John Serafini, HawkEye 360 | theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Defense Tech

Palo Alto Studio Connection Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Fost here with Dave Volante, my co-host. I'm John Furrier with the Cube. Here at the Cub's NYC studio, of course, we have our Peloto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And this is our defense tech series. We talked to the leaders who are making it happen to help our war fighters, our commanders make the right decisions, protect our society. John Saraphini is here, founder and CEO of Hawkeye 360 cube alumni, now a public company at the here at the NYC. Welcome back. Last year you were a private company, this year a public company. Great to see you. How do you feel? You got some gray hairs there. You went public in May. >> It was a a bit of a process, that's for sure, over the past year to get the company public. Uh the IPO was back in May and we're delighted to be a public company today. >> Well, congratulations. I was on the balcony watching the bell ringing. But in our conversation last year, we really kind of started to unpack, you know, the opportunity with platforms and just in general the kind of solutions that will be needed in this next generation of of defense, warfare, fighting, intelligence. The game has shifted. Now it's a whole demand curve. You're seeing defense tech booming as a market. There's some spillover in the commercial side. We're seeing a lot of private public relationships. I think we talked about some of that. What's been the biggest thing that's changed since our last conversation besides your IPO? >> Well, uh certainly we're in the golden age of defense technology. Uh the political conditions are very hospitable towards the use of commercial technologies. there's a an understanding and appreciation that commercial technologies from quote unquote Silicon Valley can bring new capabilities, be it hardware or software or solutions at much faster speed and at increasingly better price points uh to provide meaningful value to the war fighter on the ground in difficult environments. We represent an extension of that defense technology commercialization trend. uh and we dominate in the electromagnetic spectrum regime where we're collecting RF data and converting that into actionable signals intelligence for our customers. >> Yeah, I love how you kind of bring in this collective intelligence paradigm to signaling. Love that topic and it's it's you know it's very nuance in that world but now if you look at AI that's all about signaling data uh is being disagregated, dissembled, understood, reasoned against it fits the the mold. Explain how your RF platform is working these days. what's new about it? Um, and why is it becoming a critical point for defense? >> Now, the important thing to keep in mind when you when you contemplate my business model is that we're three distinct components. Uh, and the AI piece of that is just one of the three. That's the towards the end of the value chain where we convert our data into actionable intelligence. But it starts with our ability to collect our own proprietary and unique data sets. We have 30 plus satellites in space. They're flying uniquely in clusters of three in order to perform geoloccation of signals. Generally, any signal above a watt in power between 30 MHz and 18 GHz, we're able to detect from space and be able to geoloccate and analyze. That's block one. Block two is all the work in being able to process that enormous amount of RF data generally down to under a kilometer for the majority of signals. And then block three is being able to connect that into actionable intelligence by leveraging AI and data science uh to be able to do unique things with our data and provide real product value to to to the end user the war fighter. >> You know we're seeing a lot of examples where you have connectivity in some areas uh in in on the battlefield. Some are dark, dirty, congested. Explain some of these dynamics and why you know signaling and having a a platform could connect to that. Well, it's an important criteria being a defense technology company is you intuitively understand that your capabilities have to work where the war fighter is and the war fighter operates in difficult environments, environments where often times there aren't connectivity. Uh often times there's adversity in present with uh with an adversary. Uh which means that your technologies have to be battleproven. They have to be bulletproof. They have to work the first time and every time. They have to be proverbally camouflaged to ensure that they can meet the requirements of a war fighter who again they're operating under difficult environments and difficult circumstances. And your technology can't work 50% of the time. It's got to be 100% bulletproof. And the data is always has to be trustworthy. Always has to be the highest level of data integrity uh for the kind of capabilities that are being delivered to that war fighter customer. >> The question that comes up is the why, right? Give us the why. you need to exist department of war uh other areas they need the technology what capabilities and gaps does it fill what's the enablement talk about that ecosystem the broader ecosystem where it fits >> sure so we presented ourselves as a commercial augmentation to the US government and our our US uh customers uh both defense and intelligence and national security where uh we're augmenting the national systems and we're providing tasking depth to those missions. But importantly, our system is an unclassified and fully sharable set of data that can be provided to coalition