AEye, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Kirby, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to AI's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call and webcast. All participant lines have been placed in a listen-only mode, and opening remarks by AI management will be followed by a question-and-answer session. I will turn the call over to Steve Lambright, Chief Marketing Officer. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Kirby. And welcome, everyone, to AI's third quarter 2021 earnings call. With me today are Blair LaCourte, our chief executive officer, and Bob Brown, our chief financial officer. Earlier today, we announced our financial results for the third quarter 2021. A copy of the press release can be found on our website at investors.ai.ai. Before we start, I'd like to remind participants that during this call, management may make forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements regarding our future performance, growth strategy, and financial outlook. Forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions regarding our business, the industry, and other conditions. These forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risks, uncertainty, and changes in circumstances that are difficult or impossible to predict. You can find more information about these risk uncertainties and other factors in our reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the registration statement on Form S-4 that includes a definitive proxy statement that AI formerly known as CF Financial Acquisition Corp 3 filed with the SEC. Additional information will be sent forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30th, 2021. Our actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. We caution you, therefore, against placing undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements. All information discussed today will be as of November 11, 2021, and we do not intend and undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise, except as may be required by law. In addition, today's discussion will include references to certain non-GAAP financial measures, These non-GAAP measures are presented for supplemental information purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our press release, and you should refer to our reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release. So let's start by quickly revisiting the day that brought us here.

We're here today to celebrate a great milestone, a testament to the vision and dedication of our team. AI was founded eight years ago based on a very simple concept, to create a computer vision platform that could make vehicles safer, more efficient, and enable true hands-off, eyes-off, autonomous features on demand. We uniquely set out to build that platform that leverages neuroscience, biomimicry and 80 years of military LIDAR knowledge to create the first commercial adaptive LIDAR platform. Today, we are pleased to say that these systems are in evaluation and deployed globally across numerous industries. That is a grand, grand achievement and just the beginning of what we believe will be a transformative era in the way we make vehicles smarter. I would like to thank my teammates who are not able to be here today. They are the engine that propels us, provides us innovation and creativity, and we are sustained by their dedication and commitment. AI is now LIDR, and we are dedicated to bringing positive returns to our investors and positive change to the world. Hello, everyone. My name is Blair LaCourte, and I am the CEO of AI. I am joined by my colleague, Bob Brown, our CFO and treasurer. I want to thank you for joining our first earnings call as a public company. We understand that as an investor, you invest both with your time and money. We realize both are limited and appreciate you prioritizing AI. We are grateful to have completed our D-SPAC as this was an important milestone and will help us accelerate adoption of AI's high-performance adaptive LiDAR system and fulfill our mission to make vehicles safer, more efficient, and to enable the next generation of autonomous mobility. Today, and on each quarterly earnings call going forward, we intend to follow a standard framework. First, we will provide you with an overview of key themes influencing the LIDAR market. Following that, we will provide an update on the business, including product, customer, and partner highlights. And finally, Bob will outline progress on strategic milestones, financial performance, and or outlook when appropriate. In conclusion, we will turn the floor over to you for your questions. With that said, let's get started. AI's next generation system is designed to leverage AI and edge processing to move the complexity from the hardware to the software, giving industrial customers and automotive OEMs the ability to add new and compelling features. This approach also enables a unique business model, with one platform addressing all markets, accelerating hardware cost reduction, and the use of partnerships to manufacture and sell in a more flexible manner. AI also has a great track record of innovation and leadership over the last eight years. Most recently, in 2020, we released our third generation of products, the Foresight series. We launched the Foresight A for ADAS and the Foresight M for industrial applications to a very positive response. 