Airship AI Holdings, Inc. (AISP) Business
This page reproduces the company's own Item 1 Business text from the linked SEC filing. It is filer text, not grepcent analysis, scoring, or investment advice.
Informational only - not investment advice. See Disclaimer.
ITEM 1. BUSINESS.
History
Airship AI Holdings, Inc. (the “Company” or “Airship”) is a holding company incorporated in Delaware that executes business through its wholly owned subsidiary, Airship AI, Inc. (“Airship AI”). Prior to the formation of Super Simple AI, Inc. in 2022, the Company operated as Airship AI, Inc. (formerly known as JDL Digital Systems, Inc.). JDL Digital Systems, Inc. was incorporated under the laws of the State of Washington on June 30, 2003. Super Simple AI, Inc. was formed in January 2022 through a share exchange with JDL Digital Systems, Inc. On March 7, 2023, Super Simple AI, Inc. changed its name to Airship AI Holdings, Inc.
On December 21, 2023, the Company completed the merger contemplated by the Merger Agreement, dated as of June 27, 2023, as amended (the “Merger Agreement”) by and among BYTE Acquisition Corp. (“BYTS”), BYTE Merger Sub, Inc., a Washington corporation and a direct, wholly-owned subsidiary of BYTS (“Merger Sub”), and Airship AI.
Effective December 21, 2023, Merger Sub merged with and into Airship AI with Airship AI as the surviving corporation (the “merger”). Thus, Airship AI became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company. In connection with the merger, Airship AI changed its name from “Airship AI Holdings, Inc.” to “Airship AI, Inc.”
Overview
We are a robust AI-driven data management platform that solves complex data challenges for large institutions operating in dynamic and mission-critical environments with rapidly increasing volumes of data being ingested from a similarly rapidly growing number of data sources.
We solve these challenges by structuring “dark” or unstructured data at the edge, the location at which the data is generated and collected, and leveraging purpose-built AI models. Unstructured, or “dark” data, which is typically categorized as qualitative data, cannot be processed and analyzed via conventional data tools and methods. Conversely, structured data, typically categorized as quantitative data, is highly organized and easily decipherable by machine learning algorithms.
Structuring and then analyzing data using AI models at the edge, versus transmitting the data from the edge back to a central processing location for structuring and analysis, enables real-time decision making and data-driven operational efficiency.
We specialize in ingesting all available metadata from edge-based sensors used by government and law enforcement agencies around the world, including surveillance cameras (video), audio, telemetry, acoustic, seismic, and autonomous devices, along with large commercial corporations with fundamentally similar capabilities and requirements.
Data generated by these edge-based sensors, including video, can then be run through our trained AI models to detect objects present within the video frame. Once an object is detected, for example an automobile, additional identifying characteristics of the object can be extracted from the image including the license plate characters and the make, model, and color of the automobile. This process of analyzing, logging and categorizing ingested data is referred to as “structuring” the data.
Airship AI’s software allows customers to view structured data both in real-time as well as to conduct searches on the structured data at a later point in time. Real-time structured data use includes, for example, alarms on a specific license plate or a specific make, model or color of automobile. Non-real-time structured data use includes, for example, searching a database of video data that has been previously ingested and stored to find instances of a particular license plate being visible, along with other logged vehicle characteristics such as make, model and color of an automobile.
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Additional edge deployed AI models enable similar object detection and recognition of common and custom trained objects, such as an aircraft, boat, person, animal, bag, or weapon. Airship AI’s models provide similar data points for these object types allowing analysts the ability to be notified in real-time of the detection of a specified object and similarly search for historically detected objects. Examples include detecting aircrafts and boats along with their respective tail numbers and hull registration numbers.
Our AI modelling process starts with pre-trained AI models from our technology ecosystem partners which we then customize using proprietary datasets tailored towards our customers unique workflow requirements. Where customers have pre-existing AI models or engines, we integrate those models or engines into our edge platform allowing customers to leverage proprietary models within the Airship AI software ecosystem.
Our primary offerings include Outpost AI, Acropolis, and Airship Command. Our offerings allow customers to manage their data across the full data lifecycle, when and where they need it, using a highly secure permissioned based architecture.
Outpost AI is our edge hardware and software offering that is purpose built to structure and analyze data efficiently and effectively at the source using Airship AI trained models. Once structured, Outpost AI securely encodes the data and streams it to Acropolis for further processing. In the automobile example, Outpost AI will process the unstructured and unlabeled video data into structured data including images of vehicles, images of plates, make, model, color, locations and plate numbers, as well as confidence levels on the structured results.
