KULR Technology Group, Inc.

You are in the right place for the Cooler Technology Group fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. The call begins today, Tuesday, March 31st at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. Please hold on the line. You are in the right place for the Cooler Technology Group fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. The call begins today, Tuesday, March 31st at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. Please hold on the line. You are in the right place for the Cooler Technology Group fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. The call begins today, Tuesday, March 31st at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. Please hold on the line. Welcome, everyone, to the Cooler Technology Group fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. I'm your host today, Stuart Smith. In just a moment, I'm going to be joined by the chief executive officer for the company, Michael Moe, as well as the chief financial officer for the company, Sean Cantor. Both of those officers will be giving their opening remarks, and that will be followed by a question and answer section with management. And again, we want to thank you for those questions. Now, before I begin, I would like you to listen to the following Safe Harbor statement. This call contains certain forward-looking statements based on Cooler Technology Group's current expectations, intentions, and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements made on this call are based on the information available to the company as of the date hereof. The company's actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied in such forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with their business, which include the risk factors disclosed in Cooler Technology Group's Form 10-K filed with the Securities Exchange Commission on March 31st. 2026, as may be amended or supplemented by other reports the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding the company's expectations, beliefs, intentions, or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, intend, may, should, and and would or similar words. All such forward-looking statements that are provided by management on this call are based on the information available at this time, and management expects that internal expectations may change over time. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Except as otherwise required by applicable law, the company assumes no obligation to update the information included on this call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Now with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Michael Moe, Chief Executive Officer of Cooler Technology Group. Michael, the call is yours.

