NextNav Inc. (NN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to Citi's AppsEconomy Conference. I'm Jason Bazinet. I cover the media and Internet sectors here at Citi. We have disclosures available to the right of the video player or under the City Disclosures tab if you're viewing this via Citi Velocity. I'm very pleased this afternoon to have NextNav including Gary Parsons, the Chairman of NextNav; and Ganesh Pattabiraman, President and CEO of NextNav. Gentlemen, welcome.

Thanks, Jason. Happy to be here.

Thanks. Nice to meet you.

Thank you for taking the time. So maybe, I should say one other thing, for investors, if you do have questions, you can send me an e-mail directly and I'll relay them to the NextNav team or you can type your questions into the question box on the video feed. Happy to relay those questions. I guess I would just start with a very simple high-level question, which is for those that might be less familiar, what is NextNav?

Whenever I get -- let Ganesh take the first crack at that one.

Sure. Well, NextNav, we are a provider of what we call resilient 3D geolocation capabilities that delivers 3D location in GPS-denied environments or challenged environments across cities and markets. And we really developed NextNav after spending nearly a decade at Qualcomm, putting GPS into mobile phones. We recognize the limitations of GPS, which is a space-based technology. And it did not -- it had many limitations. It did not work in urban areas. It was -- it couldn't tell you which floor of a building you're in. It wasn't secure and resilient system. It didn't work indoors. So many limitations that were apparent, because it was an old technology developed in the '60s. However, if you could really overcome these limitations of GPS through a land-based network that had similar characteristics to GPS and then worked and solved many of the challenges that GPS had, you could have an outsized impact on the overall economy. And to put things a little bit in perspective, GPS is at the core of the $700 billion economy today that the U.S. government did a study on, and drives a lot of the economic activity. And so we expect to have a very similar about $100 billion impact on a worldwide basis in solving the problems and limitations of GPS. So what we've developed really are 2 platforms: the Pinnacle system and the TerraPoiNT system. The Pinnacle system is commercially available today and that delivers vertical capabilities using GPS-based horizontal capabilities across 4,400 cities and markets and that is live today. The TerraPoiNT system delivers the 3-dimensional horizontal and vertical positioning and timing capabilities that GPS provides, but we delivered in places where GPS doesn't work, indoors, urban areas, et cetera, and as the complement to GPS from a security point of view, and that is -- utilizes our spectrum, and that is available in a limited number of markets in about 47 markets nationwide. And that's what we expect to expand and augment on a more nationwide basis with our recent transactions that we just closed.

Jason, I'd also add there, because the -- most folks immediately they can see the value associated with the location. Because they know how much of the ecosystem works with the location, particularly mobile advertising and things like that. But Ganesh mentioned timing, and that also is a very key component that most normal consumers don't really focus on or think about, but it is essential to the operation of critical infrastructure. All of the 4G, 5G wireless networks are clocked off of the GPS timing signal, high-speed financial transactions and trading are all clocked on a timing basis. Power grid, energy transfers, they're all clocked in time. So if you start looking less at a consumer level and more at an industrial stage, the timing capabilities and the ability to have something that provides a resilient timing source that isn't jammable, spoofable, impacted in that way, becomes something that governments become highly interested in. And frankly, entire industries become interested in. I guess, in the PIPE Investments that we had before we went public, one of our largest investors there was Koch Industries. And then frankly, the Koch Industry Group saw those critical infrastructure elements as important aspects of their industrial base. As we'll get into it, I'm sure more as we do. But internationally, since we are now an international standard, a lot of governments around the world are now also reaching out from the standpoint of not just location and an alternate to the GPS satellite constellations there, but also something to protect themselves from a timing basis, not only hospital powers or something that clearly have been doing this for a long time now, but something just to protect your critical infrastructure.

So let me ask one question. I think in your prepared remarks, you talked about the $700 billion figure from the government about how much GPS enables the economy. And then you mentioned $100 billion opportunity. Is that sort of the waterfall between, hey, here's the existing GPS and here's all the people that are happy with it and 1/7 of it have issues as it relates to timing or security or?