Acropolis is our enterprise management software suite which serves as the backbone of our software ecosystem. Acropolis allows customers with a handful of devices or hundreds of thousands of devices to manage their user and install base efficiently and securely from a single graphical user interface. Acropolis can be installed and managed locally (on-premises) as well as in cloud/multi-cloud-based system architectures. Acropolis can work with structured and unstructured data. In the scenario where Outpost AI processes the unstructured video of vehicles into images, plate numbers and other structured data, Acropolis will compare the structured data against customer repositories of structured data in order to add labels to results for user attention. Here, Acropolis leaves the initial processing of unstructured data to the edge device (Outpost AI) and handles additional labeling which requires bigger centralized datasets. Where Acropolis is receiving unstructured data as input from devices, it will do the initial processing of unstructured to structured data similar to what Outpost AI does at the edge before any additional labelling. This holistic approach allows customers to leverage the benefits of both edge and back-end data structuring and analysis in a “single-pane-of-glass” approach.
Airship Command then allows the customer to view the final labelled data which can be presented in real-time or as search results, as alerts, in automatically updating lists or on maps. In the vehicle example, Airship Command can present alarms on specific filters such as specific plates, intelligent partial matches, make, model, color and any combination thereof, as well as searches using the same filters against character recognition and vehicle characteristics results.
Airship Command is our suite of visualization tools that allow customers to interact with their data and devices securely and efficiently. Customer data interaction may include receiving and viewing an alarm triggered by an AI detected event at the edge on a mobile phone, or receiving and viewing events from thousands of edge devices spread across multiple different locations on a large video wall in a Security Operations Center (“SOC”). Our visualization tools span applications for workstations, web-based browsers, and applications for mobile handheld devices ensuring our customers data is never out of their immediate reach.
We apply AI across the entire offering suite, ensuring that we are extracting as much value from our customers’ existing and emerging data as possible. Whether it is using machine learning to train new models for deployment at the edge, or using a rules-based approach to detect anomalies based on data generated by machine learning models, we are constantly expanding and evolving our AI capabilities.
Our offerings are used by some of the largest government agencies and commercial organizations in the world. While we are heavily focused on continuing to grow market share in the United States, our offerings are currently deployed around the world, with significant room to grow in both the governmental and commercial markets.
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Our typical customer engagement is a multi-year contractual agreement, an agreement which includes our core offerings as well as professional services, technical support, and software maintenance, which we expect will result in predictable, long-term recurring revenue. Our history shows that organizations that have chosen to partner with Airship AI stick with Airship AI.
Since our inception and until the merger in December 2023, we have operated as a 100% employee-owned bootstrapped company with no outside investment, operating in a fiscally conservative model. As a U.S. based company, we operate in high growth areas, namely the intersection of public safety and AI, with a combined $7 billion edge AI hardware and software addressable market.
Our customers trust us to collect and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time as well as make it available to their users when they need it, where they need it, as securely as possible. We believe our offerings are purpose-built from the ground up to help ensure we continue to meet or exceed these expectations.
Our Industry
We believe a robust digital transformation strategy is imperative today for companies to discover new revenue opportunities, gain competitive advantages, and create efficient business operations. Whether companies are established brick and mortar operations with large disparate operational footprints and user bases or newer entrants to the marketplace with centralized operations, the need to ingest and process data efficiently and effectively is critical.
Nowhere across the digital data lifecycle is transformation occurring at a greater rate and pace than at the edge. While the advantages of operating at the edge are clearly recognized, it is only recently that physical technology has caught up with the virtual capabilities software has to offer. These advancements include the shrinking size of processors capable of performing advanced analytics at the edge and networking advancements such as 5G that can efficiently move the data processed at the edge (in real-time).
With these advancements, the ability to move data processing workloads to the edge and achieve true digital transformation has started to become reality. To achieve the full value of this transformation, we must be able to do the following key technical attributes at the edge:
| · | Structure data and analyze it in real-time, | |
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| · | Extract value from the analyzed data in real-time, | |
| · | Securely transmit the usable data to the consumers who need it in real-time, and | |
| · | Securely retain all data at the edge for regulatory/evidentiary purposes. |
Achieving these end-states at the edge should allow companies to substantially reduce the time needed to make decisions that affect operations across their environment, in some cases in a predictive manner. This ability to make real-time decisions using data analyzed at the edge can transform operations across industry and government by improving public safety, tailoring predictive maintenance, improving quality control, mitigating organized retail crime, and providing more efficient operations, which drive better customer experiences and operational outcomes.
