Ouster - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Executive Summary

• Record Q3 revenue of $39.53M (+41% YoY; +13% QoQ) on record shipments of 7,200+ sensors; GAAP gross margin 42% (down 300 bps QoQ on mix/tariffs) and adjusted EBITDA loss of ~$9.72M (sequentially weaker due to a prior-quarter employment tax refund).
• Smart Infrastructure led revenue with robotics and industrial roughly equal; momentum driven by yard logistics (Gemini), Blue City wins in Utah, and large deployments at warehouse/retail customers; cash and investments rose to $247M, no debt.
• Q4 revenue guidance introduced at $39.5–$42.5M, implying flat-to-modest sequential growth off a strong Q3 base; long-term GAAP gross margin framework of 35–40% reiterated.
• Strategic narrative: accelerating “software-attached” solutions (Gemini, Blue City), expanding distribution (majority of 300k U.S. signalized intersections now covered), ongoing investment in next-gen L4 and Kronos silicon expected to more than double TAM over time.
• Street estimates: S&P Global consensus data for Q3 and Q4 was unavailable via our tool at the time of analysis; we therefore do not present beat/miss vs consensus for EPS/revenue this quarter (see Estimates Context).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Record shipments (7,200+) and 11th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with smart infrastructure as largest vertical; strong balance sheet at $247M cash/investments and no debt.
  • Software-attached traction: expanding Gemini pilots and Blue City wins; seven new exclusive Blue City partnerships expanded coverage to a majority of U.S. signalized intersections (~300k TAM).
  • Large enterprise and vertical proof points (e.g., major retail analytics rollout; Serve Robotics acceleration to 1,000 deployed robots, targeting 2,000 by year-end), underscoring pilot-to-production conversion.

• What Went Wrong

  • Gross margin compressed QoQ (42% vs 45% in Q2) amid mix and tariff headwinds; management maintains 35–40% long-term target.
  • Adjusted EBITDA loss widened sequentially (~$9.72M loss vs ~$5.50M in Q2) primarily due to the prior-quarter tax refund tailwind; operating expenses rose 7% YoY on R&D investment.
  • Limited quantitative segment detail and continued losses (GAAP net loss ~$21.73M; EPS $(0.37)), which may constrain near-term profitability optics despite strong top-line momentum.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hello and welcome to Ouster's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation and remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. The call today is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Ouster Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. And with that, I'd now like to turn the conference over to Chen Geng, Senior Vice President of Strategic Finance and Treasurer. Chen, please go ahead.

Chen Geng (SVP of Strategic Finance and Treasurer)

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Call. Today on the call, we have Chief Executive Officer Angus Pacala and Chief Financial Officer Ken Gianella. As a reminder, after the market closed today, Ouster issued its financial news release, which was also furnished on a Form 8-K and is posted in the Investor Relations section of the Ouster website. Today's conference call will be available for webcast replay in the Investor Relations section of our website. I want to remind everyone that on this call, we will make certain forward-looking statements. These include all statements about our competitive position, anticipated industry trends, our business and strategic priorities, the development and expansion of our products, and our revenue guidance for the fourth quarter of 2025. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements.

Factors that could cause actual results and trends to differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward-looking statements are set forth in the Third Quarter 2025 financial results release and in the quarterly and annual reports we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and, other than as may be required by law, Ouster assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements which speak only as of their respective dates. In today's conference call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures discussed today is included in the financial results release that was issued today. I would now like to turn the call over to Angus.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll start with a brief recap of the quarter and review our strategic priorities. Ken will cover our financial results in more detail before I close with some final thoughts. Our third quarter results reflect the continued growth we are seeing across our business with revenue of $39.5 million, representing our 11th straight quarter of revenue growth. We set a new quarterly record with over 7,200 sensors shipped, bringing physical AI to life across multiple applications, including yard logistics and traffic intersections. Gross margin remains strong at 42%, and we ended the third quarter with $247 million cash and equivalents and no debt. This performance further demonstrates our ability to convert pilot programs into large volume orders as we deepen our relationships across our diverse customer base.