It's not completely that, but it probably is good to do the reconciliation of the numbers. First off, the $700 billion is actually a U.S. government figure for U.S. alone. Annual. The $100 billion figure that we gave was worldwide. $50 billion of which we believe is in the United States. Now you look at the $50 billion versus the $700 billion, yes, to an extent, it's more what you said, which is which portions of that $700 billion most need our unique capabilities, indoor penetration, resiliency, timing, critical infrastructure protection and things of that nature. So we just narrowed that down. I mean, obviously, it's still a huge addressable market. We just wanted to not just say, "Gosh, we can address everything." It's more, which are the ones that are most in need of those critical elements that we provide, that GPS frankly, it answered well.

Yes. And I think what we're focused on, yes. Yes.

So -- I'm sorry to belabor these figures, because I know there are high-level figures in its early days, but to the extent that IoT is sort of a new thing, how is that reflected in the $700 billion from the figure from the government? Because I can see a lot of GPS part of the economy that's underpinned by GPS. But if we start thinking about, I don't know, pallets that are shipped back and forth, they might have an IoT shipped where someone like Koch Industries would want to keep track of it. They're probably not keeping track of it.

It's quite interesting, because as we go into the individual market segments and maybe Ganesh can elaborate, because we have ones that we've already entered, like public safety, jointly doing it with AT&T and the government's FirstNet broadband, public safety network and stuff. But we also have things like enterprise IoT. And yes, those -- you get a pretty good success rate on over-the-road trucking, for asset tracking and things of that nature. But man, as soon as it gets in the urban environment, as soon as you're needing to track something indoors, and it's not just the hard assets, it's also people assets. Lone worker safety and casinos and refineries and things like this, you want to have something there that, yes, it's driven off of an IoT base, but still desperately needs that resilient non-spoofable location elements. I mean, frankly, you look at like gambling services, it's legal to gamble online in certain jurisdictions, but not in others. So are you in that jurisdiction or not. And how can you quantify, because you could just spoof the GPS and say that's where you are.

Yes, just to add. I mean, it's more than jurisdiction. It even gets down to the location where you are within the casino, right? I mean, certain parts of the casino you can trade, because it's written where the machines are, but slot machines are. If you go outside, you're not allowed to in the bars and other places. So -- but yes, just to give some context on the -- what the U.S. government captured like the -- in the IoT space or the asset tracking, what -- it captures is really GPS-based tracking, right? So as Gary mentioned, the trucks and the pallets being tracked as long as they have a GPS chip. Those numbers are covered by what the U.S. government has. But to -- if it is indoors or if you want to track it in an urbanized setting, those are not captured in the $700 billion number that the government assessed. So there is a -- I mean, I think everybody recognizes there is a large portion of the market that is not even yet been accounted for in those kinds of statistics.

That's super helpful. So maybe just -- because I would imagine a lot of public investors don't understand as much about the GPS system today or even who operate it or how it's paid for. Can you just sort of explain who operates the existing GPS network? And how much do firms use to use GPS today?

Yes. So today's GPS system really is operated by the U.S. government, billing Department of Defense. And they fund the daily operations of the GPS system to the order of tune of about $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion a year. So it's a massive amount of money that the government spends. But it is essentially designed for Department of Defense needs for the missiles and aircrafts and ships to go around the world. And they make it available at no charge to the civilian sector, the consumers and the mass market applications. And so we are all beneficiaries as taxpayers and global users of the platform to take advantage of it. However, a whole industry, as we know, in the commercial world has now being stood up on the backs of the GPS system. I mean, everything from the chipset providers who supply the GPS chipsets to the asset tracking business, to the Ubers of the world, where we all use GPS really to determine the location of the user to hail the car or navigate from point A to point B is all on the backs of GPS. And so we've taken the advantage of what the government has done in building this platform, but there's obviously limitations to the platform and what it can deliver today in the marketplace.