In addition to the benefits achieved by increasing the speed and efficiency at which decisions can be made by offloading workflow and AI capabilities to the edge, significant cost benefits such as reduced operational costs associated with moving data across networks, processing and analyzing data using traditional massive backend servers and processors, and storage costs for extraneous data that is not valuable. Data security is also greatly enhanced, as are regulatory and compliance requirements for data, when compared to legacy data center approaches to data management.
Similarly, transformative changes are happening between edge and the cloud, leveraging applications that allow you to interact with your data wherever it resides, at the edge, on-premises, and/or in the cloud. True digital transformation can then be fully achieved when you have the “single pane of glass” interface that brings all your data together, securely, and efficiently, structured and analyzed, when and where the data consumer needs it.
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Our Solution
Airship AI’s platform today is used across multiple verticals and markets, including commercial and government, and small and enterprise. Our products are purpose-built to be scalable and flexible, operating in the environments our customers are in today as well as where they want to be tomorrow. Our software can be installed in air-gapped stand-alone environments as well as enterprise-wide federated environments with countless devices, users, and end-points where data is aggregated and consumed. Our software is installed on bare-metal servers on-premises, in data centers, and in the cloud, as well as in physical and virtualized environments.
Our software is also designed to replace existing capabilities as well as augment and/or enhance existing capabilities, from sensors to IT infrastructure to analytics. In many cases, our customers are able to achieve greater functionality out of existing capabilities through our unique approach to sensor integration and fusion than they could through the OEM manufacturers offerings, further improving ROI on existing infrastructure and cost-savings on planned future technology.
Our primary product offering is our software operating system, Airship Acropolis, supported by our edge (Airship Outpost AI) and end point visualization (Airship Command) offerings. Within Airship Acropolis, we have two variations, our commercial offering (Acropolis Commercial) and our government offering (Acropolis Law). While both variations are derived from the same code base, each is tailored towards specific workflow and operational requirements for their respective customer environments.
| · | Acropolis Commercial. We built this platform first, supporting a variety of small and medium businesses across various commercial verticals, including schools, hospitals, casinos, logistics, and retail establishments. Our growth led us to larger commercial entities where we branched out from a standalone platform managing small numbers of cameras to an enterprise platform capable of managing hundreds of thousands of cameras and users from a single graphical user interface. Acropolis Commercial continues to support our commercial customers’ requirements today. | |
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| · | Acropolis Law. We built this platform based on the success of our commercial offering and we have grown our customer base to include agencies across the law enforcement, defense, and intelligence sectors, with dozens of custom sensor integrations and unique workflows allowing agencies to break down data sharing silos when operating standalone or in joint interagency environments. |
Our edge platform, Airship Outpost AI, can be used in a standalone environment as well as pointed back to Airship Acropolis. Outpost AI primarily ingests either single or multiple feeds and using edge inference AI analyzes each feed for specific defined data parameters to alert on. All data is then encoded and streamed back to Acropolis securely for downstream visualization as well as further processing and/or analysis.
Our end point visualization platforms, Airship Command, consists of a thick client application, a web-based thin client, and our iOS and Android applications. Each of these visualization applications provides users the opportunity to securely view and interact with data being managed by Acropolis and control sensors/devices at the edge. Airship Command is the “single pane of glass” solution customers need.
Our professional services include custom model training for customers using their proprietary and sensitive data, on-site and/or remote engineering services supporting customer deployments and operations, as well as custom integrations and workflow enhancements aimed at creating additional operational efficiencies in their environments.
Our support and software maintenance agreements (“SMA”) create recurring revenue opportunities for the life of the contract and include options for general support as well as dedicated support through cleared individuals (up to the Top Secret clearance level). Our SMA provides customers access to new releases, patches, and other software updates as they are made public.
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Our Customer Base
Our market-entry strategy has been to build enduring partnerships with large early adopters, primarily in the United States. We believe these early adopters become customers and serve as validation of our capabilities to other potential customers in similar and adjacent verticals by demonstrating the value and operational efficiencies our platform provides. From our early adopter customer in the commercial space, we have successfully expanded our footprint to include additional enterprise customers in the commercial market, as well as numerous federal, military, and intelligence agencies across the U.S. government.
After our initial contract is established, our customers tend to expand their use of our products and services, as they realize the efficiency and value provided. We also tend to see rapid expansion into adjacent buying entities within the customer, allowing them to break down data silos between functional areas that have historically existed, through the sharing of data securely and efficiently across network and operational domains.
