Berkeley Lights, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Abby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Berkeley Light's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you, and I will now turn the conference over to Suzanne Hatcher. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Berkeley Light's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call reporting financial results for the quarter and year ended December 31st, 2022. My name is Suzanne Hatcher, Vice President of Communications and Investor Relations at Berkeley Light. I'm joined today by Dr. Siddhartha Kadia, Chief Executive Officer, and Mehul Joshi, 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 filing. Except as required by law, Berkeley Light 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, February 23, 2023. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Siddhartha.

Thank you, Susan, and thank you everyone for joining us. This was a transformative year for Berkeley Light as we made significant changes across the business. In 2022, we successfully completed the important AAV contract with Thermo Fisher, upgraded the software suite for Beacon and Lightning platforms, launched the Zabit memory B-cell workflow to accelerate antibody discovery, and extended our reach with multiple new customers onboarding the Berkeley Light technology. We made several great additions to our management team, outlined a new strategic operating plan, and hosted our first investor day. And most recently, we announced plans to acquire IsoPlexus. After closing, the combination of Berkeley Light's and IsoPlexus will form a premier functional cell biology company, PhenomeX, providing live cell biology research tools to deliver deep insights into cellular function and new perspectives on phenomes. I'm very excited for the future as we continue our transformation into growing, profitable, and sustainable life sciences companies. I will begin the call today by providing updates on the progress we've made against all the pillars of our strategic operating plan and will then turn over the call to Mehul, who will review our fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results in more detail. Starting with our first strategic pillar of building a world-class life sciences leadership team with a proven track record in profitably scaling life sciences tools companies. Since I joined Berkeley Lights nearly a year ago, we've made significant progress building out a very strong team with seasoned executives. With external hires bringing leadership, with deep life science experience, as well as internal appointments that bring critical knowledge of the innovative technology platform at Berkeley Lights. These key hires include chief financial officer, chief human resources officer, head of strategy and corporate development, and chief legal officer. Additionally, with the anticipated closing of the acquisition of IsoPlexus, Sean McKay will join the combined company as chief thought officer. Looking forward, we are focused on building a strong global commercial team in 2023 with the goal of establishing teams and partnerships in key regions. I'm confident The combination of our experienced leadership team and a strengthened commercial team will drive a culture of innovation, customer centricity, and a commitment to excellence in quality. We anticipate making additional commercial appointments in the next few weeks. Moving on to our second strategic pillar of prioritizing R&D return on investment through increased focus and rigor on development initiatives. We made considerable progress in 2022 as we streamlined our R&D focus areas by narrowing the scope of many projects and shifting our product portfolio from complex, multi-generational launches to a more simplified approach. We believe this approach will enable us to better fulfill our customers' needs. As we have previously shared, we believe there is a significant opportunity for our technology to add value in cell and gene therapy space. We are focused on improving the cost and therapeutically relevant deals for manufacturing AAV-based gene therapies through our platform and will continue to dedicate ample resources to the development of an AAV manufacturing workflow throughout 2023. We are seeking commercial and technology partners to develop a strong out-licensing technology model and are currently in discussions with several potential industry partners for this advanced therapy initiative. We are also focusing our resources on PCR discovery, where our technology has been very useful for large companies involved in specialized personalized cancer vaccines and enables people to make personalized discoveries on PCR, similar to our antibody discovery workflow. We believe that these two areas have the highest value for our customers and, consequentially, for the entire biotech industry. Moving on to our third pillar of delivering consistent, commercial execution through a new sales structure and enhance product portfolio and pricing strategy. We are materially enhancing our approach to the market with the introduction of a more flexible configuration and pricing strategy that encompasses the total cost of ownership. In line with this approach, in early January, we introduced, we can select a two-cheap single-cell optofluidic system for cell line development, enabling