Soundthinking, Inc. Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and welcome to SoundThinking's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Diego, and I will be your operator for today's call. Joining us are SoundThinking's CEO, Ralph Clark, and CFO, Alan Stewart. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today will include forward-looking statements regarding our future events and SoundThinking's business strategy and future financial and operating performance. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict and may cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by those statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are discussed in SoundThinking's SEC filings, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other SEC filings. These forward-looking statements reflect management's beliefs, estimates, and predictions as of the date of this live broadcast, August 12, 2025, and SoundThinking undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. In addition, our comments on the call today contain references to non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA and key business metrics such as annual recurring revenue. Non-GAAP measures should be viewed in addition to and not as an alternative for the company's reported GAAP results. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures, as well as definitions of the key business metrics referenced and management's reasons for including the non-GAAP measures and key business metrics referenced, may be found in the press release. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at ir.soundthinking.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Ralph.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining SoundThinking's Q2 2025 Earnings Call. I'll start by providing some high-level commentary on our financial results and then share exciting updates about our strategic investment and growth initiatives. We're pleased to report a solid Q2 marked by continued progress on our transformation into a broader public safety technology company. Our early strategic investments in technology, innovation, talent, and market positioning are yielding results. We remain focused on building sustainable growth, operational execution, and delivering measurable impact for our company, our customers, and communities. Our second quarter revenues were in line with our expectations at $25.9 million, representing a sequential decline from the boosted Q1 of this year. During the second quarter, we took ShotSpotter live in four new cities including New Orleans, Methuen, Massachusetts, Victorville, California, and Niteroi, Brazil, along with expanding in four additional cities and adding one new security deployment. And while GAAP revenue met expectations this quarter, our bookings did fall short of our internal targets for the quarter, primarily due to the timing of a few large deals, including a significant $2.5 million CrimeTracer transaction and a 400-unit PlateRanger transaction that was pushed into Q3. That said, we were pleased to close a marquee 20-lane SafePointe transaction, combined with ShotSpotter SecureCampus that was sold to a historically black college university. We have a healthy diversified pipeline of over $37 million for the remainder of 2025, which continues to grow beyond domestic ShotSpotter, targeted toward traditional law enforcement customers. In fact, because of the recent tragic Midtown New York City shooting, we were approached by a major financial institution to provide a ShotSpotter SecureCampus deployment. It was very important to them to work with a best-in-class acoustic gunshot detection system used and positively referenced by NYPD. We have taken this opportunity to propose adding a perimeter-based sniper solution that we're in the process of perfecting for the utility substation market in early Q1 2026. The result will be a hybrid wide-area acoustic gunshot detection solution, providing a dome of protection of several blocks beyond the headquarters location, combined with a perimeter-based solution which can detect and alert on inbound sniper fire directed at specific ingress and egress points at the building. This effectively will be providing the best of both worlds. We believe this corporate security opportunity, along with the critical infrastructure opportunity represented by utility substations, embassies, and forward operating bases are a significant growth in TAM extension for our demonstrated capability in gunshot detection. Our overall customer attrition is outperforming expectations, underscoring the effectiveness of our retention initiatives and the value our solutions deliver to our customers. However, our renewal in Puerto Rico still merits close attention due to a new and unexpected requirement to issue a formal RFP in lieu of a standard contract extension that had enjoyed strong support from the new incoming administration. Puerto Rico committed to and is in the process of issuing an interim extension to continue the ShotSpotter service through the RFP process, but bureaucratic delays prevented us from securing the interim extension prior to the June 30 contract extension date. This, unfortunately, has forced us to suspend service and revenue recognition until we can get the formal contract extension in place. On the innovation and integration front, we've made solid progress partnering with several drone providers as we enable a unique drone-as-first-responder capability in response to ShotSpotter alerts. The integration ensures that drones can be automatically dispatched to the exact location of a gunfire incident, delivering real-time aerial intelligence to officers on the ground, such as identifying victims who would need an EMS intervention along with providing valuable situational awareness to arriving officers. The combination of ShotSpotter and drones extends the value of ShotSpotter by delivering a powerful use case demanded by forward-leaning law enforcement agencies. Additionally, we have recently completed an integration between our PlateRanger LPR solution and CrimeTracer, our industry-leading investigative solution. Now any license plate or vehicle information associated with a crime can be automatically passed to CrimeTracer that will initiate an agentic search across the largest CJIS database in the country to associate that vehicle with people, addresses, and past crimes. It's a huge step forward for investigators to be able to quickly get actionable intelligence from the powerful combination of our SafetySmart products. And we believe it far exceeds the FlockOS capabilities in this area. I will add that this capability was completed in one-twentieth of the time using AI coding tools and is emblematic of the huge productivity gains we are seeing as we embrace our journey in becoming an AI-native company. We also continued to make meaningful progress in Q2 on the weapons detection space. As mentioned earlier, SafePointe scored a large campus transaction at an HBCU along with some selected expansion lanes with casino customers. Importantly, we continue to make progress in the sizable healthcare vertical, which is expected to get even further boost from California's AB 2975 statute, which mandates weapon screen capability at state hospitals to address workplace violence. A quick note on the New York political landscape. The recent primary win by assembly member, Zohran Mamdani, has triggered some understandable questions, but I want to be perfectly clear on three points. First and most importantly, we're in year one of a three-year citywide contract that has two additional option years with NYPD. And while the NYPD contract does have termination for convenience clauses like most municipal contracts, the potential litigation costs and reputational damage make a termination highly unlikely, short of the city going into extreme financial distress. Second, NYPD's operational footprint and priorities are distinct and data-driven. And because of their professional standing, NYPD maintained strong autonomy and operational decision-making and public safety infrastructure that helps them save lives, which enlists broad-based support across many communities. And finally, unlike the Chicago situation during the peak of the defund the police fad, there does not appear to be any specific political agenda pushing for a full-scale rollback of police technology tools like ShotSpotter. We'll continue to focus on execution, and we believe our ability to deliver life-saving alerts and critical crime intelligence helps us to be well-positioned independent of any political outcome. Now let me close by addressing the status of the Chicago gunshot detection RFP, which we bid on in April. We're gaining real traction in what we believe is one of the most consequential public safety RFPs in the country. We've cleared multiple competitive hurdles from being shortlisted to completing oral presentations, and we've now been invited to the live demo phase, frankly, a process that we invented over 10 years ago. This is a critical opportunity for us to showcase how far ahead we are in terms of accuracy, reliability, functionality, and real-world performance at scale. And while no formal decision has been made, we are entering the next phase with growing confidence and a strong belief that our technology is unmatched and aligned with the City of Chicago's stated needs as reflected in their RFP. I would like to reiterate that our current outlook does not include any contribution from Chicago. Any potential engagement with Chicago, if it were to happen, would most likely contribute to 2026 results. As we move into the remainder of 2025, we'll continue to focus on driving deeper penetration in existing customer accounts, expanding to midsized and smaller municipalities, and growing our non-ShotSpotter SafetySmart recurring software revenue, all the while delivering operational leverage as we scale. We're reaffirming our full year revenue guidance range of $111 million to $113 million and reaffirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance range of 20% to 22%.

