MDB Capital Holdings, LLC

Welcome everyone to the MDB Capital Holdings fourth quarter and full year 2025 update conference call. Thanks very much for joining us today. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. Today's conference call is being recorded. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation, so if you have any questions during the presentation, you can type them into the Q&A chat to be answered during the Q&A session. Remember, questions can only be seen by the moderator. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Your caution not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise, or publicly release results or any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most current Form 10-K for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading of risk factors. A press release detailing these results, which quashed the wire this afternoon, is available in the investor relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be provided later on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, chief executive officer and co-founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He'll be joined later by George Brandon, MDB Capital president and head of community development. Chris will lead an update on the fourth quarter ending December 31, 2025. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Chris Marlett.

Chris? Thanks, Tony. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining today. I'm excited to be here and talk to you about what's been happening. It's been a while since our last call, and the year's gotten off to a really interesting start, and so... I thought I'd first kind of just talk about our agenda, which I know most of you are very, very interested in where our assets are, what we think about our current investments, and what we see for the future. But I wanted to take some time to give you sort of a view from the way we're looking at building this business and why we're so optimistic for the future of MDB. We just published, which you should all have as shareholders, a year-end shareholder letter, which will talk to a lot of what we're going to talk to today, but in a bit more detail. If you can get through it, it's about nine or ten pages. But I think it does a pretty good job of giving you a real good view of where we see the business, where we're headed, and why we're excited about the future. So with that, I'll start off with just reminding everybody our story. Really, we've taken this proven model of launching companies about one every 18 months where we helped to conceive of a big idea, bring it and position it for being public and having value in the public markets, and then taking them public. And we did that before we were public, and, you know, it was a very nice business. And, of course, the reason we decided to go public was is that we believed we could scale that to three to five launches a year. Maybe not overnight, but we really believed that we could do that, have a lot more impact, and build a real organization that to build public venture really kind of into an asset class where we could actually build portfolios for our investors as opposed to just, you know, most of our investors historically had one or two of our companies in their portfolio. So we did that for 29 years. We just did our 18th IPO. Never a failure means we never, you know, failed to get an IPO done. And every one of them, you know, except for the last one, which is, you know, very new, it's only a couple months old, have traded a very significant premium to the IPO price. And that really, I think, speaks to what we've done from an asymmetric value positioning perspective. Bring companies public at a reasonable valuation and the promise of them caused them to trade it at values much higher than what we took the public at. All those companies had the opportunity to raise additional follow-on capital, and we create a lot of equity value, not just fees. And so the scaling is really what we're talking about. So talking about where we came from, and I've been in the business now for 40 years, and my mission has always been, before we even started MDB, was how do we get to the truth quickly? How do we understand truth? the companies that were getting behind or the opportunities were getting behind and creating or many times creating these companies in conjunction with inventors or universities or entrepreneurs. And so in the old days, we would, you know, look at 10Ks and 10Qs. We'd literally have to call Washington and get – these filings. It was a very haphazard approach to trying to learn about companies. These were all public companies. If we had a private company we were going to take public, the information challenge was really crazy. As a result of the internet, we launched Patentvest in 2003, which enabled us to really understand deep tech. very much in a clear way because we could get our minds around what somebody owned and how it was differentiated from somebody else out there in the technology landscape. And that gave us, in our mind, a real ability to really understand the critical elements to building leadership. And this leadership we saw was the critical element for these companies being able to trade at billion-dollar valuations or have the potential to trade at billion-dollar valuations. And as we refined it, we, in our screening criteria and our processes and trained our analysts, we could start to filter companies where instead of going from a handful in the old days or maybe 100 a year after Pat Invest, we got into the point where we could review thousands per year really because we could get through an idea in an hour or two by understanding did they have the ability to be a leader in a technology vertical pretty quickly with the development of Pat Invest. But we still had really a bottleneck, and we've really experienced that bottleneck over the last couple of years since going public at MDB, which is we can find a big idea, we can pull it together, but really that process of getting a position to create real value in the public marketplace is a very, very labor and time-intensive process. So the deep diligence and all the market insertion risks and competitive mapping and the business IP