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KSCP earnings call analysis

Knightscope, Inc.. AI-assisted transcript summaries focused on management tone, evasions, goalpost moving, catalysts, risks, and data-center exposure.

4 storedJun 10, 2026

Research summary and source transcript

readyJun 10, 2026

Knightscope reported a record Q1 2026 revenue of $6.0 million, up 106% year-over-year, driven primarily by the February 27, 2026 acquisition of Event Risk (now NYSCOPE Security Force), which contributed $2.4 million in revenue and $400,000 in gross margin at 17.5% in its first 32 days. The company is transitioning to a managed service provider model combining hardware, software, and human agents, with integration progressing ahead of schedule and early signs of operating leverage emerging. However, the business remains unprofitable at the net income level, with a $10.3 million net loss, and continues to rely on external capital to fund operations and integration.

Management knows that the integration of the Event Risk acquisition is progressing ahead of schedule, with early operational synergies already contributing to gross margin improvement and net income accretion from day one—a fact not yet reflected in the market’s valuation, which still prices the company as a pre-revenue or early-stage hardware play. The shift to a managed service provider model with recurring service revenue and cross-sell opportunities represents a structural change in the business model that could drive sustainable margin expansion over the next 6–24 months, but this is not yet appreciated by investors focused on top-line volatility or cash burn.

Revenue growth from managed service contracts (combining autonomous robots, remote monitoring, and human agents), gross margin expansion via scale and operational efficiency, and land-and-expand cross-selling of higher-margin software and technology within integrated security force engagements.

  • Integration progress of the Event Risk acquisition
  • Transition to a managed service provider (autonomous security force) model
  • Development and deployment timeline for the K7 autonomous security robot
  • Government and national robotics strategy initiatives (including CMU partnership)
  • M&A strategy as a platform for inorganic growth in fragmented security markets
  • Path to profitability through operating leverage and scale
  • The K7 autonomous security robot’s progress and planned limited summer deployment
  • The vision of a 'one throat to choke' integrated security solution for clients
  • The potential for federal robotics mandate adoption and its systemic impact
  • The CMU partnership and national security robotics lab as a long-term innovation engine
  • The belief that the acquisition has created a platform for repeatable, high-quality M&A

Management exhibits a confident, visionary, and detailed tone, particularly when discussing long-term strategy, product roadmaps (K7, orchestration software), and integration progress. The CEO uses vivid analogies ('one throat to choke', 'Trojan horse') and expresses personal excitement, which may border on promotional, but is consistently backed by specific operational milestones (e.g., 32-day acquisition contribution, summer K7 deployment, GSX timing). The CFO provides precise financial details and acknowledges risks (e.g., going concern, need for capital), lending credibility. There is no evidence of evasiveness or overpromising beyond typical forward-looking statements in a high-growth small-cap context.

  • There may be at least one Q&A answer that needs manual review for a possible dodge or lack of numerical follow-through.
  • There may be a benchmark or metric-framing issue worth manual review, especially around adjusted metrics, timelines, or changed expectations.

The company appears to be differentiating itself through its unique integrated managed service model combining autonomous robots, remote monitoring, and human agents—a combination not currently offered by pure-play technology or traditional security guard firms. This positions Knightscope to win RFPs inaccessible to competitors, suggesting a nascent competitive advantage in complex, high-security environments. However, the sustainability of this advantage depends on execution and scale, which remain unproven at scale.

  • Q1 2026 consolidated revenue: $6.0 million, up 106% YoY from $2.9 million in Q1 2025
  • Event Risk (NYSCOPE Security Force) contribution: $2.4 million in revenue and $400,000 gross margin (17.5%) in first 32 days post-acquisition
  • Core technology revenue (ex-acquisition): $3.7 million, up 26% YoY from $2.9 million
  • Consolidated gross profit: $465,000 (7.7% margin), vs. gross loss of $668,000 (-22.9%) in Q1 2025
  • Cash and cash equivalents: $11.4 million as of March 31, 2026, down from $20.6 million at year-end 2025
  • Weighted average share count increase: 156% YoY, yet net loss per share improved to $0.74 from $1.28
  • Limited summer deployment of K7 robots to select clients for real-world validation
  • GSX conference in mid-September 2026 as a platform to unveil the full autonomous security force
  • Fourth-quarter investor day at headquarters to showcase technology and team
  • Progress toward federal robotics strategy adoption via ongoing administration and congressional dialogue
  • Continued integration milestones and cost synergies from the Event Risk acquisition
  • Expansion of managed service contracts through land-and-expand with existing technology clients
  • Continued reliance on external capital to fund operations and integration, with cash declining from $20.6M to $11.4M YoY
  • Gross margin remains volatile and subject to supply chain variability, not yet at a sustainable run rate
  • Integration of acquired business carries execution risk, including cultural, systems, and go-to-market alignment
  • Government robotics strategy initiatives are uncertain and outside management’s control
  • Customer concentration risk from reliance on a few large managed service contracts post-acquisition
  • SG&A includes $1M in one-time acquisition costs; normalized expenses remain high relative to revenue

There is no direct or explicit mention of data center infrastructure, AI training workloads, or cloud computing exposure in the transcript. The company’s AI agents and software are described as edge-deployed on robots and security systems for real-time autonomous decision-making, not as data-center-dependent services. Any AI/data-center impact is speculative and indirect—potentially benefiting from broader AI adoption in security analytics—but not a stated or evidenced component of the current business model or capital allocation.

  • What is the expected timeline for achieving sustainable positive gross margin at the consolidated level, and what specific operational levers will drive it?
  • How much of the Q1 service revenue is recurring under managed service contracts versus one-time or project-based?
  • What are the specific integration milestones and cost synergy targets for the Event Risk acquisition over the next 6–12 months?
  • What is the customer concentration risk in the acquired security force segment, and what is the plan to diversify?
  • How much additional capital is expected to be required to reach cash flow breakeven, and what are the potential sources?
  • What is the anticipated timeline and scope for the limited K7 deployment, and what metrics will define its success?
  • What progress has been made toward federal robotics strategy adoption, and what would be the financial impact if enacted?
  • How does the company define and measure 'land and expand' success in existing technology client accounts?

