Spatial Intelligence, 3D Mapping & Recurring Revenue — In Conversation with Dan Smoot

Maxar for decades was the global leader in regards to exquisite imagery. The last two years, we have been working to drive more an application-based solutioning, because the fact the world has become more about the consumption of information, with a lot more intelligence around it. With the new compute capabilities that are going on in the marketplace, we've been able to really look at information completely different. AI is a great tool, but if you don't have phenomenal foundational data, it's actually not a very good tool. When you build 20 years of an archive of the digital twin of the Earth and then you can actually apply models to it, you can actually do some pretty incredible things. You can do things like understanding site monitoring or change. In the past, you'd be looking at things that could be two to three year old maps. Now, we can actually update maps almost near-time. We're seeing rapid capabilities in regards to 3D. 3D used to be — if you've ever seen GeoInt 3D in the past, it kind of had this ice cream cone look to it. It's effective to show buildings and stuff like that. Now if you look at what we can do with the compute power that's available, we can actually do it in high definition, where you can actually see the corners of buildings, the tops of trees, the window panes — and all done from a geospatial perspective. Why that's powerful is scale. The only way you could do that in the past is you had to use aerial, but aerial is very narrow.

Vantor is now a spatial intelligence company. What's the story behind spatial intelligence? So if you think about things like what we're doing, we have a product called Sentry, and this is where the industry is trying to get to, which is applying true data intelligence around site. So you're seeing site and maritime, by the way. So if you think about things like you want to understand objects on the ground, movements of vehicles, movements of aircraft, movements of military weaponry — if you're in that side of the business, you need to see very accurate information. You need to be able to do object identification. So it's not just about having this foundational data. It's about having the capabilities to apply it to the foundational data to actually learn at a rapid pace. So you can actually see a rail car, you can actually see not just a ship, what kind of ship. How are you actually getting into this GPS-denied applications?

When you have the foundational data in 3D like we do, and you have the ability to rapidly update it and apply it to much more clarity level, you can actually do it in an autonomous way. You can navigate based on landscape. GPS is about 9 meters accurate. Landscape is about 3 meters accurate. And so what we've applied is the capability to take that exquisite 3D capability and put it either on the drones or central capability from an autonomous control. And when drones are flying in areas where they're GPS-denied, you can now actually fly them based on landscape navigation. If you think about last-mile drone delivery, that autonomous capability can be really important. And if you're going to be delivering via drone to a location, you're going to want accuracy.

And landscape accuracy with high-definition 3D is much more accurate than GPS itself. So we're seeing lots of applications on autonomy and autonomous vehicles being used by having this exquisite capability. So that's where you're seeing the fusion of data come together on the ground. And by the way, we could actually use the ground sensor capability. So it used to be you were dependent just on GeoInt. Now we're taking the drone, the imagery that's coming off the drone, fusing it together, and you've got these rapid, very clean 3D map updates. And that's going to be really important — everything from defense and intel all the way to how the consumer is going to experience their own capabilities.

The business is shifting, and if you look at the health of any technology-based business, you want to get it into more of a recurring-based business. If you think about the history of the GeoInt business, it was a tasking-based business. In other words, I make an order, I task it, I get my imagery, and I move on. Maybe I collect it or I pull off of an archive.

That's actually not the way the world works now. The world is ever evolving and moving and changing. And so, if you're going to be providing customers with information, you actually want to provide them the change that goes with it. So, we've been actually building all of our capabilities around subscriptions, about platform-based delivery, about making sure that we can actually build reoccurring revenue with the customers — more importantly, so they can easily contract with us for their ongoing needs. We've shifted from probably being, when I started two-plus years ago, about 90% perpetual and about 10% reoccurring. Now we're 90% reoccurring, which is very predictable revenue, and 10% perpetual. And the reason that's really important is it just drives really good health into the business, allows us to invest forward-thinking in regards to some of these capabilities, and not being so dependent on just having to repeat this hamster wheel effect that happens in the business.