Thank you, Stuart. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining. 2025 was a difficult year for our shareholders and for our company. Share price declined significantly and we recorded a net loss of approximately $62 million. The majority of this loss was driven by one-time and non-cash items, but it was still a loss. Our investors, shareholders, internal team members, and I all felt the effects of this loss. We recognize the impact this has had, not just on our investors and shareholders, but also on our employees and partners who are deeply invested in our success. I feel that way alongside all of you. I want to acknowledge this directly. Equally as important, I want to separate what affected performance in 2025 from what matters most to the business going forward. In 2025, Kula will continue to grow and invest in its core business, the Kula One battery platform for energy storage systems. Adversity brings clarity. It sharpens our focus, reinforce our discipline, and remind us exactly what must be done. We're taking these lessons forward with urgency and intent. Our foundation is strong, our direction is clear, and we committed to executing with precision and accountability in 2026. What I want to do today is go through what we built in 2025, what we believe is the right foundation, and what realistic 2026 growth execution looks like. Cooler designs and builds advanced battery systems for autonomous platforms, digital infrastructure, electric transportation, and space exploration. Cooler One is our battery platform. Our progress in 2026 will be judged by core battery revenue growth and improvements in gross margin as volume and automation increase. The mission for 2026 is clear. Eliminate distractions and execute with discipline. Our singular focus is to build and sell more cooler one batteries. That's the work and we'll do it relentlessly. I would now like to walk you through some of the 2025 financial reportings and the situations surrounding them. Sean Cantor will provide a full financial summary during his portion of the call. Under GAAP accounting, Quota recognized an unrealized mark-to-market adjustment of $13.8 million on its Bitcoin holdings for 2025. The adjustment reflects a change in Bitcoin price at the end of 2025. While this is an expense, it's not a cash expense. We have maintained our Bitcoin treasury of approximately 1,082 Bitcoins without selling any coins. We invested in and formed a distribution relationship with a private exoskeleton company. In late 2025, that company filed for insolvency. We took the full write-off of approximately $6.9 million. Clearly, this investment did not work out. The investment and the distribution relationship with this entity have been ended, and the full account is in the 10K. The lesson is clear. We must be disciplined in how we allocate capital and resources, prioritizing the growth of our core battery platform, and focusing opportunities where we have greater operational control, strong commercial visibility, and direct alignment with our strategic priorities. Battery platform revenue, which is product sales plus contract services, was 7.3 million in 2025. That's the commercial baseline we're scaling from in 2026. Revenue was $16.1 million up 51%. Most of that growth came from Bitcoin mining and battery research granddaughters. The number that matters most to us in 2026 is the battery platform revenue. That's the business we're building cooler one around, and that's where we need to demonstrate growth. $7.6 million is where we start. I would also like to address the product sales gross margin of 1% in 2025. Cooler One gross margin at current production volume reflects the economics of an early stage manufacturing rep. Three factors are driving the current cost structure. First, material pricing at current volume is high. Second, fixed facility costs are spread across a production base that has not yet reached high throughput. Third, each new customer program carries engineering and design costs that are concentrated in early production runs before volume scales. As programs mature and volume increases, those program level costs will be absorbed across a larger number of units. All three of these factors compress margin at the start of a production ramp. They will improve as volume grows. To address these, three actions are already in motion. First, programs that began as early prototypes are transitioning to production. Many cooler one-air drone battery programs are moving along that curve. Each program that crosses from prototype to volume production shifts from a cost center to a margin contributor. Second, we're installing an automated production line in second half of 2026. Automation reduce per unit labor costs and improves new consistency at scale. Both of which will directly impact gross margin. Third, the CoolerOne platform itself is maturing. As more programs are built on the same modular architecture, engineering and design work required to onboard new customers decrease. That ratio continues to improve as platform accumulates application experiences across defense, aviation, telecom, and data center use cases. In summary, we do not view 2025 margin profile as the end state of the business. We view it as the current economics of low-volume production before programs mature, automations in place, and production volume grows. What we built in 2025 is the foundation for our growth in 2026. Our headquarter facility is a vertically integrated battery production center from design, prototyping, cell screening, qualification tests to volume production. We're working with domestic battery cell suppliers to strengthen our NDAA compliance supply chain and our customer base has grown across six diverse industries. We have an experienced and dedicated team, solid financial resources, and a broad customer base to grow our business. We have learned the difficult and valuable lessons. We're now focused on execution. Ship more batteries. You may ask the question, why now? Why 2026 is the year for change? High-growth markets that cooler serves, autonomous platforms, direct energy systems, digital infrastructure, they all share a common technical constraint, power density. The demand for high-power battery pack has emerged, and that's the biggest growth driver for us. The requirement is not simply to store more energy, but to deliver at high C rates than a standard battery. Oftentimes, this must be done in challenging environments that include extreme temperatures, high G-force, vacuum conditions, and underwater pressure without thermal failure. That's not a commercially available battery problem. That's a specialized battery problem. It requires a battery architecture specifically designed for high power and thermal stress operation. Simply put, these customers often cannot rely on off-the-shelf battery packs. They need high performance, safety, and reliability, all in one package that can deliver fast at commercial prices. CoolerOne is built to that specification. It starts with building the right architecture and then select the right battery and cell partners. Quora One is a modular and customizable architecture to meet customer needs across multiple end markets. We currently have over 30 active customer development programs in Quora One Air, Quora One Space, Guardian, and Triton, which is our new maritime platform. Those programs are at different stages from evaluation to development through more advanced commercialization work. They represent a broad pipeline of revenue growth for CoolerOne as we move these customers from design into production revenue in 2026 and beyond. Cooler's cell partnership reflect the same focus. We have worked with both Amprius and Monicell for a long time. They focus on high power and high energy density batteries. Those partnerships are a deliberate long-term strategy to maintain access to the most capable battery cell technology available as power density requirements with cooler's markets continue to advance. The combination of CoolerOne system architecture and advanced power cells from our partners give our platform a development roadmap that extends well beyond the current production configurations. Next, I'll give you an update on our CoolerOne Air program. HoloLens Air, which was launched last year to support the drone industry, is now expanded beyond just air-based autonomous systems. Just in the Cooler One Air category, we have over 20 active engagements to develop specialized battery systems for many high-profile unmanned systems companies that operate in the air, ground, and maritime markets. The intensive work accomplished in 2025 to ramp our engagement with these demanding customers will start to become apparent in 2026 as their programs and system evolve from development to deployment. Let me share with you why Kula One Air is the right platform for this market. Autonomous systems like drones and robots operate by executing rapid and high-intensity physical action. Their motors accelerate at takeoff. Gimbals stabilize under heavy load. Sensors are firing at the same time. And their control systems respond in milliseconds. Each of these actions demand a large amount of current and power delivered instantaneously. Energy batteries, the kind that optimize for energy density and releasing it gradually over a long period of time, cannot respond fast enough in sustaining the discharge rate these actions require without overheating or collapsing the voltage. A power battery is designed around the opposite priority. It's built to deliver power at 5 to 20 times faster than energy batteries. It also needs to sustain that output through repeated high-demand cycles. and it needs to manage the heat generated by the power without failure. For autonomous system where the motor, the sensors, and the computers are all cranking at peak current at the same time, only a power optimized architecture can keep up. The engineering challenge of a power battery is not simply to build a bigger or stronger version of an energy battery where heat