MDB Capital Q2 2026 Earnings Report

MDB Capital EPS Results

• Actual EPS: -$0.90
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

MDB Capital Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: ($2.33) million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

MDB Capital Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2026
• Date: 8/13/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, August 13, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30PM ET

MDB Capital (NASDAQ:MDBH), through its subsidiaries, primarily operates as a broker-dealer. The company operates through two segments, Broker Dealer & Intellectual Property Service, and Technology Development. The Broker Dealer & Intellectual Property Service segment operates as a full-service broker dealer that focuses on conducting private and public securities offerings, as well as providing research services for investment banking due diligence. The Technology Development segment engages in the synthetic biology technology development business. The company was founded in 1997 and is based in Addison, Texas.

MDB Capital Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Negative Sentiment: Microcap markets remain challenging: Management said small public and private companies are being neglected, and MDB’s planned expansion from one launch every 18 months to three to five launches annually is being deferred. Revenue is expected to remain lumpy as the company prioritizes a smaller number of high-conviction opportunities.
• Positive Sentiment: MDB plans to operate more leanly without dilution: The company is targeting approximately $5 million–$6 million in annual operating expenses, expects portfolio companies to fund themselves as they mature, and said it is not seeking to raise additional capital at the MDB level.
• Positive Sentiment: Public Ventures may generate near-term strategic value: MDB is in discussions with four or five potential partners regarding a partnership or sale of its clearing platform and aims to complete a transaction in the next quarter.
• Positive Sentiment: PatentVest is pivoting toward an AI-enabled patent law firm: MDB plans to spin the business out as an independently financed entity, using AI and an alternative business structure to improve patent-prosecution efficiency and potentially attract legal talent and clients.
• Positive Sentiment: Portfolio catalysts are approaching: eXoZymes is pursuing scalable manufacturing and commercial partnerships, while Paulex Bio is targeting an IPO in the fourth quarter and expects important diabetes-related clinical data in early 2027. Management characterized both assets as having substantial upside, though execution and financing risks remain.

Presentation

[Tony Dammicci, Chief Experience Officer at MDB Capital Holdings]

So, at this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett. Chris?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Thanks, Tony. Well, great. Let's get the deck up here. Great. Thanks again, Tony. Everyone, thank you for joining today. I wanted to thank you all for joining. It's been a really interesting time period for us, and we're making a lot of very important changes. I think that I'm excited to communicate our focus and where we're headed going forward for the balance of the year. A quick overview of the agenda, really. I wanted to talk about sort of the backdrop of the microcap markets and what it means for us and really our plan for maximizing our core assets. I don't think that we've done a good enough job about talking about our core assets.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We kind of like to change up the presentations occasionally to basically give you a different way of looking at it, understanding what we've built at MDB and what we think the value is. Those four core assets, some of you might know about, but I'll talk a little bit more as we get into the presentation. We've also got real financial discipline. When you look at our financial statements, it's very hard to really discern exactly what's going on. I'm trying to simplify that so that you understand that we have really a core operating platform that we can make very efficient, that has a lot of leverage. Our objective is to provide that leverage without any real dilution. That's the key.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

With all of our companies, whether it be a portfolio company that we're trying to help to get to commercialization and value creation, or whether it's MDB doing the exact same thing. It's called leverage without dilution. That's sort of what's inherent in all the companies that we get behind. Not to use it as an excuse, but really, I don't know that it's generally well known that this sector that's sort of the sub-$200 million market cap area that we operate in of companies we're taking public has been really sort of evacuated to some degree. Where all the concentration is really if you take the top 20 companies that are public today, they comprise over 50% of the total equity market value in the U.S.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

If you look at even venture funding, such a huge percentage of it is going to these very, very large companies. The small companies are really languishing, not only in sort of the public markets, but also in the private markets. When you look at the headline numbers of the Anthropic and OpenAI's getting funded, the money moving around is really staggering. When you look underneath it and you look at these small companies, it's a very, very different picture. When you look at overall funding, about 70% of all funding has gone towards AI-focused companies. While we have what I think are some great AI-based companies in our portfolio, I don't know that that translates into total valuation.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

