Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have ZenaTech, Inc., trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker ZENA. It is a technology company that specializes in AI autonomy drone platforms to transform commercial, government, and defense sectors, whose subsidiaries include drone manufacturing through ZenaDrone, a global drone-as-a-service business, and enterprise SaaS division of software brands. Happy to welcome Linda Montgomery, the VP of Corporate Development, and Jim Sherman, the CFO. Linda and Jim, we are happy to have you on the conference. Begin whenever you are ready.
Thank you very much, Anna. Great to be here. Hello, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our story. Today, would like to do a brief overview of ZenaTech. I know many of you are getting familiar with our story. I am going to take you through a newer deck today. First of all, we are a drone company. Our focus is building AI autonomous drone platforms and services that run on them. Our marketplaces that we are focused on selling to is commercial, government, and defense. I think what differentiates us is that we are one of the few public drone companies serving commercial and enterprise customers at scale through our drone-as-a-service business.
We are focused on the defense business as well. I think what differentiates us is a lot of our peers are primarily focused on defense. We are a revenue-generating commercial drone company today with that defense upside. We have our drone-as-a-service platform. We have over 40 locations, more like 45 now. We just did a press release this morning about our AI platforms and some of the efficiencies that we are focused on for our drone-as-a-service business, with addition of two additional companies and about four new locations in Australia. Basically, our drone-as-a-service platform, we provide turnkey drone services for land surveys, for inspections. Basically, it is a subscription-based service and we are helping customers to eliminate having to own the platforms, do the maintenance, and worry about regulation drone pilots, and all of that.
We go to a customer site, and we take care of all that. We are doing this through acquisition. We have completed now 31 acquisitions since we started this at the beginning of last year for land survey companies, but also many types of inspection companies, solar inspection, cellphone tower design, and maintenance, those kinds of services. We are integrating our drones and of course, our goal is to achieve considerable efficiencies, more precision, more data, and smart data, and also do these services much faster. We use our own technologies. ZenaDrone is our drone company, and we are vertically integrated in using our own drones for this business. That is not all we do. We also have an enterprise SaaS software division as well with multiple brands. This is really strategic to our company because these software development skills are very strategic.
This is a recurring revenue business with some great customers we've had for a long time for these various software brands, business and government software brands that we also sell. We have a pretty global footprint in North America, Europe, U.A.E., Australia, and we're expanding around the world. Zena AI is going to focus on advanced military AI types of applications. We're staffing up a facility in the U.S. for that. Recently we've announced that we are manufacturing and testing in Ukraine. Some of our performance indicators you probably perused there. I guess we started off in 2024, our revenue was CAD 2 million, and that was primarily from our software business. Since then, our revenue was, and this is Canadian dollars that I'm talking about, our revenue last year was CAD 9.3 million.
If you look at our first quarter this year, $6.6 million, this is U.S. dollars here. For the first half of the year, our revenue was $12.5 million. These are considerable increases. This one was 425% over the same period last year. Really, we're seven consecutive quarters of revenue growth, and we have also announced what we're expecting in Q3, and that revenue will be between CAD 10 million and CAD 14 million. I think I've gone through some of these investment highlights. What we're doing here is we're building subscription services. We sell to builders, construction companies, and many levels of government. Our idea is that this is usage-based, and also it's subscription-based for some of these longer-term contracts.
For instance, our goal is to work with a builder or construction company over the life of their one, two year, or whatever build, a construction project, providing those survey services that they need all the way through them. I guess we're really hyper-focused on some of these legacy non-digitized industries, of course, which land surveys with traditional methods use a total station primarily, predominantly. We believe drones enable us to cover more ground and achieve a lot of efficiencies in terms of margins, in terms of time, and building extra capacity to grow our business. Just a little bit about our leadership team. Dr. Shaun Passley, our Founder and CEO, has been an entrepreneur and has businesses since university, and he has four degrees in addition to his advanced degrees, in addition to his PhDs, our founder and our visionary.
Of course, Jim Sherman, our CFO, who's had much experience with previous public companies. Sajjad Asif, who's our Chief Technology Officer, an engineer with an MBA, and looks after all of our manufacturing and our products development and product roadmaps. It's really a huge market opportunity if you look at over 25% year-over-year growth in the area of drone services. We think we're pretty uniquely positioned in this with our technology platforms to modernize some of these traditional businesses. If we look at our near-term revenue opportunity, we're looking at a run rate of about $55 million over the next year. This is just the flywheel of how we create value with drone-as-a-service. We're deploying and we're combining our drones to really improve these workflows.