FY2026 Q1 earnings call transcript

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NASDAQ:KSCP Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript Generated on 6/6/2026 Bill | CEO: Welcome everyone to Nightscope headquarters here in Silicon Valley. Excited to walk you through our first quarter financials for 2026. But before we do that, we're going to get into the overall corporate strategy as we move to becoming a managed service provider. But before we do that, report. Lepore | CFO: Thanks, Bill. This presentation contains forward-looking statements with the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. including statements regarding night scope strategy, event risk acquisition and integration, expected revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, addressable market, and the company's ability to fund operations and continue as a going concern. Actual results may differ materially due to risks including operating losses and substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. the need for additional capital, integration of event risk, customer concentration, supply chain and labor conditions, competition, and NASDAQ listing requirements. Please see risk factors in the company's SEC filings at the SEC.gov website. Proforma information is illustrative only. Forward-looking statements may speak only as of today. The company undertakes no obligation to update them except as required by law. Please refer to the Q1, 2026, Form 10-Q for the complete disclosure. With that, Bill? Bill | CEO: All right, let's get into it. We're really excited to talk about building the nation's first autonomous security force. That is a unique combination of hardware, software, and humans in an orchestrated format. So let's talk a little bit about the escalation levels and the model behind that managed service provider. Most folks may not know this, but 92%, 93% of alerts and the like are false in the security industry. So you're dealing with the teams are inundated with a massive amount of noise. So what we want to do is put that into a very thoughtful, let's call it seven-layer take, which has three pieces, autonomous, remote command, and a physical response. So let's see if we can, on the autonomous layer, basically have AI agents, autonomous robots, autonomous machines, and the like resolve ongoing items that humans really shouldn't be having to deal with. And then when and if a decision needs to be made, then you can move on to having that escalated to the remote monitoring team. The remote monitoring then can review, approve, deny whatever changes need to be made, and if needed, then escalate it to the human agents, be them armed, unarmed, or law enforcement. So we want to provide one managed service provider, again, combination of hardware, software, and humans. in an orchestrated format, and that's going to be a new profound opportunity for us to provide positive outcomes, improved outcomes, and hopefully lower costs for our clients that seek an integrated solution and dealing with a lot of fragmented items today. So visually what that looks like is basically what I just said. Hardware, software, and humans. So you've got stationary devices, autonomous machines and robots that patrol without remote control, and then augmented security agents that can then complement that entire solution. So one of the really exciting things about not only the financial impact of the acquisition of Rentverse is just designing and strategizing what that next generation security agent might look like. So we have a small team working on a very exciting technology to take some of the capabilities that are on our robots today and actually put them on person exclusively for our security agents to be able to not only have them do their jobs much, much more effectively, but then also provide that data into a really interesting piece of unique software that we're developing to get all of that combined into one field of view. And one of the other items similarly, not just on the human side, but the team is actively working on making very good progress on the K7 autonomous security robot. This is intended to patrol much, much larger environments at higher speeds and be able to really secure that perimeter. So all of that gets combined into one field of view. So one of the things that if you've ever had a ring doorbell camera or the like and you're looking at the app, you actually can't see to the left of you, you can't see to the right of you, you don't know what's behind. And that's what you're asking a remote monitoring security analyst to do. They've never been to the location, they've never walked the premises, and somehow they're supposed to secure the facility with one single field of view. And what that signals platform that the team is developing is to provide an eye in the sky view of the entire facility in three dimensions. So you're combining video gaming technology, digital twins and then all the significant amount of data coming out of the stationary devices, the robots and our augmented security agents to keep that digital twin up to date as much as possible so you can actually secure the facility and have that analyst be omniscient and omnipresent, know everything and be everywhere and we can be more profoundly excited about uh this orchestration software that we intend to release for our internal use here during the fourth quarter of this year moving on uh for the 2026 highlights uh thus far we're uh uh very exciting time uh we were able to put up some pretty serious numbers uh on the filing last week uh we've got revenue up 106 to six million dollars for the quarter and we're just getting started uh one of the other Wonderful opportunities with the acquisition is it now has all four pillars of what we want that autonomous security force to be all included and in place. So you've got everything from autonomous machines, remote monitoring, orchestration software, as well as armed and unarmed licensed agents. And all that integration is underway so we can have one single unified force. And the image that you have there was a celebration there for Autonomous Security Force Day, our first annual. So hopefully we can do that every year going forward on our annual corporate birthday. And the team is now very strong and growing. We're well over 400 employees. And that toast from that image was one team, one force. Very excited for what we hope to be a Blockbuster 2026. So building that first, the nation's first autonomous security force, this is intended to address that $230 billion total addressable market. And the strategic logic is basically add the increase the capabilities because technology can't do everything. Humans can't do everything, but that combination is extremely powerful, and this is that unlock for us to go after requests for proposals that normal technology-only companies would not be allowed to do. And this also is a very unique land and expand where we hope to become a trusted technical advisor to our clients and be able to implement additional technologies, again, to improve their outcomes and reduce their costs. So early validation, revenues up, we've got positive gross margins, and the strategy has a lot of traction. It's very interesting when the industry is excited, the team is excited, the board is excited, all our incoming recruits are excited. We're off to a very, very solid 2026. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our trustee CFO. Lepore | CFO: Lepore, do you want to take it away? Thanks, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'll walk through the financial detail behind the highlights Bill just mentioned. We'll cover the risk acquisition, the economics, and the operational performance of the business as a whole. Please note that the figures on our financials are unaudited and presented in millions unless otherwise noted. For complete financial detail, please refer to the Q1 2026 Form 10Q file last Friday. Now, again, you guys are moving. I don't know why it's moving. Can you put it here so we can see? Bill | CEO: No, but it says slide 13. I think he moved too early. When are you supposed to have the acquisition stuff up? I think there's an error. Lepore | CFO: recording on progress absolutely thanks thanks bill uh can you hear me okay yep very good hey uh good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us i'll uh walk through the financial details behind the highlights bill just shared uh we'll cover the event risk acquisition economics and the operational performance of the business as a whole uh Now, as we announced, the event risk acquisition, it closed on February 27, 2026. To remind our investors, we wanted to provide the purchase consideration. So the total purchase consideration in fair market net present value is approximately $18 million, comprising $5 million in cash at closing, the repayment of $1.1 million of seller debt, approximately $7.2 million in Class A common stock, representing 1.7 million shares issued. The balance is future deferred cash in contingent consideration. A working capital and non-compute adjustment of $1.4 million is reflected as an offset to the deferred purchase price. Now, on the top right-hand side, we've provided the accounting allocation of the purchase price. Important to note that this is preliminary and subject to measurement period adjustments. Client relationships of $15.5 million represents the largest component and amortizes over about 10 years of life. From a financial performance perspective, at the bottom right of the screen, in its first 32 days of contributions, the NYSCOPE Security Force delivered $2.4 million in revenue. $400,000 in gross margin at a 17.5% margin, and $100,000 of net income, accretive from day one. In addition, the acquisition resulted in about $1 million of one-time transaction costs to SG&A in the quarter. We do expect to continue to incur additional expenses related to the integration in the near term. Also happy to note that on a pro forma combined basis, the Q1 revenue would have been approximately $10 million versus the $7.2 million in Q1 2025, a 39% year-over-year increase. Turning to cash position, cash and cash equivalents stood at about $11.4 million as of March 31st. compared with $20.6 million at year-end 2025. This decline reflects approximately $6.1 million of cash outlay to fund the eventless transaction, closing payment and debt repayment, and the $1 million in direct transaction costs, as well as continued investment in the security force operations. Our at-the-market facility remains active and continues to support our liquidity and operational flexibility. Now, turning to the NiteScope combined company performance. Q1 2026 consolidated revenue was $6.0 million, up 106% year-over-year from $2.9 million in Q1 of 2025. This is a record quarter and the strongest in company history. Service revenue was $4.2 million, up 98% year-over-year, driven primarily by $2.4 million of contribution from the acquisition. Product revenue was $1.8 million, up 128% driven by fulfillment of ECD orders that had been constrained, if you recall, by supply chain conditions in the second half of 2025. Excluding the acquisition, the core technology revenue grew 26% year-over-year from $2.9 million to $3.7 million. Gross margin turned positive in Q1 2026. This is the first positive consolidated gross margin in recent history. Consolidated gross profit was $465,000, or 7.7% of revenue. This compares with a gross loss of $668,000, or negative 22.9% in Q1 2025, a $1.1 million year-over-year improvement in gross profit. The acquired security force segment contributed $400,000 of gross margin at a 17.5% segment margin on its $2.4 million of Q1 revenue. Core technology, the margin inflected to a positive 1.5% from a negative 23% a year ago, driven primarily by volume and mix. A note of caution, service costs do include 1.8 million of new contracted labor associated with the acquired business. This point forward, this is expected to continue to be a recurring cost line. While the inflection is encouraging, we are not yet at a sustainable run rate, and gross margin remains subject to supply chain variability. Total operating expenses in the quarter were $10.8 million. R&D expense was $4.7 million, up $2.6 million, or 120% year-over-year. This investment is primarily directed at new product development, including the K7 and the next-gen K1 portfolio. SG&A was $6.1 million, up $2.1 million, or 51% year-over-year. Approximately $1 million of that increase represents one-time transaction costs related to the acquisition, legal, accounting, and evaluation services. Other drivers include approximately $400,000 of additional investor relations, advertising spend, $400,000 of professional services, $300,000 of acquired company G&A, and $200,000 related to the new Sunnyvale headquarters. Normalizing for $1 million of non-recovering acquisition costs, operating expenses were $9.8 million in the quarter. 59% above prior year run rate, reflecting our investment in future growth. Now, on to net loss. The net loss for the quarter was $10.3 million, compared with $6.9 million in Q1 2025. The widening primarily reflects the higher operating expenses I just described, partially offset by the gross margin improvements and lower interest expense. On a per share basis, the loss improved to 74 cents from $1.28 in Q1 2025, reflecting a 42% improvement per share. Despite a 156% year-over-year increase, in weighted average share count. Excluding the $1 million one-time acquisition transaction costs, the quarter's normalized net loss would have been approximately $9.3 million. Following the acquisition, we adopted two reportable segments in Q1, 2026. The table on this slide summarizes our Q1 revenue, gross margin, and gross margin percentage by segment. These include core technology development and operations, which yielded about $3.67 million in revenue and $54,000 in gross margin, and the acquired security core segment, which added $2.4 million in revenue and approximately $400,000 in margin. Now, it is important to note that the two segments reported in Q1 are a gap requirement triggered by the acquisition. They do not reflect how Knight Scope is managed and plans to be managed in the future. As Bill described, once fully integrated, we plan to operate the company as a single integrated autonomous security force that provides managed services. We expect our reporting structure to evolve toward a product and services framework that better reflects how the business is run. For a complete segment disclosure, please refer to Note 9 of the Q1 2026 10Q filing. Bill, that concludes the financial review. Back to you for a forward look. Bill | CEO: Sure, and what's next? All right, so looking ahead, the team has been burning the candle on both ends. On the K7 side of things, we've got a lot of great work accomplished still a lot ahead of us. We're looking at deploying a limited release of the K7 to select clients we have identified later this summer and to get some real-world deployment experience as another feed into the product development cycle. So we're making good progress there. The integration of This is probably my 25th company I've bought. The deal, as I often say, is the easy part. The hard part is the integration, the day one and thereafter. Fortunately, we have very like-minded folks and teammates. We're all getting to know each other. We've primarily been focused on a few key areas, but so far, so good. And in some cases, I think if you ask Eric or myself, we might be a little bit ahead of schedule of where we wanted to be. but still a lot of work yet for the balance of the year. GSX, we're going to be there in force. GSX is a major, one of the top two major security conferences here in the U.S. September, mid-September in Atlanta. We're going to unveil the autonomous security force as one team and one force with one contract. as a single managed service provider, literally something all new for the industry that's never been done before. So we're very excited about that. And then towards the fourth quarter, we're looking to have an investor day here physically at Nightscope headquarters. You can come feel, touch, see, talk to the team, see the technology up, up close. And obviously we'll invite all of you as well as our, bankers and analysts and the like. So look forward to doing that. We had a good amount of questions come in. For purposes of being a little bit more efficient, we condensed them down to a few key items. And I think the first one was to pour was around gross margin. How do you see that improving over time or what kind of pieces go into the puzzle here? Lepore | CFO: Absolutely, Bill. I think, you know, obviously the goal is growth margin improvement. And we believe that growth margin improvement will primarily come from a combination of operational scale, improved manufacturing absorption, supply chain normalization, and continued integration of our managed services platform. On the technology side, we expect better utilization of fixed manufacturing and support infrastructure as volume increases, while the addition of the security forks capabilities allow us to pursue larger, more comprehensive customer engagements. especially as we think about a land and expand strategy that combines technology, monitoring, and human response over time. We believe that the ability to cross-sell higher margin software and technology in addition to monitoring and the autonomous solutions into the broader managed services relationships can help improve overall customer economics and margin profile. Bill | CEO: I think the combination of humans and technology literally with AI is going to rewrite the economics for the industry and for us. There's all the stuff that you just spoke of, but there's also the not glamorous part of how do you get a security operation to run that much more efficiently? And us building an all new effectively operating system for humans to be profoundly more effective and in combination with a good amount of AI agents and hardware, autonomous hardware, I think is going to make for some margin expansion over time. But we need to build all that stuff out and then obviously integrate and deploy it. But we're heading in a very exciting direction. So that covers the first one. I think you had one on your side. Lepore | CFO: That's right, Bill. I think, you know, kind of expanding on what you just mentioned about the integration of the humans and technology, you know, a lot of analysts ask about the night scope security force integration. Where do we stand? How do you see it kind of coming to fruition in the short term as well as the long term? Bill | CEO: I think there's a – likely kind of three steps. I think we wanted to do them in sequence over a much longer period of time, but they've gotten the life of their own. So, there's the obvious, you know, financial accounting audit related items that are key for us to do our regulatory reporting and managing of the company. That has certainly been more than underway. We have a component of information technology and human resources. And how do you combine systems? How do you think about recruiting profiles, employee handbooks? There's a lot that needs to be done. And then the last piece, which isn't actually last, is the go-to-market. We've been experimenting on how do you propose something to a prospective client? How do you spend time with an existing client on the security force side that could benefit greatly from the technology and vice versa? Someone that's already a technology client of ours, how do we add the human element to, again, improve overall outcomes and hopefully over time reduce costs? We have like-minded folks, a lot of work ahead of us, but things are going a little bit ahead of schedule. I would say we wanted to take the entire balance of the year And there's some bits and pieces. There's always going to be issues, but we're working through it. So feeling good. I think to put it in Wall Street parlance, if we were a private equity shop, what we bought was a platform company, a really strong management team that's grown the business from scratch, knows the economics. knows the recruiting process, knows how to think about culture and recruiting the right team. I mean, if you think about it, most of these staffing companies, call them staffing companies, they're supposedly security companies, are 100 to 400% employee turnover rates. You've got to ask the question, like, why is our security force at 6%? Maybe we recruited properly. Maybe we trained them properly. Health benefits, stock options, and what we intend to overlay is a significant amount of technology we are going to end up with a superior and elite team to deliver all of this. So we're in good spirits, a lot of work ahead, but so far so good. That's a good idea, Bill. Go ahead. And I think the other question was around capital formation and cash burn and kind of long-term view, how should we be thinking about the business? Lepore | CFO: Absolutely. You know, we expect to continue investing through the remainder of the year in areas that we believe are critical to long-term scale and competitive positioning, right? This includes product development, AI and software capabilities, operational infrastructure, and integration initiatives associated with the broader autonomy security force platform. In the near term, some larger customer deployments may also include a meaningful human services component as we establish and expand those relationships. However, I think that over time, we should expect operating leverage, improved utilization of our technology platform, and increased attachment of higher margin recurring services to help normalize and reduce that cash flow. Bill | CEO: I think, put a different way, we're if we're shooting for a billion dollars of annual recurring revenue, you're going to have to make some key long-term investments in order to get there and kind of work with a few hundred employees, not going to work with a few thousand. Um, so we're making the right long-term bets on both the external technology that's out in the field, as well as our technology, uh, in-house to basically run the, the company. Um, our, uh, chief intelligence officers very much, uh, pushing the organization to become a fully agentic organization in the next few years, and that is literally rewriting not only the economics for the industry, but rewriting the economics and standard operating procedures and the like of what we do internally. Think about how one would go about building effectively an operating system for an all-new security provider that has – I've got a blog I'm working on called One Throat to Choke, Can you get one vendor to focus on hardware, software, remote monitoring, licensed armed and unarmed agents in one package so you can actually deliver what a chief security officer is looking for? And that is the groundbreaking corporate strategy change that we're really excited about so that we can, as one hedge fund said to me on a call, is, Oh, so you're basically almost like a Trojan horse. You're coming in with the normal type of security operation that most of your two securities would be accustomed to seeing, and then you're going to build, basically try to be a trusted advisor, a technical advisor, to then look at those operations, audit them carefully, site by site, not by client by client, and then prescribe the right technical solution regardless of if it's It's hardware, it's software, it's sensors, it's some other capabilities so that we can actually deliver on what the client's looking for. And that'll be the best marketing and client experience dollars we ever spend is to actually fix the client's problems. Lepore | CFO: That's absolutely right, Bill. And I think, you know, we've talked about how, you know, clients, the fragmented solution model makes it extremely difficult for clients to get the outcomes they seek, which is I want to secure my perimeter. I want to promote safety. But I've got to cobble together, you know, different solutions from different vendors to make that happen. And I think this approach allows us to do so in a unified way. Bill | CEO: Exactly. I mean, if you're a chief security officer, likely. you spent a significant amount of time in law enforcement, maybe SFBI or ex-military. You're really focused on physical security. And then one vendor shows up and says, hey, would you like this radar? Another vendor shows up and says, do you want this LIDAR? Do you use, you should use this robot? You should use this AI agent. Do you think this sonar is appropriate? And you're kind of only trying to sell your widget to that person who really is not necessarily fluent in the latest technologies for physical security and getting them all to work together. Your single point solution might actually work for this one little thing, but what they really need is support and help. If CFOs continue to cut expenditures on the security side of things and not giving the team the tools to be able to reduce incidents and the incidents keep climbing, there's literally a huge problem here, which we hope to be part of that solution. So I think the strategy sounds teams excited. We just need to focus on execution. Lepore | CFO: The question came in, you know, based on this strategy and this path to revenue and margin growth. As you think about the broader, you know, strategic outlook, can you talk a bit about, you know, both commercial opportunities and how that's changed with this acquisition as well as in the new economy security force dynamic, government opportunities, and then M&A? Okay. Bill | CEO: I'll take those in a slightly different order, but M&A. So I've done a roll-up in a past life, and usually a roll-up, if you don't know what a roll-up is, you basically buy the same type of company over and over again and make one big one. And so you look at a very, very fragmented industry. I think there's maybe 6,000 gardening companies in the U.S. that have more than 100 employees. Most of them are owned by boomers that are retiring here in short order. and perhaps the kids don't want to take over the business. Perhaps those are too small for the larger three staffing companies to buy them. So that becomes an interesting kind of dynamic. But we want to buy quality over quantity. So it's going to have to pass the Smith test more than just the Smith test of what we just went through with our first acquisition, and that's intended to be the platform to set that standard so that we can go after customers repetitive additional acquisitions. I think other acquisitions that we're contemplating and looking at, and we've said this publicly before, is on the remote monitoring side of things to see where instead of growing something organically, it might be better for us to do a bolt-on or a carve-out, so working through that. So we want to continue that inorganic growth and be very careful and methodical about how we go doing that. I think on the government side of things, probably a couple, two different aspects. One is, you know, we cut a deal with Palantir last year. The overall corporate strategy is I want cybersecurity to be actually not the cost center, but an opportunity for us to market things better. So, you know, long story short, can we get all our private sector, local, state, government to all have federal-grade cybersecurity? So there's one standard across the nation, and that's what we're looking at, not only looking, actively investing in, is why the expenditures for R&D have gone up and will continue, is to re-architect that technology portfolio and hardware software and how we operate into something that is federal-grade for the entire nation. I think that then brings cybersecurity to the forefront of... a long-term sustainable competitive advantage over anyone else in the marketplace. I think a second is the really hard one. I've been trying for a very long time to see if we can pass a national robotics strategy. I think there's enough interest in the administration and in Congress that I'm hopeful, and I don't control this, I am hopeful that something will happen this year. My controversial proposal which some people get really excited about and some people get annoyed, is the U.S. federal government has within its own authority to fix the problem. No one in Congress or the administration wants to lose the robotics war like we effectively lost the drone war. So what do we need to do? We need to kind of fix a lot of things. Some of them just simply have to do with demand. And so what I've been proposing is for the federal government to dictate slash mini mandate to force every department and agency that thou shall take 1% of your operating budget and you will use robotics and automation to stop wasting taxpayer dollars. All we're asking, we're not asking for the government to spend more money. We're asking you to use commercially available technology to improve the efficiencies in your own operations. If you do that catalyst, then likely you could, with one felt swoop, fix the supply chain issues and all these other issues that several different committees are all working on independently with, you know, one paragraph that I've already written and given to staff over there of how you would actually cure the problem. Big ask. I think there's enough interest that something will happen. I'm not sure what will end up coming out the other side, but at least the conversations are ongoing. So, And on that last point, maybe the eternal optimist, but in advance of hopefully that happening, we partnered with Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top robotics school of higher education in the entire world, to build a national security robotics lab here at Nightscope. And we signed a five-year deal with CMU. And we've already got five graduate students working on some cool whiz-bang stuff for the upcoming K7. But we're in this for the long haul, and we're making those long-haul, long-term bets. And we're in a very good position. I've never been literally this excited about the company's future. And so more to come, as Apoorva often says. Lepore | CFO: Thanks, Bill. That's all the questions that we have today. Bill | CEO: All right. Sorry, everyone, again, for the small technical mishap. We will be sure to get you a properly recorded version of this so you have it for your files. And thanks for tuning in. I'm looking forward to seeing you next quarter because there is more good stuff coming. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, everyone. jsPDF 3.0.3 D:20260606090210-00'00'

Research summary and source transcript

readyJun 10, 2026

Knightscope completed the acquisition of EventRisk (now rebranded as Knightscope Security Force) to transition from a pure-play hardware vendor to a managed service provider offering integrated security solutions. Management asserts this acquisition unlocks accelerated growth by enabling cross-selling and full-stack security delivery, though near-term financials remain pressured by supply chain constraints, underutilized manufacturing, and elevated R&D investment. The company is in a multi-year investment phase, with profitability contingent on successful integration, scale-driven margin improvement, and execution of its go-to-market strategy.

