Axon Enterprise, Inc. (AXON) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We're on. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you of the President of Axon, Josh Isner here. Thanks for joining us. And just a quick reminder, we value [indiscernible], so we appreciate your vote if we've earned it. But with that, Josh, it's been a long run for you at the company. You've been President for 2 years. You've been at the company for much longer than that, basically your whole career.

16 years.

So now you're running the whole company. But basically, I just want to start, we can go in a lot of different directions here. But you had a great strong start to the year, better bookings than I think a year ago, and you talked about some things that sales kind of did to drive that. But what kind of unlocked the better start to the year versus a year ago?

Yes. I think it's really probably two things. I think we -- a year ago, while we had an awesome bookings year throughout 2024. Q1, we're off to a slow start. I think there was a little complacency from our sales team. It's the only quarter where budgets don't expire, like you don't have half the country on July 1, switching over a new budget. You don't have Florida and Texas and the U.S. Federal government on October 1, and you don't have most of the Northeast on December 31 into January 1. And so with Q1, it's a bit of an air pocket, and there's not that same kind of motion around incentivization, budgets and so forth, but then combine that with the fact that we launched a lot of new products last year. And as we continue to launch new products and they're represented to larger, larger extents in the pipeline. And frankly, the same number of deals yields a much higher dollar amount. And so that's also a nice tailwind to have going into this year.

Great. Enterprise was a standout in Q4. You've talked a lot about it in recent quarters. You had your largest deal ever with the logistics company. Talk about kind of how that deal came about and what they're using and maybe describe Fusus a little bit more for those newer to that.

Sure thing. So we did sign our biggest deal in company history in Q4. It was -- with a large logistics provider that we'll be able to announce in the next few months here, but everybody is familiar with this brand. It's a very large international company. And essentially, body cameras were a small piece of the deal, but the biggest piece of the deal, as you said, was Fusus, which was a company that we acquired at the beginning of last year that essentially takes any existing CCTV systems and cobble them all together on one screen for a real-time crime center or for a security operations center. So the benefit here is you don't have to go switch out a bunch of hardware. We have a small component that essentially plugs into every camera. And then it decodes it and it's able to compile the -- all of the feeds very simply for an agency or in this case, an enterprise customer. So this particular customer had 300,000 different video feeds in their operations. And so Fusus was the biggest part of the deal in that at all of those different sites between stores, warehouses, logistics hubs that all those feeds, we're able to make it into one security operations center, and we think there's a lot of opportunity across that entire segment of the market to do the same.

Wow, 300,000. It's a lot.

Yes, it's a lot of work on the back end too, once the deal gets done.

Yes. And then retail, you've talked about some trials with some large retailers. How is that -- how are the pipelines there? What's kind of the -- I get a lot of questions on like what this is going to look like for them?

We're around the hoop for sure. I mean -- like we're talking to all of the biggest retailers in the country. We -- some are further along than others, but you take a brand like Walmart, for example, they have 2.1 million retail workers, and there's 900,000 cops in the United States. And so you can quickly see how winning some of these large retail accounts quickly trumps our U.S. state and local core customer base. Now the name of the game there is just like with public safety, we started with licensing at like $10 a month back in 2010. It takes time to build up the value to find the exact product market fit to understand what to build next to help aid an upsell mechanism there. So we still have to go through that work. So it's -- even if -- as we start winning these large retailers, they'll be at small dollar amounts to start and then it's on a per user basis, and it's up to us to build that same software ecosystem that's valuable to a retailer just like we've done that's valuable to a police force.

Wow. That's great. International is the other kind of newer market. It's been a long time in the making, but it sounds like it's kind of hit an inflection point. What's driving that? There's lots of countries out there with some huge police departments. There's been some reluctance over the years, probably because of cloud and other things. But what's causing them to finally say, okay, I need to buy this?