I do believe that we've got a great shot of our sort of AI-enabled companies getting into that trend, and that's really what we're focused on for the balance of the year. If you really look at it, both ends of the barbell are very different, and sort of all these kind of tiny companies, both in the traditional venture world and in the public venture world, are sort of being neglected. When you look at these small IPOs, we've talked about it before, but the number of public companies has been dropping in the U.S. We've gone from roughly 8,000 public companies around 2000 to less than 4,000 today. Even though there's 1,000 companies sort of in this sub-$200 million market value area, it only comprises about 2% of the total market capitalization.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

If you figure 25% of the companies are in this space, yet it only comprises 2% of the equity market value. These institutional investors, not that they necessarily drive stock prices, but it's just really an indicator of fund flows. What we found is once a company gets to a certain market value and institutions start to participate; we start to see value expansion many times. The game is really how do you get enough coverage; how do you get enough people involved so that eventually what ends up happening, when these companies get to a certain market value, they start to really scale in valuation. We see that consistently. When you look at a lot of these companies, there's a huge difference between a company trading at a $100 million valuation and a $500 million valuation.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

You'll see vast valuation differences, and I think the game is, as it gets bigger, it gets a wider audience of people looking at it. Even though you'll say, "Oh, wow, the small cap indices rebounded sharply in the second quarter," the average market cap of, let's say, the Russell Microcap Index is over $2.5 billion, which is a totally different market than the market we're playing in. Again, it's just an artifact that we haven't seen before historically in the development of MDB. It's sort of gone to an extreme level. We do think that at some point, monies rotate. Money typically rotates to value at some point or where there's the most upside. We actually think if the really big end of the spectrum, today we made new highs, that if that segment got pressured, we don't really see that as a real risk for our segment.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We actually think that money will still have to rotate somewhere. We do think that if the big market comes down, it's not necessarily going to hurt the small ones that we think are actually sort of on the floor. We look at it as it's kind of hard to fall off the floor. Again, no promises, plenty of risk factors there, but I just think that that's our view of where the markets are and what we see as the potential opportunity as money rotates again. What does that mean for us and what we're doing? We're not happy with where we're at. We certainly didn't go public with the idea of this happening and our stock being down from where we took the company public.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

But when you think about when we went public, the last three companies we had taken public before we had gone public all went to billion-dollar valuations. We expected that in that kind of marketplace, our shareholders would do phenomenally well if, let's say, our next companies went to billion-dollar valuations. That, of course, has not happened. But it doesn't mean that our companies don't have that potential. In fact, many of these companies that we've launched before were trading at very low valuations. Then next thing you know, things changed. If you look at something like a company like Pulse Biosciences that we really started the company, formed it, took it public. The stock, we took it public at four, it went to 40 or high 30s, came down again, went to the 40 again, down to a dollar.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Everybody thought it was left for dead, and today it just made another new high at $46 a share. Again, it can be super volatile and fortunes change with these things. It's really amazing to see what's happened over the last five, six years in this micro-cap sector. I can't emphasize anymore that we feel you're sort of as good as your last performance. When we had Preventice Solutions get bought for $2.9 billion, again, everybody thought it was dead and going nowhere, and next thing you know, it gets a buyout offer close to five times the price it was trading at. Again, this is not a promise, it's just perspective. It's really all it is. Many times we've seen these companies do this, and it doesn't shake our conviction in the potential of these companies. But the price is the price, right?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

You guys are looking at the prices and saying, "Wow, maybe these guys at MDB aren't so smart." Our perspective is we've been through this before. Again, I sit here the same way you do. I don't like seeing my stock being down. I certainly don't like the fact that we sold this to other people and the stock is down. But it doesn't change how we feel about what we've developed. We still feel very bullish about what we've developed. We also feel very bullish about our ability to create new companies and a lot of value. We think that we've built a great team, a great platform, and a great process for doing that.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

