Evogene Ltd.

Welcome to Evergen's first quarter 2025 results conference call. All participants are present in listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, we will open the question and answer session. You may send your questions via chat. Please type your name and company before your question. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded May 21st, 2025. Before we begin, I would like to caution that certain statements made during this earnings conference call by Evergen's management will constitute forward-looking statements that relate to future events. This presentation contains forward-looking statements relating to future events and Evergen may from time to time make other statements regarding our outlook or expectations for future financial or operating results and or other matters regarding or affecting us that are considered forward-looking statements as defined in the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other securities laws as amended. Statements that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of such words as believe, expect, anticipate, should, planned, estimated, intend, and potential or other words of similar meaning. We are using forward-looking statements in this presentation when we discuss our value drivers, commercialization efforts and timing, product development and launches, estimated market sizes and milestones, pipeline as well as our capabilities and technology. Such statements are based on current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions, describe opinions about future events involve certain risks and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and are not guarantees of future performance. Readers are cautioned that certain important factors may affect the company's actual results and could cause such results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements that may be made in this presentation. Therefore, actual future results, performance, or achievements and trends in the future may differ materially from what is expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors many of which are beyond our control, including, without limitation, the current war between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and any worsening of the situation in Israel, such as further mobilization or escalation in the northern border of Israel, and those described in greater detail in Evergen's annual report on Form 20F and in other information Evergen files and furnishes with the Israel Securities Authority and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. including those factors under the heading risk factors. Except as required by applicable security laws, we disclaim any obligation or commitment to update any information contained in this presentation or to publicly release the results of any revisions to any statements that may be made to reflect future events or developments or changes in expectations, estimates, projections, and assumptions. The information contained herein does not constitute a prospectus or other offering document, nor does it constitute or form any part of any invitation or offer to sell, or any solicitation of any invitation or offer to purchase or subscribe for, any securities of Evergen or the Company, nor shall the information or any part of it, or the fact its distribution from the basis of, or be relied on in connection with, any action, contract, commitment or relating thereto or to the securities of Evergen or the company. The trademarks included herein are the property of the owners thereof and are used for reference purposes only. Such use should not be construed as an endorsement of our products or services. With us on the line will be Mr. Ofer Khabib, President and CEO of Evergen, and Johan Eldad, CFO of Evergen. Now we'll turn the call over to Mr. Ofa Khabib. Mr. Khabib, please go ahead.

Good day, everyone. In today's conference call, I would like to begin with a review of the financial and business highlights for the first quarter of 2025 and up to date, followed by an overview of Evogen's current activities and activities of its subsidiaries. After my remarks, Yaron Eldad, Evogen CFO, will provide a financial update on the first quarter of the year. We will then open a Q&A session. Let's start with the financial and business highlights. In the first quarter of 2025, total revenues were approximately $2.4 million, compared to approximately $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2024. The reason for the difference is that in the first quarter of 2024, revenues included license fee payment totaling of $3.5 million, which were $2.5 million from the La Vie Bayeux license fee under its collaboration with Corteva, and $1 million from Act Planus license fee under its collaboration with Bayer. The primary driver of revenues in the first quarter of 2025 was an increase in seed sales by Castera. During the fourth quarter of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, Avogen established an expense reduction plan, which will be completed by the second quarter of 2025. This reduction in expenses is already partially reflected in the financial results of the first quarter of 2025. In the first quarter of 2025, total R&D expenses were approximately $3.2 million compared to approximately $4.8 million in the first quarter of 2024. This decrease is mainly due to the decrease in Biomica's and LaVieBio's R&D activity. In the first quarter of 2025, total sales and marketing expenses were approximately $0.6 million, compared to approximately $1 million in the first quarter of 2024. This decrease is mainly due to the decrease in LaVie Bio's sales and marketing activity. In the first quarter of 2025, total operating expenses net were approximately $5 million, compared to approximately $8 million in the first quarter of 2024. This decrease is mainly due to the decrease in LaVieBios and Biomica operating activity. As of the end of the first quarter of 2025, the company's cash and short-term bank deposit balance was approximately $9.8 million, including approximately $5.5 million attributed to Biomica. This cash balance does not reflect approximately $2 million due from Castera's outstanding customers, the majority of which were received in the second quarter of 2025. It also excluded the expected proceeds from the sale of LaviBio's assets and the MicroBoost AI for Arc tech engine to ICL, which we announced in April. This transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025. I would now