Alamar Biosciences Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 revenue rose 82% year over year to $29.4 million, led by consumables revenue growth of 147% as the installed base expanded. Gross margin reached a record 60%, although management expects near-term fluctuations in the mid-to-high 50% range.
  • Positive Sentiment: Alamar reported strong adoption of its Neuro 220 and Immune 340 panels, launched a blood-based eMTBR-Tau assay, and expanded its Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative/Gates Ventures partnership to profile an additional 86,000 samples. The combined consortium dataset is expected to exceed 140,000 samples and support future research demand.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management reiterated plans to add at least 100 instruments in 2026 while maintaining annual pull-through above $400,000 per instrument. The company also plans to submit its ARGO HT DX clinical instrument for FDA marketing authorization in 2027, potentially enabling clinical-trial and diagnostic partnerships.
  • Negative Sentiment: Operating expenses increased 89% year over year to $31.2 million, contributing to a $13.5 million operating loss and $13.2 million net loss. Alamar expects continued investments in commercial, manufacturing, R&D, and public-company infrastructure, while full-year 2026 revenue guidance is $116 million to $120 million and Q3 growth is expected to be only modest sequentially.
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Earnings Conference Call
Alamar Biosciences Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Alamar Biosciences second quarter 2026 financial results webcast call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Kari Mandeville, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please proceed.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review Alamar Biosciences second quarter 2026 financial results. Joining me on the call are Yuling Luo, our Chief Executive Officer, and Justin McAnear, Chief Financial Officer. Our President, Tod White, will join for Q&A. Earlier this afternoon, we issued a press release detailing our second quarter financial results, and we posted an accompanying presentation in the investor section of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that statements we make during this call will include forward-looking statements as defined under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Additionally, we are not under any obligation to provide further updates on our business trends or our performance during the quarter.

Speaker 1

To better understand the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, we refer you to the periodic reports that Alamar Biosciences files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed on May 8, 2026. I will now turn the call over to Yuling Luo, Alamar CEO.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Kari, and thank you all for joining us this afternoon for our first earnings call as a public company. Before I begin, I want to thank our investors for their trust and support following our successful initial public offering. On behalf of the entire Alamar team, we remain committed to delivering meaningful impact while creating long-term shareholder value. I will start our call with a brief overview of Alamar and our platform, then walk through our Q2 business highlights, and close with our strategy to unlock the opportunity ahead. I will then turn it over to Justin to cover our financials and the revenue outlook for the remainder of the year. Starting on slide 3. Eight years ago, we founded Alamar with a singular mission: to power precision proteomics for the earliest possible detection of disease. That mission remains our North Star.

Speaker 2

The proteomics market represents a massive, largely untapped opportunity. We believe the reason it has remained untapped is not because of lack of demand, but because of lack of sensitive and sophisticated tools. That is the technology gap Alamar was built to close, and today, I believe we are delivering on it. Turning to slide 4. What sets Alamar apart is simple. We are the only platform to combine all five elements essential for precision proteomics, ultra-high sensitivity, high specificity, flexible multiplexing, broad dynamic range, and seamless automation. Existing technologies have historically demanded a trade-off, a sacrifice in sensitivity, in multiplexing capability, or in workflow simplicity. Our platform was specifically designed to eliminate those trade-offs. Since launching our precision proteomics platform in January 2024, adoption has been phenomenal. Starting with our top-line results on slide 5. Q2 2026 was a strong quarter that reflects the momentum of our business.

Speaker 2

Total revenue grew 82% year-over-year, driven by exceptional consumable performance. Consumable revenue accounted for 53% of our total revenue and was up 147% compared to Q2 2025. For the first time, we also achieved a 60% gross margin. Turning to slide 6. We're focused on three key drivers to sustain and expand adoption of our platform in the near term. First, growing our instrument installed base to reach new institutions and geographies. Second, developing novel content to extend our leadership in our beachhead neurology and inflammation research markets and enter adjacent disease areas with significant unmet need. Third, collaborating with leading institutions to develop new applications, support third-party studies, and grow our publication base to drive awareness and adoption of our platform. Turning to slide 7. We're making meaningful progress across each of these areas.

