Innventure, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to InVenture's third quarter 2024 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 this session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Lucas Harper, Chief Investment Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us for InVenture's third quarter 2024 earnings call, our first as a public company. My name is Lucas Harper, InVenture's Chief Investment Officer. And joining me on the call today are Bill Haskell, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dave Yablonowski, our Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results, which is available on our investor relations website along with a supplemental slide presentation. A reminder that certain statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements are made based upon management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks, including but not limited to those described in our earnings release, Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2024, and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company could differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. And now, I'd like to hand the call over to Bill.

Thanks, Lucas, and thanks to everyone listening today. I'm Bill Haskell, CEO of InVenture, and we're excited to speak to you on our first earnings call as a public company. InVenture began trading on the NASDAQ in early October after closing our business combination with LearnCW, and I'd like to thank the entire InVenture team and our partners for their tireless work over the last year to get us to this point. We are incredibly proud of what we've accomplished to date and are very excited about the future. Today, I'd like to start with an introduction to InVenture, tell you about who we are and why we built our model the way we have, and then provide an update on our family of businesses before passing it to Dave to cover our financials. So let's start with what InVenture is all about and how we plan to create value for our shareholders. Our core strategy is to enable multinational corporations, or MNCs, to commercialize their proprietary technologies for their own strategic advantage. For perspective, the top 100 global MNCs spend over $720 billion a year on R&D but only a single digit percentage of that spend results in commercial products. The reason for such a stark statistic is that most large companies are not in the business of creating new companies. Instead, they're focused on the mission of growing and supporting their core business. That is where InVenture comes in. We, as engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs, founded InVenture to help commercialize breakthrough technologies whose ultimate potential often goes unrealized. We provide value to the multinational by acquiring or licensing their technology and developing a product or solution that is designed to benefit their core business and economics. We'll speak to the specific companies we've created around these technologies in a minute, but the most important takeaway is that InVenture represents a unique way for our shareholders to indirectly invest in our operating companies and capture value as we scale them. We seek early stage economics, much like startups, but seek late stage risk. As a public company, not only do we have an enhanced ability to pursue these opportunities, but we believe our company represents a unique and liquid investment option as compared to other common stock or vehicles like venture capital or private equity. So let's discuss what we've accomplished so far. To date, we've started three companies, PureCycle in 2015, Aeroflex in 2018, and Excelsius in 2022. I'll touch on each briefly, but I'd encourage everyone to review our Analyst Day presentation from earlier this year for a deeper dive into the origin story for each. You'll also be able to hear directly from Aeroflex CEO Andy Meyer and Excelsia CEO Josh Kleiman. Let's start with PureCycle, which has commercialized a technology licensed from Procter & Gamble that converts used polypropylene into recycled resin, which is the equivalent of virgin resin used to make new plastic products. This technology provides strategic value to P&G, meeting a sustainability need, as well as providing economic value. While we took the company public in 2021 and did not have an economic interest today, it was the first proof point validating our mission to build companies that represent billion-dollar-plus enterprise value opportunities. Our second company, Aeroflex, was also founded based on a technology source from Procter & Gamble. The company was started around a novel liquid packaging solution that functions like a rigid bottle made possible with an inflatable airframe. The technology leverages the best attributes of both rigid and flexible packaging to deliver a product with significant economic and sustainability benefits. The Aeroplex pack requires up to 70% less virgin plastic than standard liquid packaging and weighs significantly less, which greatly reduces shipping costs. Lastly, it is curbside recyclable, where all plastic bottles are accepted, which satisfies sustainability requirements for a broad number of products and end markets. Our third company is Excelsius, based in Austin, Texas, which was originally founded on a thermal management technology we acquired from Nokia Bell Labs. Excelsius's technology, known as direct-to-chip two-phase liquid cooling, can essentially replace air conditioning as the primary cooling method for the newest generation of servers created to support the generative AI industry. These latest high-performance chipsets produced by NVIDIA, AMD, and others can no longer be cooled efficiently using traditional air conditioning. Excelsior's technology