Nuvve Holding Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Newbee Holding Corporation first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by 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 touch-tone 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 Eduardo Royas. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you.

On today's call are Gregory Paulan, Chief Executive Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvi. Earlier today, Nuvi issued a press release announcing its first quarter 2022 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 judgments, 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 Newby's filings with the SEC and in the earnings release issued today, which are available on our website. Newby 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 Newby.

Gregory? Thanks, Eduardo. and good day to all. Thank you for joining us as we review our results for the first quarter of 2022. In the short period since our last earning call in late March, we have continued to see strong secular tailwinds for vehicle electrification and the adoption of vehicle-to-grid technology, B2G. As an example, I'd like to start today's call by highlighting our recent announcement of a Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, with the U.S. Department of Energy, DOE. This announcement is not only an example of the continued expansion in interest in V2G, but the recognition at the federal level of the critical role that V2G will play in the energy transition. We view the DOE's decision to form this partnership to be an admission that transportation electrification cannot unfold with the grid today as is. The load requirements and variation associated with EVs charging are simply too high. However, While EVs will be a source of stress on the grid, bidirectional charging and the vehicle-to-grid technology that we have pioneered for over a decade also render EVs a key part of the solution. The federal government realizes vehicles should evolve to becoming paid grid resources. To elaborate briefly on the MOU as a collaboration partner to the DOE, we'll be working with government agencies, utilities, and electrification industry leaders to accelerate the commercialization of Vehicle-to-Grid, Vehicle-to-Building, Vehicle-to-Home, and other vehicle grid integration technologies, or what they are calling Vehicle-to-Everything, or V2X. We chose Nuvi because it recognizes that we are best positioned to be a leading enabler of the solution given our experience in commercially deploying V2G around the world. To Nuvi's grid-integrated vehicle, or GIVE platform, we are able to aggregate and provide power for EVs at scale back into the grid by creating virtual power plants. We integrate electric vehicles into the grid in the most efficient way possible, generating revenue for the customer and lowering the total cost of ownership. Our solutions have resonated well with school districts and operators of commercial fleets given the predictability of their vehicle schedule and their hyper-focus on cost. And we look forward to leveraging our learning and continuing to learn as we work with the DOE and our partners in this MOU. Turning now to a summary of key accomplishments in the first quarter of 2022. As discussed on our last earning call, we announced several exciting partnerships in Q1, including one, a joint venture with 2021 AI to collaborate exclusively on the integration of their artificial intelligence platform with the new B2G platform. Two, a partnership with Swell to offer combined solar, stationary battery storage, and intelligent EV charging for residential and commercial markets. Three, LIVO's first commercial win, a 10-year contract with the Troy School District that marks the largest and first 100% planned zero-emission school bus conversion in the Midwest, all of which we've discussed in more detail on our last call. Each of these partnerships is critical, we believe, to maintaining and growing a competitive edge and providing the value we can deliver for fleets around the world as they go electric. Since the last earning call, the momentum has continued to build. On 2021.ai, we've made good progress executing on our business plan for the joint venture, which is called Astraea AI. We recently held a summit at our headquarters in San Diego and executed a collaboration agreement. We think that Astraea AI is supposed to be a great sales enabler for us. Astraea is bringing a full AI environment that not only offers the ability to run different types of models, but also provides additional governance tools necessary to run an AI platform commercially. Our JV is going to deliver products such as forecasting, a worldwide-type database, predictive maintenance, and energy insights and reporting, all of which support this intersection between transportation and energy. This all forms part of our broader integrated offering as we look to continuously make our intelligent platform even smarter. In early April, we have announced our qualification to start commercial operations in the Japanese energy market, receiving approval from the transmission system operator along with all our partners, Toyota Tsusho and Shubu Electric. Our GIF platform demonstrated it can successfully discharge power from large industrial stationary storage batteries to provide power to the grid and absorb demand fluctuation that results from big power sources. This milestone built on a series of small-scale demonstration projects we successfully completed a few years ago in Japan using EV batteries and is an example of how we continue to evolve and grow our partnerships over time. Over the next few months, we will leverage these stationary batteries in order to provide capacity back to the grid and support electric vehicle deployments. As we expand our reach into the commercial fleet business, we have two key announcements bringing more diversity to our product offering and more flexibility to our megawatts under management rollout. Earlier this week, we disclosed an agreement with Power Electronics a global manufacturer of solar inverters and charging hardware. ProEvTronics will add Nuvi V2G certified capabilities to their existing bidirectional chargers for customers in North America and Europe. This partnership is very important to us as it expands Nuvi's existing line of medium and heavy duty charging station offering for fleet customers on a global scale and helps de-risk our supply chain in charging hardware, which is of course critical to our business. Also this week, we announced an alliance with Centro, a designer and manufacturer of electric, light, and medium-duty commercial vehicles. Centro will begin to offer bundled newbie charging packages to commercial fleets with their U.S. product lineup in the Class 4 market. This is a new market category for us, and we are pleased to be able to enter it with Centro and their very attractive, relatively low-cost vehicle. Centro allows us to diversify OEM offering for our fleet-as-a-service solution and in the future, partnership in our V2G hubs concept. Adding new OEMs, expanding our product range, and securing V2G hubs are all core to our strategy, and our partnership with Centro checks all these boxes. Wins such as these have supported Nuvi's recent recognition, such as being named as 2022 BNF Pioneer by Bloomberg New Energy Finance last month. An award we are very proud and which inspires us to continue to push ourselves even further on our quest to play a foundational role in intelligently electrifying the planet. Turning now to megawatts under management, which we have discussed the past couple of quarters as an indicator of the potential revenue growth amid their commercial wins. As of March 31st, 2022, we had 16.9 megawatts under management. This reflects roughly 15% increase from December 31, 2021, and tripled the amount compared to the prior year. Taking an even higher level, we are pleased that our pipeline continues to do very healthy as well. Our qualified pipeline currently stands at approximately 225 million. As noted last time, 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. Remind you that we do not expect to convert 100% of our pipeline Further, products and services can be either sold outright to our customers or through a multi-year agreement, which would affect timing on revenue recognition. Our business developments will inherently continue to be lumpy from quarter to quarter when it comes to the pace of commercial wins, changes in backlog, and order flow, which David will touch in a few minutes. However, critically, we remain in numerous active discussions with customers, many of which we have framework agreements with, with or are in late-stage negotiation with. In abiding on this, as discussed in our last call, the school bus market remains critical to us, but there are many other segments for our V2G offering. These include with fleet management companies, government fleets, including in more isolated locations that have grid infrastructure challenges and mobile storage systems. Further, we continue to expand existing partnerships and grow our V2G hub models. We're also pursuing partnerships with multiple universities. Universities are valuable collaborators and provide a channel for B2G expansion and deployment, given their large fleet and diverse use cases, rich talent pool, and the ability to partner on an academic level. University partnerships are also important because they offer us the opportunity to dive into new and emerging B2G verticals, such as the automotive, airport, data science, and maritime segments. As select universities tend to have deep expertise and existing partner ecosystem within these certain segments. In the process, we also help foster the workforce that will be required for the electrification of transportation. We look forward to hopefully crossing the finish line on several existing partnerships and developments in the month ahead and discussing these in more details on our next goal. I will now turn the call over to David to discuss our financial results before I wrap up with some prepared remarks and we can open to Q&A.