Filed by LGL Systems Acquisition Corp.
pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act of 1933
and deemed filed pursuant to Rule 14a-12
under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934
Subject Company: LGL Systems Acquisition Corp.
Commission File No. 333-256129
The following is a transcript of the virtual analyst day event held by IronNet CyberSecurity, Inc. on June 7, 2021. The video recording of the virtual analyst day presentation is expected to made available on the website of LGL Systems Acquisition Corp.
IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
C O R P O R A T E P A R T I C I P A N T S
Nancy Fazioli, Vice President, Investor Relations, IronNet
Rob LaPenta, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, LGL Systems Acquisition Corp.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander, Founder, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, IronNet
William Welch, Co-Chief Executive Officer, IronNet
James Gerber, Chief Financial Officer, IronNet
C O N F E R E N C E C A L L P A R T I C I P A N T S
Andrew Nowinski, D.A. Davidson Research
Mike Cikos, Needham & Company
Jonathan Ho, William Blair
Josh Sullivan, Benchmark Capital
Imtiaz Koujalgi, Guggenheim Securities
Matthew Galinko, Sidoti
Nehal Chokshi, Northland Securities
Gray Powell, BTIG Research
P R E S E N T A T I O N
Nancy Fazioli
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining IronNets Analyst Day. Im Nancy Fazioli, Vice President of Investor Relations. We have a great line-up, and we hope youll find the discussion informative.
Today, you will hear from Rob LaPenta, CFO of LGL Acquisition Corp.; General Keith Alexander, our Founder and Co-CEO; Bill Welch, our Co-CEO; and Jamie Gerber, our CFO.
We have two videos, Q&A sessions, the first on technical and product, second on go-to-market, and the third on financial, and some breaks. If you have a question, kindly hold it until one of the designated Q&A sessions or the general Q&A sessions at the end of the presentation. Thank you.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
The following presentation contains forward-looking statements. For a description of the factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements, including statements regarding IronNets projected financial results, please refer to the disclosure under the heading Risk Factors in the Form S-4 filed by LGL Systems Acquisition Corp. on May 14, 2021. The presentation used today will be posted to LGL Systems Acquisition Corps website.
Id now like to hand it over to Rob LaPenta of LGL Systems Acquisition Corp. Rob?
Rob LaPenta
Great. Thanks, Nancy, and Im Rob LaPenta from LGL Systems Acquisition Corp., here to present our announced combination with IronNet Cybersecurity. We thank you for your interest this afternoon.
Were really excited to introduce the IronNet Cybersecurity team, and the presentation, and really, theres a lot going on in cybersecurity. This couldnt be more timely. We think the Companys business model really, really addresses a lot of the challenges that the industry and commercial and government and ecosystems are facing, so we thank you again.
Going on to our next slide, Im going to get into just some of the transaction points. Ill give you a quick summary of the LGL team, and then well get you over to General Alexander and the team.
Our acquisition, this is a pro-forma enterprise value of $927 million. The combination here is that the IronNet team will be rolling over their entire equityexisting equity into this new entity. Theyll own 72% of a pro-forma equity. The transaction contemplates $125 million PIPE. The PIPE holders youll see in the back of the presentation will own 10% of the pro-forma equity and will assume no redemptions. When you combine the $125 million with the $173 million in the LGL cash in trust, were looking to provide the Company $267 million in cash to the balance sheet at closing. That is net of fees, and thatll assume no redemptions.
The use of proceeds will be continued build-out of the sales and marketing infrastructure thats in place, accelerate R&D and product offerings, and lastly, leave some cash on balance sheet for any M&A opportunities that the team looks to pursue, funded solely by LGL cash in trust after redemptions and proceeds from the PIPE.
Valuationthe $927 million pro-forma EV equates to 17.1 times Fiscal Year 22 and 8.4 times Fiscal Year 23 revenue. Keep in mind, Fiscal Year 23 approximates calendar year 21, and Fiscal Year 23 approximates calendar year 22, just to make it easy for you. This applies a pro-forma equity value of $1.2 billion, and on the last bullet there, I think you can read that, attractive valuation with transformational cybersecurity platform.
The LGL team has evaluated a lot of transactions as part of our work with the SPAC. We have not come across anything as differentiated as, really, the IronNet Cybersecurity team. We think the technology feasibility and behavioral analytics, the model of a Collective Defense model is really timely in the marketplace, and then combined with the exceptional Management team, its a great package, and were really excited for you to dig in and do some work on it.
The next slide just shows you a little bit from our team. We have a broad team. Its been very helpful in terms of the sourcing and evaluating transactions. We have folks here that have been allocating capital as corporate stewards. We have portfolio managers, research analysts, a lot of folks with expertise in cybersecurity, folks from private equity, and lastly, teams here that have brought private companies public. Weve been working with the IronNet team. Were very excited to continue to help them as they transition from a private Company into a public domain, and Ive referenced, weve evaluated a lot of transactions. This was highly differentiated, and, of course, very timely.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Then with that, one of the other things about the IronNet team is the technical (inaudible) be what they are, and the differentiated, I think, approach to the marketplace, but theyre a very mission-focused team. Thatll come out in the presentation, and thats something that also really, really sets them apart.
With that, if you go to the next snapshot, I usually read a quote from the General, and then theres some payment for doing this, but take a look at that. I think that really, really encapsulate the team and the opportunity, and really, whats going on in the marketplace, so now Im pleased to introduce you to General Keith Alexander. Hes the Founder of IronNet, served our country as a four-star General, former Director of the NSA, Founding Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, widely respected in government and private sector circles for defending our nation against cybersecurity attacks.
With that, its my pleasure to introduce you to General Keith Alexander. General?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thanks, Rob. Thanks for that introduction, and for those of you have joined, the inside joke is every time Rob says something nice about me, I have to pay him 20 bucks, and this has been about the 80th time, so Im into him about $1,600 right now, but other than that, were on a mission to transform the way we do cybersecurity and address the significant shortfalls that we see in terms of personnel, detection, and malware, knowledge sharing, and crowdsourcing. IronNet has developed a differentiated solution that leverages artificial intelligence-driven behavioral analytics and Collective Defense.
Next slide, please.
I had the privilege and honor of running the National Security Agency for almost nine years, leading our nations offensive cyber capabilities and establishing the U.S. Cyber Command; two jobs, one paycheck. Thats how our government works. I spent 40 years in the military and the intelligence community addressing (inaudible) problems almost entirely associated with networks, computers, and cybersecurity.
Also presenting today are Bill Welch, our Co-CEO, and our Chief Revenue Officer of Zscaler, former. Bill scaled the business around the Companys novel approachZscalers novel approach that today is the industry standard. He then replicated this as the President of zero-trust leader, Duo Security, and it was purchased by Cisco for $2.35 billion just before they were going public.
Also presenting is our Chief Financial Officer, Jamie Gerber. Jamie has over 25 years experience as a CFO, and tremendous public company experience. Jamie understands metrics, forecasting, and needs of a public company. He has instilled that at IronNet as a metrics and benchmarking-driven operating model for our financial team.
Bill, Jamie, and the team we have assembled has an incredible network of eight players in sales, marketing, engineering, and operations that have enabled us to recruit from high impact and build a great, world-class team. Weve assembled a public Company ready Management team and Board.
Highlights from the Boardyou can see here we have Ted Schlein from Kleiner Perkins and Don Dixon from ForgePoint, both recognized in the investor community as leaders in cybersecurity.
We also have Mike McConnell and Mike Rogers who served in the government. Mike McConnell was the Director of National Intelligence; Mike Rogers, Chair of the Intel Committee; and Jack Keane, who was Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
We also have Bridgewater and Temasek, who were first customers, and are now investors in our Company.
Next slide, please.
IronNet at a glance. I want to go back to 2006 in Iraq where our forces were taking increased casualties, in part because our intelligence took too long to get to the combat brigades. Every brigade collected information on the terrorists. It was hard to share all of that information across brigade boundaries. Terrorists and adversaries could easily cross those boundaries without risk of capture. We see the same issue in cyberspace today. In Iraq, we built a system to rewire Iraq, bring all of that information together, cutting the time of collection to operational use from 16 hours to one minute. This included real-time collaboration and sharing across brigade boundaries, a variation of Collective Defense, and the first year of the real-time regional gateway helped us take down 3,950 bad guys, and Dave Petraeus credits this system with breaking the back of the resistance.
When we started IronNet, we faced a very similar issue in cyber; too slow, information (inaudible), adversaries evaded detection, limited knowledge sharing, and the attacks were increasing, and they continue today. Thats the problem that IronNet addresses. Were attacking a $25 billion security market, and that market is expanding. Within that market, we have a differentiated technology. Current technology is slow and manual, but most importantly, detects less sophisticated and already known signature-based attacks. We dont just find existing attacks. We use advanced AI-driven behavioral analytics to detect new, non signature-based attacks such as SolarWinds. This market is commonly referred to as network detection and response.
Ill give you an analogy of what were trying to do here using air traffic control. If you think about how radars working in developing a collective picture of air traffic control so all air traffic controllers and planes are safely operated, we have this great picture that ensures the safety of flight. We dont have a picture in cyberspace. Every company has its own picture of whats hitting that, and only what they know based on those events that they already know about. They dont have a way of sharing the anomalies; the unknown unknowns. We have behavioral analytics that allow us to do that, and so by sharing that information among companies, we can create a picture that, with anonymized data, can not only be shared to protect collectively those companies, and well talk about that, but it can also be shared with the government, and thats where the Collective Defense goes.
Today, youre seeing a lot of questions, are we going into a cyber war? Its up in the press today, and the question is, I think were going to see increased cyber engagements, and this is what we have to fix as a nation and what our allies have to fix; how we defend in this space. Our cloud-based scalable platform incorporates two main layers: IronDefense, which ingests about two trillion data flows a year, analyze, correlates that data using AI and machine learning, and produces relevant threat data. We layer on top of that IronDome, our Collective Defense platform, which brings in the concept of Collective Defense that I was just talking about, and shares that information and intelligence across organizations, sectors, and governments, knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing.
Our cornerstone customer gives us fundamentally new business model, and Bills going to go into that in detail. Our unique team, our world-class trained cyber hunters and experience has allowed us to create a deep, competitive moat; get access to large, cornerstone companies; retain and expand them; and execute this at scale as a fast-growing, public Company.
Next slide, please.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
We understand well the problems in cybersecurity today. If we step back, here are the biggest problems (inaudible) and their team faces. This is what is bothering them. These are the issues. This is the problem. The threats are constantly growing and getting worse. It is impossible to keep up with the evolving attack techniques. Many are from nations like China, Russia, and Iran, but most of todays cybersecurity solutions are point solutions that only look at one thing; for example, a, endpoint, a web gateway, or a firewall. No company is looking across all that to get all the attacks together, and as a consequence, we are losing the forest for looking at the trees.
As you know, every company has a security operations center to defend against attacks. The stock analysts can see the threats that their own company faces, but are completely blind to different attacks happening to other companies around them. Making the problem worse, theres a massive talent gap to hire enough qualified stock analysts. This is only making matters worse.
To summarize, there is a need for a complete solution that can stay ahead of the attackers, provide full visibility into the enterprise, and be intelligent enough to make up for the lack of security analysts.
Next slide.