But you got to have winners, and a part of that is the rotation of the asset class, and part of it is picking the right things and making sure they get to commercialization. So really what we're doing is we're working very hard to realize the potential of each asset, and that's where we've sort of redoubled our focus on our existing portfolio to make sure they get to those key value inflection points. So, what we've done, we talked about scaling from one launch every 18 months to three to five, what we talked about at year-end. We talked about AI transforming our sourcing and diligence and our launch models. We still believe all of that. And building a venture portfolio so that we can broaden the risk amongst many companies.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Much of our operating expenses had been invested in those big ideas like PatentVest and our clearing platform that we believe are smart investments. As of right now, what we're looking at is, okay, right now, going out and launching new companies is great. We're still looking for new companies, want to launch new companies, but monetizing our four core assets is really important. So when you look at whether it's Public Ventures, PatentVest, eXoZymes, and Paulex Bio, we see great potential in all those platforms, and we're in the process of really doubling down to make sure that those four assets get to a value inflection point. Our plan has never been after going public to ever really dilute the MDB shareholders. We're not looking to raise more money. We're not looking to go out and spend more money.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

As we said, nothing's changed from when we started MDB. We want to distribute the value of those assets as we create them. But more importantly, now with this marketplace, it's not so much let's be aggressive and step on the gas. It's really how do we run a very lean platform? How do we run this thing on $5 million-$6 million a year, but still not only monetize the companies we have that have had historic billion-dollar leverage, but create new ones in a very cost-efficient manner? That's what we did before we went public. And our big idea of scaling those launches is the timing is just not right. And we do think that environment will change, and when it does change, then we can go back to saying, "Okay, can we do more of them?" But right now, we don't need to do more.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We just need to monetize and leverage the ones that we've done and go back to a rifle shot approach until the environment is better for what we do. So I'll delve more into each one of these companies and tell you what we see and why we're excited about them as we've always been, and drill down on those and a little bit more on our results. So Public Ventures, we always looked at self-clearing as a really important thing as these markets transform. A lot of what's happened in the securities markets is things have transformed from companies getting funded with traditional institutional investors at the low end to being heavily influenced by influencers. We've seen money shifts to platforms like Robinhood and others that are much more momentum-based, much more different than sort of your poor fundamental bottoms-up investors in the microcap space.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We think that having a platform that can respond to that was very important. That is why we started Public Ventures. We got this up and running. It was a really great effort by our team to get this up and going, and it was about a five-year effort. It was not easy. We built it on a very lean budget. We built our back office in Latin America, which we think is super valuable to be able to support the platform. As many of you who are clients of MDB know that you can always pick up the phone, get somebody to make a trade for you, or actually give you good customer service. That is not an easy thing to do in this world today, and we have built that and got it up and running. That being said, we are not really leveraging it.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

In other words, if we are not launching a lot of companies, if we are not putting out four or five new companies a year and building that marketplace, then what we build actually has value. We are looking to partner it with somebody else out there that has a broader platform and can really use it, and really enables us to focus on what we do, where all the leverage is launching big ideas. We have been in discussions now with several parties, currently about four or five parties, and I think we will be probably a few more. We have actually received some interest, letters of intent to do partnerships or even sales of the platform. We are in the midst of that.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

I do think that we want to try and get something wrapped up in the next quarter, and I think there is a very good chance of that with the folks that we are talking about. We are excited to announce how the Public Ventures clearing platform can create more value by offering a much broader platform. To our knowledge, there are no clearing platforms really for sale or for partner right now. Currently, if you look at the discrete clearing platforms that are out there today, there are about 100 of them. We are one of 100, but so many of them are owned by the household names that you are familiar with. It is a unique opportunity for a lot of different types of people to do that.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

