Hello, welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you have joined us for our Global Technology Conference. The next presentation of the day is from ZenaTech. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter at any time. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking "Book a Meeting." At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome James Sherman, Chief Financial Officer, and Linda Montgomery, Vice President of Corporate Development of ZenaTech, which trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ZENA. Welcome, James and Linda.
Thank you.
Hello. Thank you. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to our presentation today. We're just going to take you through an overview of ZenaTech, then we're pleased to answer some questions at the end. ZenaTech is a company that specializes in AI autonomous drone platforms and services. We're transforming commercial, government, and defense sectors. We've established a leading global Drone-as-a-Service, AI autonomy platform, that I will tell you more about. Basically, we're doing drone-based land surveys, industrial inspections, maintenance, inventory control, power washing, and also precision agriculture through this business. In addition to that, we have an enterprise SaaS software solutions area of our business, that we've had for quite a while. We have longstanding business and government customers there. Most of our drone solutions are in the trial and pilot stage.
I guess our company's been around since about 2017. We do have sales and operations across North America, Europe, UAE, Asia, and Australia. We have three manufacturing facilities. The first one that we established about three years ago in UAE near Dubai. We are building a facility in Arizona, and we also do our component drone parts in our own facility that we own in Taiwan. Here's some of our key metrics. We've been a public company for just short of two years. We went public in October of 2024. Our market cap around $127 million and 19 million shares outstanding. How do we make money? Well, basically we have three different revenue models.
First of all, we sell our drones to business, government, and defense markets, where we've got a number of drones that are at the pilot and trial stage and some in the prototype stage, that we will be selling directly. Our Drone-as-a-Service business is an annual subscription, and usage model is where we are taking that business as we integrate some of our acquisitions and integrate drones with some of these existing services. Our enterprise SaaS solutions is a classic enterprise SaaS business model. I'd like to give you some information about our revenue. Our first year as a public company, 2025, we had revenue of $12.9 million, and that was a 558% increase over 2024. In 2024, our revenue was just $2 million, and that was all from software.
It was a real transformational year for us where we became a drone company, largely through our Drone-as-a-Service business model. Of course, we increased our revenue on our enterprise SaaS area as well. In addition, we've made a lot of progress in going after defense markets as well, both on developing our solutions and also engaging with program managers in the military and we've got to get some certifications to be in that market too. We're working very diligently on getting through that. I'll take you through our first quarter of this year. Our revenue there was $8.4 million, a 640% increase. Again, our drone segment was leading that. If you extrapolate this to the rest of 2024, approximately $33 million in revenue this year. That's totally through just extrapolating first quarter.
We ended the quarter with $15 million in cash and marketable securities, our total assets keep going up to almost $110 million at the end of the quarter. Okay. These slides are not advancing, so let me see here. Okay. I would like to move to the next slide here. If someone could help me.
You're on the slide wheel side.
I know. It's not advancing for me at the moment.
There you are.
I'm not sure why. Okay. I'm trying to advance to my next slide. It's not doing it. Okay, I'll try previous, see if that works. Nope. It doesn't work.
You're on the defense business slide now.
Okay. Well, it's funny. You can see it and I can't. All right.
Yes.
Okay. There we go. Defense business slides. Okay. Right, now I think we're back in business. Right.
All right.
Market is a real fast-growing market. It's growing over 25% per year. It's really a point of inflection for drones, as most people know that we have the FAA regulation is opening up more of the airspace for drones moving forward. We've seen a lot of progress in that area. Department of War, in U.S., we've had a lot of policy directives that have been very positive to drone makers. Warfare has changed dramatically in the last four or five years, of course. Procurement cycles along with that, we're seeing changes happening there too, changes that really favor American-made drone makers. Our ZenaDrone is our drone company based in the U.S. We manufacture in America, it's very positive climate for us. Has seen some tremendous industries that we are very focused in providing solutions to.
This really it's a turnkey solutions for drone-based land surveys, inspections, power washing. We're doing is acquiring these under-digitized legacy businesses, and we are bringing these as part of our Drone-as-a-Service network, and basically where the idea is in communities, they'll be your go-to Drone-as-a-Service store where you can easily access these services. We're really focused on government and business, builders and construction companies, on the land survey side, and in this really growing this through roll-up acquisition strategy. We've done 24 acquisitions to date, and we're right across the U.S. We're in 12 states in the U.S. We're in Canada. We're in Europe. We just did an acquisition in Australia.
We really have a global vision for this business, and we're really one of the leading companies with this business, and it's certainly a differentiator for us, both our vision for it and the speed at which we're executing. We're integrating our drones into the workflows and improving the speed, improving the precision, and then the data, really adding these. The data services are really, really important. Drones give us the opportunity to collect and use intelligent data in a way that we haven't been able to before. What we see for this business is our portfolio of different services that we're growing. We're starting off largely with lots of land survey engineering companies. It's a really great fragmented industry that we're able to acquire these companies and really bring them together and improve efficiencies.
