eXoZymes Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 12, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: ExoSymes secured $1.4M in grants through Q1-Q2 and a $3M CFIRE grant, bolstering non-dilutive R&D funding.
  • Positive Sentiment: The NCT program advanced from principle to lab-scale validation and techno-economic planning in just five months, validating the accelerator model.
  • Positive Sentiment: Their AI-powered exozyme platform improved enzyme stability by over 80% and catalytic rate fourfold within three weeks, showcasing a key competitive edge.
  • Negative Sentiment: Macroeconomic uncertainty and reported slowdowns in DOE grant approvals are causing potential partners to delay investment decisions.
  • Neutral Sentiment: With $7M in cash and quarterly expenses of $2.55M, the company has sufficient runway into 2026, pending drawdown of new grant funds.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
eXoZymes Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 6 speakers on the call.

Operator

welcome to our q '2 earnings call. My name is my name is Lesey Garlitz, and I'm your host today. And I will start this call by giving it to our CEO, Michael Hilson.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Lesse. Michael Hilson here, CEO of ExoSymes. This is our agenda for today's call. We will use a reporting format called highlights, lowlights, and headlights as we also use it internally for reporting, for example, on the board meetings. First, we will cover headlights that you can think of as the things that went right after how we hoped and planned things.

Speaker 1

When we cover the lowlights, that is on the other hand, what did not go according to plan or at least is messing with our business enough that it's worth talking with all of you fine shareholders and potential investors about so that you can get a complete overview of our business. Last, we will talk about headlights. That is basically what is next on the horizons when we look ahead. Today, we will also have Folat helping to end the meeting with an overview of our financials before we go into the q and a session. Feel free to message us while we're doing the presentation so we can talk about your questions in the end.

Speaker 1

We have a lot to show, so let's get started. Here we have today's team presenting for you. Damon is gonna cover the commercial aspects of our progress. Tyler is gonna give you a flyover of how we use AI to optimize insights and therefore being able to build this next generation of biosolutions. Vlad will give us the overview of finances, and Leslie will both give us some communication and marketing aspects, but also help me run this meeting.

Speaker 2

I'm Damian Perimen, chief commercial officer at Exerzymes. I'm sharing with you today a look back of our performance over the last quarter in the commercial category. Our commercialization activities can be grouped into three primary categories. Grants, those nondilutive public sector sources of funds that help to sharpen our r and d capabilities and also builds capacity for development while allowing us to unearth prospective development candidates for our accelerator. In the accelerator, targets of high potential, unmet need that uniquely align to our capabilities are placed to advance milestones that increase the speed of commercialization and our attractiveness to companies that will partner and join us in that journey.

Speaker 2

In BioSolutions, our capabilities are used to provide a new or better process for producing a target chemical that has been selected by a development partner that will in turn license and take responsibility for commercializing the technology. Grants have played a pivotal role in the pre IPO stages of exosomes and will continue to help the company to develop cutting edge and globally competitive capabilities in some very important areas. We recently were awarded a CFIRE grant that will allow us to develop better methods for balancing the energy requirements of exozyme pathways. The BioClick grant is allowing us to develop new methods of making small molecules. Our BioMADE grant is helping us to demonstrate capabilities that will support scale up of exozyme projects.

Speaker 2

And under the BIDO grant, we've been providing support to demonstrate viability for biofuel production. Collectively, these grants have provided 1,400,000.0 in income through q one and quarter two collectively and allowed us to identify Sanderly as an interesting new development candidate. We have a number of products in the accelerator, initially starting with our biofuel project in partnership with the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. Beginning in 02/2025, our strategy expanded to include nutraceuticals. The chart shown is a visual comparison of the relative technology readiness of our various accelerated products.

Speaker 2

In the past five months, we have moved NCT as our priority target from basic principle through lab scale validation. This includes demonstration of our process under relevant lab conditions, verification of product quality, preparation of a technoeconomic model, and plans to increase scale 100 x. These milestones have demonstrated our conviction to accelerate development of NCT and the efficiency of our Exosomes platform. Both are important features for attracting partners that will help commercialize and monetize our investment in NCT and as a road map for how other return on investments can be created with partners around other projects. The speed of moving through development stages for a high value product like NCT validates our current focus on nutraceuticals.