I also think that what we do in investment banking, Public Ventures, some might call it crowdfunding, is attractive to a lot of different people. We are just trying to find the best fit for MDB so that longer term, as we create new big ideas, we have a great platform and great partner to launch those with. PatentVest. AI took us by surprise to a certain degree. Again, it does not seem like that should be a surprise, but if you look at it, the realization that we hit at the end of the year was AI was changing very rapidly. Not only was the capabilities of AI changing very rapidly, but we saw a lot of the AI platforms being very commoditized.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

What we are seeing is that AI, a lot of people were investing heavily in software development, and we were seeing that, geez, what is going to get commoditized in this space? What we realized was the platform we had built at PatentVest was really unbelievably well-positioned to pair with AI to build the law firm of the future, the patent law firm of the future. We have pivoted our strategy quite dramatically to respond to the realization of that. There has been, as you have seen, a whole host of legal tech firms out there getting funded. It has now turned into a mega value market. Just four or five months ago, things like Harvey AI and these things that are serving law firms getting valued at several billions of dollars of value.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

What is even more interesting about patent law, it is very different than traditional law, is that it is a federal-only practice. That is why we made the decision to start what we call an ABS law firm in the state of Arizona, which enables us to be an owner of a law firm and bring in business processes that are critical to lawyers to providing great patent work. This is an exciting time to build a home for great patent lawyers, and it really makes a lot more sense for those patent lawyers to operate not in a traditional law firm structure that exists today.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We are super excited because what we are effectively doing is bringing our team of people with best-in-class AI processes to complete the workflow that patent lawyers shouldn't be doing, whether that is associate work, whether that is paralegal work, whether that is foreign filings.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We can do that and basically take these great patent lawyers that are the brilliant minds and provide the platform that they need that works for them, that is very different than what they may be experiencing in a small law firm that has limited resources or a very large law firm that is structured differently for patent law. More importantly, it brings an efficiency level to these companies where we can bring unprecedented efficiency without taking money out of the pockets of these patent lawyers. These patent lawyers can actually make more money while delivering greater efficiency. That is the real story with what AI is going to enable. Great lawyers are still going to get paid for their value, but it is going to be delivered in a much more efficient platform, and the inefficiency that is in that is going to be taken out.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We think great lawyers are going to want to come to PatentVest. We think the most innovative companies are going to see our ability to transform how patent prosecution takes place. We are very excited about it. Another what we thought was a very forward-looking AI-enabled ABS law firm in the immigration space was recently funded at a $750 million pre-money valuation in the VC community. We see that the logic of pairing ABS law with a law firm, a federal practice, just like they did in immigration law, but in a much bigger market than immigration law, could have huge strategic value. Javier Chamorro, who has been running that platform, has done a great job along with the team to basically put together a great strategy.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We're going to be executing a financing for that company to get it off the balance sheet, or I shouldn't say off the balance sheet. We're going to get it spun out as an independent entity where MDB is no longer funding the development. It'll be funded by independent investors. We're giving independent investors the opportunity to invest in PatentVest and then participate in the growth of this platform that we think is truly innovative and is the future of patent law. eXoZymes. eXoZymes has really been making an unbelievable transformation. I think that one of the things that's most misunderstood about eXoZymes is that since we took the company public, people had not seen real commercial traction. I think that that was a bit of misdirection.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

What we were focused on was pivoting eXoZymes to seeing that we could scale manufacturing because the bane of Synthetic Biology is it didn't scale. You had companies that created multi-billion-dollar valuations like Ginkgo Bioworks and Amyris and others that were public, and they made great announcements. They announced a lot of commercial deals, but they couldn't deliver. They couldn't deliver on manufacturing. We felt like we had to go out and make sure that we could deliver on that, while also looking for all the molecules where we can really, really get huge valuation inflection.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

