Aeva Technologies, Inc.

Good day, my name is Jess, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to AVA Technologies' first quarter 2025 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, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to Ava's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Suruj Salahian, Ava's co-founder and CEO, and Suraj Sinha, Ava's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our first quarter 2025 press release and presentations. 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 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 10Q and Form 10K. 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. And with that, let me turn the call over to Suresh.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. It continues to be an incredibly exciting time at AVA with our commercial momentum accelerating across a larger range of applications. While we continue to make strong progress in automotive, including on the Diamond Truck Production Program, as well as the Global Top 10 Passenger OEM Development Program, where we have already achieved the first key milestone, AVA's mission from inception has been to build a core FMCW technology platform to bring perception to a broad range of applications beyond just automotive. And in Q1, we delivered a number of accomplishments that further realized that mission. In industrial automation, we unveiled the EVE-1 line of high-precision sensors, which we believe can have the potential to be breakthrough for the $4 billion per year laser displacement sensor market. EVE-1 utilizes our core vision LiDAR-on-chip module to deliver sub-micron precision that is more reliable and flexible at a lower cost and size than current solutions in the market. This level of precision enables AVA to go beyond LIDAR, as the industry has known it until now, and provide an offering that can have the opportunity to accelerate our growth into new industrial automation markets because of our differentiated FMCW technology. We are seeing strong commercial traction with EVE-1 already, including securing multiple industry-leading industrial automation companies as our first strategic customers and with orders of over 1,000 sensors booked and planned to ship later this year. AVA also entered into a new market, Intelligent Transportation System, or ITS, with Census GATSO, a leader in traffic enforcement solutions, selecting AVA as its exclusive LiDAR supplier for its new mobile speed detection products in Australia. AVA was selected because of 40 LiDAR's ability to provide accurate velocity measurement for speed verification. We are seeing increasing interest from other leaders in the ITS market as well, as well as infrastructure monitoring segments, and we plan to respond to this market with our existing sensor suite, but with fine-tuned perception software specific to this market segment. Importantly, our momentum is opening new strategic opportunities to AVA that we believe further validates our technology platform and market-leading FMCW performance. as we scale in existing market segments such as automotive and industrial and enter new ones. Earlier today, we announced a strategic collaboration with a global Fortune 500 company's technology subsidiary, who plans to invest up to $50 million in AVA and together partner to help expand AVA's end markets and deliver advanced perception sensing products across multiple market segments, including in consumer electronics, industrial, and automotive. This leading technology company sees significant growth potential for AVOS Perception Platform adoption across many applications and believes our FMCW solution provides a strong path to penetrating multiple market segments with mass deployment. We're also selecting this company as our Tier 2 manufacturing partner for the Top 10 Passenger OEM program previously announced. We believe this new partnership will help further enhance our position for the broader mass deployment across future generations with the global top 10 passenger OEM development program. So in summary, we have accomplished a lot in a short few months and there is much more ahead for AVA. We have never been in a stronger position to continue executing on this significant interest in AVA's unique FMCW technology. Let's now discuss in more detail our recent business developments. I am excited about AVA's major expansion in the precision sensing market with the EVE-1 line of high-precision laser displacement sensors. Like our automotive solutions, EVE-1 is powered by AVA's CoreVision LiDAR-on-chip modules, but specifically designed for high-volume and inline industrial automation applications, such as factory and process automation. As the industry's first FMCW-based displacement sensor, we believe AVA's EVE-1 represents a breakthrough for industrial sensing. It brings a number of major performance, size, and cost advantages versus current solutions that primarily use the laser triangulation approach. For example, EVE-1D sensors are designed to measure down to sub-micron precision, and due to the coaxial measurement, can operate across a wide range of target standoff distances, all the way up to 20 meters. all within the same compact and all-in-one form factor that combines measurement and data processing. And because of FMCW's immunity to interference from other sources of light, our sensors can maintain this high level of precision in a wide range of operating conditions. These advantages allow for faster, more precise inspection, giving customers high levels of throughput, improved quality control, and better cost efficiency in the manufacturing processes. We are very encouraged by the significant commercial momentum and positive feedback we are already receiving with leading industrial automation companies due to our sensors' ability to address many of the shortcomings of traditional triangulation solutions. We have already signed on multiple strategic customers, including SIG-AG and LMI Technologies. These customers are leaders with more than 15% of the market share and volumes close to over 300,000 units per year just for these high-precision sensors. Our first orders of over 1,000 sensors are already booked, and our initial shipments to select customers have already started. Given the strong reception of the market, we're