Speaker 2

NCT has been a growing interest for researchers for its potential role in supporting healthy liver fat metabolism, gut barrier function, and mitochondrial activity, all of which are associated with broader metabolic and inflammatory conditions. ExerZyme has demonstrated its ability to rapidly design and develop at lab scale, a method for producing high purity NCT with high conversion yields. This lays a solid foundation for attracting partners for NCT as well as other programs for exosomes. NCT potentially addresses some of the largest unmet health and medical needs of our generation with developing delivery options in both nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. The nutraceutical category is a 165,000,000,000 market, and prebiotics and probiotics that target digestive health dominate that with a 40% market share.

Speaker 2

Clinically backed NCT marketed as a functional or intervention ingredient for weight loss and digestive health taps into the booming gut health market that appeals to over twenty one percent of global consumers. In the pharmaceutical category, nonalcohol fatty liver disease affects thirty eight percent of the global population. The treatment market size for that category is estimated at $21,000,000,000. Approximately four point nine million people are living with inflammatory bowel disease, and the treatment market was valued at 24,000,000,000 in 02/2024. The global anti obesity market is projected to grow to a booming 105,000,000,000 by 2035 with a CAGR of eighteen point three percent.

Speaker 2

Collectively, it's obvious the NCT appeal to a large and booming market is obvious as long as the candidate itself can be developed successfully through scale up and through clinic. As for the partnering side, we have started tracking our lead generation and deal development via HubSpot from April. Outreach activities have generated a number of leads for the team to process and screen through to viable opportunities. Moving discussions through technical alignment requires more involvement from the team and more coordination across multiple functional areas. We have a number of deals in negotiation stage, and in due course, we can share details as they close.

Speaker 2

You can see the front end of our pipeline is quite heavy as we've been active in publishing milestones and talking to companies, introducing to companies for the first time our capabilities. Those leads in due course will move through the pipeline, and we'll have further technical alignment and deal term negotiation opportunities filling out the middle stages of this pipeline. Finally, the nurture category of those opportunities that did not make it through the deal screening stages, but relationships are being maintained to support possible future opportunities. That concludes my summary of the commercial overview for this earnings call. I look forward to providing further updates on both the commercialization milestones across our accelerator and biosolutions platforms, but also more details on those deals that we're closing and partnerships we're bringing to fruition.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Thank you, Damian. Let's now move over, but still on the bucket of highlights, to how we are making progress with using AI and computational power in our R and D. First, I want to kind of

Speaker 3

remind everybody about what our competitive advantages are. Basically, you've heard us talk a lot about how we are one of the few, if not the only company that can do true cell free biomanufacturing, running the insomnatic pathways outside of the cell, making systems that are much more controllable from a process and system engineering point of view. Some people will even argue that we have taken bio out of biomanufacturing, and it's actually a chemical manufacturing just using the power of nature

Speaker 1

and enzymes. This allows us to perform much more effectively. It also allows us to be much better at purity because there's not the million other things that you typically have going on inside of a cell polluting the end product. It allows us to simply scale better, allowing

Speaker 3

a

Speaker 1

lot of the problems of cell based biomanufacturing to be last generation. What we're gonna talk about is today how we also have a different competitive advantage. We call it artificial enzyme evolution. We basically use AI powered optimization methodologies to make better enzymes, to make enzymes into exozymes, if you will. And we're doing that in a way that is speeding up both how we we do the actual engineering work, but also allowing us to do things that humans will have a hard time thinking of even if they had time and if I put into it.

Speaker 1

Overall, we do this to allow ourselves to be able to build not just the natural products that that are very valuable and a big part of our business, but also the analytes or the new versions of, sometimes called new to nature, molecules. We're very excited about how this is benefiting us and turning into a competitive advantage because we have some unique ways of generating the data that is needed to make these AI algorithms powerful. I'll now turn it over to Tyler for him to give you a bit more of a flyover how we do these things.

Speaker 4

Hello. I'm Tyler Corman, VP of research and cofounder of ExoZyme. I've spent the past twenty years engineering enzymes and developing technologies to enable cell free biocatalysis. The technologies that I've developed became the core of what you now know today as exosomes. Today, I'm going to tell you about work we've done using AI and applying it to enzymes to produce exosomes that we hope could become the next wave of biocatalysis and biomanufacturing.

Speaker 4

So when we think about AI and how it's really expanded into all aspects of our life, it's really based off of data. So if you apply that to language where you have an alphabet made up of letters, those letters can be combined to form words. If you then pass those through a large or develop a large language model, you could then predict new words, new phrases. This ability to predict is kind of the basis of AI. If you then apply this thinking to biology where you have the letters being amino acids that can be linked together to form proteins or enzymes, if you then pass these sequences of amino acids through a large language model, you can now predict new proteins.