Thank you, Ralph, and good afternoon, everyone. As Ralph mentioned, we are pleased with our second quarter 2025 results, and they are primarily consistent with our expectations. Our financial performance reflects our ongoing strategic initiatives, operational efficiency measures, and our commitment to delivering value to our shareholders. Revenues were $25.9 million, representing a 4% decrease from the $27 million in the second quarter of 2024. Note that our revenue was only 4% lower than the second quarter of last year, which included approximately $2.8 million in revenue loss for the nonrenewal of our contract with the City of Chicago as we continue to grow in all of our SafetySmart platform solutions. We did execute two NYPD contracts in the first quarter, which added approximately $3.5 million of catch-up revenue in that quarter. Gross profit was $13.8 million or 53% of revenue, compared to $16.1 million or 60% of revenue for the prior-year period. Gross margin was lower as expected, primarily related to additional maintenance of existing ShotSpotter deployments and expenses related to licensing software for the NYPD as well as an expected delay in the execution of the associated sublicensing of a new NYPD contract of approximately $1 million per year. We expect to enter into the new contract in the third quarter of 2025 and also anticipate receiving catch-up revenue related to the additional cost of the revenues that were expensed in the second quarter of 2025. Our adjusted EBITDA was $3.4 million compared to $5.1 million in the second quarter of 2024, reflecting the delayed contract just mentioned above and the increase in the cost of revenues related to the additional maintenance as well as investments in enhancing our AI capabilities that Ralph discussed. As a reminder, adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, is calculated by taking our GAAP net income or loss and adjusting out interest income or expense, income taxes, depreciation, amortization and impairment, restructuring costs and losses, including on related fixed asset disposals, stock-based compensation expenses, and adjustments to our contingent consideration obligations. Our operating expenses were $16.7 million or 65% of revenues, compared to $16.7 million or 62% of revenues in the second quarter of 2024. Our operating expenses for the second quarter declined from the first quarter of 2025, but were relatively flat compared to the second quarter of 2024, even as we invest in AI modeling and tools to enhance the capabilities of our SafePointe platform solution. We also had a $0.6 million adjustment in the fair value of contingent consideration related to the SafePointe acquisition, which reduced second quarter 2024 operating expenses. As a reminder, we expect operating expenses will continue to grow less than the revenue growth rate even with our additional costs. Breaking down our expenses. Sales and marketing expense in the second quarter were reduced to $6.5 million or 25% of total revenue, compared to $7.3 million or 27% of total revenue for the prior-year period. Our R&D expenses were $3.7 million or 14% of total revenue, compared to $3.5 million or 13% of total revenue in the prior-year period, reflecting our increased expenses related to our AI investments. G&A expenses for the quarter were $6.5 million or 25% of total revenue, compared to $5.9 million or 22% of total revenues for the prior-year period. G&A expense increases were primarily related to additional internal and external efforts associated with compliance with our SOX 404(b) requirements. As a reminder, we expect our G&A expenses to grow less than our revenue on a percentage basis as our company grows. Our GAAP net loss was approximately $3.1 million or a loss of $0.25 per basic and diluted share for the quarter based on 12.7 million basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding. This compares to a net loss of $0.8 million or a loss of $0.06 per basic and diluted share based on 12.8 million basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the prior-year period. Deferred revenue as of June 30, 2025, was largely in line at $43.5 million compared to $45.4 million at the end of Q1 2025. We ended the second quarter with $9 million in cash and cash equivalents compared to $11.7 million at the end of the first quarter 2025. As of today, our cash balance is over $16 million. We repurchased 31,570 of our shares at an average price of $14.84, approximately $0.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. Currently, we have approximately $21 million available on our line of credit as we have approximately $4 million in debt outstanding, all on our line of credit. As we enter the second half of 2025, we remain focused on execution and long-term value creation. We are encouraged by our pipeline visibility for the back half of the year, the strong renewal rate of our customer base, expanding strategic partnerships and integrations, and our ability to generate consistent cash flow while investing for growth. Now turning to our guidance for the full year 2025. We are reaffirming our full-year revenue guidance of $111 million to $113 million. We are also reaffirming our full-year 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin guidance range of 20% to 22%, taking into account potential costs associated with tariff changes and the investments that we are making in AI modeling and tools that we are incorporating in our products and internal operational use. Finally, we are reaffirming our expectation for our annual recurring revenue, or ARR, to increase from $95.6 million at the beginning of 2025 to approximately $110 million at the beginning of 2026. As a reminder, this guidance is in spite of the loss of approximately $9.7 million in annual revenue from the nonrenewal of the contract with the City of Chicago in 2024. Overall, we are pleased with the progress we have made on each of our strategic initiatives and operational performance of the business. We are now ready to take your questions. Operator, will you please open the line?

