You may not know it, but there’s a whole lot more to satellite imagery than Google Earth. New companies with new technology are now entering the market with practical and essential commercial uses of 3D data and models…including flood & wildfire risk modelling for insurance underwriting, terrain dataset for aviation, telecommunications network planning, and railway corridor risk management. Enter
Intermap Technologies Corp. (
TSX.IMP,
OTCQX: ITMSF,
Forum) – a geospatial data company at the heart of several markets experiencing high growth. The Company boasts patented technology, a proprietary data library, and innovative software. Currently, Intermap is a world leader in producing 3D elevation models, used by governments and businesses to understand their terrain environment. Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by the Intermap Technologies’ Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Blott, to introduce this leading-edge technology play to our Stockhouse audience.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH1: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
PB: Yeah, Intermap is 102-year-old company. It was the first ever to put a camera on an airplane 102 years ago during World War 1. It worked for the US army acquiring targets, put a camera on the plane, fly it over the battlefield and that was a very innovative use case for geospatial intelligence back then and so we've been doing this very long time and for me, I got involved in the industry about almost 20 years ago. This is the second geospatial company that I've led. The first one was Sea Base and it focused on sonar technology and Intermap by comparison, we are land and air and space. So yeah, a lot going on a lot of technological evolution and a lot of really exciting both commercial and government use cases.
SH2: Can you update our investor audience and your Intermap shareholders on any new company developments, especially your timely delivery of commercial elevation data and analytics to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense in support of its operations?
PB: Yeah, we announced that recently, very importantly, one of the things that really sets Intermap apart is our global scale. I mean we operate around the world, our key customers their missions on the government side are global and on the commercial, whether it's insurance underwriting or if you think of commercial aviation, their problem sets are also global problem sets and that's where Intermap lives in terms of our sweet spot. Like I said whether it was a hundred years ago focused on a battlefield to acquire targets, 50 years ago focused on the world to launch ICBMs, or more recently helping flood underwriters get hard points to underwrite flood risk and wildfire risk. Where we play is on that large scale problem and Ukraine ministry defense is a subset of that, right? They need to understand their area. They need to understand the surrounding area and they need more than just a picture, a quick look. They need to be able to understand hard points, not just the pixels, right? What are my targets? What is my bomb damage assessment? What is my planning in terms of logistics? All of those are elevation problems. It requires more, it requires a 3D context.
SH3: You’ve also recently announced a U.S. flood insurance risk assessment solution for InsitePro – a software solution company that brings together necessary data and analytics for underwriting natural catastrophe risks. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of this partnership?
PB: Yeah, so InsitePro is a very cool product targeted on the North American market. We have a sister product in Europe called Aquarius with a slightly modified use case there for their particular problem but essentially what it allows the underwriters to do is differentiate product right at the property level with multiple points at the property. So if you are trying to price the risk of a flood and appropriately capture that premium in a risk adjusted way, you need a highly differentiated analysis of a particular property. You can't just sort of use generic flood maps, generic rate maps and the law of large numbers won't help you in an environment with lots of climate change, lots of flooding, lots of hundred-year flood that are occurring every year and that's where InsitePro and our product really differentiates in place.
You're seeing industrywide a sort of a government retrenchment away from the subsidy and the programs that they can no longer afford in this environment of highly evolving climate. So the government's retrenching the way that the industry is operated with government subsidy is rolling back and filling this void, which is about a $5 billion premium hole initially was specialty lines, right? Smaller companies willing to sort of lead steer. There are clients by the dozen and increasingly recently it's the admitted carriers. It's the insurance companies that you'll see on the super bowl advertisers and the big ones and they're coming in force and they're doing huge flood programs and huge fire programs and they're using our data to do it.
SH4: You just launched the expansion of your European insurance geocoding services with global insurance giant Allianz. Can you expand on this initiative for our investor audience?
PB: It's a great question. I mean one of the ways that Intermap for a long time has been successful and will be successful is we don't evangelize to in this case, a very sophisticated industry, right? What we do is we bring the best data, mill spec data to a problem set and a solution that helps them do what they do better and the way we go to market with that is we partner with the big boys, whether that's Lufthansa in aviation, or whether it's in Europe, it's Allianz and it's Generali and they're both our key customers and that's where we start and then we sort of trickle down from there. So we're not telling them how to underwrite, they're telling us how they underwrite and we're integrating the world's best elevation data and software to help them do that better.
SH5: Patrick, can you briefly touch on the company’s newer verticals and future direction visa vis railway risk management, the renewable energy sector, geographic information systems, etc?
PB: That's right and part of my job is the commercialization of this because the use cases are endless and especially as technology and this compute power evolves and the source satellites and all those different images coming from space. We have a rapid growth of use cases and what we do is we target the high growth ones. We target the profitable ones and we target both global scale. Like I said, that's our sweet spot. So whether it's rails, another large logistical, either Countrywide or continent-wide geospatial problem and we are able to leverage the world's best military spec elevation data to help them solve that and we're similarly with telecom and we're dis-intermediating boots on the ground, it's the same thing we do with governments. We dis-intermediate boots on the ground. We allow remote targeting, and we do the same thing on the commercial space. We dis-intermediate very expensive, very large logistical networks and we allow these companies to do their work remotely, highly efficiently, highly cost effectively and with a very high refresh rate in terms of currency and quality of data because we're managing that for them.