In our smart infrastructure vertical, we expanded deployments of Ouster Gemini and REV7 at logistics yards around the country, helping our customer improve throughput, efficiency, and safety. We continued to progress with testing new Gemini AI algorithms at key customer sites during the quarter, with the potential to expand use cases and more than quadruple the number of sensors per logistics yard. We also won new deals to bring Ouster Blue City to additional intersections across Utah to enhance traffic flow, safety, and operational efficiency. In our industrial vertical, we shipped a significant number of REV7 sensors to a leading global technology company as it continued to expand the use of autonomous mobile robots across its warehouse floors.

Ouster's sensors are mounted on a variety of warehouse equipment, including AMRs, forklifts, and tuggers, enabling our customers to detect and avoid nearby objects and helping heavy machinery to work safely in unstructured environments. We also secured a substantial order to supply REV7 to a large European industrial equipment manufacturer, which is upgrading the sensor stack on its next generation electric mining trucks. These trucks are part of an autonomous haul solution that increases safety, productivity, and efficiency while producing zero greenhouse gas emissions during operation. During the quarter, we delivered REV7 sensors to support the continued expansion of Serve Robotics' last-mile delivery fleet across the United States. Last month, Serve announced its 1,000th robot deployment, compared to an average of 57 active daily robots in the fourth quarter of last year, and expects to reach 2,000 robots in service by the end of this year.

Serve is a prime example of Ouster's engagement with companies that are rapidly accelerating from initial testing to commercial deployment. Turning to our 2025 strategic priorities, we progressed across all three key focus areas: one, scaling the software-attached business, two, transforming the product portfolio, and three, executing towards profitability. Our software-attached business gained traction during the quarter. Yard logistics was a key driver of demand, and we also won a deal to deploy Gemini for crowd management solutions at major tourist sites and large events in South Korea. More customers are recognizing the benefits of our LiDAR solutions, and we won pilot deployments for intelligent perimeter security, spanning energy and industrial sites, tarmacs, data centers, and defense facilities across the world. In September, we announced a strategic partnership with Constellus, which now offers a unified security solution enabled by Ouster Gemini and Ouster Digital Flash.

By investing in AI perception, Ouster has built a core platform to enable our customers to develop targeted, market-specific applications. With Gemini, Constellus can provide real-time analytics, threat classification, and automated response protocols to bring physical AI to advanced security operations. Constellus's operational expertise and global network positions us to rapidly advance Gemini for critical and large-scale security operations. In the ITS market, I'm excited by the continued growth of our Ouster Blue City solution, where we won large deals in the U.S. and Canada. We continue to expand our distribution network and signed seven new exclusive partnerships to bring Blue City to additional states, including Illinois and Missouri. We are proving the value of AI-powered LiDAR to state and local governments across the nation, and our Blue City partnership network now covers the majority of a nationwide market of over 300,000 signalized intersections.

We also brought on a transportation integrator in Europe, following a successful pilot deployment in Brussels. These partnerships, in conjunction with expanding our Blue City bundles to provide customers with more setup options, are key actions to support the continued growth of our software solutions. Moving to the product portfolio, we continue to make major investments in retraining our AI algorithms on an ever-expanding corpus of field data. In the third quarter, these efforts delivered better detection accuracy at longer ranges and higher vehicle speeds to support use cases like tolling and highway monitoring. We also released real-time localization, or RTLS, in our Ouster SDK. RTLS empowers our customers to understand the position of their assets with centimeter-level accuracy, enabling features like geofencing, automatic speed limit enforcement, and custom go-no-go zones. In addition, LiDAR-powered RTLS significantly reduces the investment and infrastructure required by legacy sensors.

