Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Overwatch Technologies (ASX:OWL), Co-Founder and Managing Director Oscar Leslie
Lel Smits: Overwatch Technologies has lodged its prospectus with a view to listing on the ASX targeting growing demand for maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The company combines drone-based platforms, specialist sensors and data aggregation to detect, map and track radio frequency emissions with plans to expand its capabilities across land and subsea environments. I’m joined today by co-founder and managing director Oscar Leslie to discuss progressing to an ASX listing, Overwatch’s technology, government opportunity and pathway to growth.
Oscar, welcome to The Stock Network.
Oscar Leslie: Thanks Lel, good to be here.
Lel Smits: Now, Overwatch has now lodged its prospectus ahead of a proposed ASX listing. Can you summarise your investment opportunity, why you believe now is the right time to list and also how you’ll deploy the funds?
Oscar Leslie: So, Overwatch is fundamentally built around making the ocean more visible. We’re in a really interesting time. If you look at incidences like the Straits of Hormuz, just even our own local region, people are becoming much more aware about the need to deal with illegal fishing, counter-narcotics and importantly, the impact that maritime trade has on us and our entire economic position.
So, Overwatch is trying to solve the visibility problem that sits behind that. We do that by deploying low-cost, best-in-class assets with very effective sensors to detect activity at sea, whether that be ships that have turned off their transponders, whether that be illegal vessels that might be transporting narcotics, or even in the case of a search and rescue operation, it might be a sailboat that has lost connection to the shore in a storm. So, what we’re offering our customers, who are primarily governments, is the opportunity to have that delivered for them at a lower cost with greater scale and in a model that means they don’t need to dedicate all of their assets to that single area.
For us, the reason why we’re listing at the moment is we want to remain an Australian company, we want to continue growing and we’ve got some pretty aggressive ambitions and being able to actually work alongside Australian investors on that scale pathway is really critical for us. So, the IPO is about taking early traction, which has largely been in hardware sales, converting that traction across into our expanding model, which is ISR or Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance as a service so that we can grow the number of assets we have out there, and then ultimately reaching our most profitable area, which is data sales on a recurring basis. And that’s where we take the data that we’re collecting and actually make it available.
So, to give you a sense about what that looks like in a real format, that would be multiple autonomous sensors. They might be uncrewed surface vessels, they might be drones or uncrewed aerial vessels, able to operate in unison across an autonomous network to detect a vessel. In this instance, it might be a narco submarine transiting an enormous space of ocean.
Take that from just being a single signal to actually informing the customer at the other end so that they can respond and react and ultimately make their borders more secure. And that’s what Overwatch is here to do.
Lel Smits: Excellent. And when it comes to turning data into intelligence, you’ve outlined how you’re combining drones and sensors data aggregation to create enhanced maritime domain awareness. But can you outline what makes this approach different? Also, how Overwatch can turn raw data into actionable intelligence for customers?
Oscar Leslie: So, traditional models built around buying a single asset, you might have a drone, you train your people to operate that drone, to deploy it. And the issue with that is it’s incredibly costly to have to maintain the whole workforce, the support mechanisms in place.
You know, the key changes that have happened recently are that the cost of these assets is coming down, the efficacy of the model is increasing. And so, you don’t want to think about Overwatch being just another drone manufacturer or just a unbrewed surface vessel provider. What we deliver is a layer of that network.
And importantly, the team behind it are all operationally experienced. So, our team come out of the defence and national security community. These aren’t theoretical concepts for us.
You know, we’ve worked in this space, we’ve delivered against it in real life operations. And so, we take that knowledge, we deploy these networks, and then on behalf of our customers, we’re able to increase the coverage really significantly. And we’re able to pull back far more data than would be available under a traditional approach.
That means for them, they reduce the lifetime cost. It means that they can get greater coverage and they can have more flexibility in the assets that they deploy. And for us, it means that you can find efficiencies between different groups.
You may be deployed against illegal fishing, you might be deployed in a border security context. Your assets are out there and they’re able to deliver an effect for each of those different customers. That’s what really changes in the model.
And that’s where the growth is, particularly in the maritime domain. And in terms of building the maritime intelligence network, Overwatch’s longer term opportunity extends beyond the sale of individual drones or sensors, with the ability to deploy more platforms, add new sensor types, expand across maritime environments, and also build an increasingly valuable body of proprietary data.
Lel Smits: Oscar, can you outline how that translates into scale for the business? Also, what the key technical and commercial milestones investors should watch following the proposed listing?
Oscar Leslie: For Overwatch, we’ve fundamentally started with a hardware first approach in terms of embedding ourselves, achieving early revenue.
But the end goal has always been to transition that from hardware sales into managing domain awareness networks as a service, and then finally into data sales with an increasing pool of customers available at each of those steps. For us, in terms of our key milestones, commercially, we’re incredibly focused on expanding our coverage. So when you think about Overwatch, it’s more important to think about us as a coverage and a data collection organization than just producing a single drone.
We will be flexible in how we deploy our networks over time and how we get them out there. But what we really want to be measured by is how significant is our coverage, how valuable is the reach that we’re providing to our customers, and how much value are they getting from the data that we’re bringing back? Because it’s the data that actually informs the maritime intelligence over time. So for us, that will look like increasing partnerships with key platform providers and sensor providers.
It’ll look like expanding our catalog of proprietary platforms where we see genuine, unique value to be delivered. And it will be increasing the volume of recurring and database contracts with our key government partners. That, for us, is where scale exists over the next 24 months.
And when you look at the sheer volume of focus on this space, whether it be in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and our near region, where there is such a heavy reliance upon understanding the maritime environment, we think that market just has enormous tailwinds.
Lel Smits: Oscar, thank you for the update on Overwatch Technologies and all the best for your upcoming and proposed ASX IPO.
Oscar Leslie: Thanks, Lel.
Ends