like to highlight key achievements of the Avogen Group in Q1 2025 and to date, starting with Avogen itself. In relating to Campus AI for Pharma, I am pleased to report substantial advancement on the following areas. We have refined the campus AI value proposition, clearly articulating its distinct competitive advantages for the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. The design of novel compounds that are both highly potent and meet multiple critical development criteria. Considerable progress has been made in developing the foundation model application as part of our collaboration with Google Cloud. This model constitutes the core of our campus GPT lead optimization package. Moving on to our subsidiaries, starting with LaviBio. As I stated in our previous call, Avogen is focusing on creating exit events with respect to part of our subsidiaries. Such events will generate value and cash to Avogen and its shareholders. The transaction between LaviBio and ICL is the first result of such efforts. On April 21, 2025, we announced the acquisition of most of the activity of LaviBio by ICL for an aggregate value of $15.25 million. In addition, ICL will acquire Avogen's MicroBoost AI tech engine for the agriculture field for approximately $3.5 million. As part of the transaction, ICL's safe investment in La Vie Bio is being redeemed. The acquisition is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2025, following the completion of certain customary and regulatory closing conditions. We can also envision long-term upside for Evogen from certain existing assets which remain with LaviBio and are not part of the transaction with ICL. More details on the transaction will be provided later in the presentation. Now let's move to Castera. Since the beginning of the year, Castera has delivered 250 tons of casserole seeds to its partner in Africa, already surprising the 215 tons delivered through all of 2024. In Brazil, Castera strengthens its sales teams and started the execution of a new marketing and sales strategy. I am pleased to report that Castera initiated Proof of concept trials for grain, not seed, to be sold to castor crushing factories in partnership with one collaborator in Kenya and one in Brazil. Trials are already underway in all locations and the company expected initial results in the third quarter of 2025. Moving to Ag plans. In February 2025, Actlanus announced the discovery of a new mode of action for fungicides against septoria in wheat. The company made significant headway in the discovery phase with the identification of several promising candidate compounds targeting the new mode of action. Act Planus intends to commence formal discussion with prospective licensing partners by year end. I will end this part with Biomica's highlights. The phase one clinical study of BMC-128 is progressing. New data has shown early signs of BMC-128 monotherapy effectiveness through immune activations observed within 14 days of treatment. Regarding the newly launched obesity and longevity programs, initial computational analysis indicates that microbiome-based solution can be effectively designed and developed to target those areas. Early stage discussions are currently underway to evaluate potential partnerships opportunities. It is important to highlight that additional funding is necessary to advance to phase two of the clinical study. Meanwhile, Biomica established an expense reduction plan, which will be completed by the third quarter of 2025. This reduction in expenses is already reflected in Biomica's financial results of the first quarter of 2025. I will provide more details for each subsidiary later in the presentation. I will now continue with a short overview of Evogen and its growing focus on utilizing and improving its campus AI tech engine, specifically for drug discovery based on small molecules. As you all know, our vision is to position Evogen as a pioneering company in the development of groundbreaking life science products rooted in microbes, small molecules, and genomics. To realize this vision, we have concentrated on integrating life science expertise with advanced big data and state of the art computational technologies. This approach led the development of our three proprietary AI tech engine. designed to drive the effective discovery and optimization of life science products. Our AI-driven tech engines offer a strong value proposition by efficiently identifying and optimizing the most promising candidates. We believe that this enhances the likelihood of achieving innovative products within competitive timelines and in cost-effective ways. To capture the value of the tech engines offering, we established a business strategy designed to maximize potential while minimizing risk. This through a diverse network of collaborative partnership for life science product development. We partner with experts in complementary field, forming licensing or collaborations agreement with companies that bring domain-specific knowledge. Through this strategic alliance, we aim to co-develop innovative products. The upside for Evogen stems from revenue sharing mechanisms of the end product or through equity holding in the company developing the end product. Here is a current snapshot of our business achievements to date. Avogen currently owns four subsidiary companies, each focused on a specific market segment. As I previously presented, ICL, LaviBio and Avogen signed a definitive agreement in April, under which ICL will acquire most of the activity of LaviBio. Closing is expected by the end of the second quarter of the year. In our last call, I presented this slide to clarify the guidelines directing Evogen's efforts in the near future to develop a more capital efficient model to generate greater value. This by focusing further on the use of our campus AI in the field of AI powered drug discovery and generating value in cash flow from our subsidiaries. In today's call, I would like to focus on the first items in each section highlighted in bold and elaborate on relevant achievement. Let's start with our increased focus on enhancing campus AI value proposition for the farmer market segment. In recent months, we have refined and assessed the value proposition of campus AI, highlighting its unique competitive advantage for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. We aim to tackle a key challenge in small molecule drug development, discovering and designing novel compounds that are not only highly potent, but also met multiple