Management knows today that the integration of EventRisk is progressing more smoothly than expected, with willing teams and early progress on finance, HR, and IT alignment, and that they are targeting a GSX showcase in September 2026 to demonstrate tangible progress. The market likely will not see concrete evidence of revenue acceleration, margin expansion, or customer traction from the combined entity until mid-to-late 2026 at the earliest, as financial benefits depend on post-integration execution, sales cycle conversion, and scaling of the managed service model—factors not yet reflected in current financials.

Revenue growth driven by managed services expansion (ASR, ECD, Knightscope Security Force), supply chain normalization enabling product shipments, and successful integration of EventRisk to enable cross-selling and full-stack solution delivery.

  • Supply chain volatility and mitigation efforts
  • Integration progress of EventRisk acquisition
  • Shift from selling hardware to delivering managed security solutions
  • Technology development (K7, K1 capsule, signals software)
  • Execution focus as the key to future growth and profitability
  • CEO's personal excitement about the future, stating he 'can't sleep because I'm too excited'
  • Emphasis on the transformative nature of the EventRisk acquisition as a long-sought strategic move
  • Highlighting EventRisk management's track record, including double-digit growth and experience with Navy SEALs and law enforcement
  • Pride in low employee turnover (6%) vs. industry 100-400% and planned stock options for retention
  • Vision of creating the 'nation's first autonomous security force' as a unprecedented entity

Management displays a mix of earnestness and heightened optimism, with the CEO expressing personal excitement and long-held conviction about the company's mission. While acknowledging near-term challenges (supply chain, losses, integration work), they frame these as necessary investments in a transformative shift to managed services. Their tone is direct in discussing operational realities but leans into visionary language about creating an 'autonomous security force,' which may outpace near-term financial evidence. Credibility is supported by specific references to integration timelines, hiring, and event plans, though the emphasis on future potential risks appearing aspirational without near-term proof points.

  • There may be at least one Q&A answer that needs manual review for a possible dodge or lack of numerical follow-through.
  • There may be a benchmark or metric-framing issue worth manual review, especially around adjusted metrics, timelines, or changed expectations.

The company appears to be attempting to differentiate through vertical integration—combining proprietary hardware, software, and now human-delivered guarding services via the EventRisk acquisition—to offer a full-stack security solution. This addresses a key gap in their prior pure-technology model that excluded them from many RFPs. However, without evidence of market share gains, customer wins, or margin improvement from this strategy, the competitive position remains unproven and not yet demonstrably winning or losing relative to legacy security providers or pure-play competitors.

  • Q4 2025 revenue: declined approximately 9.8% year-over-year
  • Full year 2025 revenue: grew approximately 4.9% to $11.3 million
  • Q4 2025 gross loss: $1.6 million
  • Full year 2025 operating loss: approximately $33.8 million
  • Full year 2025 cash used in operating activities: approximately $30.3 million
  • Full year 2025 financing activities proceeds: $42.2 million
  • GSX 2026 showcase in September as a public demonstration of integration progress
  • Regulatory filings (10-Qs) starting mid-May 2026 reflecting early Security Force performance
  • Beta prototype testing of K7 platform in second half of 2026
  • Launch of K1 capsule at Autonomous Security Force Day event
  • Progress in supply chain normalization leading to improved product shipment timing
  • Continued supply chain constraints delaying product shipments and pressuring gross margins
  • Risk that integration of EventRisk does not yield expected cross-selling or go-to-market acceleration
  • Dependence on successful technology development (K7, K1, signals) to maintain competitive differentiation
  • High operating expenses from R&D and SG&A investments without near-term revenue offset
  • Uncertainty in converting sales pipeline into revenue, particularly for managed services offerings

There is no direct or explicit mention of data center exposure, AI infrastructure demand, or relevance to AI-driven computing trends in the transcript. The company's focus remains on physical security hardware (robots, sensors), guarding services via the acquired EventRisk business, and software for remote monitoring and signal processing. Any AI or data center impact would be speculative and indirect—such as potential use of AI in threat detection via their signals software—but no such linkage is discussed by management. The transcript contains no evidence that data center trends are a meaningful driver of current or future performance.

  • What specific revenue contribution from the Knightscope Security Force (formerly EventRisk) is expected in Q3 and Q4 2026?
  • When will supply chain constraints normalize sufficiently to allow meaningful growth in product shipments (VCD, K7, K1)?
  • What are the gross and operating margins for the Knightscope Security Force business on a standalone basis?
  • What measurable progress has been made in cross-selling legacy Knightscope technology to EventRisk clients and vice versa?
  • What are the customer acquisition costs and payback periods for the managed service offering?
  • How will the company define and measure success of the GSX 2026 showcase in terms of leads, pipeline, or customer commitments?