strategy and then really getting the company positioned to be able to communicate its value add is very tough. It's still tough. It's always tough with a big idea. And that would consume hundreds, if not thousands of hours. And it would take many months to get these companies ready to go public. And so this has really been our reality and, quite frankly, our biggest challenge in scaling that we've had. But I have to say, and I referenced in my letter, that AI really is a game changer for us. And we're committed as an organization to using it at every level. I would tell you that Even the last 90 days has just been kind of earth-shattering for us in the ability for us and our teams to really solve that information challenge that almost every company faces, and we certainly face in getting these companies ready for being public. And so when you think about the internet, it really did a great job of catalyzing and organizing that information, but it really created, you know, sort of overload and inertia. You had almost too much information. Even when we were looking at patent data, when we first started, you would look at, you know, you would do a screen and you would look at thousands of patents. Well, getting through those thousands of patents was virtually impossible. It would take you know, really unbelievable amount of man hours to make that happen and really understand how a company could differentiate itself from the other companies in that field. And so what AI has really done and really done in a very, very tangible way, you know, literally in the last 90 to 120 days, is it eliminates that inertia. It really connects the dots at an unprecedented speed. And when you couple that with our expert analysts that have created the SOPs, if you will, to actually screen through these companies like we did very manually before, those SOPs apply through agentic models in AI technology. is really become almost unbelievable. And what we're seeing, whether it's with patents or whether it's with new business opportunities, we're able to get to the truth super fast. We're able to connect dots we could never connect before. And this is going to have a unbelievably profound impact on our business. And I know AI is sort of the The catch word of today and, you know, every AI company that comes in to look for funding, I'm always very skeptical of. But I can tell you that as far as using really off-the-shelf AI, things like Claude, you know, day to day within our operation and now building SOPs and agents to effectively execute what we can do doesn't mean we're going to actually lay off anyone or fire anybody like has been put in the press. What it enables us to do now is really scale in an unbelievable way. So the transformative impact in a real tangible setting is becoming real and And we really believe that our ability to effectively boil the ocean of opportunities is achievable. And we're in the process of continuing to develop these agents where we can literally look not only for new companies through our patent data, but from grant databases, from, you know, conferences, anywhere we go where we see opportunities where we can feed it in with our with our specific criteria, these agents can now do the work of hundreds of analysts and then start to boil the ocean and get these things narrowed down to where now our analyst team, who are experts in understanding whether or not these are real, genuine opportunities, can be boiled down very, very fast to a very small stack of companies. But even if, let's say, 5% of the opportunities made it through our screen, whether it was companies that were brought to us by friends or colleagues, the real hard work was the deep due diligence. And that deep due diligence was very – that's what took the hundreds if not thousands of hours to do. And in fact, you know, every one of these companies were facing the same thing. They're trying to get to the answers quickly. The boards are trying to figure out what strategy to employ. And the information divide is just really, really difficult, especially when you're talking about deep tech or disruptive technology. And so we really estimate that we can compress that time by two-thirds. It's really astounding. And, you know, you're going to see it, obviously, you know, as investors, right? So you can put in every one of our deals. You can put the prospectus in. You can query it. And you guys are getting the questions quicker. And we're seeing it already in the last 90 days. The questions we're getting from investors and the insights we're getting from investors are is really astonishing. I mean, it's really, it's fun for us because, you know, our mission is to get to the truth as fast as possible. And so, you know, we're experiencing this real time. It's like something I've never seen before. But then when you actually want to prepare that company and take it public, It would take from six to 18 months. And I think we're going to be able to get this done in weeks. Like we, to give you an example, we just started on the S1 for Pollux to take it public. You know, our team could actually put together a pretty good draft for the S1 pretty darn quickly. And I think, and again, we're still in the early stages of really implementing all these processes within our organization. But whether it's the financial models, the business strategy, the IP positioning, we see this being done in weeks, not months, which has, you know, when you talk about the scale issue that we're – that, you know, that we faced, you know, we're seeing this as a total game changer for our ability to scale. And – And so, but throughout our business, whether it's through Pat Invest, through, you know, all of our investor diligence, I mean, this whole thing is going to change. It's going to change how our community reacts to deals. It's going to change how deals get distributed. It's going to change it at every level, and we're seeing it real time right now. So, you know, over the, since we've gone public, one of the things that I don't think has been very apparent is to everybody that is, you know, really just been focused on figuring out, you know, what one of our deals is worth or whether they should buy it or what exozymes might be, you