partners. So that's the value proposition on the US government side. On the international side, which is roughly 50% of our business, you know, we're very focused in delivering solutions to international customers, many of whom have never had access to their own uh signals intelligence capabilities, their sensors or real processing functionality. So for those customers, we can provide the full value chain where we're collecting the data, we're doing the processing with them and then the data analytics and providing actual intelligence products for their defense and uh intelligence customers. >> You mentioned the proprietary nature of the signaling. Can you explain that again? I'd like to come back. I know you explained on the first videos. I think it's kind of strategic and important as an asset. Explain how the system works. You're in space. What's what's going on? >> Sure. So part of our value proposition is this unique data set that really has never existed outside of the the classified realm. What we do is we own and operate a constellation of satellites 30 plus that that fly and operate in clusters of three. So you have a a system out in front, a system behind by about two or 300 km and a third satellite that oscillates back and forth. And that unique geometry allows us to geoloccate signals. Generally any signal above a watt in power between 30 meghertz and 18 gigahertz we're able to detect from space geoloccate uh process and analyze and convert into actionable intelligence for our customers. That's a very unique set of data that isn't available outside of Hawkeye 360. We have nearly 10 years worth of proprietary archive of billions of different RF data points that every day we're optimizing and mining against to create our processing algorithms and eventually our turnkey data analytics for the customer. >> Yeah. And it's a unique data mode for sure. You know in in defense you know there's always been conversation around the mechanism the electronics precisiong guided capabilities now see data. What's this new revolution about? How how do you guys see this capability um changing those mechanisms, those electronics? Is there is there is it a disruption? Is it a is it a changeover? Is an accelerant to something new? >> Is it hardware specific? As I mentioned earlier, this is a natural evolution of commercialization trend where the US government and allied customers are getting more comfortable with commercial capabilities being delivered at faster speed and lower price points. Uh for us, we started off in tactical intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance in places like the battlefield where we're able to detect, geoloccate, analyze, process, and then convert into intelligence products different signals of interest to the war fighter. be it maritime domain uh radar systems or pushto talk radios or GPS interference. And that's one block of our of our growth strategy. The second block is being able to expand into new applications and new missions. One of which we demonstrated at the Valiant Shield exercise a few weeks ago with our partners and investors at Loheed Martin where we were detecting certain uh radar systems uh from space and being able to download that information into weapon systems specifically the Aegis weapon system. That's a demonstration, a critical demonstration for us of Hawkeye capabilities being used in the long range fires application which we think is a meaningful unlock for new opportunity within the US government. And then second is uh not just doing work on on uh and being able to detect and geoloccate signals uh terrestrially but also being able to detect and geollocate and analyze signals in space. We have uh been able to announce a few awards recently, one with NASA, one with Noah, one with Space RCO in the past few months where we've illustrated our capabilities being used in a space domain awareness where we're identifying signals in space, tracking those signals and extracting intelligence about them as well. >> I love your your solution because one, it's technically cool and relevant. I just love the whole RF piece of it, but it's also integrating into the this new datacentric operational view, not just some bespoke platform. And you kind of change the equation from can I see the target to can I understand what it's doing, sensing, and it's more valuable than an imagery. So you can say, okay, I can look at a spot, what's going on. This is where it kind of it's not a mutually exclusive situation. Talk about this thinking. How does that shift? First of all, you agree I'm sure you agree with what I just said, but if you If [laughter] you do, what does this do to change to the human role? Because now I have more data. I I can see the target on a picture, but I don't really understand unless it's full motion video. But with RF, you could see what's going inside a on inside a bunker, what's what a ship's talking to, uh, coordinating communications before any military operations even deployed or, you know, so you're in formulation, you're in execution and it's kind of a big question, but help us understand this importance of this dynamic. >> Yeah. So our specialty is signals intelligence, RF. uh people like to categorize that similarly to electrooptical in synthetic aperture radar where you're taking images. Yeah. And the case may be that they two work complimentary to one another and in a tip and cube basis. But signals intelligence is a fundamentally different type of intelligence collection vehicle. We can do things that can't really be done with an imagery. When you take a picture, it's a picture is a picture. You can see what you