Our team continued to progress with testing and validation of our next-generation L4 and Kronos custom silicon. These investments will unlock major performance, security, and reliability improvements for our OS sensors and become the backbone of our solid-state digital flash line. The innovations from this next phase of our product roadmap are expected to more than double our current addressable market and are the most profound investment in our product roadmap to date. Finally, I am proud of our team's consistent execution towards profitability as we deliver record results in the third quarter, as we remain on track to meet our long-term financial framework. I'll now turn it over to Ken to cover our financial results in more detail.

Ken Gianella (CFO)

Thank you, Angus, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to open my comments by noting that since joining the company in May, I have witnessed firsthand the incredible dedication and laser focus on execution towards our 2025 company goals that Angus discussed, and I'm excited about the opportunities in front of us. Now, turning to third quarter financial performance, as Angus noted, our results reflect the underlying strength in our business. Revenue of $39.5 million was a record, representing growth of 41% year-over-year and 13% sequentially. We delivered more than 7,200 sensors, which also represented an all-time high. As a reminder, we do expect a level of fluctuation of volumes on a quarterly basis, as it is largely dependent on meeting our customer delivery and timing needs. Smart infrastructure was the largest contributor to the third quarter revenue, followed by roughly equal contributions from our robotics and industrial verticals.

GAAP gross margin of 42% increased by four points compared with the third quarter last year and reflects the benefits of steadily increasing revenues and product mix offset by continuing tariff headwinds. While our gross margin performance has been strong this year, we maintain that 35%-40% is an appropriate long-term annual gross margin target for the business. Next, GAAP operating expenses were $41 million in the third quarter, up 7% over the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by investments in R&D to support the new product development cycle. As I mentioned last quarter, we remain focused on managing our operating expenses but anticipate there will be variability on a quarterly basis, largely due to the timing of investments in our innovation and go-to-market expansion. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $10 million, flat year-over-year, and a decline of $4 million sequentially.

The sequential decline is primarily due to a favorable employment tax refund we received in the prior quarter. We are pleased with our ability to drive growth and have the operational capacity to meet our customers' needs. Creating strategic and operational flexibility for the company to innovate and grow as we continue to execute towards profitability remains a top priority. Our balance sheet is one of the strongest in the industry, which is important for our customers as they depend not only on the long-term support of our products but also our long-term financial security as a key supplier. We ended the quarter in a stronger position with cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments of $247 million. This includes approximately $35 million of net proceeds from our ATM. At September 30th, we had approximately $4 million of authorization remaining on our ATM.

Moving to guidance, for the fourth quarter, we expect to achieve revenue between $39.5 million and $42.5 million. Thank you for your continued interest in Ouster, and I'll turn the call back to Angus for his closing remarks.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Thanks, Ken. Ouster has a strong financial foundation, a robust distribution and partner network, and a diverse customer base of emerging and world-class companies. Ouster is at the forefront of technology that is reshaping how the world engages with the physical environment. Our physical AI solutions are helping deliver improvements in safety and efficiency across a wide range of industries. All of this, coupled with our cutting-edge product roadmap, positions us well to further accelerate the adoption of physical AI. With that, I'd like to now open up the call for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thanks, Angus. And at this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit your questions to one primary and one follow-up. And if you have additional questions, you can rejoin the queue. Thanks in advance. And we will pause just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. All right. Our first question today comes from the line of Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer. Colin, please go ahead.

Colin Rusch (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks so much, guys. You know, can you talk about, where you're at in the testing process with the REV8 and the Kronos offerings? You know, we'd love to get a sense of kind of how that testing is going, any sort of concerns or, you know, kind of accelerations that you're thinking about with the platform given the potential growth and addressable market here?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Hi, Colin. Thanks for the question. So, we, we really try not to talk ahead of the release of our next-generation products other than to make sure that it's clear that we remain incredibly committed to the investments we're making in the digital LiDAR portfolio. So our L4 chip, the Kronos going into the DF platform, these are things we talk about each and every, every earnings call because they're still the, the biggest source of investment that we have at Ouster and because of all the promise, the importance of, of these products to the future expansion of, of Ouster's business. So, you know, the, the, the points that we've made in the past and we continue to make on this earnings call, a doubling of the overall TAM, the most significant set of products, hardware products in Ouster's roadmap, in, in Ouster's history, all remain true.

