Latest / WTR Small-Cap Spotlight / Our Bond, Inc. (OBAI): Preventative Personal Security for Everyone: Inside the AI Platform Closing the 911 Gap

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Our Bond, Inc. (OBAI): Preventative Personal Security for Everyone: Inside the AI Platform Closing the 911 Gap · WTR Small-Cap Spotlight

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the WTR Small Cap Spotlight Podcast.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Tim Gerdeman, Vice Chair and Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Water Tower Research.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: Today we're joined by Duran Kempel, founder and CEO of ARBON NASDAQ Ticker Symbol, OBAI.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, Rbon offers an AI-powered preventative personal security service.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Members use a smartphone app backed by a 24-7 command center staffed by personal security agents who can intervene before a situation becomes an emergency.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: Corporations subscribe on behalf of their employees and cities, and universities have begun doing the same for residents, workers, and students.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: The company listed on NASDAQ approximately seven months ago.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Also joining is my WTR equity research colleague James Kisner.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you for joining.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Hi there.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: So to kick things off, for listeners new to Arbon story, please give them a high-level overview of the company's business model and perhaps touch on your professional background as well, please.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: So the mission of the company is to enhance personal security for everyone.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Today, personal security is available to VIPs.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: We'd like it to be available to everyone.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: And we think that we've reached a time where technology can allow for that to happen.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: The second goal is to elevate the feeling of being safe, the feeling of safety.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Sadly, billions of people be with a Bravo globally say that they don't feel safe.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: For instance, 88% of women in the UK say they feel unsafe walking on at night.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Internalize that stat for a second.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: So uh we live in an era where people for a variety of reasons feel unsafe.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: That's another problem we'd like to address.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: With regard to my background, I started the company in 2017.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: Prior to that, I spent about 25 years in information technology infrastructure, founder and CEO of two prior companies acquired by IBM and Hewlett Packard.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: Before that, I was an executive at Dell EMC.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Earlier in life, uh military special operations commander.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm a U.S.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: citizen.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Thank you all for your hospitality.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for that introduction.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Great professional background.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: I gotta say, even as a guy at my age, when I go to the gym every morning in downtown Miami pre-sunrise, I use my training from my 20s of walking right on the edge of the curb so you can bump into the road if you're uh threatened.
2:23
SPEAKER_01: So with that, I'll turn it over to James.
2:26
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Tim.
2:27
SPEAKER_02: And um, so you originally had a had a webinar uh in late August, and uh you described Bond as creating a new market, one where customers have no existing budget or personal security as a benefit.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: So um what does that mean for how you sell?
2:45
SPEAKER_00: If I may, uh James and Tim, let's take a step back and help your audience understand the profound problem the bond is addressing and what is uh there is a personal security gap globally.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: And then it become clear what is the bond's solution and why this is a market that doesn't exist.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Spit on that a few minutes?
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: So um we're uh three men on this call, plus your uh audience.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: Let's take an empathetic uh step backwards and think about everybody that we care about: our family members, our employees, our customers, if you're mayors, residents of your cities, if you're heads of universities, these are your students.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: All these humans across the genders and across the age groups, and by the way, risks do not distribute themselves equally across these demographics, right?
3:33
SPEAKER_00: All these people routinely find themselves in situations that make them feel uncomfortable and sometimes make them feel unsafe.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: It typically falls into three categories of situations.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Number one, they walk alone at night.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: 45% of American women and 35% of American men say they feel unsafe walking alone at night.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: That's 140 million Americans.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: If each one of them feels that way once per week, you multiply 140 million by 52 weeks.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: That's 7.28 billion with a Bravo cases per year.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Let's take one case, our daughter Lisa.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: Lisa lives in some uh large metropolitan United States.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: She leaves the office one at 6 p.m.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: As soon as she leaves the office, she has a five-minute walk to where she parked her car, to the subway.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: Maybe she walks home.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: As she exits the building where she works, she immediately feels less safe, right?
