SoundThinking - Q1 2024
May 14, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good afternoon, and welcome to SoundThinking's first quarter 2024 conference call. My name is Joe, and I will be your operator for today's call. Joining us are SoundThinking's CEO, Ralph Clark, and CFO, Alan Stewart. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today will include forward-looking statements about future events and SoundThinking's business strategy and future financial and operating performance.
These forward-looking statements are only predictions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict and may cause the actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by those statements. Certain of these risks and assumptions are discussed in SoundThinking's SEC filings, including its registration statement on Form S-1.
These forward-looking statements reflect management's beliefs, estimates, and predictions as of the date of this live broadcast, May 14, 2024, and SoundThinking undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available in the investor relations section of the company's website at ir.soundthinking.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to SoundThinking's CEO, Ralph Clark. Sir, please go ahead.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our Q1 2024 earnings conference call. Before I review the specifics of this quarter's results, I want to first share with you how very excited we are about the growth prospects for this year and our strong start to 2024. As we highlighted in SoundThinking's recent investor letter, our growth strategy can be summarized as a land, expand, cross-sell, and retain model. Our land opportunities or new customer acquisitions have greatly expanded beyond our historical acoustic gunshot detection business.
We're now going to market with five offerings that comprise our SafetySmart Platform, announced last year. As we land new customers on any specific solution on the platform, our goal is to maximize the value those customers experience. We believe this strategy drives retention, and if there's an identified need, it can also potentially lead to appropriate expansions and/or cross-sell opportunities. We believe we're early in the law enforcement and now commercial security digital transformation market, and that this opportunity remains extremely attractive and significantly under-penetrated.
We believe our go-to-market strength as a trusted advisor uniquely positions us to capitalize on this opportunity, as we're now able to offer relevant solutions that addresses the pressing needs of this large and growing market. Here's what we accomplished in Q1 of this year. Revenues were in line with our expectations of $25.4 million compared to Q1 2023 revenue of $20.6 million, representing over 23% year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA was $3 million or 12% of revenues, compared to $2.9 million or 14% of revenues for Q1 2023.
Our revenue attainment was primarily the result of our previously booked and deferred revenue, professional services revenue from our Technology Solutions business, combined with net new business from the platform. Net new business included go-live traction with 11 new ShotSpotter customers in the quarter, including one campus security deployment at University of Georgia. Four of the new public safety customers were in New Jersey, which is specifically budgeted for acoustic gunshot detection at the state level.
We also went live with a strategic deployment in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Housing Authority. This gives us an important strategic foothold in the city of Philadelphia with the possible future expansion opportunity in a major Tier One city. ShotSpotter also saw two expansions in Boston and Suffolk County. ResourceRouter went live in three new cities in the quarter, and we are seeing exceptional pipeline and bookings traction in new customer captures and cross-sell opportunities for ResourceRouter this year.
In addition, we added two new CrimeTracer data providers, growing our already exceptionally large data footprint. We continue to make progress on our New York City Department of Correction CaseBuilder implementation, which has led to several new corrections opportunities, including Orleans Parish, which has been booked and is expected to go live in the next 60 days, along with a CaseBuilder deployment within the California Department of Justice. Lastly, we landed four new SafePointe customers, consisting of a hospital, a gaming venue, and two schools.
Looking forward, we have 16 ShotSpotter go-live projects underway, representing 8 new customers and 8 expansions. We believe all these developments further validate the demand that we are seeing in the marketplace and the strong execution on our key growth initiatives. On the international side, we were very pleased to report on the rapid adoption of best practices by our Montevideo, Uruguay, ShotSpotter customer in the first 90 days of deployment.
The client went live in mid-December 2023, with an array totaling 4.6 sq mi. In the first 90 days of deployment, the agency has begun to effectively leverage ShotSpotter data to allocate policing resources to impacted areas and to support investigations, including the use of ShotSpotter data as evidence in a recent tragic killing of a police officer.... In addition, the agency is fully embracing integrating ShotSpotter with other digital tools used in their policing and community engagement efforts.