critical parameters. Our solution empowers drug development companies to develop breakthrough therapies while securing robust and broad intellectual property protection. At the heart of our offering is Campus AI, our proprietary computational platform built on in-house developed generative AI. Designed to explore uncharted chemical space, Campus AI produces precisely optimized molecules that meet complex product requirement with high potency. In the following three slides, I will review Campus AI offering for the pharma industry. This is a typical drug discovery and development pipeline starting with identification of a protein target, continuing with the small molecule screening and optimization phases, then validation in preclinical assays, and ending with clinical studies. Campus AI uniquely enable the discovery and design of highly potent novel compounds optimized across multiple parameters and tailored to a specific target protein, boosting the likelihood of success in preclinical and clinical studies and holding strong commercial value. In each of the screening and optimization phases, Campus AI offers unique computational capabilities developed by the Evogen team that support the researchers' efforts to discover and optimize the most promising candidates. In the next slides, I would like to present how our foundation model, which is being developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, announced in October 2024, enhanced both novelty and the ability to address multi-parameter optimization challenges. This foundation model is at the core of our campus GPT lead optimization package. Traditional generative AI models in drug discovery often struggle with small training data set, which frequently results in the generations of molecules lacking the desired properties. Evogen's proprietary campus GPT foundation model trained on extensive chemical space of 38 billion molecules in design to overcome these limitations, dramatically expanding the boundaries of molecular discovery. By exploring previously untapped chemical territories Our model enables us to generate novel, diverse, and valid molecular structures, enhance predictions of efficacy, optimize complex multi-parameter profiles with greater precision and flexibility. This unprecedented scale and depth of chemical understanding will uniquely position Avogen at the forefront of next generation AI-driven drug discovery. We expect to update on our progress in the near future. I will now move on to the second item, our efforts to create meaningful exit event for Evogen through certain subsidiaries. As mentioned earlier, in April of this year, we announced the acquisition of the majority of Levy Bio's activity and assets by ICL. This transaction is expected to generate value for Evogen in two ways, directly through the sales of MicroBoost AI for Ag, and indirectly through future dividends, as Evogen remains a major shareholders in LaviBio. In addition, more value may be generated from assets that are kept with LaviBio after the transaction, I will provide additional details in my overview of Evogen subsidiaries. We remain committed to pursuing and updating you on further milestones that unlock value or generate cash from Evogen subsidiaries. We will now continue with an overview of Evogen subsidiaries. I would like to begin with LaviBio, a global leader in developing next-generation ag biological products powered by MicroBoost AI for ag tech engines. On April 21, 2025, we announced the acquisition of most of the activity of LaviBio by ICL for an aggregate value of $15.25 million. In addition, ICL will acquire Evogen's MicroBoost AI tech engine for the agriculture field for approximately $3.5 million. As part of the transaction, ICL's safe investment in LaVieBio is being redeemed. Key assets to be transferred to ICL include LaVieBio's core team and selected Evogen's employees, the BDD technology platform, LaVieBio's microbials bank, and data assets and most of its development programs. As I noted earlier, LaviBio's existing agreements with its current partners, Corteva and Syngenta, will not be transferred to ICL and may generate future revenue for LaviBio and indirectly to Evogen. The acquisition is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2025, following the satisfactory completion of certain customary closing conditions. I would like to emphasize that this transaction followed more than two years of close collaborations between ICL and La Vie Bio for developing innovative biostimulant solutions for raw crops facing various abiotic stresses. The integration of La Vie Bio's activities into ICL aim to significantly advance the global agri-logical field and drive impactful innovation in agriculture. This transaction reflects Evogen's ongoing strategy to unlock the value of its assays for the benefit of its shareholders. Continuing with Castera, evident wholly on subsidiary, dedicated to developing an integrated solution for large scale commercial castor farming, leveraging its unique elite seed varieties. Castera's comprehensive approach is designed to address the growing global demand for stable and sustainable castor oil supply, preliminary for use in bio-based products and biofuels. The company is utilizing Evogen generator AI tech engine to drive and accelerate the development of its proprietary elite castor seed varieties. Castera began 2025 with strong momentums, achieving meaningful progress toward all of its annual targets. Today, I would like to highlight achievements related to the first three. Increase in castor seed revenue in Africa. Since the beginning of the year, Castera has delivered 250 tons of castor seeds to its partner in Africa, already suppressing the 215 tons delivered through all of 2024. We anticipate receiving additional orders for delivery later this year. In Brazil, we have strengthened our sales teams and launched the execution of a new marketing and sales strategy. Initiating of proof of concept trials for grain cultivation in Kenya and Brazil. I am pleased to report that we have initiated POC trials for grain, not seeds, to be sold to castor crushing factories in partnership with one collaborator in Kenya and one in Brazil. Trials are already underway in all locations and we expect initial results in the third quarter of 2025. With respect to development of new varieties, Castera's third target, currently significant multi-location field trials are taking place in Kenya and Brazil. I look forward to providing further updates on these initiatives