Yes, it's a couple of things. We've made far more significant investments in the team, especially in Europe. We've hired a lot of folks from other cloud providers that have historically had some success in Europe. Our Chief Revenue Officer based in Europe now, Cameron Brooks ran the Europe, Middle East and Africa for AWS. So we've upgraded kind of the quality of our team along the way to approach and to break into some of these markets with the cloud. But I think in general, there's just like in the U.S., 10, 12 years ago, there's that same thing happening in Europe right now, where folks are starting to realize, say, hey, the cloud is just -- it's going to make every process and storage, apparatus more scalable and easier to access. And it's crazy, it's taken so long to get there. But I remind people, France, like just greenlighted online banking a few years ago where that's just the level of security and kind of discomfort with any risk that you see in some of these large European countries. So it's going to take some time to break into them. But this year, we've started to unlock 2 or 3 of them that we think will close this year that will be pretty sizable opportunities. And hopefully, we can snowball that market by market.

That's great. And any sense for like the size of some of these place forces relative to your core U.S. base?

Yes, that's probably the most attractive thing about breaking in. It's a lot of work, but there's a big payoff at the end of it. You think about a country like Italy and their 2 largest police forces combined for around 200,000 officers. So NYPD is the biggest in the United States by 4x, and it's got 40,000 officers. So if you think about the idea of breaking into 2 national police forces and having 5x the size of the opportunity as NYPD, it's -- the centralization can really help. Now there's a lot of bureaucracy. There's a lot of stuff you have to get through to get to that point. But once you're there, the volumes get really, really exciting. So we essentially need 5 of those in Europe to mirror the entire U.S. customer base. So we think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Wow, impressive. What products in deals like that, would they be landing with and expanding with? Would they buy a lot of things in the initial land? Or how would that go?

Yes. I think TASERs, body cameras and some software is generally the initial kind of jumping off point. And then from there, it's about, hey, are there some AI add-ons we can sell? Is Fusus as an opportunity there? Is Dedrone, one of our other acquisitions, they're a big drone defense technology. Our goal is to get in there with kind of the basic table stakes type of stuff and then build, build, build.

Yes. Speaking of Dedrone, I think you've talked a little bit about how maybe that's helped drive some European demand.

For sure. So Dedrone was another company we acquired last year on October 1 and very excited to have them. They are the market leader in drone defense. And so in Ukraine right now, this is the technology that's taking Russian drones out of the sky, and that's how they kind of came on our radar and everything that happened down the street in New Jersey last year with all these drone sidings and people wondering, hey, how are they tracked? How do you get them out of the sky? I think the moment is coming for this technology. And Dedrone essentially allows you to monitor all of the drones and identify them in your airspace, tell you where the pilots are and monitor things down to the exact make and model of the drone. And so -- and then they also have the capability, though not yet legal in state and local U.S. only in federal U.S. to actually jam those drones and take them out of the sky or send them home. And so that right now, we're working through Congress to get that same waiver for U.S. state and local that the federal government already has.

Wow. Excellent. Speaking of drones, and you mentioned that New Jersey and clearly, it's been a big topic for you guys and just in the country, I guess, the past year or so. But you have a very tight partnership with Skydio, who is now, I think, the leading U.S. manufacturer. There was a Chinese company that's now kind of banned in some cases. But how does that partnership kind of flow into your model?

Yes. Yes. We made a big bet on Skydio last year. We were looking at the market in the U.S. government representative, Elise Stefanik, came out with a bill that said, look, Chinese manufactured drones are an information security risk to the United States because you don't know what components are in there. You don't know what's being sent back. You just -- there's not enough visibility on some of that. So they essentially said, "Hey, as of 12/31, you can only buy Chinese drones that have been in the market already. Any new Chinese drone is banned from U.S. public safety." And we had made a big bet around that time on Skydio, thinking this was going to happen and Skydio is manufactured in the U.S. Like you said, they're the leading U.S. drone manufacturer. They are winning the majority of deals right now in the drone space, especially in the drone as a first responder space, and that's really where policing is going, where someone calls 911, and based on the metadata of the 911 call, a drone is immediately dispatched to that address. So you can get eyes on the scene. Sometimes the drones -- just the presence of them, if it's like a fight or something gets people to scatter. Some of our customers are seeing that have to go to 25% fewer calls for service because the drone is there already, and it's either resolved or whatever the case may be. And so this is going to be a big part of the future of policing, and we think Skydio is the best positioned to win in that market, and we're essentially their exclusive channel partner. So we sell all of their drones into our customer base, along with all of our software that accompanies those drones.