That started with NCT, but I think the great news is now we have several other molecules which we've talked about, and I think will be talked about by eXoZymes in their conference call next week, that really broaden our ability to bring in commercial partners. I also believe that they are very close to executing a relationship with contract manufacturers or one manufacturer as a strategic partner that could effectively make all of the small molecules that they're developing. We can take the thing that's really held back Synthetic Biology, the manufacturing thing, off the table with multiple compounds, which now opens up the ability to have real commercial discussions. Those commercial discussions have been taking place, and I think are going to be accelerating now that we are developing the ability to scale manufacturing. I think it's a very exciting time.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

When you saw the great valuation expansion of those other companies, you saw them signing commercial relationships, which led people to believe that this would scale, but then they disappointed. I believe that now we can prove we can scale manufacturing, those commercial relationships will have a lot more value and could drive what we always believed, multi-billion-dollar value, just like these other companies did. Stay tuned. I think this is really a great time for eXoZymes. It's been a long road, but we think we're very close to seeing those very tangible commercial inflection points that will bring value to eXoZymes and our portfolio. Paulex Bio. Paulex Bio is really getting to an exciting point in time. I think that the company's very close to filing its registration statement for the IPO, and it's quite simply potentially one of the most earth-shattering developments in diabetes.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

The reason we funded Paulex Bio is very simple. We believe that this drug has a reasonably good shot at enabling beta cell expansion, which is insulin production, increasing insulin production, whether it be in a type 1 or type 2 diabetic. We believe that when you look at that, and you do that at a very early stage, the implications to the diabetes and obesity wars that are happening in pharma right now is really earth-shattering because this could be the core differentiator for all of these GLP-1 platforms or any of the other cocktails that are happening in this arena, which basically is completely synergistic. Not only is our drug very synergistic with GLP-1s in preclinical models, but it also effectively, as you increase beta cell production, you create a whole different metabolic profile.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We are very excited about it, and I think we are getting very close to demonstrating that it is safe, and that core value inflection point, which is beta cell production. We believe big pharma is going to have to take notice, and we see, again, huge valuation inflection potential, very much like we had in Provention Bio, which we started with the same folks that we started Paulex Bio with. We had the first disease-modifying type 1 diabetes drug at Provention Bio. The size of the market with this dwarfs what Provention Bio's discovery was. We are super excited. We think that data will start to play out in the early part of 2027. I think that everything is on track, to our knowledge, with the clinical trial, and I think they are going to be coming out with their own update very quickly.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We will be getting close to the IPO in the fourth quarter of this year. Our hope is that this could be not only groundbreaking for patients, but groundbreaking from a value inflection point for Paulex Bio and for MDB. When you look at the core four positions, we have 4.1 million shares plus some warrants on eXoZymes. We have approximately 7.1 million shares and some warrants on Paulex Bio with not only core value-creating readouts coming shortly, and we are hoping with eXoZymes, some core value-creating commercial partnerships soon. We own 100% of Public Ventures, and we own 100% of PatentVest.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

If you start to do the math and you start to look at through the numbers of MDB and through the balance sheet of MDB, you start to look at that and say, "Okay, what could those be?" We think that there is significant multi-billion-dollar potential in things like eXoZymes and Paulex Bio. We think there is perhaps not in the short run for Public Ventures and PatentVest, that kind of potential, but we think there is great potential for those as well. When you look at how much of these we own and what it can mean, and you do the math, you divide by roughly 10 million shares outstanding, you can start to realize that there is a lot of leverage embedded in MDB shares, and that we certainly do not think it is being reflected in current stock price.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

There's no value predictions on this page by design, but I think what you'll see is we have a core belief in all of them. Nothing's changed, and we're looking to make sure that we focus on getting all these things to a value inflection point as soon as possible. I don't need to read Tony's long risk factors again, but all these things, there are no sure things in life, and what we want to say here is while we're super optimistic, you never know what can happen. The microcap market is probably, in my mind, the biggest variable that we're not in control of, and I think execution, we still have to execute on all these. We feel confident in our execution. We're working every day to make it happen, and we're super excited.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