and additional milestones as they progress. Next is Agplanus, a company dedicated to developing innovative and sustainable crop protection solutions powered by Evogen's campus AI tech engine. Since the start of 2025, Agplanus has focused primarily on advancing its strategic collaboration with Bayer and on progressing its Saptoria program. The collaboration with Bayer, targeting the development of broad-spectrum herbicide, is progressing according to plan and remains aligned with the agreed work plan. Meanwhile, in its Septoria program, in February 2025, Act Planus announced the discovery of new mode of action of fungicide against Septoria in wheat. Additionally, Act Planus has made significant headway in the discovery phase identifying several promising candidate compounds targeting the new mode of action. The company plans to initiate engagement with potential licensing partners by year-end. Importantly, we expect that ACT Planus activity will be funded primarily through strategic collaboration with leading Tier 1 companies. This objective is the focal point for ACT Planus management and a key area of support from Evogen. We believe that Evogen's substantial investment in its campus AI or pharma will significantly enhance and accelerate these efforts. Now, turning to Biomica. a company focused on developing microbiome-based therapeutics for human health, leveraging Avogen micro-boost AI tech engine. As discussed in previous scores, Biomica's primary focus remains on advancing its immune oncology program led by its lead candidate, BMC128. The ongoing phase one clinical study is progressing toward completion with the majority of enrolled patients demonstrating prolonged clinical benefits. Since the beginning of the year, Biomikas has shown progress toward both in its first and third annual targets. The phase one study is advancing in accordance with the clinical protocol. Importantly, new data collected this year have provided additional mechanistic insights. Clinical response outcomes are now reinforced by immune oncological analysis, which show activations of multiple immune cell types following administrations of BMC-128. These findings serve as early proof of the candidate effectiveness observed as soon as 14 days after initiating BMC-128 monotherapy. Regarding the newly launched obesity and longevity program, initial finding from computational analysis suggested that microbiome-based solution could be effectively designed to address these areas. Early stage discussion are underway to explore potential partnership. I would like to emphasize that in order to proceed to phase two, of the clinical study for BMC128, additional funding will be required. This will require substantial effort from Biomica's management with Avogen support. Additionally, Biomica established an expense reduction plan, which will be completed by the third quarter of 2025. This concludes my section of the call, and I will now hand it over to Yaron for the CFO update. Thank you.

Thank you, Ofer. As of March 31, 2025, Evergen held consolidated cash, cash equivalents, and short-term bank deposits of approximately $9.8 million, compared to approximately $15.3 million as of December 31, 2024. This cash balance does not reflect approximately $2 million due from Castera's outstanding customers, the majority of which were received in the second quarter of 2025. Excluding Navibio and Biomica, Evogen and its other subsidiaries used approximately $3 million in cash during the first quarter of 2025. Revenues for the first quarter of 2025 were approximately $2.4 million, a significant decrease from approximately $4.2 million in the same period of the previous year. This decline was primarily due to revenues recognized in 2024 from AgPlanets' licensing agreement with Bayer and Navibayo's licensing agreement with Coteva. In 2025, revenues were mainly driven by Castera's increased seed sales. Research and development expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were approximately $3.2 million, a significant decrease from approximately $4.8 million in the same period the previous year. The decrease in expenses was mainly due to lower research and development expenses in Biomica and La Vie Bio compared to the same period the previous year, as well as a closure of Canonix operation during the first half of 2024. Sales and marketing expenses decreased to approximately $645,000 in the first quarter of 2025, compared to approximately $992,000 in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily driven by a reduction in La Vie Bio's sales and marketing activities. General and administrative expenses decreased to approximately $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2025, compared to approximately $1.7 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily attributable to reduced expenses related to LaVieBio and Evogen, as well as a closure of Canonix operation during the first half of 2024. Other income of approximately $191,000 was recorded in the first quarter of 2025 as part of the accounting treatment relating to a sublease agreement. The decision to cease Canonics operations in the first half of 2024 resulted in other expenses of approximately half a million dollars, primarily due to the impairment of fixed assets recorded in the first quarter of 2024. Operating loss for the first quarter of 2025 remained stable at approximately $4.1 million, similar to the operating loss reported in the first quarter of 2024. Net financing expense income for the first quarter of 2025 was approximately $1.1 million compared to net financing income of approximately $241,000 in the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to the accounting treatment of pre-funded warrants and warrants issued in the August 2024 fundraising. These instruments were classified as liabilities on the consolidated statements of financial position, initially recorded at fair value and subsequently remeasured at each reporting period using the Black and Schultz option pricing model. As a result, in the first quarter of 2025, the company recorded net financing income of approximately $1.5 million related to the re-measurement of these pre-funded warrants and warrants. The net loss for the first quarter of 2025 was approximately $3 million compared to approximately $3.8 million in the same period last year. The $0.8 million decrease in net loss was primarily due to reduced operating expenses and increased net financing income, partially offset by decreased revenues, as noted above. Operator.