Smart Eye 4Q25: Delusion, Disingenuous, or Deceit?
Just publish the facts and let us draw our own conclusions. Stop treating everyone like children.
It is unclear if Smart Eye management is actually delusional about the state of the driver monitoring market, is being deliberately disingenuous because the data is painfully unflattering to the founder-CEO, or is withholding critical information from the public domain.
Market analysts, financial analysts and institutional investors need data to make informed decisions and analysis. We don’t need Daddy to tell us everything is wonderful. We are adults and judge the facts for ourselves.
Nothing about Smart Eye makes sense, because we are intentionally being kept in the dark. You will have to decide for yourself if that constitutes deceit, but based on the market’s current reaction to the 4Q results and live Q&A, a swathe of investors have simply had enough and just said “stop.”
The commentary from CEO Martin Krantz is inconsistent. In the 3Q25 Q&A in November, license growth was happening across the board. Fast-forward to the 4Q report today and he says: “The license revenues are growing. In this quarter the European deliveries jumped rapidly, almost doubling from previous quarter, while the license revenues from the rest of the world came in softer.”
So, Europe up, but everywhere else suddenly softer?
The European numbers should be growing in the run up to GSR. The issue isn’t that they are going up, but that management continues to insult the intelligence of everyone by withholding the raw data.
“Almost doubling” is equally true of delivery growth from 25KU to 49KU as it is from 250KU to 495KU. But the implications for market share and cash generation to reach profitability are vastly different. We can’t judge the true picture, because the company won’t tell us.
Here’s another example from the Krantz commentary, this time on intoxication:
“By mastering the trinity of distraction, drowsiness and intoxication we are leapfrogging the rest of the DMS market. We have developed this feature for over five years and started to market this feature last year and in early 2026 we both received our first design win and decided to partake in the ongoing market consolidation by merging the market leader Sightic into Smart Eye. This move enables us to further accelerate the development and enables faster refinement of algorithms, giving us a unique positional advantage on the DMS market, ultimately leading to many more lives being saved.”
Krantz then said in the Q&A that he hasn’t seen the Seeing Machines intoxication technology, doesn’t really understand the regulatory requirements for intoxication detection in the US, and is developing technology which isn’t really aligned with the NHTSA feature roadmap.
But don’t worry about any of that, because Krantz tells us Sightic is the market leader and Smart Eye/Sightic together magically leapfrogged the rest of the DMS market.
This wasn’t an investor presentation. It was Daddy telling a bedtime story. But the monsters are lurking under the bed.
Let’s unpack three issues:
“Design wins” as proxy for market share.
Smart Eye market share forecasts.
Automotive revenue split between NRE, software licenses and AIS.