know, worth, is that we've been investing in MDB Direct and our clearing operations and Pat Invest to really build those as separate discrete assets. Yes, they're very obviously critical and important in our daily operating business, but they really are distinct assets in their own right. And we've been investing about $4 million annually since the IPO in these assets. And That is super apparent because we've been able to take and, you know, stand up these two enterprises to where they now, in our mind, have significant independent value and affect big ideas that are going to be launched off into their own entities very soon. So in MDB Direct, what we did was super unique. And We knew that scaling IPOs, especially public venture IPOs, was not a thing that is done with traditional institutional investors. Traditional institutional investors are looking for ideas that are much more highly developed. And so a lot of these companies that are, you know, sort of in the development phase or going public, a lot of them were starting to get funded by crowdfunding and other platforms like this, reggae pluses, things like that. And now we're seeing, you know, companies like Robinhood now being key distributors for these kind of offerings for big companies like, you know, the big major underwriters. And distribution is changing in a very, very dynamic way. But the key differentiator is clearing. So folks like Robinhood had to go self-clearing. They used to clear it through other people. Most of the broker-dealers that operate in the micro-cap marketplace, virtually none of them are self-clearing. But they're recognizing to be able to operate and access these investors, clearing could be a clear differentiator. And clearing is also the ability to be profitable. In many cases, stock loan, margin lending, et cetera, these things are key cash generators for any company in our space that has any kind of assets that are built on their platform. And so we know that what we've built here is a very, very valuable asset. And so it took five years of work with our vendors and our software developers and what have you to get this up and running. And it's a super valuable asset, and I think that we're looking forward to being able to scale that asset and at the same time create value and monetize the asset. So really, the big opportunity for MDB Direct is a strategic partnership to monetize the asset and also help solve our distribution challenges at scale. I talk about it in the letter a bit, But when you go from one company every 18 months with a very small community and effectively a few relationship managers that work within our organization, to go to three to five companies a year and really start to scale this, we have to basically solve the distribution challenge. And so, again, I spoke about public venture as sort of being a very much of an individual investor-oriented asset class, where you can look back to the IPOs of even companies like Amazon and Tesla that went public through larger underwriters, but the institutional investors were not major players that drove valuation in those companies. And even today, you know, SpaceX is talking about going public and raising a lot of money, Elon Musk is smart enough to know that he needs to have retail distribution. He's figuring out ways to do that in the offering because he knows they're going to end up being the people that really want to own the stock. And the institutional investors many times came a lot later. And so we see an opportunity with these firms that don't have self-clearing, that are recognizing that distribution is going to change. that this is a real opportunity to partner with either other firms to spin this off as its own entity, to sell it outright, and then clear it through whoever we sell it to. But we see this as a very valuable asset. To our knowledge, there's no other clearing firms for sale or partnering capability right now. When we were looking to do this, we were looking at – there was only one clearing firm that was set up for sale or for partnership. And that firm, even with a lot of challenges and really not a huge platform, sold for tens of millions of dollars. And so we see this as really exciting. It's now operational. It's working. And we're now just starting active discussions with various folks, and we're seeing this as really a force multiplier, not only generate some value for the shareholders, but also partner on distribution, which I think could be a really great, you know, thing for what we're doing as we have the ability to curate more big ideas. And PadVest. Just, you know, the other big idea, just as big as clearing was, was to become a law firm. So we had built a patent research company before and sold it before we had gone public. And that company was very limited by the fact that we weren't a law firm because we could do research, but we couldn't really render opinions. We had to be careful with attorney-client privilege. A lot of our analysts were in Latin America, which made a lot of people nervous. But with that, we were able to sell to a U.K.-based law firm because in the U.K. they were able to go public. And then as we went forward and the ABS program became a possibility, we became one of the first ABS IP law firms, and it's been really phenomenal. And Javier Chamorro, who runs the operation, has done a great job of getting this up and going to where we have all the core operations of a law firm today. from patent prosecution to foreign prosecution management to docketing to maintenance fees, all the various things you need to do to do that, in addition to all the front-end research that enables us to start to provide a lot more value and create higher-quality patents and a better experience for small companies and large companies that are looking to be more efficient and create higher quality. So what we see is by being the first potential ABS law firm to go public, which makes a lot of sense, and take this from being a real legal process to a business process, we can now partner with these big law firms like we used to before we sold the patent research business. And we think that big law is facing an existential crisis with regard to what's happening in patent prosecution. A lot of big law