We're incredibly committed and focused to getting these products out as soon as humanly possible. But, beyond that, gonna just leave it at that.

Colin Rusch (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Fair enough. And then, you know, as you worked through the design cycle with your customers, and we know that there's an awful lot of customers that you guys are working with. There's a lot of innovation happening in industrial hardware design. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the cadence of those programs moving forward? We know that you have a number of wins, and moving from kind of smaller volumes into more serious production, particularly with some of the off-road vehicles, but what you're seeing in terms of, you know, just the cadence of design cycles, you know, the adoption rates, you know, any sort of win rate data that you can share, we'd love to get a sense of how that's evolving here.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. I mean, so we have over 1,000 end customers. And one of the points that we've made and one of the, the kind of bright spots about Ouster's promise of the future is that the, the there's a small minority of all of the high-quality customers that we have that have actually reached full-scale production and commercial release of their products that, that are, you know, built with an Ouster LiDAR inside. So, and so that means there's immense opportunity in our existing latent customer base for tranches of these customers to go from development, all the way to commercial release.

And, you know, we mentioned on the call Serve Robotics, great example of a customer, that shows how the volumes shift from a kind of development, small-scale pilot-style production where, you know, they had 57 robots deployed with our technology if you look back, a year or so ago. Now they're on track to have 2,000 robots deployed with our technology, in the next couple of months. So that kind of fundamental order of magnitude shift is a big part of our growth strategy for the foreseeable future. And, and, a small fraction of our overall customer mix, under 10%, is actually in that full-scale production.

So, and, but, but one of Ouster's core kind of muscles that we've built on the commercial side is our ability to support our customers developing these challenging new technologies and close gaps that maybe we have better expertise closing than our customers do, either on the hardware or the software that processes our LiDAR technology so that we're getting customers to market faster, and they're seeing that we're a valued, you know, partner in that process versus just a hardware supplier. So, I think there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of kind of goodwill and deep partnerships that we've built along the way. And, and we're continuing to do that. It's, it's something that, our customers value at this point.

Colin Rusch (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks so much, guys.

Operator (participant)

Thanks, Colin. And our next question comes from the line of Andres Sheppard with Cantor Fitzgerald. Anandan, please go ahead.

Hi. This is Anandan for Andres. Congrats on the quarter, and thanks for taking our questions. You know, with the rapid acceleration of self-driving vehicles, you know, both passenger and commercial vehicles, do you guys expect to pursue this vertical a little bit more aggressively going forward? I know it wasn't as much of a focus this quarter. But, are you looking for any major OEM agreements, and what would be an ideal candidate? 'Cause it seems like most companies, with the exception of Tesla, are really reliant on LiDAR for this. Thank you.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. Thanks for the question, Anandan. So, I mean, it's first, it's great to see the renewed kind of resurgence and interest around self-driving vehicles. A lot of this is because of the advancements that Waymo has made in really providing a commercial service to customers out here on the West Coast and in Texas and Arizona, and then also some of the advancements from Tesla. So, it's great to see this. You know, Ouster already has some really strong partners in this area. If we're talking about robotaxi specifically, Motional and May Mobility both are strong Ouster partners. We've seen a lot of great partnerships that May Mobility has been inking with to build their customer base and actually expand their commercial robotaxi deployments. So, you know, Ouster already has some of these great customer relationships.

When it comes to the OEMs and kind of direct OEM integration of this technology into a car you and I can buy, that's where I've tempered expectations in the past. Just, you know, basically because of the long-time horizon for OEMs directly integrating self-driving technology into the cars that you and I can buy. That's largely because of, you know, technology difficulties on the OEM side versus, like, the readiness of compute and sensor technologies that Ouster is responsible for. So, but on that latter point, we're absolutely interested in this space. What I've always said is it's important to have the right products with the right at the right point in time for that adoption to happen. I think a lot of things are converging.

