Aeva Technologies, Inc.

Good day. My name is Betsy, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to AVA Technologies' third 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 Fung, Director of Investor Relations. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome everyone to Ava's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Suresh Salahian, Ava's co-founder and CEO, and Sarath Sinha, Ava's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our third 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 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2021. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of AVIS 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 Suresh.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. Q3 was an exceptional quarter at AVA as we achieved a number of important milestones that solidified our path towards commercialization. I would like to highlight a few of our accomplishments, which are summarized on slide five. First, today we announced a key production win with the automated trucking company PLUS to implement AVA's breakthrough 4D LiDAR on PLUS's driver-in and fully autonomous trucks at volume scale. This win is significant because it further confirms the industry's increasing transition to FMCW LiDAR to enable safe automated driving. as well as the leading performance and scalability of Ava's automotive-grade LiDAR on-chip solution. We also remain on track with key development milestones across our other automotive and non-automotive collaborations. Second, we continue to strengthen our supply chain to bring Ava's 4D LiDAR to market. We have announced our agreements with Fabrinet, a leader in advanced precision optical and electronic manufacturing, to produce our 4D LiDAR chip module, which accelerates our manufacturing capabilities and automotive-grade certified production line. And third, AVA achieved the important milestone of completing the design release of our B sample, which finalizes the architecture and provides the path to our final cost structure. Turning now to slide eight, I would like to provide more color on our key business updates. We are incredibly excited to share that PLUS, a leader in self-driving truck technology, has selected AVA40 LiDAR for long-range perception on their production autonomous trucks. This multi-year production program includes PLUS's intentions to deploy trucks globally starting in late 2022, with PLUS's driver-in solution followed by their fully autonomous system. And PLUS plans to deploy over 100,000 trucks by the end of 2025. We have been working with PLUS since 2019 to test and validate AVA's 4D LiDAR. PLUS selected AVA for its unique combination of ultra long range and instantaneous velocity measurement, which enhances PLUS's long range perception system and provides faster response time in safety critical situations. The combination of AVA's 4D LiDAR and PLUS's proprietary autonomy stack also addresses many critical edge cases, such as previously unseen obstacles that may confound deep neural networks in the perception stack. Adequate response time is crucial to enabling safe automated driving, particularly for heavy-duty trucks since they take much longer to stop than passenger vehicles. this has been a challenge to reliably achieve with legacy time-of-flight LIDARs. While the industry has for some time understood the potential for FMCW to significantly improve perception with its unique advantages over legacy time-of-flight LIDAR, such as direct velocity measurements and lack of interference, the tradeoff between range and resolution with conventional approaches has held back the adoption of conventional FMCW technologies. However, AVUS 40V breaks that dependency, enabled by our proprietary signal processing algorithms that leverage the strengths of FMCW to sense precise velocity and position at more than 500 meters of range, while simultaneously achieving millions of points per second. This enables AVUS solution to reliably measure and classify objects with higher confidence and at longer distances than legacy LiDAR solutions, and already does so today. And because FMCW uses a continuous beam to constantly transmit data, we can use our same core LiDAR chip and scale performance through software. This flexibility provides our customers, including Plus, with the ability to not only leverage ABUS 40 LiDAR for their driver end solution, but also enable next level capabilities as they bring their fully driverless solutions to market, utilizing the same AVA 40-bitre hardware. Sauce shares a similar focus with us to deploy their self-driving technology to volume scale. The company's customers include some of the largest freight carriers and OEMs, including Amazon and FAW, the largest heavy-duty truck OEM in the world. We are excited to be selected for production and look forward to supporting PLUS's volume ramp. Let's now move to slide nine, which highlights a key development in solidifying the path to bringing AVA's 40 LiDAR to market. Earlier this week, we announced that AVA has selected Fabrinet to produce our 40 LiDAR chip module. As the engine of AVA's unique FMCW LiDAR technology, the chip module is the critical element that integrates all core sensing components onto a single silicon photonics platform. We are pleased to work with Fabrinet, a leading manufacturer of silicon photonics integrated devices and advanced precision optical systems, and equally important, a trusted automotive qualified supplier to many global OEMs and Tier 1s. As part of the agreement, we are bringing online an advanced production line at SaperNet that accelerates AVA's production manufacturing capabilities. The new line will produce our third-generation chip module and scale for serious production. By securing capacity with a leading manufacturer now, we feel confident and our ability to supply the expected volume at automotive grade quality for our customers' programs. Ahead of that, we are working with FabriNet to increase automation and process efficiency, as well as establishing a local engineering team in Thailand to support the manufacturer ramp up well before the start of series production. I would now like to update everyone on our 2021 objectives. which are detailed on slide 11. We have already achieved three of the four goals set for 2021, and we are confident in delivering on the final remaining goal to finish feed sample development this year, based on the significant progress already made to date. First, we have reached our goal for two additional programs towards production with SLUS and Nikon. two leaders in their respective markets with opportunities to scale to large volumes. Importantly, we also continue to deliver on development milestones for our other partners. With our growing team, we believe we are well positioned to support ongoing work across all of our programs. Second, on accelerating engagement in non-automotive applications. This goal was met with our Nikon collaboration announced last quarter. We should be expect to accelerate AVA's non-auto opportunity in the $10 billion and growing industrial automation and metrology markets. As I mentioned earlier, there is growing interest in AVA's unique 40 LIDAR for both automotive and non-automotive applications. We will continue to put our focus and resources towards opportunities that align with our mission to bring AVA 40 LIDAR to mass scale. Third, we have significantly strengthened our supply chain for production with a number of key developments throughout this year, including finalizing the key supply chain for our silicon processing chip, and most recently, selecting Fabrinet to produce ABUS 40 LiDAR chip module, which accelerates our manufacturing capabilities towards startup production. And fourth, on our B-sample developments, This quarter, we completed the product design release, which is a key milestone to finalizing the product architecture and provides us a path toward the final cost structure. As mentioned earlier, we expect to complete development this year and are planning to deliver resample units to our partners for qualification starting in 2022. This leaves us well on track with our timeline to commercialization. And with that, I will turn the call over to Saurav to discuss the financials.