Speaker 4

This ability formed the basis of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the ability to now predict protein structure from sequence. The software was called AlphaFold, and it allowed anyone to now predict what a protein structure looks like. There are gaps, however, and we believe exosomes has an advantage in being able to turn those structures into function. We can actively learn and generate data very quickly, and this allows us to now change amino acids to now change proteins into protein structure to allow them to have new functions, allowing us to quickly design enzymes that are stable, functional outside of a cell for new reactions. We think about the enzyme the exozyme's advantage.

Speaker 4

What AI allows us to now do is to start from better starting points to be able to predict those changes in structure that lead to function much better. If we can do this many times, this allows us to iterate iterate much faster, and so these better predictions now enable faster cycles. The core of what we've been able to do without getting too much into the details of the process, we compare using traditional methods to our AI based approach. We've been able to improve functions such as stability very quickly. So using a traditional method took us four months to get a very small amount of improvement.

Speaker 4

And with our new and improved method, we're able to design and improve stability more than 80% within three weeks. We've also been able to improve a function such as rate. And, again, we able we were able to design and build an enzyme that had improved rate of greater than fourfold within three weeks. This shows the power of our approach, and it shows the power of AI and machine learning methods to allow us to now more quickly to design better catalysts that can enable that second wave of biomanufacturing. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Tyler, for that overview. Now we're going to the last of the headlights. We just wanna communicate that things are going well. Plus, following the Pareto principles that allows us to achieve a lot of impact without burning a lot of cash in the beginning of the company. People also call it the the eighty twenty rule that you can do a lot with a little if you're very focused on what is need to haves versus nice to haves versus just spend you shouldn't have done.

Speaker 1

It helps the company stay focused and super lean. We are very capital efficient, and we despite building, as we talked about, two technical competitive advantages at the same time, We're not spending tens of millions of dollars as a lot of other companies would do to be able to do the same. It comes down to relentless prioritization. We we spent every dollar as if it was our last dollar, and we make sure to to put the effort in where it's the most needed to make progress to the next value inflection point. Couple of examples here is how we expand our audience without paying a lot for for marketing or other PR style efforts that you're seeing other people do.

Speaker 1

We have something that is so interesting that we get invited to a lot of the premier sites that can be as Damian going to to world biomarkers in The Netherlands and speaking on how we're using AI to further and and progress how biomanufacturing is done. And it can be podcast interview styles like the one you're seeing here to to the left. Grow Everything is one of the absolute largest podcasts in the Zoom bio industry, and we got a lot of good reach out of that. Again, following the the twenty eighty rule, we we're putting effort and time and money where we are getting the most return on the investment. We built biosolutions that allows us to make, for example, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals that are inspired by natural products, something that's happened out in nature, but you would deplete the world's resource of it if you try to put that molecule that maybe is already proven, but it's if you want enough to talk about being a treatment, then you deplete the work resources within a year and you would basically have have have cut down the tree you're setting in.

Speaker 4

And we basically built out all of the the systems that you need to to drive these multistep metabolic pathways, cell free, to have them run for long periods of time. Because that's the goal. Right? You don't want something that just worked for a little bit and then you publish and so be it. Like, you want something that's gonna be robust, that's gonna work for a long period of time.

Speaker 4

You can just walk away from it after you you add things together and that's the that's the ideal.

Speaker 3

They're moving really quick. Like, things that I would expect a year to take, they're doing in weeks. And, you know, that kind of blew myself off when I started speaking

Speaker 4

to some of my colleagues and go, like,

Speaker 3

what if what if we could actually move proof of concept so much faster than we did before? You know, what does that mean for the type of partnerships that we could create? Or could we engage partners much sooner in the equation than we did before? Can we derisk a program differently?

Speaker 1

Now to the q two lowlights. What did not go according to plan or what has been the obstacles. We can talk about how there is a very high degree of uncertainty on a macroeconomic level. The markets that our partners are active in or wanna push into, they have a hard time assessing what the future is gonna look like for those markets. And therefore, a number of our potential partners are much more hesitant and slower than normal in in decision making and commitment when they are talking with us about these future focused investments into product development together with us.

Speaker 1

That's obviously a headwind that we are taking very serious because it has the consequences that a number of our partners are in a wait and see kind of position. They wanna wait for for next year's budget or they or maybe even reorganizing their their companies to a degree where it is for political reasons not a good time to bring up investments in into the future. The only way we can overcome this headwind is to keep pushing forward with our sales and business development efforts, making sure to get in front of a lot of people that will realize the the value of the next generation of my own manufacturing that we are bringing to to the table and keep pushing all the the potential partnerships that are in pipeline forward as as much as we can. It's only a matter of our time before some of these partnership conversations will turn into deals. And, of course, we are very, very focused on making sure this happens as soon as possible despite the lowlights of getting overall headwind.

