HawkEye 360, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to HawkEye 360's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me on the call today is John Serafini, CEO, and Craig Searle, CFO. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that our remarks may include forward-looking statements about our expectations, plans, outlook, and future performance, which we make pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Please refer to the forward-looking statements disclosure in our earnings release and our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We will also discuss certain financial measures that are not presented in accordance with GAAP. Our earnings release includes additional information about these non-GAAP measures, including definitions and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, as applicable.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to John Serafini.

John? Thank you, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone.

I'm John Serafini, founder, and CEO of HawkEye 360. First, I'd like to express a few words of sincere appreciation to the 433 wonderful employees of HawkEye 360. To our deeply valued HawkEye employees, on this call today, Craig and I will outline the many accomplishments of our company over the past quarter. They are numerous, and they are impressive, and all credit is due to you, our employees, and the professionalism, commitment, and mission execution ethos which each of you brings to our company. Most importantly, during this quarter, we honored our pledge to deliver highly valuable signals intelligence to the war fighter community, and we have done so consistently and with the highest level of care across two major wars and throughout many other areas of geopolitical tension and turmoil. We have not wavered. We have not faltered in our commitment to the governing principles of trustworthiness, humility, and enduring stability which define our company.

We need no reminder that we serve those who serve our nation. Again, thank you. To the investment community, welcome to HawkEye 360's first earnings call. We appreciate you joining us today. I am exceptionally pleased with our second quarter results, which demonstrate continued execution across the business, strong customer demand for our signals intelligence capabilities, and further exemplify the excellent momentum we have built as we continue to scale our company now into the public markets. Our second quarter was a historical achievement for HawkEye 360 and resultantly for the bursting defense tech industry, of which we are a proud pioneering leader.

We achieved many meaningful accomplishments during this quarter, not the least of which was the successful completion of a phenomenal IPO transaction representing the culmination of years of preparatory work. Yet, it is our support of our customer community, whether on the battlefield, in space, or in the dark corners of the world's oceans, where our successes can be best measured and appreciated. Across major wars in areas of persistent turmoil, HawkEye 360 delivered valuable, timely, and trusted products to our customers, enabling their operational success and continued belief in the power of commercial defense technologies. This quarter revenue increased 87% year-over-year to $49.8 million, driven by continued persistent demand across our U.S. government and international customer base and the acquisition of Innovative Signal Analysis or ISA. Adjusted EBITDA was $7.0 million, representing a margin of 14%.

We ended the quarter with approximately $292 million of backlog, providing strong visibility into future revenue. Beyond our financial performance, we made excellent progress against strategic priorities that drive mission success and long-term shareholder value. We achieved record international revenue, advanced our next-generation signals intelligence platform, demonstrated new operational capabilities during a major military exercise, and made thoughtful investments to increase collection capacity, improve speed, and reduce the cost of delivering high-quality intelligence to our customers. Before getting into those details, I'd like to spend a few minutes introducing HawkEye 360 to investors who may be hearing our story for the first time and to explain why we occupy such a unique position within the rapidly evolving defense technology landscape. HawkEye 360 is a defense technology company and a trusted signals intelligence partner to the U.S. government and allied nations.

We seek to be the best in the world in collecting, processing, and analyzing radio frequency or RF signals and converting that information into valuable intelligence and operational insights that make American and allied war fighters successful. We support the war fighter across the intelligence value chain from unique sensing functionality and signal processing to advanced analytics and mission-ready intelligence product delivery. We provide actionable radio frequency intelligence that's helped customers understand activity across increasingly complex and contested environments. Our capabilities combine purpose-built sensors, proprietary signal processing and geolocation technologies, advanced analytics, a growing RF emitter database, and more than seven years of historical data. We also deliver critical RF software, analytical capabilities, and payload systems directly into classified government environments, and have been doing so proudly for the nearly 30-year history of HawkEye ISA.

The 30-plus satellites we operate are an important component of our collection infrastructure, but they do not, by themselves, solely define HawkEye 360. Our value is defined by our ability to collect difficult-to-access signals, process enormous volumes of RF data, geolocate and identify activity of interest, and rapidly deliver actionable intelligence into the systems and workflows our customers use. This distinction is fundamental to understanding both our business today and the opportunity ahead. We are not simply collecting or selling raw data. We are delivering a differentiated intelligence solution, integrated directly into our customer systems that helps the warfighter detect threats, monitor activity, and make better-informed decisions in challenging operating environments, such as detecting, identifying, tracking, and analyzing the location and activities of dark vessels operating in clandestine manners. The need for this capability continues to grow.

Rising geopolitical tensions, increasingly contested operating environments, and the modernization of global defense systems are driving renewed investment in signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities. The electromagnetic spectrum has become an increasingly important and contested operational domain. The ability to detect, characterize, and respond to RF activity is now essential across modern defense operations, including maritime awareness, air defense, long-range fires, force protection, and critical infrastructure security. At the same time, customers are looking to augment traditional government systems with commercial defense technology that can be fielded quickly, shared across allied organizations, and delivered rapidly at a more attractive cost point. Customers increasingly want scalable, as-a-service intelligence solutions that complement existing capabilities without requiring years of development and substantial upfront investment. Historically, many of these RF collection capabilities and their associated processing architectures existed only within highly classified government systems developed by traditional defense prime contractors.

HawkEye 360 has helped disrupt that model by delivering proven, actionable, and shareable RF intelligence as a service, while also integrating our trusted signal processing and analytical products directly into government systems. We believe these unique characteristics have created a hard-earned N-of-one position for the company, a differentiated combination of collection, processing, analytics, proprietary data, and mission delivery that is purpose-built for demanding defense, intelligence, and national security customers. Our competitive position is supported by three core advantages. First, we have built a highly differentiated data and processing platform through years of supporting real-world operational defense, intelligence, and national security missions. Our collection infrastructure has generated more than a billion RF observations, which power a growing proprietary archive, emitter database, and analytics engine. Each new collection strengthens our ability to detect, geolocate, identify, and characterize RF activity, and to recognize changes and patterns over time.

This creates a compounding data advantage. As our archive grows and our algorithms improve, the speed, accuracy, and mission relevance of the intelligence we deliver increases exponentially. Second, our business model creates powerful operating leverage and attractive long-term economics. Much of the cost required to operate our collection and processing platform is fixed. Once RF data has been collected, the incremental cost of processing and delivering that intelligence to additional customers is low, and this same collection can then be used to support different customers, geographies, and mission requirements. This collect once, sell many model creates opportunities for high incremental margins, premium pricing, and recurring revenue as our customer base expands. It also gives HawkEye 360 the scalable economic characteristics of an integrated intelligence platform, substantially unique in the defense technology landscape.