Speaker 2

We continue to expand our installed base, launching three new RUO products that expand the reach and the utility of our platform, deepening our strategic partnership, surpassed 165 cumulative publications and preprints, and delivered our strongest scientific presence ever at Alzheimer's Association International Conference. I'll go through each of these achievements in a bit more detail. Turning to slide 8, we'll build a clear leadership position in neurodegenerative research. In middle March, we launched our new NULISAseq Neuro 220 Panel, and have seen incredible adoption. In early July, we launched the first commercial multiplex blood-based immunoassay for eMTBR-Tau, which is emerging as one of the most important biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease research. Our eMTBR-Tau provides a non-invasive, blood-based measurement of tau tangle burden with attomolar sensitivity, multiplexed alongside other neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation biomarkers from a single low-volume sample.

Speaker 2

We have validated this across multiple cohorts, and we have already seen data being submitted for publication from multiple customer labs. We showcased this data at our workshop at the AAIC, and the reception was outstanding. It set the stage for what was our strongest AAIC presence today. Turning to slide 9, we came away from AAIC with a strong sense that the field is approaching an inflection point, and Alamar is at the center of it. We counted more than 140 posters and presentations featuring NULISA technology, a four-fold increase year-over-year. Three things from the conference reinforce our conviction in where the market is heading. First, blood-based biomarker are going mainstream. Second, tau is emerging as a central drug target, with Biogen advancing their tau-lowering drug into phase III, and others following. The timing of our eMTBR-Tau launch could not be better positioned.

Speaker 2

Third, there is a growing appreciation for the complexity of the neurodegenerative disease. Researchers are increasingly focused on heterogeneity and co-pathology, including alpha-synuclein, frontotemporal dementia, and vascular disease, driving demand for the kind of deeply multiplexed, multi-target panels that only our platform can deliver. Turning to slide 10. Our leadership position in neurodegenerative disease research is translating into increasing use of our platform in large cohort studies. Today, we announced expansion of our strategic partnership with the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative and Gates Ventures, adding profiling of an additional 86,000 plasma samples using our NULISAseq Neuro 220 Panel. This builds on our June 2025 announcement of a multicenter initiative that profiled over 55,000 samples. Included within this expanded agreement is a national-scale initiative, co-led by researchers at three leading universities to profile approximately 21,000 plasma samples from 10,000 Alzheimer's Disease Research Center participants across the U.S.

Speaker 2

Expected to complete in 2027, the combined dataset will encompass more than 140,000 samples profiled across multiple geographies and cohorts, made available to the global research community through the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium. We believe this partnership will generate one of the most unique resources available today for understanding neurodegenerative disease. Turning to slide 11. Beyond neurology, we are also expanding content for our other initial market, inflammation. Two weeks ago, we launched our NULISAseq Immune 340 Panel, our broadest multiplex immune profiling panel. It expands on NULISAseq Inflammation Panel 250, our first immune panel. The biology driving this expansion is chronic low-grade inflammation, which is implicated across cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic disease, neurological disease, autoimmune disease, and aging. Until now, much of that biology has been out of reach because many immune mediators circulating at concentrations below the detection flow of conventional immunoassay.

Speaker 2

The Immune 340 Panel addresses that directly with attomolar sensitivity and simultaneous measurement of approximately 340 immune-related proteins from a single blood sample. It captures the regulatory signals, feedback loops, and the low abundance mediators that other platforms routinely miss. We believe this panel opens a large and under-penetrated market opportunity, and we are replicating in immunology the same playbook that has driven our success in neurodegenerative disease. Turning to slide 12. We also expanded the capability of our platform with the launch of a NULISA Dried Blood Spot Extraction Kit, making home-collected fingerstick samples compatible with our ultra-high sensitivity multiplex proteomics platform. Historically, there has been a significant technical challenge to recover protein signals from small volume dried blood spots without losing the low abundance biology researchers care about.

