Nuvve Holding Corp.

Good morning and welcome to the Nuvi Holding Corp's first quarter of fiscal year 2021 financial results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Dorme, Managing Partner. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Betsy. Good morning, and thanks for joining us today. On the call are Gregory Pilon, Chief Executive Officer, Ted Smith, Chief Operating Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvi. This morning, Nuvi issued two press releases, one regarding its first quarter 2021 financial results, and another one regarding a transaction with Stone Peak Infrastructure Partners. The company also posted slides to accompany today's call on the investor relations page of its website. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you this call may contain forward-looking statements. While these forward-looking statements reflect Nuvi's best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, from those implied by these forward-looking projections. These risk factors are discussed in periodic SEC filings and in the earnings release issued today, which are available on our website. Nuvi undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Gregory Polan, Chief Executive Officer of Nuvi. Gregory?

Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to kick off Nubit's first earning call as a public company today, following the completion of our transaction with Newborn Acquisition Corp. It's been an exciting few months, and as we begin our journey as a public company, we've been hard at work continuing to build on all that the team has accomplished in service funding in 2010. This is highlighted by the agreement to form a joint venture with StoneSick and Prospector Partners we announced today alongside our financial results. Ted, David, and I are looking forward to walking you through this joint venture as well as other recent developments, results, and outlook for the remaining of the year. To start, some of you have had the opportunity to hear the background of our business and our clear go-forward strategy, but we recognize that others are likely new to the story. So I want to take a few minutes to walk through our technology and how we are focused on driving value for our customers and ultimately our shareholders. At Nuvi, we are capitalizing on a transformational megatrend with a differentiated and proprietary mobility technology, an experienced team, and a compelling turnkey offering. The transition to electric mobility is among the largest microeconomic shifts in our lifetime, an opportunity to accelerate solutions to climate change. Our mission is to lower the cost of electric vehicle ownership while supporting the integration of renewable energies for a scalable and sustainable green society. Road vehicles account for 23% of US GHG emissions. In fact, the transportation sector emits more harmful pollutants than any other sector, and road vehicles are more than 80% of transportation emissions. The transportation world is rapidly equifying, which is key to solving the climate challenges we face. However, according to the theory, transportation electrification is forecast to result in a 40% increase in total U.S. electricity demand by 2050 on a grid that's often already strained. This increase would result in $2 trillion investment in necessary grid upgrades to keep the lights on. But there is a tremendous hidden opportunity in our increasingly electric transportations. Today, vehicles on average are parked and unused approximately 96% of the time. And if we could harness the battery in all the electric vehicles expected to be on the road globally in 2040, we could power 163 million households. This is equivalent to powering all of the homes in the U.S. for 1.2 years. At Nuvi, we take advantage of this hidden opportunity. We turned EV into power plants. So how do you do it? How do I do it? A proprietary vehicle to grid or V2G technology intelligently utilizes vehicle batteries to not only pull power from the grid for charging, but also store energy, including renewable, and then safely discharge part of that energy back to the grid when it's needed most. V2G technology enables a vehicle to make money or save on your electric bill when it's not in use. We do this while ensuring electric vehicles are always ready to pair up on daily driving needs. Nubia's system controls everything seamlessly behind the scenes. Nothing extra is needed from the EV owner point of view. Simply plug your electric vehicle, set your next scheduled trip, and you always remain in control of the vehicle's set of charge. Accounting for your needs, the platform will determine which grid services are most appropriate. Our technology enables the aggregation of multiple electric vehicle batteries in multiple locations through EV charging stations into a virtual power plant of VPP. Our platform has the capability to sell the aggregated energy back to the market and earn revenue that can be shared with our customers. This lowers the cost of ownership of EVs and helps customers save money on vehicles through intelligent, safe charging during non-peak hours when the electricity rates are low. An example of how our technology is working today is our operation in Friedrichsburg, Denmark. with our longest-standing customer there. This customer originally acquired 10 V2G-capable Nissan ENV200 vans. Each of these vehicles, outfitted with a rather small battery of 24 kWh and connected to a 10 kW charging station, has been generating $2,000 of grid service revenue per vehicle per year since it started using the aggregation platform of Nuvi called Give nearly five years ago. This is about a 25% total cost of ownership reduction over the life of the vehicle. Nubia's technology is backed by 25 years of research and development led by the Professor Willard Kenton at the University of Delaware