FY2025 Q4 earnings call transcript

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NASDAQ:KSCP Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Generated on 6/6/2026 William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: All right, let's get going. My name is William Santana Lee, Chairman and CEO of Nightscope and here with our trustee CFO, Apoorv Devedi. We're going to do a little bit of a different format today. First, an announcement regarding this Thursday, then Apoorv will go through the 2025 financial results that we filed on Form 10-K. And then we aggregated a bunch of questions that have come in, including from the three equity research analysts, and we'll try to put that in a much more efficient approach to answering questions. So with that, I'll start it off with... We're going to have our first annual Autonomous Security Force Day and also celebrate our 13th year anniversary in business. I often like to say we're here in Silicon Valley. There are 22,000 startups here. 95% of them failed despite having unbelievable ambition, financing, and the like. And for us to be able to start the company, get it funded, grow it, take it public, buy two companies, and still be at it 13 years later is really a testament to the relentless nature of the Nightscope team. And I couldn't be more excited about our future as we build out the nation's first autonomous security force. So this Thursday, we're going to have several VIP private sessions for previews as to what we're building during 2026 and intentionally to get some market feedback. And then we're going to have an open house presentation. in the evening here in Sunnyvale at our new headquarters, and there's rumors flying around there's going to be an ice cream truck and a bunch of other stuff. So hopefully if you haven't RSVP'd, please be sure to check our social media channels or newsletters, and you can grab a spot there. So that will be at 6 p.m. this Thursday. All right, with that, I'll turn it over to Apoorv. We'll walk you through history, meaning 2025, and kind of what happened then. Then we'll talk a little bit about the acquisition and the questions and why all the excitement for 2026 and beyond. So with that, Apoorv. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Thanks, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining. I will begin with a review of our financial performance, first for the Q4, and then the full year 2025, followed by commentary on liquidity and capital strategy. With that, let's jump right in. Q1, sorry, Q4 revenues declined approximately 9.8% year-over-year product shipments primarily driven by supply chain constraints, which we've talked about in the past, that resulted in delays of VCD product deliveries. The services business remained materially unchanged. gross loss of 1.6 million reflects ongoing margin pressure driven by elevated material and other input costs for production and by under absorption of fixed manufacturing overhead these factors were consistent with full year trends and underscore the need for improved scale and supply chain normalization to drive margin recovery for the company Our operating expenses of 9.7 million in the quarter increased approximately 3.8 million year over year, driven by higher investment in both R&D and SG&A functions. R&D spending reflects the company's deep commitment to continued advancement of our next generation platforms, such as the K7, the K1 capsule, and the signal software. SG&A increased primarily due to targeted investment in talent and organizational capabilities, which are critical to positioning the company for future scale and growth. Overall, the cost structure reflects a deliberate investment phase to support long-term expansion. Q4 2025 net loss of $11 million. widened versus prior year due to a combination of lower revenue, continued gross margin pressure, and sustained operating investment. The quarter reflects a near-term financial impact of scaling the platform while revenue growth remains uneven. With that, moving on to full year. 2025 full year revenue grew approximately 4.9% to $11.3 million. driven primarily by the services revenue expansion in both the machinism service ASR offerings and our full service maintenance plans on the ECD install base. However, growth in the product revenue was modest due to the uh already discussed supply chain related constraints and shipment timing issues discussed earlier million increased by approximately 1.1 million versus prior year reflecting higher bill of material costages and production variability The lack of scale continues to pressure unit economics, reinforcing the importance of driving higher volume and utilization as we continue to grow. Full year operating expenses increased approximately 12.1% year over year, driven primarily by a $5.4 million increase in R&D investment compared to 2024. This reflects continued focus on platform development and next generation products to support future scalability. The increase was partially offset by cost savings in SG&A, expenses of approximately $1.8 million, as well as the absence of half a million in restructuring charges incurred in the prior year. This demonstrating progress in optimizing the company's cost structure while investing in growth. Full year loss increased to approximately 33.8 million. This reflects a combination of modest revenue growth, continued gross margin pressure, and elevated investment levels, consistent with the company transitioning to growth. Voted average loss per share of $4 decreased by approximately 63.5% year over year. Finally, From a balance sheet and cash flow perspective, we used approximately $30.3 million in operating activities during 2025, reflecting a continued investment in Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: scale. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Importantly, we raised 42.2 million through financing activities, allowing us to strengthen our balance sheet and support ongoing operations. We ended presenting a significant increase from the 11.1 million of the 83% year over year improvement in cash position. Looking ahead, our focus remains actively on managing liquidity through a combination of capital markets access, operational discipline and strategic initiatives designed to improve cash generation over time. In summary, 2025 was a year of foundational investment. We strengthened the liquidity position, continued to grow revenue modestly, and made critical progress in evolving our business model towards a more integrated and scalable platform. While near-term financial performance reflects that investment phase, we believe the combination of our technology, software, and now human-enabled delivery capabilities position Knight Scope to pursue larger opportunities and improve financial performance over time. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill as you go through the questions provided by our analysts. William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: Yeah, of course, I think there's some connectivity issues, so if you want to kill the PowerPoint and turn your video back on, it would be great. So while he does that, let me put things in context a little bit. We've been at this problem and tackling this issue of trying to see if we can make the U.S. the safest country in the world, utilizing technology, AI, robotics, electric vehicle technology, telecommunications, the whole gambit. And after working on the problem for over a decade, it's become obvious to me that the nation's addicted to CCTV cameras, security guards, and video management systems running on Windows and are unwilling to change or willing to change at a snail's pace. And so we wanted to try to be helpful to our clients to build a managed service provider that can take a lot of the technological burden, complexity, regarding the technology itself, installation, IT, cybersecurity, keeping things up to date, making sure it's all operating off of a chief security officer's hands and go to market with a complete full solution instead of having this disparate set up widgets all over the place that don't talk to each other and the like. And an accelerant and catalyst to do that was the acquisition of EventRisk that we recently announced. And that's a transformative and strategic acquisition so that we can go to market as a managed service provider to actually fix a client's problems instead of doing the mix and match. And that's one of the reasons we're extremely excited about our future. You know, we've been at this for a very long time. I've never been this excited to get around with the team here. It's like I couldn't sleep before because all kinds of problems and stuff. Now I can't sleep because I'm too excited. So the future looks genuinely bright. We have a lot of contracts signed and just focused very much on execution, both operationally and technologically. We've got a lot of new technologies that we're developing, and we're going to showcase some of that this Thursday. And these coming years are going to create literally a new kind of entity that has never existed before, a managed service provider that can be that nation's first autonomous security force. So with that, we got a bunch of questions in from a variety of folks, including our research analysts. So, Paul, if you want to read off the first easy question, we can get on it. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Absolutely. All these questions are easy. Excellent. The first one was basically, can you provide visibility on timing of supply chain issues clearing up? And basically, you know, are any supply chain disruptions anticipated due to the, you know, due to all the global conflicts happening across the Middle East and Europe? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I think there's volatility prior in the system, still in the system, and I would forecast going forward we'll continue that volatility. So we need to better manage the volatility. Some of it has to do with tariffs, geopolitical instability, et cetera. Some of it has to do with an end-of-life component. And some of it has nothing to do with, hey, can you get the NVIDIA chip? It's the one specific resistor or button or what have you that ties up the whole thing, and it's not one strategic component. So this continues to be a whack-a-mole kind of problem that we're working through. We now have a supply chain manager and a team that's proactively working the issue. So we're starting to plan better, buy in advance, replace components, outright replace suppliers if needed. But to be on a cautionary note, we've had our struggles. I think we can try to minimize the damage, but a lot of it is not necessarily directly in our control. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: um so so we're working through the problem uh for poor vieta different take on that no agreed bill i think you know the the the volatility you know is is driven primarily by macro events and i think we're doing a lot of things internally to to mitigate as much as possible right the broader electronics market in particular continues to be volatile there's longer lead times tighter availability and items like compute modules networking hardware memory etc so I think those are some things that are just outside of control or control directly but we are putting in place a mitigation steps so things like you know making sure we're not relying on single source for expanding our relationships to multiple vendors, making sure that we identify items that have the highest risk and making sure that we have enough of those in stock, which is an investment in inventory. So there's a lot we're doing and we've been able to learn over the last few months that we're working through. I would say, you know, keeping supply chain production in sync is important for us and we'll continue to adjust as we things progress. We do expect that versus prior year, this year will have slightly better, if not much better outcomes as you continue to invest in supply chain and our relationships. All right, next. Next question was on the move. Is the move to Sunnyvale facility complete and up to operational efficiency? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: Mostly. Mostly done. We have a little bit of a challenging landlord situation with less flexibility than we want, but we're working through it. One of the reasons we're having this Autonomous Security Force Day here is to showcase the progress that we've made since we've moved into the building. Still a lot more that we want to complete, but things are looking pretty good. I will confess that some of us are nervous that we're going to run out of space a lot sooner than we were planning, but that's a good problem to have in the coming months. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Next one is on the recent acquisition. Following the event risk acquisition, can you give us an estimate of how much your potential market has expanded? Do you have an estimate around the new TAM? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I've been wanting to do an acquisition like this for five years, so the TAM that we actually put in the investor presentation, if you haven't seen the latest one, it's at nightscope.com slash America. That $230 billion there is the TAM that we're going after and remains unchanged because this was kind of the overall plan. I think this is an unlock or a catalyst for us to be able to go to market much more efficiently and much more aggressively. So I think one of the enticing things that's going to happen in the coming quarters is just to see genuine accelerated growth versus the less than optimal growth that we've seen to date. And the idea is to be able to... maybe two different steps here. One, we have existing clients between the acquisition and our legacy clients. And there's a significant amount of opportunity to cross-sell technology or security agents back and forth. So there's that kind of literal synergy. And then there's the, once that's done, let's go to market together in a in specific verticals for us to be able to, again, bring a total solution. So the TAM doesn't change the amount that we can go grab after the TAM and do it in an accelerated fashion has, I think, dramatically increased. If you haven't heard, the team's well over 400 employees now, and we're on a pretty serious pace of growth. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Yeah, I agree, Bill. I think, you know, the way to think about it is not whether the TAM has increased, but more our ability to penetrate and grab a larger piece of that market share faster is definitely accelerated. You know, we've talked about this in the past where we've said, you know, Generally, when there are RFPs and RFQs out for security guards only, we were, for example, excluded from those because we don't have guarding services, we don't have humans, we're only technology. And then when we would try to go after technology, only RFPs and RFQs. Again, we didn't have a full-on solution, so it kind of limited us a little bit. Now, with the acquisition and being able to go to market in a way that allows us to provide that fully managed services or fully managed security services, it just allows us to go to market faster. William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: Yeah, and a little bit more context for those newer to that conversation. There are I think rough numbers, more than 6,000 guarding companies in the U.S. that maybe have more than 100 employees, plus or minus. Our friends over at Lake Street helped us vet the first hundred and we came across Event Risk and Eric Rose and a lot of special things about why we got so animated and excited. Having a combination of a serious operator who's been more than around the block has been able to work in large established guarding companies, helped train the Navy SEALs, Marine, law enforcement, and been able to grow and bootstrap an entire company unto himself with the team. It was an accomplishment in and of itself. If you add the growth, the continued double-digit growth that he's been able to enjoy over the past few years is another important bullet point. But another one that's very interesting, the industry's 100% to 400% employee turnover rates. The Nightscope security force is at 6%, very laser-focused on recruiting employees. Recruiting the right people, providing them health benefits, providing them the appropriate training. And in our case, we're going to be adding a few more things. The board of directors kindly approved stock options for the entire team so we can also attract more people and keep the people employed and engaged and have them be part of the winning solution here. And we're working on some new technologies to add. to those security agents. So in the future, you'll be hearing us talk about ASAs or augmented security agents that really don't exist today. And that allows all of that combined with The stationary technology, the autonomous robotic technology, the augmented security agents all having that data fed into our upcoming new signals software platform and our remote monitoring team is going to give an unprecedented capability to properly secure a facility. And our security analyst that's remotely operating then now has machines to do things autonomously. They can escalate things to a different risk level to have some humans involved. And then there's a response element, both armed and unarmed. and that's unprecedented in the industry and one of the reasons why we're in good spirits and more than rather excited about the future. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: A question on the sales forces and how we mesh them together. Two questions, and I'll combine them here. What is the overall sales pipeline expected for the ASR, the ECD, and the event risk, or now known as the Nightscope Security Force businesses? And then what is the timing around being able to sell legacy Nightscope with the Nightscope Security Force services together? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I'm going to want Wall Street media and our own team internally to really stop focusing on selling widgets. How many of these units did you sell? How many of this standard stationary device did you sell? What we really need to focus on is aggregate total revenue growth of providing an actual solution to our clients. And that is the overall strategy for us to deliver a managed service provider and try to focus on fixing the client's problem improving outcomes, improving quality, improving service levels, and hopefully there's some cost reduction in there for a client depending on the location. But overall managed this much, much better than it's being done today and not focused on did you sell an agent or 10 agents or 100 or 300 agents with that contract or did you sell? The important part is are we fixing the client's problems? And that is a bit different now. and why the change in strategy is to force that change in adoption that's needed across the country. Most humans and most large organizations don't want to change. I told the Pentagon, DHS and Congress the same thing. This whole country does not want to change. uh even when you know sitting here silicon valley is a bunch of engineers like you hand them uh electricity fire and the internet uh in in terms of ai is like no no i'm good i know what i'm doing like i don't know uh i think we need to find a different path to to make those changes and give some relief uh to the chief security officers if you really put yourself in their shoes In this day and age, it was different 30 years ago. But when, you know, if you're ex-law enforcement, ex-military, you're here to secure a property, that's kind of your go-to skill mix. this day and age, hey, you know, can you please talk to me about, you know, 4G and 5G versus private LT versus industrial Wi-Fi? And then I don't know about the drone. And then is this cybersecurity compliant? But does the DOD accept the impact level five or is it a FedRAMP thing? And you want the robot to work with the guard, and it's just too much. You're asking a CSO to be the chief technology officer, the chief information officer, the chief information security officer, the head of facilities, purchasing, and everything else, and then we're wondering why it's not working and it costs too much money. So I really want the whole team, external and internal, to be focused on top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability as we get there. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: From a modeling perspective, will UB breaking event risk into its own reporting line item, or will it be included within the services revenue? I can answer that one, Bill. Really, TPD, we're assessing the right way to reflect the NISCOPE security force. revenues and line items in the business. Most likely, though, we do consider it to be a service, and we would want to include that in the services line. However, there are some gap rules that we're, you know, evaluating along with our auditors to make sure that we not only provide the right level of disclosures, but the right level of visibility as we go forth and draft up our 10 Qs and 10 Ks. William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I don't think we missed part of the answer to the other question. The pipeline is rather healthy, let's put it that way. And we're intentionally focused on execution as primary drivers. So changing the recruiting profile of the team, setting the standards of the team differently, changing processes, figuring out appropriate uses of AI implementation for specific areas, building new technologies. Everything's very much focused around execution because the pipeline's rather healthy. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Absolutely. Next question is, will you be announcing the contracts of the NYSCOPE security force when they are won? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I think that's also a TBD. As we mentioned during the sit down with Eric, if you haven't seen the interview, go on our YouTube channel. We want to take a thoughtful balance of the year process to Think through the branding, through IT, through HR, through finance, accounting, audit, technologies, et cetera, instead of rushing decisions. So that also applies to press releases, public relations, external affairs, government relations. and investor relations. So some will ponder and think through as the company continues to mature as a premium managed service provider. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Next question kind of tails right into that, Bill. Can you provide a timeline for integration? How is the process so far? And are there any notable items to call out? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: So this is probably my... I've lost track, 24th, 25th, or 26th acquisition. And as I often say, doing the deal is the easy part. For those that have been around the block, it may not seem that way for people that participate, but it is actually the easy part. The hard part is day one after you close a transaction. I will say it has gone a lot more smoothly than all of us expected. We have willing folks who want to work together, who want to make changes, who need additional support and changes. But as I just stated, the integration plan is try to get everything sorted in a reasonable timeframe over the balance of the year. In terms of priorities, let's call it finance, accounting, audit-related stuff first. probably dovetail HR and IT kind of the same time. And then the last is the go-to-market branding, marketing, and that sort of thing. We are planning to be at GSX in Atlanta in September so that you'll start getting a good – more than a sneak peek then as to how the integration is going. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Yeah, I think, you know, being super deliberate in how we merge the two organizations, primarily around culture, around go-to-market strategy, and obviously the back-end support needed to Support the growth of the combined organization are things that we're looking at. From a timeline perspective, I think, you know, it will take a couple of quarters, if not more, for us to kind of get our hands around how we want to move forward as a combined company. We are looking at internally some of the things you talked about, for example, finance first, just integrating finance functions first. then looking at HR IT, and then finally as we move into the client-focused or public-focused face of the combined company. Any outlook for any more M&A over the next year? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: So we continue to look. for accretive opportunities. Typically, probably around two or three subjects. One is on the technology side. Again, living here in Silicon Valley, there's always some interesting items that might be easier to buy than to build. So, we continue to look on the coal, just coal technology front. Those often may not be, you know, top-line revenue focus. It's more the nugget of talents or technology that we want. Another would be on the remote monitoring side of things. So we want to continue to build up the RTX capabilities as we build out the security force. So we're actively looking there. I think the growth on the security force itself is, as I said, healthy. So I'm not sure we want to do a bolt-on just yet, but we have a lot of activity going on. So M&A, open for business, but always want to make sure it's going to be helpful for our shareholders and the overall growth of the company. And be mindful and careful and make sure we get a good deal. Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: Last question, Bill. What are some key milestones should investors watch out for in 2026? William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: I can start. Maybe you want to finish. But I think the 10-Q that we filed in the second quarter that will reflect part of the activity from the Security Force side of things would be, one, the following 10-Q and then the following 10-Q. So I think keeping an eye on the regulatory filings starting mid-May. would be important uh maybe there are folks on the in the audience that don't realize this but usually when you have make an acquisition there's like this 71 day rule i'm sure i'm going to screw this up but within 71 days you need to file the uh kind of overall impact so we're working on that um and so that'll occur in uh in the coming weeks um probably in the in the may time frame um So that to us is going to be really important because that will show is the strategy working or not and is the company growing and heading towards profitability. Second, technology. This all gets very exciting if you can have a – pretty serious competitive advantage in a very large marketplace with capabilities that no one else can do. So, we probably want to keep an eye on the beta prototype testing actually occur in the second half of the year for the K7, which we're spending a lot of time on. When the board's excited, the management team's excited, the team's excited, our suppliers and vendors are excited, and all the recruits that we're hiring. Oh, by the way, go to nightscope.com slash careers. We've got a lot of openings. Are all excited and dying to work on the K7. Like, hey, maybe we're onto something. So keeping an eye on the K7 progress important. On the stationary side, we're unveiling the K1 capsule in Supertower here this Thursday. So progress there is important. And then also on the signals platform, I think those three things. that we can publicly talk about um or things to to keep an eye on so uh basically two answers to the question like is night scope uh doing well or not is the revenue going up yes or no and not based on press releases or anything else i want to see the regulatory filing is are the numbers going up yes or no and then or you're making uh serious progress on technology uh development that'll give us a sustainable competitive advantage i think those probably should be the two key items to keep an eye on almost before you've got another one? Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: No, Bill. I think, you know, at the end of the day, it comes out to, you know, improvements in execution and how does that reflect in the company's financials and the way we are perceived in the market and by our investors and customers and clients and vendors. It's really our ability to go out and, you know, grow revenue, And with the combined company, we have a theory that this will actually accelerate this. So look out for the second half to see some of that proof. Obviously, product launches and commercialization of our new product development that the team is working really hard on, that's going to be important. And overall, just watching, hopefully, as we do these things the right way over the next few quarters, especially going into the latter half of 2026 and then 2027, you should see improvements across all of our P&L line items, both on the revenue side as well as the cost mitigation side. And that's going to be the sum of all things we do from an execution perspective. If we do that right, it will show up in the financials. William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: And then I've gotten a lot of questions asynchronously here on – Hey, what does Bill and Apoorv and Mercedes know about running a guarding business? Well, keep in mind that the idea and how we approach this is very similar to how a private equity firm would look at it, which is basically we want to go buy a solid business that's run by stellar management. And then we give them the tools and support and technology for them to grow and give them the autonomy, frankly, to be able to do that. And we found that in event risk. The management team is very strong. They've been growing very quickly. The client retention rates are astronomically good. The employee retention rates are astronomically good. And we've got real hitters that we're betting on to continue to grow the business. And then what we're going to come with is technology then that will ensure that it's not a commodity staffing business of headcount the way it's kind of the industry has been run today. So, we're reimagining and re-architecting how physical security gets delivered to a client. And our initial interactions with folks that are in the know or prospective clients or in a pipeline, we know we're on the right path. Our focus right now is just heads down on execution. So the balance of the year to kind of wrap this up is focus on technology development, focus on growth, finish up the integration so that 2027, 28, 29 are hopefully some epic years for us. And again, we're in great spirits. The market, I think, is trying to understand what we just did. both on Wall Street and in the security industry. But the proof is going to be in the pudding. And I'm betting on this team, and we're highly confident that the future is bright. So, Paul, did you have any last remaining thoughts? Apoorv Devedi | Chief Financial Officer of Nightscope: No, same, Bill. I echo both your sentiment and the team's sentiment in that, you know, we have a lot to do. We have a lot going on, and, you know, we just have to keep our heads down and focus. William Santana Lee | Chairman and CEO of Nightscope: Lastly, I want to publicly thank our board of directors and the management team for the support in doing this strategic acquisition. Again, I've been wanting to do this for half a decade and finally got the brave pill to do it. And now I'm just kicking myself that we didn't do it five years earlier. But this is going to be a lot of fun. So hopefully for those of you that can join, we'll see you Thursday night for our first annual Autonomous Security Force Day. Please be safe. Thanks, everybody. jsPDF 3.0.3 D:20260606090212-00'00'

Research summary and source transcript

readyJun 10, 2026

Knightscope reported Q3 2025 revenue of $3.1 million, up 23.5% year-over-year, driven by an 82% surge in product revenue as the company cleared component shortages and increased production. Gross loss widened to $1.6 million due to a $600,000 inventory write-off tied to the facility move from Mountain View to Sunnyvale and higher material costs. Despite operating losses increasing to $9.5 million, net loss improved to $10 million (vs. $11 million prior year) due to the non-recurrence of a $3 million warrant liability expense. Cash balance rose to $20.4 million from $5.3 million a year ago, supported by ATM offerings and cost discipline. Management emphasized a strategic reset via manufacturing overhaul, new facility expansion, and upcoming limited-series production of the K7 robot in H2 2026, positioning innovation and scale as keys to future margin improvement.