scientists to clone, culture, assay, and select top clones in a single run on a single platform. The select is approximately half the price of the previous beacon model and will be available through different purchasing options, including capital placement, lease, or re-agent rental. With slightly reduced capability from our first platform, this will increase customer accessibility and expand the customer base as it is ideally suited for small to mid-sized biopharma and CROs and CDMOs. We believe broadening our portfolio of platforms will allow us to access a wider array of potential customers in the market with the products that are more tailored to their needs and budgets. Going forward, we intend to launch application-specific models of beacon systems periodically. In line with this cadence, we expect to launch Beacon Quest, a lower-cost device intended for the academic market, in the second quarter of this year. We are already seeing early interest in this model. As we said previously, in terms of our go-forward product roadmap, we believe that our technology can provide significant value in high-growth academic research segments, for example, gene editing and immuno-oncology applications. A top priority in 2020 will be to form academic collaboration pilot programs to help guide the design of these new applications. turning to our fourth strategic pillar of evaluating mergers and acquisitions opportunities that will help us accelerate profitable growth and leverage our cost structure. On December 21 last year, we announced our intention for consolidation in the single-cell biology industry with the combination of Berkeley lights and isoplexes to create Phenom X. This anticipated combination drives towards a broader, diversified cell biology company focused on understanding the phenome by providing a deeper analysis of cell function while uniquely preserving the live cells of interest. The transaction is expected to close by the end of first quarter of 2023, and our integration planning is in full swing. When the merger closes, the combined company will have about 400 plus install base in all the top 15 pharmaceutical companies by revenue, and 80% of comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. Together, there'll be more than 100 sales and support employees with greater reach to academic biopharma and CRO companies globally. Additionally, the combined company will have a strong 600 patent portfolio as state. We also have a balanced product portfolio with significantly diverse price points for our customers to access and substantially expanded reach to a much larger cell biology market. The combined product portfolio as Phenome X will include our Beacon system, the Beacon Select for cell line development launched in January, and the existing instrument platforms from IsoPlexus, the IsoSpark and IsoLite. We expect to launch several new technology offering as PhenomX in 2023. This includes the Beacon Select for antibody discovery workflow and Beacon Quest for the academic market in the second quarter of 2023, as well as Isoflexasis bulk proteomics platform called CodePlex Q. We plan to unveil the PhenomX comprehensive product roadmap in the summer of 2023 at a planned investor event. The combination of Berkeley lights and isoflexes will represent an important milestone and lay a great foundation for a very strong life sciences tools company. Importantly, we expect this transaction to accelerate our progress across every pillar of our strategic plan. We believe PhenomX will have the power to bring to market much more ubiquitous cell biology tools which could be used by every single scientific institution in the world. We look forward to joining forces with the IsoPlexus team as we embark on this new chapter and create value for our customers, employees, and shareholders. In addition to IsoPlexus, we recently acquired all the technology assets from Evorian Biotechnologies, developers of a system capable of live tracking cellular interactions. Their alternative intellectual property approach to single-cell functional analysis, called CellCity, will help accelerate the development of our pipeline. With this purchase, Berkeley Lights acquired the entire patent portfolio, complete with 17 patent families in all CellCity prototypes and software source code. for approximately $250,000 compared to the $20 million spent on developing the technology. Finally, I'd like to give an update on our fifth strategic pillar of generating positive operating cash flow. We are focused on building a growing, profitable, and sustainable business rather than pursuing growth at any cost. When we first announced our new strategic operating plan, we anticipated achieving this goal by 2025. We are making significant progress against our goal, with revenue acceleration supported by an updated market-driven product portfolio and pricing strategy, as well as disciplined expense and cash management. We have taken several actions in Q1 2023 to reduce our overall headcount spend, including transitioning existing employees, approximately 9% of the workforce, closing open positions, and reducing our consulting and contractor spend. This is an addition to our business optimization initiative in July 2022. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mehul Joshi to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results.