SH6: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. How are you placed to expand operations to meet demand?
PB: I focus very much on number one, the productization, right? So when we build our solutions here, which are delivered with software, the key is number one, like I said, scale. Number two the ability to roll that out at scale so that our customers just keep hitting repeat and so when we look at 2022 and we look at the growth in both use cases and also further penetration into these growing customer segments, we're positioned in a way where we're 60 people and I'm not going to have to add any to latch onto those growth trajectories.
SH7: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect with your airborne data collection services and elevation data suite?
PB: Yeah, so the company, we do three things. We collect, we create the data sets and then we deliver with them various ways, depending on how the customer wants to consume them and as I said before, the aviation platform, as opposed to satellites because we work with that data or drones, we work with that data but the aviation platform is the longest business at Intermap. That is part of our COVID impacted business. So that was impacted over the last couple of years with that the whole environment and we're seeing just a rapid reallocation of capital because a lot of that collection work, data creation work is extremely necessary. So whether you're in Asia and you have geopolitical factors, climate factors, our clients there have cities that are sinking into the ocean. They can't defer that spend. We're seeing that roaring back and recently we've made announcements. You're going to see I think in very short order, even more as those dollars start to come back as COVID restrictions ease.
SH8: What separates Intermap from the competition and makes your business model unique?
PB: Well, firstly, we're a technology company, so like I said, we're productizing things that scale and just think in terms of Netflix, whether once you have a product you can sell it over and over and over again to a variety of different customers and even into a variety of different use cases, it's very, very important that it scales. Number two, it's backed by extremely sophisticated and many years of technology investment to be able to do that so quickly, latency is the second factor. So we are able to do it at global scale really, really fast and that's a function of being around a hundred years. It's a function of learning what to do, what not to do and having the right pathway patented and so we're able to deliver solutions that really you can't get anywhere else and then you're seeing that in terms of our business grew through the pandemic because there really wasn't an alternative and these are real problems that our customers need to solve. They value it. So that's where we're differentiated.
SH9: I have to mention your stock has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride this past year. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s a good buy right now?
PB: Well, I am the largest shareholder, so obviously I do track that and I do agree that we are quite ferociously undervalued at the moment. Part of that is exogenous in our industry, there was a lot of particularly satellite SPACs that came to market and that sort of went up and down. So we were impacted just exogenously by market conditions and then the other part of it, I think is just hitting to a point now where we're starting to tip over with that commercial business and you're starting to see some big wins and I think as those big wins start to compound on themselves, both penetrating deeper of the big customers, adding new ones. I think the stock's going to catch up.
SH10: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving forward and what should retail and institutional investors be looking out for?
PB: Yeah, I think firstly, we are really well positioned as a couple of major factors start to take hold and I think the biggest and the obvious one is as much as the world would love to cut defense budgets and even our current administration and the presidential budget is up eight and half percent. So what we want and what's actually happening, that's a US situation but it's also a global situation because the environment is such that people have to have no choice they're going to allocate in that direction and once they do, they need mill spec data, they need mill spec sensors, they need everything that we do. That's a scenario where we have a larger wallets and then the second aspect of it is these other factors like climate change that are requiring a spend. The government budgets they're not infinite. So if they're going to spend more in defense, it's putting pressure on the civil side and you're going to see I think a faster migration of those dollars into the commercial space, whether it's an insurance and aviation. There's billions of billions of dollars of government spend in those sectors right now that are unaffordable that very quickly are becoming market opportunity for commercial vendors and that's why we're dealing with this incredible pull from particularly the large insurance companies that received billions dollars of premium on the table that weren't on the table before.
SH11: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management and board teams, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the 3D digital mapping space?
PB: That's a great question. Number one, across the company we're a high grower but we're lean and I think that's part of the culture and the board's small and it's lean and it's focused. Everybody who's on the board is heavily engaged and they're there for a reason. Jack Hild, really, I mean he's the godfather of commercial space and in the United States and he was the number three person at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. He's been in the industry a long time and he's there because, like me, he agrees that really as we move forward in this world it's a multi-sensor and it's a multi-source data challenge. It's not a single-source or a single-sensor. So birds in the air are really important. So are planes, so are drones, so are ground sensors and the key to it is how you make sense of all the pixels and so we see eye to eye on that and he's laser focused on it and that's a gap in the overall opportunity he's helping Intermap navigate that. Jordan Tongalson another one from Little John, his whole career is built on helping small companies grow and one of the longest established and most successful private equity funds in the United States and so everybody on our board is focused on the company they're engaged and they're there and they're bringing a very unique skillset.
SH12: And finally, Patrick, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked please feel free to elaborate.
PB: Well, thank you and thanks for this opportunity. I think one of the things about Intermap is we have tremendous market opportunities, tremendous blue-chip customers, and we're at a place right now where we're small, we're falling underneath the radar and I think if anybody sort of peels that back even a little bit and looks at our customer base, looks at our tech, looks at our patents, looks at our data, looks at our execution. You know, like myself, the reason I'm a large shareholder of the company is nobody will believe we're going to be small for very long.
For regular updates, visit
www.intermap.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.