Speaker 2

Our NULISA Dried Blood Spot Extraction Kit delivers high target detectability across our neurology and inflammation panels using many micro-sampling platforms. We believe remote at-home sample collection will be the key requirement to power future population scale screening and health monitoring tests. Turning to slide 13. In Q2, we added more than 40 new publications and preprints, bringing our cumulative total to 165, spanning neurodegenerative disease, oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic, and autoimmune conditions. The breadth and depth of these rapidly growing publications really highlight the impact of our platform. A particularly compelling example comes from Dr. Carlos Cruchaga's lab at Washington University, highlighted on slide 14. Published in the Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, the study used our platform to develop an AI-based classifier capable of diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases and categorizing co-pathology from a blood sample.

Speaker 2

What makes this study particularly striking is that a carefully selected panel of just 15 proteins delivers a strong diagnostic and co-pathology classification compared to hundreds of markers on a legacy platform. It reinforces a thesis central to our value proposition. Measuring the right proteins with sufficient sensitivity and precision can outperform larger, less targeted assays. A scalable, non-invasive method to categorize co-pathology has the potential to make clinical trials more productive and precision medicine more achievable. Turning to slide 15. As I mentioned at the start of the call, the opportunity ahead of us is massive. We serve the research market today, which is substantial on its own and estimated to reach $9 billion over the next decade.

Speaker 2

But proteomics is broadly applicable across disease areas, and we believe our platform has the potential to expand beyond research into clinical diagnostics and enable early detection and health monitoring at population scale. The real value lies in the combination of our multiplex capabilities and the sensitivity required for clinical use. We plan to partner with companies that bring disease domain expertise, establish clinical development infrastructure, regulatory experience, reimbursement pathways, and commercial channels. Think of our platform as the iPhone. We provide the hardware and the operating system, and we enable third parties to build the applications. In our case, those applications are differentiated diagnostic tests that our partners would develop and where applicable, seek regulatory marketing authorization. To realize this opportunity, we are developing a clinical instrument, ARGO HT DX, and are executing a phased diagnostic enablement strategy as outlined on slide 16.

Speaker 2

The first step is obtaining FDA marketing authorization to establish that our platform meets the regulatory bar for clinical use. We believe this will drive adoption for use in late-phase clinical trials and open the door for partners to develop laboratory-directed tests and IVD tests on our platform. We also believe that pursuing FDA marketing authorization may drive increased use in our space across discovery, translation, and clinical trial, because we offer something most research tools cannot: a clear path to clinical translation. Once we obtain FDA marketing authorization, the second step is developing high-value differentiated test offerings. With authorization in hand, we plan to partner with IVD and LDT companies to support the development of tests where standalone or as part of a multi-omic solutions that are meaningfully differentiated from what exists today.

Speaker 2

Before I hand the call over to Justin to discuss our financial results, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of our board member, Ian Ratcliffe. Ian brought Alamar the same quality that defined his entire career Intellectual rigor, genuine care for the people around him, and unwavering belief in the power of scientific innovation to reach patients and change lives. His commitment to Alamar and to the broader scientific community was a hallmark of his leadership, and we're better for having had him in our corner. We are at an extraordinary moment for proteomics, and I believe Alamar is uniquely positioned to lead it. I'm deeply proud of what this team has built and energized by what lies ahead. With that, I will turn the call over to Justin.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Yuling. This is our first earnings call as a public company, following the completion of our IPO in April. It is a meaningful milestone, and I am proud of the team's execution on both the financial and operational fronts. With that, I will now walk through our second quarter 2026 financial results in more detail. Unless otherwise noted, all growth rates reflect year-over-year comparisons. We plan to update the installed base and average instrument pull-through metrics on an annual basis, and we will be sharing those on our year-end 2026 earnings call. Starting on slide 17, total revenue for the second quarter was $29.4 million, up 82% compared to $16.2 million in the second quarter of 2025. These results reflect rapid and broad-based adoption of our ARGO HT platform across our customer segments and geographies.