and thermal stress is manageable. For power batteries, heat dissipation becomes the primary engineering constraint. The design needs to be lightweight enough for the platform to fly and high component and manufacturing quality to sustain the performance. For example, a single defect in welding and soldering joints will result in such an energy battery creating a resistance point that at high discharge rate generates enough localized heat to drive the entire pack into thermal runway. Coral One addressed each one of those constraints through a combination of engineering expertise, proprietary technology, thermal control, component integrity, and build precision. That's what separates Coral One battery that perform in the field from one fails under operational load. Our current engagements span agriculture, survey, law enforcement, defense drone programs, and surface and subsea maritime vehicles. The breadth of the applications reflect the platform's configurability. It's the same Quota One architecture adopted to the specific power, weight, and certification requirements for each platform. Quota has shipped thousands of these drone battery packs to date. We're engaged with two of the leading unmanned aerial system companies in the United States with a combined production volume target to approach 10,000 packs per month in second half of 2026. These are active engineering partnerships with production timelines, path configuration, and qualification schedules already in place. Another important point I'd like to make is about supply chain resilience, namely NDAA compliance that stands for National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA compliance is a procurement requirement for government and defense adjacent customers. Cooler entered a joint development collaboration with Helio to design, prototype, quantify, and manufacture NDA-compliant battery systems in Texas. Helio is a Texas-based designer and manufacturer of drones for agriculture and public sector programs where NDA compliance becomes important. Both the batteries and the drones are made in the United States. Next, I'll give an update on our other Cooler One programs. Cooler One Space and Cooler One Guardian are the two programs that set the performance standards for the entire Cooler One portfolio. Both operating environments where battery failure is not recoverable, human spaceflight, deep space missions, and active military operations. The engineering standards that we develop for these programs are what the rest of the Cooler One platform is built on. Every performance requirement met in the spacecraft or a combat system propagation-resistant, thermal stability under extreme conditions, certification under scrutiny, raise the engineering baseline that Cooler One Air, MAX, and Trident inherit. Customers in defense drones, electric aviation, AI data center programs abide into this architecture that has already been qualified in the most demanding operating environment. Quota continues to see adoptions across the space sector. The XLT and the Reach series batteries are in active use across multiple satellites in both LEO and GEO applications. The Reach series currently is in multiple unit deployment on four partner satellites. Next, I'll talk about what are the competitive advantages of the Quota 1 platform. The number one competitive advantage for the Quota 1 platform is the performance, safety, and quality standards the platform was built to. CoolerOne's core IP originated by the work we've done with NASA Johnson Space Center. The architecture was designed for human-rated spaceflight applications, environments where battery failure is not a recoverable event. Zero propagation failure has a propagation containment. That heritage is the engineering foundation that makes CoolerOne the correct choice for applications where performance and safety are both non-negotiable. A perfect example of that advantage is our partnership with Robinson Helicopters. Robinson Helicopter Company has manufactured more civil helicopters than any other company in the world in its 50-year history. They have manufactured more than 14,000 helicopters. Their procurement standards for safety-critical systems are established and rigorous. They value the cooler one and select it to be their next electric aviation platform. That decision is important because it further validates the engineering standards Kula 1 was built to. Under this co-development agreement, Kula will design, integrate a lightweight, high-performance battery architecture for the ER66 battery electric helicopter demonstrator. We're building a dual-life architecture, which means that each pack is engineered from day one for two use. first for primary flight cycle and a certified second life energy storage application. This model creates two revenue streams for cooling. The primary use case are rapid organ and tissue transport. Emergency response ensure her operations were zero emission performance and low acoustic signature are operational requirements. Second life energy storage is for industrial and digital infrastructure applications. Execution speed is another cool of one advantage. Not speed as a marketing claim, but speed as a demonstrated and repeatable engineering capability. In November 2025, we received a purchase order for a 400-volt battery system to power a counter-UAV direct energy platform. Five weeks later, we delivered a complete design package and working prototype. Achieving that timeline was made only possible because of the deliberate engineering foundation we built in 2025, including model-based electrical and thermal simulation, proprietary cell selection, design for safety architecture, and in-house integration running electrical, mechanical, and thermal develop all in parallel. This system is scheduled to enter production in 2026. Next, I'll provide an update on the QuotaOne platform for digital infrastructure and AI data center applications. Our digital infrastructure strategy addresses two distinct but related segments, telecom network backup and AI data center power. Both require battery systems that must perform reliably, but in different operating environments. Telecom sites face grid instability across diverse geography, while AI racks increasingly require battery integration closer to the compute equipment itself rather than rely on centralized UPS systems. Telecom operators depend on the battery backup as a primary protection against grid interruptions. 5G infrastructure roles are raising the performance and uptime requirements for those systems beyond what legacy lead asset installation can meet. In January, 2026, Cooler was awarded a five-year preferred battery supply agreement from Kabam Energy, a Miami-based company that deliver energy as a service to telecommunication operators across 12 countries. As part of that transaction, Cooler has taken full control of the battery manufacturing equipment and process, and we've commenced production. Production battery packs were delivered to Kaban in Q1 of 2026. We plan to consolidate full operation into our Texas facility in Q2 to improve efficiency, reduce overhead, and centralize operation as we grow. We now have the supply chain set up for the 48-volt, 100-amp-hour battery production, and the focus is deliver batteries to meet growing Kaban demands. Beyond that agreement, we're in active engagements with telecom operators and service providers directly with our Quora One battery as a service offering. These are separate from the Kaban channel and represent Quora's effort to build direct, not recurring revenue relationships in the telecom segment. Data centers have traditionally handled battery backup the same way when large power systems installed in a dedicated room, separate from the computing equipment they protect. That model is changing. As AI workloads grow and the hardware running them becomes more power intensive, the industry is moving towards battery backup installed directly inside the computing rack. The battery is no longer just a facility utility. It's become part of the compute infrastructure itself. That shifts create a different set of requirements. A battery that operates inside the rack next to the processor protects needs to meet much higher safety standards and needs to handle higher voltages and respond much faster than conventional backup systems. At the end of last year, who will join the Open Compute Project is the platinum member. OCP is the industry body whose specifications define how hyperscalers and large cloud operators build the infrastructure. Platinum membership places Quilter in the working groups, writing the next generation of power standards and position us inside the relevant technical working groups and help us to build a product in line with where the market is going. In the same month, Quora created a joint development collaboration with a leading global battery cell manufacturer to develop the Quora One Max BBU for AI-scale data centers. Fuller leads the system design, safety engineering, and certification, while the cell partner supplies the battery cell platform for the life of the commercial program upon certification. The opportunity is significant, and it depends on certification, qualification, and customer adoption timelines. The same trend that's driving rack-level battery demand in large data centers is also driving demand at the edge. AI inference, the process of running AI models to generate response is moving out of the central data centers into the network itself, closer to the end user. That means that the computer hardware and the battery backup protecting it must operate in telecom facilities, cell towers, and distributed network nodes. The environmental and reliability requirements at these locations are more demanding. This is where the AI data center opportunity and the telecom opportunities converge. The battery requirements are related, the customer space overlap, and the cooler one is the same architecture to save both. Next, Sean Gensher will discuss financial highlights.