We have put a lot of investment into DF and into future products on that internally at Ouster so that, again, we have the right product at the right time for this massive opportunity in direct OEM integration. So definitely interesting to us in the future, something I've tempered in the past, but, you know, I think the stars are aligning in the next couple of years here.

Gotcha. Thanks, Angus. That's, that's helpful. Just, switching gears a little bit, I guess for the past few months, the elephant in the room has been the Blue UAS certification. So I was wondering, you know, what are maybe some of the most recent updates related to that, and if you could potentially give us any granularity on sensor shipments? Or if not, do you continue to believe that you have a moat in this segment, or are you seeing more competitors pursuing this now?

Yeah. Specifically asking so, for those listening on the call, the Blue UAS certification was really a certification for using Ouster's LiDARs on defense, DOD use cases and payloads, specifically for drones. So the common use case here is or the traditional use case for LiDAR on drones is a surveying payload, surveying and surveillance payload. Ouster is a robust business as a surveying payload on drones already, and the UAS announcement made us the first DOD Blue UAS certified company in the mix. And it's definitely, you know, a boost for our business. We're not splitting out specific sensor volumes, but we do see inbounds from customers that are interested in making sure they're operating certified payloads.

And whether or not, you know, sometimes it's because the end customer is a DOD customer, and sometimes the end customer isn't but values the fact that we're using a certified American-made technology. So definitely a bunch of benefits there. I think we do have a moat. We're the first, we're certainly the first mover in this space. And we have a great set of products that apply really well, you know, small form factor, super high resolution, robust LiDARs that don't weigh a lot. And all those things make sense if you wanna put these on a small form factor drone like the Blue UAS certification is positioned for. So, yeah, not splitting out any specific numbers, but definitely a benefit to our business.

Operator (participant)

All right. Thanks for the question, Anandan. And just a reminder, folks, if you'd like to ask a question, again, star one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. And our next question comes from the line of Madison DiPaola with Rosenblatt Securities. Madison, please go ahead.

Madison DiPaola (Equity Research Associate)

Hi. This is Madison calling on behalf of Kevin Cassidy. I was just wondering, with so many customers moving from prototype to production, what steps are you taking to mitigate potential supply chain constraints that could impact growth? And just as a follow-up, what's the long-term target for Blue City attach rate?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Well, let me start with the latter first. Thank you, Madison. The bigger thing is, we're not breaking that out and giving the long-term target. It is part of our overall robotics and industrial outlook that we have already. So, you know, if you just stick with those growth rates that we talk about, that's the majority of what would be covered there. You know, turning to your first part about capacity, one of the things we've done very well and if you look at the growth, just these last two quarters, we set two record quarters of shipments, you know, pretty much quarter over quarter, our sensors grew. Year-over-year for this quarter alone was 85%, and quarter-over-quarter from last quarter to this quarter is a 31% growth. So having that capacity is very important to us as we continue our growth journey.

So part of the capital investments we make aren't just strategic. It's also financial flexibility. What's important for us is meeting our customers' scheduled demands 'cause, you know, while we pride ourselves on the continued growth, our customers are growing just as fast, and so we have to have the capacity to deliver their needs so they can meet their customers' needs. So we'll always be investing in capacity to ensure that we can meet the customer demands.

Madison DiPaola (Equity Research Associate)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

All right. Thank you, Madison. And our next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Richard, please go ahead.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Hi, guys. This is Tyler Anderson on for Richard. Thank you for taking my questions. So Amazon has been talking about adding a lot of robots in the future, and including the humanoid robots. Do you think there's gonna be a benefit to you from this? I have seen some pictures of robots that look similar to yours, and how would this show up in bookings when that starts moving forward? Is this something that takes a long time that needs to be built out? Just any way to think about that would be helpful. Thank you.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. It's a good question, Tyler, 'cause this is a fast-evolving space. I'm amazed how many humanoid robotics companies have, have been announced in the last year. Overall, definitely a great thing for us. Humanoids need sensing technology like any other robot, and LiDAR is the best possible sensor you could put in the mix, and we already have some customers that are using our LiDARs in their humanoid robotics platform. So, definitely good news there. You would see the way that's gonna impact our business is it would boost our robotics vertical, right? That's, that's, where this would fall into the financials or the financial performance of the company. I'd say it's still early days. Like, there aren't thousands of humanoid robotics, humanoid robots that are deployed at end customer sites right now.