Thank you, Siddhartha. Revenue in the fourth quarter was $17.8 million, bringing full year results slightly above the range we pre-announced in early January. Revenue this quarter was impacted by the timing of certain beacon platform placements and, as previously communicated, our ongoing initiatives to reshape our partnerships and services business away from low margin contracts to focused initiatives on AAV and TCR discovery. We also experienced a tightening macroeconomic environment similar to what our industry has been facing. with elongated sales cycles and constrained capital budgets. By geography, North America accounted for 30% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, followed by APAC at 36% and EMEA at 34%. Platform revenue was $10.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, up 5% compared to $9.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our install base grew by seven placements during the fourth quarter of 2022, including six Deakin placements. This brings the total install base to 135 platforms. Q4 sales were representative across all customer segments, including biopharma, CRO, CDMO, and academic customers. Recovering revenue was $6.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, up 6% compared to $6.1 million in prior year. We are focused on expanding the installed base to drive stable, predictable, recurring revenue. Revenue from partnerships and services decreased to $1.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, compared to $7.4 million in the prior year. This includes revenue from Vestron and Bayer partnerships. Both of these partnership contracts are now complete and we expect no revenue from strategic partnerships and services agreements to be recognized in the first quarter of 2023. As we shift to the new operating model for our partnerships businesses, we see high levels of interest in our AAV and TCR discovery solutions and anticipate having a number of customer contracts in the second half of 2023. Gross profit for the fourth quarter of 2022 was $12 million compared to $16 million in the prior year. Gross margin for the fourth quarter of 2022 was 67.3% compared to 68.8% in the fourth quarter of 2021. Operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2022 were $41.7 million, inclusive of $5.1 million of stock-based compensation compared to OPEX of $33.8 million inclusive of $5.1 million of stock-based compensation in the same period of the prior year. Operating expenses in Q4 2022 included large one-time fees for legal expenses related to a customer arbitration, expenses for M&A, and approximately $2.5 million of non-cash restructuring expense as we continue to streamline and simplify our business. Net loss for the fourth quarter 2022 was $29.3 million compared to a loss of $17.7 million for the prior year period. All net loss numbers are inclusive of stock-based compensation and restructuring expenses. We are laser focused on operating expenses and cash flow and expect our Q1 OPEX to be down approximately 25% from Q4 of 2022. Looking at the full year, total revenue for 2022 was $78.6 million, down 8% year over year. Regionally, North America accounted for 49% of total revenues in the year. followed by APAC at 34% and EMEA at 17%. For 2022, revenue from direct platform sales totaled $35.8 million, driven by 24 placements in 2022. Recovering revenue was $24.8 million, an increase of 30% from 2021. Partnerships and services revenue was $18 million, compared to $19.9 million in 2021 and reflects our shift in strategy away from low margin business. Gross profit for full year 2022 was $53.8 million compared to $56.6 million in the prior year. Gross margin for 2022 was 68.4% compared to 66.2% in the prior year. Total operating expenses in 2022 were $151.8 million, comprising $53.2 million of R&D expenses, $95.1 million of SG&A, and $3.5 million of restructuring costs. Stock-based compensation included in operating expenses was $22.2 million and increased approximately $1 million year-over-year. Net loss for 2022 was $98.0 million compared to a loss of $71.7 million in 2021. We ended the year with a cash balance of $132.8 million, which included our cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities, representing a cash burn of approximately $11 million from the end of the fourth quarter of 2022. Our ending cash balance also reflects approximately $9.2 million that was recovered due to the unauthorized issuance of shares that we previously announced in eight case filed with the SEC dated December 16th, 2022 and February 14th, 2023. Our cash is being managed appropriately and we reached our year-end cash balance goal. Our available liquidity is $142.8 million, which includes our revolving credit facility. At this time, we will not be providing 2023 guidance given the pending acquisition of IsoPlexus, which we expect to close in March. We affirm our commitment to the goal of operating cash flow positive earlier and will provide guidance after one full quarter at CINOLEX. With that, we will now open it up to questions.

Operator?

Thank you. And as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. And we will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And we will take our first question from Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hey, guys, this is Edmund on for Tejas. Thank you for taking my questions. Siddhartha, you mentioned integration planning. I was just wondering if you could provide more details around that. Ahead of the deal, what have you done to ensure that you'll hit the ground running upon the close of the deal?

Yeah, thank you, Edmund, and please give my regards to Tejas as well. We have a very strong integration planning push ongoing ever since we announced the transaction in December. And I'm happy to report that we are making very strong progress on all matters. But I have to just set a context for what is this integration about. There are three main areas of synergies, the word synergy not just being about the cost, but about synergistic business processes between Berkeley Lights and Isoflexus.

