Axon Enterprise may be the smallest competitor in its space — developing evidence-capture technology for law enforcement — but based on its deal flow, it might be the most refined.
The company recently won contracts with the New York Police Department, the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Phoenix Police Department via its acquisition of privately held software play Vievu.
Rick Smith, Axon’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC on Friday that Axon fought hard for the Vievu deal and other acquisitions it’s made in recent months.
“We’re up against little companies like Motorola and Panasonic and L3, so there’s still a lot of competition, but the fact is we’ve been winning the vast majority of the deals because our system performs really well,” Smith told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.
System performance is where Axon thrives relative to its competitors, Smith said. After Axon announced in 2017 that it would give free body cameras to every U.S. police officer, enforcement agencies signed up for field trials to test its equipment.
Following the trials, Axon won nearly every major deal that was proposed, Smith told Cramer.
“When it comes to cameras, it’s really the software ecosystem,” the CEO said. “We’re running the geekiest office in Seattle. We’re up there playing with the big guys. We’re bringing in talent. Our head of AI came from Uber. Our head of software engineering came from Microsoft and from Amazon. So we’re bringing a lot of talent and that’s building a great system.”
Smith also nodded to a 2016 Cambridge University study that showed the efficacy of body cameras in law enforcement. The survey of seven U.S.- and U.K.-based police departments revealed that complaints dropped 93 percent when police wore cameras.
“Much like I’m probably not going to do anything too bad in front of a million people here on camera, you put a camera on and police behave more professionally and the people that they deal with also behave better,” the CEO said.
“Police sitting and typing up reports all day doesn’t make sense when you can record this stuff and actually know what happened,” Smith continued. “This is a phenomenon that we believe is going to go global.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Amazon.
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