Evolv Technologies Holdings Inc

Company Overview

Evolv Technologies Holdings, Inc. (“we,” “us,” “our,” the “Company” and “Evolv”) is a leader in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”)-based weapons detection for security screening. Our mission is to make the world a safer and more enjoyable place to live, work, learn, and play. We are democratizing security by making it seamless for facility operators to address the chronic epidemic of escalating gun violence, mass shootings and terrorist attacks in a cost-effective manner while improving the visitor experience.

Unlike traditional walk-through metal detectors, our touchless security screening solutions use AI software, software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) cloud services, and advanced sensors to reliably detect weapons that could be a threat to a crowd of visitors while significantly reducing nuisance alarms from harmless personal items. This means that most visitors can walk through our solution without stopping, without removing personal items from their pockets or bags, and without having to form a single file line. Our products significantly reduce the number of false positive alarms, allowing security staff to focus their attention on high probability threats.

Our innovative technology not only enhances security but makes screening up toten times faster, which is capable of delivering up to a 70% lower total cost than traditional alternatives. Our products deliver a largely touchless screening experience — a capability that has become an increasingly important consumer demand as well as unique analytic insights about security screening performance and visitor flows. Our products, which are offered to our customers primarily under a multi-year subscription pricing model, deliver both excellent value to our customers and predictable revenue streams for us.

We are focused on delivering value in the spaces in and around the physical threshold of venues and facilities. We believe that digitally transforming the visitor experience at the entry point to venues and facilities will be a critically important innovation in physical security. We believe that our solutions will not only make venues and facilities safer and more enjoyable, but also more efficient, more informed about their visitors’ needs, and ultimately more profitable.

Our touchless security screening systems have screened overone billion visitors since 2019 worldwide since our inception. We believe that we have screened more visitors through advanced AI-based detection systems in the United States than any organization, other than the United States Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”). Our customers include many iconic venues across a wide variety of industries, including major sports stadiums and arenas, notable performing arts and entertainment venues, major tourist destinations and cultural attractions, hospitals, large industrial workplaces, schools, and prominent houses of worship. We offer our products for lease or purchase and utilize a multi-year security-as-a-service subscription pricing model that delivers ongoing value to customers, generates predictable revenue, and creates expansion and upsell opportunities.

Our Industry

We believe that most people associate security screening with airports, courthouses, and prisons. These facilities represent a small fraction of the total number of gathering spaces where mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other forms of armed violence might occur, but they have historically had a disproportionate impact on the design and implementation of security screening technology. These specialized facilities are typically required by law to meet specific screening regulations using products built to meet technical standards designed for these environments. Many of these standards and regulations were designed in the pre-digital era of the last century.

Regulated facilities like airports andprisons usually have a local monopoly on the services they provide and therefore have historically been incentivized to emphasize technical regulatory compliance at the expense of the visitor experience. Security technology providers have historically focused on serving this regulated market and, as a result, developed solutions to meet the regulatory requirements without regard to the visitor experience. This limited functionality has unfortunately led many unregulated facilities either to avoid security screening altogether or to employ outdated technology rather than risk creating a prison-like visitor experience for their valued customers and employees. We believe that forcing venues to choose between better security and an enjoyable visitor experience is unacceptable. We believe the solution is to deliver technology that provides both.

Security screening at most venues andfacilities has historically been designed around metal detectors that require visitors to enter in single-file lines after submitting their bags and pocket contents to manual inspection. This process is usually supported by multiple security guards who perform manual bag inspections, hand wand scans, and hands-on body ‘pat downs’ to resolve the large numbers of alarms, frequently false positives, generated by the metal detectors. This cumbersome process has numerous shortcomings such as nuisance alarm fatigue, ambiguous alarms, frequent human error, frustrating delays, invasive contact, high labor costs, inattentive and transient security staff, and lack of data insights.