And one point on that, I think, Jason, it would be important to note is, Ganesh mentioned, we have 2 separate network technologies or 2 capabilities, and we're rolling them out somewhat sequentially. The first one, which we call our Pinnacle service, and that is an altitude only service. And whereas that can peg you to an actual floor in a building. 90-something percent of the time, 94% of the time in FCC's blind test, they said we were able to peg the exact floor that someone was on. That works with existing horizontal location services like GPS. Because GPS obviously, is no indication as far as what floor you are on, but it can kind of peg you a little bit more or the WiFi services that an Apple or a Google would have, the blue dot. It's just the blue dot only goes horizontally now, and we make it go up and down inside the buildings. And so that immediately has a resonant impact to an entire ecosystem that is today paying for location services. Foot traffic analysis, mobile advertising, retail attribution for ad campaigns. And yet, if you look at it and you're in a 3-storey mall, well, how do you do a foot traffic analysis? You got the GAP on the one level, Victoria's Secret on the next, and the yogurt store above it. Those 3 different -- dramatically different deals of the day, if you will, if you know which one of those you were in and same way with New York City, a retail outlet on the first floor, you're going to count every single person that lives above it in that 80-storey building. So it just totally trashes the ability to do retail attribution and other things like that. So adding that vertical component is something that is being adopted very, very rapidly. Frankly, we were somewhat surprised at the gaming industry. The -- not betting gaming, but gameplay. The Unity and Epic Games platforms, they wanted to add that vertical component for 2 reasons. One is part of the gameplay itself, where they are giving a virtual -- an augmented reality type of a thing, Pokemon GO. It only works when you're in a particular physical location and now you can go vertically. But they also wanted it for fraud control. They wanted to be able to say in this game, if there's something that we're actually charging for or giving loot boxes for, are you really there or did you just move it? And so it completely does fraud control, and we think that's possibly a point-of-sale terminal, normal retail transaction, fraud control mechanism as well.

That's interesting. I guess this is going to be sort of a strange question. But in the era of sort of $1 trillion federal deficits, it would seem like if I had a lobbying arm in D.C. that was retained by NextNav, I would be lobbying to get the government to start charging for GPS to sort of create an umbrella. So you guys could sort of provide something that is less than that, but simultaneously sort of help the GPS system pay for itself as opposed to being free, but then sort of foster innovation, is there anything like that in the...

I think it's probably the reverse of that, Jason. They're fortunately, on a very bipartisan basis, and I know that's almost an unbelievable thing to even say as a phrase. It's kind of an oxymoron right now. But on a truly bipartisan basis for literally the last 4 or 5 years, there has been a recognition of the vulnerability that the GPS environment does have and of its limitations, and the critical infrastructure of power grids and financials and wireless networks. And so the government has laid out numerous bills, not yet put a lot of money with them but authorized, frankly, the testing of all the possible resilient GPS solutions. Department of Transportation took the lead on that technology bake-off, which they did 1.5 years ago. They published about a year ago today the results of that and reported back to Congress. 11 different technologies were assessed. We were the #1 across the board in every single category. And so recognizing that, okay, there is an extreme need. There has been in the $10 million or $15 million or $20 million type things for the funding and potential RFPs and other things like that, that are going on there. We do believe there is an opportunity to get the government as a key user of a resilient timing capability. We frankly think that private industry will likely build out the network ourselves, but having the government as a potential customer as opposed to having the government pay us to build the network, we don't think that's the likely place. But yes, we do have a fairly active lobby effort going on in Washington. We didn't do that into any of our business plans, but we have been fairly effective in the past at tapping that.

Well, I wasn't saying having the government pay to build it out, it's just like if they could stop the subsidy, right? Enable a listed facility right...

Actually, Jason, you bring up a very interesting point because fundamentally, the government in -- in trying to do the right thing, created the market anomaly with making GPS available for free. And so what we're -- and we have this discussion all the time with the government in terms of disrupting the market that could have been created in the absence of government activity. I think the government recognizes the role that's played in trying to enable this type of capability, which I think is a true credit to them. And I think right now, we're actively working with the government in trying to enable sort of the resilient or the backup capabilities to GPS. And so they have looked at in the -- even in the most recent budget tree processes, there are funds being allocated towards further analysis and then development of NRP type of framework that, to Gary's point, could enable the government to be the first user of such a service, because that obviously then incentivizes the other market participants in the telecommunications and other sectors to start leveraging it. Because ultimately, I think everybody recognizes the limitations and the vulnerabilities that GPS has today and what's need to be developed for the future.

Understood. So Gary, you mentioned earlier that there's an international standard for this, but can you spend a second and just explain how your patent portfolio sort of messes with that international standard and how the spectrum that you have messes with that international standard?