firms. see that prosecution is a process business and that their high-level legal talent really can be best focused on strategy and litigation. And we're having some great discussions with these law firms, and we're looking forward to seeing this develop. It turns out it's a huge business. So if you look at patent prosecution in the U.S., I think $10 billion to $15 billion is a conservative figure for how big that business is in the U.S. And we really think that we can garner a really meaningful share of that business by partnering with big law firms. And we're really excited about this. And I think that the AI legal tech market is boomed. Obviously, there's been tons of money going into that market. We don't want to call ourselves an AI legal tech company because really what we are is a law firm that is going to embrace AI. And I think that a lot of these platforms have been funded. I wouldn't be surprised if there's 100 AI legal tech law firms out there currently. And I think we're in this really great position to be able to participate in this area, create a lot of value, and we're looking to spin this out as an independent entity and finance it before year end, as we touched on last year. And so our portfolio assets, we have two portfolio assets outside of MDB Direct and Pat Invest that I think can create a lot of value. And obviously Exozymes, which is public, and Pollux, which we recently funded and are planning to take public later this year, are, again, a billion-dollar market cap potential, just like everything else we've done historically. And so talking about exozymes, exozymes is at a really critical point in its development. And I think that what had happened with exozymes is that initially the strategy was let's go out and partner with, you know, pharmaceutical companies to go help them make stuff they can't make. We recognized at exozymes, as I'm on the board there, that exozymes, that, in fact, we could make things that nobody else could make. And if we could do that, why wouldn't we just make them and sell those products? And so that's where it's going. And I think that the promise of SynBio is about ready is upon us, because companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, everybody thought that they had cracked the code for being able to scale manufacturing in SynBio, when, in fact, they hadn't. And they created a lot of partnerships, and they had a lot of sort of irons in the fire. What we realized is focusing in on a couple really big ones was really super critical, and making sure that we could scale manufacturing. And so as you've seen, hopefully you've seen is that some of the press releases is that That technology is now being turned over to contract manufacturers and being demonstrated at scales, which is something that's never really been done in our experience in Symbio. So it's, again, this is a company that, you know, I don't know that anyone's going to want to, you know, value Symbio at $20 billion again, but I think that the headroom on this, when you look at the current market value of the company, again, is pretty immense, and we're pretty excited that we're at this critical point now. And Pollux, I won't spend a lot of time on. We're going to have an update for those of you that participated in Pollux, but quite frankly, we're hoping to initiate the clinical trial in September at the same time the IPO goes. Again, another game-changing potential drug. that would touch both type 1 and type 2 diabetes by producing insulin, by helping the body to produce insulin again or produce more of it. So we started the company with some of the same folks that we started prevention with, no diabetes, and that we've had a lot of success with. So we're very excited, and I think that look forward to this IPO later this year. And we're super excited that the clinical trial results can start to emerge at the end of this year or early next year that could be really groundbreaking. So when you look at our four principal assets as it stands right now, Exozymes, you know, has as a current sort of market valuation. At year end, it was about $45 million. The stock's come down a little bit. It's about $30 million in market value currently of what we own. Pollux, we own 7.1 million shares of that. And It's yet to be seen what will price the IPO at, but it could be a very substantial asset. And MDB Direct, again, not making promises on the value, but clinic firms of this type have sold for tens of millions of dollars, and I think we're in an environment where the value of this could be much greater with where the world is going from a distribution perspective of new offerings. And, of course, PatentVest we've been investing in for a long time has, in our mind, a lot of value. We've invested, you know, many millions of dollars in the development of PatentVest since 2003 and even more so since we've been public to get it ready as a law firm and ready for launch. And then a combination of our cash, current assets through marketable securities, less all the current liabilities at year end was about $22.3 million. And one of the, you know, one of the sort of footnotes was we thought we were going to get Buddha Juice done before year end, but it ended up, you know, trickling into January. So it'll give us some benefit in the first quarter. So when you look at the financial overview, trying to simplify it as much as possible, obviously you can read the 10K for yourself. But we have about $10 million in fixed operating expenses, and we burned about $5.7 million, if you look at the cash flow statement, for the year. But if you look at the investment we've made in the clearing ops and patent vests, it was about $4 million, which was $4 million as part of the $10 million. So if you effectively took the $4 million off of the $5.7 million, we would have, in effect, burned $1.7 million. So I think that a lot of people, when they're looking at our operating statements, I don't know that that's super clear to everybody. So if, you know, post the spin out of our clearing platform and patent vest, you know, our OpEx will go down to about $6 million a year, which when you now look at the number of companies we can launch and how much equity we earn in those companies, we