The historical emphasis on technical detection performance using outdated standards tested in isolation has drawn attention away from performance of the screening process as a holistic system. Legacy screening technologies effectively detect metal, but they also generate numerous false alarms for harmless items. To bring down the false alarm rate, security teams proactively divert personal items away from the metal detectors into manual bag check processes that are vulnerable to human error and relatively easy for a determined attacker to defeat. The result is a slow, frustrating process that fails to deliver the security it promises. The root causes are outdated technical standards, old analog technology, and the inability of humans to fully compensate for these deficiencies.

Our touchless security screening technology overcomes the limitations of legacy security screening methods and processes. We define touchless security screening as a screening process that reliably detects weapons and other threats in a way that allows most people to enter venues and facilities while walking at a normal pace together with their party, without requiring manual bag or body inspections. Touchless security screening provides a range of benefits including reliable precision, automated and targeted, high throughput, non-invasive and reduced visitor anxiety, improved security staff experience, reduced and cost-effective physical footprint, continuous improvement, and analytic insights.

Our Market Opportunity

We believe that the current macro trends in firearms ownership and mass shootings suggest that the need for effective security screening processes has never been greater and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

In the United States, there are over 460 million privately-owned guns in circulation. According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 there were over 650 mass shootings in the United States.

Based on our experience with customers, we believe that visitors are and will remain uncomfortable with traditional high-touch security screening processes. We believe that visitors and security staff alike will continue to prefer a touchless security screening process in the future.

We believe that many venues andfacilities have reluctantly chosen to operate without security screening because of the inherent shortcomings of old screening methods like walk through metal detectors. Due to these macro trends, we believe that venues and facilities that already conduct security screening will feel increasingly compelled to consider alternatives. Further, we believe that venues and facilities that have previously chosen not to implement security screening due to concerns about cost, effectiveness, and/or visitor experience impact will feel increasingly compelled to introduce our modern security screening for the first time.

We believe our market opportunity has both a security screening opportunity as well as an adjacent market expansion opportunity as follows:

Security Screening Opportunity

We estimate that ourprimary market opportunity is for weapon screening at venues and facilities in the following segments:

•educational institutions including schools,

•hospitals & health care facilities,

•professional sports venues,

•industrial warehouses,

•distribution facilities,

•large workplaces,

•arts & entertainment venues,

•government offices,

•hospitality facilities, and

•houses of worship.

Using a variety of published industry reports and government data, we estimate that the above facilities together comprise nearly 400,000 sites and approximately 700,000 individual thresholds where our security screening products could potentially be deployed. We estimate that this market represents over$20 billion in potential weapon screening system sales annually.

Most venues and facilities in ourtarget segments do not fall under government regulations that mandate the adoption of security screening systems that conform to specific standards. We estimate that these unregulated facilities represent over 90% of the total worldwide market opportunity for security screening technology and represent the best opportunity for rapid adoption of our innovative weapon screening products.

Our Growth Strategy

The key elements of our growth strategy within our target market include the following:

•Develop Initial Customer Successes in Specific Target Metropolitan Areas

Decision-makers at ourprospective customers are often professionally connected to decision-makers at other prospective customers in different vertical industries within a specific target metropolitan area. We have established a successful pattern of targeting and winning lighthouse customers in specific vertical industries and then leveraging that success to solicit referrals at other venues and facilities across that metropolitan area in other vertical industries. We have developed a playbook for executing this pattern through orchestration of our direct sales resources and reseller partners in a manner that we believe will continue to scale as we develop the available markets.

•Expand and Activate Our Reseller Strategy

We have a global distribution network consisting of dozens of value-added resellers. This includes market leaders such as Motorola Solutions, STANLEY Securitas, and Johnson Controls, as well as smaller regional resellers. STANLEY Security, which was acquired by Securitas, and Motorola Solutions were also early investors in the Company. We intend to continue to develop our distribution network by adding further geographic coverage and sales capacity based upon demand. We plan to continue to cultivate field level collaboration between our direct sales team and our resellers to develop the ability of the resellers to find, develop, close, and/or support customers independently.