Why did we start IronNet? In 2008, the Defense Department was attacked by Russia in an operation known as Buckshot Yankee. NSA detected the exploit into DoDs classified network and developed and fielded a system to mitigate the compromise in 22 hours. No one else in the world could have done this with all of the encryption, decryption, and other capabilities needed. Secretary Gates realized we had special skills, and told me that he wanted me to stand up U.S. Cyber Command. I looked at Secretary Gates and, of course, said, Yes, sir, and he said, We need to defend the nation, and I said, Absolutely, we have to defend the nation, but we cant see the nation. One major problem, we can only see the attacks in the commercial infrastructure when they tell us about it. You cant see attacks, so you cant defend against it. We built IronNet to address that problem, and Ill talk about that in a future slide coming up, because my successor, General Nakasone, has said the same thing. We cant see the dots. We cant correlate what we cant see.
Attackers continue to innovate (inaudible) and advance, the game evolves rapidly, and the stakes are higher each year, as the legacy of attacks show. The concept of proactive defense will alter the cybersecurity landscape. Companies no longer will have to defend in isolation, but can and must operate as part of a collective team. IronNet is not just a better mousetrap, but a force multiplier. We strengthen not only the defense of our customers, but make the rest of the security vendors even stronger, and we present an effective solution for new real-time public-private sharing.
Next slide, please.
What does IronNet do? Were a network detection response platform that identifies cyber threats through the use of AI-driven behavioral analytics to find anomalies and network traffic behavior with a Collective Defense solution. Before I describe our differentiated solution, Im going to ask Bill to provide context for what NDR is, and why NDR and IronNet are critical parts on the security stack.
Over to you, Bill.
William Welch
Thank you, General.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Team, from my two decades at cybersecurity companies, we know that the security landscape is evolving, but theres one constant that the attackers always looking to find a way in, and, as the General mentioned, NDR technology, or network detection response, was really developed to determine if the attackers in your network, what theyre doing, and if they are trying to cause you harm. Once we have determined an attacker is in the network, the response part of NDR provide the actions that addresses those threats. These actions are most effective when theyre done automatically and at computer speed, so by analyzing that network traffic using AI-driven behavioral analytics, which the General spoke about, IronDefenses NDR can detect sophisticated evasion methods and zero day threats like SolarWinds, which well talk about in a moment.
I want to make sure that you all understand a couple of things, though, related to this industry. Customers do not hire IronNet instead of, for example, CrowdStrike, which protects the endpoint, or Zscaler, which I have some knowledge of, which provides a secure web gateway. NDR platforms ingest the data produced by these point solutions and other centers that we have on the network to analyze the data for these behavioral anomalies to identify the threats. NDR is part of the security stack, and provides a complete picture of threats on an enterprise network, so in other words, were focused inside the network to find bad actors that have gotten past the other point solutions.
SolarWinds, for example, lived in the networks for months before it caused harm. We found SolarWinds on customer systems six months before everyone else did, shutting it down before it could do damage in our customer environments. That is why some have called IronNet the CrowdStrike of the network.
With that, Im going to transition back over to the General so he can give you more of an understanding of what makes IronNet unique comparable. General?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thanks, Bill.
On the left here, you see transforming cybersecurity through AI-driven behavioral analytics and Collective Defense. What does that mean exactly? At its core, IronNet does three things to secure a network.
First, we collect data coming in from the entire security stack. That includes partner companies, as Bill mentioned.
Second, we analyze that data to determine if theres any malicious behavior on the network and provide the response that is in IronDefense.
Third, we share that data across companies to defend as a team.
That is Collective Defense, which we call IronDome.
Our solution enhances performance, and is a dramatic force multiplier similar to what we achieved in Iraq, improves threat detection, and uniquely creates an enormous network effect of more data, better analytics, enhanced intel, and more customers, etc.
Next slide, please.
Our mission space is experiencing significant momentum. The administration has issued an executive order and is mandating enhanced cybersecurity measures across public and private enterprises. Majors see change needed in how industries and nations protect themselves in cyberspace is evident here, how they share and how they work together. Page 1 of the May 12 executive order reinforces this. Protecting our nation from malicious cyber actors requires the federal government to partner with the private sector. The partner sector must adapt to the continuously changing threat environment, ensure its products are
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
built and operate securely, and partner with the federal government to foster a more secure cyberspace. On here you can see the quote from General Nakasone. He said, I cant see the dots. Were the Company thats going to help him see those dots. The DarkSide attack, Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and recent comments from the Director of the NSA all underscore the need for public-private cooperation. We feel we are uniquely positioned at the intersection of these paradigm shifts, and our customers stand to greatly benefit from our products.
Next slide.
IronNet sits in the middle of the security stack, working on ingesting not only netflow data, but we also ingest data from the endpoints, as Bill mentioned, like CrowdStrike; from the firewall like Palo Alto networks; from the web security gateway like Zscaler; and other tools, as shown here. As attacks become more advanced, so must your defenses. IronNet is a cloud-based solution, and it allows us to scale significantly. As I mentioned before, our IronDefense platform analyzes and correlates data through behavioral analytics to identify threats. IronNet then shares this intel between companies and industries through our IronDome platform, and I would point out that that information is anonymized. It allows us to share an unlisted stack of 2015. Theres no content communications, no intellectual property, no customer name.
Ill give you an example why this is important. Imagine 90 mid-sized banks, each with 10 people working as hard as they can to defend their bank. The amount of information that they see every year is doubling. The number of protocols is doubling. The number of devices is doubling. Their world is doubling every year, but they cant double the number of people, and down the road is another bank with 10 people doing the same job, and another bank and another bank. Theres 90 of them in the mid-sized bank coalition. Think about this, 90 banks with 10 people each, each defending themselves. Now imagine those 90 banks work together in Collective Defense. You now have 900 people working together, share anonymized data about the dots that General Nakasone was talking about, give that to the government, and we now have a process for defending the nation and the finance sector and the healthcare sector and the energy sector.
Our analytics create alerts. Our patented expert system gives us the insights into these alerts. IronDome helps us create these insights. Anyone who has a similar behavior, its correlated automatically, and well talk about that in SolarWinds. The power of Collective Defense is that companies can defeat attackers as a team. IronNet is that force multiplier.
Next slide.
SolarWinds/SUNBURST is an example of how the attacks today are not only sophisticated, but have wide-scale impacts on the supply chain, an ability to disrupt, not only the enterprise, but nations based, in this case, the U.S. government. How did an attack like SolarWinds succeed with every one of the 18,000 companies and agencies that were ultimately affected last year? The attack came from a trusted source. The malware spotted the conventional defenses set there to report on it, and removed references to itself from the conventional endpoint and firewall logs that were trying to report on its presence. The recon command and control activity stayed in the noise of regular activity.
IronDefense analytics operate where the attacker cannot see us, and thus, cannot try to turn us off. It can see through these methods in cutting to noise. SolarWinds is a real life example of how we detected asalmost as soon as it appeared in one of our customer networks back on 31 May, 2020, six months earlier than everyone else, as Bill mentioned. Our behavioral analytics detected command and control at network speed and sent it to the cloud. A few days later, another customer was hit with the same thing. When that was sent to the cloud, it was automatically correlated, and others went on as well.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
In our Customer Advisory Board meeting, one of our clients, a major global investment fund, said they had up to 90 products in their stack. IronNet was the only one to detect and advance (inaudible). He went on to tell the other participants that our system was six times faster, and he was now determined what he could pull up. After the customer meeting, he went back to his team and said he wanted to expand IronNet considerably throughout their enterprise and their member companies, and he is doing just that.
Some of you may be asked if detectif we detected the Colonial Pipeline DarkSide attack. The good news is none of our customers were attacked by that. However, had they attacked one of our customers, we were confident that our software would have detected the initial phishing attack. As a precaution, we run something we call prove the negative with a threat defined query in all of our customer networks when we see this to ensure that they are okay and safe, and then we tell them that so they can tell their c-suite and their board should that come up.
Ill now turn it over to Nancy.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks. We are going to now show a brief video that will highlight the cyber challenges that the private and public sectors are facing, and well follow that with some Q&A.
Video Presentation
[A video of the ABC News Program This Week, that aired on May 30, 2021 was shown. LGL Systems Acquisition Corp. previously filed a transcript of this video with the SEC pursuant to Rule 425 on June 14, 2021.]
Okay. As I mentioned, were going to now follow to some Q&A session focused on technical and product-related questions, and well have a short break thereafter.
I believe we have a couple of questions here. Jonathan Ho, Id like to give you opportunity to ask a question. I think youre unmuted now.
Jonathan?
Jonathan Ho
Can you hear me?
Nancy Fazioli
Yes, we can hear you.
Jonathan Ho
My first question is how is it that youre able to detect these threats when others are not able to, and how sustainable is this? AI behavioral also has a history of false positives, so how are you able to be six times more accurate than others?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thats a great question. Let me just start with that one, and I think theres two parts that youve asked. How do we detect what others miss? Most start with a signature-based solution. Think of that as Suricata rules or the proofpoint set of rules, and then they grab all the information that comes from those rules and run behavioral analytics over the results of the events that those rules dictate. With that process, youre only going to see what the rules see, and thats the shortfall in the way they do it.
What we do is we actually look at netflow data packet behavior, and extract features on that packet behavior. Think of (inaudible), inter-packet arrival time, (inaudible), all these differenttheres about 120 features you can look at a packet and determine whats going on with that packet. You can take that feature data, put that into aif you will, a database, and run analytics over them at network speed. What that allows us to do is something that nobody else is doing today, and that is to see events that others miss, and the DNS command and control from SolarWinds was a case in point.
Your second part of that was what about the false positives? False positives is a big issue for all behavioral analytics, and ours included, so what did we do about that? We created an expert system with machine learning and AI, and what that does is it takes all of the information from endpoints, from the SIM, from all these other things, plus what our experts in that analytic would look at to understand is this a real DNS command and control issue, is it malicious, is it suspicious, or is it benign, and it would grade it, so youll see we gradeeveryone is graded by the machine, so were not just serving that to the customer, heres a bunch of data. Good luck with it. We actually grade everything and say, these are known malicious. Look at these. These are in a high category, suspicious, and then these are ones we dont think you need to worry about, so we grade everything in that way, and that allows us to drive down false positives.
Theres yet another area that comes into this, though. When you think about the number of events that people are looking at, knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing are now part of that future, so if I say its bad, automatically everybody who has that same behavior benefits from that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing, so we get two sets of benefits here; the machine learning and AI that we have with our expert system, and the crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing that we have with our IronDome IronDefense.
Jonathan Ho
Thank you for that explanation. Just one clarification. When you say that youre able to look at the netflow data, a lot of the firewalls out there, and perhaps, Zscaler, are looking at north-south traffic thats going into and out of networks or into and out of the cloud, but my understanding is that with netflow, you can also look at east-west traffic inside of the network. Is that an important differentiator for your solution, and does that allow you to catch things that have gotten past the perimeter already?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, so its both. Its both of those, Jonathan, and you hit a key point, so you can look at both the north-south and the east-west. The east-west gives you insights for lateral movement and other things like that. On the north-south, though, on the manyjust look at a few subsets of the features, Zscaler included. Great company and a great partner, but theyre looking at a different part of their web gateway. Were looking at all the behaviors associated with packets that go through, so we see things in more detail than theyre going to see with what theyre doing. I think thats hugely important.
Does that help?
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Jonathan.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Well go to the next question with Mike Cikos at Needham. Mike?
Mike Cikos
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question here. I did have a question on the ingesting of data. Can you just further hash out all these different sources of data youre pulling in and tying together, where is thathow does that process take place, and where are you guys doing this analysis and correlation with respect to your customers IT environments?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, so what we do is we set up two parts of the environment. Great question, Mike.