Sort of curious if you could talk about the SafePointe pipeline. I think you upgraded sort of the go-to-market packaging around that a quarter or two ago to finalize that. Has the market responded to that? And how do we think about the traction there?

Yes. This is Ralph, Rich. Thanks for asking that question. The SafePointe pipeline continues to be healthy and grow, focused on the verticals that we are targeting our resources to, primarily health care but also casinos as well. We're really keen around the opportunities in the state of California with the AB 2975 initiative there and have been doing some really interesting spade work to get engaged in that marketplace specifically. So we feel pretty good about the opportunity there for SafePointe.

Then could you maybe talk a little bit about sort of international. You've hit on that in some prior quarters, how that's looking, developing, rolling out or building pipeline, et cetera?

Yes. So we're very excited about the recent developments in South America with our Montevideo opportunity there that's already expanded, doubling its footprint there, and recently being deployed in Niteroi, Brazil is also very important to us in terms of expanding the opportunities in Brazil. I would say Brazil is obviously a very big opportunity. We have some pipeline in Mexico as well. I think there are opportunities for us to expand our footprint in South Africa as well. But certainly, having those reference sites in Latin America, South America is very important for us to continue to grow our business there.

And the post-quarter cash stepped up pretty substantially. Is that just seasonal receivable collections? Is there something else we should be thinking about?

Yes. This is Alan. And it is over $16 million as of today. So we continue to generate a significant amount of cash. A lot of that does have to do with collection timing though. So it does get a bit lumpy at times, but we do still continue to generate a significant amount of free cash flow.

