Aeva Technologies, Inc.

Good day. My name is Doug, and I'll be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to AVIT Technologies' fourth quarter and full year 2022 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 fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Soroush Salahian, Ava's co-founder and CEO, and Saurabh Sinha, Ava's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our fourth quarter and full year 2022 press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our investor relations website, at investors.ava.com. 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 a 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 most recent Form 10-Q and Form 10-K. 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. And with that, let me turn the call over to Soroush.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. 2022 was a significant year at Ava that was marked by a number of milestones that moved us forward on the path towards production. I would like to summarize our key achievements on slide five. First, we introduced ARIES II, the world's first commercially available 4D Vidar offering high performance and a smaller form factor. Over the course of 2022, we shipped to more than 40 customers. Importantly, this has enabled us to progress on a growing number of vehicle programs to the advanced or RFQ stage with leading OEMs. Second, Our commercial progress was possible because of our ability to bring up our initial manufacturing line. Launching a new product is not trivial, and I am very proud of the work the ABA team accomplished to increase the pace of production by approximately three times by year end and enable us to meet more of the growing demand for our unique products. Third, we solidified our accelerator expansion into the established and growing industrial automation markets. With the addition of our collaboration with SICK-AG, we also completed core development of our LiDAR on-chip perception platform for industrial automation, which we are using for our existing customers, including Nikon, as well as to grow our opportunities in industrial automation. And fourth, all of this was accomplished while maintaining a sharp focus on spend. Alpex came in below the outlook we provided for 2022 by more than 10% without limiting our ability to execute. We ended the year with $324 million in cash and marketable securities, which positions us well to continue investing strategically to bring AVA 40 LIDAR to market. Turning now to slide seven, I would like to provide more color on recent business developments. The AVA team has been laser-focused on advancing our growing commercial momentum, and our efforts are beginning to show meaningful progress. In particular, I am excited to share that AVA has been selected by a top 10 global OEM for their vehicle development program. We are starting to deploy AVA-40 LiDAR as the long-range LiDAR on this OEM's on-road development fleet. Where valuable real-world data with a new dimension of velocity will be used to define the specifications for production vehicles with a targeted 2025 start of production. We have been engaged for some time with this OEM, and now they can start to incorporate ABA's unique velocity data and the perception software to achieve their high standards for safety. Because FMCW can instantly measure velocity for every pixel and is immune to interference from other LIDARs or the sun, it can provide unique advantages over time of flight or 3D LiDAR in detection and classification of critical objects on the road. We believe this helps OEMs with a better margin of safety and to achieve the performance needed for broad deployment of advanced ADAS and autonomous capabilities. We hope to share more details on this collaboration over the course of this year. Moving to slide eight, I would like to discuss our progress in industrial automation. In Q4, we completed the core development of our LiDAR on-chip perception platform for industrial automation, which utilizes the same chip architecture we are using for automotive, but with different software to pursue the large and growing precision distance measurement market, which is a subset of the large industrial automation sector. Precision distance measurement is used across many industries for manufacturing, inspection, and quality control. While the market is already multi-billion dollars in size, broader adoption has been limited by current solutions that are typically challenged in meeting the right balance of performance, cost, and size all in one solution, often resulting in multiple product architecture skews for each application to achieve, for example, short-, mid-, or long-range distance measurements. Through adaptable software, AVOS Lighter on chip can achieve the needed level of precision across multiple applications from short to longer ranges, all on the same scalable silicon photonics architecture at affordable costs in a compact form factor. We think this performance flexibility can bring immense value to the end user and allows us to pursue multiple opportunities with the same platform. We're using this platform starting with our collaboration with Nikon, leveraging AVA's ability to achieve micron-level precision for industrial metrology applications. Additionally, our plan this year is to leverage our LiDAR on-chip perception platform to respond to a growing pull from the market and distance measurements for large-scale opportunities. Let's turn to slide nine. After successfully bringing up our initial manufacturing line last year, I am pleased to share that we are expanding to a new manufacturing line in 2023 to support our growing commercial momentum. This line simplifies the overall manufacturing process and is where we complete our LiDAR system assembly, calibration, and test. We expect this new added capacity to sufficiently support our product deployment needs to existing customers and new opportunities until mass production. Earlier this year, we began manufacturing on this new line and expect process optimizations to continue over the next few months. Along with the higher capacity, our new line will allow us to also implement increasing levels of automation as we progress towards production. Turning now to slide 11, I would like to share more about our key goals for this year. Our priority is to convert more of our commercial progress to program wins and focus on the following objectives in 2023. First, we target winning two additional programs towards production. We are progressing on a growing number of vehicle programs to the advanced RFQ stage with leading OEMs. In addition, this year we are looking to further our engagements within major industrial sensing opportunities where we can leverage our LiDAR on chip perception platform We do not expect to win all of our engagements, but do believe we are in a position to secure additional programs towards production this year. Second, we plan to complete key product development in automotive and industrial. In automotive, this includes completing the final form factor that will be used for series production. For industrial automation, we will continue to iterate on our platform this year to prepare for market release, and expand to additional opportunities for deployment at scale. Third, complete the expansion of our new manufacturing line, which we expect to provide sufficient capacity to support our existing customers until production and secure additional production programs. And fourth, we are focused on maintaining strong financial discipline as we work to bring AVA 40 LiDAR to market. As Saurabh will discuss in more detail next, we target OPEX in 2023 to be similar to 2022. We have a strong balance sheet and will continue to strategically invest to meet the increasing demand for our unique 40 LiDAR technology. With that, let me turn the call over to Saurabh, who will discuss the financials.