4:23
SPEAKER_00: She's a normal person who lives a protected space and is now in an unprotected space.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: But despite the fact that she feels unsafe, it's too early for her to dial land on one, right?
4:33
SPEAKER_00: That's a peace of mind problem.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm putting a circle around that.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm not complaining.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: I understand the realities and the budgets of 911 globally.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: It's a global problem.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: Just pointing to the fact that Lisa has a problem that has no solution.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Problem one.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: Now Lisa is on her way to pick up her car.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: She's in the parking garage.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: She notices that the wrong person is approaching her.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: When she notices him, James, how far is he from her?
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Two cars, 30 feet, closing time, two seconds.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: You know anybody who completes a 901 call in two seconds?
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Lisa doesn't.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: According to the Bureau of Justice, 500,000 women are severely sexually assaulted every year.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about harassment, and I'm not talking about attempted you know what.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: The actual thing that 0.3% of all women over the age of 18.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Unacceptable.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Is there any solution for that?
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Somebody would say, well, what if she had a panic button?
5:34
SPEAKER_00: The likelihood that she has a panic button is less than 5%.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: The likelihood that she has it in her hand is probably a tenth of that.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: The likelihood that a civilian is going to click a panic button when somebody's rushing them is about 10% of that.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: So now we're at a fraction of a likelihood of a percent that Lisa activated the panic button.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Let's assume that she does.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: That sends a signal to some call center.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: In the call center, they see that Lisa Johnson activated a panic button.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: They should be calling her back.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: They do.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't answer.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: They should now call the local 911 center.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: There's 6,000 911 centers in the United States alone.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Assuming that they call the right one that is responsible for the error where Lisa is, they now get a notification of an activation of the panic button that is not validated.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: We don't know that Lisa is in an emergency, right?
6:27
SPEAKER_00: Most likely it's a false positive.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: In the UK, where all corporations are responsible to care for their loan workers, they give them panic buttons.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: The police says if somebody activates a panic button, you, the service provider, needs to call them three times before you call me.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: The UK 911 called 999.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Think about the minutes that are now passing.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Lisa activated.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: Pings the call center.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: They call her back.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: They call the police.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: The police is going to send the car, but notice that this is an unvalidated uh activation of emergency.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: The 901 system in the United States gets 240 million calls per year.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Most of them are not an emergency.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna have to prioritize, and yes, they're gonna send a car to where Lisa is.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: You, the audience, will imagine how long before that car gets there.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: If you assumed, because you're very optimistic that it's 10 minutes, I get stabbed 10 times in 10 minutes, I get mugged five times, and I get raped one and a half to two times.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: Too late.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: Let's reframe the problem.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for bearing with me.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: It's just very important that everybody understands what this company does.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: The problem is peace of mind too early to dial line one, 7.28 billion cases in the United States, just when people walk alone at night.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: And some of those, it's going to be too late to complete an I-1.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: This is a problem that cannot be solved with the existing paradigm.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: Tying back to your point, James, people today don't have a solution for that, which means that they don't have a budget for that.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: It means that employers don't think that they should take care of their employees because they don't have a way to do that.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Until Bond, we haven't yet talked about the solution.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: Would you like me to touch the solution for two minutes?
8:14
SPEAKER_00: So, what we understand is a reactive approach does not work.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Too late, too early into the solution.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: By the way, same situation, not only when people walk in all night, every time that somebody's alone with a stranger, who's alone with a stranger?
8:28
SPEAKER_00: All loan workers.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: That's a seventh of the U.S.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: workforce.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Salespeople, technician, drivers, delivery people, home care nurses, real estate uh agents.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Anybody who works from home, who delivers their lunch?
8:38
SPEAKER_00: A stranger.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: Anyone in a ride-sharing vehicle, take a guess.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: How many 901 calls from passengers of ride-sharing vehicles in the United States every month?
8:47
SPEAKER_00: 60,000.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: 60,000 calls.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: How many are emergencies that 901 will address?