Number one,

is to make sure that we are utilizing the SG&A structure, specifically the G&A structure built in case of IsoPlexus and Berkeley Lights for both of those being public companies, there is a significant expense structure built to support these two companies to come to public markets. And there is a significant amount of cost reduction that will take place between those functions. Next, if we talk about the sales and marketing function, This transaction provided the opportunity for both companies to significantly expand the commercial reach. The combined company will have more than 100 people across the world supporting sales, marketing, customer service support, and technical services functions. And in fact, for a company of this scale, that is a very nice scale for us to be able to achieve very quickly in very technical areas of commercialization. that is very difficult to build, so it gives us a significant advantage in coming to the market across all the geographies with a combined sales and marketing footprint. The third area of integration is in the innovation. Here, both companies being small companies with very high expectations on growth on these very small companies that invested ahead of the time on research and development initiatives, And oftentimes what I have found throughout my career and especially through here between both companies is that there is a lot of initiatives in place. And in fact, when there is way too many initiatives, it is not easy to execute against all of them. So we have taken the approach of simplification between the two businesses and focusing on a few initiatives and doing them really well. What is even more important to highlight here is that the companies come with incredible technology overlap. Berkeley Life Platform has an ability to, so really unprecedented ability to track live cells, manipulate them, and still recover them for future analysis. IsoPlexus technology allows those cells to be studied in an incredible depth with a level of analysis that has not been seen before by other tools. And at the same time, from a commercial perspective, ISOPLEXUS technology is introduced in a box that is significantly lower cost than a Berkeley Life platform. For example, ISOPLEXUS technology is offered in the market anywhere between $100,000 and $250,000 of value, whereas the Berkeley Life platform is sold between $1 million to $2 million of pricing point. Going forward, we are making significant progress on our innovation teams to come together to offer As many of our competencies from technology perspectives in a lower cost device that is a much more stronger software suite, which we were able to fortunate to be found in IsoPlexus, the software capabilities of IsoPlexus team is fantastic. And it really has created a push button answer in a box kind of a device approach. to be used in life sciences tools industry, which we are very keen to combine for our combined portfolio. So hopefully this gives you an idea. Overall, I do want to tell you that the combined company's cost structure was about $200 million. The revenue base that combined company has does not need that level of expenditure, and we are committed to going after approximately $70 million of cost reductions. Majority of it will come from obvious functions like public company expense reductions, but also some of that will come from synergizing our research and development initiatives for company to be effectively managing our execution plans. Hopefully this is comprehensive and happy to answer further questions on this.

No, Siddhartha, that was super helpful. Thank you for the color. And I guess just standing on the back of the innovation point and bringing the two technologies together, I mean, now that the deal has been announced for a couple of months, have you started to get any early customer feedback on the possibilities of merging these technologies together and any interesting applications?

Yeah, in fact, that's a great question, Edmund. We often, when individual company employees have reached out to our customers for what additional things they would like, especially in the area of cell and gene therapy, there's a tremendous demand for people to use these two technologies in tandem. In other words, people are often interested in preserving the cells of interest from Berkeley Labs platform and then doing the deeper analysis on the isoflexuses platform. And that combination has been requested by customers. So I mean, the casual discussions, you know, for quite some time. And in fact, that is one of the main reasons for the technology overlap that has given us the attractiveness to bring these two companies together, both for us as well as for the IsoPlexus management team. However, we would be unveiling the full, detailed, comprehensive product roadmap for the combined companies to bring to market in 2024 and beyond. We will be disclosing that sometime in the summer once we have a full work to work with our colleagues on the other side for a full quarter or so. in the 2023 year.

Got it. Thank you guys very much for the time today. Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Chad Wiatrowski with Cowan. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. You got Chad Wiatrowski on for Steve Ma. With regards to the AAV and TCR discovery customer contracts that you're expecting to come this year, What can we expect in terms of deal structure? Specifically, are you noticing any hesitancy from prospective partners to deploy R&D dollars up front? And does that create an opportunity to capture any downstream economics? Thank you for your question.