Speaker 1

Another lowlight to talk about, the funding by the US government, the grant environment, so to say, holds significant uncertainty. There's a lot of the grants and grant systems that have been built over the years that are being either closed down, reshaped, and it is not all of it that happens in a way where it's easy to see how they will be functional afterwards. We have received unofficial indications that DOE grant approvals are, either slowing down or being put on pause, and, the timing and the impact of that is is unclear. That's obviously, as a company that have been really good at attracting grants, not a a great environment to operate in. We do have encouraging perspectives in regards to that the department of defense is showing interest in a lot of the areas where we can positively impact with our new technology.

Speaker 1

And the the DOD also seems to be well funded, respected, and therefore, the the grant environment that comes from the DOD seems healthy. We will continue to apply for new grants and especially the the DOD ones for the reasons just mentioned. But always, we have to take into consideration how well does these potential grants fit into our business objectives? Do they lead to products that fits into our portfolio? Do they fit into basically where we're pushing the the the platform, the coming quarters and years?

Speaker 1

Now it's time for headlights.

Operator

Okay. So another update here on the projects, our strategy, and also a shift in focus around our branding and how that is all tied together. So first, when we launched NCT X back in May, that's also when we introduced this concept of powered by exosomes, which is an integral part of our brand and our platform and you can think of it as our version of Intel Inside. What we did here was also the first part in sort of moving from the rebranding, which happened in February, and we launched with a new name. We got a lot of PR coverage when we rang the bell at Nasdaq and we had the cover of gen biotechnology, introducing the concept of exercise.

Operator

So now we're slowly shifting towards not rebranding but actual brand building. And that also means that we are moving away from having a very high focus on communicating the basics. We'll still do that, of course, because there's a lot of people on the planet that still haven't heard about exercise yet. But we are going to start focusing more on our strategy. And that is called nutraceuticals with a pharmaceutical potential and extraordinary business case.

Operator

So let me just dive into that a little bit. So nutraceutical, maybe that's a word that not everyone know. It could be it's a little bit inside business jargon. However, the definition is very clear, but there is another way to think of this and that's actually a highly valuable natural product. That means it's something that we can produce in low volume, but has a very high value.

Operator

And going back to thinking about the strategy and looking at our projects, you'll see here that we have three products. You've already seen this previously in the presentation. And isobutanol, that's an extraordinary business case and it's not a nutraceutical. However, NCT is, Santalini is, and future projects that we haven't talked about yet, they are also that because that is the fastest way to market for us. And I would like to add that it's only a matter of time before we can actually announce our first licensing partner.

Operator

That's, of course, something that we are very much looking forward to and that's going to be a major milestone for us. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Lasse. I will check that and build on top of it. As Lasse said, we have become even more focused on the benefits we're getting from following our nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential and extraordinary business cases strategy. Let's dive a little bit into that. It's a fact of life that if you try to focus on many things, just means you don't focus on anything.

Speaker 1

So let's take a look at this slide together. It basically shows us our commercial partnership model and the continuum from one end where we own everything over to the right hand side. I'm talking about the lower bar to the right hand side where we have less direct ownership, but it's more leaning towards licensing and milestone payments. I wanna unpack how we want to build a portfolio of projects in this continuum. And as Damian have already nicely portrayed, we have our accelerator on the one side and our biosolutions on the other side.

Speaker 1

And sometimes, they're actually overlapping. So so some projects can be both. For example, we can have a joint venture that is not fully owned by us by definition that will license from us and therefore be smack in the middle of these two. It can also be that it is an accelerator project like isoputanol that is built by design to be licensed out. And therefore, you see it located right on on the edge of the the accelerator ready to go.

Speaker 1

NCT right now is, on the other hand, very fully owned by us, fully developed by us. And as we find the right partners and so on, it will maybe migrate a little bit more to to the right. The focus of nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential matters because it allows us to reuse a lot of the technology components, infrastructures, knowledge that we built for each of the projects. So when you look at these two circles, it's very clearly meant as covering these nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potentials and and the the surrounding areas. And over time, we foresee that the biosolutions will be applicable in many other industries.