8:52
SPEAKER_00: 0.8%.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: It's only 500.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: The other 59,500 are being told, Daron, we get the fact that you feel uncomfortable, but that's not an emergency.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: You got to leave this line available for emergencies.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Why did these 59,500 dial 9 on one if they are an emergency?
9:09
SPEAKER_00: They don't want to be alone.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: That's a normal human intuition.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: We want somebody to look after us and look after everybody that we care about.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: Do you know of any service anywhere in the world that says, ladies and gentlemen, if it's an emergency, dial 9 on one, we don't replace them.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: But in all the situations that are pre-911, these are 99% of the situation we find ourselves in.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: We feel unsafe.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: We want somebody to look after us.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: You know anybody who does that job?
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Look after you?
9:38
SPEAKER_00: While preserving your privacy, activating AI and personal security agents in order to look after you, detect in real time that something is anomalous.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's going to push the panic button.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's going to dial 911.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: Let's get that through our skulls.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: There's no solution.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: What if we look after them before?
9:57
SPEAKER_00: We detect, like a smoke detector, that there's a problem, but we also have a sprinkler system.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: What is that sprinkler system?
10:04
SPEAKER_00: We basically invite everybody to download the Bonn app on the phone.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm presenting it on the screen.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: It gives you access to 15 services.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: By the way, we're not an app.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Just like United Airlines is not an app, they're an airline with an app.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: We're a security company with an app.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: The key services that we need to focus on are the seven that I'm highlighting, the preventative, as my index finger points, services.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: That means that Lisa is invited to activate Bond before it's an emergency, just to look after her.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: Think about the operational implications of looking after people.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: It's a much larger audience than only people who are in emergency who can't activate anything.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: So Lisa chooses how she wants to be looked after.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: She can choose any of the seven services.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: Track me on the go, run a security check on me, ready an agent for me, or she can click video monitor me.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: If she clicks video monitoring, within five seconds, a bone agent, which I'll demonstrate later, is going to appear on her phone.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: In other words, what we do is we deliver preventive security.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: We built a system, an operation that invites people to be looked after when they choose.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: People ask me, when is the bar too low to activate?
11:16
SPEAKER_00: There's no such thing.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: You're a member of Bond, you decide where the bar is, you decide when you want to be looked after.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: You're in a ride-sharing vehicle, you're receiving a delivery, you're meeting a person you don't know, you feel a headache, or maybe you're epileptic.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: We handle people who have epileptic seizures.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that when they feel that epileptic seizure arrives, they're not sure.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes they think that it's coming, but it's not coming.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: If they dial 9-1, it's too early.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: If they experience the seizure, it's too late, right?
11:45
SPEAKER_00: So what we do is we invite them, while preserving their privacy 100%, to reach out to us and we can look at them electronically with AI, detect anomalies.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: For example, if you click the track me on the go, we can detect that you're not in the right route or not in the right speed, or that you've stopped with your shouldn't.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: When we immediately reach out to you, we're connected to police in the United States and 28 other countries.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: The Philippines went live two weeks ago.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: And let's assume that Lisa decided she's in a ride-sharing vehicle or she's walking alone at night.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: She activates the video monitoring.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: She clicks the video monitoring.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Within seconds, a bone agent will appear on her screen.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: The bone agent is a bond command center.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for connecting with Bond.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: This is Efredo.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: What's the situation?
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Hey, I'm safe.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm just demonstrating to a few gentlemen.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: They're on Zoom.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: I'll introduce you.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Say hi, James.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: You don't need to deter.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Can you do that for me?
12:43
unknown: Of course.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
12:45
SPEAKER_02: Hi, James.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: As you can see, Tim and James, this is not my uncle on a living room sofa.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: I think that's obvious.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: It's a bond agent in a bond command center, wearing a jacket, has a headset.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: He's very polite, but he's a professional who's trained on de-escalation and deterrence.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm safe.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Can I disconnect?