We believe these positive results and the client's willingness to broadly share their successes with other countries will seed the potential market opportunity for ShotSpotter in the larger South American market. In fact, we're making steady progress to book and go live with another major South American city in early Q3 of this year. Overall, we continue to refine and enhance the SafePointe solution, including a major software upgrade coming this quarter. We are leveraging the existing SoundThinking software stack in order to provide a new and more modern user experience.
For example, we're making it easier to monitor multiple facilities and entrances and to quickly find historical incidents of interest. Moving to this new code base will make future enhancements faster to deliver as well. We also expect to deliver an upgrade later in the year to the object detection classifier by integrating a new camera system and machine learning model using the company's deep experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which we believe will enhance SafePointe's detection efficacy.
In fact, we've been granted a new fundamental patent on using passive magnetic moment in motion to detect weapons, which allows the systems to be unobtrusive, helping to provide a better experience for visitors and employees, all the while providing an important layer of security protection. Our SafePointe demand generation engine is fully operational, with two dedicated BDRs who are assigned to drive over 250 discovery calls for the year, of which they have successfully delivered on 65 calls in a compressed Q1, 2024.
As a reminder, we also have in place five seasoned territory sales professionals, combined with two recently hired and experienced security experts as customer success directors, to help guide our go-to-market discussions, as well as onboard new live customers. So far this year, we've secured business from our top three verticals, healthcare systems, casinos, and enterprise corporate accounts, and our momentum in healthcare is particularly impressive with having either secured lanes or being in advanced contract negotiations with multiple healthcare systems.
We have seen security professionals in the healthcare system vertical that have already deployed competing products, turning to SafePointe due to its lower total cost of ownership and discrete footprint. The SafePointe pipeline continues to grow in these key verticals and is currently over $12 million. We believe this provides solid coverage to meet the $5 million target for booked ARR forecasted for SafePointe this year.
With respect to our full year outlook, we are reaffirming our revenue guidance of $104 million-$106 million for 2024, along with our adjusted EBITDA margin guidance of 18%-20% for the year. Now, Alan, over to you.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Thank you, Ralph. We're pleased with our performance in the first quarter. As Ralph mentioned, this quarter, we went live with our ShotSpotter gunshot detection solution in 10 new cities and one university, expanded our ShotSpotter coverage in two cities, and added seven new customers with our other software solutions, as well as several previously booked customers that have now gone live.
Revenue is in line with our expectations and was attained from deferred revenue previously booked, being recognized in the quarter, professional services revenue from our Technology Solutions business, and also from new business mentioned above that went live. We had minor attrition of only six miles this quarter. Let me provide more details on the quarter, and then I will share some thoughts around the balance of the year. First quarter revenues were slightly above expectations at $25.4 million.
Revenue is over 23% higher than first quarter of 2023, as we continue to grow in all aspects of our business. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2024 was $14.9 million, or 59% of revenue, versus $11.3 million, or 55% of revenue for the prior year period. We expect gross margins to continue to improve as the year progresses. Our adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2024 was $3 million, up slightly from $2.9 million in the first quarter of 2023.
Our adjusted EBITDA is lower than analyst expectations, primarily because of continued higher than expected legal costs, some other one-time expenses, and also because we conducted our company all-hands meeting in the first quarter, which added a one-time cost of almost $1 million. It is important to understand that we do not provide guidance on a quarterly basis for revenue or adjusted EBITDA.
Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, is calculated by taking our GAAP net loss and adding back interest expense, income taxes, depreciation, amortization, and impairment, stock-based compensation, acquisition-related expenses, including adjustments to our contingent consideration obligation. Turning to our expenses. Our operating expenses for the first quarter were $17.5 million, or 69% of revenues, versus $13.1 million, or 64% of revenues in the first quarter of 2023.
Operating expense increases were primarily related to higher headcount and employee-related costs, including personal cost increases related to expected SafePointe growth. Breaking down our expenses, sales and marketing expense for the first quarter was $7.1 million, or 28% of total revenue, versus $5.8 million, also 28% of total revenue for the prior year period. Our sales and marketing teams continue to build our sales pipelines and expand our marketing efforts. We also continue to focus on maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction, which helps keeps our attrition rates low.