I'll do it for a second, but I'll turn it over to the expert to do that. From all of those decades at Qualcomm, he figured out tremendously well what is essential patents necessary to do under [ Fran ] (20:27) terms to get something adopted as an international standard versus the other patents that you have that kind of make it work really well. And we did that. I mean obviously, you don't get to become an international standard in 3GPP unless you have gone through a pretty hefty technical vetting process against all of the other 4G location, OTDOA, 5G. So they expected versus all of that and adopted the Metropolitan Beacon system or Terrestial Beacon systems that we proposed as the international standard for ground-based location. So there's GPS, Baidu, GLONASS, Galileo, and there's Terrestial Beacon systems. So we are that. That is why -- and then in fact, there is a lot of international interest in understanding how you adopt this, because we're essentially the only non-satellite based one that there is an international standard around, but that has moved forward. We would offer our essential intellectual property on fair and reasonable royalty terms, rand terms. But obviously, we have something like 115 patents now. I don't know, know number of claims that add the other secret sauce that goes with it. We're the only ones that have an operational proven system that has been tested by carriers, tested by governments, tested by DHS, DOT, everybody else.

Okay. Ganesh, do you want to add anything to that, for that cover?

Yes. No. I think, Gary covered it to a large extent. I mean, fundamentally, yes, we did get the technology standardized in 3GPP, which I think was important for a lot of the telecommunications and countries that operate these types of systems or take advantage of these types of systems. And so, we were successful right from really 13 of the 3GPP standard, which goes back to 2015, 2016 time frame to get the technology standardized. And we were actually supported by the Department of Commerce, AT&T, FirstNet, a whole host of industry players in getting the technology standardized because, again, they recognize the limitations of GPS and that you needed other assistants to complement it. And frankly, we were recognized in addition to these government space-based systems like GLONASS, Baidu to be the terrestrial version of GPS, and that is now built into the standard since then. And so we are part of the 4G and the 5G standards. And what that has done is stimulate the global awareness of the technology and has driven many conversations with governments and business entities on a global basis, and that led to our partnership in Japan, for instance, with a company called MetCom, because they recognize that there's similar needs for complementing GPS in the highly urbanized and vertical markets of Japan. And so MetCom is a Sony KYOCERA funded entity, and they are a licensee of our platform. And they've got -- they actually were allocated spectrum by the Japanese government on an experimental basis to prove the business case for the TerraPoiNT system, that they are right now in active trials in the Japanese market. And we're taking -- and they're also a licensee of our Pinnacle system because, again, if Tokyo doesn't need vertical location, then I don't know which other market in the world does. And so they absolutely jumped at the idea of being able to deploy the Pinnacle system for the Japanese market. And they're scaling that and they're in active trials with companies like SECOM and other providers to enable the technology there. And again, we'll get into our business to real partnerships in globally, but it's a very -- it's not a very capital-intensive project for us because it's really a licensee who is licensing the technology. They're in deploying and operationalizing it in the market there, and we're really making the platform and the infrastructure available to them and we charge for those kinds of things.

That makes sense. What -- you mentioned that the 2 different services you offer, Pinnacle and TerraPoiNT. Can you just talk about how the networks differ between those 2? Because I think they're quite different.