13:05
SPEAKER_02: Yes, you're safe, you can disconnect.
13:07
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for choosing Bond.
13:08
SPEAKER_02: We're here for you 24-7.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, disconnecting.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: In other words, our Lisa activated the video monitoring button.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: She got an agent.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: By the way, first of all, he asked her what's the situation.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: She says, Everything's okay.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: Do you mind walking me to my car?
13:21
SPEAKER_00: He says, Of course, that's my job.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: Anything in particular worse you today, Lisa.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: She says, No.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: He walks her to her car.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: We just addressed it too early to Dal Nair One problem, right?
13:30
SPEAKER_00: Do you know anybody else who does that professionally?
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Could be Lisa's mother or father, which is good, but just like me, I can perform a dental surgery and my kids, but it's not a good idea.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Now, you ask me, Daron, what if somebody approaches Lisa?
13:46
SPEAKER_00: If somebody approaches Lisa, the role of the security is to get her out of the situation.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: Lisa, go back into the building.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Go into the CVS, lock yourself in the car.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: If we can't get out of the situation, let's think tactically, which is not how people think about it.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: We think that the perpetrators are almighty.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: No.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: They're typically male, they're opportunistic, they too want to survive, they're very selective about their target.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: They don't choose Shaquille O'Neal.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Also, they want to stay free.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
14:13
SPEAKER_00: No cameras, no witnesses.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: This is very intuitive, almost impulsive for perpetrators.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: If they see a camera, that's not the good move.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: What did we just bring on Lisa's phone in five seconds?
14:27
SPEAKER_00: A witness on a recorded line.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: And most people are not going to even approach her.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Now, if somebody does approach her, the agent can't get out of the situation, the agent will tell her, Lisa, I'm with you.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: I need you to stop and gently turn your phone screen towards the approaching stranger.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Let me speak with him.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Just like you could see him very clearly from my phone, and you can hear him very quickly.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: He now speaks with the approaching stranger.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Sir, this is a live video recorded call.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm a security agent of the firm Bond.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: The gentleman or the lady feel uncomfortable.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: I'll handle you.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Don't need to help me and a good evening.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: We don't blame him.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: We don't agitate him.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: We give him a diplomatic out.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Tim says, Daron, this sounds great in theory.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: Does it work in practice?
15:08
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: Out of nearly 1.5 million security service requests that we've handled in the last six years, about 350,000 have been video monitoring requests.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: It's the most popular service when people feel unsafe.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: In most cases, we don't have to deter because nothing is happening to Lisa.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: She just wants to be safer.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: Bless you, Lisa.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: In some cases, somebody would have approached her, but he sees that she's on video, not a legitimate target.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: In all hundreds of cases where somebody did approach and we had to speak with them, good ending, which is actually better than I thought.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: I thought that there's going to be 1% of people who are bad and not in the right mind.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: And they may hit Lisa, throw the phone away.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Has not happened.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Probably will happen.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: We can't promise control over these particular people.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: But there's a different state of mind of somebody who's angry and hits, and somebody who's not angry but desires something like your wallet or something worse than that and takes you away.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: That hasn't happened.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: So back to your question.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your patience.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Important to understand the problem and the unique bond solution.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: This is not an existing market.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: People believe that personal security is available to VIPs.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: We're creating an environment with all of us, not can but should.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: Because we are all leaders.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: We're leaders of our families, of our schools.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: There are people around us who look up to us.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: All of us need to make all of them safer with bond, and there's no excuse.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: There are people around the world who don't have money to pay.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: We'll take care of that.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: No excuse.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: I have not met a leader who uh convinced me that they can't fund it and we didn't find a solution.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: We offer the service for free, by the way, to some shelters, to organizations that deal with trafficking of uh minors.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Let's keep uh everybody uh safer.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: So, new paradigm, doesn't have a budget, not in corporations, not in cities, not for welfare uh workers, not in universities, that needs to change.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: Back to you, James.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: I I will observe James and Duran.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: It's an ingenious service.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, the reason I say that, I just think about myself in every major city I walk in, particularly in the evenings after work hours.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: How many women I see walking with FaceTime on?