2021 has also been an exciting year. We completed our merger with CFAC and became a public company. We hit a milestone of filing more than 100 patents supporting our unique technology. And we continue to secure customer and third-party validation of our industry-leading performance with a 1,000-meter range in weather, scanning speeds of more than 20,000 hertz, and super high resolution of 1,600 points per degree squared, four times that of any of our competition. As this is our first call, we thought it was important to take a few minutes to articulate the technology vision AI was founded on in 2013, which was to build an AI-driven sensing platform that would perform better than the human visual cortex, not to simply build a standalone passive LIDAR sensor. We used lessons from biomimicry as well as lessons from the military's use of targeting and surveillance systems over the past 30 years. We developed three key technical principles to guide our base technology architecture, partnering strategy, and commercial model. First, we needed to rethink LiDAR hardware. We understood from our experience with radar and cameras that to really drive LiDAR adoption, it needed to be an intelligent, upgradable, and ultimately have a very steep cost reduction curve. We started with a transformational patented bi-static design, which is at the core of our adaptive capabilities. This allows us to parallel process information, increasing speed and accuracy, similar to a human eye's use of the visual cortex. We also knew that the ability to scale hardware production while reducing costs would require that our components be modular and be produced through standard, high-volume processes by world-class, automotive-grade Tier 2s. Second, we understood you need to have an intelligent software at the sensor level, which is a departure from the common approach of transferring raw detects to a separate perception software engine. LiDAR needs to enable functionality that cameras and radar could not, such as tracking fast-moving environments with small objects and lateral entries. This requires intelligent software on the sensor that substantially increases situational awareness and the probability of detection while reducing false positives without impacting swap C. Third, with these new hardware and software capabilities, we had to rethink the role of perception software within the autonomous vehicle stack. We understood that sending a perception engine more data wasn't the answer. Perception systems need the right information. Traditional passive LiDAR systems always oversample and undersample with every scene, especially in high speeds or variable weather. By delivering better quality information, we enable any perception engine to be faster and more accurate, whether it's AI's perception software or an in-house or third-party system. Our conclusion was that the world is dynamic. The way your vehicle senses should be as well. So why are our customers so excited? This adaptive sensing platform enables them to use our software to optimize a sensor for any placement in a vehicle from the grill, headlight, windshield, or roof. and to optimize the scan pattern for any use case or market requirement, from super long-range requirements of trucking and rail to more general scanning requirements for construction applications to very highly specialized scanning requirements for aerospace or intelligent traffic systems. Our partnership model, combined with our embedded SDK, uniquely enables Tier 1s and systems integrators to assist end users in this process if needed. We also intend to offer customers the ability to upgrade their software for different application needs. The Intelligent Sensor software platform can be broken down into four simple levels, each designed to meet the needs of specific use cases or applications. The first level we call design. It enables users to create a single deterministic scan pattern to deliver optimal information for any specific use case to address use cases such as highway autopilot or pedestrian detection in the city. The second level, triggered, has a set of scan patterns, each one addressing a specific use case. For example, a user can create a different scan pattern for highway, urban, and suburban driving. In addition, users can create scan patterns for those same driving environments, but optimized for bad weather. The design and trigger levels are ideal for ADAS applications. There are, however, two additional levels designed for industrial and mobility applications that are intended to be unlocked on demand. The first of these is responsive. With responsive, the entire platform is situationally aware, adjusting in real time how it scans the scene. In this level, system feedback loops and other sensors such as camera and radar inform the LIDAR. The highest level is predictive. Predictive understands the motion of everything it sees, which enables the system to deliver more information with less data, focusing its energy on the most important objects in a scene while paying attention to everything else in its periphery. Now, before we talk about specific customer highlights, let's step back and take one final look at how we uniquely approach the market in comparison to our peers. The combination of our unique hardware and software creates a high-performance LiDAR system that allows us to address multiple markets with the same platform. This creates a unique advantage against competitors who are unable to reconfigure the capabilities of the product to address the specific needs of each market. Another advantage of our model is that we can approach each market with an appropriate selling model. We can sell direct as we do in several industrial markets or through a licensing model with Tier 1s in the ADAS market. This gives us the flexibility as the markets mature to drive adoption of LIDAR. Now let's highlight a few of our partners and customers. As you may be aware, Continental, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers, has selected AI's LiDAR as their high-performance ADAS sensor to be implemented into its installed base of customers. This validation by Continental is critically important because Conti has been one of the leading global suppliers of ADAS solutions over the past 25 years. After an exhaustive two-year review of LiDAR technologies, Continental selected AI as its partner. Together, we announced that Conti will be shipping a long-range LiDAR product based on AI's technology to its automotive and trucking customers with volume production starting in 2024. I would like to mention this relationship goes well beyond licensing and manufacturing. We jointly and recently exhibited with Continental at the IAA conference in Munich and traveled thousands of miles on a roadshow across six countries where we reinforced key relationships with major OEMs with current or impending RFQs. For more on our work with Continental, let's hear from Gunnar Juergens, Continental's Vice President of LiDAR. Gunnar?