Speaker 3

Consumables continued to be the standout performer and accounted for more than half of the total revenue in the second quarter. Consumables revenue was $15.5 million, up 147% year-over-year, driven by strong demand for our multiplex panel kits as our install base has scaled. Instrument revenue in the second quarter was $7.8 million, up 35%, driven by continued growth in new instrument placements. We are pleased with the pace of placements, and as Yuling noted, the installed base now supports a strong and growing recurring consumables revenue stream. Service and other revenue was $6.2 million in the quarter, up 49%. This line is composed of our Technology Access Program, or TAP services, and maintenance contracts. Today, the majority of our service revenue is TAP revenue. Revenue from maintenance contracts is a smaller fraction as a large portion of our installed base is still covered by the one-year warranty.

Speaker 3

As a reminder, TAP serves three key objectives: driving new customer acquisition, supporting custom assay development, and beta testing new products prior to launch. It is worth noting that TAP is not intended to be a long-term service business. Our goal is for new customers to ultimately purchase their own instrument or transfer their work to a CRO, and we actively manage our TAP program with that conversion in mind. The increase in Q2 was driven primarily by larger custom assay development projects. As our platform continues to gain adoption and our publication base grows, we expect TAP services to grow at a slower rate than other areas of the business. Looking at the geographic breakdown for the second quarter on slide 18, the Americas represented 69% of revenue, EMEA represented 22%, and APAC represented 9%.

Speaker 3

We are actively building out our international presence, and we see meaningful runway in both EMEA and APAC as we deepen our distribution partnerships and direct commercial efforts in those regions. From a customer mix perspective, 52% of second quarter revenue came from academic and research institutions, 42% from biopharmaceutical companies, and the remaining 6% from distributors. The continued strength in biopharma is particularly encouraging, as these customers tend to run larger, more sustained cohort studies that drive meaningful consumables pull-through over time. Gross profit for the second quarter was $17.7 million, compared to $8.6 million in the prior year period. Gross margin was 60% in the second quarter of 2026, up from 53% in the second quarter of 2025. Gross margins were at an all-time high. The improvement was primarily driven by two factors.

Speaker 3

First, manufacturing efficiencies as consumable production has scaled significantly, and second, a favorable shift in product mix with a greater proportion of revenue coming from consumables, which carry higher gross margins than instruments. Total operating expenses in the second quarter were $31.2 million, compared to $16.5 million in the prior year period. These increases primarily reflect deliberate investments in the people, infrastructure, and R&D capabilities. Research and development expenses were $13.8 million in the quarter, up 55% from $8.9 million a year earlier. The increase reflects higher lab supply costs to support our expanding consumable panel menu and an increase in personnel cost. Selling, general, and administrative expenses were $17.4 million in the quarter, up 129% from $7.6 million in the prior year period. This was primarily driven by an increase in personnel cost, as well as higher professional services costs for legal and accounting services.

Speaker 3

Loss from operations was $13.5 million in the second quarter, compared to $7.9 million in the second quarter of 2025. This includes $3.3 million of stock-based compensation for the second quarter of 2026 as compared to $0.7 million for the second quarter of 2025. Net loss was $13.2 million in the second quarter, compared to $7 million in Q2 2025. We ended the second quarter in a strong financial position. As of June 30, 2026, we had $256.3 million in cash equivalents, short-term investments and restricted cash. Also, this month we refinanced our existing debt facility with SVB First Citizens Bank into a new, more flexible revolving credit facility at improved terms and more favorable pricing. This facility includes $60 million available at closing, along with an additional $40 million uncommitted accordion for a total of $100 million.

Speaker 3

We are pleased to continue to deepen our relationship with SVB First Citizens Bank, who has been a valuable partner in supporting our growth since well before our IPO. The strength of our balance sheet reflects our April IPO, which generated net proceeds of $197.8 million. We are well capitalized to execute our plan, and we intend to deploy this capital strategically to scale our organization and capabilities in support of future growth by expanding our commercial sales and support function, increasing manufacturing capacity, and enhancing our research and development organization to expand product content. Turning to our outlook for the rest of the year, we expect revenue for full year 2026 to be in the range of $116 million to $120 million, reflecting expected annual growth of 59% at the midpoint of the range. For the third quarter, we expect our revenue to be a modest sequential increase from Q2.

