Nuvve Holding Corp.

Greetings. Welcome to Nuvi Holding Corp. Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Eduardo Roy's Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Thank you.

On today's call are Gregory Polan, Chief Executive Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvi. Earlier today, Nuvi issued a press release announcing its fourth quarter and full year 2021 results. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call up for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that 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 Nuvi's filings with the SEC 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 would like to turn the call over to Gregory Poilon, Chief Executive Officer of Nuvi. Gregory?

Thanks, Eduardo, and good day to all. Thanks for joining us today to discuss our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2021. The need for vehicle electrification and the benefits and possibilities of vehicle-to-grid technology are coming more into view with each passing day and seem poised to grow mainstream. Recently, many of you have likely heard the buzz around Ford and GM support for bidirectional charging and pilot programs with utility companies that will demonstrate the ability for vehicles to interact with the electric grid. The bigger TOEMs get it. As they prepare to launch an electric version of their flagship models, they want to be sure they are enabling those vehicles to capture and deliver the full value they are capable of as the world electrifies, and this includes vehicles to home. We see this development as a huge endorsement for Nuvi, raising awareness about the ability for EVs to send power back to the home and the grid. However, A vehicle capable of bidirectional charging does not on its own address the current challenge faced by the grid today for increased EV adoption. And vehicle-to-home, which allows an EV to power a home in the event of blackouts, and vehicle-to-grid are two different offerings. Bidirectional EVs are part of the solution, but they cannot solve the challenges posed to the grid on their own, nor do they improve EV economics, and this is where Nuvi comes into play. Through Nuvi's grid-integrated vehicle, or GIF platform, we're able to aggregate and provide power from EV at scale back into the grid by creating what we call virtual power plants, or VPPs, thereby integrating electric vehicles into the grid in the most efficient way possible. In doing so, we're able to generate revenue for the customers and thus lower the total cost of ownership, or TCO. And at Nuvi, our focus is first and foremost on fleet, given their particular focus on TCO. The opportunity provided to them by V2G is simple. A fleet vehicle has predictable needs and spends a predictable amount of time parked and thereby not being utilized. By intelligently integrating vehicles into the grid, we're able to turn EVs into economic assets that both generate revenues and save costs to the customers. In the process, They also help provide overall grid stability and resilience. This is something very tough to do and is a product of our company's dedicated focus on V2G since our funding 12 years ago. And it is something that big established companies in the renewable sector with multiple focus areas are not equipped to handle today. Of course, electric vehicles need to be prepared to be used for their primary use case, which is to transport people goods and services from point A to point B. Our cloud-connected technology makes sure that every vehicle on our platform has enough energy to charge for the next trip before it calculates how much capacity it can afford to sell back to the grid. And it ensures the vehicle is charging and discharging at optimal levels, all within safe battery warranty limits. The end result is that through our technology, we can, one, help lessen the burden on the grid that will be caused by the shift to electrification of transportation. two, increase the value of renewables, and three, flatten the load curve. Let me now turn to a recap of some of the key accomplishments in the fourth quarter and the full year 2021 before discussing a few recent developments and expectations that make us particularly excited for the year ahead. To recap the year, we completed our GO public acquisition just over a year ago and are incredibly proud of our advancements in the past 12 months. Key milestones that we achieved include the introduction last May of our V2G Hub model, which enables us to combine energy from multiple EV batteries to form virtual power plants and generate energy to be sold back to the grid. We took a big step towards putting this into practice in November when we announced our partnership with Bluebird to install hub infrastructure for up to 400 buses at the company's primary delivery facility in Georgia. We'll give you some updates in the near future about this project. Last May, we have also announced our Levo Mobility joint venture with Stonepeak and Evolve and disclosed that transaction in the third quarter. Levo allows us to deliver a turnkey fleet-as-a-service solution for fleet of all types of vehicles. And as discussed in our last earning call, we had several notable commercial wins in the fourth quarter, including one our partnership with Bulbox on the Iberia Peninsula, which gave us the entryway into the consumer-slash-residential vehicle-to-home market. two, a collaboration agreement with BYD and Nivo, and three, the V2G Hub announcement with Bluebird that I just referred to, all of which we discussed in more detail in our last call. Each of these developments are critical to building out our pipeline of projects and expanding our megawatt-hundred management, which I will touch on in a few minutes. Since the last running call, the momentum has continued to build. In February, we have announced a joint venture with 2021.ai to collaborate exclusively on the integration of their artificial intelligence platform with Nuvi V2G platform. 