They are. They're actually quite different from -- both from the way they have developed and the technologies that they use. So the Pinnacle system is really our altitude determination system. It delivers precise altitude using or leveraging the existing GPS-based horizontal technologies or WiFi-based horizontal technologies. So it complements those technologies. That is made available using biometric sensors that we deploy around a city. And so we've covered that on 4,400 sites today in partnership with AT&T. And the capability is it's a passive network. It does not radiate any signal. It really senses the administratic information, combines that with the sensor information from the device. So most modern smartphones going back to 2011, 2012, have had biometric sensors placed in them. I mean, all the iPhones I've had it since I think iPhone 6 or 7. And so we have a software development kit that goes into an application that wants to determine an altitude. And it sends that information to our cloud infrastructure. Our cloud takes the information from the sensor network that we've deployed around the city combines that with the information from the device to then return a very precise altitude to the device. And we're able to do that, deliver floor level or 3 meters, 94% of the time as was tested by the government a couple of years ago. And so that's -- the big advantage of that is it's an entirely software-based system, can work on legacy applications, and new applications. It's really sort of as you make available with any other application. And we've got announcements there where AT&T has launched the service with various public safety applications, interpret response, others -- we've got people like gimbal, leveraging that SDK for on the way sort of the food delivery and pickup at the restaurants and at the stadiums. And we've got people like Unity and Unreal, who have enabled that capability on their platforms and game developers can then incorporate that when they're trying to create the digital twin between the physical world and the virtual world. And we've got applications like Atlas Reality that actually have built it on the Unity platform. So a whole -- pretty much all the apps in the world that today use to the location can benefit from this capability and add a third dimension to it pretty quickly. It's -- the TerraPoiNT system, on the other hand, is a radiated network. And what -- by that, I mean it actually involves us deploying terrestrial radio transmitters around the city, very similar to Pinnacle, but it involves us to essentially deploy GPS like satellites on the ground. And we, in fact, send a GPS-like signal. That is then received by what we call a modified GPS chip that can then triangulate and figure out your location in places where GPS doesn't work. So this could be inside buildings and parking garages, whatever location. That requires the modified GPS chip, but which is relatively inexpensive. In fact, we've got people like Broadcom, who incorporated into some of their chipsets and then GCT, that have enabled that capability. But that delivers the very -- the full GPS-like capability of horizontal location and the vertical location from Pinnacle to give you the very tight 3-dimensional geolocation capability and timing. As Gary mentioned, timing is a very important byproduct of this whole network. And that is essentially today available in some set of applications. And so we're working with a lot of the drone guys to enable this capability. So NASA leveraged our system and we have a deployment at NASA Langley and what they're doing is looking at how urban drone operations work. We are working with various companies in the EV tolls space because they're essentially wanting to not only know where you are in 2 dimension, but it's very important for them to know where you are in 3 dimensions. Because you're trying to fly across the city and you -- there are all these air corridors that you need to navigate with -- and then we've got people in the telecommunications space who want very precise timing for their small cells. I mean all these 4G and 5G small cells that are getting deployed, they all rely on GPS today for synchronization. Well, guess what, GPS doesn't work in the urbanized areas. And it's very hard to deploy a GPS signal to the small $200 small cell, because you got to put it on the roof, run a cable down to it, and that can run you a $30,000 to $40,000 CapEx just to deploy that $200 box. Well, we enable that capability on a wireless basis. And so you can essentially modify that GPS chip that is already there in the small cell with our GPS -- modified GPS chip that somebody like Broadcom or DCT provide. And then now you can get seamless timing and you can literally drop ship that box. I mean, Cisco and others can essentially ship the box to the enterprise or a homeowner, they can turn on, open the box. And if GPS is available, the small cell will use GPS. If it's not available, it will essentially use our signal to get that precise timing, and that's important for them to maintain synchronization with the macro networks. So those are the different networks and the applications for both Pinnacle and TerraPoiNT.

Okay. Can I -- I just want to make sure I understood all that correctly. So a lot of the limitations you talked about, like lack of the Z axis, resiliency, security, accuracy both Pinnacle and TerraPoiNT address those. It seems like the main difference is one of them still relies on the Pinnacle, still relies on the GPS network, and then just augment it, where TerraPoiNT is a full wholesale replacement, which is what the government is more interested in given some of the vulnerabilities that they're nervous about on the GPS legacy GPS system. Is that the right way to...

At a high level, I mean, yes, Pinnacle basically uses whatever horizontal technologies there and adds to the vertical component. That's it. It doesn't even...

And I think a good way to, Jason, to potentially look at that as well too is, I know we're in an AppsEconomy conference as well too. The Pinnacle service gives the AppsEconomy an awful lot of the things it needs. It adds that vertical component. It does all the differentiation that Ganesh talked about. One of the key things, though, that you find of receptive customers for the full TerraPoiNT service, is those who have a criticality associated with their autonomous vehicles. Joby and Air Taxi is, you can't have something put it at the signal can be spoofed. It can be toll to land in a different location than where it was. You've got to have some encryption. You've got to have a powerful signal that can't be jammed. You've got to have those things that work as well indoors. So all of those customer sets really are the ones who, yes, the Pinnacle is a great addition, but they're still vulnerable to having their GPS spoofed or something like that. So TerraPoiNT takes that off the table. It protects the critical infrastructure. And one of the key elements that I think is often overlooked there. Almost anybody in telecom these days is going to ask, "Okay, so now that 5G is coming, now that 5G is here, won't that take care of everything? " And the answer is no. 5G is more of a customer for us. The faster and faster speeds you get, like the millimeter wave stuff and the signal doesn't go very far, and it needs to be deep indoors in order to serve that floor. They need that timing source. They need that location capability. And we're the ones that provide that so that they can ease the implementation of their networks to these super small cells. The other piece from a spectrum utilization basis is really quite interesting for folks who have followed the unlicensed spectrum, the CBRS spectrum, the 6-gig stuff, I know that Cisco and some of those guys who are looking at for use on WiFi, those have limitations on use of the unlicensed before their little transmitter can start transmitting. It has to log in with a governmental SAS site that says, am I allowed to transmit. And by the way, here is my horizontal location within 50 meters and my vertical location within 3 meters, and you either have to hire a professional surveyor or you have to have something like we did. Guess how the government chose those statistics? Right up from the Homeland Security and Public Safety Bureau who had done the testing with us for the 911 service. And so they picked up those same things and said, "Great, let's just adopt that. Somebody that wants to have a CBRS spectrum usage or 6 gig usage or any of the unlicensed, they can simply have then modified GPS chip in there, same price as a regular GPS chip. It drops, ships it, you turn it up, it locates itself. It finds its altitude, it logs in with the SAS and you can begin broadcasting. So those are some of the interplays that happen with how we are used by the 5G networks rather than being in competition with the 5G network.