•Concentrate Sales and Marketing Effort in Specific Target Accounts in Specific Vertical Industries

Through our experience to date, we have developed a proprietary list of target vertical industries, developed a list of target accounts within those industries, and identified target decision-makers in our target accounts. We believe that our target account list represents the best immediate growth opportunities for our business. Over time we plan to adjust our target account list to reflect current market conditions and the capabilities of our products. We plan to continue to execute advertising, content marketing, lead generation, and sales development activities to our target account list to create qualified sales opportunities.

•Promote Awareness by Gathering and Leveraging Our Customer Community

Our business model presents significant opportunities to bring incremental value to existing customers over time. We intend to realize this value by seeking referrals from existing customers and partners to other prospective qualified customers, selling additional capacity to existing customers, and selling new add-on products and services to existing customers. We are continuing to develop and expand our customer success function within the global revenue organization to focus on helping customers successfully deploy our products and cultivate referrals, expansion, and upsell opportunities. We are also investing in programs to help our customers connect with each other to share best practices on a regional and vertical industry basis. Our buyers are naturally collaborative on security best practices due to their vested interest in collective deterrence and the likelihood that any security event will have a negative collective impact at the metropolitan, regional, or industry level.

•Extend Our Value Proposition with Additional Products and Digital Capabilities

Our customers turn to our solutions first and foremost for increased security at the thresholds of the entrances of their venues. In addition to increased security posture, we believe our solutions also provide for an enhanced visitor experience, lower overall security costs, enhanced employee retention and unprecedented insights into visitor and security data through our Evolv Insights solution. Our customers often look to us to provide additional applications and services that extend the security perimeter beyond the threshold of their venues. To that end, we believe there is an opportunity to introduce new applications and services that solve adjacent security challenges being faced by our customers. As we adapt to customer demands, we may introduce new applications and services to the market via our own internal product development, partnering with third parties, or through acquisitions.

Competition

We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, competition from a number of companies, including other vendors of security screening systems. A variety of security screening technologies compete with our proprietary technologies, including, but not limited to legacy walk-through metal detectors, handheld metal detector wands, and passive or active weapon screening systems based on magnetic field sensing, millimeter wave or terahertz imaging technology.

We believe that we are well-positioned to compete in our industry based on these core competencies and on the following competitive strengths:

•Unmatched Detection Effectiveness Based on Artificial Intelligence Software

Based on feedback from our customers, we believe that real-world screening operations using our products detect more actual weapon threats with fewer nuisance alarms than similar screening operations based on conventional walk-through metal detectors. Our solutions use digital processing and artificial intelligence to differentiate between real weapon threats and harmless items like cell phones and keys. The Evolv Cortex AI® software platform provides the digital brain of our solutions. Unlike analog alternatives, our solutions classify threats based on classification models that improve over time as we process more real-world data. Evolv Cortex AI also makes it possible to integrate new kinds of sensors and data sources and integrate our solutions with other platforms and applications.

•Large and Growing Data Set

The vast amounts of data collected by our products during each screening process constitute a large and diverse repository of digital machine learning training data for weapons and common non-threat items. This proprietary data set is essential in training our software to accurately classify a broad set of threats and non-threats under a wide variety of real-world conditions. We expect that this data set will continue to grow as our products are deployed in more venues and facilities. As the data set grows, we expect that our detection capabilities will continue to improve. In turn, we expect our customers to benefit from these improvements through regular software updates under our subscription business model. In a world where data is an increasingly decisive competitive advantage, we believe we are well positioned to deliver value to our customers in ways that competitors may be unable to match.

•Differentiated and Proprietary Technology Platform

We have invested significant resources in developing proprietary and patented technologies across artificial intelligence software, cloud services, and advanced sensors to accelerate the widespread adoption of touchless security screening. These technologies serve as the foundation of our products. We have also designed our platform with application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow integration and interoperability with complementary third-party security solutions such as brandished gun detection, biometric authentication, video management software, threat intelligence, messaging, and mass-notification systems.