Our R&D expenses for the first quarter were $3.6 million, or 14% of total revenue, compared to $2.7 million, or 13% of total revenue for the prior year period. We continue to invest in increasing the functionality of all of our products. G&A expenses for the quarter were $6.8 million, or 27% of total revenue, compared to $4.6 million, or 22% of total revenue for the prior year period. G&A expenses were higher due to legal costs, our headcount increase, and other employee-related costs, such as our all-hands meeting mentioned previously.
We expect our G&A expenses will fluctuate quarterly throughout the year in absolute dollars, as the company growth will require some investment that will be offset by the expected reductions of certain one-time expenses incurred during Q1. Our net loss for the first quarter was $2.9 million, or $0.23 per share, based on 12.8 million basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding. This compares to a net loss of $1.8 million, or $0.15 per share, based on 12.3 million basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the prior year period.
Deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $50.8 million, versus $42.1 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2023. We ended the quarter with $8.5 million in cash and cash equivalents, versus $5.7 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2023. The increase is primarily related to AR collections, partially offset by the payment of the company annual bonuses in February. We have approximately $7 million of debt outstanding on our $25 million line of credit related to cash used to partially fund the SafePointe acquisition last year.
Turning to our full 2024 outlook. We are reaffirming our full year 2024 revenue guidance range of $104 million-$106 million, representing over 13% year-over-year growth at the midpoint compared to 2023. We are also reaffirming our expectation for Adjusted EBITDA margin to be approximately 18%-20% of forecasted revenues in 2024. Now back to Ralph for some final thoughts, and then we'll be happy to take your questions.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Thanks, Alan. Just to close my prepared remarks, it was exactly one year ago when we acknowledged the ultimate sacrifice of Chicago police officer, Aréanah Preston, who was tragically killed in an attempted carjacking when returning home from work. Sadly, we are here again, one year later, with the killing of another Chicago police officer, Luis Huesca, this past month in another attempted carjacking. Our sincere thoughts and prayers go out to his family, loved ones, and the Chicago Police Department.
We believe these tragic incidents require us to even be more determined to do our part in providing tools and critical expertise to help law enforcement, first responders, and the communities they serve, to save lives and to drive better public safety outcomes. We're now prepared to take your questions.
Operator (participant)
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Richard Baldry with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed.
Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Thanks. I was wondering if you can go into a little more detail on the Philadelphia win. I noted it was with the housing authority. You know, how will they work between themselves and the local police? You know, is it something where you have the ability to grow outside of the housing authority relatively quickly easily, or do you have to build new relationships outside of that to grow into other areas of Philadelphia? Just so we sort of understand what that initial deployment represents.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah, thanks for that question, Rich. This is Ralph. So there is a very strong collaboration between Philadelphia Housing Authority, which is the buyer of the ShotSpotter services for this particular implementation, and the broader Philadelphia Police Department.
So we're really quite encouraged that they're in fact working very closely together, and we very much think that it will open up a potential opportunity for us to expand beyond Philadelphia Housing Authority to broader Philadelphia, because they can certainly use a technology like ShotSpotter and other solutions to help them address the crime problem in Philadelphia.
Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Thanks. Can you remind us in terms of the $12 million in identified pipeline on SafePointe, the economics on, I think I recall it's like $620,000 a lane, which would imply something like $600. So where was that pipeline when you bought the company, so we can sort of gauge how quickly it's expanding?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... Yeah, so when we bought the company, they had a pipeline, and we've gone through the vetting process to have that pipeline match up to our standards. So there were some puts and takes there. And so I think what you see in the current pipeline is some subtractions of the pipeline that we inherited. We kept some, but I think there's been a lot of healthy growth with the BDR investment that we've made.
And also, our six, or excuse me, our five quota-carrying salespeople are also developing their own pipeline. So it's been fairly strong and really quite encouraged, and we're seeing that pipeline develop across those three key verticals that I spoke about earlier.
Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
And maybe last for me, following on SafePointe. You know what, you know, any challenges you'll see ahead or, or areas you might need to smooth out in the supply chain in order to kind of scale up your ability to do those deployments? Are there any, you know, custom deliverables you need to make sure you have access to, or is it something you feel that the friction to growth should be pretty minimal?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Pretty minimal. I think we're in pretty good shape from a supply chain point of view. So no constraints.
Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Great. Thanks.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of C.J. Dipollino with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed.
C.J. Dipollino (Research Professional)
Hey, everyone. I'm on for Jeremy Hamblin tonight. Thanks for taking my questions. First, wanted to touch on the income statement. Looks like you guys made some nice progress with gross margin expansion. Is there anything specifically that you could point to that led to the, you know, the increase year over year and actually sequentially, too?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah. So this is, Alan. Thanks for the question. Yeah, if you think about it, we've gone up 23 as a whole, had a gross margin about 57%. Q4 was 58%. Now we're 58.6%, so it continues to improve. As we expect, it's gonna continue to go higher, and that's for a lot of things. As we continue to grow the revenues, we don't have to increase the cost of goods sold as much across the board for pretty much any of the software solutions that we have. So, revenue growth is gonna continue to help drive that gross margin a lot higher. We do expect to end the year closer to 60%.
C.J. Dipollino (Research Professional)
Okay, great. Thank you. And then I... You know, one more on the income statement. I know you cited G&A being higher due to some, what sounded like some one-time expenses. Do you mind just trying to quantify how much of the G&A increase of, we'll call it, you know, $2.2 million year-over-year, came from the increase in headcount? Just so we have, you know, sort of a baseline moving forward.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
No, absolutely. Great question. This is Alan again, as well. It's almost significantly in two major categories. Number one, last year, we did our all hands meeting in Q2, so you would see G&A go higher in Q2 last year. This year, we did it in Q1, and that was almost $1 million. The company has grown. We have over, you know, 300 people now, so it costs a lot more to do that. That was done in Q1. So out of that, $1 million was there. We also had additional, legal costs related to, some issues we had with, two of our employees that did things that were inappropriate.
We're continuing to defend ourselves on that, and that was about almost $250,000 as well. So just between those two alone, which are certainly the all hands is one time, and the legal costs, we're hoping those continue to go down, that would have been $250,000. The delta is just, you know, slightly other higher things related to G&A with the growth of the company.
C.J. Dipollino (Research Professional)
Okay, great. That's very helpful. And then, one more on the Philadelphia Housing Authority contract, if you don't mind. Is there any details you could share on economics surrounding that deal? Maybe the contract length, things of that nature.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah, fairly standard. I mean, that's our standard MSRP pricing. We write annual contracts, so nothing unique there on the Philadelphia Housing Authority transaction.
C.J. Dipollino (Research Professional)
Okay, got it. Thank you, guys. That's all for me.
Operator (participant)
The next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore with Northland Capital. Please proceed.
Speaker 8
Hi, this is Aditi on behalf of Mike Latimore. Could you give some color on the sales cycle for gunshot detection? Is it stabilizing, or could you give some color on that?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah, this is Ralph. Thank you for that question. So the question, just to repeat it, is what we're seeing in terms of sales cycle for our acoustic gunshot detection solution, otherwise known as ShotSpotter. I think there's some interesting puts and takes there. We're certainly seeing a little bit of headwind that's lengthening the sales process in certain situations because of some of the noise coming out of of Chicago, to be candid. But then also, we're seeing some collapsing sales cycles as we more deeply penetrate tier four and tier five.
You've probably noticed that in this particular quarter, we put up a lot of new customers, kind of 10, 10 ShotSpotter customers, and a number of those customers were smaller customers, and those sales cycles tend to happen much shorter. You can think about those sales cycles being, you know, 9-12 months, and our other sales cycles being more the traditional 18 months, with a little bit of headwind that's been added to the larger deals.
Speaker 8
Got it. And what percentage of your gunshot detection pipeline is international?...
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah, so this is Alan. I think at this point, it's still relatively small. We have international deployments in the Bahamas, in South Africa, and also in Uruguay. We are expecting... If you just add all those together, you know, it's pretty much just a couple million dollars. But we are also looking to expand, and hopefully in Q3, we'll have another one in another country that we've talked about in the past. And that should add another probably $500,000-$600,000 per year for the first deployment there. We are still expecting some growth, both in the new one that we're going into, possibly in South Africa as well as Uruguay.