We're using AI in some of our proprietary analysis that we do, lots of backend operations for LIDAR processing, and data processing and analytics. We think there's going to be additional revenue opportunities around this. Then, of course, the idea is that these recurring revenues, subscription-based. Then we want to expand our portfolio of services. As well as land surveys and many inspection services, we have companies that have all of our acquisitions have long-term relationships with customers, like 20-year relationships with customers, like for instance, telecom companies and railway, brand name railway companies for land surveys. Many of them have these relationships and they're profitable when we acquire them. We want to expand our portfolio of services. Precision agriculture is something that we are working on.
We do today, and we're working on some of our technology solutions to do this larger scale. These are branded businesses. Drone-as-a-service, you can go online, you can order your drone service from one of our local drone-as-a-service locations in your city where we have operations. Then, we're the drone-as-a-service go-to place in the community as well. This is just a little bit about the drone-as-a-service platform, which I think I already explained how we do, I won't go into that again. I've talked about some of these services, land surveys, inspections we do a lot of today. Power washing is another service that we do. We have 2 locations, and one of them is a franchised organization, and so we are now rolling out drone-as-a-service, power washing. We're under our own brand from the franchise model was already established through the company we acquired.
These are the ones today, and of course, we are looking at other applications beyond this mining. We feel that this is a platform that we're certainly able to scale. Our drone portfolio. Starting with our IQ Quad on the far left-hand side, this is our land survey drone, specifically designed to carry various sensors required for that. That's in the testing stage right now internally in our operations. The IQ Square, the one beside that's our outdoor line-of-sight drone. That's also the drone we use it for inspections and also power washing. It's tethered to water supply and also an electrical supply, and we're using it for that. Then the IQ Nano, the yellow drone, is for doing indoor inspections. It actually reads barcodes, and this one is actually in the customer paid trial stage today.
We do inventory management with that drone. The IQ Aqua is at the prototype, and actually now it's at the testing stage. That's our underwater drone for commercial, and then we hope to use it for defense uses. Then, of course, the ZenaDrone 1000, that's our large drone. It's a medium-sized, heavy-lift cargo drone, the one on the far right side, and it carries up to 40 kilos. This is the one we see a lot of defense applications for inspections, surveillance, reconnaissance, and cargo. So carrying medical supplies, for instance, in the Navy from ship to ship. With other defense agencies is what we're looking at there. We also announced that we are in the counter-UAS area. We have products we're working on there. They're at the prototype stage right now. We have two interceptor drones.
One of them is a small one-way drone, the Interceptor P-1, and the ZenaDrone 2000 is a larger one. IQ Glider will be our marine-based launch and refueling station. The ZenaDrone 2000 will be a gas-based drone. That is part of our integrated defense system that is in development right now. We are getting Blue UAS certification. We require that to be on procurement lists. We are well into that process, and we are, I would say, the last half of getting that certification. That is going to be a very important milestone for us moving forward, but it does not mean we are not engaging with the defense decision-makers. We certainly are.
We have been for well over a year and a half, and of course, previously we have done paid trials with the Navy and the Air Force as well, so very big focus for us. We have a Washington, D.C. office. We are staffing that up. I believe we have three, four people there, about to hire someone, and we are expecting a few more in that office for federal sales. We have been invited to do demos. Our indoor inventory management drone, we are setting that up right now with a defense agency, and we hope that moving forward we will have more of those. We have three manufacturing facilities. We started out with the one in Sharjah near Dubai, and that is 22,000 sq ft. We are commissioning our, actually expanding our facilities in Arizona right now.
That will be very important for us for domestic production and also for the U.S. military. Our production will all come from that. Our component parts come from a facility that we own in Taiwan. That will be sensors, PCB boards we are doing today, and we plan to do a lot more of our component parts from that facility. Patents are very important. I will not go into detail, but we have a patent portfolio that we are continually adding to for our drones. Also, we have provisional patents for wildfire solutions. We are working on some very unique solutions there using acoustic technology for that and accumulating our portfolio there. As far as future catalysts are concerned, on the defense side, we need to get certification, and we are looking at further engagement for more demonstrations and trials on the defense side.
As far as drone-as-a-service is concerned, we continue to do acquisitions for that business. I will just mention that we have got many products at various points in the development process, and so we are continuing on bringing those products through to full commercialization. For the financial overview, I am going to pass it over to our CFO, Jim Sherman.