Great. So the software is the piece that would flow...

Yes. Just drones just like fixed cameras or in-car cameras or body cameras, they're just constantly collecting and streaming evidence. And our products are what enables the storage, but also the live streaming of that video back to a police command center.

Wow. Yes. Your website is -- or your Twitter kind of shown some videos of drones DFR, Drone as First Responder in action and it looks extremely powerful.

Very cool.

I think I would certainly want that in my city. And so that's kind of gone mainstream already faster than people thought. I think even like last fall, it was kind of first started -- I mean, I think in New York, it's here. What does it take to kind of -- is there an effect where some other departments across the country can say, hey, look at what these big cities are doing, we need to do this, too. Is there that building effect?

Yes, for sure. I mean there's -- it's maybe not quite a 10x year-over-year at this point. But for a while, it was, it went from less than 5 police departments operating DFR programs to 50 a couple of years ago. Last year, it got up to about 500 accounts, and now it's over 1,000 accounts that are currently either trialing or have drone as a first responder deployments. Now a lot of these might be small. You might start with 1 to 3 drones just to figure out, hey, we're going to send these towards the area in the city where there's the most crime, make sure we understand how to use it and make sure we're seeing value out of it. And then just like anything in public safety, it will scale from there. And so the key is just winning those early days and having a foundation to build on.

Wow, 1,000 already that's great. Great. Let's back up a little bit to macro. You've been pretty clear there's been no impact of DOGE. You do have a federal business, but I think the expectations for this year are modest because of what's going on. But more importantly, I think there's been no trickle down to state and local budgets. So maybe just talk about how state and local budgets are trending. I get a lot of questions on what's -- what are the risks around those budgets? How much do those budgets grow normally? And then if there's any like state funds that DARPA funds that either run out or whatnot, but...

Yes. Starting with the first part. So yes, federal is a smaller business for us. It's fast growing, and it's grown nicely over the last 5 years. But relative to our bookings as an entire business, it's still small such that it really doesn't change our guidance for the year, even if we were experiencing [ cutstar ] contracts, which we've been lucky enough to avoid in almost every agency. And so we're -- right now, we're big into the federal civilian space in public safety, which is all the 3-letter agencies: DHS, ICE, the FBI, customs border protection and so forth. And to really build a monster federal business, you got to break into the DoD side of the house. And a lot of that is more, hey, they're sending out specifications and saying, we're going to pay a lot of money, but you've got to build to these specs and that hasn't been our motion historically. So we're still trying to figure out how we navigate and grow in that segment without totally distracting our product teams from all the other awesome opportunities that we have. But on top of that, in terms of the funding, we actually think that state and local will have the opportunity to capture more funding in this next budget cycle. We're hearing from -- as part of the 2025, 2026 budget, which will start on October 1, that there's money allocated for just state and local law enforcement, for the World Cup, for Olympics, and all of these are just new pools of money available to our core customer base that we think we will be in a position to capture some of.

Interesting. So there could be extra.

I think folks are cautious based on what's happened in dose. But at the end of the day, this administration is very pro-police. A lot of the campaign promises were about refunding the police or upping police budgets and so I think you're going to start to see that happen starting later this year.

That's excellent. TASER is how the company started many, many years ago. TASER 10 demand has clearly been very strong, orders outpacing the prior generation by 2x still, even kind of 2 years post launch is impressive. And it's a big technology upgrade. So maybe just talk about, is that helping drive more actual usage of TASER? Is there lots -- is there some room to increase penetration of TASER? And it is capacity constrained as well. So how do you kind of flex -- turn on more capacity to meet that demand?