Yeah. So the site — what we call site change capabilities — is what you're referring to. First off, I think what's really important is, take the US government for example, and the capabilities that they have. We actually provide a platform — it's called GEGD. A lot of people know there's almost 400,000 users that use that platform, not just in the US government but worldwide. It's actually the true consolidation of all GeoInt information — not just ours, but other providers, SAR providers as well as some high-resolution providers. And we take all that information onto a single platform and allow access to different agencies to be able to update it. Now, what we don't control is the tasking and the updates. We can apply a lot of information, but if you think on an international level — when working with international governments, they don't have the history and depth of the US government and have built these platforms for decades. So what they're doing is they're actually taking our Vantor platform, which is basically a subset of what we built for GEGD, and productized it. And now they have a capability to have their own archive. We call that their own living globe.

Now you're actually saving cost. Now, it's weird for a guy who sits here and runs a constellation who lives on this thing called tasking. But yet, I'm saying you don't need to task as much because of the fact that you can task intelligently. It's just shifting the industry to have a little bit more ground control and platform control to make the constellation more available.

I think we live, first off, on the orbit — we live in a coopetition mode. So you've seen partnerships with Satellogic. They're high-revisit, small-sat, 70-centimeter type of environment. Why is that important? If I want to get certain coverage, I can use Satellogic to give me some view of change, and then I can bring my constellation, which is much more exquisite, over the top and get actually the definition. That's really important for like a tipping cue. Saves me capacity, saves me intelligence. That's — we have a great partnership in that. We've done some really interesting US government wins leveraging those type of capabilities. I'm doing the same thing with some of the other providers as well. We're doing that with SAR providers because certain parts of the world are highly cloudy or have night issues, and you need a combination of EO and SAR to be able to pick up what's actually going on on the ground. And that's important. So those kind of relationships are important, but the ones that excite me are actually the ones that we're integrating into some really, really unique capabilities. We launched one with Anduril. We're doing something with their augmented reality, with their goggles for simulation and training. We're ingesting our 3D data into the simulation and training. So you can actually do battlefield training on real ground landscape through their augmented reality. We're doing the same thing with a company called Niantic. That's going to bring a whole other capability to us with their experience and our capabilities, and deliver the same kind of solutions to not just the government but also the commercial markets.

Yeah, we live in a very different world than we did a couple years ago. A lot of people — we reflect it back as a company — March 13th of last year was kind of a real turning point, I think, for the industry as well as for Vantor. That was the day that the US government actually withheld intel for the Ukrainians.

We hold a GEGD platform, we manage it for that, and that's actually where a lot of it was. And that was a US government decision. Why that was an important moment is it kind of woke up the world to sit there and say, 'Oh my god, we're reliant on a lot of US intel from a GEOINT perspective, but we don't have our own capabilities.' And that was kind of a tipping point. A lot of countries were going down the sovereign route already, but they were going at a certain pace. We've seen that just accelerate in the marketplace. Countries are really trying to drive their own capabilities.

The issue that's happening — why it's really healthy for our industry is they can't build like the US has built for years, or some other nations have built for years, and catch up.

So they're going to have to use commercial capabilities to supplement that as fast as possible. There's only been a few countries from the West that have actually fought in a battlefront and used intel for things like targeting. If you think about Western Europe, for example, they have not had to use these capabilities and they've not had to worry about this in decades, and suddenly this is top of mind for them. So they're having to drive these new sovereign capabilities and learn how to actually take the application of GEOINT — which is crazy incredible information stream — but how to operationalize it. You need the geospatial and geospatial intelligence side with everything from how we can disseminate, task, and do all that information ground control, which is a huge investment. You need your battle management systems, your ISR capabilities. And that's why you're seeing this rapid change in the marketplace. And it's not going to be over. I mean the Germans just announced again with a trillion over three to five years. It's a massive dollar amount that we're seeing in this problem.