Speaker 8
Got it. Fine. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
The next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with JMP Securities. Please proceed.
Trevor Walsh (Director of Equity Research)
Great. Thanks, gents, for taking my questions. Ralph, maybe I'll start with you. You made some comments in your prepared remarks about just best practices. I think it was more in the context of international business, but just piggybacking off of that a little bit. If a customer was to kind of want to evaluate the cost-benefit analysis specific to ShotSpotter, I know you've talked about in the past of not necessarily wanting to go down the slippery slope of kind of quantifying kind of human life saved, even though we have kind of good examples of ShotSpotter doing just that.
What, in terms of best practices, are you seeing customers that do want to do that kind of cost-benefit analysis? What other metrics might they use to just help illustrate that and kind of justify to city councils, whoever the kind of might be, as kind of the spend being saving officer time, whatever it might be? How do you measure that?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Sure. Yeah, thank you very much for that question. So it's a couple of things. I think first, there's the overall awareness of criminal gunfire that takes place in neighborhoods. And we know from years of experience across multiple deployments, that 80%-90% of criminal gunfire goes unreported via the traditional, I would describe, broken 9-1-1 system, analog, manual system. And so having the ability to have real-time alerts that are completely vetted, get to a dispatch center and then dispatched out to an officer in less than 60 seconds with a very precise location is a game changer.
It shows the community that police are prioritizing the response to gunfire. And when police are responding to gunfire, certainly, they're getting there. If they're not encountering a perpetrator, perhaps they're aiding a victim, which is where you get into life saved. We have lots of evidence that the physical forensic evidence collection process is significantly enhanced.
And of course, that's really critical for downstream investigations, getting those shell casings and running them through the NIBIN system, and embracing a kind of very strong robust gun crime intelligence platform, where you're investigating shootings that don't necessarily lead to a gunshot wound victim, and the like.
We're very excited about our Data for Good initiative, where we're repurposing the data, or I should say, our clients are repurposing the data and sharing it with other outside of law enforcement agency resources that help get critical non-enforcement resources to these communities that are suffering through the trauma of gun crime. We're also seeing our customers be able to aggregate the data over time and really being able to better plan their resource deployments based on exactly where gunfire is taking place over specific time windows.
I think there's an overall theme of encouraging our data, or excuse me, our customers to be much more transparent in sharing data and the outcomes that they're getting, and it really does get down to, you know, getting cops to dots, recovering physical forensic evidence, recovering crime guns, recovering physical forensic evidence in the form of shell casings. I'm very much leaning into the idea of valuing the saving of a life, because, I mean, those lives are critically important and have value. They mean something.
I think the line that we don't want to go down as much is taking on the responsibility for overall prevention and reduction of gun violence from a singular point of view, because we know that gun violence in total is a very complex issue, and it really does take a grouping of kind of technologies and processes all working together with very strong leadership that drives the effect of reductions in gun violence. You can't single out a particular technology to be able to do that on its own. So we do resist that non-line of sight, I guess, outcome, if you will.
I think there are several line of sight outcomes that our customers can embrace when they do implement best practices and really get cops to every single shooting and try to save lives, recover physical forensic evidence, and take gun crimes off the street.
Trevor Walsh (Director of Equity Research)
Great. Thanks for the color. Maybe one more higher level question for you, and then I have a couple for Alan. You mentioned the kind of momentum within state of New Jersey and how that's more state-level funded. What do you think the appetite is for that type of kind of funding profile to come from state government versus local, kind of just more broadly across the U.S.?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah, so there's a couple of states beyond New Jersey. I won't name them in this conference call, but we're working quite closely with a few states on copying, basically, what the governor of New Jersey did in terms of allocating some specific funding for acoustic gunshot detection, because it is recognized how important this critical technology is in helping police better respond to criminal gunfire. So more to come there, but we're quite encouraged with some of the movement we're seeing in a couple of other states.