Yes, for sure. So on the product side, our previous generation TASER 7 was -- you essentially could load 2 cartridges into it and each of them had 2 shots. So 1 trigger pull, 2 darts go down range, and they're at a slight angle, so they're spreading as they go. And as you might be able to guess, it's hard to -- when you have a suspect that's fighting back or fleeing or whatever the case to get 2 darts in a moving target with heavy clothing on and so forth, stemming from 1 shot, that's hard. And you got a backup shot, so you had another crack at 2 darts and you need to get 2 out of the total of 4, but that still gives you about an 80% to 85% success rate. TASER 10 has 10 single-loaded cartridges. So only one dart per trigger pull, but you can fire them in rapid succession, that performs much more like a police firearm. And these darts -- the design is much more penetrating, especially in terms of heavy clothing. And so the success rate in the field is going way up, and that's driving a lot of the upgrade cycle to TASER 10. Like you said, such that it's being adopted at 2x the rate of our last generation of TASER. The biggest thing that's happening though is it's instilling more confidence in the users. And our mission is to protect life and to make sure that public safety, whether it's police officers or [ sheriff deputies ] aren't having to fire bullets down range to stop a threat. And I think TASER 10 represents a big jump in that direction. And there's still a couple of other big jumps that have to happen before we can truly say like in the field, this will outperform a firearm, but this was the first one, getting more shots -- the range is now 45 feet instead of 20-ish. So all of a sudden, you can hit the target from double the range, and that makes a big difference to cops. Because inside of 20 feet, if there's a threat with a knife or a gun, that's generally the distance where you start thinking about lethal force. And so to go up to 40 feet with that same threat, you just have more time to react and using less lethal before having to escalate. So we're really big on what the future represents in terms of TASER and all the success we've had in TASER 10. And it is supply constrained where every one we're building right now has a home. We're trying to get more and more automation equipment online to catch up to the demand. But certainly, that's the dynamic right now.

Well, that's great. It sounds like you're building capacity throughout this year, for sure.

And into next year, no question.

Okay. There was an interesting comment. I think you made at another conference where some departments -- well, one, there are some departments still on the 2 versions ago TASER [indiscernible].

Yes, many.

That's interesting. And then there are some that even share -- some departments that share TASER. And maybe this time, they decide, yes, everyone should have their own. So those are 2 kind of...

Yes, that second dynamic is a little more relative to just the way we sell now where you buy 1 license and includes a body camera and includes all your evidence storage and software and it includes your TASER. So as -- before, when you paid upfront for x number of TASERs, you could buy what you could afford and then you share them. Now it's completely operationalized, where it's an annual payment that includes everything. It's financed over 5 years. And so it's structured in a way that triggers much more adoption.

Yes. That's great. A lot of your customers are still on -- I think it was 70% of customers are still on basic plans. That was an interesting stat [indiscernible] quarter.

70% customers.

Yes. And so -- but you've done a really good job upgrading to premium plans over time. How is that kind of go-to-market motion? And how do you get that percentage to increase at the premium plans?

Yes. The bet we're really making is that no matter where you start with an Evidence.com license. Over time, you're going to understand more and more of the pain points that come along with the body camera and just basic information management and digital evidence storage software, like -- and that's really the moment in time that we can capitalize because a customer might not value the sharing workflows upfront. They might not value AI-assisted redaction upfront. They might not care much about how you how you set up user profiles within your account, so only certain people can access certain things. And then all of a sudden, once you start using body camera in the basic software for a year, you come back and say, hey, I need this, this and this, that I didn't necessarily know I needed upfront, and that's really the conversation when we talk more about a real upgrade from the basic to something far more premium than that. And I think that motion is really working well.

Well -- and your pricing is very transparent in your slide deck. I think the highest end is over $300.

Yes, it's around $350 for of the officer safety plan per user per month, but the plans start at $40 or $50 a month. Now the [ AI Era plan ], the AI bundle is on top of that. It's another $200 a month. So our max kind of per user value is around $500 to $600 a month.