Last for me would be, at the midpoint of your revenue guidance, it looks like you'd be up in the range of, call it, $2 million a quarter sequentially in the second half. How much of that would be go get, you still got to go close the contract and then deploy it versus what you think is essentially backlog, sort of how much visibility do you have into that second half sequential reacceleration?

Yes. So this is Alan. I'll start and then Ralph can add or correct. We have some things that are already committed to us by the sales team to get us pretty close to the numbers that we're talking about. Obviously, Q3 needs to be north of $27 million and Q4 north of that. One of the challenges might be some of the timing. We have some very large potential contracts. The timing of those can affect those. But ultimately, we're feeling really good about being able to get to that guidance and producing exactly what we are saying we can do.

Yes. With the exception of the Niteroi deployment in Q2, I was just curious if there are any themes common amongst the three new cities and the one new university that you signed up in Q2?

Not really. It's all quite similar. These are cities facing challenges in responding to and investigating gun violence. We have a leading solution that detects and alerts gunfire, which is often unreported in many communities. We are particularly enthusiastic about New Orleans as it represents a significant opportunity for us. I believe Superintendent Kirkpatrick is an outstanding law enforcement executive, and we are confident that she and her team will achieve great results, which we hope will help us grow even further in the southeastern United States. Overall, these situations reflect a unified issue; it's essential to address the ongoing problem of gun violence that sadly continues in numerous cities and communities.

As far as the competitive landscape, any competitor popping up that you're beating consistently? Or is it kind of ad hoc?

Yes. So I'll jump in and Alan can jump in and correct as appropriate. I mean so we do hear some noise about Flock and their Raven solution. We don't see them directly very much, to be perfectly honest. I think it's the type of thing that we're a proven technology provider at scale, and so we're still feeling really, really good about our competitive position. We've done a number of things that we didn't actually get a chance to chat about in this earnings call around continuing to perfect the ShotSpotter solution. I'll maybe just spend a second talking about our new sensor platform, which is really sophisticated that now allows us not only to do the time of arrival, which we've been known to do. That's how we do the location accuracy. But now because we have multiple sensors, previous generation sensors may have had two microphones on it. These new ones have like more than six or so microphones. So now we can do some really cool things around angle of arrival in addition to time of arrival, which gives us a great deal of precision and then frankly, also kind of sets us up for the thing that we talked a little bit about on this call around a perimeter-based solution to do more sniper acoustic gunshot detection where you're looking at the kind of bullet coming into a specific area you're trying to protect. So slightly different than wide-area acoustic detection technology. And we think that's going to open up a pretty interesting TAM opportunity for us to protect critical infrastructure like substations, headquarters of large financial institutions, embassies, forward operating bases, and the like. So we're pretty excited about kind of moving that technology forward commercially and hopefully get some success on that, if not later this year, certainly early 2026.

Just to maybe piggyback a little bit on that last topic of the new solution you have coming out around the sniper type of threat. Is that something that needs to piggyback off of existing infrastructure for ShotSpotter within the city or within the area? Or can that be its own self-contained type of deployment with all the same timelines, et cetera, that we would expect from a normal deployment of ShotSpotter?

Yes, it's its own implementation. And frankly, we don't imagine that our traditional public safety customers would be running towards this particular solution. I think this is much more of a specific use case around critical infrastructure protection. So there, the buying centers are most likely very different than our traditional law enforcement buying centers. So as I mentioned earlier, focusing in on utility companies, which we know are at risk of having these armed attacks to take down the electric grid that's a key target for us, along with embassies. Maybe there are some commercial property campuses and likes. Certainly, we have this one particular opportunity in New York City with a very large financial institution group headquarters there that originally came to us because they weren't aware of a sniper-based solution. They came to us around our traditional ShotSpotter deployment. But when we're talking to them about the work we're doing with this perimeter-based solution, we got pretty excited about kind of giving them a two-for-one, a hybrid solution that has both, I'll call it, the wide-area detection capability or dome of protection and then very specific sniper-based perimeter solution that could detect incoming sniper-based fire that you would use to protect your major ingress and egress points.

Great, super helpful. I have a quick follow-up question for Alan on the same topic. Considering that this is a priority for 2026, are you expecting to add any additional sales teams or headcount to pursue that opportunity, or can it be managed with the current team as it is?

That's a great question. We're integrating it with the current team. In fact, we've already completed most of the work needed to develop the solution using the existing team. Additionally, it's a relevant point regarding our operating expenses. Our operating expenses have decreased by $1 million from Q1, and we expect them to remain relatively stable in sales and marketing as well as R&D for the rest of the year. Therefore, we don't need to significantly increase our capabilities to achieve this, and we don't anticipate any costs beyond what we are already incurring.