have huge financial leverage. Even if you look at You know, the equity position that we earned from, you know, co-founding Pollux this year, that equity is certainly worth, in our minds, worth a lot more than what we burned from a cash perspective this year. And so we think we generate a significant equity value that's really not apparent in fiscal year 2025. But going forward, we've seen this leverage as being really, you know, unbelievable. And so I think that, you know, all of our things have, you know, billion-dollar capabilities. And if we can launch three or five a year, you know, on a $6 million in office space, I think we're going to have – really, really, you know, we could drive a lot of really important shareholder value. So what could go wrong? Well, you know, we are – this is not a public sure thing. It's a public venture, right? And so what I would say is that, you know, there's a lot of interesting things going on, you know, that we've faced since we've started. There's obviously a lot of macro and global risk. I have no idea how it's going to turn out, nor do I want to venture a guess. You know, the microcap market conditions have been very difficult. A lot of these companies, because of the venture markets and small public markets, were having such a difficult time. Some of these companies faced such horrible dilution. There were lots of institutional investors investing in the space, but the dilution of these small companies was just horrific. And so, you know, we're hoping to see that change, you know, hopefully soon. Obviously, execution risk, not only our execution risk, but obviously our portfolio companies have to execute. And this distribution gap that we're looking to solve is probably the biggest worry I have. And I'm not too worried about AI execution risk. We're already seeing those tools work for us. And with regard to clinical and regulatory risk, those are always something to be faced with all the life science companies we're involved with. So the path forward is pretty straightforward. We're now positioned to launch three to five high-quality companies a year, you know, again, and that's going to depend a lot on our distribution and how we, you know, how we can build that. We've got a lot of, you know, we've talked about in the past we're doing a lot of things and partnering with other distribution partners, and so we're hoping to make that happen, you know, in addition to what we're doing with spinning out the clearing platform. And we're obviously going to, you know, spin out patent bets as well and monetize that. And this, you know, cost scale efficiency improvement, I think, is only getting better as we get better at what we're doing. And as always, you know, shareholders retain preferred access to MDV deals. And so... I want to thank you all for having faith in what we're doing here at MDB. And, you know, it's been a really tough couple years for us watching our stock go down for the last couple years since we took this company public. And so I'm going to use that for a second here to editorialize for one second. I know I've rambled a bit over, you know, on this presentation. We're up to 37 minutes. But I'm going to try and make this as quick as possible. You know, we've had a lot of people that have stuck in there, but a lot of people have sold our stock or the stock wouldn't have gone down. And I think a lot of people have been disheartened. And I think part of, you know, what I will take credit for is this was a lot harder than we originally thought to get up and going. You know, I could use the market backdrop as an excuse, but the reality was is that we thought we had it in the bag. And You know, when you looked at the three, let's call it the batch of companies we did right before we, let's call it the grouping of companies we launched right before we went public, all of them went to billion dollar valuations. And, you know, if that had happened after we were public with our current batch, you know, we would not be having this conversation right now. And I think that, you know, a lot of our investors were like, well, you know, yeah, you got lucky with prevention. One of the drugs worked and it sold. Or, you know, how much were you really involved? Well, the reality was we started that company. Those assets wouldn't have been licensed. There wouldn't have been, in my mind, that opportunity, and certainly not in a public realm, hadn't we been able to, you know, to make that happen. You know, if you look at post-biosciences, you know, investors have had, you know, it still trades, I think, for a billion and a half dollar valuation or so, maybe close to two. I don't know where it's at right now. But investors have had multiple opportunities to make many multiples of their, you know, of their investment for where we took that public. And even when you look at the most challenging one, which was QBioPharma, this company, you know, achieved a billion dollar valuation on the promise. The technology worked, but it also highlights the difficult parts of what we do, which is, you know, the company's got to execute. And in that technology, we haven't given up on it. We still think the technology is brilliant and it should be. you know, broadly available to patients, but it's, it's, it's, you know, it's had some challenges. But when I look at the current batch of companies that we have here today, when you look at all four of the principal assets we have, I really believe all those have billion dollar capability. And, you know, obviously if all of them hit billion dollars, we, you know, it would be, you know, crazy return to shareholders. I'm not saying that's going to happen and I don't expect it to happen, but I, It would not surprise me if any one of them hit a billion-dollar valuation. And I think that when you couple that with the pipeline of things that we see that we have coming, it seems inconceivable to me that we're not going to find one of these companies to hit a billion-dollar valuation again and reward shareholders. So, again, it's not a promise. It's with all the caveats. But that's the way we're seeing things and why we're excited. So with that, I'm going to open it up to questions. I think, George, why don't you come back?