Speaker 1

So the biosolutions side will probably grow in in size and area much more than the accelerator will. I I foresee that we will be focused on nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals for for quite a while when it comes to what we take ownership in ourselves. And again, back to because for focus makes you master of certain elements when you do them over and over again, and it is a very healthy end of the market. Natural product, pharmaceuticals, also fits us well, basically, because it allows us to start with often something that the the broader community, the academic scientists have already figured out that there's this really interesting compound out in nature somewhere that if you could only get hold of it at scale, then you would have a massive business opportunity. Those are obviously beneficial for us because a lot of the prework have been done on on the on the discovery side, but frankly, even more from the natural side.

Speaker 1

So when we look at a small molecule that some plant or some natural product organism can make, then we can go and see what is the DNA that leads to those enzymes, that leads to that small molecule. And by borrowing that blueprint, it's much easier for us to get a fast start with our AI and self free capabilities that Tyler, for example, talked about today. So this allows us to take natural product, nutraceuticals, to market much faster. And it allows us also to address a very big and growing part of the markets that are in in wellness and health and longevity. All of these things were were natural products fits really well.

Speaker 1

Damon gave a really good example of how big and multiple places in CT can can actually be applied. And that's basically also what we're looking at here on the next slide that is an expansion of the first slide that shows that even the projects can sometimes be broken up into sub bits. It doesn't have to be one company that works on the pharmaceutical and the nutraceutical in CT. It could, in principle, with time b two. And let's just say for for the sake of playing around with the the slide and the model here that NCT pharmaceuticals would end up in a licensing relationship, then that would migrate to the right.

Speaker 1

And maybe nutraceutical stays with us and becomes something we keep taking forward ourself, then it stays much more to to the left. Sandaline, that is what Damon talked about. That is the new small molecule we will be building a biosolution for because we got financing from the National Science Foundation under the CFIRE grant. This small molecule is a highly valuable natural product that is found in nature in sandalwood tree oil. So it's the active component in this very, very expensive oil that is super hard to get hold of.

Speaker 1

We're obviously excited to have gotten financing so we can start building a new biosolution. And for this specific molecule, we we can foresee at least three different areas where it could end up as as a product. It's already known that sandaline is a component of the really expensive perfume fragrances, and it's one of the reasons why we know it's a very, valuable small molecule. It's very valuable also because it's very limited in in production. So at the same time, sandaline can also be used as a potential nutraceutical and as a potential pharmaceutical.

Speaker 1

So again, you could see these development packages technology wise be built, but actually be applicable with small optimizations. So remember, when we do pharmaceuticals, we do often analogs and improved versions of the the natural product. If we do a nutraceutical, we often stay very close to the natural version, if not exactly on the natural version because it allows us these much faster GRAS, generally recognized as safe, and and other forms of of approval that makes us able to go to market much, much faster. Okay. So another thing that comes from us focusing in the same space and being able to reuse these things is that we get to set the new standards for how these things are built because we are pioneering the cell free biomanufacturing.

Speaker 1

And we actually aim medium to long term to become the standard in regards to how you do cell free biomanufacturing. So if we go to the next slide here, we can talk about how that is actually a type of IP. As you all know, we have a a very healthy patent portfolio, still growing it on on a quarter by quarter basis, and we have even more trade secrets. So for example, when Tyler is talking about how we do AI, yep, we are using AI algorithms that are developed by others, but proprietarily trained on the data that only we can generate. That's a good example of of a trade secret type of IP.

Speaker 1

Only we have access to it. Only we know how to generate it. Only we, therefore, knew know how to harvest the the opportunities from it. The third kind of IP that very few people talk about, because the first two ones are frankly what is something you could get as a service if you call a law firm, and the third one, you cannot. So people typically only talk about the two, but the third one is actually when you get to influence or maybe even control what industry standards looks like.

Speaker 1

Because if you do that and you build it so that it fits your technology exactly, it's very difficult for someone to come with a a different version of a similar thing and and incorporate that. They they will have to follow the standards. So what we do specifically to get into a position of setting the standards is we have engaged with BioMADE that is where we have one of our grants from and a very big biomanufacturing interest organization industry connector. And we are hitting up the cell free biomanufacturing group where we are helping other people to to wrap their heads around how it's possible to do so free and so on. Of course, it's a fine balance.

Speaker 1

We don't wanna give away our trade secrets by definition, and we don't want people to infringe on our patents. But on the other hand, we want them to use our technology and adapt our technology so that we have the opportunity to build biosolutions for them and and, basically, licensing opportunities. We are also via the Sandelin project. That's actually only, as Damon showed, in component of what we got our $3,000,000 to do. We have other modules that can be reused.