Speaker 3

On the expense side, we expect to continue investing in headcount across the commercial and R&D functions, along with the ongoing cost of operating as a public company. As we grow, we remain focused on maintaining a disciplined path towards profitability. With that, I will turn the call back to Yuling.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Justin. Before we open to questions, I want to acknowledge the Alamar team. The work required to build this business, complete an IPO, and deliver a quarter like this simultaneously is extraordinary. I am deeply grateful for everyone on the team who made it possible. Looking forward to the rest of 2026, we have three major goals. First, growing our installed base by at least 100 instruments for full year 2026. Strengthening the foundation for recurring consumable revenue. Second, maintaining per instrument pull-through above $400,000, which we believe is the clearest signal our customers are running our platform at real scale. Third, advancing into additional large cohort studies, particularly in translational and biopharma settings, where demand for high sensitivity multiplex protein data is most acute. Into 2027, the milestone gets more significant.

Speaker 2

We plan to continue to grow our installed base of instruments and launching a multiplex panel targeting a new disease area, submit the ARGO HT DX for FDA marketing authorization, and establish partnerships to drive our clinical and diagnostic enablement strategy. Our conviction in this opportunity has never been stronger. We are well-capitalized, we have a clear roadmap, and we have a team that has demonstrated it can execute. With that, we will now open the call for questions. Operator?

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star one one again. We ask that you please keep your questions to one and one follow-up. One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. We have a question from the line of Casey Woodring with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed.

Speaker 4

Great. Thank you for taking my questions and congrats on the quarter, guys. Maybe to start, wanted to ask just on demand trends between academic and pharma customers in the quarter. I know pharma has been driving growth for you guys of late. Just curious if that was the case again, if you could frame up the growth by that customer segment. I would also be curious to hear if you saw any underlying improvement in the academic markets. As a follow-up, on the instruments you placed in Q2, more broadly speaking, was just curious if you could give us a sense of, growth was driven by more placements into existing accounts or with new customers.

Speaker 2

Yep. Thank you, Casey, for the questions. In Q2, we have seen strong growth from both academics as well as biopharma segment. We have seen exceptional adoption by our neural. I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing incredibly strong growth in the academic market. Going forward, we continue to expect significant growth on both academic as well as research market.

Speaker 5

I-

Speaker 5

Casey, to answer the second part of your question on instrument placements, you asked if we're mostly going to new customers or existing customers. If we look at this year to date, the majority of instrument placements are going to new customers.

Operator

One moment.

Speaker 2

And maybe just add that, I think we're exciting to see the existing customer continue to adopt additional instrument. To me, this is a good indication of existing customer have found a lot of value and the utility of our platform, and they like to expand. Some expansion are beyond one site to additional site, which is quite exciting to see.

Operator

Our next question is from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen. Please proceed.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you. Congrats on the first quarter. Maybe just the first one on the quarter itself, on the TAP strength and maybe kind of unpacking a little bit consumables and instruments. TAP drove really strong growth from upside. Could you just unpack, was there any one-time nature in that at all? Do you expect kind of TAP to continue? I know, Justin, you talked about modest growth sequentially. Just wondering, is that typical or is that being conservative? Just anything on that front as well, and then I have a follow-up.

Speaker 2

Hi, Dan. Thanks for the questions. We're very pleased with our consumable pull-through and a growth almost 150% over last year at the same time. We're also quite excited to see the TAP increase, which is certainly significant above what we have anticipated. One of the major reason for this is the customer asset development. We are happy to see that the customer asset development indicates, the customer wants to move from discovery, leveraging our platform to translation and future clinical application. We do believe that over the longer term, those increase in customer revenues will translate into future consumables or instrument adoptions.

