Makes me wonder what made near map such a large company over time.
2 x factors.
1) Captial raising.
NEA had:
$20m in the bank as Ipernica 2009
$25m capital raising in 2016
$90m capital raising in 2020.
There's probably other NEA capital raising events that I've overlooked, but that's at least 5.4x what AMX raised from their 2019 IPO.
NEA was eating capital as faster than they could raise both capital and revenues. I fully believe the board of NEA went for the Thoma Bravo buyout because they had only a few years left before again running short on cash.
It still baffles me how NEA managed to eat the cash as fast as they could, but I would guess it was likely a combination of their cloud processing costs being unsustainably high, or their arrangements for leasing aviation also being high. Likely a combination of both.
I think in world where AMX & NEA were armed with equivalent capital. AMX could deliver better ROI than NEA, but my crystal ball can't forecast if AMX would request more capital, or if there's market appetite to fulfil should it be required.
2) Targeted market.
Nearmap emphasised USA operations, and the US has 333 cities above 100,000 inhabitants, whereas Australia has just 17 centres above a population of 100,000.
AMX chose not to offer their bread and butter Lidar and photo mapping operations in the US due to market saturation, and so AMX concentrated with their niche 3D offering in the US. The product is still considered very high quality despite rising competition.
As for drones, yes, miniaturisation of technology plays a part. Lidar's, cameras, FLIR, Sonars, and Radars are already being used on drones for mapping purposes, but the weights, power, endurance, and productivity are all scaled right down accordingly.
To go back to the prior analogy with plumbing:
A water supply authority manages big scale water sources, like a city reservoir, is the scale that AMX and NEA's aircraft operate at.
You'd call a plumber to fix a leaking tap inside your house, or customise the replacement of a showerhead. That's the sort of scale that 98% of commercial drone operators work at.
Yes a plumber might have an idea on how the cities water infrastructure works, but the plumbers tools and equipment are sized for the works after the water meter. Similarly; the water authorities JCB backhoe would be overkill to change your bathroom tap.
Where crossover might be, is if and when drone swarms can be effectively managed, but then we go back to the issue of regulatory red tape, and that's before weighing up effective use of capital: considering utilisation, costs, risks & productivity.
But I do agree: there is potential for AMX to ingest data from all sorts of sources. The caveat is if such sources could be effectively managed.
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