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

Welcome to the Axon fireside chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Brittany Bagley, who is the CFO and COO at Axon. Brittany joined Axon in August of 2022 from Sonos, where she served as CFO, and previously worked at KKR on the Americas private equity team. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover Axon and IT hardware here at Goldman. We have about 35 minutes for today's presentation, inclusive of some investor Q&A. But first and foremost, thank you so much, Brittany, for being here. It's really a privilege to have you on stage here with us.

Thank you. It's nice to be back.

So to kick things off, maybe we can talk big picture strategy. Axon is a market leader in public safety, has a portfolio spanning TASERs, body cameras, software products, drones, fixed camera offerings. Could you just elaborate on the management team and your vision of Axon? How do you view Axon in the broader landscape of the public safety market across both the hardware side and the software side of things?

Yes. Thank you for the question. I mean I would really start with the fact that we are a very mission-driven company, and many companies say that. We truly are. People will come to Axon and be incredibly passionate about the problem we're trying to solve, and that starts with Rick, our founder and our CEO, and our moonshot goal, which is to reduce death between the police and public by 50% by 2032. So we gave ourselves 10 years for that moonshot mission. And that really shaped a lot of how we think about our products, our portfolio, where we're going to do, it's sort of our North Star as we work through some of our strategic decisions. That has led us to both creating some new categories, greenfield, a lot of the products we have, they weren't categories, they didn't exist before we invented them and before we went into that. And I think we are continuing to do that today with some of the new categories that we're going into, inventing the use cases or inventing the technology for them. Often, we don't even need to invent the technology, but we're inventing the way a problem gets solved. And I think that, that's allowed us to expand pretty dramatically. So to your point, we were here a year ago and a lot of the products that we're going to be talking about today, we didn't have or they were still nascent or they were still just ideas. I think today, we're spending a lot of time thinking beyond our core set of products of TASER and body camera and our DEMS software business, and we're talking about AI, AI use cases, drones, counter drone. It's just continuing to increase the scope of the product. And yet all of it continues to come back to our mission about making both officers and increasingly other parts of the world, safer, more transparent, more comfortable solving those problems. So that's really what we bring it back to at the end of the day.

Yes. That's a great segue. As you mentioned, this time last year, you had a lot of nascent products that have gained a lot of traction and had a lot of success. And I think the Axon story is really one of an incredible land and expand, cross-sell motion. You guys have just done a phenomenal job in the TASER market and have really executed on expanding into other products and services. So maybe you can just talk a little bit in terms of where we are in the product life cycle of those things. As the TASER installed base mature and kind of growing at a slower pace, how has been the attach of some of these more nascent services or adjacent products been?

Yes. Yes. I mean it sort of starts with TASER. I think TASER 10, as we've talked about, has been a really incredible product for us. It's increased efficacy has allowed us to get into markets that we just weren't in before. And back to the mission, it's effective in more situations. So it's doing more for those who are carrying it to be able to de-escalate situations. We talk about TASER being on about a 5-year refresh cycle. So we're about 3 years into a 5-year refresh cycle for TASER 10. And then we talk about our body cameras being on a 2.5-year refresh cycle. So we're always thinking about and innovating on the next version of those products. I think a lot of what is driving growth beyond those products, that was some of those innovations and a lot on the software side. I think because TASER is so iconic, it's the first question that gets asked, but actually, we have this incredible software business that is outpacing our hardware business in terms of growth. It's a $1.2 billion ARR business now. We've got net revenue retention of 124%. I mean it is really performing incredibly well. And now we get to layer in things like AI on top of that. So our AI Era bundle, which is a bundle of all of our AI offerings, we really launched in October of last year. So we haven't even had that bundle out for a full year. And in Q2, we were able to say we've already done $150 million of bookings on that. So that's going to keep driving some of that software growth. As we talk about drone and counter drone, it's really easy to envision the hardware component of that, and that's a really valuable component. There's a lot of innovation there. There's a lot of technical capabilities there, there's also a beautiful software business attached to all of those hardware components. So I think where we really thrive and we're successful is where you have that hardware, software integration and they make sense together and they play well together and really having one lets you have a better version of the other.

I mean I've increasingly been focused on a single KPI coming out of Axon, and that's bookings. And I'm just kind of curious if that's the core KPI that you guys focus on in terms of like a demand indicator because there just has been an incredible amount of bookings growth. You guys have guided to high 30% bookings growth this year. I think it really speaks to how large the company can grow from a revenue and EBITDA perspective, while certainly appreciating there are some multiyear deals in there. But could you just elaborate a little bit on Axon's bookings momentum and whether you similarly view it as important KPI within the company?

