Vantage Update

We’re excited to share an update on Vantage’s latest advancements with shipments, government contracts, product improvements, commercial sales developments, and finances.

  • Vantage’s position as a US government supplier continues to improve, capitalizing on the vacuum created by multiple recent bans of DJI drones by DoD and DHS. We are currently in late-stage consideration for three military development contracts with an expected value of $1.8M in 2018 and the opportunity to win a $20M sales contract for early 2019. This includes an expected $1M sub-contractor project with FLIR, an $8.4B thermal imaging company.  Additionally, Vantage is in discussions with DHS for a similar DJI replacement contract, which is currently pending.
  • .We shipped 241 units in Q2, up from 189 in Q1, and expect to ship 370 in Q3. Vantage has shipped all of our original pre-orders to customers who responded to our address update request, but we still have a backlog of 190 units from ongoing Shopify orders and unresponsive pre-order customers. We expect to complete the remainder of our backlog by the end of September. Vantage is now receiving rotor sets and batteries from high volume overseas production partners, which has improved throughput in our local production facility. In response to ongoing supply chain challenges, Vantage has developed sourcing and operations management partnerships with Berkeley Sourcing Group and Amphibian Operations Support to continue to improve our production capabilities.

  • Customer feedback remains extremely positive, with a 2% return rate and a steady stream of amazing customer videos created with Snap. Here’s one of our recent favorites:

  • We continue to improve Snap hardware and software rapidly in order to maintain a differentiated position in the marketplace:
    • We released our pioneering phone-based vision tracking feature in July, shown below:

    • The new tracking beacon is debugged and working well. An edit from video of a local surf camp instructor using the tracking beacon follows below:

    • We’ve upgraded Snap to include optical flow position control, as well as several robustness improvements.
    • The company about to release a new “VR” control mode, controller-free rapid launch and gesture launch features, which enable sub-ten second deployment times. The rapid launch feature is shown below:

    • CNN plans to use our latest range extender, which enables broadcast quality video streaming, at the Fargodome on September 29th.
    • We are on track to ship the tracking beacon, range extender, and tracking rotor set in Q4.
  • Commercial traction continues to improve, with additional sales to law enforcement, journalism, event media, DoD, and inspections customers. Vantage has developed a partnership with Kaze Media for journalism sales and is in discussions with GE for an inspections partnership. More information on our current commercial strategy can be found in our latest deck and our full sales pipeline can be viewed here. We plan to narrow our focus to 1-2 verticals by the end of Q3 and focus on ramping volume in Q4. The adventure tourism opportunity continues to look quite promising, with strong pull from our test customers, highly attractive margins, and great results from Snap. A video of a student from the surf camp, shot automatically using our tracking beacon follows below: