Ouster, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Ouster's first quarter earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation and remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. The call today is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Alster Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Ewing, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I'm joined today by Alster's Chief Executive Officer, Angus Bacala, and Chief Financial Officer, Ana Brunel. Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that Ouster issued a press release announcing its first quarter financial results shortly after market closed today. The company also published an investor presentation, which is available on the investor relations section of Ouster.com. I'd also like to remind everyone that during the course of this conference call, Alster's management will discuss forecasts, targets, and other forward-looking statements regarding the company, including statements from its press release, future customer orders and shipments, near and long-term revenue opportunities, market share trends, future products and commercial paths, potential future opportunities, customer traction, winning an OEM, intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for four looking statements. While these statements represent management's expected future results and performance, Oster's actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations that we may share with you today. In addition to any risks highlighted during this call, you should consider outsource future results as described in its most recent annual report on form 10k and its other filings with the sec except as required by law rule or regulation the company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this call information discussed on this call concerning the company's industry competitive position and the markets in which it operates sources and management estimates. Management estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third-party sources, as well as data from the company's internal research and are based on reasonable assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and its experience in and knowledge of such industry and markets. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risk, which could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimates. During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude the effects and events and transactions we consider to be outside our core operations. These non-GAAP measures should be considered a supplement to, and not a substitute for, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today's press release. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Angus McCullough.

Hi, everyone. Following the breakout year in 2021, Alster continued to bolster its strong position in the market in the first quarter. We maintained positive gross margins, introduced new solutions, and delivered on major automotive milestones along our product roadmap and with our strategic OEM partner. We believe these developments will act as catalysts for growth in each of our target industries and further improve our position in the marketplace. At Alster Automotive, we are pursuing a hardware-first strategy focused on winning the multi-billion dollar opportunity to supply LiDAR hardware into consumer vehicles through the superior price and performance of digital LiDAR. Astra Automotive announced the Digital Flash, or DF series, for automotive last fall, the industry's first multi-sensor suite of short, medium, and long-range solid-state LIDARs for comprehensive coverage around the vehicle. Just like Ouster's OS scanning sensors in market today, the Digital Flash series is powered by a single silicon CMOS chip, enabling us to scale performance in line with Moore's Law, unlike any other LIDAR company, while simultaneously dropping cost and complexity. We continue to track towards automotive readiness for our DF series to support automotive programs starting production in 2025. In the first quarter, we announced the Chronos chip, the automotive-grade, fully custom digital LiDAR system on chip that will power our DF solid-state sensor suite. The Chronos chip is the foundation of the DF architecture and will enable us to deliver more performant, power-efficient, and compact sensors for automotive series production programs. We also shipped the first DF A-sample sensors, delivering on a major milestone in our strategic development agreement with our global automotive OEM partner. We plan to present the upgraded A-sample to over 30 additional auto OEMs, Tier 1s, and AV companies in order to unlock new commercial opportunities and progress to the next round of discussions with those already in motion. The A-sample is another step on the path to achieving what consumers and automakers alike are pushing for, vehicles with safe, convenient, and reliable autonomy features that they can trust with their lives. LiDAR is the bridge from driver assistance to true autonomy, and digital LiDAR goes further to make these systems more feature-rich and affordable for everyone. With no moving parts, Ouster's DF series is the first solid-state digital flash LiDAR on the market. By absorbing the system complexity into the chronos chip, Ouster's suite of short, medium, and long-range DF sensors offers automakers greater affordability and flexibility in vehicle design and coverage. Ouster Automotive can offer a total of up to five VF sensors for roughly $1,000, a lower price and smaller overall size than the single forward-looking analog ladders offered by some of our competitors. This price and form factor advantage extends to single sensor RFQs as well. By being small and affordable, a suite of DF sensors can be integrated around the vehicle, just like digital cameras, to provide 360-degree awareness and a rich set of safe economy features. Short, medium, and long-range LIDARs looking to the front, sides, and behind the vehicle provide the critical data necessary for safe automated lane changes, confident maneuvering through four-way intersections, reliable high-speed merges, and so much more. A vehicle powered by a single forward-looking LiDAR cannot even navigate a four-way intersection without driver oversight. Put simply, multi-sensor digital LiDAR suites are the bridge from driver assistance to safe, affordable autonomy. Turning away from automotive into smart infrastructure, our team was excited to announce the launch of the Ouster Accurate Vision Security Solution this past quarter. Ouster Accurate Vision is a joint security solution that combines Ouster's 3D digital LiDAR with industry-leading security software from Tacticalware, a hexagon company, to target the multibillion-dollar security market. Nearly every high-value piece of infrastructure has a security system in place, from industrial sites and high-value warehouses to airports, military and defense buildings, and data centers. today this market is dominated by cctv cameras and thermal cameras that passively record the events unfolding around them 3d lidar based systems are paradigm shift because they can generate active alerts in real time while providing all of the passive recording capability of legacy technology we see a massive opportunity to disrupt this market with our ouster accurate vision digital ladder security solution Turning to other product updates, we remain on track to release the L3 chip later this year, which will succeed the L2X chip in powering all of our OS sensors. The L3 chip is the culmination of years of R&D inside Ouster and keeps us on the exponential performance path of Moore's Law. The improvements provided by this fully custom and proprietary chip design leverages technology advancements that revolutionize the camera sensor industry and brings them to the high-performance ladder industry for the very first time. I simply can't wait to unveil it to our customers as planned later this year. Another benefit of our digital roadmap is our ability to ship continuous over-the-air software updates to all of our customers, which introduce features that expand our ability to win additional opportunities across our TAM. Since the introduction of our first OS sensor, we have released five firmware updates. Our latest firmware introduces new features to make our sensors more adaptive for remote applications, including data flexibility for faster, more efficient edge computing. We expect these updates to also benefit industrial customers who are accustomed to processing limited data from legacy 3D LiDAR sensors, but are eager to adopt high-resolution 3D LiDAR to improve safety and performance capabilities. We continue to invest in building out a best-in-class software development experience that serves as the foundation of our entire software ecosystem. We recently released an updated version of our software development kit, or SDK for LiDAR, and continue to see tremendous customer adoption with hundreds of downloads each month. Again, this is an important tool that accelerates our customers' time to autonomy, enabling them to test and validate our sensors faster and bring their applications to market sooner. This year, we expect to release more products spanning hardware and software than ever before. Advancements with our DS series for automotive, L3 chip, software ecosystem, and industry certifications are expected to be major catalysts for digital ladder adoption across our four target industries and directly contribute to our growth this year and beyond. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Ana Brunel, to provide a full update on our Q1 2022 financial results and business outlook.