A good question. I think depending on the type of customer we are talking about, there is different arrangements we're going to make. So we're not going to go into specific details here on that. the structure of specific customers, but I can tell you that our first very successful customer experience in that was all upfront R&D dollars. We believe that the value is significant, and for us to fully capture the value, we're going to want to have further contracts structured in a way that allows us to participate in the downstream revenue in addition to having a reasonable margin business for providing the services in the first phase. So going forward, you will see in our target margins are actually in that north of 60, 70% gross margins. In addition to that, we would be expecting that customers share with us the downstream value creation because the value creation, as we've talked about it, instead of doing these kind of projects, Berkeley Life Platform could be used in all sorts of research applications. And frankly, we could get boil the ocean approach here, but we've identified two places where the opportunity for us is high, but more importantly, opportunities for our customers to add value for their customers is even very, very strong here. And that allows us to reasonably expect participation in the downstream economics. So you should expect more of that, but there's a lot more discussions and negotiations going on, so I'm not going to comment on the specifics right now.

Got it. Thanks. And then just in regarding the combined sales force, Do you expect to cross-train both reps and are there any opportunities like at the launch of the Beacon One plan for this year to maybe leverage each other's existing sales channels?

It's a fantastic question, Chad. And yeah, the Beacon One has been renamed to Beacon Quest, implying the quest as in discovery and science in the research academic market. And you are absolutely correct. One good thing about these two companies coming together is not just a random marriage of two life sciences, two companies with very different product lines. These are both cell biology-based companies, both serving in a customer segment that are overlapping and speaking the common language. So we will be able to cross-train the personnel, and that is a very large focus for our integration planning. Of course, the transaction is not closed here. We are expecting it to close in the next few weeks here, and as soon as the transaction is closed, we intend to start the cross-training between the two teams. And just to add one more thing to that, Chad, just one more thing on that, Chad. Berkeley Light's capabilities on a commercial slide has been significantly invested in the biopharmaceutical customer segment. We have some academic market transactions, but not because we specifically targeted salespeople to that segment until recently. However, the isoplex assist team is very strong in academic market segment and has a significant academic presence. In fact, many of the units are actually placed in the largest cancer research centers in North America and a very strong presence in terms of the combined install base, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, approximately a total of 400 install base, really giving us a much significant increased not only from our customer access from a sales point of view, but also having a lot more customers who can speak for us. Every week there is a publication with sites, a product that was used from either company's products now.

Thanks again, Leah. Looking forward to more updates throughout the year.

Thank you, Chad.

And we will take our next question from Mark Massaro with BTIG. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. This is Vivian on for Mark. Thanks for taking the question. So I believe isoplexes didn't yet report their final Q4 results. Is it your view that they're also being impacted by instrument placement timing and longer sales cycles? And on that note, how many placements during the quarter for Berkeley Lights were tech access subscription? If you could give us any flavor there. Thanks.

So we're still an independent company, so we're not going to comment on IsoPlex's fourth quarter results. You'll have to wait till they publish their results. On the number of placements, we had seven placements in the fourth quarter. Six were beacon placements, and one was a lightning placement. So those were capital sales. We did not earn any revenue from a new tech access placement. However, we have booked a tech access placement that will get installed and start earning revenue shortly.

Okay, great. Thanks so much for that. Just a quick follow-up. You briefly mentioned, I think, the acquisition of the patent portfolio. So what's your updated thinking around M&A, or is the focus in the coming months primarily going to be on isoplexis integration? Thanks.