First, we have a sensor that sits in their traffic. We have both a virtual and a physical sensor depending on how they want to operate. With that, we can also store on their site pcap data so that they can go back and look at something thats of interest, and then we send that data theif you take the metadata from our flow extraction, so we extract features from that flow data and we send it into a database, and from that database on their network, we run that in their environment, and we generate alerts. Those alerts then go through an expert system that looks at each alert individually and adds to it information from the firewall, from the endpoint, from the SIM, plus a number of different enrichment things like is this a frequently-used website? What are the things that we want to understand about? What would an analyst go do manually to determine if that alert is important to them? They do research.
What we do, because there are false positives, we say, why waste an analysts time when the machine can do all that, so we actually run all that through our machine, and then we list out the results, so when an analyst clicks on it, they dont have to go through all that. If theyre interested in that, they can see everything thats happened, what the expert system has done, and if another analyst has looked at it and its in the dome, they get the benefit of that knowledge as well.
Does that help, Mike?
Mike Cikos
It does. It does. Thank you for that, and then the follow-up, with all these alerts being pushed, and were talking about the analyst going through the data, but Im trying to think about it in the context of this community defense. Is that being automatically pushed to all your customers, and is that automaticallyis that defense automatically taking shape for them, or is there some manpower resources required to adopt those?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thats a great question. No, thats great, Mike. Youre hitting exactly on where this is, wherewhat we do, and why this differentiates itself.
If I see something, lets say Im a really good DNS command and control guy, and Ive got really good knowledge on that, and I say, whoa, this is bad. I say its malicious. Everybody who has that event or that type of event is automatically notified at network state. It goes out to their entire system. Youve got a bad thing, heads up, so think of it as a fire alarm. Youve got one and everybody knows, and then when you look at it, you can now have a discussion and say, well, heres what I see. I dont understand why youre saying its bad. Can you help me? Im not familiar with domain name server command and control. Why is that? Well, we look down three domain levels, which we actually did in the SolarWinds. Most people stop at the first subdomain level. We found some things in the third subdomain level that were very important. We listed that out. The expert system laid out what it saw in all that.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Thats the type of help that I think is needed, so what youre doing is youre doing what a machine can do very good. It can grab all that data source, it can lay it out, it can grade every event, so you can have a million events, its going to grade them all, and the good part is a human didnt have to look at that yet. Then its going to rank order them. Heres the ones that are above a 900. Heres the ones above 800. Heres above 700. Heres the ones we dont think you should worry about. Now, we put the ones you dont think we should worry about. We dont throw them away. We say, thats odd, but we dont see anything bad to that right now. Then if something were to occur that makes us think its bad, so now I think you have a DNS command and control. Were waiting for a response, and if the response in the SolarWinds was like a Cobalt Strike Beacon that comes back, then those two would be paired together and youd know you have something really important. We do that as well.
Does that help, Mike?
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Mike.
Im going to turn next to Josh Sullivan of Benchmark Capital. Josh?
Josh Sullivan
Good afternoon.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Hey, Josh.
Josh Sullivan
Can you just go over, what is the main incentives for those other players in the cybersecurity stack to work with IronNet on new attack vectors? Is this information that just isnt valuable to them for their individual tools, or do you need the customer to say, hey, listen, IronNets got a great product. Its very valuable to us. Please provide them with the information they need.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Its really the latter. Customers are coming in and saying, hey, we want to CrowdStrike you guys, Palo Alto. Work with IronNet and what theyre doing. It helps both of us, and to be honest, the cybersecurity companies are saying, look, the better we partner together, the better were going to support companies, and we all want to do that, and so its actuallyI think youre seeing a conversion, so many of these companies now working together for the good of the companies they support. The better we work together, the better it helps our customers and the more they appreciate it, so thats like a double bonus.
We get that from all of our customers, especially in the energy sector, the CISOs (phon) said, yes, can you also work with this, so you saw publicly, we talked about Dragos, and looking at OT. How do you build IT and OT, so those are things that bringing those together helps the energy sector, and I think thats part of the future; working together. I think thats got to be where we go, not only as a Company, but where sectors, states, and nations are going to go.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Does that help, Josh?
Josh Sullivan
It does. It does. Thank you.
Maybe just one more, just how resilient are the behaviors? Youre looking at the packet level. Are these pretty static behaviors, or are these updated continuously? Just whats the differentiating factor there?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, its updated continuously, and its an evolving area, and when I say that, think about this. Its actually, with machine learning and AI, there are things that we can do that were patenting that allows us to see events that others cannot see by the way we cluster events around known malware that is not a signature, but a close association with a signature. You cant do that any other way than what were doing, so that gives us a great opportunity and a great advantage. I think what that really does is it says to companies, in the future, where are we going? Were going to go to this type of system which integrates with others, exchanges data with the endpoint, with the firewall, with the SIM, and allows us to begin to use this machine learning, AI expert system to help defend networks and share that across companies. Thats what I think is the future of cybersecurity. We have to do that. There is no other way to see the unknown unknowns, and thats whats kicking everybodys butt.
If you look at all the stuff thats happened over the last six months, nobody knew about SolarWinds. Nobody saw the Microsoft hack. Nobody saw Colonial, if you look at all, and the reason is theyre looking for what they know and the bad guys are changing it to something they dont know, so you have to go to this part. It is harder. We spent seven years creating it. Its like the seven-year itch, and its not been easy. Thats why we brought in Bill who has great experience in building companies here and helping us take this to a commercially viable Company. We have great technology, and then I think its patented, both this and what we call IronNet 2.0, so thanks for that question.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Josh. Next to Taz Koujalgi from Guggenheim Securities. Taz?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
You may be on mute, Taz.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Sorry about that. Can you guys hear me now?
Nancy Fazioli
We can hear you.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Perfect. Hey, guys.
I have a couple of questions. Number one is who else does what you guys do? Can you talk about the competitive landscape, who you guys compete with, when customers buy you guys, who do they (inaudible) IronNet against; and number two is can you talk a little bit about the deployment model, your form factor? Are you guys on-prem? Are you guys in the cloud? Is it a SaaS model versus an on-prem license model, so those two questions?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Okay, so real quick, we normally get compared withDarktrace is probably the biggest one, Vectra and ExtraHop. Those are the ones that people see in thewhat we call behavioral analytics. There is a big differentiation there. Most of them start with Suricata-based rules to actually create their events. Thats a shortfall that they have that means they will not see some of the stuff that we see, and we can prove that with our cyber threat emulations. More importantly, youre not sharing the known knowns and correlating that data. Thats another value that they need, so thats who we compared with. I think Bill brought a great point out earlier when he said think about IronNet. It is a CloudStrike for the net itself, and thats what companies are actually saying about us. I think thats part of it.
Now, our deployment model. Weve worked hard over the last few yearsBill canBill will smile about going from a refrigerator to virtual capability in the cloud, so we wanted to goit takes way too long to grow a lot of equipment and do all that. We can now spin up the capability in the cloud in 15 minutes. Thats good, and we have virtual sensors as well. Many customers want an on-prem sensor, but each of those, were talking a day or less to do all that and to set up a customer. Thats part of the future, so they get a choice.
Then finally, some are going to say, I dont want to go to the cloud, so we have a (inaudible) ready, Nutanix (phon) version that we can deploy on their infrastructure, and we can spin that up, and we actually demonstrated that on (inaudible) in any environment. Youve got that Nutanix. We can fire it up and we can run our system there, so for companies or countries that want their own infrastructure, we can do that as well.
Does that help, Taz?
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Yes, it does, and just surprised how you have customers who are running (inaudible) on Azure so people who are on the cloud, you can still deploy IronNet sensors and your (inaudible) coreyour core back end on theon public clouds as well?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thats correct. Thats correct. In fact, we have a great partnership with them, and its growing.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Thanks, Taz.
Ill move next to Gray Powell from BTIG. Gray?
Gray Powell
Great. Thanks. Can you hear me okay?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
We can.
Nancy Fazioli
We can hear you. Thanks.
Gray Powell
Cool. Yes, so I had a few questions here, and I think youve pretty much hit on this first one, but yes, as you look at the other vendors in the NDR space like Darktrace and Vectra and ExtraHop, what do you say is the biggest one or two points of differentiation? Is it the data sharing capabilities with IronDome, or is it just the overall effectiveness of your AI detection rates?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Well, the most visual one people come to the fastest is the Collective Defense through IronDome. That differentiates us from all of them. Hidden underneath it is the foundation of the way we do behavioral analytics, so its those two, actually. The second one, the behavioral analytics and the differentiation there is significant. It means were going to see things they will not see. The Collective Defense, though, is the important thing for what were doing to help defend companies, sectors, states, and nations. You need to see the dots. General Nakasone said, I cant see the dots. Were creating the dots that the private sector can use and working together, knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing, and because theyre anonymized, theres no personally identifiable information, no content or communication, no company name, they can be shared with the government and the government can say, wow, why is that happening? Imagine sharing all that on the SolarWinds. The government could have shut this down in June of last year. Thats where we should have been. Thats part of the future.
Gray Powell
Okay. Thats really helpful, and then this is a hopefully not too basic question, but do you bill separately for the detection capability versus the threat intelligence from IronDome? If a customer wanted to, could they just purchase a smallcould they just cover a small portion of their assets with the detection piece of your products, but then get all of the crowdsourced benefits from IronDome? Im just trying to think through that dynamic.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, so they can determine how much they want to do, when, and they can still do that in the Dome and benefit from that. Most companies, though, want to see whats going on throughout their infrastructure, and they go for the whole thing. They find that is the most viable. I would say the vast majority do it all. Some say, Id like to test it on some, and I think thats where they say, let me test a 10 gig thing over here. Im going to test this data center in Ohio and lets do it this way, so we start with that, and then they say, wow, okay, I really need to see all my events. I need to see it across my entire enterprise.
Does that make sense?
Nancy Fazioli
Yes. Thank you very much, Gray, and were going to move to Andrew Nowinski of D.A. Davidson. Andrew?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Andrew Nowinski
Great. Thank you very much. This is very interesting. Thank you for the presentation, General.
I just had a high-level question. Maybe if you go back to the first mega breaches of Target and Home Depot back in 2013, theres always been an obvious need to share information with other entities to prevent those same types of attacks from happening again, yet its never happened, and breach activity has continued unabated for the last 10 years, so how willing do you think are government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies, to share data with IronDome, and then similarly, what has changed now that enterprises willare now willing to share their data with their potential competitors?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, thats a great question, and in complete candor, not all companies yet have bought into sharing their data, but 90%-plus are moving down that road very quickly. The energy sector en masse is going down that road, and were seeing that across the defense industrial base. Were seeing that in healthcare. Were seeing that in some of the finance sector, and in some of the hedge fund community, so I believethis is an area that Ive lived my whole life, and Ive worked both the offense and the defense, and if you want to defend in this space, youve got to do essentially what were talking about here. Its the only way we could think of to defend our nation.
Now, with respect to are they willing to share? Absolutely. Ive talked to the intelligence community and the Defense Department. They want to share. They need a vehicle to share. Its one thing everybody wants them to share whats going to go with my software? Thats something they may not see and others may see, but what they can do is they can say, oh, Iyoure seeing A, I think A is bad, and heres what I can do, and they dont need to say, oh, its coming from intelligence agency one, two, three, or four. They just can say its the U.S. government. This is bad. Everybody benefits from that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing. More importantly, Andrew, what they can do is the intelligence community, and my old place, NSA and Cyber Command, can say, now, what the heck are they up to?
