Buunari already brought up some good points. Here are a few more:
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Smart Eye is “hardware-agnostic,” meaning the software works with any camera, unlike their main competitor Seeing Machines.
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Smart Eye has a massive amount of data used for “training” the software, accumulated over nearly 30 years.
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My understanding is that DMS (Driver Monitoring System) margins do indeed shrink as the feature becomes more widespread, but at the same time, the increasingly common “interior sensing” (which covers everyone in the car, not just the driver) has significantly higher margins: the ASP (Average Selling Price) is many times higher compared to a standalone DMS.
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The push for in-house development by automakers is brought up in discussions from time to time, but the general response is that (as Buunari noted above) the portion of the car’s total cost represented by DMS/interior sensing is so small that automakers likely have little interest in investing heavily in their own development (considering, among other things, how much data it requires).
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The high switching barrier for automakers also means that a manufacturer is likely to choose their existing supplier for new models as well. This should provide Smart Eye with substantial revenue well into the 2030s. Growth will, of course, level off at some point, but in the coming quarters, growth should explode to entirely new levels and, after leveling off, remain high for a long time.
I see the investment case in such a way that Smart Eye should be in a very strong position at least as long as the transition to fully autonomous vehicles is ongoing. Once traffic is fully autonomous, the need for DMS will likely disappear, but that will take a long time—it’s unlikely to happen even in the 2030s. And even then, there will still be demand for interior sensing, so that the car can alert, for example, to a sudden illness or if a child or pet is left in a hot car, etc.