Newsfilter article unlocker
Enter Newsfilter article ID in the field below. Example: https://newsfilter.io/articles/39be1bef03e66cdc886c08a2a6319c47
Retrieved article
Are you introducing me? Oh, yeah. Yoav Efron is the CFO of Actelis Networks, trades over-the-counter AS&S. Correct. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Yoav Efron. I'm Deputy CEO and CFO. I'm the CTO of Acteles Networks. Happy to be here. Thank Equity. Thank You for having me. Thank You For Coming. We're webcasted, correct? So, I'm here to tell you about Actelis. Actels has been around for a while. And today, we're doing this, we connect AI to the edge. And we focus on modernizing defense, federal, intelligent transportation, and hospitality. We have had, I'll start with that because there's no way around it. it we've had not a not a good year in 2025 not at all and our our revenues were slashed versus 2024 finished the year with less than four million dollars of revenue and uh welcome to come in uh Less than $4 million of revenue, but 2026 looks much better. We're home to MEND, and after our first half, we're at 2.1, up 26% in revenue, up 80% in booking, and Q3 is not yet released. But one thing I can tell you is we delivered a significant order to the U.S. Marine Corps in Q3, which was a major progress in our federal play and our federal program. gross margin went back to where it should be at 51% and we have many years in business most of them as serving the telecom the telecomm world in in in the IPO we did were right after the IPO we didn't 2022 we transition pivoted into critical infrastructure critical infrastructure intelligent transportation and smart cities and so on. Lots of patents. And before I get to the story of the business and the technology, I want to talk a little bit about the momentum that we created since we had that terrible 2025 year. In federal, we've done federal business for a long time, but we did it sporadically and project-based and what we did in 2025 we hired new talent who knows how to get to head sales into programmatic sales the federal government especially the military operates what's called programs of record programs of record once you're in the program designed in then you're continuously tapped into in order to continue modernizing and modernization is the name of the game in government everything needs to be modernized from many many aspects and that's the frenzy that's going on right now I talked about the I talked of all the IP telephony where do I put the laser oh I don't Okay, so in any case, in Q3, in September, we delivered a large deal as part of a U.S. Marine Corps IP telephony upgrade of 65 buildings, and we did that successfully, so that's part of our Q3 results. We are in lots and lots of trials and discussions into the programs of record, and this will be shown as we get into 2027. In ITS, Intelligent Transportation Systems, it could be in smart cities, it could be road agencies. We provide communication solutions to anything that needs to be connected around the road or the city could be a camera, a sensor, a sign, you name it, everything else, everything that manages the city, the smart, the digital city, is what we connect. And the deeper work in the city is showing. We're tapping into the 100,000 to a million people cities. There are over 300 of these in the U.S., and we are in a multitude of them, but there's so much way to go. Cyber hardening is a focus of ours and what makes us also differentiated. Cyber harding is an element that's critical in networking in order to be encrypted, in order not to be able to be tapped. So in intelligent transportation, in intelligent environments, it is critical critical and we're putting we release constantly release software versions that are embedded into our devices that have enhanced cyber hardening hospitality is a new segment for us lots of integrated analog technologies in hotels all around you probably saw it and see it all the time as we get into streaming into new customer experiences we have multi gigabit solutions for hospitality that are unique and believe it or not it's not that not that easy to make that in-room experience digital and and also appealing recent developments we had a big software and services renewal with a big tier one carrier in the U.S. We had been working with Alaska environments in rural areas to connect schools and healthcare facilities. We reported Q2, which we talked about. We're getting our deeper engagement with the federal market, as we talked About. And in September, we finally delivered that U. S. Marine Corps project, which is one of, I hope, and I believe many in the future, from a strategic, Corporate strategic priorities, we have two main priorities in the pursuing of an M&A, which we're in the process of. I cannot talk about it, but we are focusing on a synergistic acquisition that would allow us to join hands with someone who has a cyber orientation that would fit us, would be synergistic technologically and market-wise, and will be able to help us grow inorganically and eventually join hands technologically. This is something that is doable, and right now we're working on a target that I hope I'll be able to say more soon. The other thing is we want to return to NASDAQ, and that's what we need to do. We can do that, and M&A will help tell the different story because we now have been reorganizing, cost-reducing, and on top of that, we have been doing this progress that I talked about in the federal government. so what do we do there are three huge markets that are enabled with what Actelis does and the huge markets is that big bubble on the right that's probably outdated because the federal department of war as it's being called now is much higher than that it's over a trillion dollars and grow cyber safety always big and always large and always growing and the third one is edge AI edge AI or edge computing as we as the AI world is progressing it's it doesn't just happen in the cloud where we enjoy cloud and chat GPT and we work on it on a soft basis the more AI will become automating the environments we are in robotics autonomous cars buses you name it autonomous