QuantumScape Corporation

and welcome to QuantumScape's fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. My name is Cheryl, and I'll be your conference operator today. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Thank you. John Sager, QuantumScape's head of investor relations, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon and thank you to everyone for joining QuantumScape's fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. To supplement today's discussion, please go to our IR website at ir.quantumscape.com to view our shareholder letter. Before we begin, I want to call your attention to our safe harbor provision for forward-looking statements that is posted on our website and is part of our quarterly updates. The safe harbor provision identifies risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the content of our forward-looking statement for the reasons that we cite in our Form 10-K and other SEC filings, including uncertainties posed by the difficulty in predicting future outcomes. Joining us today will be QuantumScape's co-founder, CEO, and chairman, Jagdeep Singh, and our CFO, Kevin Hetrick. Jagdeep will provide a strategic update on the business, and then Kevin will cover the financial results and our outlook in more detail. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jagdeep Singh.

Thanks, John. Welcome to our first earnings call as a public company. Earlier today, we published a letter to our shareholders summarizing the major developments from the last quarter and fiscal year. If you haven't already read it, we encourage you to take a look, as our shareholder letter will be the primary way we report our progress to you. In addition to the SEC website, you can also find it on our company investor relations website, I won't repeat all of the contents of the letter here, but I would like to call your attention to a couple of key highlights. First, for those that are new to the QuantumScape story, some brief background. We were founded in 2010 out of Stanford with a mission to revolutionize energy storage and enable a sustainable future. The first application we focused on is the transformation of the automotive power train to an electrified version, which we believe represents both a very important part of the solution to the emissions problem, as well as an opportunity to create tremendous value over the coming decades. Over time, we expect to push into other markets, including stationary storage for the power grid and consumer electronics. We are a pioneer in the development of a new type of battery, the solid state lithium metal battery. Our technology replaces the polymer separator used in conventional batteries with a solid-state ceramic separator, enabling us to replace the carbon or silicon anode used in these conventional cells with an anode of pure metallic lithium, which in turn allows us to make batteries with higher energy density, greater driving range on a single charge, faster charge times, and improved safety while offering long cycle life. We believe these are some of the fundamental issues holding back widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles. The beauty of our approach is we deliver these benefits not by increasing the complexity of the battery, but by simplifying it, eliminating the anode layer of conventional cells. As a result, we believe the cost of these batteries at scale can actually be less than conventional batteries at the same scale. Last December, at our battery showcase event, we unveiled for the first time the performance data of our single layer cells, making clear the benefits of this lithium metal approach versus the traditional lithium ion approach. In particular, we showed data showing the cells were capable of achieving long cycle life. Now at over a thousand cycles to about 90% of initial capacity while operating at near room temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and high current densities or rates of power of one seat. In addition, We shared data showing these cells were capable of fast charge rates of 15 minutes to 80% state of charge, excellent performance relative to conventional cells on the most demanding drive cycle, such as those found on racetracks, and operation at low temperatures, including cycling data at negative 10 degrees Celsius. We believe this data marks a new high watermark for the solid-state battery industry and are unaware of any alternative solid-state approach with better performance results. Having demonstrated this level of performance on our single layer cells, our goal for the coming year is to stack these layers up and make multi-layer cells, forming the basis for our commercial target cells. We are therefore very pleased to report for the first time that we have assembled four layer cells in the 30 by 30 millimeter form factor, and that these cells have reached close to 800 cycles to over 90% capacity retention at both 1C and C over 3 rates at 30 degrees Celsius, substantially similar to the cycling performance we showed in our single layer cells and demonstrating it is possible to stack our single layer cells without adversely impacting cycle life and capacity retention of the cells. We used 30 by 30 millimeter cells made from separators cut from our standard target commercial area separators because it allowed us to effectively quadruple our current output as we work to scale up our engineering line capacity. While there is still a lot of work to be done, and we could encounter new challenges as we increase our layer count, this is an incredibly important result, and we are excited to have this so early in the year. We now need to make these multi-layer cells using our commercial area 70 by 85 millimeter layers, increase the number of layers, aiming first for four layers and subsequently for eight to ten layers by year-end, optimize the manufacturing processes, and address any new challenges we find. We believe that if we achieve these milestones, we will be on track to achieve our goal of delivering prototype battery cells to our customers in 2022. The other thing I'd like to draw your attention to is that based on this recent progress and to help with further scale-up, We have decided to build our own pre-pilot line facility in San Jose, which we call QS0. QS0 is intended to have a continuous flow, high automation line capable of building over 100,000 engineering cell samples per year, and we expect to be producing cells on this line by 2023. QS0 will help provide the additional capacity we need for our development work, and will enable us to accelerate work on the next generation of manufacturing tools. It will also provide capacity to make enough batteries for hundreds of long-range battery electric test vehicles per year. This will allow us to provide early sales to VW, as well as other automotive partners, explore non-automotive applications, and help de-risk subsequent commercial scale-up. With that, I'll hand it over to our CFO, Kevin Hetrick, to say a few words about our financial performance. and then open it up to Q&A. Kevin?