We want to then have a portfolio of different services. Of course, it's all about improving the margins and creating this AI autonomy platform and centralized data management to get the data to customers faster, to differentiate that way as well, and that we're growing now globally. This is sort of the flywheel of value creation whereby we are converting these legacy services to drone-based. Our defense business, we've been working on for quite a while. We've done paid pilots in the past with both the Navy and the Air Force. A really big objective we have is getting Blue UAS certification. That's going to enable us to be on the procurement list to be able to sell to defense agencies. We see a lot of opportunities in. We have an indoor inventory management drone.
We see a lot of places where there's defense agencies that need this to keep a lot of inventories, such as the Department of War. Then we have a cargo drone that is really useful. It's a medium-sized heavyweight cargo drone that can be used instead of helicopters to bring medical supplies, in the case of the Navy, from ship to ship. We basically would like to sell all of our drone solutions to the right areas of both defense agencies and different areas of the federal government as well. We are engaging with program managers. Over the last year, we've really been focused on a lot of this and finding those demos and pilots leading to those contracts for that kind of work. We have a Washington, D.C., office that we are currently staffing with business development capture specialists and whatnot.
Also, Zena AI is a company we established. It's a hub for AI services for the military. We're currently building that office in Louisiana. We've recently announced Counter-UAS solutions as well. Here's our colorful list of drones. I mentioned the first one. This is the ZenaDrone 1000. That's the medium heavyweight cargo drone, ISR, inspection or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance cargo. You can put cargo in the middle part of that drone. It sort of opens up, and it's hollow inside. It's a very large drone. It's 7 by 12 feet, and we're working on a gas version of that as well. This is our line of the IQ Series of drones. The smallest is the IQ Nano. That's an indoor inventory management drone. It reads the barcodes and is a much faster and even safer way of taking inventory.
The IQ Square is a larger version of that. It's our outdoor drone for inspections. The IQ Quad, we've specifically made a land survey drone capable of carrying the sensors required for doing various land survey work. The IQ Aqua is one that is at the prototype and now testing stage. That is an underwater drone that we plan to use for commercial purposes and underwater inspections, but also for defense, for instance, finding underwater mines. Our Counter-UAS solutions, we just launched those. We're working on the prototypes, interceptor drones, including one that's going to be a one-way drone, low-cost interceptor drone. The IQ Glider, which is a launch and refueling station for part of this integrated defense system for marine-based types of interception applications. The ZenaDrone 2000, which is going to be a gas-based interceptor drone.
This is all of our Counter-UAS solutions that we are also recently announced that we're going to be manufacturing and testing in Ukraine, and we're setting up that operation now as well. These are our three manufacturing facilities. Arizona is our U.S.-based one that we're currently in the process of. I guess we're moving to a new location. All of our manufacturing facilities are growing, whether we're growing our capacity or growing our teams. We're laying the groundwork for Ukraine as well. Of course, our IP portfolio is very important to us. We have a number of patents and more in the pipeline. Here's our team. I'll just point out our founder and CEO, Dr. Shaun Passley. He's been a founder since high school. He's had many companies that he's founded and successfully exited from, and he's our visionary, driving the company forward.
Jim, of course, our CFO. CTO, Sajjad. This team's been working together for a long time, which is very important, over 10 years, in fact. Our path forward, we want to get Green and Blue UAS certification to be on procurement lists. We got four drones in that process. Continuing to expand our manufacturing capabilities. We said we were going to close 25 acquisitions by mid-year. We've done 24, so we're pretty on track there. We're going to continue to build and scale our product solutions to getting them through. Some of them are prototype, getting through the testing, and getting those paid pilots, getting more and more of those paid pilots leading to long-term contracts.
As well, we're doing a lot of R&D work on drone swarms, including quantum computing, which we believe is going to be the future of real-time data from swarms of drones. Also wildfire management, very important one that we'd like to be on the leading edge of solutions. In conclusion, our investment highlights are an AI-driven drone automation growth. We're automating work, lowering costs, and providing real-time smart data. Revenue generating vertically integrated AI autonomy platform through our Drone-as-a-Service. We're basically scaling a turnkey drone services, leading to recurring revenue and higher lifetime value. Our roll-up acquisition strategy. Under digitized businesses, upgrading them with drones, accelerating growth and margins. We're targeting defense markets. We're pursuing the certifications that we need, and we are well on our way to engaging with customers. We're going to leverage growth in the U.S., but also global demand.
Certainly our Interceptor drones, we see global customers for that. Our enterprise SaaS business, that continues as well. We have recurring revenue there, and these are core skills we do is across our business as well. We are ZenaTech, ZENA, listed on Nasdaq, now we'd like to be available to answer questions. Let's go through some of these questions.