everything then more computing has to happen not in the cloud but close to where the activity occurs because latency is uh it can mean loss of life and very dangerous so latency is something that is one of the reasons why ai automation is going to drive a lot of the processes to be at the edge where the critical infrastructure uh lies in the city on the road in the in the airport in the on the rail tracks and so on and this is where we play we have so this is one of the tailwinds that helps us uh be very relevant the other one of course cyber safety could be the weakest link and uh i i'm definitely sure that uh all of us do not want cyber safety to be a weakest link in anything we do so we increasingly we it's increasingly critical compliance gets tougher and tougher Europe introduced the cyber resilience act becoming into becoming mandated for organizations in 2027 to make sure that they are vulnerability free in the US FIPS is the cybersecurity standard for the joint IT command of the Department of War. So it's a, call it a military thing, but more and more municipalities and educational facilities who are hacked all the time. And I see stories, endless stories of ransomware attacking those civilian facilities. so the result is they say well we want we want everyone that serves us to be FIPS compliant so we are FIPs compliant this is a process we have to go through with the joint IT command and that wasn't easy but it's behind us and and talking about the edge at the edge we have three wired infrastructures fiber copper and coax coax is another fancy name for the cable tv infrastructure so fiber is amazing fiber is the best form and uh and and conduct uh of of of networking but it doesn't exist everywhere actually it will never exist everywhere because there are 10 to 30 percent of locations where It is just impossible to put fiber in. So what are the alternatives other than wireless and mobile? Let's put that aside because in critical infrastructure, it's not necessarily doable. Then we could use command and control, telephony lines, all those infrastructure cabling that have been there since the 60s, since the 50s, and coax. what happens is that when when when a smart city needs all those services and copper is available everywhere but is difficult and unsecured difficult to operate fiber is amazing but not everywhere and wireless is problematic just because of its because of it's characteristics so the result is what we can do is we provide equipment that can work on either fiber or copper or coax or a hybrid solution of all so in other words the real world we look at it again the real-world is a mishmash of many many infrastructures and it's different in every corner of the city or web or wherever so we we the the task that we are we know how to do well is to provide that infrastructure networking infrastructure that is tailored to whatever the infrastructure exists so no recabling rewiring all this requires a lot of disruption very expensive very slow and mind you AI is so fast that we have to be fast we cannot wait so fast to implement because you just go plug and play and no need to wait for additional infrastructure to be deployed or set up. Resilience and cyber safety and the results is fiber speed, fiber grade on any wire. This is an example, think about it, these are many many many copper pairs and they sit in in this very big cluster, originally desynchronized, unsecure, and disrupted heavily by the elements. The result of what our technology knows to do with that is to make it optimally synchronized, to make encrypted, to make spectrally compliant, to make manageable, and also if you can think about copper as a conduit for for electricity it's also allows to it also allows for power over Ethernet so that is an important element for for implementations looking for for power Ethernet these are the three main verticals that we are playing at federal primarily military smart cities and roads and hospitality you can see this you can see here in the small print there are so much there are so many budgets going on for modernization modernization is the name of the game as i said earlier and that modernization is for of course for speed and for reliability but also for cyber safety so we enjoy the fact that this is a critical requirement for those verticals just to give you a glimpse of these think about it these are kind of switches these switches these are this is how our products look those small boxes they're not very big inside those this is our giga line product line and one superset serves many many all those Verticals and the embedded software provides the low latency, the ability to be hybrid, the ubiquity power over Ethernet that we talked about, power over the network, the cyber hardening, low touch management, all the good things that are required in managing a critical infrastructure network that needs to be reliable all the time. On top of everything, we also look at that you may not understand you may not have heard of maybe you have in in the physical world there is a the world of IT which we all know the information technology and on the other side there is the OT the operating technology the operating technology means all those devices that are in the network so there's an IT element the network itself where the traffic flows and there's the operating technology it could be it's it's these types of devices on the road or in the smart city but it could an MRI machine in a hospital or it could be a manufacturing device or manufacturing machine in a factory those have their own operating technology vulnerabilities and we are looking to use the network and provide meta shield which is a solution that we have right now of AI intelligence and threat management anomaly detection and auto correction for from a centralized centralized machine that looks through and monitors 24-7 what's going on and identifies things that should not be either, anomalies. For example, this traffic light talks to the camera and it shouldn't, or the speed and the volume of traffic from this device should be one gigabit per hour, and right now it's 500 gigabits per hour. So these are the types of