represents a stair-step improvement in data center cooling efficiency and can reduce average energy consumption at data centers by approximately 40%. Even prior to the generative AI boom occurring in the marketplace today, the industry has long grappled with what we call the thermal wall. which is effectively the physical limit for data center server cooling capacity imposed by these very hot processors. We see a tremendous growth opportunity for Excelsius, which went from a standing start in June of 2022 to producing commercial systems that are being delivered to the market today. We're very excited and proud of what we've done at Excelsius, which is also the first company developed under what we call the conglomerate model. That means we own a majority of it today, and we intend to own a majority for the long term. We believe that maintaining majority ownership in the companies we create in the future will maximize long-term value for our shareholders. Dave will speak to this more in his remarks, but the ultimate goal is to consolidate financials and access the underlying cash flows from our businesses to fund not only InVenture, but future NUCOs as we go forward, which we believe will compound shareholder value. Now let's discuss how our closed-loop model has helped position InVenture for success. We have purposely designed InVenture's business model to mitigate five key risk factors historically inherent in high-growth venture creation. Market, technology, adoption, funding, and operational execution. Our closed-loop model is designed to help mitigate these risk factors and act as a value creation flywheel to found and grow disruptive companies. We call this the science of company building. Our partnerships with multinational corporations are key to mitigating the first three risks, market, technology, and adoption. Let's start with market risk. MNCs, by their scale and nature, constantly listen to the needs of the market and have a wealth of data that provides visibility into end market demand that a typical startup would likely not be able to access. The MNC uses this knowledge to identify significant unmet market needs, which as a valued collaboration partner, InVenture is typically granted unique access to. The second key risk factor is technology. Unlike traditional startups that start from scratch, many of the technologies we evaluate are many years and tens of millions of dollars into development. We look to acquire technologies that have been proven to work which helps mitigate the risks attributable to commercializing disruptive technologies. Further, InVenture should not have to assume the majority of the initial financial risk related to the invention of new technologies. Third, our MNC partners often help catalyze broader adoption of the end product by becoming an early customer or assisting with offtake. They have considerable brand recognition and scale, which drives immediate consumer awareness. InVenture also benefits from their significant sales and marketing channels, which is substantial as compared to a typical startup. Next, let me address funding as a differentiation point. As I mentioned, Our plan is to fund InVenture NUCOs from inception through to commercialization off our own balance sheet, which helps us maintain majority ownership along the way. This is important to our end shareholders in two important ways. First is that InVenture can maintain operating control of our NUCOs, which is critical for early stage company success. The second is for the economic value opportunity. We seek to capture the outsized value for our shareholders that can come with founding a successful company. Lastly, there's operational execution risk mitigation. Our team is comprised of professionals with a deep pool of talent and experience in taking companies from inception to commercial scale. Rather than backing first-time entrepreneurs, we rely on our executives that have founded and successfully commercialized several companies during their careers. This level of expertise, paired with the vast marketing resources and market data of our MNC partnerships, is key to InVenture's past success positions as well for future growth. Overall, we believe this model is highly differentiated in the marketplace and one of the key tenants that we expect will deliver value for our shareholders. Now let's touch on how we've designed our model to synthesize the vast amounts of data available to us and determine which opportunities fall into our strike zone. As I noted earlier, risk mitigation is woven into our DNA. We only pursue opportunities that we believe have billion-dollar enterprise value potentials. We are looking for a compelling unmet customer need that is backed by a proven industrial technology. We believe the technology solutions we pursue have significant and quantifiable value generation opportunities and are backed by established market data from our MSC partners. The years of R&D resources and millions of dollars of capital invested into these technologies helps to significantly mitigate risk before we even begin our evaluation. Most importantly, there needs to be a clear path to material profitability. I'll say it again. We're aiming to bring billion-dollar-plus enterprise value opportunities to the market, and the opportunities we analyze must meet that criteria, in our opinion, before we deploy capital towards company formation. This steadfast discipline has been the key to our success and will remain in place moving forward. With that background on New Venture, let me now provide updates on our individual businesses for Q3, starting with Excelsius. As a reminder, Excelsius is the first in-venture company operated under the conglomerate model, where we own a majority of the business, approximately 55% as of today. This