Right. For first quarter revenue this year was about CAD 5.9 million. Second quarter was CAD 6.6 million. The third quarter revenue, we've estimated it, and it is subject to audit review and so forth. We've estimated it to be approximately CAD 14 million. We had a big step-up in third quarter. That's about $10 million US dollars. Our revenue is growing with leaps and bounds. This is part of our strategy to roll up land survey companies. As you see here, our drone, the red drone, I like to say the red drone is used for inspections. It's also used for land surveying. We can go to the next slide. This shows our portfolio of drones. Our assets are growing on a quarter-by-quarter basis. We have successive quarters of increase in assets. We make acquisitions.
We incorporate these acquisitions into our company, and we are able to grow revenue, and make the low-cost acquisitions, and we add technology to the acquisitions when we acquire them to increase margins. Right now, we have about a 27% increase in organic growth on a year-to-year basis from the acquisitions we made in 2025 to 2026. We're far outpacing the industry as a whole in land surveying with our revenue growth. This is because we've added technology for the drone technology. We're also able to convert the data rather quickly, and this gives us a competitive edge. Let's go to the next slide. Right now, we're right around a $200 million market cap with a little over 200 million shares outstanding.
This is reflecting our growth in company size associated with these three endeavors here with the first picture you see is indoor warehousing, and land surveying, and inspections. These are the source of our revenue growth, the warehouse package with the indoor drones, as well as growth through land surveying and inspections.
Yeah. With that-
I'd like to turn it back to Linda and open it up to questions and close.
Yes. Thank you. We're ZENA on Nasdaq, and thank you for listening. I think we may have time for a few questions.
Okay, great. Yes. You announced this week you're targeting adjusted EBITDA breakeven in 2027. With revenue increasing rapidly, but acquisitions, manufacturing, and technology development requiring substantial investments, what are the two most important operational changes that will get you there?
Some of the acquisitions that we're making, and the start of sales to the government, these are some of the things that will help to get us there. We're experiencing a very good organic growth. I mentioned the 2025 acquisitions had 27% organic growth in revenue, because we've added technology to those acquisitions. We've also made 2026 acquisitions. Those will start to provide organic growth in 2027 as we add the technology to them and convert their operations. Certain other inspection areas that we had are increasing and taking out certain inspections, large inspections, they are long-term sales. These initiatives that we've had are starting to show up as various revenue growth in those areas. That's going to help us to get to that break-even point.
At what quarterly revenue level do you believe the business can consistently generate positive adjusted EBITDA?
I think we're going to be hitting that point with our acquisitions at some point in 2027 with our growth strategies. With our acquisitions and with our organic growth in 2027, that's what's going to bring us to the break-even point.
Where does your company scale on any government contracts relative to national security?
We have some solutions there. We're working on our Blue and Green UAS certifications. Our Blue UAS certification, when that is completed, we have three drones going through that process right now. When that is completed, that will open us up to larger government sales. Staffing and opening up those manufacturing facilities for this prospect will help us to be able to make that break-even point. But getting these certifications, which is coming early in 2027, I believe, will open the door to the larger scale of government contracts.
You-
It's not just the one drone that we have. We have three different drones going through the certification right now.
Right. With that said, you're simultaneously acquiring surveying businesses, developing drones, building software, expanding. Which two businesses do you believe will generate the greatest shareholder return over the next three years?
Probably definitely the military, because drone companies get a plus for selling to the military. Drone-as-a-service is growing so fast, it's going to take time for the military to outpace that because drone-as-a-service has surpassed our expectations in revenue growth up to this point in time, and it has a pretty good start on the military sales. Within three years, military sales will outpace even drone-as-a-service.
Let's talk about your AI software. Will you keep this technology exclusive to your acquired surveying businesses, or will you eventually license it out to other companies?
Right now it's resident. It gives us an edge on computing, especially in the land surveying industry and in some of the other industries. If we see commercial profitability there without giving up company secrets, we can lease that out and it can become a real solution to others. Right now, the development of this technology is helping us compete more in the lanes that we're receiving revenue in. It helps us to compete and surpass the competitors' revenue.
Yeah. I'm afraid we've run out of time. We would love to take some more questions, but perhaps the next time we present with you.
Okay, sounds good. We'll send you all these questions so you can answer our viewers on your own. Thank you so much for joining us.