It's a prototyping environment, so I don't expect it to be a big impact, positive impact on Ouster's business, you know, for the next year or so, foreseeable future, but this is all about laying the groundwork for a future tranche of customers to, you know, to reach commercial deployment just like what we've seen, with some of our other verticals, happening, all the time, so we love investing in, in new customer sets. I think the humanoid thing is interesting, but I think it's gonna take a couple of years to play out.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Great. Thank you. And then you mentioned something about a majority of intersections, about 3,000 in the U.S. Is this the total addressable market that you're speaking to, or is this something that you already have plans and that's, that's moving forward with business in hand? Just wanna get a look at that. And then also, is there any way that you could categorize the attach rate for your traffic business?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, so what I said was that we had signed exclusive partnerships, distribution partnerships that covered regions, for the majority of signalized intersections in North America. There are about 300,000 signalized intersections in North America. That's the total addressable market. But I think it's a market that we can largely go after aggressively today. Blue City is a best-in-class intersection, you know, intelligent intersection product. It can cover a wide swath of the use cases today. We haven't quantified exactly how many of those 300,000 intersections exactly that Blue City can go and capture, but it's a significant, significant fraction. And a major impediment to going and addressing that market is just having regional partners that we can sell through that can support the end customers, not just in installing the technology upfront, but also supporting them for the long term.

You know, it's important that a municipality has support on their traffic infrastructure for, you know, for, for, for many years to come. So we have a lot of inertia there. We announced seven new exclusive partnerships. And so overall, we have partnerships that cover the majority of the North American market. When we're talking about attach rates, you know, it, Blue City is by default a software-attached product. You cannot just buy sensors, and you cannot just buy software. You have to buy the whole complete solution that goes turnkey onto your intersection. So every Blue City sale has an attach rate of 100% for LiDARs, has an attach rate of 100% for a software component. So it's more what we're seeing is, you know, that we're growing pretty fast in this market. Smart infrastructure was our biggest vertical this quarter.

And so my goal is instead of looking at attach rates per se for Blue City, it's looking at the growth rate for Blue City versus the rest of our business. I think there's some early signs that there's some really positive, you know, fast growth happening there.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Awesome. Thank you. I'm gonna hop back in the queue.

Operator (participant)

All right. Thank you, Tyler. And again, ladies and gentlemen, last call for questions. Star one on your telephone keypad if you'd like to ask a question. Once again, star one. All right. Our next question comes from the line of Casey Ryan with WestPark Capital. Casey, please go ahead.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Good evening, everybody. Great quarter. We've talked a little bit about defense. I just wanted to get your perspective on that as a vertical 'cause I think there's a lot of focus on drones. But a-a-as a company, do you do you guys define it as maybe being, service-wide, meaning potentially all vehicles could, could sort of use automation? And, as part of that, w-w do you see sort of a retrofit opportunity as being potentially significant in addition to new, you know, weapons platforms and vehicle platforms?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Thanks, Casey. It's a thoughtful question, so the defense market is incredibly diverse. I think that's the first thing to acknowledge, and there's legacy vehicles already deployed, in the DOD. There are traditional defense contractors, and then there's this new tranche of kind of faster-moving, startups in the space. Ouster is really focused, I would say, on the non-retrofit opportunities, working with traditional defense, industry or the new players.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Mm-hmm.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah, I think that the, the retrofit opportunity may be not something that we're tracking. But overall, like, there's a big opportunity here, but with, I would say, a unclear timeline to the scale where this is deployed universally on these vehicle platforms.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Mm-hmm.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

