AEye, Inc.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining AI's first quarter 2023 earnings call. With me today are Matt Fish, Chief Executive Officer, and Connor Tierney, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we announced our financial results for the first quarter 2023. A copy of our press release can be found on our website at investors.ai.ai. Before we begin, I would like to remind participants that today's discussion may include forward-looking statements as defined in the securities laws and regulations of the United States with reference to future events, future operating results, or financial performance. 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, uncertainties, and changes in circumstances that are difficult or impossible to predict. 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. You can find more information about the risks, uncertainties, and other factors in our reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in our more recent periodic report. All information discussed today is as of May 11, 2023, 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 as a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of the 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. Now, let me pass the call over to Matt.

Thank you, Jen. Here with me today is Connor Tierney, who has recently assumed the role of our chief financial officer, and we're delighted to have Norbert Hammerschmidt, vice president of the components business at Continental, also speak today. I'll begin with our strategic plan and market opportunity. Norbert will discuss our Continental partnership, and Connor will review our first quarter financial results. We have a lot to cover today, so I'll jump right in. Over the last three months since joining AI, I have met with our teams and partners, and I'm even more enthusiastic about where we stand on the cusp of commercialization and our enormous market opportunity. I've also met with some of you in the investment community and appreciate the feedback you provided. We are committed to investor relations and will work hard to rebuild Wall Street support. After these initial meetings, it was clear to me that we have the best business model in the industry, a gifted team, and exceptional products featuring best in class LiDAR technology. It was also clear to me that we need to hyper focus on automotive and our path to commercialization with Continental. We believe that we have both product and business model advantages in automotive. Our technology's reliability, range, and reconfigurability delivers the dependability, performance, and adaptability that OEMs need. And our licensing model, cost structure, and continental partnership enables us to drive down our cash burn rate, deliver strong margins, ramp lighter volumes quickly, and pivot to emerging technology trends faster. We have right-sized our resources and cost structure to align with our automotive first strategy. This includes a company restructuring, which took place in April, as well as an across-the-board reduction in operating expenses. As a result of these actions, we have a plan to extend our cash runway through the end of 2024. AI's go-forward operational model is now realigned with our business model, which is based on licensing for automotive markets. This will continue to allow us to further reduce our operating expenses without hampering our ability to deliver to our customers and partners. Our automotive approach is very different from many of our competitors who now face increased operational and capital expenditures to scale in-house manufacturing. With our licensing model, we can ramp to large volume production quickly by leveraging partners such as Continental while minimizing OpEx and CapEx at AI, accelerating our path to scalability and profitability. Achieving automotive scale will open our doors to even more opportunities in other markets longer term. In the industrial space, we have narrowed our focus to select opportunities that are fit from a product and revenue generation standpoint. Our Foresight M product is market validated in the ITS sector with key automated tolling, smart intersection, and automated incident detection deployments in Virginia, Minnesota, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. We continue to receive accolades on our product's performance, most recently with a Best of ITS award for our collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Our ultra-long-range solution was shown to improve road safety even in the most challenging weather conditions. In the automotive space, validation is already in progress at Continental, who is building the HRL131 long-range LIDAR product using AI's LIDAR technology. Together in 2023, we're on track to hit key milestones by putting the product through its paces to ensure automotive grade robustness. This entails rigorous product testing with extreme temperatures, humidity, and vibration for thousands of hours. Once design validation is complete, we can scale quickly with Continental, who has a global production footprint. AI is set up for success with our deep and complementary partnership with Continental and our jointly developed HRL131 long-range LIDAR. Now, we are honored to have Norbert Hammerschmidt, Vice President, Components Business at Continental, say a few words on our partnership. Welcome, Norbert.

Thanks, Matt. I would like to start by saying that Continental is very pleased with the new management and the go-forward plan presented by AI. AI's decision to take an automotive-first strategy further strengthens our partnership and provides the focus and velocity needed to secure automotive series production awards and expand our LiDAR business case. As a 150 year old automotive tier one supplier, we at Continental deeply understand the processes, time and capital required to industrialize products for passenger and commercial vehicles. So when we choose partners like AI, we do so with our brand and reputation with OAMs in mind. We are as committed to AI today as we were three years ago when we began this journey, and even more so as we work together to accelerate through the design validation stage, which is a precursor to OEM integration and higher volume production. The Conti and the AI engineering teams are working collaboratively during this stage to perform stringent accelerated lifecycle testing on the HIL131 long-range LiDAR products in our labs. while also replicating real-world scenarios in a variety of adverse weather conditions at our closed-course tracks in Michigan and Germany. In parallel, our business teams have progressed tremendously on quoting activities with multiple large-volume LiDAR programs from both passenger and commercial vehicle OEMs, where we believe we are well positioned to win. As the global leader in ADAS products, Continental began this journey with AI with the belief that the automotive LiDAR adoption curve will mimic that of Radars, which saw exponential growth over the last 25 years. And these recent RFQs from OEMs confirm our belief. The future looks very bright for our LiDAR market and our partnership with AI. With that, back to you, Matt.