Let's just jump into it. If you have a question, you can get into the Q&A down at the bottom. Just scroll over the mouse, and you can type a question in there. I'm going to start right off. Chris, I know you hit the positions we have the biggest stake in, but I just got a question on, you know, can you talk a little bit about Q, clear sign, And B, and then also a question on Buddha, you know, that was unusual for us to do Buddha. So can you just, you know, give a little bit of view on those positions that many of our shareholders still hold?

Yeah, yeah. So ClearSign is, you know, certainly been on that long commercialization journey. and that's a company that Anthony knows much better than me, and it's a very small position within our firm. But they have done this commercialization journey, and their unique burner technology is more relevant than ever. We're going to be burning a lot more natural gas, and so I think that that company is scaling, and I still think the prospects for that company are quite good. With regard to HeartBeam, HeartBeam did something that most people thought was impossible. To get FDA approval for a 12, you know, pocket 12 lead ECG, you know, what's not told in that story is that that ECG is even better than a 12 lead in many ways. And, you know, as they've signaled, could be the first device to be able to detect a heart attack, which is a game changer, would save millions of lives. The commercialization journey is not easy for any of these small, you know, companies. And so, but HeartBeam, we're still super, you know, we think everybody in the ECG space or health monitoring space, AI space, should want to partner with HeartBeam because they have the most sensitive ambulatory ECG in the planet. Period. End of story. So... You know, we're very hopeful that the team is going to execute on making sure one of those partnerships happen, which will bring scale to a really, you know, unbelievable technology that could save millions of lives. Buddha, you know, I address it in the shoulder letter. You can look at it, but Buddha, everyone said, well, geez, why are you going away from deep tech or what have you? Well, it was a bit serendipitous because a friend of mine really was the CEO of the company, and he was visiting me in Nicaragua. We were sitting around, and he said, well, here's what I'm doing. And I said, my God, you're building a whole new category in a category that's going to be everything. So when you look at Buddha – they have the opportunity to be not only the fresh juice leader, which is not, you know, widely known as, you know, you can't really buy fresh juice, you know, at scale in most markets like Walmart and Kroger across the country. And – but this fresh movement is going big. And now ever since, you know, we started to think, man, every one of these markets – need a fresh element because all the shelf-stable processed foods are all going to get shipped by Amazon. And quite frankly, everything's going against processed foods. So it was the opportunity to basically participate in what could be one of the biggest global shifts we've seen. Anybody that's shopped at markets in Europe knows that, you know, people go shopping, you know, a couple times a week because they want fresh. They don't want They're not eating preservative foods, you know, for the most part in Europe. So this is a massive, huge opportunity. And we saw an opportunity to bring that to our community. It's a unique company that could be the leader in a space. And it happens to be profitable. And so we're super excited about it. And what else did I miss?