•High Screening Throughput

Our unique detection methodology results in fewer nuisance alarms and allows visitors to walk through in unstructured flows, without emptying their pockets and without surrendering their bags for manual inspection. The overall result is screening that is up to ten times faster than old screening processes. The result is a visitor experience that is more like walking through a department store shoplifting prevention system than an intrusive airport security checkpoint.

•Significant Cost Savings

Because our technology generates fewer nuisance alarms and scans visitors so quickly, far fewer security guards and equipment is required. We believe the total scanning costs are up to 70% lower with our products, allowing venues to reduce overall operational costs and making security screening financially feasible at more venues and events.

•Digital Access and Analytic Insights

Evolv Insights® provides our customers self-serve access, insights regarding visitor flow and arrival curves, location specific performance, system detection performance and alarm statistics, and comparisons across multiple business dimensions.

Using Evolv Insights, organizations use the powerful dashboards and metrics provided to inform their security decisions, operationalize the way their security and venue operations teams make staffing and traffic flow decisions to avoid overcrowding, rebalance security and operational resources, and improve the overall experience for their guests.

•Key Strategic Partners

We have signed strategic partnership agreements with Motorola Solutions, STANLEY Securitas, and Johnson Controls. Each of these strategic partners has a globally recognized brand, a large distribution network, systems integration and support capabilities, and customer networks full of potential prospects for our touchless security screening solutions. Both Motorola Solutions and Stanley Security were early investors in the Company. We believe that these strategic partners will provide us with significant leverage and reach that will allow us to rapidly scale our business and guide customers to success.

•Distribution Capabilities

We have developed a distribution network consisting of dozens of value-added resellers. Our resellers, who have extensive experience in physical security technologies and processes, provide marketing, sales, systems integration, and local support services for customers across an array of vertical markets and regions. They also bring an existing base of customers into which we can drive awareness of and ultimately sell our touchless security screening products. Whenever possible we seek to form relationships with the leading resellers in each region in order to secure access to the most valuable existing customer relationships and the best talent pool available in each region.

•Visionary and Experienced Management Team and Advisors

Our management team and board of directors blend a range of skills and backgrounds from technology, cybersecurity, materials science, artificial intelligence, military, and law enforcement. Our advisors are renowned industry leaders with experience at the United States Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), the U.S. military, the TSA, the United States Department of Homeland Security (the "DHS"), the United States intelligence community, and United States Congress. Our engineering and digital products teams are led by accomplished and visionary technologists and scientists who have many years of experience in relevant fields. Our commercialization efforts are managed by individuals with prior successes in building and scaling both direct and indirect, reseller-driven global sales organizations.

•Self-Reinforcing Adoption Cycle

We believe that as we acquire more customers and deploy more of our products, we gather more digital data that helps us improve the detection accuracy and performance of our systems and provide deeper analytic insights to our customers. As the accuracy and analytic insight of our systems increases, we believe more prospective customers will be attracted to our products and more engaged prospects will choose to purchase our products. We anticipate that this cycle will continue to operate in the future, creating ongoing competitive advantages for us and our reseller partners.

Our Products

Since our founding in 2013, we have developed an extensive portfolio of proprietary technologies that form the foundation of our integrated security screening products, which are comprised of artificial intelligence software, cloud services, and advanced sensors.

Evolv Express

Our flagship product is Evolv Express, a touchless security screening system designed to quickly detect firearms, improvised explosive devices, and large tactical knives in unstructured people flows. Evolv Express currently supports a maximum screening throughput of approximately 4,000 people per hour. Evolv Express became commercially available in October 2019. The number of Evolv Express solutions deployed across our customer base grew from 2,267 at December 31, 2022 to 4,505 at December 31, 2023. We believe that the number of Evolv Express solutions deployed is closely correlated to our revenues.

Evolv Insights Analytics Application

We collect a significant amount of anonymous data from every visitor that passes through one of our Evolv Express solutions. This data allows us to generate analytics that appear in our Evolv Insights application. Evolv Insights provides self-serve access, insights regarding visitor flow and arrival curves, location specific performance, system detection performance and alarm statistics, and comparisons across multiple business dimensions. Using Evolv Insights, organizations use the powerful dashboards and metrics provided to inform their security decisions, operationalize the way their security and venue operations teams make staffing and traffic flow decisions to avoid overcrowding, rebalance security and operational resources, and improve the overall experience for their guests.

