Blaize Holdings, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Blaze First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in 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 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To draw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lana Adair, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that earlier today, Blaze Holdings, Inc. issued a press release announcing its first quarter 2026 results. Earnings materials are available on the Investor Relations section of Blaze Holding, Inc.' 's website. Today's earnings call and press release reflect management's views as of today only and include statements related to our 2026 financial guidance, revenue, gross margin, competitive position, anticipated industry trends, market opportunities, products, and financing opportunities, all of which constitute forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could impact our actual results, please refer to the company's Form 10-K and Amendment No. 1 to Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and our Form 10-Q for the period ending March 31, including the risk factor section therein and today's press release, both of which can be found on our investor relations website. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and other than as may be required by law. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information for future events. Information discussed on this call concerning Blaze Holdings, Inc., industry, competitive position, and the markets in which it operates is based on information from independent industry and research organizations, other third-party sources, and management estimates. These estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third-party sources, as well as data from Blaze Holding Inc.' 's internal research. These estimates are based on reasonable assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and Blaze Holding Inc.' 's experience and knowledge of such industry and market. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risk, which could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimate. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures discussed during this call to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today's press release. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Dhinakar Munagala, CEO of Blaze Holdings Inc.

Thank you, Lana, and good afternoon, everyone. We came off a breakout growth year in 2025, and we expect 2026 to continue the trend. Q1 strengthened our commercial foundation through several new contracts and partnerships. First, We expanded our NeoTensor contract, bringing the total potential value to $70 million. We signed a strategic partnership agreement with Winmate, a publicly traded leader in ruggedized computing, with the intent to close approximately $15 million in business in the first year. We deepened our joint engagement with Nokia across Asia Pacific. Together, we stood up a joint AI innovation lab advancing hybrid AI rack scale development. The engagement also includes a strategic partnership with Datacom, one of Southeast Asia's leading cloud service providers. Finally, we announced Blaze AI services and will bring our first application service to market. Q1 revenue came in at approximately $2.7 million. This reflects a global memory shortage that limited server availability from one of our trusted suppliers and delayed orders. Customer demand remained intact throughout the quarter. We expect to secure the inventory needed to deliver over $11 million to a single customer in the second quarter of this year. and we are reaffirming our full year 2026 revenue guidance of $130 million. At Gitex AI 2026 in April, one of the largest AI showcases in Asia, we announced Blaze AI Services, which we expect to turn AI infrastructure into production-ready APIs that cloud service providers, data center operators, and system integrators can deploy, monetize, and resell. Today, we are going to announce the next step in execution, the upcoming launch of our face recognition AI service, the first in a series of application level services running on the Blaze Hybrid AI platform. Why this matters, AI services will complement our hardware sales with reoccurring application layer revenue per query. It's higher margin, it's stickier, and it scales with our partners' growth, not just with their capex cycle. Phase recognition is the first proof point. Additional high-demand services, including intelligent document processing, will follow. We have signed a contract with Neotensor that is expected to generate up to $50 million in revenue in the first year. This builds on more than $20 million in revenue that we recognized in Q4 of 2025, bringing the total potential value to approximately $70 million. The development uses a co-branded AI server built on Blaze QuadCard. Each server handles 200 plus simultaneous camera streams with advanced AI analytics while running LLM and VLM inference on the same infrastructure. This is what our hybrid AI architecture was built for real time perception at the sensor layer, advanced reasoning on the same rack, no round trip to a distant cloud. The rollout is expected to span multiple cities across Asia Pacific in multiple phases. Each phase is expected to drive higher margin revenue as the AI services layer takes hold. Earlier this month, we entered into a strategic agreement with Winmate. Together, we will integrate Blaze AI into ruggedized systems, drones, handhelds, vehicle mounted units, and embedded devices for mission critical operations, border security, maritime, essential infrastructure, and field health care. Beyond the contracts I just described, we are advancing a series of rack-scale hybrid AI engagements anchored by our joint partnership with Nokia. This work reaches cloud service providers and infrastructure partners. These opportunities are multi-site, multi-phase with hundreds to thousands of edge nodes per program. They span spot city, sovereign data center, and large-scale ruggedized field use cases. The architecture is hybrid GSP plus GPU at rack scale, orchestrated by Blaze AI Services stack. The pattern is consistent. Customers want sovereign control of their data. They want efficiency. They want application-level AI services they can resell. Hybrid AI delivers all three. Stepping back, the AI infrastructure conversation is shifting fast. A year ago, the industry was focused on one thing, massive centralized GPU clusters for training. Today, the conversation moved decisively toward sovereign language model, inference at the edge, in country, at unit economics that actually work at scale. That shift is what Blaze was built for. Three pillars. Number one, sovereign AI infrastructure. Governments and large enterprises across Asia, Middle East, and Europe demand compute that stays within their borders, under their control. Hybrid rack scale enables this without hyperscaler economics. Number two, smaller LLM-based AI services. Most enterprise AI workloads do not need a frontier model. They need a tightly tuned domain-specific model on infrastructure they can afford. Our hybrid architecture runs vision and language workloads on the same rack, opening the service revenue our partners can monetize per query. Number three, programmable energy-efficient compute. This is where the Blaze GSP Advantage compounds. Performance per watt deterministic latency, a software stack that serves Vision, LLM, and VLM workloads on the same hardware. Hybrid Rackscale is the unit of deployment for the next phase of AI. We are building toward it, and our partners are buying in. On May 6th, we closed a $35 million equity offering supported by a group of large institutional investors. This capital strengthens our balance sheet, The proceeds will support our commercial deal commitments, continued AI services development, rack scale hybrid platform advancement, and next generation platform development. Blaze is a company executing against one of the most significant opportunities in AI history. Rack scale hybrid AI, sovereign infrastructure, the strategic path for reoccurring AI services revenue, and partnerships that put Blaze at the center of the AI inference build-out. Contracts are expanding. Partnerships are deepening across an increasingly diverse base of AI use cases. And finally, engagements are advancing in the field. So with that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Harminder Samy.