Innoviz Technologies Ltd. Ordinary shares The ThinkEquity Conference
Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.
Transcript
Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.
Reach retail investors for the last 20 plus years, have an audience of 700,000 plus investors. Without further ado, I will let Eldar speak about Innoviz.
Thank you very much. I am Eldar Cegla, I am the CFO of Innoviz. Innoviz was founded 2016, 10 years ago. The focus was providing lidar 3D sensors for the auto industry. This is the industry we were focused in order to allow autonomous driving. Over the years, we won a few programs in the industry, working very closely with big names, BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler Truck, Mobileye. BMW was launched in 2024, so you have autonomous vehicles running with our technology already as of 2024. Volkswagen will launch next year with the Level 4 application, so a lot was going on. We matured the technology, we matured our product, we matured the production line, and we came to the conclusion we can now serve other industries as well.
The automotive industry is very demanding, cycle times are very long, price pressure is very high, and once you have a mature product technology and production line, after an exploration mode, we concluded we can serve the security and defense market as well. We have the capacity to do it. There is a great sense of urgency in this market, and I will talk about the different applications that we are serving here. Less than a year ago, we started exploring this market, marketing, selling, looking for partners, and we are now very much focused also on the security and defense market. We have already few partners that we are collaborating in. I will talk about the different segments in a few slides that we are supporting.
In the automotive industry, we are serving as a Tier 1, a direct supplier, providing not only our lidars, but also services, integration, qualification, testing, whatever the OEM needs. In the security and defense market, our go-to market strategy is different. We are not the prime supplier for the industry. We are not trying to be. We are a Tier 2 or Tier 3, connecting or looking for all of these prime suppliers as a Tier 2, providing our solutions to be integrated into a wider solution and then sold to the end customers. We are spread all over the world. We have presence in the U.S., we have presence in Germany to serve our German clients. We are headquartered in Israel, and we have additional presence in Asia. Let us go to the next slide. I will focus here on the product lines.
We are already in the second generation product line. The first generation was InnovizOne, which went into the BMW cars. Now we are on the second generation product line, InnovizTwo. We have short-range lidars, long-range lidars. A lidar is a 3D sensor, if I didn't mention it. We scan the environment and have a 3D image of the environment in real time. We have different ranges for different applications, and we took basically the same product out of the same production line and offered it to the security and defense market. The only difference is we brand it as Perciz. In order to avoid confusion between the auto market and the security and defense market, we branded it differently, but it's the same product, the same maturity level, which means I don't have to invest more, not in CapEx, not in development.
I just need to focus my efforts in selling and marketing these kinds of product. This is our headquarters. We are a public company, INVZ, as of 2021. Let's go to the next slide. Perciz, this is the new focus of the company, as said, less than a year. We understood that there are two main market segments that we can focus on where there is the greatest need. One is counter-UAS, which is the drone problems that we see all around the world, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Europe, in America as well, and perimeter security when you want to protect, is it government facilities, different utilities, borders? They are using today smart solutions, smart sensors in order to protect different kinds of perimeters, airports.
These existing solutions that are mainly using radars and cameras can work much better if they are using lidars because they have certain shortcomings that I will address in the next few slides, and we can solve it. Lastly, on the longer term, we will also address UGVs, which is unmanned ground vehicles. This is very natural for us. We come from the automotive industry, allowing autonomous features. Supporting UGVs is, let's say, relatively easy for us, and this is a bit further down the road. The greatest sense of urgency, I would say, is counter-UAS and perimeter security. This is our focus. Let's go to the next slide. Another click. Yes. Thank you. First, before I go to the actual problem, I would say that the opportunity is very big for us.
Based on our understanding and analysis of the market, think that by 2030, the opportunity will grow to $7 billion-$8 billion for us in aggregate. This is a very big market. We see a lot of budgets are funneled into these kinds of applications. The sense of urgency, again, is very high, and governments, both in NATO and in America, in the U.S., are funneling billions of dollars in order not only to fund the research, but once a solution works and is proven, to deployment. These budgets will also go to deployment, and we see the cycle time in security and defense application is very fast, at least from where we come from in the automotive space. Until you get to fruition, to SOP, start of production, it can take three to four years.