2021.ai platform handles the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence development and operation, and we believe this will bolster the predictive analytics capabilities of our products and services. As we continuously look to enhance our platform, we will always consider whether to build, buy, or partner. And this is one area where we believe partnering with those who are already experts in the field is most logical. A few weeks ago, we have announced a partnership with Swell Energy to offer combined solar, storage, battery, and intelligent EV charging for residential and commercial markets. Our vehicle-to-grid services, combined with Swell's distributed energy resource management system, plans opportunities for residential customers to establish a comprehensive home energy system. We believe this will open the door for us to engage with other solar and storage providers and continue to enhance Nuvi's overall value proposition. Turning now to our Levo Mobility JV for a few brief updates. Earlier this month, Levo announced a 10-year contract with the Troy School District in Troy, Illinois. The contract initially calls for the deployment of 76 chargers under a Transportation as a Service Agreement and provides NEVO with the right of first refusal to convert the school district's fleet of 64 school buses to zero-emission vehicles in as little as five years. We are incredibly proud of this deal as it marks the largest and first 100% planned zero-emission school bus fleet conversion in the Midwest. We expect to kick off with an initial deployment of chargers installation and infrastructure upgrades this summer before rolling out additional chargers with fleet conversion plans in 2023. Meanwhile, the leadership bench at Levo keeps getting deeper. Earlier this quarter, we announced the hiring of Levo's Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, and we recently hired a Chief Procurement Officer. Levo now has an established core leadership ready to capitalize on increasing appetite from our turnkey fleet as a service offering. Lastly, and more broadly than newbie, We continue to be excited about the $5 billion that will be made available to build out a national electric vehicle charging network and new infrastructure flow. We have made a tremendous amount of progress across our business and achieved many important milestones over the past 12 months. These operational accomplishments have driven growth in our megawatts under management and significant increase in orders for our chargers and momentum in our pipeline. I'd like to briefly speak to each of these. First, megawatt under management, which we introduced on last quarter's call and is a pretty good metric that we tracked because we believe it is a good indicator of the potential revenue growth embedded by commercial winds. Megawatt under management quantifies the aggregated amount of electrical capacity from deployments of new V2G chargers, V1G chargers, and stationary batteries that we control and can supply under ideal conditions. We ended 2021 with 14.7 megawatts under management. This reflects a nearly 20% increase versus the third quarter of 2021 and nearly tripling of megawatts under management from year-end 2021 levels. We also experienced a significant increase in order for our chargers in the fourth quarter, including a step change in orders from DC chargers. In fact, we sold more DC chargers in the fourth quarter than during the previous nine months combined. Importantly, we believe we are just getting going and this is reflected in our backlog as well as our pipeline. Over the course of the year, we have increased our dedicated sales team, which is approaching 10 people compared to only one at the start of 2021. Through the sales team and business development efforts that are the focus of our senior management team, we have created a process to connect with potential customers that we spend insights from one to five charging stations to larger partners involving thousands of more charging stations. At your end, we have a hardware and service order backlog of approximately 6.2 million. And through our sales effort, our pipeline continues to grow at an even faster rate. We consider our qualified pipeline to be those potential customers where we have a memorandum of understanding in place or where we are working towards a definitive agreement. Our qualified pipeline is currently approximately 225 million. Formalized agreements can take time to execute and announce, given that, in most cases, these are the first conversations that customers are having about exploring the benefits of v2G. This is a new concept to many prospective customers and stakeholders, and there is much to understand. We do not expect to cover 100% of our pipeline, and it's of course also important to keep in mind that, ultimately, products and services may be either sold outright to our customers or through a multi-year agreement, which would affect timing on revenue recognition. That said, we believe this information is helpful in providing insight into the efforts of our teams and the future potential we see with the growing market of EVs and increasing adoption for V2G. And based on active discussion and framework agreements we have in place, all in that stage negotiations, We expect to have several exciting developments to announce as we go through 2022 that will support backlog growth and ultimately revenue growth. School buses have been the focus use case for our technology. School buses are, of course, parked the majority of the time, making usually just two trips per day and sitting at home for many, many months out of the year in the aggregate, all of which make them an excellent use case for V2Gs. However, the school bus segment is hardly the only opportunity set. To expand a bit on this, fleet management companies, or FMCs, are rapidly exploring vehicle electrification opportunities. As touched on earlier, their fleet customers are hyper-focused on vehicle economics and lowering their total cost of ownership. And so as EVs go mainstream, we see opportunities to partner with FMCs to set up hubs in various U.S. locations and sell our products and services through their sales channels through multi-year agreements. Government vehicle fleets also report going electric. This is especially true in isolated or remote location where there is, of course, a building out renewable infrastructure and where today's energy supply has proven to be costly and unreliable. And where keeping the lights on at the reasonable cost is likely to be increasingly challenged by the effects of climate change. NUVI's V2G offering not only helps reduce the total cost of vehicle ownership as governments replace their IC vehicles with still more expensive EVs, but it improves the grid's resilience and therefore, ultimately, quality of life. Mobile storage systems are another exciting deployment in the battle against grid infrastructure challenges that are often dynamic in nature. We're excited to explore opportunities to integrate our vehicle-to-grid technology with mobile stationary storage Opportunities that can track trickle grid challenges not only when needed but also where needed And finally we see initial hub agreement and other contracts when we have announced reflecting Only the beginning when it comes to our potential commercial opportunities with these particular customers we are always in discussion with our existing partners about how we can scale up our offering and even further and whether it be by expanding the number of vehicles served or enhancing our offering as we enter into new partnerships such as our collaboration with Swell to integrate solar plus storage. The same goes for Levo. Our win in Troy is getting the Levo name out there, and we think it will help drive additional important commercial wins over the balance of the year. The future of Nuvi truly does feel bright. With that said, let me now turn the call over to David to discuss our financials before I conclude with some prepared remarks and open to some questions.