Nuvve Holding Corp.

Good afternoon and welcome to Nuvi Holding Corp's third quarter 2023 earnings call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Eduardo Reyes. Thank you. You may begin.

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 third quarter 2023 results. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call up for questions. Before we begin, I'd 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 uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking projections. These risk factors are discussed in Nuvi's file into the SEC and in the earnings release issue 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 Paulin, Chief Executive Officer of Nubit. Gregory?

Thanks, Eduardo, and greetings to all. Thank you for joining our third quarter 2023 results call. We came into 2023 with optimism that we were going to experience a well-overdue inflection in growth in our business. In the first half of the year, we began laying the foundation of this to play out with record orders and much higher sales than in 2022. Momentum continued to build in the third quarter and so far in Q4. As discussed on our August call, we continue to evolve our AI capabilities by integrating Astraea AI into Nuvi Speedbox Charge Management app in July. The enhanced functionality helps us maintain our differentiated edge and comes at a critical time as we accelerate deployments of our software-equipped hardware. With a 97% accuracy rate, Astraea is set to maximize revenue generation and bolster our V2G technology globally, revolutionizing EV usage and preparation. In October, we deployed a record number of 38 AC and VC bidirectional charging stations connected to our GIF platform. While growing our megawatt-hundred management does not immediately correlate to revenue dollars, it is critical to our growth strategy as One, it increases our pipeline of potential future grid service revenue. And two, with more and more people benefiting from the value of our VPG software, market awareness expands, which in turn accelerates demand for our products and services. These deployments were carried out by New VK-12, which was only launched in June of this year, in order to provide a full range of services in order to support fleet electrification for North American citizen transportation. We expect for record deployments in Q4 as the supply chain challenges that have plagued the last two years continue to abate. Last month, we were proud to hit a big milestone by launching in Texas. With EPF funding, UVK-12 was able to assist the Martinsville Independent School District, or ISD, in converting their five diesel bus fleet with five Bluebird electric buses. five Nuvi Level 2 chargers, and our innovative AI-powered Nuvi Fleetbox $2 charge management software. With these deployments, we understand that Martinsville ISD has the first all-electric school bus fleet in the U.S. Finally, in California, we were honored to have received the highest score among applicants of a proposed award of $1.9 million from the California Energy Commission for our revolutionary Reschool V2G project. These recognition underscores our commitment to leveraging bidirectional EV school buses to enhance California's power grid resiliency, marking not just a milestone for Nuvi, but a leap for the state's energy ecosystem. In Q3, we continue to see steady growth in grid service revenues, which came in at 3.4 times the level recorded during corresponding period last year. We're also pleased to tell the five buses we have been carrying on our balance sheet for some time which helped sustain the revenue growth trend for the first half of the year. While marginally, we freed up working capital through these bus sales. Altogether, this puts us on pace to grow total company revenue by more than 50% year-over-year in 2023, with one quarter left to go. As stated before, however, growth can be lumpy, especially when there are substantial government dollars for our matrix school bus fleet customers to go chase. which can and does impact the timing of orders and sales. Further, we are no doubt operating against the capital market backdrop that has seen a continued deterioration in sentiment towards cleantech, a sentiment that seems to have only worsened in recent weeks due to the results and commentary from cleantech companies and about the EV landscape. With our cash run where we felt this backdrop gave us no choice but to continue raising capital piecemeal fashion at depressed equity prices as we did last month. Moving forward, we'll continue to evaluate all options to methodically and incrementally finance our business while we await for an improvement in market conditions. This may include additional equity financing and or debt financing. For example, we may continue to work towards putting in place an asset-backed lending facility, which the bill will expand upon. We have also been working on reducing our cost structure yet again to optimize our cash runway. Specifically, we are working towards lowering our cash expense rate to at or below $5 million per quarter as we get into 2024. This is the result of reducing our cost across administrative and legal functions. We are still investing into our platform in a manner that is commensurate with our focus priorities. In October, We issued a press release discussing our patent. The messaging behind putting out this release should be clear. We have been at this for a long time, investing significant resources into growing our V2G patent portfolio and developing a comprehensive V2G solution. With IT and expertise around areas such as power flow control, charge management, and power capacity, and as we push our technology further ahead with Astraea AI, We have a market-leading offering and remain the only pure-play public company today with a proven track record in deploying commercially available and scalable vehicle-to-grid technology worldwide. Our belief in and commitment to our role in the energy transition is unbearable, and we expect both the macro and capital market backdrop to get back on track after the current rough patch. We expect for Nuvi to be there throughout as V2G forms a critical piece of the energy transition and as we march towards a critical inflection point in EV adoption in the second half of this decade. The 2022 edition of the EPA Clean School Bus Program was a big tailwind for our increased orders and sales in the first half of 2023, and we are excited about the subsequent round. To update on this, in August, the next installment of $400 million competitive grant funding round closed its application process. Notice of award is expected to start trickling out later this month and run into January, with awards to be issued later in Q1 2024. Since our last call, the EPA has also opened up a subsequent $500 million funding round. This installment will look more similar to our round one in 2022, as it will be a rebate process. The application window for this round is expected to be open until the end of January. Prepaid recipients are expected to be notified in April 2024 after which winners can place purchase orders in relative short order and submit for reimbursement. We look forward to hopefully adding even more success in these rounds as we did in 2022. With our new DK-12 unit, we are confident we are in even better positions. Before passing it over to David to discuss our financial results, we spoke a lot earlier in the year about our Circle K partnership in the Nordics as it forms part of our strategic initiative to accelerate growth in megawatts under management through deployment of our GIF platform on third-party charge point operator hardware. As of today, we have largely completely integrated our software with our hardware. We expect to begin participating in the market and generating revenue prior to the end of the year. More importantly, we are paving the way for more material revenue generation starting in 2024. and for exponential growth in megawatts under management in the region and beyond over the long term. David, over to you.