Trevor Walsh (Director of Equity Research)
... Great. Terrific. Alan, maybe for you, I appreciated the ARR guidance, kind of how you built your 2024 number. And I know you don't necessarily guide on a quarterly basis to that metric, but was there anything in the quarter from a trending perspective that gave you kind of more or less confidence around that 2024 – call it just $100 million ARR number?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
No, thanks for the question. So no, there's nothing that changed. We are still struggling a bit with Puerto Rico, trying to get that in there or back online, but we already included that. So the ARR growth getting north of 100 already included that we didn't get Puerto Rico at all. So, you know, we're still working with that, hoping that we can be positive there. Nothing else has really changed based on the buildup to get that north of 100.
You already heard about the pipeline with SafePointe. We're excited, we're excited about that. We, you, you talked, we heard about the 10 cities going live and the university, so things are going well there. Everything else seems to be going really well across the other products as well. So no, no major changes there.
Trevor Walsh (Director of Equity Research)
Okay, great. Maybe just one more, just kind of piggybacking on some of the SafePointe questions. Appreciated the comments earlier around just the overall pipeline build. Have you seen, kind of maybe asked in a different way, have you seen a noticeable change in sales cycles, particular to SafePointe, kind of comparing, contrasting from when the company was kind of standalone versus in the short time that it's been kind of part of the SoundThinking family, if you've seen any kind of accelerations, I guess, there, in terms of just the overall deal flow?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah. So I think I would first acknowledge that this is still relatively new for us. But I think one of the approaches that we take is a very consultative approach, and really making sure that we're thoughtful and intentional around doing diagnostics and discovery calls, if you will, with our customers, and really making sure that we understand what they're trying to accomplish, and then making sure that our solution can fit with what they're trying to accomplish. So we take a little bit more of a deliberate approach.
We're not trying to be transactional. That's never really been a part of the DNA of this company. We like it sticky. We like to get in, solve a problem, and be able to be with a customer really over decades, and so we're not into the transactional sale. More to come there. We're pretty comfortable with the way we see the pipeline building. This is a huge market opportunity for us.
There's certainly a very strong, compelling need out there, particularly in the verticals that we're addressing, to be able to provide a layer of security, but then also have a fairly seamless experience for visitors and employees and the like, that you don't want them to have to go through the friction of, you know, getting pressed down, going through a traditional metal detector. So we're gonna be picky and diligent, and I think our idea is that when we get a customer, we're gonna have a customer for life.
Trevor Walsh (Director of Equity Research)
Great. Thanks both for the questions. Appreciate it.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
The next question comes from the line of Yi Fu Lee with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you for taking my question. Hello, Ralph and Alan. So first question is really on the go live customer on the way, you know, for, for SoundThinking. And I think, I think, Ralph, I think Alan mentioned there's 16 of them. Can you guys give us a little more color on this pipeline? You know, whether it be Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, and you know, what kind of profile are these?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
So I think we stated earlier, this is Ralph. I'll try to answer the question, as-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yep
Ralph Clark (CEO)
... as much as I can. So, we're trying to give people a flavor for, obviously, Q1 went very well with the customers that went live. We've got, 16 customers, or excuse me, 16 projects, I would say, in queue for ShotSpotter. And I think eight of those customers are expansion customers, so we know the customers very well, and that's a mix of various types of customers, in that-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Mm-hmm
Ralph Clark (CEO)
... expansion side. And then on the new customers, I think it's another mix of customers. You know, certainly if there were huge kind of tier zero or tier one city, we would call that out. But I think there's a combination of tier two, threes and fours in there. I think you're gonna see us kind of put up more higher customer numbers, new customer acquisitions, and they'll be smaller customers, but in aggregate, they'll add up to the miles. So we're still holding to our target of 120 miles going live this year for ShotSpotter across the board, and we're on track.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. Thanks for that, Ralph. And then, along the same lines, right, great job on the cross-sell for the CaseBuilder and CrimeTracer on the Virginia win. And I understand you guys done that in New York City as well as looking to California. I was wondering if you could give us more color in terms of like, you know, the cross-selling opportunities now that you have more experience, right, in this motion. You know, how frictionless is this selling experience now, that your sales team has a couple of these deals under your belt already?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah. Do you want me to take that, Alan, or...?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah. I mean, either one of us. So this is Alan. I think the good news is we've been doing cross-selling and bundling products now for over a year, and it is working. I mean, we've had-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Mm-hmm
