Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings, Inc. Common Stock Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Austin. Pleasure to be with you. I think I should extend an invitation to Bozeman, Montana for a fireside chat by wildfire sometime. I think that would be pretty disruptive, right?

On the plane. Yes. Next time. Sam Davis, CEO of Bridger Aerospace. We are headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, the heart of wildfire country. We are an aerial firefighting company. We deal with suppression and surveillance. Used to be on the East Coast. When we would visit, we would have to explain the business and what was impacted. It seems to no longer be a mystery, especially with the smoke and the long-lasting effects and what you guys have already seen this year, the necessary need for what we do, and how it is growing year-over-year, and the effects of climate impact that we see. We have the largest privately-owned fleet of Super Scoopers in the world. These aircraft are built to scoop and drop water continuously on fire and provide that overhead suppression for ground forces and allow other aircraft to get in and do their work.

We also have a substantial fleet of innovative sensor-enhanced aircraft that provide real-time situational awareness, and we're introducing those with new capabilities and coupling with our proprietary software. Our mission is to save lives, property, and the environment threatened by wildfires, so it influences everything we do. We pride ourselves on operating all over the country and continuing to introduce the most advanced technology into firefighting.

Yeah. The Super Scooper, which is up on the screen, the yellow and red aircraft, those are purpose-built water-scooping aircraft built for firefighting. They can scoop and drop water continuously on a full tank of fuel, which is about a 4-hour cycle. Typically, they fly in pairs. They can mobilize nearly anywhere. They're short takeoff and landing aircraft, so very versatile, and could provide even hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in a day to a wildfire. They're extremely high demand. We see that there was a very unmet capacity here in the U.S. for Scoopers, so we own 6 of the 10 that are located here. All of those are on a federal contract, and every year we see the demand for them increase. Because they're so unique, they're on a standalone contract with only 4 of our competitors' aircraft.

We have just recently bought 2 of them. They're located in Spain, they're flying right now in Portugal, to increase our fleet to 8 total, and potential ability to acquire more of them as they get decommissioned, and we could repurpose them from governments. The flagship of the company, they are, like I said, in high demand and high utilization, so have been very accretive in what they've been able to produce for our growth. The moat around them is they're hard to get, hard to operate, and require a lot of expertise and a big infrastructure, which we excel at. The surveillance aircraft we have are just as disruptive to the industry, but the moat around them is our integrated services that we have to modify and produce the engineering capabilities to put sensors on aircraft.

Right now, we are on federal fires, and we are doing live stream capabilities down to the ground, perimeter mapping, fire modeling even, and giving that real-time situational awareness to incident commanders, ground firefighters, and so on. We are bringing military-grade technology that has existed for decades into wildfire for the first time and combining it with the most high-performing aircraft out there so that we can get the most efficient, high loiter time, and as well, economic ability to give intelligence to incident commanders.

Unfortunately, they say it takes a disaster to make change happen. We have seen year over year the headlines grabbing national news, the smoke in the air. We saw Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas, which was over 1 million acres, wiped out 22,000 cattle in Texas. We saw the Palisades fire that took out billions in homes and was, I think, 22,000 acres in January of last year. The Maui fires that happened as well. So those headlines are grabbing attention, as they should be, and growing, unfortunately, more frequent every year. And we see that as kind of a three-pronged result of increased temperatures, fuel loads that are continuing to not be managed appropriately, or we cannot manage them enough, and finally, people moving into wildfire and prone areas, which is creating problems. So that has created a lot of attention, as there should be, on how wildfire is managed.

The agencies have looked to how they fix this problem with a scarcity of aviation assets, therefore they've leaned more into commitments. In the early days of Super Scoopers, when we brought our first 2 of 6 into the U.S., we had pure call-when-needed contracts where we would sit and wait for the phone to ring, and very expensive aircraft with staff on standby waiting for work. It was not truly sustainable. As of this year, we have 4 of our 6 in the U.S. on 160-day task order, which was a major milestone for us. Our 2 Spain Super Scoopers, which are in Portugal, are on a 90-day task order, which are evidence of that long-term commitment that you mentioned, that we see.