Welcome to FinTechTV. As the artificial intelligence landscape evolves, the demand for trusted, domestically developed security tech is surging. ROC is a developer, a U.S. developer and manufacturer of multimodal vision AI, providing sovereign biometrics, video analytics, and mission intelligence for defense, public safety, and digital commerce. Joining me today is B. Scott Swan, the CEO of ROC. Scott, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Well, for our viewers, can you tell us what ROC does and also about the transition to public markets?
Yes. So we're a national security company. We operate in the AI space. We build solutions and identity. So think biometrics, your fingerprint, your face, your iris, or objects from video. We're able to fuse that information together and create actual intelligence for both our government as well as our commercial customers. So we've been in this business for about 10 years. We've done everything organically. We've actually never taken any outside capital. we got to the point where it was time to really scale this business. So the IPO provides us with that infrastructure, allows us to take our first investments, and we're competing against essentially billion-dollar foreign-owned companies. This is a part of AI where the United States has simply fallen a little bit behind, and we are able to use these funds to actually help us scale and be able to put the U.S. in a really competitive place across the globe. And you mentioned scaling. So tell us what that actually looks like and what the core mission of rock actually is. Yeah. As we got started we were selling components and we were very good at building algorithms which is actually the hardest part of the problem. building the artificial intelligence itself. And what we saw was we looked around and other companies were building the full solution stacks. So scaling for us is actually going from components to building a full platform with the products and being able to provide that end-to-end solution to our customers. And we are seeing a growing demand for trusted AI as well as identity security. So tell us why it's so important to have a sovereign U.S. based developer. Yeah people are surprised when we talk about this but the way that we screen people for the United States for example and we're talking about you know the FBI the Department of Defense the intelligence communities and Department of State. We're almost 100% powered by foreign AI technologies, and these are critical national security systems. The need to be able to use U.S. technology in those places, it's very important. The ability to have a more trusted partner in that space where making the decisions on how these systems actually work, that's the gap that we're really trying to fill at ROC. Yeah, and speaking of the actual technology, can you walk us through how Vision AI actually works? For sure. So one of the big components of this from a rock perspective is biometrics. So think about your fingerprints, being able to search large galleries of fingerprints. You use this oftentimes in the law enforcement space or for national identity systems globally. Or face recognition, being able to, whether that's for a benefit, to be able to access your phone or be able to screen people for consular affairs for entry into the United States. So there's a lot of utility for biometrics. As we think about video, cameras are ubiquitous these days. We see cameras everywhere we walk. But instead of just watching video, being able to say, who is this person in this video really rock builds a platform that allows us to pull all these biometric systems, these video systems, other digital evidence systems together and be able to allow this data to coalesce and make more actual intelligence for customers to be able to understand who it is that they're dealing with. And you mentioned biometrics and we all know that given our devices or if we're going through lines and security at the airport or other buildings, we know that biometrics plays an important part when it comes to security. So what are you doing at ROC and what is the future? Yeah, you know, biometrics can provide a much frictionless access for a lot of benefits that we get today. But also it just from a protection, protective space, it allows us to provide, you know, more capability to law enforcement, Department of Defense, national security, as well as anybody with a commercial security business and being able to provide those biometric capabilities to understand who you're dealing with or looking for things like, is someone carrying a gun? And being able to, just from common video that you would see, being able to detect that someone may be brandishing a weapon. Those are the kind of capabilities we're trying to bring to market for our customers. And of course, all eyes are on AI as well as the future and application of these technologies. So what are some innovations that you think are opportunities and what are you excited about? Yeah, a lot of these capabilities have historically been stovepiped, and the idea of pulling these together into a single platform, whereas it's no longer just law enforcement biometric systems or defense biometric systems, and then somewhere else, another division is doing all the digital evidence or all the video analytic processing. Being able to bring all that data together It's much more powerful for users. And I see that coalescence of data is really one of the major, I guess, thrusts of where I see the industry going. And Scott, finally, before I let you go, of course, when we're talking about sensitive data, like biometrics, there might be concerns about privacy. So for viewers and investors out there, potential investors, what would you say to them?
It's something I've always taken very seriously. In fact, it was one of the things that attracted me to ROC. I looked across before I arrived at ROC, and they were one of the first companies to put together an ethical use of biometrics. These are very powerful technologies. They're important technologies. They can save lives. They can save children. They can do a lot of things. but they should certainly be used responsibly. So I always remind our customers as we talk to them, you need to have the right protocols in place, your policy implementation guides, your standard offering procedures, and you need to make sure that you put the right governance in place to be able to use these technologies responsibly. When they're used responsibly, they're very powerful, and they're very good for our country to be able to support our security missions. Well, Scott, great having you here at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for sharing the story of ROC. Yeah, I appreciate your time. Thank you.