Management knows today that the company has successfully transitioned to a 33,000 sq ft facility in Sunnyvale with significantly expanded manufacturing capacity, has completed a deep operational overhaul of its build-and-deliver processes to address scalability issues from its historical 'scrappy' model, and has cleared prior-quarter component shortages to enable increased K7 production ahead of limited-series H2 2026 launch. These operational improvements — including inventory management shifts toward building finished goods stock to reduce backlog and improve shipment speed — are not yet reflected in current financials but are expected to drive future revenue conversion and margin expansion over the next 6–24 months as scale economics take hold. The market has not yet priced in the potential impact of this operational reset on execution efficiency or the commercial ramp of the K7.

Revenue growth driven by product volume (particularly K7), gross margin improvement through manufacturing scale and supply chain efficiency, and operating leverage from fixed-cost discipline amid R&D investment.

  • Manufacturing overhaul and scalability initiatives
  • Facility expansion to Sunnyvale (33,000 sq ft vs. prior 13,000 sq ft)
  • K7 robot development and planned limited-series production in H2 2026
  • Shift from build-to-order to building finished goods inventory to improve shipment speed
  • R&D investment in next-gen capabilities (off-grid, terrain, perception AI)
  • Cash preservation and ATM-driven liquidity growth
  • CEO Bill Santana stated: 'I've never been this excited about the company's future, even since inception.'
  • CFO Apoorv highlighted R&D investment increase of $2 million YoY as a strategic priority.
  • CEO emphasized the K7's 10 mph speed, off-road capability, and autonomous recharging as transformative.
  • Management expressed enthusiasm about the new headquarters as a foundation for growth.
  • CEO described the K7 as a 'massive step' toward the vision of a million cooperating machines.

Management displayed a mix of candid self-assessment and restrained optimism. The CEO and CFO acknowledged past operational shortcomings ('scrappiness doesn't scale'), gross loss drivers, and uneven adoption, demonstrating credibility through specific examples like the $600k inventory write-off and facility move rationale. However, excitement around the K7 and future prospects ('I've never been this excited') bordered on aspirational, particularly given the lack of near-term revenue visibility from the robot. While not evasive, the tone leaned toward motivational framing of long-term vision over current financial performance, balancing transparency with forward-looking emphasis typical of early-stage industrial tech firms.

  • There may be at least one Q&A answer that needs manual review for a possible dodge or lack of numerical follow-through.
  • There may be a benchmark or metric-framing issue worth manual review, especially around adjusted metrics, timelines, or changed expectations.

The company appears to be maintaining a niche position in the autonomous security robot market with no clear evidence of gaining or losing competitive share. Management explicitly dismissed direct competitors, framing the real competition as 'status quo' security practices (human guards, cameras) rather than rival robotics firms. While highlighting 4M+ hours of field operation as a competitive advantage, there was no discussion of market share, wins against specific rivals, or competitive differentiation in pricing or technology versus peers. Thus, competitive position is not assessable as winning or losing — only that the firm is persisting in a long-term adoption challenge against entrenched incumbents.

  • Total revenue: $3.1 million, up 23.5% YoY
  • Product revenue: up 82% YoY (driven by clearing component shortages)
  • Services revenue: up 2% YoY
  • Gross loss: $1.6 million (includes $600k inventory write-off from facility move)
  • R&D expense: increased by $2 million YoY (primarily for K7 development)
  • SG&A cost savings: ~$1.1 million YoY (lower third-party fees and IR expense)
  • Loss from operations: $9.5 million (vs. $7.7 million prior year)
  • Net loss: $10 million (vs. $11 million prior year, due to non-recurrence of $3M warrant liability expense)
  • Limited-series production of K7 robot beginning in H2 2026
  • Completion of manufacturing process overhaul to enable scalable production
  • Reduction of backlog from ~$6M peak to ~$1–2M via finished goods inventory build
  • Expansion of facility capacity to 33,000 sq ft supporting higher output
  • Growth in services revenue from ECD device maintenance subscriptions
  • Potential margin improvement from scale economics in manufacturing and vendor management
  • Adoption of autonomous security robots remains uneven and slow in target markets
  • Gross margins remain negative due to scale inefficiencies and inventory write-offs
  • R&D investment ($2M increase YoY) may not translate to commercial success if K7 faces delays or weak demand
  • Dependence on ATM offerings and cost cutting to sustain cash burn path to profitability
  • Backlog reduction strategy (building inventory) risks obsolescence if demand does not materialize
  • Execution risk in transitioning from scrappy innovation to structured, scalable operations

There is no direct or indirect evidence in the transcript of Knightscope having AI, data-center, or significant computational infrastructure exposure. The company's technology focus is on physical robotics (K5, K7), sensors (LiDAR, sonar, cameras), edge autonomy, and remote monitoring — not data center operations, cloud services, or AI training/inference workloads. While the K7 includes onboard processing for navigation and detection, there is no mention of data center partnerships, AI model training, or server-side analytics platforms. Any AI referenced is embedded in the robot (perception, event detection) and not indicative of data-center scale exposure. Thus, data-center impact is absent from the current business model.

  • What is the expected timeline for limited-series K7 production to convert into recognizable revenue and gross margin contribution?
  • What specific cost reductions or yield improvements are anticipated from the manufacturing overhaul, and when will they reflect in gross margin?
  • How much finished goods inventory is being built for K7, and what is the anticipated sell-through rate post-launch?
  • What is the updated cash runway given current burn rate and $20.4M balance, assuming no additional ATM proceeds?
  • What are the key milestones for K7 off-grid charging and terrain capability development, and when will they be ready for deployment?
  • How does management define and measure progress toward an 'autonomous security force' beyond hardware development?