Speaker 1

So basically, the module in our biosolutions that is about how we use energy and let the the enzymes and exoscience have energy, that module will be upgraded to a new version so that it can much easier be plug and play into to to new biosolutions, making it even easier to develop cell free biosolutions in the future, again, if you use our standard. And what I also want to point out is that other than us getting $3,000,000, it was actually a $9,000,000 grant. So there's five universities where the most prominent and and lead, one is Georgia Tech, that got $6,000,000 between them to start looking at how to to make tools and how to make, processes and how to educate people for cell free biomanufacturing. Again, inspired by how we, share our knowledge and so on, and therefore, a way for us to help set the standards for the future. We are now coming to the last agenda point before the q and a session, financials.

Speaker 1

We'll now be talking about the financials and how we plan to attract more investors to our stock. We have been talking with more than 15 investment banks to learn about all the different services and things they they offer. We're very happy with how MDB Capital is helping us as our investment bank. And what comes in addition to that is that some of these other investment banks has access to some large long term investor networks that are very interesting that we will start engaging with. We will not be signing up any one specific investment bank at at this point, but we are talking with the the cream of the crop of the 15 about engaging if we need an investment bank at some point.

Speaker 1

We are also starting a number of non deal road shows. We will basically be going out to a number of investors and investor investor networks to introduce ourselves so they get to know about our company, our stock, and and the potential we hold. We have been lucky and have a number of investors come and offer us investments and or access to to to capital. We have not accepted any of these offers yet as we are very focused on getting the best possible, deal and only getting high quality long term investors into the company as all of you that have already invested. And now over to Vlad.

Speaker 5

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Vlad Lois, and I'm the VP of Finance at Exxasymes. Our financial results for the second quarter are detailed in the press release that was issued. I encourage you to read the report, and I'll take a moment to review those results. As a pre revenue company, our primary focus remains on prudent financial management while making targeted investments to drive long term growth.

Speaker 5

As of the June 2025, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $6,990,000 providing us with sufficient liquidity to support ongoing operations and key initiatives into the 2026. Our total operating expenses for the quarter were $2,550,000 which represents an increase of approximately $1,200,000 compared to the 2024. The increase in 2025 was primarily driven by R and D investments, personnel expansion of the leadership and the R and D team with a focus on further developing our internal infrastructure. Net loss for the second quarter was $2,360,000 with a year to date net loss of $4,220,000 We remain disciplined in our spending approach, ensuring capital is allocated to maximize shareholder value. Additionally, we continue to explore non dilutive funding opportunities, strategic partnerships and potential government grants to further strengthen our financial position.

Speaker 5

That concludes my presentation of the financials. And with that, I'll pass the call back. Thank you.

Operator

All right. So if you're on our website reading all the exciting news that we share fairly frequently, and you're wondering how do I keep myself up to date? Well, actually, you can go under the investors tab and you can click email sign up. And here you can sign up with your email and then you select the preference of what kind of updates that you would like. If you haven't signed up already, I would highly suggest that you do it.

Operator

We will have a lot of interesting news coming out, moving forward, and this is the way to keep yourself up to date in the fastest and easiest way possible.

Speaker 1

And that brings us almost to the end. I just wanna give you a summary of the most important things that makes me very excited about what we're doing and the future just in front of us. Our commercial efforts is developing and progressing fast despite the micro economics headwinds that we're experiencing. Being in joining our team as our CCO has been nothing less than a success. Our focus on development of highly valuable natural products are moving fast forward, and NCT is definitely our lead and most, successful program.

Speaker 1

So we are very happy with that one. We have not just one, but two technical competitive advantages that sets us apart from all other companies in the world. It means we're very difficult to mimic and follow. We also have a lot of IT protection. We even talked about how we as the only company are in a position where we can actually help set the standards for cell free biomanufacturing.

Speaker 1

Our ability to go full scale on the advantages of cell free biomanufacturing and that we're the only company doing in time optimization via AI. The way we do it because the way we generate our unique data is something that allows us to be fast, good, and cheap, and those are all the things you wanna have as competitive advantages. On the next slide here, team exoscience is super capital efficient. It's so important in this market. We're not spending tens of millions of dollars on technology development, yet we're making progress as if we were.

Speaker 1

So this is a true statement of how much four wheel drive we have in our r and d. We are setting standards for the future. It will hugely benefit us down the road, and we are overcoming the the the headwinds in the grant funding environment. And all of this is possible due to the four wheel drive by our team. We have a really strong team, and we are very well aligned as a team working on on this very important mission of making our company a huge success.