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... I think we've got about probably close to 17, almost 20 of our customers that have more than one at this point, and a couple of them have three of our products, and one of them has four. So-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Mm-hmm
Alan Stewart (CFO)
The good news is, the more that we're doing this, the better our sales team is getting at doing it. So, it's working well. We're just gonna keep doing what we're doing and,
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Mm-hmm
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... not change too much of that. We do give a slight discount for when they go from one product to ... very small, though, and that hasn't really hurt us at all, as you can see, in terms of the revenue growth.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Got it. Got it. And then on the Puerto Rico incident, in terms of I understand both of you guys are trying to get this back online. What needs to happen? I understand, like, in the past, you mentioned there wasn't a second, like, competitor, right? You know, I guess, what's the holdup to get this contract back live?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah, 100% funding. It's a funding issue.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Oh, it's a funding issue.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. That's, that's nice and easy, Alan. And then last one, Alan, it's, it's more of a numbers - it's, it's the long-term guidance you gave in terms of 70% growth margin and obviously 40% EBITDA margin. What's the time horizon that we should think about this? Because right now we are about, you know, high 50s in terms of the GM, gross margin, and probably low double digits, right, high single digits in the EBITDA margin, right? How should we think about the time horizon? And that's it for me. Thank you for-
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah, this is Alan. That's a great question. I mean, we've guided for 18%-20% Adjusted EBITDA right now.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
You can expect that, and we are gonna expect that it's gonna go up about 5% a year. So maybe-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
5%, yeah.
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Sometime in the next 3.5-4 years, I would expect this to be-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... close to that 40%. And, at the same time-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
So, Alan, 5% per year for the GM expansion, gross margin expansion?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah. To be clear, we're not giving you guidance on that right now. We're just kind of giving the long term in terms of where-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... we think we can get there. So the short answer is probably about four years. We would expect that-
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah
Alan Stewart (CFO)
... gross margin to be close to that 70% and the Adjusted EBITDA closer to that number.
Yi Fu Lee (VP and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Got it. Thanks for that, Alan, and thank you, Ralph. Congrats, I guess, on a strong start to 2024.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Louie DiPalma with William Blair. Please proceed.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Ralph and Alan, good afternoon.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
How are you doing?
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
I'm doing well. From a bookings perspective, at the end of 2023, I think you ended with 170 cities under contract and 19 campuses for gunshot detection. Did those figures move higher in the first quarter, despite the noise from Chicago and the elongated sales cycles?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
This is Alan. Yes, they did move higher. They did not move a lot higher, just to be honest, but that is, it is somewhat lumpy. I mean, we have quarters where we add a lot, and then we have quarters where we're executing, going live and a lot, and the bookings maybe just take a little longer, but it went up.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Great. And, you discussed cross-selling of CaseBuilder and CrimeTracer, specifically, with the Newport News account, which I believe is also a ShotSpotter customer. But how many of your existing ShotSpotter cities use multiple solutions? And, you know, is there a lot of opportunities there in the pipeline for that?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
Yeah, this is Alan. At this point, there's about 20 of them that are using more than one. And we do expect that there's a pretty strong pipeline. We're seeing for a relatively strong growth in some of the ResourceRouter that we have not necessarily seen in the past years, which is excellent. And of course, CaseBuilder as well. So we're excited about where things are going. So the short answer is we are seeing more opportunity there in the pipeline.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Great. And for SafePointe, how significant are the software enhancements that you are implementing? And does the effectiveness of the solution continue to improve over time with the machine learning technology in terms of, you know, the different types of, you know, weapons that people attempt to bring past the scanners and how your technology works with that?
Alan Stewart (CFO)
We're making a fairly significant investment in the technology platform for SafePointe. We're really encouraged by the fact that we're starting in a really good place. I think that the innovation around using kind of magnetic moment in motion as a kind of a passive sensor technology that can be completely unobtrusive, unobtrusive is really, really interesting and highly differentiated. Our plan is to continue to build on that, not only in terms of the core, in terms of improving the overall detection efficacy, but also in kinds of applications that that are built around it.