Sales Models

We sell our solutions under two primary sales models. We offer a pure subscription agreement that bundles our AI-software, cloud services, and advanced sensor equipment. The SaaS agreement generally provides customers access to our solution for a defined time, usually with a multi-year term, annual pre-payment installments, and no right of cancellation for convenience. For end-user customers that prefer to purchase our hardware outright, we offer our distributor licensing model based on a distributor licensing agreement (the "Distribution and License Agreement") we entered into with Columbia Electrical Contractors, Inc. ("Columbia Tech") in March of 2023. Columbia Tech, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Coghlin Companies, currently serves as our primary contract manufacturer. Under this arrangement, we have granted a license of our intellectual property to Columbia Tech, which contracts directly with certain of our resellers to fulfill sales demand where the end-user customer prefers to purchase the hardware equipment. Columbia Tech pays us a hardware license fee for each system it manufactures and sells under this agreement. In these instances, we still contract directly with the reseller to provide a multi-year security-as-a-service subscription to the end-users. Under the distributor licensing model, the title to the related hardware equipment is transferred to the end-user customer by Columbia Tech. We also directly offer short-term rental agreements for our solutions and allow certain reseller partners to offer rental terms to customers under certain conditions.

We also have historically sold our systems under a purchase subscription model, where customers purchase the hardware from us, and we provide a multi-year security-as-a-service subscription. However, except in limited circumstances, we do not plan to offer this sales model in future periods.

Our Customers

Our customers include many iconic venues across a wide variety of industries including education, healthcare, professional sports, notable performing arts and entertainment venues, major tourist destinations and cultural attractions, large industrial workplaces, and houses of worship.

The majority of our customer agreements include non-cancelable multi-year commitments. Two customers each accounted for more than 10% of our total revenue for both the year ended December 31, 2023 and the year ended December 31, 2022.

Research and Development

We believe that the touchless security screening market is poised for rapid technological advancements across software, cloud services, and sensors. We invest significant resources into ongoing research and development programs because we believe our ability to maintain and extend our market position depends, in part, on breakthrough technologies that offer a unique value proposition for our customers and differentiation versus our competitors. Our research and development team, which is responsible for both the development of new products and improvements to our existing product portfolio, consists of talented and dedicated engineers, technicians, scientists, and professionals with experience from a wide variety of the world’s leading physical security, cybersecurity, and software technology organizations. Our primary areas of focus in research and development include, but are not limited to:

•Enhanced system usability, operator ergonomics, form factor options, and mobility to drive further efficiencies and opportunities in a variety of operating environments;

•Continued improvement of the detection algorithm performance, including assessing the ability to detect new threats;

•Additional system sensors and fusion with a variety of other data inputs to expand venue insights, analytics applications, and operational performance;

•New applications that digitally transform operations in and adjacent to the arrival experience at venues and facilities; and

•Integrations into venue security infrastructure and operating systems.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our security screening products through both our own direct sales force and through a global distribution network consisting of dozens of reseller partners. Our partners sell our products to our joint customers, for whom they may also perform installation, systems integration, and local support and maintenance services, with backup services provided by our internal support teams. Many partners offer third-party physical security products including cameras, access control systems, and video monitoring systems in their respective territories and regions, which provides an opportunity to cross-sell our touchless security screening products to a broad, existing customer base that has purchased these other products. To augment the reach of our distribution network, we also intend to increase our direct sales efforts focused primarily on serving major accounts and expanding our footprint.

