Airship AI Holdings (NASDAQ:AISP), the Redmond, Washington, artificial intelligence company helping U.S. Homeland Security agencies monitor the nation's border, announced that it won a large contract with an agency within the Department of Justice to support emerging public safety and investigative requirements.  

The DOJ will use Airship AI's Acropolis Enterprise Video and Data Management Platform which is capable of gleaning actionable information in real-time from several sources including body cams, surveillance cameras, drones and CCTV, among others. Airship AI said it won the sole-source contract with the DOJ agency because it was the only company bidding on it capable of providing the necessary technology. 

Airship AI's Acropolis backend enterprise management system will enable the agency to manage devices and sensors across the entire digital ecosystem – directly to the cloud or through Airship AI's Outpost AI Edge Appliance. Built on the NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) Jetson platform, Outpost AI provides advanced analytic processing at the edge, along with highly efficient video and metadata encoding and encryption over various RF and network backhauls back to the cloud. The management system, which can be deployed in specialized law enforcement agencies, has been engineered to meet law enforcement-specific needs including workflow for preserving evidence, advanced auditing capabilities, virtualized server instances and individualized cases for adaptive compartmentalization of sensitive data and video.

The contract marks the first agency within the DOJ to deploy Acropolis within the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program or FedRAMP, the U.S. federal government's compliance program designed to create a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and monitoring of cloud applications and services across all government agencies. Getting an in with the DOJ should position the company for future contracts, Airship AI said.

"This award represents an expansion of a pilot program started with the agency in 2023, validating our ability to meet demanding agency operational and security requirements," Paul Allen, President of Airship AI, said in a press release. "Equally as exciting is this project represents the second U.S. Government agency to deploy our Acropolis platform in a FedRAMP-certified cloud environment." Airship AI's President noted the company has a strong pipeline for 2024. When news of the award broke in early March, shares of Airship AI soared. Year-to-date the stock is up over 300% as of this writing.

As it stands, surveillance can be extremely complex, with law enforcement agencies and others in surveillance tasked with managing disparate applications, equipment and permissions while at the same time managing various access levels across multiple departments. Airship AI's platform pulls it all together – helping law enforcement, intelligence agencies and companies make informed decisions in real time. Its tailored software operating platform opens up customers’ access to data from cameras and sensors for decisive and accurate responses using data that's enhanced by AI. Airship AI customers can use their existing hardware – saving them time and money getting up and running.

Airship AI is creating a niche in an area where organizations can get bogged down in the exacting and evolving technical difficulty of turning dynamic data into intelligence in real time. Managing, analyzing and gleaming actionable information from an array of sources can be difficult and time-consuming. The company said there is a big demand for its technology and pegs the addressable market at $7 billion for edge AI software and hardware. Airship AI said the market is projected to grow to over $40 billion by 2030.

The company's revenue growth seems to back up the demand estimate. For the full fiscal year 2023, Airship AI earned revenues of $12.3 million on gross profits of $5.8 million. The company entered 2024 with about $140 million in the pipeline comprised largely of U.S. government customers and new growth opportunities within commercial sectors. For all of 2024, Airship AI expects triple-digit revenue growth and positive cash flow. 

The deal with the DOJ agency marks the second big contract awarded to Airship AI since it went public in late December via a Special Purpose Acquisition Corp. or SPAC deal with BYTE Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ:BYTS). As part of that win, Airship AI provided solutions based on its AI Outpost product to agencies within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to support real-time intelligence collection along the U.S. borders. The $10.9 million contract was first inked in September. Airship AI's Outpost solution is the company's edge product, which consists of an edge appliance that provides local high-definition recording with user-defined low-bit rate video stream encoding and on-board edge analytic capabilities – providing the Department of Homeland Security with advanced object detection and recognition capabilities. Airship's platform is already being used by federal, state and local law agencies as well as the private sector, including FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX) and Home Depot Inc. (NYSE:HD).