Re-imagine SolarWinds. We are detecting that now in May of 2020. June, were seeing whats going on. We can be blocking that at the same time our offensive teams are looking at whats the SVR doing to our country and why are they doing it? Lets send them a message right now, just take down part of their network or do whatever theyve got to do, and look, they get the message. That ends there. Thats where we need to be. Thats what we have to do, and it requires, as you point out, the government sharing, the private sector sharing, weve got to work this together. I think that will come, and I think that will be good for all of us.
Andrew Nowinski
Thank you, and then what kind of vetting do you do of companies that want to participate in IronDome? There could be, certainly, some companies who are nefarious organizations. How do you give at thosethat 10% of enterprises that are unwilling, so far, to share thatto give them the confidence that their data is secure and that this is the right community to share data with?
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, a great point. Theres a couple of tests that we can do on that. So far, it has been easilyeasy for us to regulate and go through, and the second part would be there are things that we can do to test to see the efficacy of some of the people that were doing. Work to be done in that area, for sure. Its a great question, Andrew. Now, the nice part is they dont know how the events and the alerts are actually correlated and they dont see all that, so an adversary that comes into this, this is going to be part of the give-and-take of cybersecurity is understanding whos trying to penetrate what. There are things that we can do to hide and do that that will evolve as we go forward.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Great question, and things that were working on. Thanks.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Thanks, Andrew, and thanks to all of you for your questions. Were going to move to a short five-minute break here, so well start again at 1:05, and let you take that short break. Thank you again, and if you had additional questions, we will have a general question session at the end. Thanks.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Okay. Welcome back, everyone.
Ill now let Bill, who has deep experience in scaling businesses at both Zscaler and Duo, walk through our plans for how we plan to replicate his prior success and do it here at IronNet. Over to you, Bill.
William Welch
Thanks, General.
As the General shared with you, I have seen the security industry evolve from legacy providers such as Symantec. I worked at Symantec, and I saw the evolution from the inside of next generation security providers like Zscaler and Duo. Point solutions are providing point protection, not comprehensive protection like the General and all of us have been talking about today, so no existing vendor in the market, to our knowledge, is approaching cybersecurity like IronNet, so after I helped Zscaler become the industry standard for cloud security, I then went to Duo where I was part of the next generation two-factor authentication of that company. I was pursuing the next category-defining company, which is why I chose IronNet. See, Ive seen how cloud adoption has evolved over the past few years, and I believe that Collective Defense and knowledge sharing will be the new way for cybersecurity.
This slide tells you a couple of things that I want you to take away.
Number one is many of the companies represented here were not considered household names by all of us in the security world five years ago. Now we consider them as next generation security leaders. These companies identified security industry pivot points very early. They delivered on the innovation of value curve better and faster than anyone else. The companies helped customers do this, and the investors who backed these companies, as you all know, saw great rewards.
IronNet has identified a security pivot point. Were the only Company, to our knowledge, that takes this Collective Defense approach, so let me repeat that. Were the only Company that allows a customer to move from security in isolation to security in teams, and we believe that, due to our product capabilities and our unique business model with Collective Defense, that were going to be part of the next generation leaders that investors will come to know as defining and transforming cybersecurity.
Next slide.
We go after multiple segments similar to what Zscaler and CloudStrike did. I can speak from my Zscaler experience when we sold a secure web gateway, but we set the vision for cloud security. IronNets doing the same thing. Were starting with an addressable market serving the network traffic analysis, or NTA, and network detection and response, which is the NDR space. Were dominating in that space. Its
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
growing because of everything youre seeing in the news from SolarWinds to Colonial Pipeline to Microsoft, and all these other similar attacks. In this market, Gartner lists our competitors as Darktrace, Vectra, and ExtraHop. However, theres a larger global TAM that we have the opportunity to grow into, including endpoint, web security, MSS DDoS prevention as identified by our customers.
Our platform for innovation is the vision to expand in the global, as well as the U.S. markets. Weve already had great success in EMEA and APJ, which Ill talk about later on. In addition, our total addressable market, or TAM, as you all know, is growing with the advent of 5G, IoT, and increased Internet usage, expanding the need for IronNet and this concept of Collective Defense. You might have noticed recently in your readings that CrowdStrike recently increased their TAM, which we completely agree with. Weve kept our TAM conservative, but we believe that its similarly expanding across the cybersecurity space.
Next slide.
This is the first Company Ive been at where we have this concept of a network effect, and I know youve seen network effects like Facebook and Twitter drive expansion and increase usage. It expands the marginal return for each new party that joins, as well as the cost of leading that platform. Lets talk about on the technical side. On the technical network effect, IronNet, at its core, as the General described, is an advanced, AI-driven behavioral analytics platform. We leverage our artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to deliver these high-fidelity analytics required to detect these unknown threats, as weve described today. In addition, we provide advanced enrichment techniques via our expert system to ensure great levels of low false positive rates and great visibility, all of it done at network speed and cloud scale.
On the customer network effect, a flywheel is created as more customers join the IronNet Collective Defense. This creates a customer flywheel based around a cornerstone customer. Youll hear that term a couple of times today, cornerstone customers and community customers, who then help us as a result of getting a cornerstone customer to recruit community customers. These cornerstone and community customers strengthen the technical behavioral analytics platform that I described on the technical network effect. By gaining a cornerstone customer, and then having this cornerstone adding community customers, its better than doing 50 individual sales calls.
IronNet has the ability to convene CEOs and leaders within an entire industry. Example weve already given youthe energy dome. Weve been able to convene the top energy companies across the United States and make sure that theyre working together in this Collective Defense to defend critical infrastructure.
Some other examplesNew York Power Authority where were bridging and building New York municipalities, the munis and co-ops; Berkshire Hathaway, bringing in their portfolio of companies; and Southern (phon) Company, bringing along their supply chain members, and including other examples like the defense industrial base, so we sell to enterprises and governments.
We first wanted to ensure that we secured enterprise customers first. Then were expanding in the government. That has been our plan since the origination of the Company.
Next slide.
We describe our go-to-market as land and expand with network effect. Our goal is to land at the top with a cornerstone customer, and then expand out into their respective communities, so as the community grows, the value of our platform grows to each of these customers both technically and commercially. A good way of thinking about our go-to-market is that were expanding horizontally with our cornerstone and vertically with our community, so once we have a community customer, we have the opportunity to make them into a cornerstone customer, and then expand from there.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Just so you know how we define a cornerstone customer, its a customer whos a leader of a recognized industry, nation, state, or vertical, so the two examples of this land, expand, and multiply here in the United States, with a U.S.with the U.S. government with the defense industrial base where we have a large systems integrator, along with a branch of the military, securing their thousands of supply chain members with Collective Defense.
Another examplea large APJ global investment fund that the General mentioned was a customer, and now is an investor, that we expanded from a single portfolio to multiple portfolios, and the goal is to expand in their 600-plus portfolio companies.
Next slide.
Previously, you heard the General describe a full year of data for us in 2020 around what we ingested. We ingested almost two trillion pieces of information and data, and wethat resulted in over 2,000 indicators of compromise for our customers, and what you see on this page is that more and more customers, as they adopt our products, the value to our customers grows, and switching costs will rapidly begin to grow, so one thing I would highlight, its the same thing that Apple does where people buy iPads, iPhones, and Apple Watch, and use many Apple apps. Over time, it becomes nearly impossible for someone to leave the ecosystem or leave Collective Defense because they would have to start all over again on another platform. At IronNet, we believe that with more customers, our customers will receive an even better product. This will lead to upsell, cross-sell, great pricing dynamics, which, in turn, will help ARR accretion, and in the future, were going to analyze net retention rate not only on a whole Company basis, but also at a community level basis.
Next slide.
We sell into all elements of the supply chain; companies, sectors, industries, nations, governments. A key insight that General Alexander brought to IronNet was that the leading companies in any industry are in it together whether they like it or not. The weakest link, as some of you have referenced in your questions, can bring down the strongest, and as a result, everyone must work together and be a part of Collective Defense, so weve identified tens of thousands of cornerstone customers, hundreds of thousands of community customers. Of these, were targeting over a thousand cornerstone customers already with an expected penetration of 40% to get us to our FY 25 numbers. Eight-hundred-and-fifty of those, along with their community customers, will help us achieve $1 billion in revenue. We expect the number of community customers will be far larger than the number of cornerstone, with a ratio of about 13.5 by the end of FY 25.
We have great examples of our go-to-market approach that have already been brought to light; our energy dome, our U.K. healthcare dome, the APJ global investment dome. There are many familiar logos and household names that weve already incorporated into the domes that you see on this page, and companies are beginning to collectively purchase their security out of efficiency and effectiveness. The scale of this is critical, and so were able to send back insights into thousands of customers at once so everyone in our domes are operating at scale at once.
Id like to have the General now expand on the user interface that you see on the slide, and how actually this is being done inside of our customer environments. General?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes. Thanks, Bill.
We talked about the events that are created by our analytics and that go through our expert system. On the left, you can see an enterprise looking at the whole suite of events that have been created over a one-week period. On the inner circle, you see the red events. Those are ones that are deemed malicious either by the customer or by the expert system itself. The orange are ones that are suspicious, and the bluer ones that were of lesser value, but are out there, and what we do with those is we look across, in this case, its an energy sector company. They can see other companies in the energy sector in a consolidated view, and in the oil and gas sector by looking at events that they have in common.
If you look at the top event there, it has a red line coming from the enterprise. That company has already determined that to be malicious. The energy sector has one or more companies with that same issue. Wed know the number of companies. It would come up in the numbers, and they see it as suspicious, so they benefit from that knowledge sharing. The next three events that are suspicious, that enterprise has not yet looked at. They gain from that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing by someone already determining theyre suspicious, so that helps everybody work together.
What were seeing is we add in companies. The number of events that automatically correlated are increasing significantly. This is a huge benefit for knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing. What it will get to is eventually, companies have to look at a fraction of the events that are going on in their environment because others are looking at them and already grading them, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is how we leverage those 900 people in the banking sector to work together. Thats part of the future.
This is an area where you can actually play it over time. You could take that one event and you could show when it hit the enterprise and when it hit the energy sector, when it hit the oil and gas sector, you could actually play it over time, you could sweep it back and forth and you can help people understand whats going on and where its happening.
This is a great opportunity that can actually look at it from a recon perspective, from a command and control, they can look at all the different aspects and parse the analytic and the threat environment and the picture that theyre looking at for only those things that theyre really interested in. We think its a great opportunity and a great user interface.
Back to you, Bill.
William Welch
Thanks, General.
Lets go to the next slide.
Were all encouraged by these entities on the slide that trust our platform, whether its a large APJ global investment fund, whether its a top agent mobile phone operator, a global European bank, large investment firms, or as the General mentioned, top energy companies. But were going beyond the enterprise. Our solution is trusted by nations, DoD branches, U.S. state agencies, state and local governments who have very, very strict and stringent security requirements. Were partnering, as you heard earlier, with Amazon and Microsoft, who trust IronNet for our AI-driven behavioral analytics and our Collective Defense.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
But this slide is the confidence slide, as I call it. Why I call it the confidence slide is it represents the reason we have confidence well achieve the revenue and billings that we presented to you today. We believe we have the ability to follow a similar growth trajectory that my team was able to achieve at Zscaler. We expect to deliver these results by securing multi-million dollar large, cornerstone customers with long contract values that weve already demonstrated and Jamie will share with you in a moment. In addition, were securing community customers by leveraging our volunteer sales force with our cornerstone customers and partners which expect to deliver contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, each of them bringing into the IronDome.