ownership stake takes into account the Series A funding that Excelsius announced yesterday. As I mentioned, we see a huge growth opportunity in the liquid cooling space, and that vision is being validated by the market. We are happy to announce that Excelsius started delivering systems to customers in Q3 of this year. I'd remind everyone that we started Excelsius in 2022. To be generating revenue in under 30 months since founding is something we are incredibly proud of, and it is a testament to InVenture's closed loop model. What's even more exciting than the rapid commercialization of the company is the pipeline of opportunities we have ahead of us. While it is still too early to get into specifics, Excelsius is in discussions with many of the top players within the data center ecosystem. The company's booth at industry events such as OCP Global Summit, Digital Infrastructure Network in London, and the upcoming data center world in Atlanta has been a popular destination, which furthers our conviction that the technology is truly disruptive and presents a compelling growth opportunity. Josh and his entire team are doing highly impressive things at Excelsius, and we look forward to updating the market on their progress in the future. Now shifting to Aeroflex. In venture owns approximately 31% of the company today, and it is carried on our balance sheet as an equity method company. While we don't plan to disclose the same level of financial details as we plan to do for the businesses we consolidate, the Aeroflux business is a story we love telling. The product is designed to meet a significant market need, and the commercialization of the technology is another great example of InVenture's closed-loop approach with MNCs. The company's manufacturing operations are fully developed, with the capacity to manufacture tens of millions of packages on an annual basis. We are proud to announce that Aeroflex is currently delivering product and building a pipeline of demand. We expect to see Aeroflex products available in the marketplace in 2025. We are proud of this milestone achievement, but I'd like to put Aeroflex's growth potential into perspective. For illustrative purposes, a single household brand from a company such as P&G might sell well over 500 million units a year globally, which is more than 10 times the volume we believe is required to make Aeroflex profitable. Needless to say, there is a vast addressable market opportunity for the company, and we are only in the very early stages of capturing that opportunity. 2024 has also been a pivotal year for Aeroflex's global growth plans. First, in February, the company announced a partnership with Dynapak Asia, and in June announced a partnership with Chemipak to deliver its liquid packaging solution to the European market. Finally, as announced yesterday, Aeroflex received the highest standard and rating under the Brand Reputation through Compliance Global Standard, or BRCGS, and is certified as AA grade. This represents the fourth consecutive year the Westchester manufacturing site has achieved the highest rating, which is an important credential MNCs look for in our packaging supplier. Great progress is being made at Aeroflex, and we expect many exciting things in the future. Congratulations to Andy Meyer and his team on the success and execution to date. Now let's shift to one of the most exciting differentiators of our business model, our robust pipeline of multinational corporation relationships and how those relationships could translate into opportunities. Today, we have two ongoing MNC partners, Procter & Gamble and Nokia. Beyond that, there are seven MNCs that have shown us at least one opportunity over the last 12 months. This network includes widely recognizable corporations across large industries, such as energy, industrials, telecom, and aerospace and defense. While expanding this network continues to be one of our top priorities, the beauty of our model is that we don't need dozens of active partners to be successful. We only need a handful of high quality, high conviction partners that believe in the InVenture model and understand the strategic value InVenture can deliver for their organizations. These MNC relationships translate into a highly active flow of technology opportunities delivered to the top of our evaluation funnel. Each opportunity then moves through our down select analysis, a rigorous discipline employed to identify what we believe are the best technologies that overlap with the largest and most achievable value opportunities. It is important to remember that we don't focus on the exact number of technologies spread across the different phases of down select at any given time, which can vary significantly from quarter to quarter. The most important factor for us is the quality of the opportunities, which has continued to increase as our MNC partnerships evolve. As we discussed in depth at our analyst day, the overwhelming majority of the opportunities that come into the funnel do not meet the stringent criteria we've established to initiate new company formation. InVenture maintains a strict discipline to abandon opportunities even at the 11th hour if they don't meet our standards, which positions us to succeed. Best of all, even opportunities that reach the final stage but ultimately fail down select do not tie up capital or drive significant expense. On the other hand, the rare gems that do meet our standards become NUCOs that we believe have proven technology and a billion-dollar-plus enterprise value potential. It's the model we've spent our careers optimizing, and we cannot be more excited as we aim to create value for new and future shareholders. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Dave Yablonowski, to review our financials. Dave?