And QBIO.

And QBIO. So Q is struggling. You know, I think they've struggled, you know, putting together a cohesive management and board and giving that technology to commercialization. That being said, they partnered with Borger Engelheim and also partnered with Immunoscape on 101, and now they're about ready to put 401 in the clinic. All of these are massive game-changer-type opportunities. The stock doesn't reflect it. You'd never guess by looking at the stock that it has any value. But, in fact, we believe that all three of those opportunities, those shots on goal, are super valuable. And we're still just as bullish about the technology as possible as we've ever been. But they've had their challenges in getting the execution side of it done.

So a question on moving on to Exozyme and that conference call. We're going to jump right off this call and go right into Exozyme's year-end call here that starts in 15 minutes. So we'll wrap up before that. But what are you looking at for, obviously, they're going to have to raise money. What's the dilution going to look like in your mind? I'm getting a question on how do you think the dilution works and how does that work when you're looking at an asymmetrical opportunity?

Yeah, so the great thing about exozymes is that, again, much like if you think about MDV at a $10 million OpEx level to create big opportunities, exozymes is the same way. Exozymes has about $10 million in OpEx to create huge opportunities. Now, they've created now two gargantuan opportunities in NCT and cannabinoids. And, you know, they're going to talk all about that, so I won't go into it too deeply, but combination of government grants, and now those opportunities be on the doorstep of commercialization. These aren't science projects anymore. So dilution, in our mind, is going to be relatively minimal because this is not like putting drugs in clinical trials. This is not... You know, they can outsource manufacturing. So it is super capital efficient. And we've worked really hard and they've worked really hard to create a high-impact organization to focus on big, huge platforms where they can be, where they can generate, you know, we're talking about TAMs in the hundreds of billions with the two platforms they're in. And they have the ability to be a major player in those platforms with a relatively small operating budget, which really speaks to how impactful their technology is. The reality is nobody believed they could do it. Nobody believed it would scale. I would just tell you. Throw all your best scientists at it. Go visit the company. Go see where they're at. And you're going to see that this could be the biomanufacturing. This could really be the start of a huge biomanufacturing revolution. And, in fact, you know, the U.S. government, you know, we can't continue to outsource manufacturing, especially pharma, you know, and nutritional supplement, you know, manufacturing overseas. And so... This is a huge initiative. I think you're going to see continued government grants coming to them. And so I just think that it's in the right place at the right time. And now we just got to go out and tell the story.

A question on Pat Invest. How systematically or structurally, how do you see that spin out if I'm a shareholder of MDB? How is that going to impact me? Do you have an idea what that path is on, you know, valuation and spin-out? I know you said you weren't really sure about what the valuation was going to be. But if I own a share of stock, what am I going to see as a shareholder?

Well, the good news about both the clearing, you know, MDB Direct, the clearing ops, and Patent Us is we own 100% of both of them. So, you know, we're starting with a much larger share of those than we do with the other companies we have ownership in. And so our objective is to do a round of financing to bring in partners. We want to bring in, you know, folks, can't mention names, whether it be law firms, big corporate strategics, or other strategics, and we're talking to, you know, various strategics right now. Our goal is to get that funded and out of MDB as a company. Then we're going to look forward to taking it public in 2027, and the method in which we do that and how we do it is not really completely formulated yet. But that's going to be largely dictated by what we do on the partnering front here in the short run and funding it as its own independent division here shortly.

Can you talk a little bit about what your deal pipeline looks going forward in the next 12 to 24 months?