Were going to show you a brief video with some of our customers and industry leaders that highlight our value proposition.
Video Presentation
John Allaway, Chief Technology Officer
Temasek Holdings
What were recognizing in domestic is that no single agency has the war chest, the wherewithal, the ability to get access to talent, tools, technology to put the whole thing together. So, were calling for collective defense. In line with what IronNets doing with its Iron Domes.
Tom Wilson, VP and CISO
Southern Company
Look, theres a lot going on from the collaboration standpoint, and that need (phon) and focus has always been there for an industry that really collaborates, and some of that intelligence sharing, working with our energy sector (inaudible) while working with our government. We have daily updates from our security operations centers across the industry talking about whats going on so that the end of the (inaudible) of that broader view which is one of the reasons that we (inaudible) of that situational awareness and get away from anything that (inaudible).
Weve seen interesting news on things like we have whats called cyber mutual aid (phon) that many, many. You think about normal mutual aid for our industry to where we can help each other against storms, (inaudible) big ice storm, people will come from all over the country to develop this one service. We are implementing those types of concepts for cyber.
John Allaway, Chief Technology Officer
Temasek Holdings
We have people (inaudible) to us. Silver bullets and many opportunities literally all the time and theres a lot of hype in the market. Theres a lot of promises that are broken, etc., I think, in the cyber security space and on some wishful thinking, and for us to who are very analytical people and investors, we like proof of life. We really tangible things that we could see. We put the IronNet capability into our environment, and low and behold, the results were as follows:
The IronNet tools then were six times more accurate than any of the other tools that we had in our defenses in terms of detection.
The other interesting thing was speed. We want network speed in (inaudible) and we want to be able to network that out to others. Our existing tool set was taking days/weeks/months. The IronNet tool set, an average of 15 minutes on these attacks to alert us. That time is so precious because the sooner you know someones in there, the sooner you can contain it, do triage on it, and start thinking about your remediation.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Arno Robbertse, CEO
ITC Secure
IronNets Iron Dome and collective defense solution helps us, as a more security service provider, and ultimately our clients, do more with less. Were able to scale our security operations center by having a very sophisticated tool that reduces false positives. Organizations are learning that by learning more about the attacks on their peers, they can protect themselves better and theyre able to share their information and learn from their information without compromising any sensitive information or any regulatory information internally. Were able to learn from not only attacks on our own organization, but observations across all other organizations participating in that dome. Therefore, achieving the true collective defence, and not only to defend on our own.
Steve Swick, Chief Security Officer
American Electric Power
Were a top target. Having those partnerships and being able to share valuable actual data at the government level is critical for us because we are getting the attacks. The threats are absolutely out there, and we need to figure out how to be able to take that action and give them the picture that you described so they can actually see where those attacks are and then be able to help us address those threats that are over in those threat countries.
Tom Wilson, VP and CISO
Southern Company
While we are a U.S. only entity, we cant have a U.S.-only mind set. The systems that we are all using across both our sector, the unit cross (phon) sectors (inaudible) the same. The adversaries are all the same, so we have to find ways to work together and to share on our common knowledge and our common (phon) experiences to raise the level of all of us, and I look forward to this as we work with General Alexander and IronNet bringing more international companies into the fold to give us more situational awareness of what is happening around the world.
William Welch
As we pull the presentation up, I just want to echo how thankful I am to our customers and partners who are out there everyday obviously securing and helping us transform cybersecurity through Collective Defense.
If we can go to the next slide, that would be great.
As weve gone through our presentation today, we believe that all the points in this slide are pretty self-evident. Our growth is anchored by world-class benchmarks with a focus on constant innovation. The SUNBURST event and all the other events that youve seen in the news recently really has validated our mission to drive AI-driven behavioral analytics and Collective Defense to the overall security market. Were continuing to invest in our platform. Our focus on expanding the sales force will add thousands of cornerstone customers and then hundreds of thousands of community customers. International expansion is another path to grow our Collective Defense communities for the global enterprises, which we already had great success in. Our platform is also purpose-built to leverage additional security technologies in either a buy or a build posture.
With that, Im going to hand it over to Nancy. But I will tell you we have a very exciting story. Were just at the beginning of transforming cybersecurity through AI-driven behavioral analytics and Collective Defense.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Nancy Fazioli
Okay. Thanks, Bill. Were going to take 15 minutes of Q&A on the go-to-market and sales strategy, and after that well have a short break. When we come back from break well then hand it over to Jamie for the financial overview.
With that, lets take a look and queue up your questions.
Im going to pass it over to Mike Cikos. Mike?
Mike Cikos
Hey guys. Thanks again for taking the questions here. Just wanted to come back to it but can you help me define the cornerstone customers that youre talking about? Then the follow-up question to that is, if I think about lets say the oil and gas industries being a vertical youre expanding into versus healthcare versus financial services, are these domes that youre setting up eventually seeing individualized or industry specific AI engines based on the different requirements for them? Can you help clarify that point as well?
William Welch
Yes, absolutely. Mike, great questions. Let me take them one at a time.
First of all, a cornerstone customer to us is somebody that is that leading in their sector, theyre a vertical nation, state. For example, it might be the State of Texas, it might be a very large technology company in Europe, or it might end up being, like I said, a very large APJ global investment fund or some of the examples we gave in the energy company. You saw some of them in the video just now. These are the cornerstone customers. These are the ones that not only are bringing together their peer group, like in the energy sector, bringing in the Southern Companies, the Con Eds, the Avangrids, all the different names, but at the same time theyre bringing in their supply chains, theyre bringing in those areas that obviously are the most vulnerable and trying to protect them. Its not only just in the United States, but its, as youve heard in the video, its going at a global level, because as you know the adversary is testing things overseas. That is how we go after our cornerstone is those that are leaders in those market segments that we just described.
As far as the verticals and industry specific, they all have obviously the ability to have their energy dome or their healthcare dome, but then they feed up to a U.S. dome or a global dome to where information is being shared anonymously between their vertical domes, their GO domes or across the globe so that we can get real-time information over to these domes so that they can take action. The technology is the same, whether youre in an energy dome or whether youre in a financial, healthcare, whatever, and the analytics are the same across those different domes.
Mike Cikos
Thanks for that. Then a quick follow-up. Once you guys have identified these cornerstone customers or the community customers that go alongside that, how is it youre approaching these customers? What is the go-to-market process? How long are the sales cycles? Can you walk me through that process as well?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
William Welch
Absolutely. Go-to-market, right now, its very much a direct model. We have been working very closely with partners also, like Booz Allen and Raytheon and Jacob (phon), some of these youve seen announcements already. But our direct models that go after those targeted cornerstone customers, which we have clearly defined, as I mentioned, and our team is in a direct model going after them to secure them. What happens is once we actually secure a couple of them within that space, we actually leverage them to help go get other members. Thats what we had in the energy dome, where we started with a few and then we have many and then its expanding out from there. You can understand that network effect.
As it relates to the actual interaction with a customer, our sales team will go in and do a cyber threat emulation exercise where well actually showcase to them what would happen to them if an adversary actually was targeting them. We will do that cyber threat emulation exercise. Usually it takes a couple of days, nothing extravagant. Then in turn, well end up possibly doing a proof of value. That proof of value will last no longer than 30 days. The nice thing is because weve already been in their network, where we might be putting in an AWS instance or an Azure and that information, they can go and deploy on the 31st day after theyve seen that information and seen the value of our technology.
Very quick time to value, very quick deployment, very quick results.
Mike Cikos
Sure, thanks for that. Then just two more, if I could real quick building on that. The POV that you do over the course of the 30 days, that is in their environment using their data. Youre doing this in real-time through that POV process is the first question. The second follow-up, for that process, who is your, for lack of a better term, cheerleader or buyer? Are you pretty much doing this with a CTO, the CISO? Who are you going to?
William Welch
Yes. You described it perfectly, exactly what happens in the proof of value and as far as the target persona. The good news is that we actually have the ability to go to multiple personas. The security operator is certainly interested in the behavioral analytics and the detection and some of that visualization that we showed you earlier with the General. But then the CIO and CISO is obviously keenly interested in making sure that the security operator is more efficient and can get more work done because, as the General said, they have no lack of amount of things that they need to do. The CIO and CISO is very keenly interested in this whole crowdsourcing and the ability to share the information across companies, sectors, nations and states.
Then, certainly at the CEO level theyre very interested and the executive team because theyre the ones that are being asked, the question of the board is, are we secure? Thats where the General mentioned our ability to go do threat defined queries, so when a Colonial Pipeline happens or some of these other incidents of compromise, our ability to go in there and say, No. If this had happened, you are already protected. This is what the result set would have been.
Mike Cikos
All right. Thanks, Bill. Ill turn over the mic, guys.
William Welch
Thanks, Mike.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks. Bill, we have a question in the chat from Jon Ho at William Blair. He wanted to ask if you could please talk a little bit about the channel engagement and how IronNet is rising above the noise from folks like Darktrace and Vectra. Thats the first one.
William Welch
Yes. Were very, very encouraged by the traction that weve had already in the channel. Youve seen some announcements recently with Jacobs where were working with them on some of their portfolio captures that theyve done not only in the state and local market but also the U.S. government. We also have great, as you saw in the video, partnerships over in EMEA and also in APJ. Its not just here in the United States. What I will tell you is that these partners do a great job of helping us with deployment and the governance and the policy management, making sure that companies are coming together and working in the dome.
Those are just some of the examples that weve seen with our channel.
As far as the competition, I will tell you the differentiator goes very similar to my days at Zscaler is, we would compete on a secure web gateway with the technology companies that Gartner put us with but once we competed in that space we set the vision for cloud security. Its the same thing in IronNet. We will compete head-to-head in an MDR bakeoff, the network detection and response, and weve done that. As a matter of fact, we have an example recently of a very large state here in the Northeast that did a competitive bakeoff we saw an adversary in the network, our competition didnt, they went dark, just a point of phrase there, and what I will tell you is that on an MDR head-to-head, we are beating the competition because we are at a behavior-based while theyre still legacy signature.
Then the last thing I will share with you as far as our winning against our competition, is that they love the idea now of not only just absorbing our IronDefense or behavioral analytics, but that Collective Defense to where they can actually get that leveraged network effect of other security operation center experts to help them with these indications of compromise.
Jonathan Ho
Thank you for that, Bill. A follow-up question would be, how much of your customer base value proposition comes from the automated threat detection and the crowdsourcing on versus maybe things like manage threat hunting and response, just having that support sit behind the efforts that a lot of these overwhelmed IT people face?
William Welch
Yes. Theyre very encouraged by obviously our ability to detect and given the analytics and the network speed and obviously at the cloud scale, but I think the other thing that theyre very encouraged by and weve seen this with our CIAC, as we call it, where we actually have some of our hunters that are engaged with their security operation centers. We have a small, very small services part of our business, but where were actually coming alongside them to show them what is the most effective way to do threat hunting, the most effective way to make sure that theyre leveraging the tools.
As you heard in the video, where one of our customers had over 90 different tools, we make sure the efficacy of the technology is leveraged appropriately so that there might have been things that they were missing that they should have had a certain firewall where we could have showcased that to them as a result of our detection and analytics. As a matter of fact, one of our customers were very grateful for, theyre so trusting of not only our detection and analytics and also our hunters, that they automatically take our response and our recommendations, put it into a ServiceNow infrastructure and then immediately send it to their help desk to deploy the remediation that has to happen at the network level.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Jonathan Ho
Thank you.
