Berkeley Lights, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Berkeley Light second quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Carrie Mendeville, Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you. Earlier today, Berkeley Light released financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2021. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to ir at berkeleylights.com. Joining me today from Berkeley Lights are Eric Hobbs, Chief Executive Officer, and Kurt Wood, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties, that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. For more information, please refer to the risks, uncertainties, and other factors discussed in our SEC filings. Except as required by law, Berkeley Lights disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast August 11th, 2021. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Carrie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. Today, we are going to provide an update on our progress against our stated strategic objectives, as well as an overview of our second quarter 2021 financial results. Berkeley Lights continued to make important progress during the second quarter, and I'm very encouraged by the increasing demand and enthusiasm for our platforms. Our team members across the globe continue to execute on our strategic initiatives, and we are better positioned than ever to find the biology that cures disease. Starting with our second quarter results, we generated $19.3 million in revenue, bringing our year-to-date revenue to $38 million, a 56% increase over the first half of 2020. We successfully launched our new tech access subscription offering tailored to the specific capacity needs of antibody discovery and cell line development customers. We released Opto Plasma B Discovery 4.0 on schedule. Customers are now finding 10 times the hits at a tenth of the lead time and a tenth of the cost per validated sequence. This quarter, we also officially announced our partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific in AAV, which successfully progressed into phase two of the project. And this morning, we announced a partnership with Bayer for high throughput functional screening to significantly accelerate their pipeline for agricultural product discovery and development. This partnership, along with the Thermo Fisher partnership, highlights the progress on our business development efforts. Collectively, these two non-exclusive partnerships represent a revenue opportunity of more than $30 million with the potential for additional long-term revenue related to the future milestones and commercialization of products. At Berkeley Lights, our mission is to find the biology that cures disease. This starts with therapeutics for people, but our impact goes way beyond that. Our technology can help find cures for diseases in plants, animals, and also provides a scalable and sustainable path for life on this planet. To achieve this, we are providing the most advanced highest throughput, functional characterization platform on the market today as a means to find the best biology. To understand the full potential of our platform, it is helpful to place Berkeley Lights in the context of the three main pillars that are the key to unlocking the full potential of biology. The first pillar is sequencing, which enables us to read biology. Sequencing gives us the fundamental code of life. Today, sequencing is a huge industry. And although the ability to read sequences is extremely important, sequences without correlated function have limited value. The next pillar is gene editing, which allows us to write to biology. Here we attempt to reprogram biology by changing the genes in the cell and modifying its code. Gene editing is another massive industry. And today there is the potential to edit vast numbers of cells. But without understanding which edit creates the needed product, there is also little value here. And the third and final pillar is functional characterization. This is where sequences and edits come to life and gain true meaning. Today, functional characterization is fragmented, highly manual, and lacks standardization. At the same time, there is an ever-growing mountain of sequence data and a near-infinite rate at which gene-edited cells can be made. This has created an enormous backlog of required functional characterization. The complexity in that backlog is growing exponentially, requiring higher resolution and polyfunctional readouts. Current manual processes simply won't scale. Berkeley Lab's goal is to consolidate and standardize functional characterization. We are bringing the first biological supercomputing platform to market, providing automated high-throughput, high-resolution screening, access to rare precious samples, polyfunctional resolution on live biology, the export of an optimal live biology, and digitization of multi-parametric data. To translate the multi-billion dollar opportunity that functional characterization represents, Berkeley Lights must run a high-volume platform business, establish high-value service businesses leveraging Berkeley Lights BioFoundry, and generate revenue from Berkeley Lights-owned biological assets. The Bayer deal is another step into offering high throughput functional screening services at Berkeley Lights. This truly is digital cell biology, where we receive DNA sequences from our customers, express the proteins encoded in the DNA, and screen each DNA sequence in a massively parallel fashion for the desired function. The service business gives Berkeley Lights full access to data, which is critical to our strategy. Digitization of multi-parametric data at a large scale linking function to sequence, is critical to enabling the future of in silico design of biology. The service business is a prerequisite towards our ability to create Berkeley Light's own biological assets. It is here where Berkeley Light's will run its own targets and partners targets with the goal to participate in downstream revenues such as milestones and or royalties. The Thermo Fisher partnership is yet another example of deeper value capture through our technology. The successful completion of this partnership will transform how viral vectors are developed and manufactured at industrial scale, allowing gene therapies to move from orphan diseases to mainstream therapies. As previously announced, the viral vector workflows developed in this partnership will only be available through a subscription model. I would like to spend a little time to talk about high throughput functional screening on the Berkulites platform. As sequencing and gene editing capabilities mature, there is an increasingly large library of unvalidated sequences, which require high-resolution functional readouts at scale. Typically, functional readouts are performed scanning many live cell candidates against one common target. We have developed a nanopen-based cell-free expression solution, which allows direct expression of DNA into proteins against thousands of targets simultaneously for functional readouts. This provides one to two orders of magnitude improvement in speed and throughput while significantly reducing cost when compared to currently available methods. We will offer our high-throughput functional screening services only via our BioFoundry. We believe access to these services will accelerate the design-build test cycles for our customers, further reducing the time to find biology that cures disease. We expect that as cell-free expression continues to evolve, it will find many applications in many markets. With that, I will now turn the call over to Kurt for more detail on our financials.