You know, it's really interesting because the deal pipeline is great, and I can only see it getting better. So, you know, the biggest point is really our ability to get them sold, right? We have to get them packaged and sold. And so, you know, right now with, you know, where we're at, you know, the biggest constraint isn't the number of companies we're seeing. It's really going to be to work out the distribution side of the equation and get that done. So I think once we do that, You know, who knows how many we can do a year. So, like I said, the biggest issue is solving the distribution thing. Obviously, our stocks, you know, our stocks, some have done okay, some haven't, you know, haven't done as good as we hoped. And, you know, obviously if a couple of them work out pretty good, then that puts wind in the sails of everybody. But we really need to add incremental distribution. Our community is still relatively small. We have, well, we have a couple thousand shareholders. We only have 675 active accounts. So it's still very small. And, you know, we're trying to broaden distribution so that we don't have, you know, a couple of really large shareholders, you know, investors in our deals. We're trying to broaden that a bit. And so as we do that, then, you know, our ability to get more of them done is going to increase. So, you know, I'm not worried about the number of companies. that we can launch. I'm worried about just making sure that we can find investors for them all.

Okay, so I got a question here that's a good question, but I'm just going to read it. I normally paraphrase, but would or have you considered a SAS model for Pat Invest, that in turn for its analysis? This would serve not only to generate revenue but attract IP contribution to increase IP content to evaluate the combination of IP to uncover unexplored opportunities.

Yeah. So I think to be 100% blunt, I think SaaS is going to be crushed by AI.

Go into that a little bit.

Yeah, so just to give you an idea. Just to give you one segment that's a really, really big core thing of what we do. So let's take patentability, which is what is largely called prior art search. So any new inventor that comes up with a new idea wants to do a patentability analysis or should do a patentability analysis. So heretofore, maybe if you would subscribe to a patent database, you would go out, you would do your own patentability analysis, you know, analysis and search. You would, you know, maybe pay Pat Snap $10,000 or $12,000 a year or $15,000 a year to go do that. And it would kind of get you part of the way there, maybe, right? And you'd kind of, you'd get a lot of data. You'd say, well, you know, maybe this works. An expert user would use Pat Snap and maybe five or six other databases to and then get to a really, really good patentability, but very few people did it because it was too expensive and too time-consuming. We've now, just to give you an idea, what we were doing is we had expert-trained analysts in Latin America with PhDs and master's degrees in science. They would do a patentability analysis in 45 hours. Now, even though the cost was lower by doing it in Latin America... 45 hours is still a huge amount of inertia to actually go through and actually do that work. We took the same SOPs for doing a patentability analysis, now run by that same expert analyst that we have in Latin America, with AI where we basically programmed the agent. We programmed the agent ourself with AI. you know, popular AI vendor, where the software needed to run that analysis was completely done in-house without a software developer, mind you, okay? We can now do that patentability analysis with our expert patent searcher in an hour and a half. And it's better. And that's today. We're doing that right now. I'm telling you, it's going to completely change the SaaS business. So these folks that are out there building AI solutions, you know, curated AI solutions, I think they're going to – I'm very skeptical of the value of them because we're building them with off-the-shelf AI solutions today with our own people. They're not even software developers. And – So the curated data that we have that we've invested in for all these years is super valuable now because it's got to be done behind a wall, right? And we don't think that people should be putting their investments or their inventions into ChatGPT and doing this. So that gives you a reason why I think SaaS is going to be – and we have a shot to be the leader in it because we're an ABS firm, because we have attorney-client privilege, because we have the ability to basically turn this into a unified business process. I don't see it as a SaaS business going forward.

Okay. Well, we're at the end here, and I'm going to go ahead and turn it back to you and let you go ahead and close it out.

All I can say is thanks. It's been a very tough road the last couple of years since we've been public, but I hope that by listening to Where we see things going, that you have a bit more enthusiasm and you have the ability to kind of keep the faith and hang in there. We're super excited about the future for the firm. We're getting better and better every day. We're not, you know, the entire team here is working their ass off to make things happen. You know, it's been a rough thing. We haven't given people raises. We've taken back our issues. We've really backtracked a lot. And a lot of the expectations that we had for ourselves were not met. But you just don't give up. You never say die. You just keep going. And I appreciate everybody at the firm that's done it. It's not been easy. It's been a lot of really difficult discussions. But that being said... When I look at what's bubbling up from what we have, I'm super excited. So I'll leave it at that. George?

Oh, you want me to make the ending? Oh, well, thank you, everybody, for coming. Tony, that was your job. You're supposed to jump on there, close it out, start it, close it out. That's all right.

I'm ready to do it. So we'll say thank you very much for attending today's presentation. This will conclude our conference call.

All right. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.