Sean? Thanks, Mike. 2025 was an important year for Cooler. As Mike mentioned, it marked a transition to a scalable product-focused model. Let me touch on a few points from 2025 before we get to the Q&A. Cooler generated over $16 million in revenue in 2025. This is a 51% increase over the prior year. As we have previously discussed around our focus on product, our product revenue increased and our service revenue declined. Product revenue was up 39%, while service was down 50%. Again, while we expect to have some service business, we anticipate continued growth to come from the product side of the business as we scale into the large end markets, like discussed earlier. Product revenue came from 47 customers in 2025. Revenue per customer was approximately $108,000, or 56% higher than 2024. Services revenue came from 34 customers, the same as 2024. Services revenue per customer in 2025 was approximately $65,000, or 50% lower than 2024. Mike touched on gross margins earlier. We have set out in detail information about gross margin, R&D, and SG&A in the Form 10-K filed today. CULA recorded an approximately $62 million net loss for the year. There is an aggregate of approximately $33 million of non-cash expenses on the income statement that contribute to the net loss. These represent almost 55% of it. As Mike mentioned, the largest of these is an approximately $14 million mark-to-market expense due to the decline in the price of Bitcoin. As a reminder, in the second and third quarter, Bitcoin's ascending price contributed a non-cash gain to those quarters' results. Now let's get to the Q&A. Back to you, Stuart.