17:21
SPEAKER_01: And I used to think, wow, how naive that you're on FaceTime on a busy street.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: But as I observed their eyes, I noticed fear.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: So they're literally doing that to have someone observing, but loved ones are not trained to professionally deal with a situation like you're talking about.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're doing the right thing.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So, James, uh your question was, what do you mean there are no budgets?
17:40
SPEAKER_00: When we go to chief security officers, we tell them, look, you probably assume that we're here to talk to you about another panic button.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: And uh that's not all at all what we're gonna talk about.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about a new paradigm that can keep everybody that you're responsible safer.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: According to EY, new uh research published on the 29th of July, if you offer a bond to all of your employees, it's gonna save you about$200 per employee per year.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: Think about it, if you're a company the size of one of the large telecommunications companies in the United States, you have about 100,000 employees, that's$20 million saved if you give the service to your employees.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, you're gonna save all of that money in the first year of the service.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Because think about it, if you have 100,000 people, just multiply that.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh, let's assume that half of them are women, multiply that by 0.3%.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: That tells you how many of them are going to be sexually assaulted.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter if it happens on the job or at home, they're still gonna miss days of work, they're still gonna be treated in some clinical hospital.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: You pay for that.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: By the way, I'm talking about the financial elements as opposed to the tragedy that this is, because I'm talking about the EY report right now.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: So this has significant cost in terms of medical costs that you pay for through your insurance premiums, or if you're very large, you pay for it off your balance sheet.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Then they lose days of work, that's lost revenue.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: Then, because of the stigma they're typically going to churn, that means you need to recruit new people, that means you need to train new people.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: If this happened on a job, there are also legal and reputational costs.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: We reduce the uh occurrence of those situations and their severity.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of money that is being saved, can be proven statistically according to EY, Ernst Young.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: In addition, apparently, when corporations offer bonds to their employees, it raises their engagement level, their morale.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: In other words, I'm more likely to help the person next to the lettuce stand, and I'm less likely to churn.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: Churn is very expensive.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: If you're a retailer in the United States, on average, a half of your employees are gonna leave this year.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Think about the cost of that.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: Recruiting half of your retail employees every year and retraining them.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: If we reduce that, as it says EY, by small percentage points, that saves a lot of money.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: The next bias that the chief security officers have is that this is gonna contend on their budget, which is very flimsy and on their time.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: Not the case.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: They just need to tell HR that they've found this gem called bond and that the largest companies in the world are already using it.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: And maybe we want to offer it also as a benefit to all of our employees.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: HR gets the budget, HR gets finance on board, but all of that is a new reality that addresses your point, uh James.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: This is a new market, people didn't know that it exists, but they're coming up with a budget very quickly because it makes sense morally, ethically, and financially.
20:39
SPEAKER_02: That's a great overview.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: Um I kind of bundle a few questions together here.
20:43
SPEAKER_02: Just talk about verticals a bit, kind of like key markets you're going after here.
20:47
SPEAKER_02: So cities, um, you talked about as a part of the story.
20:50
SPEAKER_02: I think you said one city is buying bond for all 270,000 of his residents, and that Jerusalem just signed on for uh its 10,000 miserable workers.
20:59
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think you've said the early dialogue with maybe 20 cities um or uh across several countries.
21:05
SPEAKER_02: So just you know, maybe just talk about the city sale in general and you know that opportunity, like why is that market you know particularly attractive?
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: So um very excited about the city market, too early for us to claim uh victory, but for the audience who typically are invested in public companies, they don't get to basically witness how companies start, right?