When you zoom out a bit, what we're really trying to do is protect against dilution and distribute the value. Again, as we've always talked about, monetize or get to a value inflection is really where we're at, not dilute MDB and distribute those things out because if we can operate on $5 million-$6 million a year and we generate some fees to offset those, you have an enormous amount of leverage in your ownership in MDBH. Looking at first half operations, again, that marketplace, our ability to get things done, we got two transactions done in the first half. We participated in an IPO for Ticket plus, again, closed right after the end of the second quarter. We didn't do a lot of transactions, but it did offset some of our overhead.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Our first half numbers do reflect those two transactions, and the pipeline remains active. We have a lot of really great things in the pipeline. Our quality bar is unchanged, but some of these things, again, you really want to make sure that the backdrop is great to launch these things. The backdrop does impact how many of these we do. When the backdrop is bad, you got to focus on ones that you can absolutely pound the table with impunity with to get done. If you look back at the history of MDB, there's been times, I reference Pulse Biosciences when we did that IPO, we barely got it done, and it was a really, really, really bad time to do IPOs, and we got it done through conviction and through pounding the table, and it's provided unbelievable returns for our shareholders.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We're still going to pound the table and get life-changing things done, but it's not like we're going to be able to get them done at the same rate while the markets are the way they are. We're looking at two transactions. Could be Paulex Bio, could be another one in the second half. When you look at our fee income to offset Operating Expenses, look to those kind of transactions in the second half of the year. We have one fee transaction that we're working on that could be quite significant. There is a lot of leverage in what we do at MDB, and we're hoping to surprise you with some things that we're working on that are not necessarily apparent today.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Again, I talked to the capital discipline as we spin out PatentVest and as we partner off the clearing ops, we can bring down our platform to about $6 million in total Operating Expenses that can be offset. That's a really critical number because it provides a sustainability without dilution, and that's where, as a shareholder, I'm trying to protect against and not have to sell our positions too early and wait for those key inflection points. In some cases, if I saw an opportunity to invest more, to do more, the great news is I don't see that. What I see is that we've invested in these things, they're ready, they need to go off on their own, and the ones that are already public or about to go public, they can live on their own. We're excited. We think it's a sustainable thing.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

It's going to be lumpy. It always has been lumpy historically. Since we're not doing three to five transactions a year of new big ideas, it's going to be lumpy, and there's no way to get around it. I would say that as a public company, sometimes you have to deal with the lumpiness, unfortunately. There's sort of no way to get around it. But the underlying value we're still very excited about. I think I've pretty much covered this. Basically, launch big ideas, operate lean, and own equity in meaningful new companies. Tons of leverage. Any one of them becomes a billion-dollar enterprise like the three we launched before we went public. The leverage to MDB shareholders is massive.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

It's easy to get morose in environments like this and say, "Oh my God, it's never going to happen." From my perspective, I always say you're only as good as your last performance. That faith in basically that we can recreate the magic is everyone gets tried in these environments, and certainly, whether it's employees, myself, all of us, we get tried, but we still really believe in what we're doing. I'm energized every day to launch these new enterprises. If you look at the 17 IPOs over the 29 years, all of them have traded a significant premium at some time post-IPO and reached valuations enabling follow-on capital. Again, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns, but we're highly confident that as a rotation happens, our companies are going to get noticed.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

It is a difficult environment for microcaps, but it's also the place if you're patient and you research your positions well, and we have some really sophisticated investors in our community, and it's an opportunity for them to do their research, dig in, understand them, and they represent really great opportunities and we're trying our best to get those investors to go visit these companies, understand what they're doing, and gain their own conviction, because that's the key in these hard times. What keeps us excited is we know that we're creating companies that make a positive difference. That's what keeps me still working today, is in doing what I'm doing in difficult times. We know that these companies are game-changing potential companies that really, really will make a difference. It's the only reason I do what I do today.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

It is an exciting time to be alive with what is happening in AI, what it is enabling for companies like eXoZymes, like PatentVest, and others. It really is one of the most transformative periods in our history. We really want to thank you for being part of our community and at MDB and help to make a difference in what we do and with all these companies we launch. With that, George, I will open it up to you. How do I, let's see, end, click to exit.