Speaker 5

Yeah, thanks. Dan, to add to that about the TAP program, like we said, it's got three objectives, drive new customers, support the customer asset development, and then beta testing of new products ahead of launch. We do have a really strong TAP pipeline, and as Yuling Luo said, we believe it's a good leading indicator of future demand. To your question around one time, I suppose you could say if we're ideally, all of TAP would be one time because then we would be transitioning to new products. We did see a higher volume for TAP in this past quarter than we had been expecting. I do expect that the trend will continue in the near term into Q3, but not at the level that we saw in Q2.

Speaker 5

Then you had another question around just the step-up overall from Q2 to Q3, when we talk about a modest step-up. When we use the term modest, to me that means, low single-digit sequential growth from Q2 to Q3.

Operator

One moment for our next question, please. It comes from Puneet Souda with Leerink. Please proceed.

Speaker 7

Yeah, hi, Yuling Luo and team. Thanks for taking my questions here. First one is on pull-through. I wanted to understand the $400,000 pull-through number that you have and you expect to continue to exceed that. You exceeded that number last year, too. Just trying to understand how are you thinking about that number longer term, the cadence of that. As I look at this quarter, was there a step-down in the pull-through from Q1 to Q2, and is that just a function of more installs, which is an indicator of future consumables growth in our mind. Also, last part of the question is, could you maybe talk about the ceiling that you can reach, given the output of this platform on the pull-through side? Thank you. I have a follow-up.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Puneet. Certainly, we're seeing great demand for consumables. As I mentioned, the consumable has grown close to 150% over last year. We think this is still early days. When you acquire a new customer, it takes time for the new customer to ramp up, and that's exactly what you explained about the pull-throughs. We remain very confident that we'll continue to keep the pull-through above $400,000 this year, which I remind you that this is industry-leading.

Speaker 5

I'll just add that new instrument placements will put some pressure on pull-through in the near term, just given the number of instruments that are being placed each quarter relative to the size of our install base. We expect that there would be fluctuations quarter to quarter on the quarterly pull-through, which is why at this time we're providing that metric on an annual basis. Puneet, you had a second part around the pull-through ceiling. If you were to use the assumption that you would do three plates in a 24-hour period, five days a week, you could get to a ceiling of $5 million-$6 million per instrument on a theoretical pull-through.

Speaker 7

That's super helpful.

Speaker 2

I just want to

Speaker 7

Yeah, please, Yuling.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I just want to add that, many of the pharmas, time to resolve is critical to them. They are not fully utilizing their capacity of the instrument. Rather, they would rather buy a few more instrument to get the results faster.

Speaker 7

Got it.

Speaker 2

That is another reason why the pull-through can be controlled.

Operator

One moment for our next question, please. It comes from Dan Arias with Stifel.

Speaker 8

Hi, guys. Thanks for the questions here. Just wanted to ask a question a little about the assay portfolio. Yuling, my assumption is that you're going to try and move folks that use the CNS 120 panel to the Neuro 220 panel pretty quickly. I guess I'm just curious whether when that happens, is there a validation process that needs to take place there, and does that create a bit of a pause or anything to be contemplated when we just think about run rates and consumable pull-through rates as that's taking place?

Speaker 2

Yep. Hi. Thanks, Dan. Our product roadmap, very much like what we said during the IPO process, first, we're going to double down on what's winning, which is launching the Neuro 220 panels, where we launched this in March this year, and we have seen incredible adoption since then. We also doubled down on the immune panel, with the launch of Immune 340 a couple of weeks ago. We see some early signs of adoption. We're quite excited about that, and going forward, we're going to build content to cover new disease areas. Certainly, in the cardiovascular and metabolic disease area, as well as oncologies. So those are the sort of high-level product roadmap that we're going to go move forward.

Speaker 8

Okay. Justin, maybe just following up on the consumables pull-through rate. If I look to last year, you did have this really big 3Q to 4Q step-up. Can you just talk to whether there were large orders in 4Q of last year as we sort of think about seasonality and trying to use last year as a guide for this year? I just want to make sure that we model these things correctly in the early days without a ton of historical information to go by.

