Nuvve Holding Corp.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Nuvi Holding Corporation's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in 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 your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Eduardo Royas, Managing Director, ICR. Please go ahead. Thank you.

On today's call are Gregory Poilon, Chief Executive Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvi. Earlier today, Nuvi issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2023 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 NuBE'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 NuBE's filings with the SEC and in the earnings release issue today, which are available on our website. NuBE 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 Polan, Chief Executive Officer of Nuvi.

Gregory? Thank you, Eduardo, and hello to all. We thank you for joining our second quarter 2023 results call. We are proud to have yet again achieved a record order quarter in Q2 2023, topping the record set in Q1 and delivering yet another quarter of strong year-over-year growth across key metrics, including revenue, megawatts under management, and backlog. We came into 2023 discussing our optimism that we were finally hitting an overdue inflection point in both interest in and adoption of vehicle-to-grade technology, and specifically our differentiated newbie offering. Our results in the first half of the year evidence this, and we are pleased to have increased visibility in our business. Our conviction and optimism, however, are founded on much more than just the improvement in orders and activity in the first half of the year. Nuvi remains the only peer-played public company today with a proven track record in deploying commercially available and scalable V2G technology worldwide, and players across the EV charging and grid infrastructure landscape are taking notice. As we sit here today, the interest from companies looking to explore ways in which to partner with us or leveraging our technology is noticeably higher than it was just six or nine months ago. Industry participants are increasingly recognizing, one, the value of our technology and IP across areas such as power flow control and EV charging management, and the work we are doing with AI, and two, the importance of our experience and relationship networks in being able to provide a holistic fleet electrification solution. The same cannot be said, we believe, about all aspiring V2G providers. We look forward to building on this momentum as we go through the second half of 2023 and beyond. Now, to summarize our key accomplishments in the quarter and since last call. As we did last time, we won't go into specifics on orders other than to point out that our DC fast chargers orders in Q2 saw a more than 15% sequential improvement over the prior quarters than record and more than 75% increase over the second quarter of 2022. The big driver of this increase was the 25-unit order, our largest single order to date that we discussed on our May call. At the time, we noted that this was for a school district that was awarded funds via the EPA Clean School Bus Program, but was not one of the districts we supported in the grant procurement process. We have since disclosed that this order was for a member of the Beacon Mobility family of companies in Massachusetts. Beacon is a large fleet provider comprised of several independent companies to the U.S. and operating over 11,000 vehicles. We also received orders associated with rebates for the 2022 EPA Awards across multiple school districts in line with our previously communicated expectations. While we have shipped some of the DC charges associated with the EPA funding, a significant majority remain in the backlog and are likely to be shipped and recognized as revenue over the second half of the year. Looking ahead, we look forward to supporting additional school districts as part of the 2023 installment of this massive program which has an application deadline that is less than two weeks away. Further, we continue to see an ever-expanding pipeline of potential orders beyond this. During the quarter and so far in Q3, we continue to make progress on our strategic initiatives as well. In Q2, we launched new VK12, a new dedicated division to provide a full range of service in order to support fleet electrification for North America student transportation. And importantly, we announced the hiring of David Bersik, an experienced student transportation and automotive sales and marketing executive from Bluebird Corporation, to build out a program. At Bluebird, Bersik has seen significant growth in the EV bus sales, developed a supporting ecosystem, and enhanced relationships with their network of dealers. As touched on during our May call and alluded to in my earlier remarks, Future electrification is a process. It is not a simple yes or no decision. As future customers come up the learning curve, they may well decide that electrification is in their best interest, but it can take time for them to convince fellow stakeholders, or they may hesitate to commit without a better understanding or plan for how to optimize the transition to EV. People with relationships and an ability to walk through the electrification process on a step-by-step basis are invaluable. And this is exactly what we have gained by bringing on David. As I just alluded to, orders can be lumpy, but the lumps appear to be getting bigger and more frequent. And so if it gets well, we'd be critical to ensure we maximize our opportunities as school districts look to scale up their electrification journey. In the second quarter, we're also proud to advance commercialization of our AI capabilities. We have long held the view that leveraging and developing AI technology has the potential to be a tremendous differentiator and a sales enabler for us, which is why, in early 2022, we entered into a JV called Astrea AI to explore AI integration into our EV2G platform. The fruit of this work is now paying off, and we have announced both our strong capabilities in forecasting energy market values, EV schedule, and energy requirements. The forecasting power harnessed by AI is, in our view, indispensable and invaluable in terms of the service it provides to the end customers. The more we maximize forecasting capabilities, the better we are able to optimize or address challenges related to vehicle readiness, energy management, and battery health. With the combined power of AI and V2G, we can thus eliminate the various pain points of owning an electric vehicle and ultimately make V2G a strong selling point in the consumer market. Today, we are seeing our AI capability put into practice, starting with the enhanced frequency regulation capabilities our AI integration is enabling for us in the Nordics. With Astray AI, our platform is able to continuously forecast price and capacity from Nordic primary reserve to optimize energy market bits and therefore optimize revenue for us and our customers. This technology leveraged newbie six plus years of experience providing frequency regulation services in the energy market and is just one example of the benefits that AI integration can deliver to our customers. In July, we continue to evolve our AI capabilities by integrating SRAI into our Nubis Fleetbox charge management app. Our customers on the Fleetbox app can now use the enhanced functionalities to better manage their battery state of charge, charging status, charging equipment, and reports. In other words, our customers can optimize all of these activities and therefore truly maximize revenue generation thanks to the power of our S3IA technology. Lastly, on the strategy initiative front, as we have discussed on the last few calls, integrating Nuvi's GIF platform into established third-party hardware networks is a critical part of our strategy, and our partnership with Circle K announced in the first quarter is a great example of how Nuvi is executing on its strategy. We continue to work closely with Circle K on integrating and we are in the process of rolling out the technology across the different sites selected. Our AI platform is also providing advanced services. Before turning the call to David, a quick update on the California Senate bill, or SB233, which I have discussed on the last few calls. SB233 intends to make bidirectional charging a requirement for consumer electric vehicles and electric school buses sold in California by 2030. We think this is a recognition of the societal benefit, energy cost equity, that D2G can unlock as more and more vehicles electrify. At the end of May, we were pleased to see that the State Senate approved the bill with a vote of 29 to 9. It is expected that by the end of this month, the bill will go through appropriation in the State Assembly, and if successful, would go for the Assembly vote thereafter. I continue to have good dialogue with the legislators on this topic and I'm optimistic on a favorable outcome for SB233. With that, over to David to discuss our financial results.