We believe there are substantial opportunities to leverage work done for our existing early adopter customers in the commercial and government sectors, where we continue to see growing parallels around operational needs and the technology capabilities we provide that can solve them.
Revenue Mix
Historically, a majority of our product revenue has consisted primarily of a bundled hardware and software product and to date we have sold or licensed a minimal amount of standalone software. In the future, we expect to see more deliveries of our products using a cloud based software solution which will allow us to create additional subscription revenue.
We expect to capitalize on the significant investments made over the last several years by refining our enterprise software platform for federated users in our defined customer verticals and completing the development of our AI driven edge hardware platform running our proprietary edge software and analytic platform.
These investments have positioned us to not only significantly grow market share at higher margins in these existing verticals but to also find and/or create opportunities in greenfield spaces where the benefits of AI are just starting to emerge.
Competitive Strengths
We believe that our approach to providing a holistic data management solution that leverages AI is the key to our future success, as much as the foresight to build a scalable and federated data management backend was when we first started our company. Our software and capabilities are more than just tools in a customer’s toolbox, they are integral parts of their day-to-day operational workflow and equally ingrained into their operational processes.
| · | Single Pane of Glass Platform: Our platform brings together disparate edge generated data into one place, structured and unstructured, allowing our customers the ability to visualize multiple analyzed data forms in a true “single pane of glass.” This approach substantially reduces the infrastructure, human and physical, that has been historically needed to view and extract operational value from the customers’ data. | |
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| · | Superior Customer Experience: Our direct approach to customer engagements enables our team to manage the entire customer experience, starting with the first platform demonstration and continuing through installation and long-term employment. This is key to our goal to build partnerships with our customers, which we equate to potential long-term recurring revenue engagements with strong opportunities for expansion within the organization. |
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| · | Ease of Use and Adoption: Our solution is architected such that it can be installed in as little as one hour with minimal direct engagement or support needed, yet ready to support operational engagements of a handful of users and devices to thousands of users and tens of thousands of attached devices. Everything within the architecture is purpose built to be intuitive and straightforward, allowing users to become operationally proficient in short order with limited training. | |
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| · | Hardened and Secure Platform: As a U.S. owned and operated company, our offerings are compliant with the National Defense Authorization Act (“NDAA”), the Commercial Software and the Trade Agreements Act (“TAA”), and the Buy American Act. Thus, cybersecurity and safeguarding data at rest and in transit is factored into everything we do, resulting in our platform having been accredited with numerous Authorities to Operate (“ATO”) for U.S. government agencies for on-premise deployments as well at the Fed Ramp high impact level in the secure cloud. This allows us to bring government-grade security to the larger commercial sector. | |
| · | Significant Cost Savings: Our edge solution enables customers to add AI capabilities to their existing IT infrastructure, allowing them to immediately recognize the operational benefits of our AI platform without having to add expensive backend servers. Additionally, our open approach to edge sensors and devices allows customers to extract the full value out of their existing devices compared to the more common industry standard rip and replace approach. |
Market Opportunity
Airship AI serves a large and rapidly growing addressable market. We determined the total addressable market (“TAM”) based upon publicly-available third-party industry reports on the current and projected markets for edge AI hardware and software offerings as well as federal, state, and local grants and set-aside funding for law enforcement, public safety, and community violence intervention efforts.
In addition to the $7 billion combined edge AI hardware and software addressable market by 2029, growing at a blended compounded average growth rate (“CAGR”) of 21.8%, for 2023 alone the U.S. government has set aside $3.2 billion in discretionary resources for state and local grants and $30 billion in mandatory resources to support law enforcement, crime prevention, and violence intervention, based on The President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2023.
We believe our existing product market fit in the law enforcement vertical supported by our rapidly growing edge AI hardware and software offerings positions us well in this market. We plan to take advantage of this nexus market opportunity by targeting the larger state and local public safety marketplaces as well as commercial customers where our edge AI platform can allow them to participate in joint public-private ventures to improve public safety for their larger communities.
We expect that our market opportunity will continue to grow as we expand our edge AI hardware and software capabilities allowing us to serve our customers more broadly across their operations.
Growth Strategy
We also began to see movement during the fourth quarter of 2025 and into the first quarter of 2026 on several large projects in the federal and commercial marketplace, including several notable awards:
| · | $1.9 million award from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) supporting large National Special Security Events (NSSE) scheduled for 2026. | |
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| · | $2.8 million award from a large commercial customer supporting a technical refresh of deployed hardware and software. |
Our backlog as of December 31, 2025 was $3.3 million.