Understood. You mentioned at the very beginning of our discussion that the DOT did this trial, and they sort of stacked up your service vis-a-vis, I think it was about 10 or 11, I think?

Yes, 11.

And you scored very well on all of those metrics.

Like #1.

Like #1, exactly. So is that -- if people go through your investor presentation and look at that slide where you scored #1, is that -- would you consider that a reasonable sort of parallel to the competitive landscape? In other words, would you describe yourselves as in the pole position? Or does it really depend on the application, where there will be one application that might be a customer of yours that only cares one attribute in the...

Yes, I'm sure, there probably are -- I mean, the caveat that you just put on it, there probably are certain implementations where you only need one aspect of this like-for-like timing. And if you're in a big data center and you want a timing back up, you might be able to use fiber. Okay? So, yes, the ones that scored below us, what essentially the DOT said is, we were the only ones who were able to fully do all of the GPS functions. Beyond that, we were the best accuracy on any one of the individual ones as well. So it's a combination of those 2. So to fully back up GPS, for example, precision farming out in the Nebraska corn fields, they probably don't necessarily want to build towers out there. So -- but Downtown Manhattan, where the commerce is, where the people are, where the vulnerabilities are, we were clearly the #1. That's probably a good take on the competitive landscape. If you purely look at just vertical services only, then there probably are different competitors, but no one has been able in all of the governmental tests that have been done to come anywhere near floor level accuracy that we have. And we think that's really kind of the bifurcation between being, yes, that's kind of interesting too, yes, I can use it for commerce. If you don't know what floor your are on, you really can't do the retail attribution. You can't do the floor traffic analysis. You just can't do that if you don't have that level of accuracy.

Okay. And could you guys spend a second and just talk about how you price your services in broad terms?

Yes, Yes.

So fundamentally, there's -- I mean, our business model is very flexible and adapted to the market we sell. Fundamentally, what we are selling is access to our network. But how we monetize it really depends on the application. In the case of public safety with AT&T and FirstNet, there, it's a fee per user, a monthly fee per user because the application is a persistent use, tracking the first responder as they're moving around in buildings, et cetera. There, it's a monthly fee that varies by volume. In the case of something like the mass market and the gaming applications, there are different models there. There is a monthly active user based on the number of active users that may be there, there may be -- it's a percentage of the -- in the data and analytics side, it's a percentage of the improved context awareness that is created by having higher precision location information. And there, we charge a percentage of the uptick. In the case of IoT, there, there it may be a perfect fee because there is -- the device is ultimately static. The fixes happen only once so often, and we can -- we charge based on knowing where you are vertically in addition to horizontally. And then there's something like 911, where the carriers have regulatory requirements from the government to meet a vertical access requirement starting this April. And there, we charge a flat annual fee, because it's sort of an insurance policy that the carriers need to make sure that they're in compliance with the FCC. So it really depends on the market that we're addressing, but those are the models that we use for Pinnacle, and we expect similar models on the TerraPoiNT side also.

Okay. And what about your go-to-market strategy? What are your plans there? And how does it differ between the U.S. and outside the U.S.?

Yes, it's a good question. I mean -- so we're trying to essentially power the same scale of applications that GPS does today. And so it's very important for us to get to scale very quickly. And so the way the approach we've taken in the U.S. is really sort of a sequential methodology where we are partnering with large platform providers. And so that explains our partnership with AT&T, FirstNet, who essentially make the capabilities available to all the first responder markets. There's about 10 million of them nationwide, and they have a very active sales force. And so we struck a partnership with them where they essentially enable our capabilities within the applications that they market to the first responder market. You struck a deal with Unity and Unreal for instance. And they are in about -- they've got about 1.5 million app operators, I think Unity itself is about 1.5 million and about 2 billion users on a worldwide basis. And so, there making this capability available on their platform. So app operators can build to it, and we have a business arrangement with them to scale the capabilities on a nationwide -- on a worldwide basis. We've got a partnership with Gimbal, for instance, which is present in about 1,800 quick retail applications, right? Anything from Foot Locker to the Panera Bread and all those types of applications have the Gimbal SDK for delivering sort of the best user experience when you go pick up your bread at Panera kind of thing. And so, what you can see from there is that, we essentially are -- by striking these platform deals, we're able to quickly then get to scale, because they essentially introduce us to a lot of the app providers who then build the capability for the end user. And essentially, we've got a business relationship with all of those entities. Internationally, it's different. Internationally, the way we expect to do it is, we expect to partner with local companies that essentially will become sort of our licensee that -- but they deploy and manage and run the network, and they strike a partnership with the local app guys. And then, we have the licensing revenue that comes off of the services that they generate. And so -- and Japan is a classic example of that. They essentially are deploying and operating both the Pinnacle and the TerraPoiNT systems there. They take care of striking the appropriate business deals for the Japanese market with the local app developers. We're able to bring the applications that we've struck partnerships here in the U.S., for instance, like that in Reality, we can take that to the Japanese market, and they have a ready network and are able to then take advantage of the same platform to deliver that higher precision Z. And so pretty soon, what you see on a global scale is that these multiple countries that have deployed our network, the apps can all sort of grow between the networks seamlessly and take advantage of the network and services directly and we benefit from all of that.

That's great. So 2 last questions. Just what is the Spartacus transaction do for you guys that sort of is fundamentally different from where you were from a financial standpoint before that transaction?

Well, let me kind of take that one on, because I knew a lot of the Spartacus guys from the prior life. A lot of those folks, I'm very well known along with Colombia Capital and Dr. Rising for having repurposed various spectrum assets and turning them into something of value. Some of the Spartacus principles, including particularly Neil Subin have done the same thing over the years, and we did deals way back in the XM Satellite Radio, they just that made a lot of money. So there was a natural desire to work with parties who understood the spectrum asset that we have, the inherent value on that asset, and we can certainly talk about the fun things we can do with that beyond what we're doing currently. But that was what generated the interest in it. We already had put $0.25 billion in to the company over the last 10 years, because we knew that there were major hurdles that had to be overcome. The international standardization, the proof of the technology, passing all the government and carrier tests and working with handset guys to work on it. So all of those things take development effort, but it builds kind of an enduring platform, fitting is hard to replicate or displace once you get that international standardization and adoption within the ecosystem. So that cash has gone into it on the backs of some really long-term venture money, including the Columbia Capital, NEA, Oak, Goldman Sachs, big folks that have been around for long term, even Sovereign Wealth, the group out of Australia, Future Fund has been involved for a longer time. So moving it into a public environment, we think was an important aspect. We obviously had a very quick and oversubscribed PIPE Investment, which was kind of unusual in the stack days. They have turned out very well, and we have some very strong folks. I think Koch Industries actually was one of our largest PIPE investors. They view this critical infrastructure and industrial use of this as kind of a key component of it. So that's what it got us. It got us the necessary funds to ramp the development of our Pinnacle service. Certainly, we have pre- and by the way, pay off all of our debt. So we are a totally debt-free common stock only entity, which is a wonderful thing to be in right now. And we have previously been able to borrow against the hard fixed assets of our spectrum. And now we'll have our spectrum and network to go with it. So we can augment additional cash on a debt basis, if we want to. But certainly, the funds even that we just took out of the SPAC transaction allow us to accelerate the development of our Pinnacle marketing, get into the market, actually expand into the international environment. And I think that's where you'll see most of the, say, stock action over the next several couple of quarters or so. When we make announcements that show there is a major platform adoption or a major carrier adoption or a major country adoption, I think, that you'll likely see positive movement from those things.

That's fantastic. Well, Ganesh and Gary, thank you guys very much for the time today.

Thanks so much, Jason.

Enjoyed it. Enjoyed the conversation. Take care.

Thank you.