Innovators and Investors: A Q&A

Greg Davis, Founder and CEO of Overwatch Imaging, joins The Innovators and Investors Podcast for a look at what makes the company unique

Greg Davis, Founder and CEO of Overwatch Imaging sat down with Finstrat Management Inc. CEO and CFO, Kristian Marquez, to discuss a wide range of topics, from Overwatch Imaging's founding principals and key value propositions to company culture, business strategy and how the changing political climate impacts the company's approach to the market.

Highlights from the conversation are below. More info on the podcast HERE.

What is Overwatch Imaging?

Answer: "Overwatch Imaging is a venture backed intelligence technology company working in the dual use space, wo we have civil and commercial clients; we have defense and intelligence clients; and we work primarily on automation of airborne imagery intelligence.

We deliver geospatial intelligence used to allow the teams that need to respond to critical situations- whether that's wildfires or search and rescue situations or infrastructure inspections or defense applications- to find what they're looking for faster, to know more about their environments more automatically so they can spend more time responding to intelligence, rather than searching for the needle in a haystack."

What was your inspiration for founding Overwatch Imaging?

Answer: "I founded Overwatch in 2016, so we've been at this for a long time. I've spent most of my career, all of my career really, in overhead intelligence; imagery intelligence. Around 2016 I was seeing major shifts in how the world was thinking about drones and how the world was thinking about intelligence and data.

At that time, we were starting to see the rise of Nvidia, the rise of really incredible edge compute technologies. We were beginning to see the rise of artificial intelligence applied to image data and things like ImageNet. We're starting to get to the point where many people could take them seriously. You know, the the outputs of those systems was really starting to become comparable with human level performance at image interpretation.

And then we saw an opening in the drone ecosystem. So my background is in UAVs- uncrewed aerial vehicles- and I saw that uncrewed aerial vehicles were kind of transitioning from a decade or more working primarily in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we're starting to think about what comes next. So that meant much greater focus on civil and commercial applications. It also meant much greater focus on the defense sphere and applications in the Pacific.

All these changing trends led me to think that we needed to build a new kind of company that was more focused on dealing with data rather than simply collecting data. We saw that the there were a lot of ways of collecting data that existed in the world at that time, but the customers were were already saying they're getting overwhelmed with how much data they had.

 And we've only seen that get worse over the years. There's just so much data available. And so, what Overwatch focuses on, is not just that collecting of data, but kind of doing something with it to turn a data collection mechanism into actionable information."

What overarching problems is Overwatch Imaging working to solve?

Answer: There's consistently an issue that's raised by both civil and commercial end use agencies, as well as defense and intelligence agencies, that we need to get more done with less. You know, we want to become more efficient at our operations.

We want to reduce the crew that's assigned to any given operation to keep finding efficiencies in our work that may be motivated by economic incentives, that may be motivated by safety. Maybe motivated by just simply recruiting challenges. But this idea of needing to get more done with less is a really strong theme that we hear from all the clients we work with.

But then at the same time, we see this issue that clients are increasingly trying to find small things. The needle in the haystack is becoming more and more important. You might think of that in the in the context of wildfires; one small lightning strike can create a massive wildfire. And so our ability to find those small spot fires faster is increasingly important.

Or you could think about that in the defense ecosystem where you see the rise of small uncrewed surface vessels creating a threat to Navy ships. So this changing world has led to just physically smaller objects creating more of a of a need for a real time response. And so the ideas of timely data and the ideas of getting more done with less- more interpretation, often done with less resource- are kind of driving themes that we always come back to when we're thinking about our product roadmap, when we're talking to clients about how we add value to their operations.

Is Overwatch Imaging focused on hardware, software or both?

Answer: It is, of course, tricky running a hardware business and a software business at the same time. But we we accept that complexity because that's the way our users and our customers think about the world.

Generally, our market is used to buying hardware systems. Now, those can be software enabled hardware, but that's where the market is. It's important to us that we meet the market where it is; and while it's nice to have discussions with investors about the dreamy financials of pure SAAS businesses, that's simply not where the market is. And for good reason.

In the defense ecosystem, there are real reasons- one is to project power, and that's done largely with hardware. Again, software enabled hardware, but at some point the idea of software-only needs to be installed on something in order to interact into the physical world.

We do a lot of our operations in areas that are disconnected from unlimited or simple communications. So we're frequently operating in areas where there's no communications. You know, we're used to an ecosystem where, I'm at my desk at work, and I have perfect information data flow, on my drive home on my phone, I still have perfect information data flow. And once I get home I have I have that access.

But when we're working in a search and rescue environment, when we're working off a Navy ship, there frequently isn't perfect access to data transmission and so we need to understand the hardware implications of where is that software going to live, what are we going to physically do with the data when we collect it?

We we can't always just push everything to the cloud or store it on additional servers. Sometimes we don't have those available to us. It created a really interesting business model, though, where we are working to bring a software business model to a client community that is used to buying hardware. And so that leads to really interesting discussions where we're talking about things that our personal lives and in in our kind of enterprise business lives, we've been doing without thinking much about it for decades already, like signing up to recurring license agreements, things along those lines, recurring revenue products in the kind of government sale infrastructure market, in the defense market. That idea of recurring software delivery and recurring software revenue is pretty novel still, especially for software enabled hardware and edge software.

How do customer missions impact your company culture?

Answer: One element that's been important to our business is, we have been operationally supporting customers in in real world applications almost since our founding day. We were shipping product just a few months after we started the company. And we continue to have full rate operations going that are real, relevant users, real relevant missions.

That's something that our team just loves. That's something that we all can fall back to; we do have big aspirations about additional markets and additional products. But, you know, on any given day, the products that we've made that we've made here, and we can be pretty specific about that, you know, the wire connections that any given employee, we can point to and say, hey the work you did there, the software that you wrote and tested there, that flight test you completed, that product is now in this user's hands, doing real work, adding real value to the world.

I think our team loves that and rallies around that. So, I certainly embrace that as part of our startup journey.

Yes, I would love to just work on the future. But being out there and relevant today is how we learn what really works versus what sounds like is going to work in PowerPoint, but but doesn't actually meet the need.

So we're able to learn about that. We're able to collect great data. And that builds and reinforces the team culture.

How do political changes impact your approach to the market?

Answer: I think intelligence is always valuable.

The more we know, that provides decision makers with options. So I'm excited regardless of who those decision makers are and ultimately what some of those response decisions are. We are in a good spot because we are informing those decision makers earlier, faster, more efficiently, more safely with the information they need to make good decisions.

I value that intelligence, that awareness. I value that expertise. And so those are kind of my wishes for public policy and for our elected officials. I think the way I can best contribute to that and what we talk about here as a team, the way we can all best contribute to that is, by doing a great job of providing great information in a timely way so that people can make the best decisions with the best information.

We certainly would love to see less conflict in the world and less disasters in the world. But also, you know, those, those, conflicts and disasters do seem to be increasing. I feel like we're we're making an impact with our work by supporting better response to those things.