Our marketing strategies are focused on supporting sales growth by (1) driving awareness; (2) developing comprehensive sales and marketing content, tools, and campaigns for each stage of the sales process; (3) scaling those campaigns via our global distribution network, and (4) building our sales pipeline through demand generation efforts. We drive awareness for the Company, our security screening products, and our customers’ successes through public relations and communications efforts that span mainstream, business, social media and trade press across the security sector generally and in key verticals such as education, healthcare, professional sports as well as tourist sites, performing arts and entertainment, theme parks, industrial workplaces, and municipal governments. Our internal marketing team develops content in multiple formats and delivery methods to facilitate marketing campaigns and sales enablement.

Manufacturing and Suppliers

Our physical products are manufactured by our primary third-party contract manufacturer, Columbia Tech, based in the United States with international quality certifications, such as ISO 9001:2015. We also utilize other third-party manufacturers for the production of certain components. We design our products and processes and internally manufacture the initial engineering prototypes. Our internal manufacturing and supply chain teams work collaboratively with both our internal engineering department and Columbia Tech to scale up the prototypes for commercialization through a phase gate product launch process. There have been significant efforts made over the last several years with Columbia Tech to scale up our production. Columbia Tech also provides a variety of services including sourcing off-the-shelf components, manufacturing custom components/assemblies, final product assembly and integration, end of line testing and quality assurance per our specifications, material and finished goods inventory, and direct global shipping to our customers.

We initially manage the supply chain for key components and materials, and then, in some cases, set up supply agreements in conjunction with Columbia Tech to enable stable supply and redundancy where applicable. Component purchasing is managed by Columbia Tech's sourcing team under a vendor list approved by us to leverage the buying power of their global scale. All of our products are built to our specifications, work instructions, and testing protocols. Inventory levels are managed with our manufacturing partners to ensure an adequate supply is on hand to meet business forecasts.

Intellectual Property

Our ability to drive innovation in the security screening market depends in part upon our ability to protect our core technology and intellectual property. We attempt to protect our intellectual property rights, both in the United States and abroad, through a combination of patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret laws, as well as nondisclosure and invention assignment agreements with our consultants and employees and through non-disclosure agreements with our vendors and business partners. However, our contractual provisions may not always be effective at preventing unauthorized parties from obtaining our intellectual property and proprietary technology.

Unpatented research, development, know-how, and engineering skills make an important contribution to our business, but we pursue patent protection when we believe it is possible and consistent with our overall strategy for safeguarding intellectual property. We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would advance our business objectives and maintain our competitive position. Notwithstanding these efforts, there can be no assurance that we will adequately protect our intellectual property or that it will provide any competitive advantage. Intellectual property laws, procedures, and restrictions provide only limited protection and any of our intellectual property or proprietary rights may be challenged, invalidated, circumvented, infringed, misappropriated, or otherwise violated. Further, the laws of certain countries may not protect intellectual property or proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the U.S., and, therefore, in certain jurisdictions, we may be unable to protect our intellectual property and proprietary technology.

As of December 31, 2023, we own or co-own eight issued United States patents, 24 issued foreign patents and have 24 pending or allowed patent applications. In addition, we have five registered United States trademarks, five pending United States trademark applications,36 registered foreign trademarks and nine pending foreign trademark applications. Our patents and patent applications are directed to, among other things, security screening, threat detection and discrimination, imaging systems, and related technologies. In addition to patents owned or co-owned by us, we have in-licensed 95 patents, including but not limited to metamaterials, RF imaging, compressive sensing, and signal processing, for security related applications.

While most of the intellectual property we use is developed and owned by us, we also use a combination of proprietary, open-source and third-party licensed software in connection with our products and services. Although we believe these licenses are sufficient for the operation of our business, these licenses typically limit our use of the third- parties’ intellectual property to specific uses and for specific time periods.

From time to time, we have faced, and we expect to face in the future, allegations by third parties, including our competitors, that we have infringed their trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property rights or challenging the validity or enforceability of our intellectual property rights. We are not presently a party to any such legal proceedings that, in the opinion of our management, would individually or taken together have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows.