can see. When we're overhead and we're collecting signals, there may be scores of different signals that we're able to detect over a specific area. It's a it's a layer that's un not seen by the the naked eye. And we're extracting all that intelligence and we're associating with different types of emitters and extracting intelligence about those emitters. Um even making estimations about what the humans who are operating those emitters may be doing or may do in the future. So to give you an example to help it make a bit clearer, think about the South China Sea. When our our sensors are overhead, generally every 35 or so minutes, we're collecting on different types of maritime domain awareness capabilities. It might be Xband radars or Sband navigational radars from vessels. It could be pushto talk radio systems. It could be Lband satellite phones or emergency beacons. Whatever it may be, we're overhead. We're identifying those specific signals. We're using them to create unique uh pictures of each individual vessel that we can identify and then we maintain chain of custody of that specific vessel into the future and extract intelligence about where that vessel has been and even forecast estimations of where that vessel will be in the future and what kind of activities it will be doing. So that's one domain, the maritime domain. As you can imagine, we do things similarly on the battlefield and the aerial environment. And as I mentioned to you earlier, we're now able to flip and and do similar capabilities in space. >> I love the multi-dommain aspect. Let's go there because this is where you're starting to see coordination of resources across domain. This I think AI can certainly intelligence will definitely help. You have your own intelligence layer. How do other platforms or your platform even expand on this notion? And how can someone become an intelligent node in your network? Because you got air, space, land, sea, cyber, and electromagnetic spectrum. I mean that is basically your entire domain. But you don't wake up and say we just do space. [laughter] You kind of do it all. >> Well, certainly we anticipate over time, John, to have uh multiple different sensor platforms, aerial, terrestrial, etc. Today, we specialize in space. Uh I think we're pretty good at that. Uh but what's also interesting as you mentioned is the war fighter today, whether that's an intelligence analyst or a war fighter on the battlefield, they have access to intelligence modalities and capabilities that are pretty rich. And where it gets really interesting is when they're able to tip and queue amongst the two of them and combine them to create multi-int fused capabilities. So for us, we can tip over to electrooptical or synthetic aperture radar satellite to say, hey, we identify anomalous RF activity in this specific area. Say it's a a dark vessel that we've tracked inside another country's EEZ that we think is performing some kind of elicit activity and we can say to whatever is the commercial EO or the commercial SARS satellite when you come overhead this specific lat long we want you to take an image and then we take that image we fuse it with the RF profile to have u a better intelligence estimate of what might be going on and then deliver that to the customer at rapid speeds. It is about rapid speed. You know today the intelligence value has to be measured in minutes. It can't be measured in hours. So developing low latency high revisit capabilities extremely important. >> Yeah. And I like that's I wanted to highlight the nuance because your asset in space translates into other domains. This doesn't have to be you guys dominating. You know what I'm saying? It's just if you can help me. I'm I'm in the I'm in another domain. And that's why I like this cross domain. Okay. air defense monitoring in generally just is does it get to a point where everyone's in the game? What's the advantage? How do you guys see that volume of RF data and machine learning behind it? What's the what's the strategy? How do you guys maintain the potential everyone trying to do this? >> Yeah. Well, I see it as as two mechanisms for our business plan thing. One is we want to dominate collection. We want to be very very good at collecting RF data uh from low earth orbit space all the way to the ground. And as I mentioned to you earlier, we're looking at different types of platforms for us to do that collection on. And then secondly, we want to dominate across the entire value chain of preparing that information to be to be utilized by the war fighter customer or other customers. And that includes being exceptionally good at the processing, knowing what the signal looks like, identifying, geoloccating that signal, and then the analysis to convert that into actionable intelligence using AI, machine learning, and other data science technologies. Those are the two things that we're very focused here on at Hawkeye. >> I love how you're turning the the the spectrum into a real-time asset for AI, too. Um, and you're using all that and fusing it together. You guys had a news release about your earnings coming up Thursday here at the NYSC. Um any color commentary on what to expect? >> Uh we're delighted for the opportunity to present our Q2 and stay tuned on Thursday. >> All right, John, thanks for coming on the cube on this defense tech. Appreciate your time. Busy day. You got to get into those meetings now. Appreciate you taking the time to share your insight. >> Thank you, John. Great to see you again. >> All right, I'm John Furry with the cube. We are here at the cubes NYC studio for the NYC Wired program and community. Thanks for watching.