Berkeley Lights, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Berkeley Light's third quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants' lines are in 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 will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Carrie Mendeville, Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, Madam.

Thank you. Earlier today, Berkeley Lights released financial results for the quarter ended September 30th, 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 and certainties and other factors discussed in our SEC filing. Except as required by law, Firstly 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, November 4th, 2021. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Carrie. And thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. We delivered record revenue of $24.3 million during the third quarter of 2021, coming in at the high end of the revenue range we pre-announced in mid-October. Our team members across the globe continue to execute on our strategic initiatives, and we are well-positioned to find a biology that cures disease. On today's call, I will provide details on the continued progress we are making across our business. I will then turn the call over to Kirk to discuss third quarter financial results and share our outlook for the remainder of 2021. The industry continues to experience strong growth. At the same time, it's going through some significant transformations. We are increasingly seeing companies outsource both R&D and manufacturing to CROs CDMOs, which was a main growth driver for our business during the quarter. This trend was accelerated by COVID-19. We expect this outsourcing trend to continue for the foreseeable future. As a result, Approximately 40% of our third quarter revenue came from CROs and CDMOs. Revenue from CRO CDMO customers grew more than 150% for the first nine months of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020. Capacity utilization as well as global adoption of our technology in this customer group continues to expand as evidenced by five repeat Berkeley Lights platform purchases year-to-date and more than a two-fold year-over-year increase in consumable revenue. Demand for antibody discovery is primarily driven by the need to access increased levels of biological diversity in terms of species and cell types that are screened in search for therapeutics against harder to hit targets. Our customers continue to see significant differentiation with our platform's capability when it comes to the hard to hit target classes, such as GPCRs and ion channels. As high resolution and the ability to run complex cell-based functional assays becomes even more critical. Access to more biodiversity and different cell types continues to be a strong driver for expanding our opportunity in antibody discovery. With the rollout of Opto Antibody Discovery 4.0, we are focused on product development activities that broaden species access. Opto Antibody Discovery 4.0 dramatically increases access to biodiversity, but it also includes the ability to deeply interrogate primary human cells. This is significant. and early access customers are seeing promising results, which can be further appreciated in the Vanderbilt webinar on the customer page on our website. Translating more complex antibody products, such as multi-specifics, into highly productive cell lines requires increasingly deeper polyfunctional clone interrogation and selection. Our OptoAssure product line enables our customers to do just that at unprecedented scale and speed In Q3, we continued to see global deployment of that capability by an industry-leading CDMO, which is yet another example of the value proposition enabled by Berkeley Light's technology. Other trends emerging are CROs integrating downstream, adding cell line development to their product offering. Genevac is a recent example of this. With proven success in discovery and development of antibodies against challenging targets using the Berkeley Light's platform, they recently invested in their third beacon, with two platforms dedicated to antibody discovery and the latest dedicated to their expansion into cell line development. GlaxoSmithKline also shared their success with our platform on an analyst customer panel. They have switched the majority of their cell line development work to the Berkeley Lights Beacon platform, which has enabled them to accelerate their decision making from a timeframe measured in weeks to now just a few days. GSK also purchased its third beacon during the quarter, moving upstream in the value chain by adding beacon antibody discovery workflow capabilities to their antibody therapeutic development and manufacturing capability. Cell and gene therapies continue to drive significant pipeline growth and are becoming a larger part of the total therapies under development in the biopharma industry. In line with this trend, non-antibody therapeutic revenue as a percentage of total sales grew to nearly 25% in both the third quarter and year-to-date revenues. We continue to build our presence in translational centers by driving the deployment of cell therapy products and demonstrating access to primary biology that previously did not exist. Globally, we have placed 20 platforms across the academic sector. Development efforts around an integrated cell therapy development, QAQC, and closed-loop manufacturing solutions continues to progress nicely. Recently, Dr. Anthony Azimura from the Medical College of Wisconsin presented at the CAR-T Summit on how he was leveraging the Berkeley Lights lightning tool to identify how modifications in CAR-T cell manufacturing can improve in vivo persistence and clinical efficacy. A link to this webinar and others like it can be found on the customer spotlight pages of our Berkeley Lights website. Expanding into new markets remains a key aspect of our growth strategy. The industry trend to partner in core technology development has driven growth of our business development activities. Here we are developing new solutions with partners by providing access to capacity through our bio foundry. We currently have two principal engagement models. Both partnership offerings start with an R&D capacity subscription that can span over multiple years. This is either followed by platform placement of the customer for the developed application or the arrangement is transitioned into a service offering where Berkeley Lights runs the established workflow in our bio foundry. In either model, we may share in downstream economics via milestones and or share in the created downstream economic benefits on a per unit basis. This model continues to gain momentum in both pipeline activity as well as revenue contribution. In 2020, full-year revenue from partnerships was $5.8 million, compared to $12.5 million during the first nine months of this year. We expect revenue from partnerships and services to exceed $18 million in 2021 and account for approximately 20% of this year's projected revenue. Our current service and partnership backlog for 2022 has grown to approximately $20 million at the end of the third quarter. To serve this rapidly growing part of our business, we recently completed the build-out of our Boston BioFoundry, which will provide additional campaign capacity as we enter 2022. Before I hand the call over to Kurt, I'd like to again thank our team for their hard work and dedication towards making our vision a reality. We are at the forefront of something profoundly important, and we continue to push the envelope every day on what is possible through the cutting-edge fusion of biology and technology. Our platform is becoming essential in some of the most important fields, such as cell therapy, antibody discovery, synthetic biology, and many more. As we have advanced the capabilities of our platform, we increasingly hear from our customers how our technology is enabling them to solve complex problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable. We are still early in this journey, and there is work to be done to integrate our technology platform across many new market segments. As we have demonstrated this quarter, we are continuing to make great progress, and we remain more excited than ever about the road ahead. I will now turn the call over to Kirk for more details on our finances.