FY2025 Q3 earnings call transcript

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NASDAQ:KSCP Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Generated on 6/6/2026 Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Welcome, everybody, to the third quarter 2025 Nightscope earnings call. My name is Allison Schwanke. I'm the VP of Marketing here at Nightscope, and I'm joined by our Chairman and CEO and CFO. We're excited to go through the results and some exciting news for us here at Nightscope. I'll hand it over to you, Bill. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Thanks, Allie. Welcome, everybody. We're live streaming from our brand spanking new Nightscope headquarters here in Silicon Valley. If you see some noise or stuff going on in the background, we're getting ready for KHQ nights. We're going to have... friends and family here this evening, and we're excited to get everyone to come visit the new facility. So the other important thing to note, we will not be covering any MNPI during the call, so no material non-public information. If you ask a question after the discussion on the earnings, if we can't answer the question, we'll try to rephrase it so we can. But Ali's here to moderate and make sure we stay out of trouble. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, if you do have any questions, please use the Q&A feature inside of the webinar, and we'll make sure and line those up so we can answer after we address some of the initial findings. Bill | Chairman and CEO: So with that, we're going to turn it over to Apoorv, who's going to walk us through the third quarter. Apoorv | CFO: Thanks, Bill. So as we look into our third quarter financials, there's three primary themes that are emerging. On one side of revenue, we saw modest revenue growth. Companies still largely early stage in an industry where there's a lot of excitement around robots. However, the adoption is still uneven. We believe that we will be able to better penetrate existing markets and enter new markets with innovative technologies that the company is bringing forth in the near future. On the margin side, has been challenged as we continue to build scale economics in manufacturing. Wait one second. In manufacturing, in the field servicing. and in our material manufacturing. Historically, our team has been exceptionally scrappy, doing whatever it takes to meet growing demand. This scrappiness has been our superpower, but it doesn't scale. So as we prepare for our next phase of growth, we're completely overhauling how we build and deliver our products. In Q3, we saw a temporary dip in our margins as a direct result of the deep dive we took in our manufacturing operations. Lastly, our investment in product development and innovation. We are investing in innovation and product development, and we believe that innovation will be a critical engine of our growth in the near future. With that, let's jump into the financials. Total revenue of $3.1 million grew by 23.5% versus prior year. This was driven by increase in both sides of the business. Services revenue grew modestly by 2%, while product revenue grew by 82%, largely as the company delivered higher production to catch up from prior quarter's component shortages. Gross loss of $1.6 million is largely driven by $600,000 write-off of slow-moving and obsolete inventory that were identified as part of the move from Mountain View to Sunnyvale, in addition to recognizing higher material costs incurred to meet production demands of the third quarter. OPEX increased by almost 13% and ended at $7.9 million, largely due to intensified investment in R&D, primarily in the next-generation four-wheeled K7 robot. As such, our R&D investment increased by $2 million as compared to prior year, However, this was offset by cost savings of about 1.1 million across SG&A, primarily in lower third-party professional fees and in lower IR expense. As a result of these dynamics, our loss from operations came in at 9.5 million as compared to 7.7 million prior year. Additionally, Our net loss of $10 million came in $1 million better than prior year, primarily due to the $3 million expense hit that we took last year as part of the change in fair values of the warrant liabilities, which are no longer on our books. EPS came in at negative $0.98 as compared to a loss of $3.58 prior year. And finally, on a great note, our cash balance continues to increase as the company relies on its ATM as well as cost management. So we ended our cash balance at about $20.4 million this quarter versus $5.3 million last year at the same time. With that, I will pass it on to Bill for Q&A. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Now, before we get to the Q&A, I really think we might have a video of this show. Apoorv | CFO: Oh, interesting. Bill | Chairman and CEO: All right. Apoorv | CFO: Let's do it. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Let's roll it. All right. Well, hopefully everybody enjoyed that. We've been working on the Nightscope K7 for a very long time. We're excited to announce that we're going to start limited series production, second half of 26. And we're in very good spirits here as building on what Apoorv said, kind of resetting the stage and foundation for growth. I've never been this excited about the company's future, even since inception. So things are looking up here. Allie, you want to hit us with the easy questions first? Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first one I already answered, but I'm going to go ahead and read it again. Robin was excited for us to speak about what was coming. I think maybe that was the video that we referred to, but the earnings were released this morning. So what other news is behind that? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Literally behind us is an all-new K7 autonomous security robot. We're really excited about building a new foundation to be able to handle much larger environments at much higher speeds with a ton more capabilities. And I think you and I are going to be sharing a little bit more over the next coming months and feeding some exciting news ahead of the launch in the second half. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's a couple questions here regarding some of the financials, so let's go into those. Sure. So Greg says, is the company building first, then selling the inventory or building inventory and then selling products? Apoorv | CFO: Oh, that's a great question. It's traditionally we've sold the products first, then built them. However, as we kind of move forward towards scaling, I think one of the things we want to do is figure out how do we build the stock and then sell the inventory as demand comes in. It's important for us to be able to, you know, as we scale, to do that because that allows us to then turn the bookings into revenue much faster. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think historically, if you look at the numbers, we at the peak had maybe $6 million worth of backlog. We brought it down to about like $1 or $2 million now. We want to get that down as much as possible and start building finished goods inventory so that we can actually ship quicker and actually the whole operation, the financial area, then get improved. So that was one of the other reasons to move here to a much, much larger facility. In Mountain View, we had about 13,000 square feet. Here in Sunnyvale, we're at 33,000 square feet and a lot more capacity for us to continue to grow. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: There's a question here about the stock. The stock's down over 99% from the IPO price. How can you justify C-level salaries with such dismal performance? Apoorv | CFO: Man, look, the stock price is rarely an indication, especially for a company like our size. It's really an indication or a performance of the company itself. It's really more driven by market dynamics and what people think the stock and the company will do and what they're seeing. The salary expectations and the compensation is really driven by board. The board determines what they think we've done and how we've performed and how we've done, and they determine that. I think overall the company's been in a really great point so far. It took us a lot to get here. We're looking forward to the growth, and I think what we're seeing is the compensation reflects where the board feels that the company's going to be. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about the K7 capability. Is there some questions here about what all can it do? What are the capabilities of the new K7? Bill | Chairman and CEO: We're not going to unveil everything today, but... It will go up to 10 miles an hour, so much faster than the K5. They handle much more difficult terrain, so light duty off-road as well as kind of street-level type of environments. We're going to – we're still working on this. It's not ready for prime time just yet. but we're going to work on off-grid capabilities for us to deploy these in much larger environments that don't have power infrastructure. That's another big R&D investment for the next year plus for us to be able to deliver on that capability. Still at the, you know, R&D stage. We have a few things up our sleeves, but remember what I've often said. We want to put a million machines in the network that can see, feel, hear, smell, speak, and autonomously cooperate. And the K7, this next generation of technology, is a massive step towards that vision. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, one more quick thing to add is the amount of hours that we've now acquired in experience in the field of controlling. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think if we would have tried to build this much earlier in our development cycle, it would have been that much more difficult. We've now operated well over 4 million hours fully autonomously across every time zone in the U.S. in multiple winters and summers, and it's important to have that field experience, and that literally gives us a competitive advantage because we can see designs from science fair projects to startups and the like that might have an interesting thing to look at, one quick review, we know this is going to fail, that's going to fail, and this is going to fail, and they're going to find out real quick why you're not going to want to go down that path. So having that intelligence and understanding from being out in the field is really, really important. You cannot develop this stuff in a laboratory. Absolutely. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Well, let's pivot a little bit back to some shareholder questions. So we have a couple here about what we're doing to drive or specifically address shareholder value. Apoorv | CFO: Sure. So shareholder value, again, comes from execution, right? We as a team are going to have to figure out how do we execute and deliver on the promises of growth that we're giving to the shareholders. And that's just a process. It doesn't happen in a quarter. It doesn't happen in two quarters. It takes a while. The company, as we've talked about in a prior few calls, is going through a true transition period. We grew for the last 10 years through being scrappy. Scrappy is great for innovation. However, in order for us to move forward to the next phase of growth, it requires us to set in processes, structure, and basically set up for scale. And to do that, we need shareholder support to continue to believe in us. What we'll deliver in the future is higher revenues. We're focusing on that. We're focusing on penetrating new markets. We're focusing on driving our margins lower. Again, right now is kind of an interesting time because we have to clean up some backlog and some other just things that have happened in the past. But as we kind of go through that cleanup phase, as we set up for scale, that's how we add shareholder value by showing growth and through innovating. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think maybe it might be worthwhile recapping what we've done over the last two years and why we're excited. We've literally turned Nightscope inside out and upside down, going through every single functional area, every single department. We brought in a new stellar board. We've got rid of about 40% of the management team. We took about 30% of the payroll out and brought in new talent. We shut down a few facilities. We moved into a brand new one. We set up a new remote monitoring department, new sales team, new accounting team, new CFO, new VP of marketing. And now we've got a huge product launch that we're working on with the K7. There's the K1 stuff that we'll talk about next year. So it's focused on growth, but you need to kind of have a stable foundation for the report we're trying to get at. We literally change everything in the building, including the address of the building, and if you haven't noticed, the actual logo of the company. Nothing is – no stone unturned to make sure that we're set up for success. And our three growth strategies – to be abundantly clear. Organic growth is to grow the base business, the current business that we have and all the blocking and tackling that needs to get done for that. Second is new product development-led growth. So new products, new technologies, new capabilities that give us a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. And then the last one, inorganic growth. A lot of focus on mergers and acquisitions that can build on that top-line revenue or give us additional technical capabilities. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So that actually is a good parallel to what's being asked here, which is are you working on any M&A opportunities? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Never crossed my mind. Apoorv | CFO: You want to cover that one? Sure. So we are absolutely looking at M&A opportunities. There are two primary areas that we're focused on. One is do we – how do we – so the way we think about growth, Injun, is really hardware, software, humans, right? Right. Those are three critical components of our growth in the future. On the hardware side, we have development here. On the software side, we're looking for partners and or companies to acquire that allow us things like, you know, perception AI or audio AI or sense AI. So those are the things that are going to help us become better at the analytics and being able to give our machines the capabilities to perceive the environment around them in a better way. Third part of it is the human side. We, as you guys know, as Bill just mentioned, this year or last year we invested in something called the RTX Group, which put humans in the loop. We do believe that really this idea that, you know, robots will somehow replace humans You know, is the answer. It really isn't. The answer is you've got to pair humans with robots. You've got to augment them so humans can become better, right? Humans can become faster at what they do. So we're looking at industries or at least companies where we can find some great humans to work with us. I think – Bill | Chairman and CEO: Defining the next generation augmented security guard is certainly a path that we're considering, the remote monitoring. And at the end of the day, we had a large VIP client here yesterday. At the end of the day, clients don't care. Please fix my problem in a way that I can afford it. And all the solutions today really aren't delivering what clients actually need. So what we're off building is that solution that will be comprehensive to actually permanently fix the problem for the clients as opposed to pushing a certain technology or certain strategies. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So this question plays into that a little bit, and it's about autonomous driving. So the fact that it's already being adopted by much larger companies, was there consideration in teaming up with them in terms of incorporating Nightscope Tech into one of theirs, or are we totally set on developing our vehicles or this vehicle from the ground up in-house? I guess totally in-house was the clarifier there. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Totally in-house. I think, as I often said, there's going to need to be a very large portfolio of technologies. This is what's behind us is just the beginning, as was the K5 and the K1. The easy way to think about it is it's very different to secure and protect a school as it might be to secure an underpass of a bridge or a federal courthouse. You can't have one single technology and voila, that's just going to fix everything. If that were the case, then, you know, oh, the camera's going to fix something. Well, there's 85 million cameras in the U.S. I don't think it's fixing much. So I think you need a large portfolio, and either we're going to do it ourselves or We may partner with folks or we may buy it. But one way or another, we need to achieve the mission. And it ends up being a make-buy decision. In some cases, we know a little bit more than what's out in the marketplace. And we're in a little bit of an odd space, right? So you've got the delivery robots making some good progress on sidewalks, less than five miles an hour on sidewalks. Then you've got the autonomous vehicle folks and the trucking folks. They're primarily focused at 35, 50, 75 miles an hour on city streets and highways. That's a very different profile than... 10 miles an hour around the perimeter of a security location that needs security. So we're still specializing. We're certainly open to partnerships. We've been evaluating them as part of our M&A strategy or as part of our technology development. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Fantastic. There's several questions here around government and government contracts. So I'll group these together and people asking, do we have any government contracts that we're pursuing or what has been the latest of some of the work you did on Capitol Hill? Bill | Chairman and CEO: So, yes, we have local, state, and federal contracts in the stationary side, a good portion of them. The federal side, to be frank, as we always are, rather frustrating. We're in the middle of a whole conversation, and then to have the government shut down is really not productive. So we'll restart those conversations, but that certainly was a little bit of a setback. At the same time, the problem still persists, right? All these military bases need to be hardened. The 10,000 federal security – sorry, the 10,000 federal buildings still need improved security. And so I think the solutions that we're building, inclusive of us partnering with our friends over at Palantir to get our technology on their FedStart platform, is also a huge enabler for us to grow the federal side of things. But as I've said – You know, this is a medium, long-term type of thing. You're not going to all of a sudden have a significant growth on a client that moves very slowly. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, well, speaking of this may be related to that. So, you know, how do we think about the K-7 having an applicability for border security? Is it rugged enough? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Well, light duty off-road is really important. The other reason we're looking at the off-grid charging, autonomous charging is also important because you don't necessarily have power out in the middle of nowhere. And I think the Department of Homeland Security is looking out to put a request for a proposal on certain autonomous technologies to do that capability to support our friends over at CBP. So it's certainly on the roadmap for us. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Great. What about the ability for us to share K7 pre-order numbers as part of future quarterly reports? Apoorv | CFO: I mean, look, I think we traditionally just haven't been forward-looking. Again, the key is we want to execute first and then talk about what we've done, and I think that's going to stay our course for now. I think over the years we've had a Bill | Chairman and CEO: We have a lot of existing clients and former clients that have expressed a great deal of interest. So reengaging those folks is certainly at top of mind, inviting them here, doing some beta testing in some of these locations, et cetera. We wouldn't build this if we didn't think there was strong demand for it, but I'll – Agree with the report. We'll probably make sure these get deployed, and then we'll talk about the actual numbers. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, there is a wait list open right now. So if there is interest, people can go, and it's on the website. Head under the Autonomous Security tab on the website. It's also on the homepage. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Knightscope.com. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Forward slash K7. Oregon, if you don't have any extra clicks than you today, just go to the homepage, and there's a button right on there. You can go see it. Thanks. Cool. Let's talk about how the K7, maybe the robots, K lines, are made in terms of components. So are K components sourced in relation to tariffs versus U.S. made? Bill | Chairman and CEO: So to be clear, we design everything, we engineer it, we manufacture it, we deploy it, and we support it. For a majority of our products, if not all of them, we're BAA or Buy American Act compliant, and that is the strategy for these machines. And you need to be careful with other companies that love to import stuff from China. and then have that surveilling your own property without the proper cyber controls or point of origination type of discussion. And so we're being very careful with that. This is technology built and designed in America to protect Americans. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Let's talk about the facility that we have here. We have a couple questions on if it's available to come in for a tour, if people aren't able to make it to the event. Yes. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think we're going to have to set that up because we get that request a lot. I haven't talked to you about this, but so April 4th or the April 4th. The first week in April. The first week in April is probably the next time we'll do an event. So that will be our 13th year anniversary event. So we'll work to have a poor do some karaoke that night and get you all here to visit us here at Nightscope. What we want to do for our prospective clients and existing clients is actually have the facility amenable to and set up properly for you to understand and view the technology and You can only PowerPoint and Zoom people to death and email them so much. Sometimes they need to come and see and touch and feel and experience. So we're spending the next probably three to six months finishing up the setup of what's planned here for Nightscope headquarters, and we'll certainly have an invitation out for you. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Robert has a question about our sales force. Have we reassigned your sales force to specialize in different industries, federal, state, et cetera, or local governments and education, kind of in the vertical strategy, I guess? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Mixed bag. So we've tried vertical only, sometimes has been successful. We've done more regional. We just brought on a new director who specializes on local and state. So kind of a mixed bag, and I think we'll continue to do that. Again, this is new technology. No one in the history of mankind has done this before, so there's a lot of experimentation. Something that works in one region may not work in a different region or one vertical in another vertical, so kind of working our way through that. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Do you feel the new K7 will put our competitors, such as, I won't name the competitors specifically in this call, but will we put the competitors in the review mirror, and if so, how? Bill | Chairman and CEO: What competitors? Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Do you want to name them? No. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I don't acknowledge any viable products out in the field with millions of hours of operation. Okay, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So I think first and foremost, most people don't like the next assertion, but we're serious about making the U.S. the safest country in the world. Anyone and everyone who's trying... with a new public safety technology, a new law enforcement capability or physical security, we want to support them. We're not that company that's like, oh, well, everything's cutthroat, it's a zero-sum game, and if we win, you lose, and you win, we lose. That's not the game here. I want to make it miserable for anyone who wants to cause harm to an American citizen to understand that they can't do that here anymore. And so we want to be supportive. We're always going to have, you know, some fun conversations with competitors and so-called competitors. But I think we're very confident in the K7 and its capabilities. And we're also excited to get it out on the road. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Competitive-wise, one of the things that is important for us to remember that substitute competitors and our people's perceived behavior and the way that they've always done things is one of our biggest competitors. Bill | Chairman and CEO: That's a great point. I think the actual real problem, kind of what I told Congress when I was on Capitol Hill, is the biggest fear I have of AI is not the technology. The technology is moving very quickly. in an exciting fashion. The actual problem is humans. Humans don't want to change. Large organizations don't want to change. I don't think it's new news. Like, we've been arguing with the Department of Veterans Affairs for five years now. I literally went to go see the secretary of the VA to continue to plead our case, to spend half a decade to try to convince a client that you have a problem, you have a budget problem, you have a staffing problem, you have a security problem, and the organization continues to want to do business the old way is problematic. And so that's why I've been pushing for a national robotics strategy to basically be that catalyst for the federal government to unstuck this. Because this continues to happen. And it's not just us. It's everyone that's working on robots or automation or AI or any kind of technology. You have an industry that doesn't want to change. And, you know, new news coming for you, it's going to change one way or another. Apoorv | CFO: Yeah, I think that's what I mentioned earlier when I opened up the financial themes. The adoption is uneven, especially in the safety and security world, right? And as you mentioned earlier, the more people, the more industries that are out there adapting and adopting to what robots and machines and technology can help them with, the easier, actually, it becomes for us to go out there and propose a value proposition. Otherwise, we are competing, again – against status quo, and sometimes it's a harder sell. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Actually, I'll go down a path. I think we shared this with the analysts. I think it would be fair to share it with the audience here. If I can have you visualize a bar chart, and if I put a very large bar here of three companies, three guarding companies in the U.S., a third, a third, a third, plus or minus, these three companies alone generate $30 billion worth of revenue and employ a half a million humans in the U.S. alone. Now, if you go over here and you make a little chart here, if you add up all the competitors, folks that have new technologies, anyone working in public safety, law enforcement kind of technology, physical security, you're like almost about 1% of this. And that's pretty much stayed steady for a decade. And that proves my point. Folks don't want to change. The country's addicted to video management systems running Windows, humans, and cameras. And then we're wondering why everything costs so much and a violent crime occurs every 26 seconds and a property crime every four seconds. The system's broken. You've got a million and a half guards, a million law enforcement professionals, 85 million cameras, 300,000 cop cars. Not working. We need to change. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: This is a question that most likely a lot of companies like us receive, but it goes to you, Bill. Some of these goals Bill has been saying for years, we've struggled to deliver on them. Why will this time be different? Bill | Chairman and CEO: So I live here in Silicon Valley. There are 22,000 startups here. Literally 95% fail. So the statistical probability of someone starting a company, getting it funded, growing it, taking it public and still be alive and kicking 12, 13 years later is almost near zero. So first and foremost, I want to thank our investors that have stayed with us all this time, our vendors, our suppliers, the relentless Nightscope team, and all our supporters, because what we're doing is technically very difficult. Operationally, it's extremely taxing, and there's an industry that doesn't want to change. That said, now that we've built that foundation that Apoor was speaking of earlier, now we have that foundation to actually grow to the next level. I think another thing to put in context, people take for granted that the autonomy side is kind of really easy to do. Okay. Well, about half a dozen folks have tried to literally do what we're doing and no longer exist and given up. And half of them were large corporations and half of them startups. I think on the self-driving type of thing, started 2007, 13 started getting some traction. Everybody will be in a self-driving vehicle by 2020. Hey, folks, it's almost 2026. It's not scaling across the nation. There's some great progress being done by the team over at Waymo, at Neuro, et cetera, but And by the way, the team at Tesla is doing awesome work, but it's extremely difficult problems. So if you think this is just going to over one decade just miraculously appear and it's going to work and Bill just keeps saying the same thing over and over again, well, you can take it two different ways. Like Bill's delusional. This will never work. You can try to bet against this. You will fail. Or maybe he's on to something and this is just going to take some time, but if we can stick with it, Crime's not going away. Like, there's not a market risk here, right? Technology? Yeah. Can it be improved? Sure. And the last part of the risk is execution. And that's what we really need to focus on. So, yes, I've been saying it for a long time. We're focused. We're relentless, and because we're focused and relentless, we're going to get where we told everyone we're going to go. Is it taking longer than we want? Sure. The team at Tesla has promised all kinds of things. Eventually, they get there, and, you know, we applaud them for that effort, and we hope to follow in their footsteps. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So this question follows that up. It might be more in my territory, but Francis says, what are some of the new marketing strategies? Bill | Chairman and CEO: First marketing, new marketing strategy? Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: go hire marketing that's a genius so go for it ali sure well thanks for that question there is a lot of foundational work that we are building right now we have a lot of focus on data and integration of systems to see the whole entire customer journey across the uh knowing about the product to even creating demand and then uh eventually through the customer experience so i've got a lot of things planned out for next year right now we're seeing the k7 launch as you've seen it's hopefully in your email and on social today. But we have a lot of vertical work that we're doing, pairing that with a lot of content. And then the new focus on how people are actually finding information online. So we've got search engines are changing. We're now looking at how that feeds into ChatGPT and AI discovery. But ultimately, you're going to see a lot more of us at the industry-specific presence next year. So we've got a big focus on trade shows and events and field sales, as a lot of people are getting a little bit tired of that digital environment. So we're going to see a lot more faces in person. And just like we had yesterday here on site with the group that came and toured, lots of excitement, and I think we're seeing the public wake up to the idea that robots are here, and we need to see them in person. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Yeah. Robots will be everywhere. Taking a little longer than we want. We'll get there. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah. We're also working on some content production, so we're working on a podcast studio. This is a makeshift setup today to show you the K7, but we do have some details that we're working on so we can create content and actually use some of that AI. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I don't know, form on TikTok? TikTok. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: We already know how to do karaoke, but I'm really excited as a strategic marketer to build out a team that's really data-focused. So Apoorva and I speak the same language of if it's not a number and it didn't actually end up on a report, it didn't happen. So that's a big difference that I'm bringing to the team here. Absolutely. All right, well, we have a couple questions about drones. So this person has been following for about eight years. Now are we thinking in surveillance drones, are they possible? Bill | Chairman and CEO: There's a lot of companies that have been working on it. There's a few technical issues that folks are overcoming. I think you still have the end user desire not to change. There's some law enforcement agencies that have been using it, you know, drone as a first responder. I'm excited to see that work being done. to kind of enable a different approach. I think eventually, you know, there'll be drones flying out of these machines. But for persistent 24-7, it's not really yet a thing in the physical security side of things, which is different than law enforcement. I think on the law enforcement side, there's certainly a lot more traction. I think the opposite on the federal side It's not the drones or drone capability. It's the never-ending drones showing up on military bases that aren't supposed to be there. And so there's actually a more poignant approach on anti-drone technology. And it's getting to be a real serious problem for all the military bases. I don't think this is kind of new news, but, you know, there's – I won't give you the number, but there's thousands of foreign nationals that try to get on U.S. military bases every year. And those bases need to get hardened, not just from the human element, but from the drones as well. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: There's a question here about our goal of achieving 100-plus K-5s in the field, and this was a goal several years ago, but it doesn't seem like we're there. What are the greatest obstacles? Apoorv | CFO: I mean, I think we have more than 112 ASR devices out in the field. Really, the biggest challenge comes out to adoption, right? It's the same theme that we go across when you have new technologies. We have certain early adopters that continue to, you know, renew and continue to expand. And then there are certain places where we still struggle because, again, it's such a new technology. territory for potential clients that they just need to get more comfortable. Again, it's just time, as you mentioned earlier, Bill. We just need time to be in the open. We need time to be in front of customers and clients. We need them to see our devices in front of them. Bill | Chairman and CEO: So I shared that with Allie when she first joined. And, you know, woe is me. We're having struggles with these type of clients. We're having struggles with these type of clients. And, you know, but I don't understand. We've had clients renew for three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I think we're coming on a ninth-year renewal with the same client. She's like, I don't want to hear about the struggles. Who are the people that keep renewing for half a decade or almost a decade? Like, we need to go understand that better. And that's the kind of right attitude and question to ask and kind of where we're going to be very much focused. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, and some of the anecdotal feedback from the field is we're seeing a lot more adoption of the technology of what it can do versus it being sort of a shiny object. So I'm really excited for we're seeing a lot of that happen. Bill | Chairman and CEO: And because there are a lot of investors on the call. I think one other analysis that Portman and I did when he first arrived is for those clients that did renew for three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years, you know, what do the financials look like for those units? And actually it's lucrative and kind of what we planned. So we're just going to need to do a rinse and repeat on that type of approach. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: We have one question about maybe what can be done to overcome the fear of a robot's Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think it's maybe a general question. I think there's one soft thing to do and then one harder thing to do. The soft thing to do is just communicate. Spend the time, do the webinars, invite people over, do the lunch and learn, educate, put out the content, get people to share the content. You know, for places that we've been deployed for a long time, people are bored with it because it's, you know, yeah, it's a robot. It's supposed to be here. Fine. Move on to the next subject. For a lot of places where we go, it's still a novelty. It's, you know, something from science fiction that's off the movie screen and now in front of me. You know, I think educating... is probably one of the most important things to do. I think the harder thing, which is my ask of the administration and the folks on Capitol Hill, is we need to pass the National Robotics Strategy. to basically have a mini mandate to require every department and agency to take 1% of their operating, maintenance, and service kind of budgets, and thou shalt use it for robotics, automation, and autonomy. And this is not an ask to increase expenditures for the federal government. It's actually to reduce it. Can you please stop being inefficient with our own tax dollars and use commercially reasonable and commercially available technology that's already proven in the marketplace so we can save taxpayer dollars and you guys can still spend that money elsewhere? And if we can get Congress to actually put that mandate in, we can actually get some footing in this industry, which then has a bunch of positive repercussions. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So I'm going to put these two questions together. One is about who will be the customer of the K7, and then the other is a question about whether or not the red and blue lights are restricted to law enforcement, only seeing that on the video. Bill | Chairman and CEO: There's no restrictions. I mean, you can go look at a security vehicle sometimes has those. And in terms of who the clients are, we're not ready to disclose that yet, but probably the easiest sale you might ever get is from an existing client. So we'll probably start there and do some good amount of beta testing before we do a wider release. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Do you envision any entry into the K-12 education market? Bill | Chairman and CEO: I struggle with the K-12 situation, which is different than higher education. Our country unfortunately can't pay our teachers properly. The schools don't have enough budget to buy the appropriate computers and tools. And then someone's going to show up and say you need six or seven figures to come out of nowhere to pay to properly secure this facility. Like, this is more of a... almost now defunct, the Department of Education discussion because the schools don't have the budget to do this. That's kind of the first issue. Second issue is we operate primarily very well in 24-7 operations. So healthcare, casinos, airports, et cetera, work a lot better for us. K-12 don't necessarily run 24-7 and I think they should, but they don't actually run 24-7. So I think that's a challenge. We've spent a lot more time with universities and colleges, and sometimes there is the actual budget. They run closer to 24-7 and is a better match. It's still, I think, a sore point that needs to get addressed. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Can you talk about the other side of the business? It is two-thirds of revenue. I think they're asking that. Is it? Please clarify. Apoorv | CFO: Yes. The ECD devices continue to be the primary driver of our revenue today. It's about 60% of overall revenue. Bill | Chairman and CEO: And I think there we talked about growth being organic. It's just basically blocking and tackling kind of the same approach. That said, I think we said earlier in the year that we're looking to revamp the K1 stationary lineup. Today is about the K7. Perhaps sometime in the future we'll have a night school briefing on a new product launch to discuss the K1 separately. Apoorv | CFO: And if I can expand on that, Bill, the other part of it is the dynamics of how the revenue is recognized across both products, right? So on the ECD devices, primarily we recognize revenue as we sell. It's a transactional sale. On the robots, it's really the revenue is, you know, over a course of time, whether it's, you know, every month is one-twelfth of the annual revenue or every year is, you know, the full subscription price. So if you think about that, obviously the one-time sales of the ECDs will be a higher percentage of our revenue. One of the things that companies also are doing as we continue to grow is how do we grow more of our revenues to be recurring? So even on the ECD side, We are growing the services side of that business slowly but surely. So we're focused on things like, you know, our chems that allows our customers and clients to see the health of their ECD devices in real time. we are expanding on the full services maintenance model that allows our clients to essentially be hands-off and pay a monthly subscription fee or an annual subscription fee for us to take care of their units for them. And we believe there's growth there. There's demand there. There's growth there. So that's going to continue to happen. But for now, because of the way we sell these devices, the revenue on the ECD devices continues to be higher. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So Kevin asks, given so many of our competitors have not been successful in this area, what should we be watching as an indicator that the market has matured enough for Nightscope to succeed? Bill | Chairman and CEO: So what we've been talking about is adoption. Once again, it's boring. It would be a good thing. At some point in time, there will be a tipping point. where if you don't have an autonomous security robot, you're like the outcast weirdo? Like... the insurance company is going to look at you and go, you didn't want to pay the $5, $10, $15 an hour to properly secure your facility? Like, we're not going to underwrite this, you know, policy. At some point, it's going to have a tipping point no different than, like, you don't build a building today without fire extinguishers and smoke detectors and fire detectors and that sort of stuff. But I think what you need to really kind of focus on is adoption and use cases, and that's kind of what we're working on. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Well, a quick administrative thing. It sounds like your microphone is a little bit lower than a part of myself, so if you can adjust that for us, that would be wonderful. There's a question here from Nathaniel about he references, like, the PC was offered to the public. Have we created anything for the home? Oof. Bill | Chairman and CEO: So we intentionally started business-to-business because if you start with a new product, business-to-government, you will fail or much higher risk of failing. So we started business-to-business. We've slowly been adding business-to-government, which is a different animal. Business-to-consumer, that's a wildly different process, wildly different marketing, sales, and service distribution. price points, et cetera. I think we are slowly getting in there, but not on purpose. So we've had clients that have very large estates that look more like a business than a home or an HOA or apartment complex and that sort of thing. I think once we're comfortable with how we're operating in all 50 states, we're Happy where we are with the federal side of things and the local and state government. We've got good penetration in all the rest of the business-to-business. I think we can start discussing business-to-consumer, but that's a very, very long time from now. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Corb, I think this one is for you, a financial question. Greg says, This might be a typo in here, but what was the company's last fourth income versus the development expense investments? If expense is greater than income, how is that sustainable? Apoorv | CFO: So I didn't quite catch the first part, but the second part of the question is, long-term, it's not sustainable, right? That's what we have to figure out is how do we continue to drive business growth, to drive business margins, and then obviously drive growth. EBITDA or net income for the B positive cash flow. The challenge is we're a hardware company. Software companies can develop a product and then put it out and get 70, 60, 90% margins. As a hard tech company, we have to scale. That's really what it comes down to. We've got to scale. Once we scale large enough, we can use economics on the manufacturing side, on the vendor management side, on humans, and use that to then drive gross margin and EBITDA. And that's really the, you know, it's an execution challenge and an execution, you know, strategy for us. That's really what we have to do. Bill | Chairman and CEO: I take a slightly, maybe a different nuanced approach for 12 years on every single call. You guys don't have enough money. You're going to run out of money. You're going to hit the wall. It's never going to work. And We've never missed a payroll, never run out of money. We literally have the most cash on hand that we ever had in the history of the company. We actually have the resources now to do what we had planned to do. We're working on improving the gross margins. We're improving the product, our fixed cost basis and everything else and that's why we're excited and that's why the board's excited is because we actually have a plan to move the company forward in a very exciting way. You don't get talent like this and the rest of the entire management team and the whole team to go work on a very difficult problem if you don't have a way to get from A to B. We've got a way to get from A to B, and it's kind of exciting. So I'm in the – it's not a conversation point anymore of, oh, well, you don't have enough cash on hand to make whatever next quarter. We're not having that conversation. The conversation now is you have the resources, you have the management team, you need to focus on execution. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: There's a couple questions around shareholder value from earlier investment. So I'll put them together. And how is Nightscope helping early investors recover losses? Apoorv | CFO: Continue to be investors. I mean, I think this is a long game, right? So over the long course, as we continue to, again, do the things that Bill talked about, new product innovation, growth in revenue, drive margins, drive EBITDA, drive execution, our share price will reflect that over time. Again, one of the first questions we ask is why is the share price where it is? The share price isn't reflecting today where the company is and what things we've accomplished. It's really more of a, you know, there's certain players in the market that are able to, you know, influence the stock price to where it is, which is outside of our control. That being said, the only way we can continue to combat that or to address it is to really execute. And that's all we're going to focus on. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: There's also a couple questions here about pairing drones or additional technology with land-based units or pairing those with police. And so I think the questions revolve around how might we be thinking about that or what are your thoughts on those topics? Apoorv | CFO: I would say we've just got to focus on what we have today. That stuff is in the future. But, you know, I'll follow your lead, Bill. I'll leave it there. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Okay, fantastic. There's a personal question for you, Bill. How are you doing as a CEO? There's been some dark times in the company history. What makes you want to do this every day for so long? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Thank you for that. Yeah, it's been a long 12 plus years, I think. I think I've said this publicly. I'll say it again. I think the first nine years, I was primarily very focused externally to just get the capital to do what we wanted to get done. We didn't get the support here from all the VC establishments. So we turned to 35,000 retail investors to give us the capital and invest the capital where we needed to at least get to this point. And we're forever grateful. If you're upset with us, I'm upset too. We're not where we need to be, but I can't fix the past. I got to fix the future. And if you're still a long-term hold with the team, I hope you continue to do so. I think kind of as a first point, the two years right after taking the company public were probably the two most miserable of my professional career. I won't go into all the drama associated with it, but one of our largest investors called me, and he basically said, hey, Bill, this is not a democracy. Take control and go do what you need to go do. And then a couple of our executives, Rashidi Zinnapur, also pulled me aside, like, you need to, like, go with your gut. And one of the things I hate about getting old is getting older. But one of the things I love is having all this experience. And I think we're going to get out of the mess that was created and be an extremely, extremely exciting force in public safety. And... What gets me up is I made a commitment that we're going to go try to make the U.S. the safest country in the world. It sounds absolutely freaking ludicrous. But what I told Congress and what I'll tell you is now that we've worked the problem for like 12 years, we actually have a plan on how to get there. There's a line of sight on how to actually physically do it. So that gets me motivated and excited. I think the second thing that gets me motivated and excited is the people that I get to work with every day. I get to work with. and the technology that I get a chance to participate in. I love what we're doing. I know down to my bone that we're going to be extremely successful. It's been painful, but that's what will make the victory that much sooner. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: We have a couple questions about the K7 and this market. Bill | Chairman and CEO: A couple questions about the K7. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yes. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Do you think there's maybe something there? I don't know. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: We have a couple questions about could we use it in neighborhoods? How do you keep it from, let's say, people trying to do bad things to it or harm the device? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Similar to what we've done with the K-5, you end up behind bars, and we have all the evidence to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. We have, and we will continue to do so. You are not to graffiti a police car. You are not to knock over a law enforcement motorcycle. You are not to break a camera or break a fence or a gate. And if you mess with a security robot, like, you're going to end up a night in jail. Don't do it. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Has the IP been valued? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Oof. Most people don't like this answer, but, you know, we have, like, maybe close to a dozen patents. I'm not a big fan. I might get in trouble with the next statement, but typically investors on the East Coast have a lot more either actual or sentimental value with patents. Folks on the West Coast are like, the technology moves so fast, like it's not worth it doing. We did some of the basics. If we would have just sat here and literally patented everything we could, There's probably 100, 120 patents we could have done, and we would have spent an arm and a leg, and a massive amount of staff time is not worth the trip. I'm kind of with the Tesla team in some cases. Like, the technology is moving so fast. We actually want the country to be successful. Like, you know, here's our patent. Go do what you need to do. It's not kind of very much where we're focused. We're not like a pharmaceutical where we have, like, the secret ingredients. And the ingredients change. Like, six, 12, 24 months, everything is completely redone. Like, why do I want to use the recipe from last year? Apoorv | CFO: And I think the other part is, to your point, Bill, is, you know, in a world where resources are constrained, where do you allocate the resources for the most result on your investment? Is patent protection the thing that's going to drive this company and give us returns we need? I think our view is that it probably won't. We would rather invest that money in innovation, in people, in talent, in process, and that's where we get the biggest bang. Yeah. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So this question is about the way the company is evolving. And it seems, so Michael says, it seems like the company is still engineering-led. At every shareholder meeting, we talk about R&D, new product development, new tech. Have we ever, I'll paraphrase this question, have you really achieved product market fit or repeatable business model? Are we fundamentally too early or better off embedded in Google X or similar? Bill | Chairman and CEO: I think it's a good question. We've talked about adoption problems. But I still go back to client, you know, it's not a 99-cent download of an app. You can get a client to pay you for 3, 5, 7, 10 years in a row full price and continue to renew. Like, I think we got product market fit. You just got to make sure that the sales team is aligned with the marketing team, is aligned with the client experience team, et cetera, to go after the market that has the best fit as opposed to trying to sell to everyone and every Tom, Dick, and Harry that would like a robot. Like, I made fun of this, but to make the point, one of our worst clients we could ever have is the chief innovation officer that has budget. and needs a shiny object to show that he or she did a great job of bringing in new technology and then a year later, like I don't want to renew. Well, why not? Well, you didn't fix any problems. Well, you didn't have any problems in the first place, so we shouldn't have sold you the technology. I think bringing Ali in to be like super laser focused on getting that accelerating where we do have product market fit will alleviate that situation. I think one of our first employee, Mercedes Soria, for the first, I want to say, 10 years, she literally was like, we're too early, we're too early, we're too early, we're too early, we're too early. The last couple of years... We're right on time, but we better pick up the pace. She's a lot more conservative in kind of business approach than I am. So to me, that's an important gauge as she focuses on our AI strategies and the like. So it's been a long haul. Like, it's been very difficult. But I'm telling you, this next five, ten years is going to be absolutely freaking epic. Apoorv | CFO: And to be honest, you know, what company grows that doesn't invest in innovation? Like how do you drive growth? How do you drive revenue? How do you drive market adoption if you're not constantly investing in R&D? I would say, if anything, we should be doing more because that's exactly where, you know, we're going to get things like the K7 and all the things we want to do with the new sets of technologies we're looking for. That's right. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Well, one of the biggest pieces of the data work that we're doing is having that feedback loop actually then feed back into a lot of the engineering. So I think that that's going to help us position product market fit even more effectively going forward. We have one question about if we have reached out. So I'm going to read this verbatim. Have you considered reaching out directly to President Trump? Perhaps Congress was a waste of time, but our efforts might be received better elsewhere. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Yeah. try not to give play-by-play on a lot of the government relations type of things. I think there's a need for an executive order, and I know this administration has used it to great effect and in some cases maybe overused. But in this particular case, it probably needs to be both by legislation and by executive order. Remember, an executive order doesn't last. It's not a sustainable type of thing. So we probably want to do both. But it's very difficult to have those conversations when the government is shut down. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Sure. We have time for a couple more questions. There's a couple questions here about expanding to the European market or perhaps Chile. What are your thoughts on expansion? Bill | Chairman and CEO: Absolutely not. And this gets some people on the team and our investors frustrated. But listen, when we've achieved our mission, which is to secure the U.S., we're operating in all 50 states. We've got $500 million cash on hand. We're bored out of our minds and we have nothing else to do. Like we'll go work on Chile and Argentina and Japan and everything else. Having worked on four continents, I can tell you forcing to go do that now You're near 100% chance of a business terminating event. This is not just software that you just go plop over in South Africa or Japan and it's just going to work. Like, tell me, who's going to do all the translation? Have you done all the ITAR stuff? Have you done all the import-export things? Oh, great, now you've got to set up a subsidiary in Tokyo. You understand the insurance requirements there? Have you done the market research? We shouldn't be the arrogant Americans to think our technology, just stick it in Tokyo and it's going to work perfectly. We have the right font. We have the right... radii on the on the on the products and everything else uh you know then he's going to be arguing about you know transfer pricing and oh great now we're going to tell the auditors like hey go audit the subsidiary in tokyo like not doing that and it looks great on the powerpoint some bankers will push us to go do it absolutely freaking not i work for the shareholders and the board And I'm telling you, that's a good way to cause a massive distraction and a massive level of difficulty. So that is not in the cards in the short, medium, or possibly long term. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So we have several questions here that are more specific to maybe your individual situation, so I'll encourage you to reach out to us if that can be answered offline. But the last question we have, since we'll keep you at time here, is there's this concept you've talked about, the autonomous security force. Is that the same thing as the K7 situation? Bill | Chairman and CEO: does that what does that mean uh i guess since i told congress i can tell all of you uh that tuned in uh and we've been hinting at it for the past year uh poor beds mentioned it on some remarks with uh the analysts uh we've mentioned in some of our communications And I think in order for us to really bring a software plus hardware plus humans approach, we really need to build the nation's first autonomous security force that can bring the entire portfolio of technologies to bear with almost every element of the human possibly involved that may or may not influence our M&A strategies. But if you're able to bring in a solutions provider that actually has a solution to fix the problem and you need to uniquely combine hardware, software, robotics, AI, technologies, perhaps with a future augmented security guard, I think that probably is the right mix and one of the reasons we're very excited about our future. And now I'm going to put up Torb on the spot and see if he'll elaborate. Apoorv | CFO: I mean, this kind of goes back to the question we were answering earlier about how do we look at M&A, how do we become a force multiplier, The reality is when you were talking about that graph with the $30 billion and the $1 billion, you know, it's one of the reasons why the technology firms continue to, you know, have a challenge. Our challenge in growing is really each one of us are providing one part of a really complex solution, right? Somebody's got cameras. Someone's got a robot. Someone's got a LIDAR detector. And if you then – Go to the head of security. We talked about this. They're like, well, now I have, I don't know which dashboard to look at. I don't know which one's giving me the right information at the right time. And sometimes I miss things. we've come to the conclusion that really for us to be effective in the future, especially in the long run, we need to really create a fully perimeter secure solution that combines not just one or two things, but multiple things and multiple parts of the process of what it takes to secure a perimeter. And that includes, again, hardware, software, and humans. So that's what the force is going to be, is going to be all three of those things combined. and under a platform of technology, data, insights that, you know, perhaps today may exist, but they're definitely fragmented. Bill | Chairman and CEO: And that is what we plan to do to unstuck the adoption problem. If the clients are unwilling to adopt the technology outright, maybe we can, not maybe, we will put it in a formats that they're more accustomed to doing and will be that much more effective in us delivering what we're promising that we want to do from a long-term mission standpoint. So we're well on our way. There's, as you often say, more to come during 2026 and 2027 about that. But just think about those three words, and we literally mean it, an autonomous security force. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Right. Well, I think we've got some folks on the call that wanted to see more about this K7. Would it be possible for you to give us a little bit of a walk around? Bill | Chairman and CEO: We've got to move the chairs? Sure. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: I mean, I think that our producer, Eric, if he'd be able to give us – You got promoted, man. If you have to log off, we'll continue to do this, but we'll also have additional videos online. So, Bill, give us a tour of what's behind us. Eric | Producer: This is all new. Bill | Chairman and CEO: So the K7 autonomous robot, standing right in front of it, obviously is not too small. And a lot of capabilities. I'm going to cut this in half maybe. First, let's talk about the autonomy side of things. It's very important for us internally and operationally. The clients don't care. The clients just want the technology to work and fix their problems. We care because we need these things to run 24-7 and autonomously recharge and be completely hands-off. So there's a unique combination of sonar technology, LiDAR technology, actually multiple LiDAR. There's a GNSS RTK with a monocular camera that will help us with some visual adoption. all the camera, all the wheel encoder stuff, and combine that so that we can patrol analogously to what a self-driving car might do. And this is a next generation, all new, complete do-over of the Napa Gates, which we're really excited about. One thing that I can mention is that we've learned a lot over operating 4 million hours. And in some cases, it's making mistakes is how you learn. So what we ended up doing is putting a kind of test procedure in place. There was one or two or more challenging client locations where with the K5 and the older technology navigation stack, we were having some difficulties. So we literally came up with a test procedure to see if we can get the right sensor stat for the K7 to be able to successfully operate that. And on top of that, do that both in the real world and in simulation. So really excited about the autonomous stat on here. It's got four-wheel steering. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: So just want to make sure. I know folks are staying a little bit late. So would you just want to hold this in your mouth when you're speaking? Would that be okay? Eric | Producer: There you go. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yes, so folks that gave us questions or notes in the chat, let us know if that's a little bit better. Bill | Chairman and CEO: Yes, Allie. All right. Saw on the video tons of lights. That's also a different way of doing the physical deterrence. 360-degree view. And what we'll do over the next few months is start sharing more about what the vehicle sees, how it operates, et cetera. I know some folks have already been asking, like, hey, I want to see what the detections look like. So we'll work on that. A really loud public address system, so we can do top-down through broadcast messages, pre-recorded or speech-to-text, or text-to-speech, rather. And I'll mention this four-wheel steering. This will go up to 10 miles an hour. We'll work on higher speeds a little bit later. And this is intended to handle terrains that we haven't been able to control prior. So gravel, dirt, sand. Think of like a Judy off-road. We're not off-roading like blah, craziness type of thing. Not a lot of crime going out in the middle of nowhere. But enough to be able to handle something like the the border, more solar farms, really large environments. And so there's also something I forgot to mention here. There's a Pantel Zoom camera on here. We're working on some capabilities for acoustic event detection. There's maybe some other sensors that we're going to add. We'll talk about that later in a future briefing in terms of new products. But This is going to be able to handle much, much larger environments at higher speeds, providing that physical... What we included as standard is RTS, the Risk and Drug Exclusion. So we will monitor... because most law enforcement agencies or security operations centers are wildly understaffed. And as one of my friends likes to say, you have a million cameras and you're literally blind. You can't see because you've got too much data. So if we're able to actually help with that, it's going to be very important. And we're excited to have a huge – I don't know if it's huge. We're going to see how big it's going to be this evening. We've got a good amount of friends and family coming over to Knight School headquarters to see the K-7 in person and check out our new facility. And you'll all get an invite for April for the unauthorized annual anniversary thing that our CFO hasn't signed off on. But I think we can do a wrap. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Yeah, that sounds good. So we've had a lot of interest, I think, in people having – Touring on the K7, so in the future we will actually do more of a video about the K7, so we've got some focus on that. And with that, any closing comments, Aborf? Eric | Producer: Well, thank you for joining us. We appreciate you asking. We'll be talking to you all as we're going. And we're excited for you to join us. Bill | Chairman and CEO: To wrap it up, you know, investors always ask, why should I be interested in Nightscope? There's usually three risks. Is there a market? No. Executional risk. Well, Ellis, as you've often said, there's not a market risk here. Crime's not going away. Technology, we're at the bleeding edge of capabilities, and now we have a new strategy with that autonomous security force approach that we think is going to be a big unlock. And on the execution side, I will bet on the Knights Go team every single time. Thank you very much. Allison Schwanke | VP of Marketing: Thank you. Thanks. jsPDF 3.0.3 D:20260606090214-00'00'

Research summary and source transcript

failedJun 10, 2026

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FY2025 Q2 earnings call transcript

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