Yeah, Vivian, for the next quarter, we are super focused on executing the integration planning and the subsequent actions that need to take place. And the entire management team is right now fully focused on that, on both sides. As we discussed earlier on the call, there's also a lot of heavy lift to be done on a commercial integration and training, cross-training across the business, as well as a significant amount of work to do on making sure that we have a robust product portfolio roadmap for the next three years. And we'll be unveiling all of that later in the summer at the investor day. However, I think to go back to the transaction you mentioned, it was a transaction that was pursued in parallel with IsoPlexus, And it is quite interesting people who, this asset actually was in Germany with some very capable engineers and scientists trying to do this work around cell-cell interactions. As we engage with them, we saw that there's something very important here that we could leverage into our combined platforms, especially as we were already discussing the combination with isoflexus. We saw a huge opportunity for us to acquire a total assets at a, a significant discount at 1% of the total investment value for which it was created, approximately $250,000 for an asset that was created after $20 million of investments. We believe this kind of opportunistic transactions are something we'll still keep an eye on. Just as a kind of a matter of a perspective on the industry, life sciences tools industry got tremendous investment in what was the end stage of the bull markets in the world. approximately $4 to $5 billion of venture capital funding and related funding had gone into creating all sorts of life sciences tools companies. And then candidly, unfortunately, not many of those technologies will become companies and not that many of the companies that have formed will become going concerns. And therein lies the opportunity for a company like us having a robust leadership team and a very clear pathway for becoming a broad functional cell biology company to be very selective about it, but then also be very strategic about continuing to look for assets like this. So we will not be making any large transaction announcements in Q2, I can assure you of that, but we'll continue to look for opportunistic transactions like the one we just described today.

Got it. Thanks for taking the question.

Thank you, Vivian. Pardon me. We will take our next question from Matt LaRue with William Baer. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Apologies if you covered this because I had some connection issues earlier on, but just on Pick and Select, obviously, that launched in the quarter, and that was something you expected. I just wanted to follow up to understand maybe early interest that you are seeing, obviously. Is that a different price point and opened up the market a bit more for you? So how maybe some of the pre-order or customer conversation activity from the end of last year has converted into further interest or sales early on this year?

Yeah, so that's a great question. Let me just make sure that we explain sort of what we... We originally intended to launch Beacon Select later in the year, but we were able to accelerate launch of the Beacon Select in Q1 in... specifically for cell line development workflow, which is where we initially thought there was going to be a significant demand for accessing our portfolio products at a lower cost upfront in exchange for a higher consumable cost in the longer term. And we have, as you know, the sales cycles for capital instrument is actually a two to three quarter long cycle. So we are building the funnel right now. Our sales people are trained on the new tool now and they are building the funnel as we speak. So we don't have a a specific funnel report to give out to you, but we have some early success in the transactions. We will disclose that when the Q1 is finished, but we will continue to inform you on that. The second thing I would say is that given the Beacon Select success that we are seeing in the early discussion with the customers, we've also decided to launch a Beacon Select platform for antibody discovery workflows. which is a different application. And we will be launching that sometime in Q2. Again, as our commercial team is getting more successful, explain the total cost of ownership equation to our potential customers. This is something that we thought was valuable to do to lower that barrier, upfront barriers for most of our customers. Hopefully that answers your question, Matt.

Yeah, thank you, Siddhartha. And Mehul, understanding that you're not providing guidance It might be helpful if you could at least review for us any comp issues from the previous year, any previously communicated margin dynamics or seasonality issues, regional macro issues that you want us to be aware of as we're, you know, putting our model together ahead of a more formal update after the transaction closes. Yep.

Yeah, I think, Matt, let me take that and I'll hand over to Mehul for specifics on the discussions here. But just to be a step back for a second and make sure we explain the reason for not providing guidance. As you know, I've taken the job now for three plus full quarters coming onto my fourth quarter finish here as a CEO of this company. We came in and we have decided to look at everything with fresh set of eyes with a very specific orientation toward life sciences tools market and being very fact-based and fact-focused. We made some significant progress on laying out the principles by which people run the company. We believe that we made significant progress towards each one of the pillars that we laid out. And we were fortunate to be able to both identify and conclude a transaction that really lays out the proof of that strategy going forward. I think it will be important for us not having managed that company under our wings until at least a quarter or so to start providing guidance for something we don't yet own. And I think it's important for us to just make sure that we make that after appropriate amount of deliberation and owning the business for a little bit. More importantly, as we plan through integration planning, we are making active trade-off decisions between cost and revenues and also synergies in all aspects of the company, including the operations function where gross margin is going to be designed between the two companies' product lines. There are significant opportunities for operational synergies, but it all requires a lot of heavy lift and work. So we need to own the business for a little bit before we start providing with specific guidance. We do, however, reaffirm our earlier statement that The combination will allow us to become cash flow positive earlier than when we stated in the previous discussion. So with that, maybe let me hand over to Mihul to see if there are any specifics that he can provide the color on.