William Welch
Not on mute, Nancy. Are there other questions?
Nancy Fazioli
Sorry. Next, Nehal Chokshi. You may be on mute.
Nehal Chokshi
Now you can hear me, right?
William Welch
Got you.
Nehal Chokshi
All right. I have two questions. One questions on financials, but I assume that were going to have a financials section so I shouldnt ask the financial question here. Correct?
William Welch
Correct.
Nancy Fazioli
Correct, (inaudible). Thanks.
Nehal Chokshi
The first question then is onI like the Slide number 10 here. It I think provides the layers of differentiation. I love that you have it in a nice visual here. I think one of the key things here that youre talking about is that you have the cornerstone customers and then you have the community customers. But when you think about large cybersecurity players, they effectively already have this. The rest of this is effectively algorithms that they can potentially replicate. Can you talk to what you believe will be your sustainable differentiation as some of the larger cybersecurity players come in and see what IronNet is doing and saying, Hey, this is a good idea. We can replicate that. What will stop them from doing that given that they already have effectively the community in place?
William Welch
Yes, actually, Im going to ask the General to come alongside me on this and explain what weve observed with Palo Alto and CrowdStrike and what theyre doing in their own environments versus at a collective layer. General?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Yes, thanks, Bill. What they do is important. They grab all this information and they take that information, they use it to update your analytics. I did get a good clap for that, I think, as that went through. What theyre doing is they see an event, they say, okay, I want to now block that, Im going to create a signature and I go after that.
What we do thats different is were not taking the knowledge and then changing our solution to just a point; were sharing that knowledge amongst all our customers. That knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing makes their analysts better. They learn as we learn in a collective group. Thats an important differentiation. You dont see that. Although, and I think the world of Palo Alto and their WildFire database and what theyre doing and how theyre doing it, thats great, but thats what they use, its not something their customers can easily use to gain knowledge and grow. Does that make sense?
Nehal Chokshi
Yes. Thank you.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Okay.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Thanks. That iswere going to take a five minute break now. Well be back at quarter to two for the financial section. Thanks.
William Welch
Hey Nancy. Are you going to respond to Jonathans note there that came in the chat?
Nancy Fazioli
Yes, I will do.
William Welch
If you could respond, it was very kind of him, that note he sent. If you could just respond to him. I didnt want to do it.
Nancy Fazioli
Okay.
William Welch
Thank you. Are we ready?
Nancy Fazioli
I think we can go. Jamie?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
James Gerber
All right. good. Welcome back, everybody, and thank you, Bill, thank you, Keith.
Our revenues have grown steadily since our first product release in 2016. We made our first moves to the cloud, as youve heard, in 2018, and are excited about the new packaging and scalability that well be getting from our updated cloud versions already coming out now in a general release early next year.
This evolution in our product allows us to deploy to customers more rapidly, scale more quickly and drive our revenue growth. Like our comparables, revenue is heavily software product focused with a small layers, as youve heard, of services. Over 80% of our product revenue is from the private sector. That is our focus. but the government market is largely untapped and were ramping up rapidly there too. Already 35% of our software product revenue is international, whether regional presence, in APJ and EMEA.
Let me elaborate as well on why were so confident in our revenue increase now with $55 million this year.
Weve primed the pump with well over 50% of that revenue coming from customers already under contract. We have an experienced sales force and enablement team already in the field with 24 fully ramped sales reps and more coming on board.
We also have strong KPIs and strong tailwinds behind us that youve been hearing about. IronNet has a strong recurring revenue base with sticky customer relationships. Our average contract length is over three years. For those multiyear contracts, we often receive payment upfront, greatly facilitating cash flow. Our margins are strong and will continue to increase driven by falling compute costs with our latest generation cloud-based platform. We already have built a solid net retention rate over the last several years, which is similar to where CrowdStrike was at its point in its growth. We expect that net retention rate to improve similar to our comparables to 120% by Fiscal 25.
Because our long-term contract terms have less frequent renewals, this is currently a three-year average. So we expect to start to provide quarterly updates on NRR once those frequencies of renewal will increase. In the meantime, and as we initiate our regular reporting, well be using the more aggregate ARR measure to show our overall growth performance over time.
Next page, please.
On the financial metrics page, let me orient this for you.
Rob did a great job upfront reminding you that Fiscal 22 is our current fiscal year. It began February 1. Our revenue is expected to be nearly $55 million this year, with over 80% growth going into fiscal 23.
On this slide, we lay out the specifics on our revenue and margin growth that well be driving with the additional capital from this raise. From our earlier financial deck youll see that we have updated Fiscal 21 with actuals, now showing that we exceeded our revenue and gross margin forecasts. We met our objectives on sales and marketing spend, decreased research and development slightly as we reorganized our engineering departments towards our cloud-based and increasingly SaaS delivered software offerings, and except for $1.5 million of one-time charges relating to our response to COVID restrictions and becoming an all virtual company, our G&A would have declined to $19.8 million or 68% of revenues. We like exceeding our expectations here and were pleased to add in those actuals.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
As you can see, from a percentage of revenues perspective, well continue to invest, particularly in sales and marketing and R&D, along similar lines as our other high growth comparables, coming down over time on those metrics into the 60%, low 30% and 20% levels, respectively, for our various operating expense categories, while continuing to expand our gross profit margins. Significantly, I want to highlight several factors in that go-forward investment.
Weve invested in sales and marketing spending already, starting in calendar 2020 to capture the current market opportunities that General Alexander and Bill described. Take note of the sales and marketing line. We nearly doubled sales and marketing spend in calendar 20, which supports our growth going into this calendar year 21. We plan to use our additional capital to invest more into our sales team and to continue to grow the business.
IronNets network effects make our business model more efficient than our high growth comparables because our cornerstone customers also drive sales. Youve asked some great questions in those areas. Like our high growth security comparables, were focusing our capital to grow our revenue given the huge TAM and market opportunity in network effects.
On the R&D line, R&D investment will continue to be focused on developing additional features, (inaudible) options, covering of different communications media and sharing functionality. We already cover physical networking and cloud deployed application medians and are already deployed on telecommunications backbones to detect abnormalities in mobile device traffic. Weve already also shown efficacy against ad fraud types of traffic and expect that our ability to detect and to automatically enrich and cross-analyze threat behaviors as the variety of customer communications expand will remain priorities for our R&D teams.
It is that feature set expansion that will not only continue to solidify the leading position that we have as we grow into our expanding TAMs, but also to add to those feature sets the ability to increase expansion and future upsells into our existing customer base to expand the NRR.
Having our cyber operations center embedded within our R&D teamssorry, with our R&D teams, will assure that our product remains highly informed with techniques and findings developed by our (inaudible) teams and that our customers remain constantly scanned with the most updated analytics and with the latest in specialized threat defined queries to give them confidence that their communications networks, data and operations remain clear of potentially damaging threats.
On the cash flow slide, as well cover more extensively on the next slide, upfront payments on our contracts will also to help fund our growth. Given our current level of revenue and expected path to profitability, we expect to reach cash flow breakeven within similar timelines to CrowdStrikes, Zscalers and Cloudflares based on their progression. We also have invested strongly in R&D to continue to upsell our customers, win new customers and outperform other security products.
Our model lends itself to the fact that there is a large TAM out there and a massive opportunity to grab market share in the underpenetrated MDR segment, and like every high growth security name, our focus is going to be on the top line as work ourselves to a cash flow breakeven in the outer years. Our game plans are clear. Based on benchmarks of other high growth security companies that have gone before us in the same growing TAM that were pursuing, the additional capital well be garnering through this de-SPAC combination will be a key accelerator to our growth.
Next slide, please.
In addition to what weve shown in previous decks, we have introduced within our S-4 both the ARR and billings metrics. We did want to show you what those components of our going forward model were.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
We have updated the Fiscal 20 and 21 bars on these graphs with the actuals from the S-4 that we recently filed. ARR is defined more broadly, that is usually the case, to capture the recurring nature of our contracts, regardless of the subscription or analytic support renewal contract forms. Weve been standardizing those forms and that is a key element to our scalability, but ARR makes sure that regardless of contract form that we get to show the add-ability to continue to layer on our recurring revenues, one cohort on top of another.
Substantial growth in recurring revenue in Fiscal 21 as we completed the transition of contracts from non-recurring to recurring revenue is a really important element of that. Leading up to Fiscal 21, we did have more non-recurring components to our revenue, but we have completed that transition now and thats a really significant element in our ARR growth for Fiscal 20 to Fiscal 21 and coming into Fiscal 22.
Until contract renewals develop sufficient frequency for us to present NRRs, Ive noted, as a regular reporting metric, well be utilizing ARRs as our primary indicator of the annualized run rates of revenues reported and of the ACBO (phon) contract signed during the quarter as an indicator of forward revenue. As we complete our transition to a SaaS-based model, we expect ARR growth to continue to be driven by the three underlying key growth factors: retention and upsell with our current customer base, attraction of new cornerstone customers, and expansion to smaller related companies through the community cornerstone effect.
On the billings metric, again, like many of the high growth security companies in the sector, well continue to have the benefit of payments upfront on our contracts and this will be the metric that will help to show that. As many of our contracts continue to be multiyear, we will often also be paid upfront, as noted, for those multiple years, all upfront instead of just for a single year. Of course, wed like the multiple year upfront payments as theyre clearly favorable to the cash flows of our business, but what weve modeled here is just one year or 12 month annual upfront payments. We do have an opportunity to outperform on this metric as well.
With that, back to you, Bill.
William Welch
Thank you, Jamie.
Lets go to the next slide.
I just wanted to share with you some of the insights as we think on our operational benchmarking.
We think of IronNet as a transformation security company, but also a data analytics company given the amount of data ingest and the AI capabilities of our platform. On this slide, weve done comparables against traditional security companies like Zscaler, CrowdStrike, but also data analytic companies like Palantir (phon) and C3 AI. We compare very favorably with these names on the slide in terms of growth and have similar software gross margins.
As Ive shared, I started at Zscaler when it was not a household name, much like IronNet today, but as youve seen, the customers and shareholders have been rewarded for their confidence in transformational companies, like we are doing with Collective Defense. We believe the market will position IronNet at the unique intersection of security and analytics, both of those sectors exhibiting great opportunity.
Im going to let Rob now take you through the valuation benchmarking and some other areas.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Rob LaPenta
Thank you, Bill.
I think, from our perspective, and I think youll share that the Companys core capabilities places it squarely in this ecosystem and sets it up well to be an integral player in the cybersecurity landscape.
I think a couple of points which I think really worth mentioning. We referenced it. The Companys offerings serve as a complement to many of these offerings of some of these very sophisticated cybersecurity solution providers. Were complementing what they bring to the table and also the threat intelligence market, we are also expanding it. Were really in a good place when it comes to the market dynamics.
As an investor, I look at the investor platform. Weve got a high growth, hard to replicate business model, the network effect of cornerstone customers, implementation of behavioral analytics versus the traditional signature, and an experienced Management team, which I think is really key in cyber, which is such a, for lack of a better word, dynamic ecosystem. But were coming to market here at a significant discount and some metrics here, over 50%, a lot of these have been updated from our prior presentation. These are reflecting stock prices and valuations that are more current. There is some discounting here.
If you go to the next slide, I think what this can show is where we are mapped against some other metrics and I think, again, it all comes down to execution. We spent a lot of time with this Management team and we think they are really well positioned with their experience in both commercial, government, building, private, public, to really make up this valuation gap and really create a lot of shareholder value and really create value for everybody involved here.