The first question, how sustainable is the revenue growth? We've grown from about $2 million in 2024, and if you annualize first quarter 2026, that comes out to be about $30 million-$35 million. Roughly 15x growth in less than 18 months. We grow through acquisitions. Since first quarter, we've made some acquisitions. How sustainable is our growth as a percentage? Of course, it's probably not going to be as much. As a dollar amount, our growth will continue year-over-year to a greater extent. If we take our first quarter revenue and annualize it and then add in our acquisitions that we've made just so far this year, we're looking at probably a $35 million-$40 million in revenue, which is closer to a 20x growth. Do I think we're going to grow 20x in the next 18 months?
That's going to be hard to repeat, the 20x growth. As far as large percent growth, we have targets for continued growth. We have targets for much revenue growth. We do growth through acquisitions. What we do is we identify an industry that's right for drone technology. We look for a company in that industry, and we make an acquisition. Our growth strategy is tied directly to our acquisition strategy. We've outpaced the market in our growth, I believe that's going to likely continue.
We have another question here. Can you talk about how your new AI-enabled LED camera system on the IQ Nano drone is translating into pipeline conversations for inventory, security, and defense customers? Where do you see earliest high margin deployments? Yeah, we are actively engaging, as I mentioned, with program managers in the military. We're trying to find those. We are focused in on those agencies where we think this inventory management system can add the most value. There's certainly a number of them. Those conversations continue. On the commercial side, we're involved in a lot of trade shows and conferences where we're engaging in the logistics sector. We have certainly, our sales team is very focused on engaging with customers and trying to find those opportunities.
We've done some paid trials already. We're actively looking at more of them for the inventory management solution.
Next question. ZENA is poised across the AI drones, DaaS, enterprise SaaS, and even quantum computing solutions. Where do you see the most near-term revenue acceleration? Which segment is the best poised for surprising investors and margins? The AI drones, all of our drones use AI within them. The DaaS is Drone-as-a-Service industry. The service industry is one of the areas where we're growing the most in. In the near term, the service industry is where we're going to be growing the most. We can grow through that through our core strategy of identifying an industry that's right for drone technology, making an acquisition in that industry, and then changing their technology to using drone technology. That's an area that we're very capable of growing and most likely will grow the fastest.
We look for undervalued SaaS companies and when we find them, we'll make an acquisition. We made one acquisition this year, and it's performing nicely. We'll continue to make SaaS acquisitions, but Drone-as-a-Service is really the area that we're going to grow most in the short term. We have certain solutions that combine drone technology with our SaaS technology. Enterprise software, we have a product for warehouse management. The warehouse management, we've incorporated drone technology into that warehouse management software. The drone technology takes the inventory and position of the items and feeds it back into our software. That's an area that's probably going to be the next growth that we start to see after the Drone-as-a-Service. We have military aspirations, as Linda was saying.
That's more of a long-term growth. We'll continue to come out with more and more on our military aspirations. We see that those are very valuable to our investors and of course, we do have those. I would put it in that order. Drone as a Service is going to grow the fastest. Our software and integrated drone technology will probably grow the second fastest, and then more military applications throughout the end of this year and next year.
Here's a question. What surprised you, talking about the Drone as a Service business, what has surprised you most in terms of operational efficiency gains as you consolidate those platforms?
We've taken many different companies in land surveying industry, and we've consolidated them and operated as one. We have received some operational efficiencies. Not in the field work so much, but in corporate offices. The operational efficiencies that we're seeing right now is where we can take a licensed land surveyor and add technology to them, whereas they become a licensed drone operator. A licensed land surveyor and a licensed drone operator can literally take the place of two people on the land surveying area. Whereas it used to take two men eight hours to do a certain job in the land surveying, if there's a licensed land surveyor and a licensed drone operator, if that's the same person, we can send that person out with a drone, and they can do the same job in about two hours.
Those are certain efficiencies that we've gained in the land surveying industry. In power washing, drones can do stuff much faster than individuals. It's the growth technology or the growth strategies to get more and more contracts in that area and to grow through certain other methods through acquisitions and other methods in this area. We want to outpace the growth of our competitors, and so far, we have been outpacing the growth of our competitors. The industry has been growing by 25%-35% every year, which means it doubles every two to three years. We did 20x in 18 months. We are outpacing our competition. That's kind of our strategy in a nutshell and our medium-term, long-term, short-term growth strategies. The efficiencies in the land surveying industry, we're not trying to reduce costs, but we're trying to increase capacity.
It's a great industry. It's a $20 billion industry, and it's fragmented. There's no true leaders. As we've entered into this industry, we've become one of the leaders in the industry, and we're leading the way with the drone technology and integrated systems.
Yeah. It looks like we're out of time now. We had a couple more questions. However, if you'd like to get in touch with us at investors@zenatech.com, we'd be happy to answer any more questions. Thank you very much for listening. We really appreciate it.