All right. Thank you very much for that, Sean. And as mentioned, that now takes us into the question and answer portion for our call today. And here's the first question. Can management speak to which markets are seeing the most momentum today and where early customer interest is starting to turn into repeat business and meaningful revenue?

Yeah, Stuart, I'll take that one. I would say the Kula One Air for the autonomous platforms are the clearest near-term production momentum. It has expanded beyond the airborne drones to surface and subsea maritime applications as well as land applications. We now have over 20 active customer development agreements or programs Across Aquila One Air platform, thousands of battery packs have already been shipped. And two of the leading drone companies in the U.S. have active production timeline with us, pack configurations, qualification schedules in place. And we're looking at over 10,000 battery packs per month later in 2026. I would say that's the market has the highest momentum these days.

Thank you for that, Michael. Here's the next question. Could you give an update on where Cooler is positioned in the AI data center backup power market and what investors should be watching for to know whether this can become a meaningful source of growth?

Yes, we start developing our AI data center BBU product in 2025 and And at the end of 2025, we joined the OCP platform membership, which positions us inside the working group that writes the next generation of the power standard for these hyperscaler infrastructures. So now we're building products to meet where the market is heading for the next cycle of growth. 2026 is the year that we really need to work with our BBU cell providers on the UL9540 certification. and work with the hyperscaler customers on integration work. And I would say that 2027 is the year that we can see revenue opportunities.

Next question. Where do things stand in telecom and energy infrastructure? And what still needs to happen before those opportunities can start contributing in a bigger way? The Kaban announcement was a great start.

Yes, we've taken control of the battery manufacturing equipment and process from Kaman, and we've commenced production. Production battery packs have been delivered to the customer, and we plan to consolidate that into our Webster facility in Q2 and improve efficiency to reduce costs and also centralize operation as we grow. We now have supply chain set up for the 48-volt, 100-amp-hour battery production. And the focus is now to deliver batteries to meet the customer's needs. In addition, we're in active engagements with telecom operators And service providers, you know, directly to provide cooler one batteries as a battery as a service offering that's separate from the command channels. So we're starting to test the water to offer that as a battery as a subscription service. And the goal is to lower the total cost of ownership for operators to replace the lead acid batteries into lithium-ion batteries.

Michael, since Cooler is involved in several areas like aerospace, defense, telecom, e-mobility, and data centers, where is management most focused right now, and where will most of the company's attention and resources go over the next year?

Yeah, the focus for 2026 is simple, build and sell more cooler one batteries. The management is most focused right now on the cooler one air platform. That's the one that shows the highest growth with our customers. I think I repeated it now that, you know, we have over 20 active customer engagements for the autonomous systems for air, land and maritime systems. And we've shipped thousands of battery packs for the customers and that this is the one that we see the highest growth in 2026.

Looking at the rest of 2026, what are the biggest goals and milestones investors should be on the lookout for and what would management consider a successful year?