Thanks, Bill, and good morning, everyone. My name is Dave Jablonowski. I'm InVenture's Chief Financial Officer, and today I'll be sharing with you an overview of our third quarter financials. As Bill mentioned, to date, we've started three companies, PureCycle in 2015, Aeroflex in 2018, and Ascelsius in 2022. So my focus for today's discussion will center around how we will report our financials for our operating companies and what you can expect to see from us in the future. Let's start with our reporting structure. Our first operating company, Purecycle Technologies, is no longer reported in our financial statements. While we are the general partner of a fund that is invested in Purecycle shares, InVenture itself no longer holds an economic interest in the company. InVenture took Purecycle public in 2021 and return the value created to the pure cycle shareholders. For our second operating company, Aeroflex, we use the equity method of accounting to record their financial results. As such, you will see our share of Aeroflex's net income on the equity income line of the income statement and in the investment line of the balance sheet. Any dividends received from Aeroflex in the future will appear as such on the cash flow statement. The financial results for our third operating company, Ascelsius, are fully consolidated. The non-controlled portion is recorded on the non-controlling interest line of the balance sheet and the non-controlling interest line of the income statement. As Bill mentioned, Ascelsius is currently delivering systems to the market, and we expect product sales to ramp as Josh and the team continue to execute on their go-to-market strategy. And lastly, InVenture Corporate earns a management fee from our general partner role in the Inventus ESG fund. These fees are reflected in the management fee line of the consolidated income statement. Moving to expense, the operating expense line reflects costs associated with InVenture Corporate and Ascelsius. InVenture Corporate provides many of the service and support functions for our operating companies especially when they are in the very early stages of their development. Operating and venture in this way is capital efficient and highly scalable. More importantly, this allows our operating companies to focus on what they do best, the production and sale of product with a keen focus on the customer. We expect this to be an important driver of margin expansion as we launch, commercialize, and scale new companies in the future. Hopefully this overview helps. Now let's shift our focus to our capital position. Prior to the close of the third quarter, InVenture entered into investment agreements with certain qualified investors for the issuance and sale of approximately $11 million of Series B preferred stock. Proceeds from this offering augmented the $11.3 million of trust assets that were not redeemed in connection with the previously announced business combination last October. This happened after the close of the third quarter. InVenture has also entered into a conditional $50 million secured line of credit with Western Technology Investment, WTI. We'll look to draw on this line of credit in multiple installments between now and the first half of 2025. subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions and achievement of certain commercial milestones. Finally, in connection with the business combination agreement last year, the company entered into a conditional standby equity purchase agreement with Yorkville Advisors, giving Adventure the option to issue and sell to Yorkville up to $75 million worth of the company's Class A common stock, subject to certain limitations and conditions. The WTI line of credit, private placement, along with our agreement with Yorkville, strengthens InVenture's financial position. Now moving to capital allocation, which we presented during our analyst day last April. We'd reiterate that discipline and risk mitigation is part of our DNA, and we take that approach as we look to scale our operating companies. We will aim to pace capital investments with revenue visibility and we will be highly focused on cost management to minimize early stage expense. Again, this is one of the main benefits of our closed loop model as our collaborations with our MNCs are designed to help reduce much of this operating risk. We will also focus on supporting our operating companies with the goal of funding off of our own balance sheet This aligns with the conglomerate model that Bill spoke about earlier. We believe our operating companies have tremendous growth potential, and by maintaining long-term control over them, we will have an opportunity to unlock significant shareholder value. Finally, as we continue to scale and launch new companies, we plan to consolidate their cash flows and, in the future, may look to return excess capital to our shareholders. That concludes our prepared remarks. We believe there are many exciting things on the horizon for Adventure, and we look forward to executing on our strategy and delivering for our shareholders. Now we will open up the call for Q&A.