Yes. I mean we absolutely do. It's an incredible leading indicator. And I think we often start talking about things before they're even out from a product standpoint before we can even sell them. So we just have a lot of vision about where the space is going to go. So we start by talking about the vision. And then we start talking about the products before they're even available. And then we start talking about bookings, which is the first time you can see how those products are doing and the traction they're getting and it's incredible for that leading sense of how well are these products resonating with our customers. Of course, I also care about revenue and profitability. So I do track those metrics and we do talk about those and we talk about the balance between investing back in for more growth in the future and all of the opportunities we see and delivering some of the profitability. I mean, I also think we track -- as I said earlier, we track our software business. So we look at that net revenue retention. We look at our ARR, we look at customer satisfaction because at the end of the day, we have the ability to do what we do. We have the ability to invent and create new categories and experiment because we've delivered for our customers. And so that's probably the other one we don't report it in an earnings release, but we care deeply about our customers and our customer relationships.

Yes. And when you think about the composition of bookings, and I can appreciate you may not be able to offer a lot of specifics here. Like what is in there? Is it mostly core? Is it mostly new? How do you kind of disentangle the composition of what that looks like today?

Yes. I mean, all of our products are continuing to grow and continuing to deliver. So you have all of those showing up in our bookings numbers. And I think more and more we talk about our Officer Safety Plan and customers that are buying at all and customers that are buying a bundle. I think the more we have out there, the more that resonate being able to get everything, be able to try it. So you see a lot in our bookings. I will say in Q2, we called out the AI plan, also called out a good chunk of that bookings. I mean, you can keep me honest on the transcript, but I think we said something like 30% of those bookings were coming from some of our newer products. And so it's just a great indicator that our new products are playing a huge role. Now the second half of the year, so Q3 and Q4 is when we do a huge amount of our bookings. I don't know if that number of new products will carry through. I think we'll sell a lot of our core in the second half, too.

Yes. Great. And just on that, the $150 million of AI Era Plan bookings in the second quarter. I tend to think of Axon as one of the early and few companies that have actually done a good job of selling AI-powered software. Maybe you can just unpack a little bit in terms of what's in the AI Era Plan, what's resonating the most?

I agree with that. I think -- and I had someone ask me maybe a month or so ago, a really good question, which is why aren't other companies doing what you're doing around AI, which is really solving a problem for your customers in a very tangible way. We're not asking our customers to sort of take these tools and go figure it out themselves. We are giving them a use case. So our big products right now, and we have what we call Draft One, that is our AI report writing tool for our customers. That was our first AI product that we came out with. So it's been out the longest. We have really good customer data on that now that it saves an officer about 11 hours per officer per week of time that before they were writing those reports themselves from scratch. Now they can use Draft One to do that. It's a real time savings. It's a real ROI for them. And also, many of the officers will say that they didn't get into the job to write reports behind their desk. So it's satisfaction. They're out doing what they got into the job to do, which is to be on the street or to be serving the community. Really great traction from that. Our two other big products, those have launched more recently, so we have less data on them. But it's our translation product. So on the body camera, you can actually direct translate with somebody in the community. So we've got great videos on this, but somebody gets into a bike accident. They don't speak the same language as the officer. Well, instead of having to go find someone who can translate just having a subpar experience where you're trying to get help and you can't communicate, now you can do Real-Time Translation. And I think one of the surprise hit is something we call Policy Chat that loads all of the policy documents into a searchable database where the officer again, on their body camera can just ask what the policy is about X, Y or Z. Everything from like, what does my uniform need to look like to what do I do in this traffic stop, to what do I do in this situation. And that is both making an officer's life easier because they don't have to go look in the manual or they don't have to get something wrong. But also cases can often get thrown out for policy violations. And so it's a real benefit to the officer and the department to not have something get thrown out just because they didn't get the policy right. And I would say that's one where our relationship with our customers really matters. I'm not sure we internally would have said that should be one of our first few products that was out for GA. And then we talked to our customers, and they were like, "Yes, that, please, please give us that." And so we were smart enough to listen and it's getting really good feedback.

Yes. And what solidified Policy Chat for me was the demonstration that you guys gave at Axon Week, where you actually showed what the alternative was, right? I know it was an officer in a group chat with other officers asking for what the policy is and you got a mixture of answers and none of which were necessarily correct. So it definitely made a lot of sense. Just in terms of Draft One, I would love to hear a little bit about what have been some of the frictions to adoption and where the company is and overcoming some of those issues because from a productivity standpoint, it seems like a no-brainer, but nothing's ever as clean and neat as it may appear in a thesis.

