HawkEye 360, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Hawkeye 360 second quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Tom Cook, Managing Director of ICR. 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 risk 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 include 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 warfighter 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 burgeoning 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. 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 and 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 in 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 US 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 warfighters successful. We support the warfighter 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 helps 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 end-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. We continue to invest in the technical advantages that reinforce our market leadership and expand the missions we can support. Our objective is straightforward. Increase collection capacity, improve revisit rates, accelerate processing and delivery, reduce latency, and lower the cost of deploying new capabilities. Each of these improvements increases the value of our platform to the warfighter. while strengthening the economics of our business. A key component of this strategy is the continued evolution of our processing platform. In addition to the customer and TAM expansion rationale, one of the primary reasons we acquired ISA is the company's powerful, real-time, high-throughput signal processing engine. Since closing the acquisition, we have seen how Hawkeye ISA complementary technology unlock greater value from the growing volume of RF data collected across our network and expands the opportunities available to the combined company. For example, historically, identifying new forms of radar activity could require developing individual algorithms for each radar type. Now we are able to leverage Hawkeye ISA's more generalized algorithms to rapidly and automatically identify a broad range of emitters, including maritime and air defense radars, which improves the speed, scale, and flexibility of our processing platform. We are now delivering analytics to customers based on this new engine to address urgent customer requirements, and we expect to scale this offering greatly over time. Our investments are also materially reducing latency, which is increasingly critical as signals intelligence moves closer to real-time operational decision-making. A recent example was Valiant Shield 2026, the U.S. Pacific Command's premier joint training exercise. Again this year, Hawkeye 360 partnered with our investor Lockheed Martin to demonstrate an integrated operational workflow combining our Hawkeye 360 RF intelligence and tactical direct downlink capabilities with processing technologies from both companies on a Lockheed Martin platform. The demonstration reduced data latency by more than 50% compared with the 2025 Talisman Sabre exercise. Additionally, this data received a high track quality rating, representing a measure of accuracy that is suitable for fire control systems. This data was integrated into the Aegis weapon system and illustrates our ability to become relevant for track custody and long range fire missions. While this was an early demonstration, it clearly highlights our path to materially increasing our addressable market as our platform progresses from supporting strategic intelligence applications to also enabling more time sensitive operational and tactical missions. Accordingly, as we seek to dominate RF collection and analysis, our vision goes beyond delivering standalone intelligence products. It includes embedding our software, hardware, data, and analytics more deeply into the platforms, systems, and workflows our customers leverage today. As these integrations expand, Hawkeye 360 will become an increasingly essential intelligence and operational layer within the broader defense ecosystem and respective targeting and decision-making chains. We have several insightful examples of this broader strategy from this past quarter. Specifically, we announced awards from the U.S. Space Rapid Capabilities Office, or Space RCO, as well as from NASA and NOAA. The Space RCO award highlights both the expansion of our RF capabilities for space domain awareness and the customer demand for procuring Hawkeye 360 payloads for installation into the national security architecture. The recent awards from NOAA and NASA demonstrate customer interest in civil applications of our spectrum analysis and RF interference detection capabilities. These products have potential for commercial telecom enterprise and other new use cases while leveraging the same underlying technology, infrastructure, data, and processing platforms. They expand our addressable market and diversify our customer base while reinforcing the scale advantages of our core business. We also continued strengthening the collection infrastructure that supports these capabilities. During the second quarter, we commissioned Block 2, Cluster 14, and brought it to full operational capacity in the shortest commissioning period in our history. Cluster 14 is already delivering essential data to defense, Maritime and National Security customers, increasing our capacity and strengthening coverage in priority regions. The next phase of capacity expansion remains on track. Clusters 15 and 16 are entering final testing ahead of planned launches during the second half of this year. Once operational, these clusters are expected to increase revisit rate and enable us to serve a greater number of customers and mission requirements. We are also advancing our first Block 3 cluster toward a planned launch in the next six months. Block 3 is a completely in-house design that materially increases collection capacity while radically lowering satellite capital costs. This represents an important advancement in both the technical capability and capital efficiency of our platform. In addition, we initiate development of our Block 4 satellites and are planning the first demonstration of our angle of arrival payload prototype anticipated for launch in 2027. This initiative is intended to accelerate the introduction of innovative capabilities in new frequency bands and to support our longer term objective of significantly reducing latency. Collectively, these investments are designed to improve revisit rates, collection capacity, latency and capital efficiency. Turning to customer adoption, we continue to see robust demand across each of our major customer groups. Within the U.S. government, defense and intelligence organizations increasingly view commercial RF intelligence as critical to augment national collection systems, rapidly address emerging intelligence requirements, and share insights more easily across organizations and allied nations. Internationally, allied governments are accelerating investment in sovereign defense systems and capabilities and increasingly recognize the value of commercially available, shareable RF intelligence. We generated record international revenue during the second quarter, onboard substantial new sovereign customers, and expanded our work across multiple agencies within existing countries. We are seeing unprecedented levels of demand. especially over certain priority geographic regions. This reinforces the need for our ongoing capacity investments and illustrates the critical importance of RF intelligence in areas of heightened geopolitical activity. We continue to increase our available capacity for customers not just with more satellites but also through technical innovations like onboard processing and evolving business models like broad theater collections that can be sold to several customers concurrently. As such, we have proactively pulled some spending forward to accelerate our technology development roadmap. Craig will provide details momentarily. Recent customer activity included the multi-year India Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Award and continued expansion within existing customer relationships including European and Asian Ministries of Defense. These examples demonstrate the land and expand dynamic we frequently see across our international business. To highlight this, we traditionally experience customers beginning with an evaluation, a defined geographic area, or a specific intelligence requirement. As our data becomes integrated into their operational workflows and demonstrates its value, our products become very sticky. and those relationships can expand across products, missions, agencies and contract durations. One of the characteristics we value most about our business is the durability of these customer partnerships. Once customers incorporate Hawkeye 360 into their workflows, we have opportunities to expand both the number of products they consume and the missions we support.