Certainly. And our first question comes from the line of Chip Moore from Roth Capital Partners. Your question, please.

Morning. Thanks for taking the question. First, congratulations to everybody just for getting to this point. I wanted to start with Exceltius. You know, the liquid cooling market's been moving very, very fast since we heard from you at the Investor Day earlier this year. Maybe just an update there on the potential for that to ramp, right? Your first delivery this quarter, great to see. Can you talk about You know, is that more of a proof point, sort of the pilot or ability to grow with that customer? And how should we think about revenue ramp potential in the coming quarters?

Sure. Thanks, Chip. I appreciate the question. So first of all, we've just started delivering, as you mentioned, in the third quarter. Our initial orders are really for small quantities for evaluation purposes, so the various clients can test out the systems and make sure they perform against the specifications. But we've targeted partners that have significant scale, various VARs, OEMs, et cetera, that have a significant multiplication effect. So if you look at Gardner, Forrester, and other consultants in the marketplace, they projected just the liquid cooling sector to be on order 5 billion by 2027. It was 3 billion in that same time window 18 months ago. And now people are talking about perhaps as large as $7 billion. And as one of the only players in the space, we are seeing significant demand. It's going to be difficult to project the timing of the ramp, honestly. But if you look at the book of business and the demand that we have currently, we anticipate some meaningful growth going forward. I know that's not as specific as you'd perhaps like, but I think that's an accurate portrayal of where we are.

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's helpful, Bill. And I guess maybe on the, you know, sort of these initial evals, is there a sense of how long that process takes or, you know, are the customers needing to move faster in some cases? Or I guess what's the early feedback?

Yeah, it's interesting, actually. The systems that we're delivering, we're delivering as I'll call it white glove systems, where we're sending a representative of the company to actually babysit the systems. make sure they're collecting all of the requisite data, and really it only takes a few weeks to evaluate a rack of equipment and make sure it's performing according to the guidelines and the expectations. It's really the big timing risk is tied to the procurement process for these various large corporations. It's a new product in the marketplace, and they have shared with us these large bars and OAMs have shared with us their projected demand for 2025 and beyond. It's quite impressive. It really just comes down to their ability to engage and issue these larger scale purchase orders. But the timeline from delivering a, I'll call it an evaluation system, which by the way is a fully functioning commercial system, and then deploying the larger scale is quite short.

That's very helpful. Appreciate it. And in terms of Excelsior itself sort of, you know, scaling up the funding you announced yesterday, I imagine that helps, but just give us an update on where the company stands in terms of build out of resources. And then that funding, you know, is that sufficient near term or how should we think about that?