And that's still only 2% max of the budget?

Oh, yes. It's -- most of -- most -- almost all of police department budgets go to staffing and over time, right? And then the rest is split up across a number of technology vendors. But I think our -- at our largest deployments, we're still far, far less than 1% of the police department budget.

Even at the large -- wow. That's a good jumping off point to the Draft One and AI Era bundle which can improve officer efficiency, save a lot of time. I think the pitch is very clear, but would love to hear like what you're hearing from customers that are actually using it, the ROI they're getting any kind of anecdotes around that, just around the demand for that you're seeing?

Sure thing. I think for Axon, we're very lucky to be in the position that we have this kind of Venn Diagram forming of customers that have been underserved by technology historically that are sitting on large data sets and that have a huge percentage of their work as like administrative type of work, like report writing. And when you have like those 3 things being true, that's like the ripest opportunity for AI right now. And that's why, frankly, we've been able to -- when a lot of companies are trying to figure out how to launch AI tools that are valuable to their users, we've found this very quickly that, hey, every body cam video has an audio transcript. AI can analyze the audio transcript and write a summary, i.e., the first draft of a police report as to what happened. And yes, the officer might have to edit some things, might have to fill in a few blanks but officers historically spend about half their time writing police reports. Like so if they're working 5 days a week, they're only police officers for 2.5 days. And with Draft One, that goes down to about 10% to 20% of their time. So you're giving every police officer and police force an extra 1.5 days or so of officer capacity every week, and that's very, very valuable. That means you have to hire fewer open roles. And frankly, a lot of police departments are funding Draft One through employee headcount vacancy. And they're just shifting that budget over and saying, "Hey, we don't need as many folks anymore because they're not sitting around writing reports all day." so that's kind of the power that some of our early AI tools have. And this next wave will just continue to build out the value across all of the workflows, not just report writing.

Excellent. What percentage of your customers do you think could adopt this eventually?

I think -- we tend to focus most of our business and resources on the top 1,200 police agencies in the country because even though there are 18,000 police departments, the top 1,200 house about 70% of the number of users. So our goal is to capture -- and those are generally -- those are all the agencies over 100 officers. They're generally better funded. They generally are more adopting of new technology. And so our goal is to capture as much of that top 1,200 as we can to start. And I think we have a realistic chance to do that.

Yes, yes. That's a good stat reminder. It's a fascinating industry and market. I went to your conference in April, which was excellent, the Dreamforce of Law Enforcement, I think you [ called? ]. Yes, very different than Salesforce Dreamforce but it was great. And we just would love to hear like what customers we're most excited about asking you for there are a couple of new products, Lightpost and Outpost.

Yes. So we have Axon week every April or May, and it's essentially a week-long user conference, where the first half is all TASER, the second half is all video and technology. And it's one of my favorite weeks of the year because most of the time, we're focused on, hey, this customer is having an issue. We've got a blitz to solve it. Here are all the things that aren't going well that we're focused on day-to-day, getting -- improving upon. And then you show up this week, and everybody is like you're reminded of how much impact you're having, how much customer excitement there is around your product like your NPS score comes to life that week and you see all these happy customers that are passionate about how we're helping. And so it's a great week in that regard. I think excitement-wise, definitely the fixed ALPR products that we launched, automated license plate recognition between -- you can mount it on traffic lights, you can mount it on light post. You can install it yourself with its own dedicated real estate in every city. That's a big one and one that we're seeing a lot of excitement around the AI -- the new AI products we announced, especially the AI assistant on your body camera that can do things like translate 100 different languages and play them back in English for the officer. A lot of our next-generation evidence management, AI tools. There is a lot to be excited about. So great week, a lot of pipeline generated. That conference cost us a couple of million dollars to put on, and you walk out of there with $300 million to $500 million in pipeline as a result. So the ROI is extremely high on that type of event, and we're excited coming out of it.

That's amazing. With that, we're out of time. Thank you very much, Josh.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, everybody.