I do think that that's where it goes. Automation is good in this, no matter what in this industry.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Mm-hmm.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

but it's gonna take quite a while, I think, to field this technology in a big way. But there's some promising first, you know, places where this is useful, even today. So Blue UAS, surveying platforms, great example. It's not automation. It's surveying. That use case ready today, being widely deployed and used, great for Ouster's business. Automated systems operating in the field in life-or-death situations. There's a very high bar for fielding that. And I think it's gonna be a couple of years before that's a major impact on Ouster's business. But Ouster is as well-positioned for this industry as anyone in the world.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Okay. Terrific. That's a very thoughtful and helpful answer. Very quickly, there's the potential for DJI to be blocked, I guess, for U.S. shipments. Could you see that having an impact here, you know, commercial opportunities? 'Cause I think, you know, DJI obviously dominates market share in the U.S. for people who are using commercial drones for businesses and things like that. But I wonder if we should associate a sort of a blocking as being positive somehow for Ouster in terms of serving domestic manufacturers.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. I think the, maybe there could be a positive impact on just the general awareness on, you know, on w-where customers are sourcing critical technology in their supply chain. So, you know, the scrutiny of DJI, it's, it's an adjacent market to us.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Mm-hmm.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

But I think more would be around the general kind of, perspective on strategic supply chains and knowing who you're buying from. And maybe there's some bleed over that benefits our business. So net, net little bit of benefit for Ouster.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Okay. Well, good. I don't wanna overstate that. Thank you. That, that's very helpful. I'll jump back in the queue as well.

Operator (participant)

All right. Thanks, Casey. And our next question comes from the line of Tim Savageau with Northland Capital Markets. Tim, please go ahead.

Tim Savageau (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks very much. And congrats on the results. I might have dropped off there for a second, so sorry about that. My first question is, you called out, Serve Robotics as a kind of an example of, of the deployment of technology and volume. I wonder, you know, we've, we've seen some work. It's y-you obviously just did a deal with DoorDash for Los Angeles. There's some estimates that DoorDash, you know, LA by itself could take 10,000 robots. You know, as, as you look at the scale of this opportunity, is, is, is that something that's, you know, significant in terms of potential growth drivers, whether it's last-mile delivery in general or, or Serve in particular that, that you're focused on?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. You know, I, Serve Robotics is I think they're having their Waymo moment, right? It's been many years of wondering, is this market, is last-mile delivery viable? As a business, is it ready technologically for the prime time? And they've stuck to their game plan of making the technology and the commercial strategy work. And here we are with them now moving to orders of magnitude greater deployments. So kudos to them. I think that they're, you know, that's, that's the best evidence that this is a real market, with that. Well, not just a real market with real demand, but that it's a viable market now. So I, it's easy to be skeptical and pessimistic and people were of Waymo, and then they kind of scaled by orders of magnitude and now everyone's a true believer.

I think that's what's happening with Serve, and I'm happy for it, both because they're a customer and because it also is, like, a harbinger of good things to come in the rest of the last-mile delivery market.

Ken Gianella (CFO)

I think I just wanna add on there too, Tim. It's a great proof point for our strategy of go-to-market, right? You know, we across multiple verticals. It's just not a one vertical play. And Serve is just one of our thousands of customers who were in these early stages who scaled to success with their business plan and prevailed and gave us the opportunity to grow with them. So, you know, not just betting on one sector in riding that, but having the foresight to go across multiple sectors and really work with these companies through their success, it's paying off for us now.

Tim Savageau (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. And that's a good segue to my follow-up, which is, I guess, I think you mentioned sub-10% of your customer base having scaled into full production. And I don't know how far sub-10%, but, you know, I guess if we look a little bit forward, I don't know whether it's a year or two and that number's, you know, 25% or 50%. What are the implications there for your overall revenue opportunity? And that's it for me.