Well, I think that across our portfolio, the CoolerOne Space and Guardian products will continue to gain customer traction. As you know, the private space exploration in the DLW, the market is also very growing very quickly. The telecom batteries were shipping volume to our customers to meet their demands. We have some new telecom operators that hopefully will get contracts in 2026 for battery as a service. Keep in mind that these operating engagements can take some time, but I think it could be a very good recurring revenue business for us. But the most important is the Quillow On Air product that's going to ramp in scale with our customers. And I think the baseline is 10,000 packs per month as we get our automated production going. So I think these are the big ideas for our goals.

Okay, excellent. Next question then, how stable and repeatable is the CoolerOne platform revenue base becoming?

Like I said in the prepared remarks, what has fundamentally changed for Cooler in 2026 compared to previous years is that the need for power battery pack has emerged for these very fast-growing new markets, autonomous platforms, digital infrastructure, and direct energy. Cooler One is engineered from the ground up to serve this paradigm shift. And our customer engagements are now broader industry coverage. The customers are very diversified in different markets. And we also have a lot more customers, and they all have their programs that's running. And we're customizing our solutions specifically for their programs. And these customers have their own roadmap to ramp in volume in 2026. And that gives us more confidence and build our production capability to serve these customers on schedule. We're certainly moving to a more stable and repeatable product sales business model in 2026.

All right, Michael. Next question is, as space-based AI data centers become more of a long-term discussion point, does Cooler see a potential role there given its background in space applications, thermal management, and battery safety?

Well, first of all, I think this is a long-term conversation and it is not something Cooler can focus on in 2026. But the space-based AI is probably one of the biggest and the hottest idea right now. Elon Musk talked about it. He believes that the best way to solve the difficulties of building AI data center on Earth is to move them into space. And at GTC 2026, NVIDIA launched the Space One Vera Rubin module along with their Thor and Jetson platform. And these are engineered to deliver AI performance for the orbital data centers. And on top of that, how to code chips In space, it's still an unsolved problem. These data centers will definitely need to use space-proven batteries. And some of these private space companies that NVIDIA is working with for space AI data centers are already cooler customers. So I think there might be opportunities, but not particularly a focus for us in 2026.

Understood. Here's the next question. You have recently announced drone partnerships with Helio, a backup power partnership with Caban Energy, and a standards body looking to modularize AI data center building blocks. These three initiatives represent a large market opportunity, but how much, if any, will you see in 2026?

Yes, Helio and Caban are both 2026 revenue contributors. Caban's in production right now and grow for the remainder of 2026. Helio is an active engineering collaboration right now, and revenue will follow qualification and production milestones as program move from prototype to volume. And we do expect that the Helio revenue in second half of 2026. The data center preview business, as I talked about, it would be more like a 2027 business for us.

Michael, here's the final question for today's call in regards to your ability to power drones. Given the recent developments globally, are you aligning yourself with companies that plan to rapidly increase output as a result?

Yes. Cooler One Air for drone autonomous platform is the focus for Cooler 2026. We have many active engagements for air, land, maritime applications, and many of them will go to production in 2026. And we're setting up an automated production line for those platforms, for those batteries to be in operation in the second half of 2026. Also related to the drone is the counter drone direct energy systems. And we develop a 400 volt battery for a customer in five weeks time from when we received the PO. And that's actually a record time for a system like that. And these systems will go into production 2026. Another one that's really important is NDA compliant. So that's for domestic production. A lot of times that's a structural requirement for government drone programs. And this is why we partner with Helio to build made in USA batteries and drones together. So we are very well positioned to serve many of these customers that's going very fast. for both defense and commercial applications in 2026.

Well, as mentioned, that's our final question for today's call. I do want to point out, as we do in all of these calls, that all you need to do is pull up the press release that came out for this call, which came out March 26th, and continue to send your questions in throughout the quarter leading up to our next call. We appreciate all of those who did submit questions for today's call. And I would like to thank Michael Moe, CEO for Coolatech, as well as Sean Cantor, the CFO. for Cooler Technology Group for joining us here today. That concludes our call, and I will now turn the call over to our operator.

Thank you. This does conclude today's webcast and conference call. You may disconnect at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you once again for your participation.