working on ramping up our capacity to meet the growing demand for our EVON sensors with our existing manufacturing partners. In addition to our strategic first customers, we are engaged with multiple other leaders in this large but concentrated marketplace, where the top five participants represent around 60% of the market. The overall addressable market for these laser displacement sensors is greater than $4 billion today, with annual volumes of more than 2 million sensors. It is projected to grow meaningfully as laser displacement sensors are redefining precision manufacturing and quality control in automated production environments across many industries. From positioning during manufacturing to inspection of a wide range of components and products such as PCBs, metal sheets, or tire threads, to even packaging, laser displacement sensors are increasingly utilized in numerous factory and process automation applications. And because of AVA's ability to directly measure velocity, we believe our technology will open up new capabilities that bring the possibility to expand the use of AVA sensors across the industrial precision market. We are already exploring with existing customers to leverage this capability. AVA is uniquely positioned for the high precision sensing market due to FMCW's ability to achieve the needed micron level precision that is not possible with time-of-flight LiDAR. From metrology applications with Nikon, to displacement sensors with SICK-AG and others, we see significant opportunity to continue growing in the large industrial robotics and factory automation market, leveraging our core vision ladder-on-chip module and our proprietary precision algorithms for the industrial applications. Let's now move to an update on our progress with the Global Top 10 Passenger OEM. We have officially kicked off our development program with the OEM and have already achieved the first milestone centered around integration. As we announced back in March, this OEM has selected AVA for a LiDAR development program for its next-generation global production vehicle platform, where we are jointly working closely on development and integration of AVA's Atlas Ultra 40 LiDAR for use across a broad range of OEMs' global line of passenger vehicles. This is effectively the first development phase of the serial production program. As you may recall, in addition to the development program, we also secured a letter of intent from this OEM toward the Serious Production Program Award. We expect that upon successful completion of the development program, which is expected later this year, the engagement will transition to a large-scale global production program opportunity for AVA. We're highly encouraged by the strong start to the development program and believe the overall progress we continue to make positions us well for the OEM's Serious Production Award. I would now like to discuss the new strategic collaboration that we announced earlier today. Our partner will invest up to $50 million in AVA through a combination of $32.5 million in AVA common stock and up to $17.5 million in new joint product development revenue, as well as capital investments to bring production capacity online for AVA's next-generation solutions across automotive, industrial, and consumer applications. As part of this, the partner will take an approximately 6% stake of equity in AVA. With our strategic partner, we plan to accelerate AVA's product roadmap in industrial and expand into new consumer application and markets, utilizing our partner's global manufacturing expertise and electronics innovation. As part of the agreement, AVA will also select this company as our Tier 2 manufacturing partner for the Global Top 10 Passenger OEM program. The OEM has extensive experience working with our strategic partner, and our partner's decision to invest and partner with AVA is a major vote of confidence in the performance, maturity, and scalability of our LIDAR. We believe this further positions AVA to successfully transition our development program with the OEM into the series production phase. More broadly, this strategic collaboration marks another significant validation from a highly respected technology and manufacturing leader that AVA's differentiated FMCW tech is a future for the industry. The company sees significant potential for our LiDAR to bring new levels of perception across many applications. They have significant experience with LiDAR, as well as have extensively evaluated all other LiDAR solutions. The decision to invest in AVA and partner on joint development was driven by our partner's view that a scalable, high-performance FMCW LiDAR is key to enabling broad deployments of perception solutions across multiple use cases in multiple end markets, not only automotive, but also industrial and across consumer markets as well. We are incredibly excited about this new strategic collaboration. In the coming months, we plan to name the partner, and both companies plan to jointly provide more details about our new partnership. We look forward to jointly leveraging our respective strengths and to accelerate the adoption of AVA's technology across a broad range of markets and applications. Turning now to AVA's recent entrance into a new market, Intelligent Transportation Systems, or ITS. This is an area where there has been growing adoption of LIDAR to enable safer and more efficient roadways and other modes of transport. CensusGasso recently selected AVA as the exclusive LIDAR provider for its new mobile speed detection products in Australia. Our 40 LIDARs velocity measurement will provide speed verification to help address speeding problems and improve road safety at high-risk locations. CensusGasso is a global leader in traffic safety enforcement solutions. Besides Australia, the company's solutions are in 60 countries with more than 60,000 deployments globally. Initial deployments of AVA sensors in Australia have begun, and we look forward to supporting additional deployments in that country and exploring with Census on rollouts in additional markets. Ava is also engaged on a number of other ITS opportunities besides Census GATSO and are making strong progress on expanding in this area. With that, let me now turn the call over to Saurabh, who will share our financial results.