Yes. I think change in new workflows can always be challenging, I think when we were first talking about Draft One, we talked a little bit about was it going to get accepted by DAs, and we did a lot of work with our customers and our partners to get DAs more comfortable with that. I think that may still exist in pockets. I think that's died down a lot just as the entire population has gotten more comfortable with AI and using AI and what AI is going to do. And so now I think it's more just change management. How do you get someone used to using this? How do they know what the tool is good at doing and what the tool is less good at doing? Where do we have tweaks on our side? Where do they maybe need more training. And so I would say now we're in more of a like just what does it look like to roll out any new tool and get any new tool adopted.

Yes. Can we talk a little bit about the go-to-market for the AI Era Plan because it seems like the AI Era Plan is a bundle of AI services. Right now, it's Draft One, Policy Chat, Real-Time Translation and a promise to deliver AI-powered services in the future. Why is that the right way to do it? And maybe you can talk about why that's acceptable for the customer, too, right, and the history that you guys have in terms of delivering innovation for your customers?

Yes. Thank you. Yes. So we took a little bit of a risk with the AI Era Plan in terms of creating a bundle that didn't have all of the products in it yet. And I think there's a couple of things that led to that. One is the pace of innovation in AI and the tools and the products we can come up with is pretty fast. I mean some of these are being come up with -- we're coming up with these in less than a year. Our customers go through pretty long procurement and buying cycle processes. And so we actually got feedback from one of our customers who had just gone through a whole contract with us, and then I think we announced Draft One. And their response was like, "I don't want to rewrite the contract, like, I don't want to do this all over again, to get Draft One in it." And so we came up with this concept of like, well, of course, that makes sense. You don't want to have to go back to city counselor or go back through your process every time we come up with a new tool, so let's bundle it all together. You can buy it for one price, you're future-proofing it. You get the innovation that we're coming up with AI. And you don't have to come back in and buy product a la carte, after a la carte. I think the reason it worked is because of the trust we've built with our customers they believe that we will keep innovating and that we will keep coming out with new products and that it won't just be a 1 or 2 or 3 product bundle that they're better off buying a la carte. They believe we're going to keep innovating and keep delivering value for them.

Where is Axon right now in terms of penetrating the U.S. state and local opportunity? And I think there's been a view for the last couple of years that the company is kind of fully penetrated in U.S. state and local. And I think it was last quarter where you signed the biggest deal in the company's history with a major police department. So kind of shame on somebody like me to say that you guys were fully penetrated. So how penetrated are you? How do you think about that?

I mean you're not alone. In my 3 years here, we get this question constantly. And I think it's a logical question because we are creating new categories. And so I think it's very easy to look at our existing products and say, well, don't most officers in the U.S. carry a TASER? Most do not all. Come on San Francisco, but most do. And then you take, well, don't most officers have a body camera, and they do. But I think what's getting missed is that we keep coming up with new products, there's new offerings. We're continuing to create new categories like with AI, AI doesn't exist and yet it saves time, it saves money, there's ROI. So I think that's the big pieces that we're not standing still. We are continuing to innovate and come up with new things. And then those go into our Officer Safety Plans, and our customers, when they come back to rewrite their contracts, they have more to buy from us. And they are buying it because we're really solving a problem for them. We're not just saying, let's take an apples-to-apples product and raise the price and at some point, aren't you going to get sick of that. We're saying, no, here, we're putting 5 new things we've come up with in the Officer Safety Plan. The price for that went up this year, but it also -- it had drones in it, it had counter drones in it. And we're coming up with new products that will go into our Officer Safety Plan for next year. I think the other piece that gets maybe underappreciated is how big a market there is outside just core public safety. When we think about the international market, that's a huge opportunity. There's opportunities in federal, and we're relatively early. There's opportunities in enterprise. Q4 of last year, we had our biggest ever company deal and it was in the enterprise space. So there are these markets where products were coming up with and we're inventing have applicability in other spaces or they have needs in other places. And so that creates big new market opportunities for us to keep going after. And back to your bookings question, we start to see it in bookings, we're starting to get that traction. We're pretty early in both federal and enterprise. International, it can be a little lumpy. It was about 20% of our revenue in Q2, and we're still early in international. So there's just lots of runway left both in our domestic business, but also in our new market.