Ken Gianella (CFO)

Yeah. I mean, I'm pointing straight to our model of the 30%-50% growth, right? When you look at how we're progressing with that and, you know, with that going into production, I mean, we've had some good tailwinds with margin lately, but I think that would keep our margins in that 35%-40% on a GAAP basis we looked at. But, we fully are looking at that ramp-up. That's where you can get towards the higher end of that 30%-50% range.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. And I, I would say this is exactly the sub-10% in production is why we talk about Ouster's being in the early innings. Or I think last quarter we said we're still in the dugout. We're not even playing the game yet. So there's a long way to go and a lot of growth for Ouster to grow into our TAM numbers. We've put out TAM numbers.

I think those are real in the long term, and it just speaks to the confidence we have in hitting our 30%-50% revenue growth, for the foreseeable future.

Casey Ryan (Director of Institutional Research)

Great. Thanks very much.

Operator (participant)

All right. Thanks, Tim. And I believe we have Tyler from Craig-Hallum with a follow-up question. Tyler, please go ahead.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Hi, guys. Just a quick one. So thinking about your software business, are you or are customers able to use other sensors with your software? And essentially, could you be just overlaid in different use cases with your software for what people have already purchased?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

So, short answer, no. You cannot use a different sensor with our software. And that's why it's a software-attached business. We really always focus on, the fact that we're selling systems. Blue City and Gemini combine our sensors with our software and, in most cases, our compute as well. So software-attached business. There are cases, though, where you can buy that we have some customers, distributors that used to buy, used to sell, just Ouster LiDARs, and now they're selling, Gemini on top of those LiDARs, maybe after the fact, to a certain set of customers. Maybe a customer thinks that they can write their own software for our sensors and realizes that, you know, after, trying for a little while, that Ouster has something more mature and they can sidestep a bunch of difficult technical issues by purchasing the Gemini software themselves. So we do have some cases there.

But, but again, the, the end result is that the customer is running a software-attached product, a solutions product from Ouster.

Ken Gianella (CFO)

Yeah. And Tyler, I think the goal here for us is that software attach rate is buying the full system and, you know, perception and sensing, fusion from us. The goal is that you would use an Ouster product set for your sensor and perception. And then once that software is integrated into your software stack, they can grow with us for generations because our, we write this so it's forward and backward compatible on the hardware elements that we sell. So regardless of the generation we're on, it gives us the flexibility. The other thing I would just add to that is if you start thinking about into the future having that software attach rate, that makes us extremely sticky to our customer bases.

So, you know, once you get in there, you wanna provide not just quality service and quality products, but if you can provide a whole system and a platform that they can grow, you know, generation over generation, that's the ultimate goal of this, of this play.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Awesome. And just one more for me. So just thinking about the software and the model training, this is all traditional machine learning, correct? And is there any way or are there any customers that are, they're pushing for some kind of LLM or, or visual model capability that, that isn't traditional machine learning?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

I don't know if we've ever used the term traditional machine learning. I would definitely say that for this type of LiDAR perception, we are using cutting-edge models, but they're not text models, so LLM is almost a misnomer, you know, for this industry, but we are using cutting-edge deep learning models in our products trained on giant corpora of, you know, annotated data that we've collected from the field, so true kind of cutting-edge fleet learning, true cutting-edge deep learning models used best in class in the perception space for LiDAR, so yeah. I think that there are ways we could augment our products with things like LLMs, or maybe that the perception space will transition to transformers and LLMs, but the cutting edge is actually what we're using, and that's deep learning.

Tyler Anderson (Associate Analyst)

Got it. Thank you. And I, I meant traditional as in, in non-transformer models. Coming from a data background, I was just trying to differentiate from that. But thank you. I appreciate it.

Angus Pacala (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Operator (participant)

All right. Great. Thank you, Tyler. And with that, I would now like to say that Q&A is concluded. So I will hand it back to Angus for closing remarks. Angus?

Angus Pacala (CEO)

All right. Well, with that little discussion on LLMs, thank you all for joining the call, and have a great rest of your day. Cheers.

Operator (participant)

Again, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.