Yeah, so two pieces to that, I would say. One is the manufacturing capability to ramp, and the other is the capital required to support that. So they were oversubscribed, as we mentioned in the release that went out yesterday morning. We were targeting $20 million. We received over $24, and we could have taken in more capital had we wanted to. So ultimately, there's a lot of enthusiasm for this space, as you can appreciate, just given the trajectory of the overall marketplace. We intend to continue to support Excelsius off our own balance sheet, as Dave mentioned in his comments prior. And there also, we'll be looking to augment that with a working capital line. You can appreciate that the just inventory growth and so forth is relatively capital intensive. And so they'll be seeking a separate operating line for that kind of growth. But in terms of their normal OPEX, between what they have and what we're able to provide, you know, we should be able to provide the requisite capital they need to scale. On the manufacturing side, they're currently at a point where they can manufacture sufficient quantities of systems to get through the first half of 2025. And so we are in discussions with a number of contract manufacturers that already service this industry. and are quite familiar, in fact, to the various VARs and OEMs that we're interacting with. They can handle very significant quantities of production. We have clients that could order as many as 1,000 racks a week. That's their, I'll say, their aggregate demand. So we will be relying upon contract manufacturers to service that. But additionally, we're planning over the next 12 to 18 months to increase our manufacturing scale by roughly an order of magnitude above what it is today.

Great. That's very helpful, Bill. Maybe if I could switch to Aeroflex. I think first deliveries you just announced here at the end of October, obviously that market, I think, is a little more cautious, given the customer but I think you mentioned expectations to get some, to see product on the shelf next year. Just, you know, what's driving the confidence there? Should we expect to see some sort of an order announcement first, or how should we think about that process?

Yeah, good question, Chip. So we started delivering here in the last handful of weeks, actually, the first product into the marketplace. The big gating item for a lot of these large multinationals are these certifications that we just announced, in fact, yesterday that we received. To your point, they're a conservative lot, these large CPG companies. It's a tremendously large marketplace, as you can appreciate. It's around $400 billion a year in terms of consumer packaged goods products. So we've got a massive total addressable market. There have been two, I would say, things that have impacted the path to commercialization for Aeroflex. One is a new requirement that came upon us a couple of years ago to make the package itself recyclable. The initial view was that just the source reduction, about 70% less plastic going into the manufacturing of the bottles or packages themselves would have been sufficient to support various sustainability goals But we found later and the market determined later that it also needed to be recyclable. So we had to completely redesign the package to make the package itself recyclable and to make it so that we could make it out of recycled content. And that was about a two-year process to completely redesign the product and go through the various certifications, make sure that it was curbside recyclable, and we had to go through a quite a rigorous testing protocol to support that. And then finally to get these certifications that we literally just achieved in the last couple of days. So those are kind of the gating items. Now that all of that is behind us, we would anticipate, we start seeing some meaningful commercial orders going forward. And so yes, over the next quarter or two, I would expect us to see some meaningful orders and some announcements around those. The customers are a little bit, careful about giving us permission to tell who they are. If they do, we'd be happy to announce who they are. But up to now, we haven't been given the latitude to discuss the various specific customers. But you can appreciate the nature of who they are based on the large players in the marketplace.

Understood, understood. Yeah, that makes sense. And should we think about first orders being more, you know, U.S. based given the the facility there in Ohio, and then in terms of the international partnerships that are ongoing, are those sort of in parallel or any update on that side?

Yeah, good question. They really are in parallel. We have an initiative in Europe, Chemipac in Asia with Dynapac, Southeast Asia, and of course, our own sales and marketing force here in the U.S. So we do expect all of these things to occur in parallel. The pipeline, if you kind of dissect it, really is global. We don't have any particular geography that's currently outshining another. These are, of course, by nature, multinational corporations, so they have operations all over the planet.

Perfect. And if I could ask one last one, just on the pipeline, I guess the seven multinationals sharing with you, in addition to the two you have, just any sense of how many opportunities are being explored right now and any rough sense of where those sit in the down select process?