What we experience in the security and defense market is that the cycle time can be less than a year from pilot to deployment. We are already on few programs that hopefully will have step functions once they go to full deployment. Let's go through the next slide. Why do you need a lidar? What does it solve? We are showing here a picture of a very noisy environment, an environment, unfortunate, that is maybe a war zone. Usually, in order to detect threats like drones, you use cameras and radars. In this picture that you see here, there hides a drone. Somewhere here in the picture, there is a drone. It's very hard to detect, even with the eye. Usually, when a radar or a camera looks at the sky, it's a clean, unnoisy environment, and they are very good.
They operate very well. A radar can look very far away, but this is in clear environment. Once you take a radar or camera and point it to the ground, to a noisy environment, you have debris, you have trees that may move, which trigger a radar. The radar has difficulties. You have power lines here, metal objects that also are very problematic with radars, and the solutions today can detect that there is a danger. If we click to the next slide. Somewhere here, the drone is hiding. You will sound the alarm, and everybody will run to shelter. But this is not enough, because knowing that there is a danger and running for shelter is not enough. If we click to the next slide. No, this one. Yeah. A utility cannot run for shelter, a ship cannot run for shelter.
If the drone is there, eventually it will detonate and cause damage, so you need to take care of the damage. This is exactly where a lidar comes into play, because we are bringing an automotive-grade lidar to these kinds of solutions, which have high resolution, long range, high frame rate, and can operate very well in very noisy situation. When trees are moving and you have metal objects all around, they can detect the dangers and pinpoint the drone in 3D space. This is what a lidar does. It's a 3D sensor with high resolution and can pinpoint in every second where the danger is, which means you can deal with the danger. We'll go to the next slide. We'll show a clip. This is what the lidar sees. You need to go and run the movie. It's somewhere over there. Yes. Try to Yeah. You see the trees are moving.
You have metal poles, and here is the drone. You see the XYZ that the lidar gives you at every given moment. It is a very small drone, so it can be a big problem for radar because it's difficult to detect with all of these noisy environments. Birds may be flying all around. This is a challenge that we can solve and allow the systems to deal with the threat. If we go to the next, you need to please press pause. Can you take it back a little bit? Yes. Another application is perimeter security. The previous one was drone detection and pinpointing. Here, we are talking about the next application, perimeter security, and I'll explain how it works today. Today, they are using radars and cameras.
The radar have a wide field of view. Then if the radar detects something wrong or a danger in the scene, it will send the camera to zoom in in order to identify what it is, what the object is. Again, when you take a radar and point it to the ground, it's very noisy. You have trees, you have leaves. A radar cannot penetrate the leaves. A lidar can. It can see beyond the leaves. It will be triggered all the time. We will have a lot of false positives. In order to simply solve these problems by replacing the radar, the existing solution, with a lidar, it gives the same functionality, but it's more accurate and more reliable. Let's play it. You will see, this is what the radar sees, the lidar, our lidar sees.
Suddenly, it sees that there is an object, so it will zoom in the camera and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until the camera can see, identify what it sees, and it's a deer. So it's not dangerous, but you see how the system works. A radar will have a lot of problems seeing something here in this noisy environment. If we go to the next slide, we show that there is a person that is working here, and now he will try to hide behind the trees. Since we are using a 3D sensor that can see beyond the leaves, the lidar tracks the person, even though the person tries to hide and the camera will not see him, the lidar will continue to track him, and he would not be able to hide.
So for perimeter security application, a lidar replacing a radar, coupled with a camera, is very effective. So these are the kinds of solutions that we are using. Going to the next slide, before you press play, I am trying to demonstrate here what does it mean to have an automotive-grade lidar in these kinds of applications. Obviously, it's the specs that we are deploying, again, the resolution, the frame rate, the range, and so on, but it's not only that. It's a functional safety component in a vehicle that drives autonomously. It needs always to be available. So it needs to see the scene or the different objects or whatever is there on the scene, even if it's operating in outdoors environments. When I am in outdoor, it means I have rain, it means I have mud sometimes, it means it has dust, and so on.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Continue the full translated transcript in StockNow.
Access every statement, the English original, and speaker-by-speaker history with StockNow Pro.
View the full transcript with ProCall participants
2 people spoke on this call — only 1 are shown here.
PARTICIPANT LIST
View participant details in StockNow.
Log in to see executives and analysts, their roles, and complete speaking history.
Log in to view all participantsKeep exploring
