Codex DNA, Inc.

and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during that 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 first speaker today, Jennifer McNeely. Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Paul. This afternoon, CodexDNA released its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2021. If you have not received the news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to IR at CodexDNA. Joining me today from CodexDNA are Todd Nelson, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Gibson, our Chief Technology 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 meeting of the federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appear in the section entitled forward-looking statements in the press release we issue today. For a more complete list and description, please see the risk factor section of the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, and in other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except by required by law, we disclaim 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 10, 2021. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Todd.

Thanks, Jennifer, and thank you all for joining us this afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome you to our first earnings call as a public company and to review our results for the second quarter of 2021. During the second quarter, Codex D&I took a big step forward in the evolution of our business, We successfully closed an IPO, strengthened the diversity of our leadership team and board of directors, enabled new downstream mRNA applications, expanded our customer base, and grew revenue 76% year over year. We continue to be well-positioned to build on this foundation, scale our global operations, and empower more customers with the ability to rapidly create sustainable synthetic biology solutions to help advance precision medicine, biologics drug discovery, vaccine development, genome editing, and both cell and gene therapy. I'd like to take a moment and express my sincere thanks to our amazing team for their hard work and dedication leading up to our IPO in June, in which we raised approximately $123 million in gross proceeds. All the incredible progress we've made is truly a testament to their collective efforts. I would also like to thank all of our investors for their continued support. We look forward to developing meaningful long-term relationships and working with you to grow the company together. With that in mind, let me give you a sense of what's driving us at Codex DNA. Our mission is to apply breakthroughs in automation solutions for synthesizing DNA, mRNA, and proteins to allow scientists to program and print synthetic biology, creating sustainable healthcare and technology solutions for some of humanity's biggest challenges. Our team has been innovating in the synthetic biology industry for years and has driven many of the industry's most significant scientific achievements, including the invention of Gibson Assembly Method, which has now been cited in more than 6,000 scientific publications. We're excited to drive the next revolution in synthetic biology, The first revolution focused on the reading or sequencing of DNA molecules, decades of investment in this area has led to the opportunity to write or print DNA at the benchtop, which will allow for the rapid translation of DNA into novel products. We believe the next revolution will be driven by synthetic biology applications that rapidly write or recode DNA, allowing customers worldwide to develop sustainable technology solutions and bring critical products to market faster. We've developed an innovative solution to unlock this writing revolution that is purpose-built to meet pressing needs for fast and accurate DNA writing technologies that drive significant improvements in productivity. Our BioXP automation platform has the potential to unlock this DNA writing revolution, giving us access to large market opportunities by bringing this technology to the bench top. The award-winning BioXP system is disrupting an industry by providing a fully automated push-button system for the rapid synthesis of both DNA and mRNA. Certain drug discovery activities that previously took months can now be completed using the BioXV system in just a week or so, and what previously took days can now be done in hours. Industry-leading quality combined with enhanced speed, accuracy, and scale can result in vast improvements to productivity. This allows scientists to write or print functional-grade DNA and mRNA with the push of a button, enabling rapid iteration of synthetic biology products. Scientists around the world are able to accelerate the design-build-test paradigm for faster development of novel, high-value products for precision medicine, biologics drug discovery, vaccines and therapeutics, genome editing, and both cell and gene therapy. Our technology is being applied towards developments in medicine as well as food supply sustainability, as is the case for Citrus Greening Disease Grant awarded to us by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Now a few words on our second quarter results. In the second quarter, we responded to customer demand with a number of BioXP synthetic workflow enhancements. We launched the first mRNA kit for BioXP system. This product line is the first of three mRNA kits in a full product line. It's designed to enable the rapidly growing market for mRNA vaccine development and RNA-based therapeutics. We also launched longer gene fragment building capabilities for overnight production of error-corrected de novo synthetic genes as long as 7.2 kB in length. Such improvement in the size dramatically expands the menu of applications that can be studied, such as antibody engineering, metabolic engineering, genome construction, targeted gene variant analysis, and more. In July, we signed a licensing and supply agreement with TriLink Biotechnologies, which is part of Merivy Life Sciences for its industry-leading clean cap technology. We plan to integrate the mRNA capping technology into our suite of automated mRNA synthesis kits for the BioXP system, as well as within our biofoundry services offering. customers will now have the option to generate up to 16 biologically active mRNA constructs at a yield of at least 10 micrograms each, all from fully de novo synthesized and error-corrected genes in a single automated run. These combined technologies increase the fraction of translationally active mRNA during transcription, which simplifies and shortens the mRNA manufacturing process and results in higher levels of protein production. Together, the technologies are expected to increase productivity and yields for mRNA synthesis workflows potentially opening the doors for a broader range of downstream therapeutic and vaccine applications. We also strengthened our leadership team with three key additions to the board of directors during the second quarter. They are Jamie Nochstein, Christine Singos, and Andrea Jackson. Jamie is the former corporate vice president of sales and marketing group and the director of worldwide marketing at Intel Corporation and currently serves on the board of several leading biomedical and technology companies. Jamie serves as the Chair of our Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee and as a member of our Compensation Committee. Christine is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Bio-Rad Laboratories. She previously held executive positions at Autodesk, the Cooper Companies, and Atest Systems. Christine serves as the Chair of our Audit Committee. Andrea is the Director of North Pond Ventures, which is a science, medical, and technology-focused venture capital firm that was founded in 2018. She is also a member of the board of directors of other emerging growth companies, including Current Health, NanoView, Octavi Biosciences, and others. Andrea serves as a member of the Compensation Committee and the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee. We welcome them all to the CodexDNA team. And with that, I will pass the call back over to Jennifer to review our financials.