Yeah, good question. So I think historically we've evaluated something like 160 opportunities. And an opportunity is a combination of a known unmet need in our marketplace along with a technology that addresses that need. And we've picked three things out of 160 today. So we're pretty fussy about what we pick. What we're realizing, and we've had a lot of demand from a lot of multinationals to engage with us, and that's increasing. And the quality of these MNCs is increasing as well. And by quality, I don't mean the quality of the company itself, but just I'll say the match between what their expectations are and what we're looking for. And so it's really less about the number of multinationals really only a handful would allow us to kind of hit the cadence that we anticipate achieving going forward in terms of new co-creation. But what we're finding is that the longer we engage with certain multinationals, the better quality of opportunities we see. Again, most things we reject, but for the partners that have engaged fully with us, now then the opportunities they provide to us are getting closer and closer to kind of the things that we're looking for. So it's less about a numbers game. It's really more about finding the right quality of partners. And even over the last, I want to say three to six months, we've seen a big uptick in really highly engaged, high quality household name partners that are really enthused about our model based upon seeing what we've done to date with the companies that we've produced so far.

Excellent. Appreciate the caller. I'll take the rest of mine offline. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Thank you. And as a reminder, if you have a question, please press star 11 on your telephone. Our next question comes from the line of Nihil Chakshi from Northland Capital Markets. Your question, please.

Thank you. Congrats on becoming a public company. Some questions here on Excelsior. Not too many, but a few. The evaluation customers that have taken in a delivery, I guess there's one so far, what are the actual key specifications that they are actually looking at?

Yeah, so there's a kind of a thermal barrier, I'll call it, in terms of how much heat can you dissipate across the rack of equipment. What we're finding in generative AI is that proximity of these chipsets to one another is very critical because of latency. So we're finding much, much more compact and dense chipsets than we had envisioned even a couple of years ago. And so what they want to see is that we can have fully populated racks. And just to give you some relative view of that, know a typical rack up until you know this last year or so was sort of a seven or eight kilowatt rack now we have demands for 40 50 70 even 100 kilowatt racks and projected going forward up to maybe 250 kilowatts so we're seeing orders of magnitude increase in in sort of the heat flux or capacity that we have to be able to accommodate so we have in addition to the latest chipsets that we've put into racks with our cooling solution incorporated into them. We also have heat simulators that can generate heat well above and beyond the chipsets that are available today. So we can look at two or three generations out. And so we've got an ability to demonstrate not only that we can cool these 500 or 600-watt chips, but maybe even 2,000-watt chips that we anticipate coming out over the next couple of years. So it's really just about the ability to dissipate the amount of heat that they're anticipating seeing over the next couple of generations of chipsets.

Okay. Are they looking to characterize reliability by any chance as well?

They are. As you can appreciate in data centers, you know, they have about, you know, five nines of reliability concerns. And one of the things that I'm very appreciative of that Josh and his team have done is make these racks of equipment very operationally robust. And there's a lot of redundancy built in, and every component of our cooling solution is hot swappable. So ultimately, if there's failure, you can actually swap out a component. For instance, some of these racks will have three pumps. You can operate on two, but we have three. And if one of the pumps fails, the rack will continue to cool and continue to operate, and you literally can pull a pump out while the system is operating. The load will then fall over to the other two and continue to operate normally without any degradation. Same thing is true even for the controller boards, where we can map the information from one controller board over to another. You can pull out a controller board, and again, how swappable. So virtually every component allows for that. That is something that even low level technicians can be able to service. So those things are quite, I would say our customers are quite impressed with that. And we got a lot of guidance from our customers along the way helping us design systems that have that reliability component.

That's great, that's smart. Now, these evaluation customers, are they comparing the Excelsior solution to the whole gamut of potential cooling solutions of air-cooled, one-phase DLC, as well as other two-phase DLC?