and my partner in selling Nubia. With more than 350 deployments on five continents and more than 11 years of market participation in PGM, our patented technology is ready today for large-scale deployment to lower the cost of electric vehicles and help solve the climate challenge. There are major benefits of NuViz V2G technology. These include the acceleration of EV penetration by monetizing an increased level of utilization, the improvement of grid resiliency, and the acceleration of renewable penetration. The market opportunity for V2G is vast, totaling over $6 trillion. We have identified the fleet market as our initial area of focus because of ease of scalability. School buses, in particular, are a key area of focus. Why school buses? They are by far the largest mass transit fleet here in the U.S. and are considered the ideal application of EPG technology. Given their consistent and predictable routes and the fact that they sit idle for most of the day and during the summer, which are times when utilities need power the most. Discharging power from aggregated electric buses into the grid at these times of high demand to express off-electric distribution equipment increases grid resiliency. In addition, 95% of these buses are diesel today, which represents a tremendous opportunity for electrification while possibly impacting the health of students, drivers, and the planet. If we can electrify all of the school buses in the U.S., it would be equivalent to planting 108 million acres of trees, The benefits would also be equivalent to electrifying 1.6 million passenger vehicles. Recently, school bus electrification has been gaining momentum and has an extremely strong support from the current administration. But obstacles remain to electrifying school buses. Today, the upfront cost of an electric school bus is often cost prohibitive for school districts. In addition, managing electric school bus fleets requires specialized expertise across technology power market, policy, and finance. Financially, sorry, finally, each school district has unique needs and concerns. We have always believed that in order to supercharge the adoption of electric vehicles, we would need a 100% turnkey infrastructure financing solution. As a result, we are excited to announce an agreement to form NEVO, a joint venture with SONTIC that plans to deliver a transportation as a service solution for the electrification of fleets with an initial focus on school buses. Stone Peak is a leading infrastructure investor with $32 billion of assets under management and significant experience investing in transportation and energy. Stone Peak plans to deploy up to $750 million to the JV to fund Levo's assets and infrastructure. David will provide specific details regarding the joint venture structure, but let me say how excited we are to announce this important step forward in our strategy with the support of Stone Peak. Upon closing, the joint venture will provide us with the ability to continue enhancing our core business, expanding our valuable partnership, and providing our V2G technology to more and more customers. Labor will bring together our proprietary V2G technology, electric vehicles, associated charging and grid infrastructure, maintenance services, seamless customer experience, and a financing solution to create a customized offering to Electrify Fleet. While the initial focus of labor will be school buses fleet, we see a vast opportunity in other fleet verticals such as commercial fleet, last mile delivery, ride hailing and ride sharing, as well as municipal services. We also intend to work with our OEM partners across the value chain with whom we have strong relationships to deliver this solution and meet the needs of customers of all sizes. Nuvi will continue to work with our global industry partners, including developers, fleet owner and operators, to enable widespread of VQG technology and complement labels offering. Upon closing, we believe our partnership with StoneSix will set newbies with a differentiated infrastructure funding solution and a well-regulated partner that bring much more than just capital to the table. We believe the label partnership will deliver a strong value creation for our shareholders while expanding the reach of our technology. We believe this is just the beginning of a differentiated approach that can be scaled and replicated to drive future revenue. Bringing us back to Nuvi's mission, we're excited about the acceleration of electric vehicle performance that our revolutionary technology enables, creating a greener and more equitable planet and helping to address the climate change. Before I turn the call over to Ted, I want to highlight a few key hires that recently were added to the team. We recently appointed Tim Hennessy as our Chief Revenue Officer and Jesse Bryson as Vice President of Utility Recruitment and Joint Venture Deployment. Tim will lead revenue opportunities and draft strategies to deploy our V2G solution across key markets, and Jesse will help lead the effort around our V2G and tax offering. For the last 15 years, Tim has been at the helm of energy storage. having developed the energy storage extension for the California Self-Generation Energy Program, SIGP, in 2008. GSE formerly served as SDP Global Market Development for Advanced Microgrid Solutions, an AI software company in the renewable energy storage space. Additionally, we appointed Steve Moran as our Chief Legal Officer, who brings decades of public company general counsel experience in telematics IoT, and mobility segments focusing on patents and intellectual property protection. We're excited to welcome all these three leaders, which it brings vital industry experience and relationships that will enhance our business. We continue to be excited about the future of Nuvi, and with that, I will turn the call over to Ted.