Speaker 1

We do not doubt that we will end up with a large number of licensing partners and many more high valuable natural products that will release a lot of value to our shareholders step by step again and again over the coming years. The last slide here is a promise that I'm making to you as our shareholders. We want to build a better system for our shareholders to get an overview of the progress we're making both on our accelerator product development projects and also a better way of getting an overview of the licensing negotiations and the the partnerships that will be coming out of those. We thank our existing shareholders, you guys, for co owning our company with us and for growing up together as a company to get to where we can reach our full potential, both short, medium, and long term. We really believe there's a big bright future for us.

Speaker 1

And, of course, we welcome new shareholders and investors to consider joining us all. As long as you remember that we are a public venture investment opportunity, lots upside potential, but also a road to get there. And those ups and downs that is a part of any venture journey is something you have to be able to stomach. We look forward to making the future a better place. We want to enable a new way of making chemicals for humankind, new natural products and all kind of chemicals.

Speaker 1

That is our long term goal. The medium and shorter term goals is this strategic focus on natural products that has a high value, that is our focus area first. We are very excited about the things we're already bringing forward and the things we will be working on and sharing when they have ripened up to a degree where they're ready to talk about. Now it's time to go over to our q and a session. Great.

Speaker 1

So, Leslie, did we get any questions today? I don't hear you, Lasser. Maybe the rest of the the crew doesn't hear it either. You know what? Why don't you text me the questions, and I will, I'll read them out loud.

Speaker 1

I saw the first one here that I can start with. So let's see. So we have a question. There seems to be a large push to onshore pharmaceutical manufacturing back to The US with billions, to be invested. Is Exercise planning, to try to capitalize on this tailwind?

Speaker 1

Thank you very much for the question. Yes. And finding that exact sweet spot where we are not gonna end up in, just building APIs, the active pharmaceutical ingredients that that other people can also build, but focusing on where we have a competitive advantage so we can have healthy margins also in the future and that we can, in in a fair way, ask for for a licensing relationship. It is, not gonna be all APIs that are gonna be relevant. Some, especially the ones that are being brought back from from China, is is petrochemical so petrochemical based chemistry.

Speaker 1

And reason why they were sent to The The US in the first place was because of how polluting and, frankly, expensive they would be to make in in The US. We're not gonna try to to compete on molecules where it's just gonna be moving things from from, let's say, China to The US, we're gonna, focus on where we can make, highly valuable, small molecules that can either not be be made at all, or we can make them in a significant better way. Okay. But, yes, biomanufacturing is becoming really hot here in The US. And if you follow some of the, proposals that are being proposed, by by US politicians from both sides and even collaborating.

Speaker 1

One of the few areas where there still seems to be collaboration, biomanufacturing is receiving a lot of, financing and and grant financing. That is, also why, the the the DOD and organizations like BioMate is getting, significantly more, more value. Okay. Question number two that I'm getting here. How long is your runway, and what are you going to do when you need more capital?

Speaker 1

We basically covered this a little bit in in Folat's presentation, but let me outline it. So we basically have, a a burn right now that allows us, this quarter, the next quarter, and the first quarter of, next year, so, up until 2025 if nothing happened. If we just basically spent money and didn't take any, extra liquidity flows into our bank account. What have already happened that is not put into that is that we got our, seafire grant that is $3,000,000. We haven't incorporated that in our cash flow because it's not, completely understood exactly how we can draw down that money in which order, how fast, how much of it.

Speaker 1

It's not a lump sum, payment upfront that you get. Until we know that, we we're not gonna, put it into our cash flow. But, of course, $3,000,000 matters, a lot to a company like ours. So that in itself will help expand, the runway. We've also been offered, basically investments by, multiple investors, everything from, large groups and and professional groups to ultra high net worth individuals that would like to become a part of the the the co owner circles of exoscience.

Speaker 1

So we have some different options we we can consider. I'm working closely together with Chris, our chairman from MDB Capital, to to sort through and and, actually, also a couple of other board members helping out to to sort through our different options to find out what is most relevant for us, but we have not taken any choices, yet. We do feel comfortable and confident about being able to raise more financing if and when needed. Let's see the next question here. What percentage of the NCT market do you think you can capture, and are there other competitors?

Speaker 1

That's a good question. Let's see what's, so it's too early to put numbers on yet, but we are confident that our biosolution that we are building for NCT will be competitive with any other solutions that that might, come to market for for this very interesting, business opportunity. You saw the enormous market potential that basically is a reflection of that these are some of the largest unmet medical needs. Thirty percent of everybody has nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and, bringing a nutraceutical and or a pharmaceutical to market for for that is is obviously, huge, huge business opportunities. We do have competitors in that market.