Yes. When you think about the spending power of your domestic state and local customers, like how do those budgets look? And I think in the last couple of years, those budgets were helped by federal grants and some federal money, which, I think, to some degree, has gone away, but is the state and local budget like up, down or sideways? Like how do you think about that?

When you go back and look at history over time, budgets for police departments have been up on average 5% or so for something like the last 40 years. So the budgets are continuing to go up. There is budget there. We are a really small percentage of the budget still today. So I think for most of our departments, we might be about 1% of their budget. For some of the departments who are buying everything from us, that might go up to 3% to 5%. And then you say, well, like how is that? And it's because technology is still a relatively small portion of their budget. If you think about their biggest spend, it's on personnel and over time. And then you say, well, but okay, maybe you're a large part of the technology budget, okay, but the technology budget is continuing to go up and the more you can deliver solutions that are helping with overtime challenges with staffing challenges, right? Drones are making officers a lot more productive. They can be first on scene. They can save time. They can save manpower. That opens up the budget that is accessible to you. And so that's really why we think about it as that 1% or maybe that 5% because you can help drive that productivity.

Maybe just talking about some of the adjacencies, which you mentioned, enterprise, federal, corrections, international. Where do you see the most promise in the near term? 20% of revenue last quarter from international, I think, was a record. So you clearly are demonstrating some traction there. And when I think about the last 12 months, I think of Axon actually very successfully being able to demonstrate good traction in these adjacencies where I think back to 2023, 2024, there was a lot of skepticism. So yes.

Yes. We thrive on some of the skepticism. I think there are all opportunities, like I think different people inside the company have different perspectives on which one of those have the most opportunity. I am quite bullish on our enterprise business. I think when you look at some of the new products that we have, whether or not that Fusus, which is our real-time crime center, single pane of glass, and you think about some of the problems that retailers are having with theft and asset protection challenges, that is and does really resonate with those customers. And that's a huge market that we are not in at all. And again, it's sort of a greenfield. There's no -- there's legacy video management systems, but there's no Fusus equivalent of a real-time crime center for enterprise. You think about drones, we are so early in drones, but multiple years out, the more drones there are, the more you're going to need counter drone, the more you could see campuses, warehouses, people's houses being protected by drones and counter drone systems. I mean drones are coming, and they're going to be part of life, and that's going to have impact for everybody running any kind of physical footprint. So I think we're at the very beginning and as we continue to innovate on some of this technology, it has this broad applicability in enterprise. It does for international, too. So somebody could probably make the same arguments for international.

Great. Shifting gears and maybe focusing on specific products, starting with TASER. As you mentioned, we're in the middle of a refresh cycle, TASER 10 from TASER 7. What's your medium-term outlook for revenue growth on TASER? And what are some of the components that we should think about in terms of installed base growth, the TASER 10 ASP premium versus TASER 7. It sounds like maybe we'll get another TASER in 2 years, but...

Maybe. Yes. I think that's a big question back to like when are you through your upgrade cycle and like are we just waiting to see growth fall off? I mean, we saw incredible demand first 3 years. So I don't know that I have any big promises to make. But what I'll say is we're still selling TASER 7s today, right? So there's a long tail on these that will continue to get upgraded. And then I wouldn't discount the fact that there are new markets and new customers for TASER. We talked about on our last earnings call, some big contracts with corrections. Corrections is a big market where TASER is incredibly relevant that when we were selling TASER 7, we really weren't in. And so as you think about where does TASER 10 go, I wouldn't discount new spaces and new opportunities to keep selling that into. And whether or not that's TASER 10 or in 2 years, whatever the next TASER product is or I mean we say-ish on the 5 years. So like I'm not actually putting a time line out. But there's just big opportunities where the more effective that device becomes the more situations that becomes important and relevant to.

And there's a lot of innovation with the cartridges and the ability of pierce through clothing and things like that, that will help improve the effectiveness of it right?

Yes.

On the body camera side, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what industry demand looks like from -- for body cameras. And I think that a skeptic might say, we've crested what feels like the call for policing accountability. On the other hand, I think that having a body camera in many ways has been a tool that officers want to use, right, because it kind of protects them in a lot of ways as well. So we'd just like to hear your thoughts on what you're getting from the industry from a body cam demand perspective.