Yeah, no, I don't think I'll provide any specifics. The only thing I'd add to what Siddhartha said, which I think was pretty comprehensive, is as we combine our commercial teams and the footprint that we'll have and the cross-training that will occur, we believe you know, having that coverage across, you know, multiple industry segments will enable us to drive revenue with our enhanced product portfolio, as we've talked about with the Beacon, Beacon Select, Beacon Quest, as well as the IsoPlexus products. And so, you know, we have high aspirations, but until we, you know, uncover all the details and create the integration strategy around commercial, you know, We don't really want to lay out any specific guidance.

Okay, understood. We'll look forward to that next update. Thanks.

And we will take our last question from Gaurav Gopuraju with Barenburg. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. With the introduction of Beacon Select and incoming release of Beacon Quest, are you planning on offloading the TechAccess subscription as an option, given seemingly muted demand there? And as a follow-up, why do you think customers are more receptive of the Select and Quest than they seemingly have been for TechAccess?

Yeah, good question. We don't anticipate changing what has been offered to our customers. There are people who might only have a operational expenses budget, and for them, tech access is a better fit for them. Some people might have budget earmarked for capital purchases. Of course, that's a very different type of processes for organizations to run for spending their budget, so we will offer both. The specifics on why it is more attractive, for economic market segment, anything north of a million dollars is a very, very long shot unless It is absolutely something that is core to the person does for the work. Most academic grants don't justify that level of capital spend. So we have to introduce something that is more sensible for academic market segment. And that's what the Beacon Quest will do. With Beacon Select, we decided to go after a market segment that is not fully addressed here yet, which is the smaller to mid-sized biopharma companies as well as CROs. and some of the early-stage companies that are interested in our technology but do not have the capital upfront budget for $2 million. Again, it's valuable for us to be able to offer them a capital placement opportunity so that they can actually own the equipment, get their personnel trained, and feel more confident rather than just having attack access, which is a partial commitment on their part here. Hopefully, that explains to you. You want to be flexible with the introduction of this amazing technology in a way that customers see fit, not sort of we dictate how the customer should access it.

Got it. That makes sense. And then, you know, one quick follow-up from me. I'm kind of on a similar angle. I know you mentioned, right, one lightning placement out of the seven. You know, overall, are you seeing any pickup or maybe just, you know, equilibrium in demand for, you know, lightning and culture station?

You know, it's a great question. As we say, there's a few things about Lightning launch. I've evaluated sort of all the things that have happened in the company's commercial history for the last four years. And one of the things I think was a miss in our opportunity is that Lightning was offered in a significantly lower feature set compared to what the customers can do. In fact, the export of cells is manual, which is one of those things that actually customers may or may not like because it requires a person to sit next to the machine for a long time to export the cells. And as a result, the technology is not offered in its full glory, if you will. So BeaconQuest has been kind of an answer for that. We are offering a large part of our capability to academic researchers in that BeaconQuest design that we are pursuing right now. And we believe that's actually a better solution for people who want to use our technology. Not to say that some people are still not interested in lightning, depending on the application and the kind of labor resources they have to deploy against this technology. Some people still might want lightning and will continue to support them with that. But our second thing I will say is our commercial footprint in front of the academic market just never has been that strong to support lightning at a wide level. There are thousands of academic research labs that we couldn't have reached with a limited number of commercial employees that we had. So having this combination of commercial footprint between IsoPlexus and Berkeley Light as Phenom X, we'll be able to take both of our technologies, Beacon, Quest, as well as Lightning to the academic customer base with a lot more access available to the customers.

Awesome. Thanks, Ed. Appreciate it. Thank you, Gaurav.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Berkeley Light's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. We thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.