We have a lot of experience in applying that to ShotSpotter. When you think about ShotSpotter, detecting and locating gunfire and all the apps that we've built around that, that have really moved that solution forward, we're gonna apply the same playbook to SafePointe. We have a strong collaboration with the various engineering groups kind of working together. We're really excited about the fact that we can leverage the existing software...
Excuse me, the existing SoundThinking software stack used for ShotSpotter that can be applied to the application that SafePointe is gonna be coming out to market with. We're in a really good place, and we'll continue to invest in this because it's such a significant market opportunity.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
... Great. And one final one for me: Do you expect the Chicago noise to die down, in that it seems that Chicago is an anomaly here, in that you have 170 cities under contract, and, you know, there's one, you know, very loud one here that seems to be opposed. But do you expect that to die down and for the sales cycles to return to normal this year in terms of you, you know, meeting your, y- your guidance in terms of adding another 120 miles of coverage?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah. Well, first thing I'll say is Alan owes me $10 because I made him a bet that we weren't gonna get through this call without someone asking about Chicago. But, thank you, thank you for that question. So let me make it perfectly clear with Chicago. First and foremost, our guidance is not dependent, our 2024 guidance is not impacted at all by Chicago's actions. And in fact, when you talk about the subject of Chicago, what you're really talking about is the mayor of Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson.
I think if anyone's kind of following the news there, it's Brandon Johnson kind of versus what his superintendent has been fairly public in supporting ShotSpotter, along with the city councilmen or the vast majority of the aldermen of the city of Chicago. We know the residents of Chicago are being quite vocal, along with the local press, around the need for this technology. We've been deployed now in Chicago since 2011. Our focus is to continue to build on that great service tradition through the end of the current contract period with 2000...
Excuse me, that'll take us through November of 2024. With respect to the impact around it, I think there might have been a little bit more noise late last year. As we kind of move into this, we don't see customers, you know, really slowing down ultimately from jumping on the platform.
We have to answer more questions, but I think, you know, people are understanding this to be a fairly kind of isolated situation. I mean, to wit, you know, we added 10 new customers in Q1, and we're working on, you know, 8 new customers for Q2. So the momentum is still there. And, and 10 is the highest we've ever had in a quarter, actually.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. Yeah. Is RFP activity similar or greater or less than this year versus last year? How would you assess just the RFP activity?
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah, so RFPs, with respect to, ShotSpotter, if that was your question related to ShotSpotter-
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
RFPs have never really been a significant portion of our business, because this is viewed fairly much as a kind of sole source, technology. It's a technology solution that we invented, and we continue to kind of, I guess, lead the category, if you will. So I don't know. RFP stuff is really kind of, kind of noise. And the RFPs that we have, the few RFPs that we have tended to respond to, I, I don't think we've ever lost one.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
No, they ended up selecting someone.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah, if they selected someone, they selected us. They maybe didn't move forward with the RFP, but, if they made a decision to execute against the RFP, we've been the, we've been the winner.
Louie DiPalma (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah. No, the context of my question is how some emerging competitors in the market, they are bundling gun detection with ALPR cameras, and I was wondering if that has had any impact on the win rate or even, like, the pipeline expanding in terms of RFP activity.
No real impact on win rate, no impact on pipeline. I mean, there's questions that we have to answer about this, especially in some of the smaller cities, but I think that people recognize that you probably don't want to combine your ears with eyes on the same platform, the exact same physical platform. It's pretty challenging. So we're pretty comfortable that we're in a good space from a competitive landscape point of view.
Great. Thanks, Ralph and Alan.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. If your question was not taken, you may contact SoundThinking's Investor Relations team by emailing [email protected]. Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Clark for his closing remarks.
Ralph Clark (CEO)
Great. Thank you very much. Alan and I want to thank everyone that took the time to dial in, and thank you all very much for your questions, and looking forward to a number of follow-on calls with you all in the next few hours. Thank you all very much. Be safe.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.