Yes. I mean I don't think body cameras go away. Like they're just a permanent part of what people expect to have out there now. And that is true from the officer perspective, too. I mean I think when body cameras first came out, I think it was really pushed from a public transparency standpoint. But now if you talk to an officer, do they always love having a body camera on them? No. Do they want to go do their jobs without having a body camera? Also no. Because if they are doing a good job and most of them are trying to do a good job, that protects them, too. They want to show that they were trying to do everything how they were supposed to do it. And so it's really been embraced. And I think the other thing is people have just gotten used to being filmed. Like in any situation and this goes to body cameras potential applicability in enterprise and in retail, right? Like now everybody has their phone up and they're filming anything that happens. Well, wouldn't you rather just have a body camera that is actually getting the evidence and then can get shared with the police and can get used in any situation rather than trying to go out and collect phone evidence and video cameras and trying to piece that together. There's just an expectation now that there is a video of something that happens. You can like that or not like that. But that has -- we've crossed that bridge.

On drones, could you just maybe clarify, shed some light on Axon's strategy around drones because you guys have Dedrone, anti-drone that you're going to market with DFR. My understanding is that, that's in partnership where you guys are selling software, but also you're partnering with the company to actually manufacture and sell the drones, you're in some ways a reseller. So what's the strategy and the go-to-market for drones today? And then how might that evolve over time, if at all?

Yes. Yes. We have a close partnership with a really great company called Skydio, and they are selling a lot of the drones that police departments are using and deploying for drone as a first responder. Those data points then go into our software. So that video that gets collected goes into our Evidence.com. It goes into Fusus, it's an endpoint. It creates this whole ecosystem in terms of how that works. And I think where does that go? I think a lot of major cities and a lot of cities period are piloting drones. Things like car theft, the need to get away from high-speed chases. These are a lot of good examples, especially in dense cities, where there's a lot going on in a small ratio. These are all really good examples of where drones are really helping and aiding the police force. So great partnership there, and it's sort of self-reinforcing in terms of how it feeds back into our software. We then have Dedrone, an acquisition we made just under a year ago, and that's really the counter drone piece of things. So that's both hardware to do the sensor arrays to sense where the drones are and then it's software to track them. Again, broad applicability across the police departments enterprises. And then we also -- we do some indoor tactical drones, again, more niche, but for police departments back to our mission. You would want a drone to go into a room and get information or get a camera in there first before you sent in an officer. So I think drones are really integral to that mission piece of taking people out of dangerous situations, and we're coming at it from all angles.

Great. Maybe bringing it back and tying it together with some of the financial guidance points that you guys have laid out. Last quarter, the company raised its full year revenue growth outlook to, I think, 29% at the midpoint. Could you just talk a little bit about what's been driving the better-than-expected top line growth? Where do you see the midterm revenue growth outlook for the business?

Yes. I mean the nice thing about the bookings number and the future contracted bookings is we tend to have fairly good visibility in terms of what will come in for the next year. That forms the basis for how we think about our guidance. But what we've really been seeing is what doesn't go into that number is the deals that we book in the year. And so I think as we're out talking to customers, we're just getting incredible traction, including around the new products and getting in more deals this year than we were expecting to get in. So that both helps with the bookings guidance that we give and the revenue coming through for this year.

That's great. 25% EBITDA margins is the guidance for this year. This is a company that I think has compounded roughly 30% a year for several years. How much operating leverage is in the model? And where could EBITDA margins ultimately end up in an end state, end of the decade?

I think that all depends on where we see growth and opportunity. And right now, we see so much opportunity. We see so many places where we can and should be investing back into the business, both in terms of new product opportunities and in terms of some of these new market opportunities that I think we're pretty happy with where our margins are now. And even keeping the margins at this level, we're making important trade-off decisions. So as we've gone through even this year, we don't have any longer-term guidance out right now. But even as we've gone through this year, we've been really reinvesting back in the business. At some point, if we don't see as many opportunities out there, could we drop more to the bottom line? Yes, we absolutely could. But right now for where we see innovation and growth and the ability to really try and keep this amazing business going for the next 5 years, we're investing back into all these opportunities.

Great. Maybe in the last couple of minutes here, we can just segue into some of those investment opportunities that you see, the strategic priorities for the company over the next 12 to 24 months?

Yes. I mean it's so much of what we've gone through. I think we're nascent in AI. We are nascent in drones, enterprise, federal international, huge opportunities. And there's also probably 3 things that Rick is going to think of an invent in the next 12 months that I don't even have on my list right now, and he's got a pretty good track record with those.

Great. It's a great place to wrap it up. Brittany, thank you so much for being here on stage with us. It's really been a privilege to have you here.

Thank you. Great to be here.