Yeah, so we're seeing an evolution. As you can appreciate, almost all data centers today are air-cooled. I would say that virtually all of the lead players now have realized that the only path forward is liquid cooling. air conditioning at its physical limit to be able to cool these hot processors, just impractical to provide enough cold air flow to cool these latest and greatest hot chip sets. So about 18 months ago, I'd say immersion cooling was a favorite child. I think while there are still some perhaps unique applications for immersion, I think that's likely to go by the wayside and will be replaced by other liquid cooling solutions. So the predominant competitor really is, I'll call it, a generation behind what we have, which is single-phase water, where ultimately, rather than using a dielectric fluid like we use, they use water to flow over the chips to cool. The challenge there is that it requires sort of linear flow of water increase as the chips get hotter and hotter. So if you look at the surface area of a chip and how much heat is being dissipated, if you need twice as much heat removal, you have to pump twice as much water. Think about it as pumping water faster and at higher pressure over these chipsets. The failure rate for water is high. Virtually all of these data centers that are using single-phase water are experiencing leaks from time to time, and it's, of course, ruined servers when you get water in contact with electronics. Whereas a dielectric fluid like we use is actually vapor at room temperature, and so it doesn't damage the chips, and it also doesn't damage humans. And the particular fluid that we're using predominantly has a global warming potential of one, so it's a very eco-friendly liquid, and we can operate it at very low pressure and actually quite high temperature removal using this dielectric. Back to competition, there really are only a couple of players that offer two-phase solutions in the marketplace, two-phase direct-to-chip solutions. And it's us and really just one other player in the marketplace. The demand forex outstrips the available supply. I'll just say that much in terms of the ability to service the market or the projected market going forward.

Okay, great. Is the evaluation that was shipped during 3Q on Blackwell samples, or is it on Hopper?

Say that again?

The evaluation delivery that was made in 3Q24, was that on Blackwell samples or Hopper chipsets?

I'm not 100% certain, to be honest, but I will tell you that we have characterized most of the chipsets out there from the various chip manufacturers. So we have characterized, I think, virtually all of the leading chipsets that are in the marketplace today. Again, I'm not certain about which particular chipset the system is in Q3 serviced, but we've delivered additional systems, of course, since then.

Okay. Additional systems to the same evaluation customer or to different evaluation customers?

Different customers. A range of different types.

Okay. So in the 45 days since 3Q24 ended, how many additional evaluation customers has Excelsior gained, has actually made deliveries to, rather?

Yeah, we're not given any kind of forward-looking information with respect to either revenue or number of systems. Part of that's just competitive protection, I'll call it. But again, we're not really offering any kind of forward-looking things. But I will say that we are dealing with virtually all of the key players in the ecosystem as it pertains to direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

Understood. Okay. And then it looks like Inventor's ownership of Excelsior went from 66% at the time of the investor day to 55% after the Series A investment. Is that correct?

Yeah, I think it went from... I think it might have been up to 58 or something back in that day. I don't remember exactly the numbers off the top of my head. But yeah, we've taken just a modest amount of dilution to fill out our Series A. And again, it was a bit oversubscribed. I can't remember back to analyst day whether, because a lot of the money had been, I think, collected up to that point. So I don't know what the differential is between then and now. But yeah, it's only a few percent at most.

Okay. Essentially, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to back out what the Series A funding values Excelsior is at. Are you willing to just disclose what the other investors did actually value it at?

We're not, and there are a bunch of reasons for it, which I can't get into on the call, but we're not planning to disclose the valuation for the Series A round.

Okay. All right. All right, that's it for me right now. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Bill Haskell, Chief Executive Officer, for any further remarks.

Thank you. I just want to thank everyone for listening in. I know this is our first go-round for the quarterly earnings call. As quarters unfold, you'll be getting, I think, more and more granularity in terms of how our current system, our current operating companies are performing. But we wanted to kind of give you an idea of the kind of direction we're taking and what kinds of things that we're planning to announce in the market. We're a bit non-traditional against a classic company, but we do plan to report on those companies that we consolidate in terms of kind of economic metrics But for the companies that we don't, like Aeroflex, then again, it's an equity method accounting, so we'll be reporting less granular information on that. But we will give operational highlights and kind of show you the trajectories of those companies. But we're quite enthused with not only the companies that we have, but in our pipeline of prospective new companies going forward. And we're happy to have come through this process relatively unscathed. It was a lot of work to get to this point. So thank you again for listening and for all the Q&A.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.