as I mentioned, we're acquiring these companies. We're integrating our drones, and we only just started this strategy in January of last year. Up to now, we've done 22. This year we're going to see, like, a full year of revenue from this drone-as-a-service business. The companies we're acquiring are profitable, and they are well established in their communities, sometimes as many as 20 years. It's a business strategy where we are obtaining customers. We're obtaining licensed land surveyors.
It takes, it takes five years after university to become a licensed land surveyor, and there's a shortage of them. There's a lot of good reasons why we chose a land survey and engineering companies. The idea around drone-as-a-service is it's a whole platform for multiple drone services. It'll be the brand and place in your community where, you know, the place to get drones. That's our vision. The flywheel, of course, the integration is really important. This is all about improving the margins and then building these centralized services, building an AI autonomy platform that we can scale, and then providing multiple services. I talked about our drone manufacturing.
We're currently focused on our output from our UAE facility which we had for a couple of years, and we are commissioning our facility in Mesa, Arizona, for U.S. domestic needs. Taiwan is growing too. All of our manufacturing facilities are growing at the moment. Of course, our IP portfolio is very important to our company. I won't go through it. Of course, regulatory approval status in all the places where we do business. We're led by Dr. Shaun Passley. He has six advanced degrees, and he's been a founder since high school. He's had multiple businesses, and he's certainly the visionary behind the company.
He is joined by our CFO, James Sherman, who actually couldn't be here today. He's worked with Shaun for quite a long time, very experienced CFO. Our Chief Technology Officer, who spends most of his time in Dubai and looks after our manufacturing and of course our product portfolio. Again, very experienced individual. They've all worked together for a long time. We're focused on the Blue UAS certification. It's not even green anymore. Since we applied last year, the process has been streamlined. Blue is the important certification to get, now all three of our drones are on track for Blue UAS certification. We're very focused on getting that done.
Our manufacturing drone facilities, we want to expand our production, and set up our recently announced facilities that we are in Ukraine and of course continue to commission the Arizona facility and get testing and do assembly there. We've said we're gonna close 25 acquisitions by the end of June for our drone-as-a-service. We've done 22, so I think we're on track for that. You know, a real big job of ours, and something we're all really focused on is drone-as-a-service and that integration and expanding that business, integrating the drones into all of the workflows and AI as much as we can as well.
Advancing our solutions is something we're doing a lot of work on, increasing, you know, the number of pilot programs at with customers and that's across our business solutions and of course our solutions for defense as well. Of course R&D we're thinking of next generation solutions. We have a team of 20 people that are focused on wildfire management using our drones and weather forecasting and drone swarms and the next generation. It's not even the next generation. We may see some of these a year from now. The business is moving quite quickly. Anyway, thank you very much. We're Zena, Z-E-N-A, on NASDAQ. Thank you for listening. Happy to take any questions. Yes.
I think you have the most integrated, vertically integrated strategy of anybody in the drone space, and obviously it's a very hot space. You've got the software that serves the DaaS. You make the drones for the DAS. You've got quantum and AI. You didn't mention, but you also have components with manufacture in Taiwan, so you're vertically integrated there. That all comes out in the strategy. Your CEO is a PhD. Can you talk a bit more about Dr. Passley and the vision and, you know, how you came to this integrated strategy and where we'll see it going forward?
Right. That's a good question. You are referring to our, the integrated strategy of the company and where we're moving going forward. Yes, Taiwan is where we're doing our component parts, our PCB boards and cameras and sensors, and this is all part of being NDAA compliant. You know, we can't source them from China anymore. You know, that's an important part of our strategy to find the best sources of those component parts. The strategy is really, as I mentioned, AI autonomy platforms and being vertically integrated.
Our drone-as-a-service business is a big part of that. You know, we'd even love to do drone-as-a-service for the military. We think that there's a lot of benefits in passing on the risk and passing on basically paying for outcomes through that kind of model. We're really building this vertically integrated AI autonomy business. Basically we're building the platform out right now that we can continue to scale from. Whether it's drone-as-a-service or which is short-term, shorter term I guess, then military, which the usual timeline for military is demos and pilots and then long-term sustainable contracts.
We do differentiate from some of our competitors in just by this kind of diversification that we have. Then we have a software business, you know, on top of that where we think that's really important, the skill sets that provides, you know, across our business is important also. Yes.
For the U.S. defense or military contract, do you have the proper license, ITAR license? What type of license you have you can operate the things that.
Sorry.
Like, I think for drone business, right, when you sign the U.S. defense or military contracts, you have to have a license.
What license are you referring to? Did you say ITAR?
Yes.
Is that what you're referring? Oh, right. Right. Yes, those rules are very, very important and we are compliant with all those, all those rules. Yes, we just announced our that we're manufacturing and testing in Ukraine. We are working with lawyers now to ensure that we're following all of those rules.