21:36
SPEAKER_00: We know of uh companies once they've become very successful and they become public.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: We're very early in the journey and in crossing the chasm.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: So we're in dialogue with the cities.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Cities have responsibility over very large groups of people, much larger than corporations.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: The largest corporation in the world is Walmart, 2.1 million employees.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: We An offhand think about cities that have 10 million uh residents or 20 million residents.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: We've started with some uh small ones, we're in dialogue with about 20 cities, a different phase of their adoption rate.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Most of them are in countries like France, Israel.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: We're now testing it also in Mexico, in uh Brazil, and we don't know what would happen.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: What we see is great resonance where we've started, which is France in uh Israel, and we've started in those countries just because it's expensive to get to mayors, they're very busy, and you want to get to them from the uh top, from people whom they trust.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: And uh we're seeing great uh resonance and already success.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: The city of 270,000 people, just to give people a sense, that's the size of Boise, Idaho.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: You speak with the mayor, it's very important to get to the mayor, because only the mayor can consider all the implications because there's no budget for that.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: And all cities in the world today suffer from this problem where the residents say that they feel unsafe.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And there is this response gap.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: I spoke with the chief uh security for a city of 250,000 people.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: He listens to the presentation just like you did, and then he says at the end, you know, Daron, my challenge right now is that my response time in a city is 12 minutes.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: I need to cut it to 10 minutes.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: How does this help me with that?
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Tell them, great, cutting it down uh by two minutes is very important.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: How much does that cost?
23:30
SPEAKER_00: Two and a half million dollars.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: Two and a half million dollars to cut the response time from 12 minutes to 10 minutes.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: I tell them that'll be great if you can cut it down.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: But 10 minutes is still a long time.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: You're still not addressing the problem in 10 minutes.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna solve it for some people, you're not gonna solve it for most.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Plus, how do you know to trigger the 10 minutes?
23:51
SPEAKER_00: Who tells you that Lisa is being attacked right now?
23:54
SPEAKER_00: You don't know that she's being attacked.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: So you have the detection problem and then you have the response problem.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna solve it with the current paradigm of putting more cameras in the city and adding more officers.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: You're basically at the flat end of the Pareto curve for the audience who follows uh graphics.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: What I'm offering you is a new paradigm.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: New paradigms arise when you have a new technology and a new operating model.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: For example, cloud computing, virtualization of compute resources, that's the technology, and then AWS starts a model where they host all of your compute resources.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: And within a certain amount of uh time, six years in their case, they get to the inflection point.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: Everybody does it.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: Same thing with drones, for those of us who follow what's going on right now in various uh battlefields.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: Can the Ukrainians deal with the Russians with the old paradigm of adding more tanks and MiG-29s?
24:54
SPEAKER_00: They have no chance, they aren't number one to ten.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: So a new technology is drones, and the new operating models is using the drones in order to attack, not only to look at what's going on.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: We're doing the same thing.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: We're introducing a new technology that makes it possible for the first time to look after people before it's an emergency and to deter.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: So if we deter in 99% of cases, what does that mean?
25:20
SPEAKER_00: That in 99% of cases we cut your response time not from 12 minutes to 10 minutes, from 12 minutes to five seconds.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: And instead of putting more cameras in the city, it costs of millions of dollars.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: They have a thousand cameras.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: Tell them now 250,000 people can have a camera on their phone.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: That by the way, that biceps bypasses the debacle right now in the US about privacy as opposed to cameras in the street, right?
25:49
SPEAKER_00: We're led to believe that there's a trade-off.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: You want security, you need to give privacy.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: No, you don't.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: We're on your phone, you decide when to activate.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: We recommend that you activate whenever you feel uncomfortable.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: My mother, 84-year-old widow, somebody knocks on the door.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: Mom, be on video when you open the door.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: You're a real estate agent, you're you're getting into a house you don't know.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you hold a video?