Great. Just a couple more quick questions before I pass the line. Did you mention a $2.8 million revenue headwind in the quarter related to the City of Chicago? Also, regarding the large SafePointe implementation, will the revenue recognition for that likely need to occur later in the year as the deployment takes place? Is that already included in your guidance, or will it be considered additional revenue once the project is fully operational?

Yes. So this is Alan again. The Chicago, we did mention the $2.8 million that was in the Q2 of '24 revenue. The fact that we only went down 4% is because we added almost $2 million of revenue from other of our solutions in our SafetySmart platform. In terms of the actual SafePointe, what we didn't really give you more details on was it was actually about a $2 million booking related to that, but it's a multiyear type of a booking. So that is going to produce revenue for the next couple of years. But we have other things in our pipeline that we hope to see very similar things.

Yes. But if I can add just an - excellent point, Alan. To answer the question, that's very much in our guide. We wouldn't count that as upside. We're expecting that, and that's in our guide for the year.

And I want to start by coming back to the Chicago RFP. And just understanding the potential timing of when you think you might hear back from the city. You mentioned the short-list. Can you remind us how many companies are on that short-list at this point, I think five or six. But any more color you might be able to share on when you expect to hear back on that one?

Yes. So thanks, Jeremy. This is Ralph. So we really don't know the number on the short-list. We do believe, I think there were eight or so respondents to the RFP. Our suspicion is, again, we don't know this for a fact, but it feels like they've pulled that list down to maybe half, maybe four or so, but that's to be determined, I guess, we don't have a definitive point of view on that. And with respect to timing, it does feel like we're kind of getting to the end of the process, certainly being notified that we made the short-list and then being invited to participate in an oral presentation, which we did, I think, about a month ago, and now being invited to participate in a live fire demonstration that will take place sometime in the month of September. It feels like they're getting the information they need to be able to make a decision. But again, they haven't been explicit with us about what the exact timing looks like, but it does feel like we're making really, really good progress.

Great. That's super helpful color. And then I just want to make sure to understand the details here around the NYPD contract and the sublicensing, the catch-up revenue and the expenses associated with it. Alan, can you just remind us here of the dollars that were deployed in terms of expense costs, and then how do you recapture some of that here in Q3?

Sure. Yes. The actual dollars, and this would have gone into COGS, was about $400,000, and it will be about that per quarter. The actual revenue is slightly lower. It's only about $250,000 per quarter, but that is because what we did is this used to be a solution that was provided by another vendor that we are now providing, and we're actually saving, what we're giving them is about a 23% commission, which was over $3 million a year, which we now no longer have to pay. So even though it looks like you might be losing a little bit on the actual subscription, overall, we're saving significantly across the board in the entire income statement.

Got it. I want to revisit the topic of CrimeTracer. You mentioned a potential deployment with expected bookings of $2.5 million. Can you update us on whether you anticipate that happening in Q3 or if it might be delayed until Q4?

Yes. I would conservatively say Q4, but we're working really hard to bring it into Q3. It's an identified need. There's budget for it. There's certainly a lot of movement taking place to kind of go through the bureaucratic process to kind of execute a deal. The ARR is approximately $2.4 million. If I said $2.5 million, I actually meant to say $2.4 million. Hopefully, I said $2.4 million. And it's a deal very similar to what you've seen us do on a statewide basis, both in the state of Tennessee as well as the state of Massachusetts with Massachusetts State's police, but you can think of it as a very large kind of coverage area aggregating a bunch of CJIS data for an affinity, not quite a state, but something close to a state that they're going to be using in a really interesting intel-based way. So we're pretty excited. We think this opportunity is replicable across some other opportunities as well. There's, I think, public acknowledgment that the state of New York is looking at something similar to this that I think a lot of people are around waiting for an RFP coming out of the state of New York for a kind of similar intel-based solution that CrimeTracer can address. Great. Thank you very much. And thank you to everyone who joined us today, and thank you to my SoundThinking colleagues, our clients, and our partners for your support. SoundThinking remains committed to making communities safer through technology, transparency, and collaboration. We're clearly focused on maximizing shareholder value and appreciate your time and support of the company. I'd also like to encourage each and every one of you to read our fourth annual ESG report, if you haven't done so already. We published it in June, and it's available on our Investor Relations website. So thank you very much again.

This concludes today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a good day.