Speaker 5

Yes. Dan, thanks. Thanks for the question. When we look at Q4 of 2025 and that step-up from Q3 into Q4, it was a pretty decent step-up. We also did have some fairly larger orders for large cohort studies, two in particular that hit in Q4. When we look at how we are thinking about the step-up this year from Q3 to Q4, we still have larger cohort studies like that spread out over many quarters. When you look back at Q4 of last year, those made outsized contributions just due to their size, compared to the rest of the revenue base.

Speaker 8

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Ryskin with Bank of America. Please proceed.

Speaker 9

Great. Thanks, and congrats on the quarter. Justin, maybe I will stick with both for you on the P&L. Maybe just first on the gross margin line, as you said, you guys hit 60%. Nice margins in both products and services. Any reason that should not carry forward, just both in terms of your mix is not going to be that different going forward, it is going to continue to bias towards consumables, the efficiencies in some of your manufacturing processes as consumables scales up, as just volume scales up, that should continue. Any reason this should not be sort of the starting point going forward in gross margins? Could you give us the roadmap from here of where that number goes? I got a follow-up.

Speaker 5

Yeah, thanks for the question, Mike. When we look at our 60% gross margin in Q2, that really reflects two primary drivers. That is the growing mix of consumables revenue, which has higher margins than the instruments, and also the continued benefit of manufacturing scale and leveraging overhead. As consumables continues to become a larger share of revenue, we expect that driver to expand the margin over time. That is also dependent upon how quickly our instrument installed base grows and the mix between instruments, consumables, and services. When we are looking at the rest of the year, although hitting 60% gross margin was a great milestone to hit, we do expect to fluctuate in the near term, and I would expect that fluctuation to be in the neighborhood of the mid to high 50s, in the near term.

Speaker 5

But I would expect to continue to trend upward over time.

Speaker 9

Okay. All right. Then follow-up is actually going to be on the OpEx side, R&D and SG&A. You guys managed that really well the last couple quarters. You have successfully completed the IPO, upsized it. You have got some nice war chest there. During the process, you guys constantly referred to the efficiency of your sales organization, your ability to leverage a really small organization for the revenues that you are getting. Now that you do have a little bit of this war chest, any change in how you are thinking about the next three, six, 12 months in terms of spending on OpEx and sort of where you see the opportunities, the levers you are going to toggle with that? Thanks.

Speaker 5

Yeah, thanks for that follow-up, Mike. When we are talking about our capital allocation priorities, pretty clearly defined. Our largest investment would be in these three areas, expanding the commercial org, focused on driving instrument placements and deepening the penetration in existing accounts. Next, scaling our manufacturing capacity, including expanding our Fremont facility. Then third, continue to invest in R&D to develop new panels, new instruments, including the ARGO HT DX, and new applications across different disease areas.

Operator

All right. Our last question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink.

Speaker 7

Yeah. Hey, guys. Just to follow up. On those large scale projects, I just wanted to clarify, cadence-wise, the 21,000 project, is that a different project that you had outlined earlier? Versus the Alzheimer's project and the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative and the Gates Ventures project. What I'm trying to really get to is how should we think about the samples and the cadence of those samples in 2026 and in 2027? Thank you.

Speaker 5

Yeah. Puneet, thank you for the follow-up. These large cohort projects, as you did touch on, there are a couple of those, and they will be spread out over multiple quarters. These studies naturally have long lead times, more than our standard commercial orders. You have to manage sample logistics, institutional coordination, and data infrastructure. Those all have to come together before we can complete the profiling at scale. I think we've got the 2026 numbers contemplated in our guidance, and then the rest we'll see phased in over the first half of next year.

Speaker 7

Okay. Just wanted to clarify, the 21,000 sample is the CLARiTI project, and that's different than the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative?

Speaker 5

Yeah. Those are tied together. Yep.

Operator

It's part of the Gates Ventures ADDI project.

Speaker 5

One is a sub-part of the other.

Speaker 7

Got it. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference for today and Q&A session. Thank you all for participating, and you may now disconnect.

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