[George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director at MDB Capital Holdings]

You are good. Hey, look, the first question is, can you talk a little bit about how these portfolio companies, obviously with PatentVest and the Public Ventures broker-dealer, you have control of those, but with, like, say, eXoZymes and Paulex Bio, what are you doing to help these companies kind of recognize or their full value or help them for people to know about them and learn about them? What are you doing for portfolio companies? What impact are we having as a firm on those companies?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Well, I think that what we have to offer, especially after launching, is our close to three decades of experience of how to manage it. If you look at eXoZymes is a great example. The team at MDB spent a lot of time on eXoZymes. The markets have pivoted and changed, right? To us, it should be obvious that these guys could finally deliver on Synthetic Biology, but we have had to pivot and say, "Listen, guys, let's help on commercialization. Let's pick up the phone. Let's actually help eXoZymes secure those commercial relationships." Our community, us, we have a lot of relationships that can bring to bear on that. We are doing that. We are spending real time with the team at eXoZymes, not taking anything away from them. It is all hands-on deck, right?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

With regard to getting recognized, we have to really dig in and help them to translate that to the world. It is very, very difficult. It is a complex science, but we have spent a lot of time working with a team to simplify it and translate it. You take a company like Paulex Bio, same thing. You have got the life science sector, in a sense, has come back a bit. Obviously, the sector they are in is super exciting, super vibrant. But making very tough decisions about what is the best way to go public. Do you go public with a partner on board already, or do you just do the IPO before, which is what our plan has been? There is a lot of real considerations in helping develop these companies and helping develop the value of these companies.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

I think connecting the dots is really the key thing for all these small companies. These small companies, there is a wall of doubt and worry that surrounds all these things, and it is really making it obvious to investors that they have the right plan to get there, right? We spend a lot of time on that. Then just getting them in front of people, right? That is what you do in the community. We got to get them in front of people that can make a difference. I do not think that your average. We are not really an investment bank per se, even though we own one. But most investment banks are just interested in getting a transaction done and getting paid. We are interested in seeing the stock go up.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We are redoubling our efforts, and when the markets are slow, it gives us more time as a small organization to help these companies. That is great. It also gives us more time to focus on the launch of PatentVest and also more time to get some sort of value-creating deal with Public Ventures as well. If the current market is slow and new launches are more difficult, then you focus on the ones you have and helping get them there. We are a small but mighty organization in our own mind, and you just got to focus. I think the idea behind this presentation was to say, "Hey, we are focused on getting these core assets that we have not fully realized to realization of their value.

[George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director at MDB Capital Holdings]

It is great. It was great hearing about the different companies. But as a shareholder for MDB, can you talk a little bit about what you have been doing, what you are planning to do? This is a pretty good story. If you buy into the leverage here, how are you getting that story out and the message out to other shareholders so other people would join in here with where the stock is at? What have you been up to?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Well, I have been doing a few podcasts. I do not know how, again, sometimes we go out and go to these conferences and what have you. But we went to the Planet MicroCap conference, and they put on a wonderful conference. I do not want to take anything away from them, but it is a little depressing to see how unpopulated these conferences are, right? We have been to two MicroCap conferences, and we know that waxes and wanes and changes and whatever else, but there is just not a lot of new blood there. You get out to conferences where I am doing a few podcasts. I do not know how much reach they really have. You try and simplify and tell the story in a different way. But when your asset class is out of favor, it is challenging. But like I said, nothing stays constant.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Everything is always changing. You just be consistent with out there informing people, getting the message spread the best you can. We talk to these family office platforms or RIA platforms. It is really interesting. What I love is people love the concept of what we are doing, and they understand it from an intellectual perspective. That is not where the money is flowing, so they are no longer putting money in private equity as much. They are no longer putting money in traditional venture as much. They do not need to because you can buy Nvidia and just get all the liquidity you want and make lots of money, until you cannot. I think that is the way I look at it, is we just stay consistent, do that work, continue to tell the thing. If anyone has got any bright ideas, we are all ears.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

