Aeva Technologies, Inc.

Good day. My name is Alex, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to Ava Technology's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. During the opening remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the opening remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and simultaneously webcast. I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Fong, Director of Investor Relations. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everyone to Ava's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Suresh Salahian, Ava's co-founder and CEO, and Saurabh Sinha, Ava's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our second quarter press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our investor relations website at investors.ava.ai. Please note that on this call, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative of our views as of any subsequent date. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our form 10Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2021. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of AVA's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the Investor Relations link. With that, let me turn the call over to Surush.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. Q2 was an important quarter at AVA where we already achieved a number of the goals we towards our mission to bring perception to all devices i'd like to highlight a few of our accomplishments as summarized on slide five first our strategic collaboration with nikon is a transformative milestone for the perception industry and marks ava's first announced expansion beyond automotive It's an incredible opportunity to work with a global leader in optics and precision technology like Nikon, where we can leverage their market expertise with AVA's breakthrough technology to accelerate adoption of 40 LIDAR in the $10 billion industrial automation and metrology markets. Second, we're not standing still in automotive and continue to make significant progress in our automotive programs towards production. including expanding our collaboration with TuSimple and continuing to deliver on our milestones with the undisclosed customer that we announced last quarter. Third, in product development, we continue to make good progress on the final design and remain on schedule to complete B-sample development by year-end. And fourth, we are seeing incredibly strong interest for key talent to join AVA and help bring our industry-leading technology to market. Since the start of the year, we have grown our team by over 100%, which will enable us to continue to support our customers' development towards production, as well as pursue additional growth opportunities. Within this, we have made a number of notable leadership hires from leading companies in the technology and automotive sectors who bring deep expertise in product design, development, and validation. Now, let's dive deeper into key business updates for this quarter, starting on slide seven. Earlier this week, we announced AVA's first expansion beyond automotives. a strategic collaboration with Nikon to bring next-generation high-precision solutions to the industrial automation and the metrology markets. We are thrilled to collaborate with Nikon, a leader in precision optics and industrial metrology technologies. Their products are used today for automated inspection of high-volume manufacturing by leading global automotive OEMs such as BMW and Stellantis. which is the parent company of FCA and PSA brands, as well as top aerospace manufacturers, among others. As we have detailed before, AVA's mission is to bring perception to all devices. We have always believed in a significant opportunity beyond autonomous driving that could be unlocked by leveraging our common core 40 LIDAR chip technology. By utilizing the same unique 40-light-hour technology, we aim to offer an unprecedented level of accuracy to measure objects at the micron level at a distance and without contact, a level of performance we believe is achievable only with FMCW technology, which is core to AVA. And AVA is taking this to the next level with our LiDAR on silicon photonics, where we aim to significantly reduce the cost and size of these industrial automation solutions. Through this collaboration, we'll have a direct opportunity to pursue a broad range of industrial programs and applications, leveraging Nikon's best-in-class quality and distribution channel to reach customers globally. This gives us a clear and broad path to bring Florida LiDAR to industrial applications by 2025. Now, for those new to industrial metrology and automation, the next slide summarizes what industrial metrology is and the many uses for it. Industrial metrology is a large established market today. and is the process of precise measurements of parts manufactured in volume production to ensure manufacturing process control, improve product quality, and increase throughput. It requires micron-level accuracy, which for context is 1,000 times more than typical time-of-flight 3D LIDAR precision. Industrial metrology is needed across a large and diverse number of applications, including automotive and aerospace manufacturing, and generally in volume manufacturing where there is a need for precise measurement during the production process. However, achieving such superb accuracy in an affordable and compact package remains a key challenge for the industry. It has limited mass adoption of these solutions in the market, with many in the industry continuing to rely on slower or less accurate legacy solutions that result in lower throughput and higher costs. Turning to slide nine, AVA's breakthrough 45R chip technology solves these challenges, delivering high precision in a compact form factor and at significantly lower costs. fmcw technology uses a continuous theme to constantly transmit data and we can use our same core lidar chip for automotive applications but adjust our proprietary sigma processing algorithm to process that data for different performance metrics for example micron level accuracy versus 500 meter range so our knowledge AVUS 4D LiDAR is the only solution that has the potential to achieve this incredible level of performance scalability utilizing the same foundational technology. And with all core components integrated onto a silicon chip platform, we can deliver a compact, high-performing LiDAR system that is more reliable and truly scalable at an affordable cost for industrial automation applications. We expect our solutions will be comprehensive, including hardware and software that provides precision measurement capabilities. The end result is next generation solutions that we hope will establish a new standard in precision measurements to fundamentally improve manufacturing quality and productivity across industrial applications. Turning to the next slide, I want to highlight the broad and large opportunities in the industrial automation and metrology markets. By incorporating our game-changing solution that delivers high precision at an unmatched cost, we believe AVUS 40 LiDAR can meaningfully accelerate adoption across existing applications. We also believe this only scratches the surface of what's possible in industrial automation beyond metrology alone. As the trifecta of high precision, small form factor, and low cost opens up a number of new applications where performance, size, and cost have been limiting factors, such as machine tooling, infrastructure, and other volume manufacturing, collectively a $10 billion and growing market. We are excited to pursue these large opportunities where we believe AVA can provide unique differentiation as we continue our work towards our mission of bringing perception to all devices. Now, switching gears to automotive. We continue to make good progress across our automotive programs, including continuing to deliver on our milestones with the undisclosed customer that we announced last quarter. In addition, I want to provide an update on our work with Trucking Partner 2 Simple on slide 11. We have expanded our collaboration with 2Simple over the past quarter and are now taking another step forward with the implementation of AVA's 4D LiDAR as the only long-range LiDAR on 2Simple's current fleet operating on the road. As part of this, 2Simple is also incorporating AVA's unique instantaneous velocity data into its perception stack, which helps classify hazardous objects instantly with greater confidence and at long ranges. enabling a critical factor of safety needed for autonomous trucks. Turning on slide 13, I'd like to share our progress on the priorities we set for 2021, which are focused on investing in developing a world-class perception solution and supporting our customers on the development milestones to bring our 45R to market. In the past quarter alone, we have already achieved a number of the goals we set out for this year. And based on our strong progress, we are well on track to hit the remainder of our goals. On our B sample development, we are progressing well with our final design and remain on schedule to complete our B sample development by year end. Importantly, this iteration will represent our final product architecture and puts us well on track towards production. Second, with our goal for additional programs towards production, Our strategic collaboration with Nikon represents one more of those programs. And given our progress with ongoing engagements, we feel confident in one additional program this year. As we continue to see strong commercial traction, Ava's approach to partnerships has not changed. The aim is not to win the customer count, but instead our focus is on aligning with leading companies that have a shared determination working closely to build the world's best perception solution for mass adoption. Third, on accelerating engagement in non-automotive applications. As we discussed earlier, we expect the Nikon collaboration to accelerate AVA's non-auto opportunity in the large and growing industrial automation and metrology markets. We also continue to see strong inbound interest across the board, and with our growing team, have the ability to support our customers' ongoing development and pursue additional opportunities that align with our strategy. And fourth, on strengthening our supply chain for production. Over the past quarter, we finalized a key supply chain for our silicon processing chip. And with that, I will turn the call over to Sirab to discuss the financials.