Our total validated pipeline as of December 31, 2025 was $173.4 million, consisting of single and multi-year opportunities for AI-driven edge, video, and sensor and data management platforms across our customer verticals. Our pipeline includes opportunities at varying stages of progression with expected award timeframes over the next 18-24 months. While many of these opportunities are multi-year engagements which are expected to be highly competitive, they represent years of work of developing the opportunity around our unique value proposition and differentiators in support of a sole source award or to position Airship AI as the company to beat.
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Outlook for 2026. We enter 2026 optimistic about growth opportunities across both the federal and commercial market segments. During the second half of 2025, we began to see returns from investments made earlier in the year to expand our sales and business development organization, reflected in increased customer activity, pipeline development, and pilot deployments.
Based on these results, we have significant additional investments planned across the company, preparing us to execute against anticipated awards and opportunities from the growing pipeline. These investments include additional resources across our software development team, ensuring that we can continue to scale our platform as quickly as our customers need, while operating at the highest levels of cyber-security that our customers demand. As we build out our back-office capabilities, we will continue to add to our customer-facing teams, including more partner-focused sales and marketing personnel.
As part of our on-going digital transformation efforts, we have successfully incorporated AI into our daily operational workflow, leveraging the best of AI to assist with making our existing team and processes more effective and efficient, rather than replacing people or processes. All these efforts are aimed at getting to positive cash flow as soon as possible within 2026, driving increased value for our customers and shareholders.
Looking forward, we expect most of our revenue to come from the federal vertical in 2026, with meaningful new growth in the commercial vertical adding to our overall pipeline for 2027 and beyond.
Federal vertical. In 2025, we expanded our footprint across multiple agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and the Department of Justice (“DoJ”). We initiated multiple new pilot efforts, including our first deployments of rapidly deployable Airship-built hardware and software solutions based on our edge analytics platform, Outpost AI. Our current pipeline includes opportunities we estimate to be in the tens of millions of dollars; however, pipeline represents potential opportunities and is not a guarantee of contract award or revenue.
We believe current U.S. border and homeland security funding priorities support continued demand for solutions aligned with Airship AI’s capabilities. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“OBBA”) (H.R. 1), signed into law on July 4, 2025, includes funding for border infrastructure and technology, including $6.2 billion for border security technology and investments that reference artificial intelligence and machine learning, approximately $46.5 billion for border barrier system construction and enhancements (including items such as cameras and sensors), and $5 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities and checkpoints. We are actively supporting each of these efforts through our growing partner and integrator eco-system, leveraging our long-standing direct customer relationships.
Commercial vertical. In 2026, we plan to continue expanding our regional partner and integrator ecosystem. We believe a partner-led approach can accelerate customer acquisition and deployment efficiency versus solely direct routes to market, particularly where partners bring established customer relationships and complementary capabilities and services that we do not plan to build internally.
Early partner and customer engagements have further reinforced our view of the marketplace that there is not only room for but the need for a new entrant in the marketplace, one that can move quickly and be responsive to customer needs while still providing a robust enterprise level platform capable of meeting demanding operational and security requirements.
Platform expansion. We are expanding the use of our edge AI capabilities across additional sensor modalities and operational platforms, including mobile autonomous platforms. We believe analytics developed for fixed deployments can be adapted to mobile use cases, creating additional product and marketplace opportunities.
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These deployments include emerging partnerships with robotic platforms built to solve physical security and public safety challenges. Early customer engagements to date have been encouraging, noting these initiatives are in development and may not result in commercial deployments or revenue on expected timelines.
Go-to-market focus. We believe early customer engagement, helping shape requirements based on validated operational needs, remains important to our ability to compete effectively. Many opportunities, particularly in the federal market, involve multi-year sales cycles and can represent significant total contract value over their lifetimes (including potential programs that may extend into the $100 million range), but may take years to progress from early-stage activity to awards, if at all. In 2026 and beyond, our sales and business development teams will remain focused on building our pipeline, advancing qualified opportunities, and collaborating with partners to develop and pursue joint programs across both the federal and commercial marketplaces.
Employees
We employed sixty three employees as of December 31, 2025. The employees are headquartered in Redmond, WA and are supported by a growing team at our Customer Center of Excellence located in Charlotte, NC. We employed eight research and development personnel in Taiwan as of December 31, 2025.
Intellectual Property
We do not have any patents and instead rely on trade secrets and know-how in the development of our business. Although large technology companies use patent portfolios as a means of strategic and legal deterrence, we believe it is more advantageous not to disclose our proprietary know-how.