We certainly do not believe we have got it all figured out. We rely upon our shareholders telling us what they think and what we can do.

[George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director at MDB Capital Holdings]

HeartBeam did not make your four horsemen there, but our share position on that is small compared to the other four, obviously. One of the questions here is, what do you feel about HeartBeam right now and the technology and where the company is at?

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Again, we completely believe in their platform. It can be completely transformative. Nothing has changed. They have got the ability to, with an ambulatory device, read ECG signals better than anybody that we know of. I think that they have now acknowledged that trying to launch the product on their own was not the right approach, and I think that there are plenty of people that could integrate that technology platform into their product or service category. It is more capital efficient. If the market is going to dilute you have got one of the best technologies out there, why would you dilute your shareholders to do something that is super capital-intensive at this price? Quite frankly, they do not have the team to launch the product appropriately. We try to give good counsel to them, but we do not run the company.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

But I think that their strategy now is the right strategy, and now they need to, whether it is work with foreign governments or work with other ECG makers, other ambulatory monitoring companies, whether it be wearables or whoever, this device needs to be in every airport and every airplane and every public office and every sports team. This device needs to be everywhere, every health clinic in the world. Because it is going to save millions of lives. But they have to do the partnership deals, much like eXoZymes. It is all about partnership deals. You got to leverage your technology platform with people that have the channels open already. I was very happy to see they are moving in that direction. It extends their runway, enables them to get to commercialization with less dilution. Nothing has changed except the stock price is depressing.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

But again, for somebody that does their work and goes in there and understands it, spend some time with management. I think now that their strategy is, I think, the right strategy, this could represent an unbelievable opportunity for investors.

[George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director at MDB Capital Holdings]

Okay, back to eXoZymes, and final question. If you have a question, go ahead and hit that Q&A button down at the bottom of the screen and type it in. But we have got time for one or two more questions. But regarding eXoZymes' financing, they were hoping to raise a lot more money, ended up raising around 6. Can you characterize the challenges? I think you kind of have already, but you might want to re-summarize where they were at and where they are going.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

You want to manage dilution. Again, they are also capital efficient. They have huge asymmetric upside. Their OpEx, depending on grants or whatever, around $10 million a year. I think that one of the things that we have talked about is if NCT becomes its own platform that is funded separately, that becomes a real, not only value-creating event, but also lessens the capital needs of developing NCT. But I think there are other molecules that they can do deals on as well. So, I think that you could see strategic investments. You could see spinouts that help fund things that are non-dilutive, right, that actually create value. I am not promising those things. I am just saying that I know those are things that they are working on, and that could happen.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

I think once you get to a value inflection point by these commercial deals happening, these offerings become less dilutive, and more importantly, it becomes easy to do a financing once people clearly see that this thing is going to be commercial and it's no longer just a technology platform. I think that, as soon as we see those commercial deals happen, I think people are going to get it.

[George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director at MDB Capital Holdings]

Okay. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. Tony, do you have any closing comments before Chris wraps up?

[Tony Dammicci, Chief Experience Officer at MDB Capital Holdings]

No, George, I think if that's all we've got for today, we just want to say again, thank you for attending, and this will wrap up today's call.

[Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder at MDB Capital Holdings]

Thanks, everyone.

Participants

Executives

• Tony Dammicci, Chief Experience Officer
• Chris Marlett, CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder
• George Brandon, President, Head of Community Development, and Director