Human Capital

Our employees are critical to our success. As of December 31, 2023, we employed 293 people, substantially all of whom are full-time employees. We also engage numerous consultants and contractors to supplement our permanent workforce. A majority of our employees are engaged in research and development and selling functions. We consider our relationship with our employees to be in good standing. None of our employees are subject to a collective bargaining agreement or represented by a labor union.

Diversity and Inclusion. We value the diversity of our employees and are committed to providing an engaging and inclusive atmosphere for all employees that promotes productivity and encourages creativity and innovation. We strive to maintain a highly skilled and diverse workforce where employees are hired, retained, compensated, and promoted based on their performance and contribution to the Company.

Employee Development and Retention. The attraction, development, and retention of our employees is a key focus for our Company. We offer training programs to enhance the knowledge, skills, and advancement opportunities for our employees. We focus on maintaining a solid pipeline of talent throughout our organization and we are continually developing the capabilities and skills needed for the future of our business.

Work Environment. We believe that maintaining a work environment that recognizes effort and teamwork, values mutual respect and open communication, and demonstrates care and concern for our employees is essential to an engaged and productive workforce. In furtherance of this objective, we provide a regular Code of Business Conduct training for our employees to identify and prevent misconduct and report situations that violate our policies and/or negatively impact our work environment. We investigate and take prompt action to correct conduct that is inconsistent with our Code of Business Conduct and other policies.

Competitive Pay and Benefits. We strive to provide pay and comprehensive benefits that help meet the varying needs of our employees. Our total rewards package includes market-competitive pay, equity compensation, unlimited time off, tuition reimbursement, 401(k) match, and other comprehensive and competitive benefits.

Government Regulations

We are subject to various laws, regulations, and permitting requirements of federal, state, and local authorities, related to health and safety, anti-corruption, and export controls. We believe that we are in material compliance with all such laws, regulations, and permitting requirements.

Anti-Corruption Export and Trade Matters

We are subject to anti-corruption laws and regulations imposed by governments around the world with jurisdiction over our operations, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (the "FCPA") and the U.K. Bribery Act 2010 (the "Bribery Act"), as well as the laws of the countries where we do business. We are also subject to various trade restrictions, including trade and economic sanctions and export controls, imposed by governments around the world with jurisdiction over our operations. For example, in accordance with trade sanctions administered by the U.S. Treasury Department, Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) and the U.S. Department of State, we are prohibited from engaging in transactions involving certain persons and certain designated countries or territories, including Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, the Crimea Region of Ukraine, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, and the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, unless authorized by OFAC or otherwise exempt from the regulations. In recent years, the United States government has a renewed focus on export control matters. For example, the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 and regulatory guidance thereunder have imposed additional controls and may result in the imposition of further additional controls, on the export of certain “emerging and foundational technologies.” Our current and future products may be subject to these heightened regulations, which could increase our compliance costs.

See Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors — Failure to comply with applicable anti-corruption legislation, export controls, economic sanctions, and other governmental laws and regulations could result in fines, criminal penalties and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations” for additional information about the environmental, health and safety laws, and regulations that apply to our business.

Corporate Background

On July 16, 2021, we consummated the business combination (the “Merger”) contemplated by the Agreement and Plan of Merger, as amended on March 5, 2021 (the “Merger Agreement”), with NHIC Sub Inc. (“Merger Sub”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of NHIC, which is our legal predecessor, and Evolv Technologies, Inc. dba Evolv Technology, Inc. (“Legacy Evolv”). Pursuant to the Merger Agreement, Merger Sub was merged with and into Legacy Evolv, with Legacy Evolv surviving the Merger as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company. Upon the closing of the Merger, we changed our name to Evolv Technologies Holdings, Inc.

Additional Information

Our Internet address is https://evolvtechnology.com. At our Investor Relations website https://ir.evolvtechnology.com, we make available free of charge a variety of information for investors, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to those reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file that material with or furnish it to the SEC. Our SEC filings are available to the public over the Internet at the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. The information found on our website is not part of this or any other report we file with, or furnish to, the SEC. We use our Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing material information. Accordingly, investors should monitor our Investor Relations website, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings, and public conference calls and webcasts.