Really like the set up as an entry point as well. Then the next slide I think just gives you some more color. Again, a very substantial commitment from the existing shareholder base of IronNet, rolling a significant amount of equity, all their equity, will own 72%. You could see on the next slide that the PIPE shareholders own about 10% and then the LGL trustholders about 14%.
I dont know if thats still on this slide to get to the next slide.
William Welch
Yes, it is.
Rob LaPenta
Yes, there it is. That really shows you the EV build and again pro forma equity ownership post deal.
I think thats back to you, Bill or General.
William Welch
Thank you, Rob.
Team, I hope today weve really discussed a lot of these key themes, whether its a large and rapidly growing TAM, a transformational platform, an experienced and great Leadership team, compelling financial profile and then, most importantly, a cybersecurity company with a mission. We have a founder and chairman of the board that has been mission oriented since he began his career. IronNet is committed to protecting societies through security for global industries, governments and healthcare providers. Were thankful that we have this opportunity to transform cybersecurity through Collective Defense.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
I did want to hand it over to the General for some final words before we give it over to Nancy for questions. General, over to you.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Thanks, Bill.
In closing, I want to say that I founded IronNet to fill a national need and opportunity. We brought in Bill and team to help us execute on this vision and Im with the Company for the long term to build a billion dollar company and beyond.
Thank you, everybody, for your time and participation. Over to you, Nancy, for the next part.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Thanks, General.
Well go first to Josh Sullivan. Josh? Might not haveare you able to talk, Josh? Okay, there you go.
Josh Sullivan
Yes. Can you just expandJamie, you made a comment about the government end market there. Can you just talk about exposure now and going forward, maybe which agencies or programs are some of the cornerstones in that land and expand strategy? Then maybe, did you see anything in the Biden defense budget request that supports that? Any specific line items that we can look through to call out?
Nancy Fazioli
Bill, do you want to start with that one?
William Welch
Yes. A couple of things. One, were very excited about the executive order and how it really is talking more and more about the public and private partnerships. I will tell you that weve been very encouraged by what were seeing also in the defense industrial base within the DoD and the Federal Government. That is the first and most critical area for defense. Obviously, theres a lot of intellectual property, a lot of very important things that were trying to do as a country. Were seeing some great success there.
Weve already had some very good wins within the government, especially within the DoD sector. We are also in the final phases of our Fed ramp status to make sure that we can go across the entire civilian government. Then, more importantly, I will tell you were seeing a lot of interest at the state and local level in higher ed, whether its within Texas, whether its in New Jersey and New York. I can give you example after example of not only customers weve already secured, but even in expansive pipeline in the same local.
I dont know, Jamie or General, if you have anything else youd like to add.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
I would just say that we are seeing, as Bill said, a lot of traction and its growing. Its interesting that were seeing the cornerstone and some cornerstones bringing the community along with them. We think thats going to be really part of the future when a big company comes in and says, I need just to secure my supply chain. Can you help me there?
Great opportunities. Thanks, Bill.
Josh Sullivan
Maybe just as a follow-up, how does IronNet beat out x, y, z government service contractor coming in with low cost, technically acceptable database of cyber tech vectors for communal use? How do you combat that approach to communal defense going forward?
William Welch
Josh, Im not going to say that were not going to see that but I will tell you in the early stages right now were very encouraged by the partnerships that weve seen, like with the likes of Jacobs and Booz Allen, Hamilton and some of these youve already seen in some of our public press releases. Were actually seeing a lot of them coming and approaching us even more of the behavioral analytics and obviously the pedigree of the talent that is at the Company.
They see a great collaboration and partnership that were working together where they can bring their expertise and their talent with services and people alongside our tech.
Josh Sullivan
Thank you.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Josh. Going next to Taz Koujalgi.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Hey guys. Can you guys hear me?
Nancy Fazioli
We can hear you.
William Welch
Absolutely.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
A question for Jamie. On the financials, can you give some clarity on the revenue model? You said that most of the revenues are recurring, but are these term licenses that need to be renewed every year? Are these perpetual licenses and maintenance go along with that? Just some clarity on the revenue model would be helpful.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
James Gerber
Yes. I made reference to the recurring revenue through a scalable contract form. Almost all are now in the subscription form and most are in multiyear forms of that. We do have some legacy customers that started out years ago with perpetuals, and for them, their contract model, the recurring component is all the analytic upgrades. Even from the beginning of those, that was a very high percentage of the perpetual component. But those have now renewed all completely and are just on that analytical upgrade portion, even for them.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Got it. Then just one moretwo more for me. The NRR, that numbers pretty impressive, almost I think 100% over the last few quarters. Is that just renewals or is there an upsell component of that NRR metric included?
James Gerber
Yes. There is some upsell thats in there. We are actually quite gratified to have a nearly 100% at this stage of our growth, with very little upsell actually kicking in quite yet. The form of our product and packaging now really will increasingly lend itself to more upsell opportunities. Thats whats really going to drive us here over the next few years.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Thanks, Jamie. One last one and then Ill cede the floor. Your projections for Fiscal 22, theres a big jump in your revenue growth, almost from 26% last year to 87%. I see that youre investing a lot in sales and marketing, so maybe thats one of the catalysts. But if I go back and look at your sales and marketing growth, thats not changing that much. Theres no big inflection there, but youre showing a big inflection in your revenue growth expectation. Is there anything else thats driving the big inflection in revenue growth apart from just sales and marketing?
James Gerber
Yes. I think theres some timing involved there. We made our big investment in the sales and marketing team last year. Thats why that big kick-up last year. But thats also while we were seasoning that sales team and getting them into fully ramped status coming into this year.
Were not actually having to add that much in sales and marketing this year to go hit our number. We are adding some more to continue to grow out in the out years, but I think its really just a little more of timing that we actually started that investment last year.
Imtiaz Koujalgi
Thank you very much.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Thanks, Taz. Next well move to Matthew Galinko from Sidoti. Matthew?
Matthew Galinko
Hey, good afternoon. Can you hear me?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Nancy Fazioli
We can hear you. Thanks.
Matthew Galinko
All right, thanks. One, I was hoping if you could just clarify quickly on the payment cycle on the contracts. I think I heard occasionally upfront on a three years post to annually, but whats the typical cadence there today?
James Gerber
Well, actually, if its a three-year we almost always get paid all three years upfront. There are some contracts that go multiyear that just go on an annual billing. But thats actually the lesser of the contract payment types in our mix. We most frequently actually get the full amount upfront for however many years it is and weve had some that recently renewed last fall for five years.
Matthew Galinko
Got it, thanks. Maybe going back to the last section for my follow-up. You touched on expanding TAM through M&A. I was hoping you could go a little bit further into the strategy or philosophy there. Are you thinking that you could be maybe more effective at data collection or more effective at incident response by having maybe an endpoint position, or are you more effective at data collection, drawing into the dome ultimately? If youre in the endpoint, just how do you think about M&A and how it fuels your strategy?
William Welch
Yes. Matthew, certainly it is an area that all companies look at. I will tell you that were looking at M&A really from two lens. One lens is how its going to expand our product road map and accelerate that road map and whether thats with getting additional engineers or whether thats, again, moving in our road map modules faster in order to increase our net retention rate and upsell. Then second is, are we going to be able to add some level of accretive ARR?
Those are the two lenses that we will look through and really stay in our space around behavioral analytics and our Collective Defense. Were very thankful for the relationships we have with some of the leading endpoint vendors like CrowdStrike, and well continue to maintain them.
Matthew Galinko
Great. Thank you.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Matthew. Next well go to Nehal Chokshi.
Nehal Chokshi
Thank you. Hi. Thanks. I had four questions actually. In your net revenue retention rate slide there, you have a big pickup from Fiscal Year 24. I heard 10% to 120% in Fiscal Year 25. Whats the rationale for that big pickup there?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
James Gerber
Yes. Thats actually not at all atypical for our comps. Youll know where our game plan came from for adding those elements of upsell. It is in terms of increasing NRR. It is the blocking and tackling, three yards in a dust of clouds butcloud of dust, but it is that incremental feature set. It is that expansion from one subsidiary to multiple subsidiaries that is what our customer success team will be doing, just like how this is done, to go ahead and steadily increase that upsell set that drives NRR from that 100% on up. We are blessed with really upper end of the pyramid types of customers. Were not exposed to the kind of churn that some of the companies that focus and sells very heavily on SMB are doing. Thats going to be a plus for driving our numbers up. But the key is always just making sure that youre doing that volume and feature set upsell.
Nehal Chokshi
Just to be clear, when youre talking about net revenue retention rate, are you talking about customers that renewed within that year or are you talking about all customers that have an active contract?
James Gerber
Yes. When we start to report that were going to do it the way its classically done, which is to focus on customers that are renewing within that period, or upselling within that period and not putting the existing customers in that base if theyre not doing anything.
Nehal Chokshi
Got it. Understood. Okay. What is the time to ramp sales and marketing investments to full productivity?
James Gerber
Thats a sales rep ramp. Maybe, Bill, you want to cover that one?
William Welch
Yes. Nehal, in the beginning I was seeing about nine months. We have actually moved that down to six months. Were now getting fully ramped reps within six months.
Nehal Chokshi
Got it. Okay. All right. I think you already answered this. Last question is is that for your fiscal 24 and 25 revenue ARR and billings projections here, is there built into that the flexing of pricing power that, Bill, you had discussed that you believe that you will have as these communities build out?
William Welch
Yes. Certainly I think theres a lot of different ways that we can see those dynamics change. Number one is additional modules. As we add additional modules obviously we have additional pricing mechanisms we can add in as they adopt additional technologies as part of the platform. I also believe that as a result of building out these domes, our ability to bring, in one fell swoop, for example, 50 or 100 supply chain members, where either the cornerstone customer may pay for them, or then instead of going out to 50 individual sales calls. Theres a bunch of different pricing dynamics that we have the ability to flex on.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Nehal Chokshi
Okay.
James Gerber
I would just say on the model side that we have not been assuming that were going to be raising our pricing. This is make ourselves efficient for our customer and thats going to continue to be a watch word for us. We have not assumed exerting any pricing pressure in this model in any way.
Nehal Chokshi
Great. Thank you.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Nehal. Moving next to Mike Cikos. Mike?
Mike Cikos
Hey. Thanks again for taking the questions, guys. Just building on that last comment, and I understand the value you are bringing to your supply chain partners on. But do you guys have any examples currently where customers come on board and brought 50 to 100 supply chain partners in one fell swoop?
William Welch
Yes. Id say were about to. Were finalizing a contract now exactly like with that model and thats why I referenced it.
Mike Cikos
Awesome. Okay. If I could also just build a couple more questions on the sales and marketing investments you guys have as well. There was mention of 24 fully ramped sales reps and Im imagining that these are quota carrying reps that youre referencing here.
William Welch
Correct.
Mike Cikos
Is that at the end of Fiscal 21? Can you help us get a sense of how quickly that has ramped, what is that building off a base of, or what are the targets to ramp those reps to by year-end, something like that?
James Gerber
Do you want me to jump in there, Bill?
William Welch
Yes, go ahead, go ahead, Jamie, because I was actually looking for theI had this all in front of me but go ahead.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
James Gerber
Ill let you get in there and add to it. Remember, we werent coming out from six sales reps coming out of fiscal 20. The 24 was what we came in to this fiscal year with. At the end of 21, which is, say, our fiscal 21, which was back in January, were coming into this year with 24 fully ramped quota carrying sales reps. Those we are adding to this year and I can go into some of those plans as well. But just to clarify, Bill, (inaudible) for anything he might add, were coming into this year with that sales rep base already included.
