Axon is a fascinating company. It was founded 33 years ago by its current CEO – Rick Smith – after two of his friends tragically passed away in a road rage incident. Smith’s sorrow sparked an intense energy within him that morphed into motivation for inspiring change. He then dedicated his career to the initial Axon goal of providing better public safety tools to keep the world safe. He wanted to equip everyone with tools to safely de-escalate, rather than lethally injure. His answer? Tweaking and popularizing the Taser. 33 years later, Axon is a $50B company where he’s still CEO.

Axon, which was called The Taser Company until 2017, did not invent this hardware, but it did change the design and go-to-market strategies that led to its broad proliferation. The inventor was actually Jack Cover, a NASA scientist who used gunpowder to shoot the canisters. That decision meant Tasers were regulated like any other firearm and prevented meaningful traction. Smith sought to find a loophole that wasn’t legally treated this strictly and enabled more relaxed restrictions. He knew this technology could be an invaluable asset without needing deadly force. Together, Smith & Cover redesigned the Taser to use compressed nitrogen instead of gunpowder, which unlocked its use for civilians without a gun permit.

Interestingly, Smith and Axon initially focused on the consumer market and found very little success. Because of this, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy throughout its early years, even relying on the family to plug liquidity gaps and avoid shutting down in 1994. Like any generational founder, Smith dug in. He bobbed, weaved, contemplated and clawed until Axon finally found the product and go-to-market strategy that drove its success.  The change? Pivoting to a focus on state and local law enforcement, which became Axon’s primary growth driver for decades and is still its bread and butter today – with plenty of runway remaining. Early on, he even made himself a public test dummy in a famous marketing stunt to convince customers of this product’s value (& non-lethal incapacitation). He was and is all in.

As we’ll learn throughout this piece, Axon is now the global Taser leader by a mile. It has leveraged this great success to expand into several product categories that round out its positioning as a holistic, central operating system for its customers. Over the last few decades, they’ve carefully built a large and connected product platform well beyond the Taser to cater to a wide range of public safety needs.

Their increasingly platform-wide pursuit is why they’re now called Axon, as this refers to nerve fibers that connect the human brain and foster movement. Axon wants to be the company to connect public safety workflows, departments and systems into one collaborative force for enhanced security. This goes for both hardware and software, with Evidence.com (Axon Evidence) marking its software debut 18 years ago. And as we’ll see throughout the piece, the magic of Axon is offering this better safety while also generating meaningful cost and labor savings for law enforcement customers.

The founder-led culture can be described as responsibly ambitious. They’re a bunch of friendly yet maniacally focused sci-fi nerds, as evidenced by Smith rocking his Star Trek-themed attire at the most recent investor day. They host grand events that resemble Berkshire Hathaway or Dreamforce, yet do so only if they can generate enough sales pipeline to make them worthwhile for shareholders. They take innovation and growth very seriously, but have strict guardrails in place to ensure stakeholders are still cared for.

Management is also exceedingly competitive. They are driven to outspend, out-hire and out-innovate the competitive landscape. They will openly criticize themselves when they think they can do better, and show a consistent ability to quickly fix any operational issues as they pop up. For example, the company was quite blunt about a disappointing start to bookings in 2024. They said they weren’t focused or proactive enough in sales motions (despite what was a pretty good quarter), and fixed that for Q1 2025, delivering bookings momentum that surpassed expectations and set them up for a great year. Some companies will search for any excuse they can to explain bad results. Others, like Axon, overcome very real headwinds and execute. They can’t stand losing and are obsessively determined to beat everyone.

Axon’s leadership is wonderfully paranoid, constantly looking over their collective shoulders and searching for new threats to address. They are allergic to complacency despite holding dominant positions across several product categories. That starts and ends with CEO Rick Smith and extends to every corner of Axon’s operations. Simply put, this company is a lean, mean fighting machine focused on the right things and led by the right people. And they don’t want us to rely on their internal opinions. They want stakeholders to hold them accountable to their abstract goal of improving public safety by setting a concrete target of cutting police-related deaths in half by 2032. They won’t declare a win unless it’s objective and they’re energized by all the tools they have to secure that sweet, sweet victory. We’ll dig into all of that throughout the piece.

Rick Smith’s resume is simply graduating from Harvard and founding Axon. One of his key priorities over the last handful of years has been building out the rest of his executive team. He wanted to deepen the bench of talent to confidently hand off day-to-day work so that he could focus on big growth opportunities and customer relationships. Axon’s President is Josh Isner. I love his background because it screams loyalty and alignment with the company mission and culture. Like Smith, he finished school at Harvard and immediately began climbing the ladder at Axon. 17 years later, he is running earnings calls and core Axon operations. He’s energetic on these calls and certainly a tad feisty, as he’s happy to remind a bearish analyst when their forecasts were way off during a Q&A.

The COO/CFO is Brittany Bagley. Ideally, I think a company of this size should have a separate person for each role, but this isn’t unprecedented by any means. Bagley was the CFO at Sonos for 5 years before this and was a Managing Director at KKR before that. The CTO and Chief Product Officer (CPO) is Jeff Kunins. He was just CPO for 4 years and added the CTO title in 2023. Before Axon, he was a VP of Alexa and Kindle at Amazon and a GM of Messenger and Social at Microsoft, among other things. Finally, Cameron Brooks was named the Chief Revenue Officer almost 2 years ago. He spent 6 years at AWS as the GM and Managing Director of their EMEA region and was a Director of key divisions at IBM like Watson. Internal employee surveys indicate strong employee support for leadership, and the company routinely earns “great place to work” accolades from various 3rd-party research organizations.

Axon sells hardware like Tasers and body-worn cameras (BWCs) and software to form an end-to-end product suite. All products are bundled into various subscriptions, where hardware revenue is largely recognized upfront and software components over the course of the deal. 96% of its revenue is tied to active subscriptions, which, when paired with sky-high renewal rates, leads to great demand visibility. Recurring monthly subscription fees range from $99/month to $600/month. The firm loves to offer free trials to show off what it views as a superior offering, as these trials frequently close the sale. Like all good subscription-dominant companies, they’re fixated on elite price-to-value. They will not opportunistically take price at every turn and instead focus on improving product and customer value wherever possible. When (and only when) that leads to an overly aggressive price-to-value gap, they will take price. And? As a nod to the mission-critical nature of their platform, they’ve never dealt with material churn when doing so.

The Total Addressable Market (TAM) sits at an impressive $160B. They have so many growth levers at their disposal, while their most mature U.S. state and local law enforcement niche ($19B TAM) is just 15% penetrated. The 15% figure is before factoring in all of the product innovation and up-selling available to capture larger deals and more budget. And they’re already basically in every single one of these departments across the nation (about 17,000 of them), with cross-selling the biggest remaining driver of their growth. They already dominate. They’re already ubiquitous. For a sector like policing where vendor reputation and trust are especially important, that gives them the ability to win in other product categories. As we’ll explore later, they are doing just that. 

Across its emerging enterprise ($48B), international ($78B), federal ($12B) and civilian ($5B), the company is in excellent shape in terms of finding more opportunities to drive sustainable, multi-year growth. They don’t need to reinvent the wheel to find more demand, as the highly relevant product adjacencies are bountiful.

In terms of broad categories, Axon splits its connected device revenue into Tasers, personal sensors (like BWCs) and platform solutions (like drones).