anomalies that, and there are so many other types, that can be captured and mitigated. A small glimpse to some of our customers, transportation authorities all around the world, cities that we all know, all the Department of War and Homeland Security, US agencies. If you remember last year there was a a big incident of a halt in in the in Newark of traffic air traffic control was was stuck was frozen for more than over a minute it caused a ripple effect of weeks of delays this had to do with antiquated infrastructure in their network the FAA received a 12 billion dollar critical urgent budget to to modernize and we are competing to be there and we're going to and work we're going after FAA projects within that energy campuses we see Canadian rail over there New York City Seattle Fremont San Jose Washington DC is a very large customer of ours all those are smart cities that we have been talking about and announcing every once in a while we release a story about some wind that we had some implementation Washington DC we talked about the FAA we talked about as well legacy t1 to fiber modernization for major US carrier Alaska Air Force and so on the the numbers are endless and the cases are endless and if i uh want to summarize uh i remind you we had we didn't have a good year in 2025 and we're in the men right now looking for an mna but synergistic and uh we restructured we have cost reduced we are going to going to market differently more more systematically and more efficiently. We're positioned in the intersection of two huge and critical markets today. We're unique. We have lots of IP. Our brand reputation is, I can tell you that we're kind of, we have a reputation of high quality and maybe slightly high or expensive pricing. Experienced teams, strong players in federal market that, as I said, Jason Chassie helps us get into the programs of record and lots of integrators and contractors partners that will help us do what we are here to do so I really appreciate everyone listening and thank you if there are any questions I'll be happy to answer but this is it onwards and upwards hotel brand resonates because it seems like their internals are very antiquated even though they've been shining. Is it a sell or are they dying for the solution? Well, they have to and sometimes they're not dying for the resolution because in order to modernize a room, you have to keep it vacant for a period and of course they don't like that it's the same as the subway in new york it it doesn't get it doesn'T get modernized because just you can't stop the subway ever so but yes if you if you think about the analog equipment in hotels or also in venues in sports venues in order to uh transition into streaming transition the customer experience or the guest experience in the in the tv to a streaming uh something that uh that that that is a 21st era 21st century era you have to deploy those this modernization and become uh multi-gigabit eventually we all we get into the hotel so we log into our Netflix account and you watch the shows that we like from home and many times it's if the hotel is new and and and well invested it might be there to begin with but if it's a hotel that has been around for a long time it's not necessarily available so that's an important one yeah yeah that's a great question so first of all so I spoke about fiber only which is a big big component of not just telecom networking, but also critical infrastructure, and then the hybrid networking, or the more people may consider it a less advanced, when you talk about copper networking, which we actually can show that we make fiber to fiber-grade multi-gigabit. So in fiber only, you have very big players like Juniper and Cisco and Xtreme. So these are in Siena, so these would not typically go for projects the size that we are going because it's too small for them which is a good thing for us so the small to medium market is less competitive but you do have extreme playing in the smaller market but also names like Belden Hirschman AdTran to an extent but the quality of the ability to do hybrid networking well depends on many, many, many small factors. And we know how to do it well. I would say that we know howto do it the best. And that's why when it comes to hybrid, and it's not always a hybrid network. Sometimes it's just copper only, fiber only. It could be something less hybrid, as I said. And then it might be, as I mentioned, those competitors more competitive. But we were able, for example, in Highways England, we are in phase three now of modernizing all their devices around the roads. We beat Atron and Cisco at that time. It was in 2018, but now it has a positive ripple effect for us as we're already 10 years later, and we continue to be relevant for them. So price is important here, especially in those economies where it's critical. sure the hardware is our own of course we assemble and we develop the final product but the chip the memory all those things are coming from the vendors yeah so a lot of so the firmware is definitely ours and and that's where we developed all the cyber hardening which is probably by now the biggest focus of of that Firmware. Are you, if you're doing Firmwares development, do you guys try to make sure your code is prudently secure? Absolutely. We have several tools of code scanning, which we do constantly. I think up to once a week for all code. And when we identify vulnerabilities, and that happens, You get to a new week, and then you have a scan, and you see that there's a new vulnerability. So we need to fix it and then ship it to customers. If it's major, then we may, so it may be a reason to charge for it. It depends also when we come to customers who actually bought from us five years ago, eight years ago. Even more. So the equipment might be working fine, but the firmware is so outdated So A, it will be cyber vulnerable and we will need to update it or the cyber secure hardened firmware will not be able to run on their outdated hardware. So, but yeah, that's by now the most important element of firmware and we scan it constantly and not just with 1.2. Thank you. Thank you. Any last question. No, thank you.