William Welch
Thats correct. Mike, what I thought you were askingand my apologies, I didnt get right to my answer, was I thought you were asking by quarter, because I actually have it here in front of me where we went from three, then added another two, then six, then eight, because by quarter I see how many reps are then fully ramped, and as Jamie said, as we finish the calendar year, we had the entire sales team fully ramped, but as you can understand, based on their hiring, it was a ramp over each quarter, if that makes sense.
Mike Cikos
Yes, it does. Im also just trying to gauge, so if we have lets say these 24 quota carrying reps coming into the new year, whats the support staff for those reps look like and then theressorry, answer that first and then I have another one.
William Welch
Yes, no, so its really a franchise model that were incorporating. You have a systems engineer usually at a two-to-one ratio, and then depending on territory, obviously, over in EMEA and APJ we have to watch the language and that, but what I will tell you, it ends up about two-to-one. Then we have our inside sales and SDRs, our sales development reps, where theyre supporting somewheres around three to five reps out in the field. Well continue to ramp them, those inside sales reps, so we can migrate and mentor them out into the field, and then we run on average at a leadership level about an eight-to-one ratio of sales management to reps.
Mike Cikos
Understood. Just the last question for you. Thanks again for the time. The question is around the productivity inefficiency. I know that you guys have discussed being able to compress that time to reaching productivity. We went from nine months down to six months now. Just to ensure that you guys are still maintaining those productivity levels. Can you just discuss how youre building this in so its in a repeatable fashion and something that you guys continue to execute on?
William Welch
Yes. Jamie, Ill let you comment on what you see as far as some of the productivity numbers, how theyve been ramping over the years. But the one thing that were most encouraged by is that were seeing very, very, as Jamie has said, large multiyear contracts. We actually do reward our sales team to paying them a multiyear contract. While they are compensated and quoted on one year ACB numbers, we are actually also compensating them from an additional bonus for years two and three. Thats also helping us with our productivity.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Jamie, any other comments?
James Gerber
Yes, Id just say you all will be familiar with sales rep productivity in this space, so you wont be surprised that thats a 1.2 plus per year type of quota carrying that goes with that, with those reps. That does of course vary by territory and you know where that goes as well.
I would just note that in addition to sales development reps and the sales engineers, we do have a really solid sales support team thats also out there facilitating the sales team with sales enablement. Weve really built this out with a group of real pros that know how to do this, marketing well tied in on messaging and lead gen and customer success really focusing on that quick time to value.
It is a team effort, beginning to end, and the quota carrying reps, the tip of that spear, but its that really whole team thats driving it.
I hope that gives you a little more color.
Mike Cikos
It does. Very helpful. Thank you, guys.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Mike. Next to Gray Powell. Gray?
Oh, Jonathan, go ahead. I think...
William Welch
Jonathan jumped in front of him.
Nancy Fazioli
Somehow its my error. Sorry.
Jonathan Ho
Ill just go ahead. Gray, my apologies for somehow getting bumped up. Just in terms of when we look at the five-year potential growth rate, is there a way for you to unpack or maybe help us understand how much is driven by maybe factors like adding new customers versus penetration of your existing customers versus potentially selling new products? Can you just maybe weigh that out in terms of the top three or four things and how that potentially drives that accelerating growth rate?
William Welch
Jamie, I think youre on mute.
James Gerber
It is workingor it was. Okay. Yes, I think the primary vector for growth here for us in our model to really get to the super core is that attracting the cornerstone customer. Thats the thing that we have established really strong line of sight towards. As Bill mentioned, we already have in our ABM model the thousand cornerstone customers globally that were going after. Its a little bit over 400 of those that we built to by our Fiscal 25 number to get there. Now they bring along community and that ratio will continue to expand as we go, but thats going to bethere will be probably in our model be about 8 to 8.5 community customers for every one of those cornerstone customers. I think thats vector number two.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Then vector number three is that increase in NRR, which is, I think, we take comfort in the fact that in the way weve built our revenue model here that that is number three. That, however, really can be a really important driver in and of itself. Wed like to think that thats going to be a nice component of upsellsorry, upside to where we can drive that. I think doing quite a bit more with the government sector customers than what weve built into the model as well is probably another underweighted component.
Does that also give you a little sense of where the key drivers for revenue are coming from?
Jonathan Ho
It does. That (inaudible) is always helpful from a (inaudible) perspective. Just one follow-up onyour spending on R&D is significantly higher even in the out years than some of your (inaudible) competitors. Why do you need to spend more and do you see most of the opportunities to leverage that investment to maybe further widen the gap or is this unique functionality that your customers are asking for today? Just want to get a sense of how mature the product and the platform are.
William Welch
Yes. General, you can go first and Ill come alongside you.
General (Ret.) Keith Alexander
Okay. Thats a great question, Jonathan. I think talking to some of our peers and CEOs in the market, some of them said they underinvested in this area and theyre paying for it now, because they dont have the team ready to go in the next generation product. Add to that the fact that machine learning and AI is really making a strong jump in presence in what were doing specialty. We believe that this investment in research and engineering is going to pay off. Were seeing we have some tremendous opportunities coming in, what we call our IronNet 2.0 and other things coming down the line.
I think its really good. Bill and I both talk to some of these and our friends that are out there and they say, Yes, we kind of screwed that up. We went with a great sales force and now were stuck with a product thats outdated.
Over to you, Bill.
William Welch
Yes. I would actuallyand I think Id rather be accused of spending too much than too little. I know my competition has that in spades, where they spend not enough in R&D. What I will tell you is that we are an innovation engine company. We are constantly looking for innovating the platform. I dont think its a matter of shortcomings. I think its a matter of seeing whats around the corner. I learned that valuable lesson from my Zscaler days is, what is the next two or three modules that we are investing in in market segments?
We will continue to put money into that area.
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
James Gerber
I thinkif I could just come alongside, Mike, to go see (inaudible). I think the invest in R&D model thats most relevant for us here is CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike was at the 46% of revenue level as they were passing through $100 million in revenues, and were forecasting and built our investment rate at about that level as we go through $100 million ourselves.
I think they have been well rewarded for not only staying out in front of the investment and sales and marketing but also their R&D. I think youd probably look more to how theyve been attacking that continued investment in R&D just from a comparable reference basis.
Jonathan Ho
If I can just have one last question. Bill, you joined the Company relatively recently. I just wanted to understand what opportunities you saw to mature the sales process and help drive this accelerated growth. What were some of the low hanging fruit that you saw and that youve been able to execute through in that timeframe? Thank you.
William Welch
Yes. Jon, thats a great question. I will tell you, this reminded me so much as far as where it was on its maturity model of when I joined Zscaler, when I joined two years ago and saw thatwhen I joined IronNet, I saw the trajectory, but I also was most encouraged by the mission. This is an opportunity really to transform cybersecurity. Ive been selling cybersecurity technology for more years than I want to admit on this call, and I will tell you, even with all that great technology that Ive been able to be fortunate to be a part of, were still not as secure as we should be. The nice thing about it is when I see people like the Colonial Pipeline and companies like that, these are notthey didnt do anything wrong, they are victims, and this was somethingthis is an opportunity for us to really come alongside these companies because theres no company out there that can compete against an adversary of the likes of Russia or China or some of the other ones that youre seeing.
This is an opportunity for us really to think differently, which is what I was excited about joining IronNet, number one. As far as the transformation of the Company, its all about making sure everything is visible, predictable and repeatable, which is what weve been doing. Number two, its about making sure that we are benchmarking ourselves. Opinions are great, but I want to benchmark ourselves against everybody out there from a world-class what you can see, and not only have we done our models, but how weve built out the Company in every single department.
Hopefully that answers your question.
Jonathan Ho
Yes, thank you.
Nancy Fazioli
Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for nimble there. Gray, wed like to turn to you now.
Gray Powell
All right, great. Thanks. Thanks for working me in. Can you hear me okay?
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
Nancy Fazioli
Yes, we can hear you.
Gray Powell
All right. Thanks. Yes, so maybe back on the ARR ramp, how should we think of the linearity in ARR for Fiscal 22? Can you give us a sense as to where you were at Q1? Then how much of that ramp do you have visibility on with the pipeline today versus what you have to go out and win over the next eight months?
William Welch
Jamie, go ahead.
James Gerber
Yes. Well be putting out our quarterly numbers here before too long and the S-4s. I hope I can gethave you be a little patient for that as we do our next releases on that.
We continue to havebe blessed with some really large opportunities that are getting bigger right at the moment. I think what were focused on is that ARR built through the year and we like the momentum were seeing here.
Gray Powell
Okay. Thank you.
Nancy Fazioli
Great. Ill give it a second to see if theres any additional questions.
I think that wraps it up. Thank you, all, again, for your time and participation today. That concludes our Analyst Day, and have a good afternoon. Thanks again.
William Welch
Thanks, everybody.
Important Information and Where to Find It
This transcript relates to a proposed transaction between LGL Systems Acquisition Corp. (LGL) and IronNet. LGL has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a registration statement on Form S-4 (the Registration Statement) that includes a proxy statement to be distributed to LGLs stockholders in connection with LGLs solicitation of proxies for the vote by LGLs stockholders in connection with the proposed business combination and other transactions described in the Registration Statement, as well as a preliminary prospectus relating to the offer of LGLs securities to be issued to IronNets stockholders in connection with the completion of the proposed business combination described in the Registration Statement. After the Registration Statement is declared effective, LGL will mail the definitive proxy statement/prospectus to stockholders of LGL as of a record date to be established for voting on the proposed business combination. LGL also will file other relevant documents from time to time regarding the proposed transaction with the SEC. INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS OF LGL ARE URGED TO READ THE PRELIMINARY PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS AND, ONCE AVAILABLE, THE DEFINITIVE PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT HAVE BEEN OR WILL BE FILED BY LGL FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE SEC
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
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Forward Looking Statements
This transcript includes forward looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, without limitation, statements regarding IronNets business combination with LGL. When used in this transcript, the words estimates, projected, expects, anticipates, forecasts, plans, intends, believes, seeks, may, will, should, future, propose and variations of these words or similar expressions (or the negative versions of such words or expressions) are intended to identify forward-looking statements, including statements relating to IronNets future financial performance. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, conditions or results, and involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other important factors, many of which are outside LGLs or IronNets managements control, that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Important factors, among others, that may affect actual results or outcomes include: the inability to complete the transactions contemplated by the proposed business combination; the inability to recognize the anticipated benefits of the proposed business combination, which may be affected by, among other things, the amount of cash available following any redemptions by LGL stockholders; the ability to meet the NYSEs listing standards following the consummation of the transactions contemplated by the proposed business combination; costs related to the proposed business combination; IronNets ability to execute on its plans to develop and market new products and the timing of these development programs; IronNets estimates of the size of the markets for its products; the rate and degree of market acceptance of IronNets products; the success of other competing technologies that may become available; IronNets ability to identify and integrate acquisitions; the performance of IronNets products; potential litigation involving LGL or IronNet; and general economic and market conditions impacting demand for IronNets products. Other factors include the possibility that the proposed transaction does not close, including due to the failure to receive required security holder approvals, or the failure of other closing conditions. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described under the heading Risk Factors in the Registration Statement, and other documents filed by LGL from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause
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IronNet Virtual Analyst Day 2021, June 7, 2021
actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and neither LGL nor IronNet undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
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