Speaker 1

There are other people trying to get to to NCT by isolating from from natural product. Those guys are really struggling. The other companies like Brightseat, for example, that have spent a lot of time and money on finding ways of getting NCT. And we picked that market specifically because of of both the the size of the opportunity, but also because we actually don't mind being compared to the the alternatives to the cell free biomanufacturing. So we we went after a market where other people are also in the market or at least trying to get into the market by building their kind of solutions so that we can show the the benefits of being self free and and how things scale better and the the the the purity we can provide and and all of these beneficial factors that in the end is competitive advantages.

Speaker 1

For the pharmaceutical application of NCT, it's only us that has a system where we can basically exchange a number of the exosomes or the building blocks they'll exosomes working with to make these analogs that can be built to to the potential of being more potent or being more bioavailable and other things having having longer treatment times, all features that might be necessary for a pharmaceutical track of this business opportunity. We're the only ones that can build these analogs. We can get patent protection on these analogs. And that part of the market opportunity, we have a real chance to own ourselves. Okay.

Speaker 1

Let's see the next question here. What is the undisclosed product development project hinted at in the product accelerator slide. Okay. Someone have have, was paying attention here. So, on on the product accelerator slide, we we showed basically, our isobutanol SAF program that is despite being the one that is, progressed the longest, we have used a lot of time on.

Speaker 1

Then we had NCT that we have is almost catching up in maturity levels to, to isobutanol, despite that it is a, much, much, younger program. It's moving much, much faster. Then we had Sandaline, and then we had a a gray box saying undisclosed. Of course, by definition, I I can't answer that yet, because we wanna announce it in in in due time. But, we do have a number of conversations with potential partners and internally about what is the next natural product that we're gonna build.

Speaker 1

And we are, in the in the r and d in the research side of the r and d phase, working on different things that, will will become the next thing. So it's equally much to to to communicate to you that there are new things coming up, both, potential licensing things and potential natural products we would, commercialize or co commercialize ourselves according to the accelerator model. It it wasn't to communicate a specific, thing is coming up. It was more generally to communicate there are more things coming up. Okay.

Speaker 1

Why license out the product and business opportunities instead of owning them a 100% yourself? That's a that's a good question, and and it touches our strategy specifically. There's a lot of things that goes into the strategic analysis of what things we're working on and how it basically adds up as a portfolio. So if we were to just take one or a few projects and drive it all the way to bring it to market to the end customer and consumer and taking that whole journey, we would only get one or a few shots at goal. Where by using this licensing and partnering opportunity, despite we have to share some of the the the the the cake, we get many more shots on goal.

Speaker 1

So for example, we, for sure, need a licensing partner for the isobutanol, ceph, biosolution where, NCT is a product that we, in principle, could go along with, ourselves. And it therefore depends a little bit on on what we are talking about. Sustainable aviation fuel is just such a big, opportunity that it will take a long time. There will be a lot of build. There will be a lot of reasons for why we are not the the optimal company to to bring that all the way to market other than we are the optimal company to build the technical solution of that part.

Speaker 1

And therefore, partnering makes a lot of sense. We can also stay capital, lean and effective by doing what we are exactly good at and then teaming up with companies that, have market access, market knowledge, maybe even brains, and and, existing sales into the right markets. So instead of us becoming the newcomer in a new market, we we can team up with, who is best suited to take the the the competitive advantages we have created and then applying them to the market. I can even imagine some markets where the where there's big dominating players, and therefore coming in is is not even an option. And therefore, if we're not partnering up with one of those, companies, then there will be no access to those markets.

Speaker 1

And the last argument I would, add here is, basically, there's so many opportunities, and it is so important for us. We focus on what creates the most value, and it is us bringing those product development, projects through from identifying the opportunity to ending up as a product that has a competitive advantage that can lead to, healthy profit margins. That is basically where we are creating the most value. Other companies are better at creating the the rest of the value chain, and therefore, is our preferred method. Okay.

Speaker 1

I'm getting a signal here whether we have passed the one hour and that we need to wrap up. Last question for the day here. Let's see. Any plans to do more regular podcasts? The grow everything one was excellent, hoping for more.

Speaker 1

Well, thank you very much. And, yes, in in in fact, there is and we have already been invited to to speak at at, a couple more podcasts already, so there is more of that in the pipeline. And with that, I think we will wrap it, for today. Thank you very much for your time and attention. We really, really appreciate your support and you co owning this business together with us so we can make the impact on the future that we are so, hardworking to deliver on.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much.

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