26:10
SPEAKER_00: By the way, you don't need to be on video.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: You can be on ready and agent.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: You click the ready an agent, an agent is available.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: You put your finger on the screen, the agent knows that you do not want intervention.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: You're a home care nurse, you just want somebody to look after you.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: Hang can be by your side.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: If anybody grabs you, all you cognitively need to do is release, starts a countdown.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: The only way to stop the countdown is to enter the passcode of the real estate agent or the home care nurse or my mom.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: They don't enter the passcode, the bond agent knows that they want intervention.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: Bang, they're gonna come in on video.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Hey Philly, I'm safe.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh just say to a bunch of people on the screen, uh, hi everybody, do it in French for me.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: Can you do it in French for me?
26:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay, go ahead.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: Bonjour tout le monde.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: Great job.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm safe, disconnecting, entering my passcode, so Paul knows that I'm okay.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: In other words, new technology, new operating model, preventive uh personal security.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: So, James, the city market, we present this to mayors.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: I tell them, I tell our advisors, I need to speak with the mayor, not with the chief of security, with the mayor, because the mayor is the only one who can think about the implications also on being elected.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: Also, on being elected.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: And I'm very optimistic, and we offer them different options.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: We tell them, hey, either you pay for all your uh residents, and you of course, when you start that, you offer very special prices.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: You want to get the first the early adopters.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And and sometimes, by the way, our investors ask, Daron, why don't you share the economical uh terms?
27:44
SPEAKER_00: Because if I say that I gave it to James for$10, I then need to give it to Tim for$10.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Do you want me to give it to Tim at the same price that I gave it to James, the first customer?
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: So if you care about the outcome of this company, don't ask me to share the financial details of customer number one in a category.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: We should be paying them to take the service.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Of course, we don't do that, but I'm just trying to ensure that the audience is not naive.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: This is the life of a company that forges a completely new category.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: You need to entice the first users to come in and then get to the right price uh levels.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: That for bond, by the way, is high margins because most of the job is not done by the agents, it's done by the technology.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: For instance, on Ready and Agent, if there are a thousand people right now on Ready and Agent, not all of them are going to release and not enter the code.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: We know at different times of the day across 29 countries, what's the likelihood that somebody is going to release and not enter the code?
28:50
SPEAKER_00: And we need to staff accordingly.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: By the way, if they're on track me on the go, they're letting us know their destination, what's their mode of transit, and now the AI is looking at them.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: There are no agents involved.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: We just keep enough agents who can engage if something is anomalous.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: Same thing, if a uh home care nurse is activating uh security check right here.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: She's starting her visit.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: She tells us, check on me in five minutes.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: If I don't respond, call my boss Tim and my neighbor Daran.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: Again, the technology is taking care of all of that.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: We just need to have what banks call reserve rate.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: So we have enough agents to engage in five uh seconds.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: So I've connected some of the dots.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: I think that cities represent great opportunities.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: We're showing them different opportunities financially.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Worst case, we tell them Mayor Tim, if you don't want to pay for your uh residence, that's okay.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Of course, they'll know that Mayor James has bought it for all their residents.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: If you don't want to pay for them, that's okay.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Well, let me offer something else.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: Help us inform your residents, help us inform your residents, and we'll give them a discount and we'll credit the mayor, Mayor Tim, for the for the discount.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: You can hear I'm positioning it such that this is very worthy for the mayors, because of course they care about the residents.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: By the way, the residents could be 30% students, and to that their parents in one of the cities that has 270,000, we're now presenting to all the schools, right?
30:27
SPEAKER_00: They're coming back from summer vacation.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: If the schools play a video of three or four minutes that informs the students and invites the parents to Zoom sessions where we'll inform them, think about the adoption rate that can uh occur there.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: All of these are the realities of creating James and Tim, a new market.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is doing this in the world.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: The security companies are offering panic buttons to travelers.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: Adoption rate that they see 5%.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: Adoption rate that we see in corporations, 50 to 70 percent.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Different universe.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: Back to you.
31:04
SPEAKER_02: All right.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: Well, let's wrap up um with one more, please.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's an amazing story, but um, you know, you said in Q2 that the deal pipeline has never been stronger.
31:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, also, you're cutting operating expenses.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: Just you know, what milestones should investors be looking for to kind of see that the strategy is working, you know, say the next you know six months to a year.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: So the question that I'm being asked, I'm gonna pose your question with with a twist, is you talk about this inflection point, what does it mean?
31:32
SPEAKER_00: It sounds kind of abstract.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: What it means is that we went public.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: This now allows us to put resources into sales and marketing, resources that we don't have.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: When you think about this inflection from the perspective of the investors, it's gonna look like growth, right?
31:49
SPEAKER_00: More revenue over time units.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: So if in quarterly the revenue right now is X, we wanted to see it increase to 2x, 3x over time.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: In order for that to happen, three things get better.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: Number one is the success rate is higher.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: So if I go in and I present to James, to Tim, and eight more people, there's going to be a larger percentage of them will say, Yes, I've heard about that.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: I know that they're doing it there, I'll do it too.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, there are more conversations that turn into deal flow.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: That means that you're more efficient because it costs you time to set up the meeting with Mayor James and Chief Security Officer uh Tim.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: So, number one is you're becoming more efficient in your lead generation, sales and marketing activities, more meetings turn into deals.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: That's number one.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: That happens when people see that others are doing it and the largest companies in the world are doing it.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Number two, the sales cycle contracts.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Right now, if we meet James and we tell him the story, he scratches his head, he brings it to the chief security officer, they take another month, they then go to HR.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: All of that takes time.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: Once you cross the chasm, all of this starts to happen.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: Analogy to the cloud, the board is asking, why are we not moving our uh ID to the cloud?
33:06
SPEAKER_00: It eats 10% of the budget of the company.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Why are we not moving it to AWS?
33:11
SPEAKER_00: So the sales cycles contract.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: That's also a matter of efficiency, but that's this the cycle time of a deal.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: Number three, the size of the deal increases because deal number one, Tim says, you know what, I'll buy it for this division.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: Then after you cross the chasm, James says, let's buy it to all store all 30,000 store employees in the United States, or let's give it to everybody, and then we plan that.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna see all of that happening, but think about it.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: If a sales cycle on average for bond is, say, nine months, just throwing a number out there, and we've started making these investments in Q2 this year, that means that we're gonna start seeing the results late in 2026.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: And as we invest more and more, and by the way, as you cross the chasm and the inflection occurs, you're growing.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: So a more dollars are invested back into sales and marketing on what becomes a shorter size cycle, greater win rate.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: And that gives rise to that inflection point.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: So, to your question, we've started doing that once we uh went uh public.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, this weekend on the 13th, we're gonna be at GSX, the most important security trade show in the world.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a large booth.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: That's a significant investment.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: That's a half a million dollar investment.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: Just going there with our team, with brand ambassadors, doing all the promotion, inviting people to hear about it, starting the dialogues, telling them about the EY report, asking them to introduce us to HR.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: That's a great overview.
34:43
SPEAKER_02: And uh, Duran, thanks so much for coming.
34:45
SPEAKER_02: This is a fascinating story and a very novel uh use of AI, and um such an important problem to be solving um for so many people.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: So I'll pass it back to Timmy.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, James.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: And uh, Duran, I agree with James's comments.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm I don't say this often.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: I do many of these per week on every kind of business model known to man.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, this is fascinating.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: It actually is overdue service.
35:07
SPEAKER_01: My crime thesis, which no one's paying me to give, is not very favorable because when the economy starts to slow down, I think crime is going to go up materially in big cities.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: So the service is needed, and congratulations on this model.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: It all starts with all of us leading for our families, for our friends.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: We're sending you guys uh free licenses.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh get people around you safer.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for your time.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, as well as visiting wwwwatertowerresearch.com to stay up to speed on the company small cap written research reports, podcasts, fireside chat, industry specific symposiums, and conference schedules.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: We will see you next time for another edition of the WTR Small Cap Spotlight Podcast.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: Finally, a special thanks to the producer and editor of the podcast, Christopher Fitzpatrick.