Quantum-Si Incorporated

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Quantum SIQ3 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press TAR 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Katherine Atkinson. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Earlier today, Quantum SI released financial results for the third quarter and is September 30th, 2023. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Joining me today are Jeff Hawkins, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Kyes, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will be making certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements of our Press Release. For a more complete list and description of risk factors, please see the company's filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, November 9, 2023. Except as required by law, the company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will also be referring to certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in the press release filed earlier today. With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff Hawkins.

Thank you, Kathryn. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. In today's call, we will provide a business update present our third quarter financial performance, and provide an outlook for the remainder of 2023. We will then open the line for questions. As you are aware, the goal of QuantumSI is to bring next-generation protein sequencing to every lab, everywhere. Our proprietary technology delivers deeper, unbiased proteomics insights that we believe will accelerate scientific research, enable the discovery of new biomarkers, and ultimately power the development of new therapies and diagnostic tests that will positively impact human health. Before sharing updates on our progress during the quarter, I wanted to take an opportunity to look back on the significant progress that we have made as a company during my first year as CEO. First, we have enhanced the leadership team with the addition of proven industry leaders across key roles, including our Chief Financial Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, Senior Vice President of Operations, and Senior Vice President of Product Development. Second, we commercially launched Platinum, the world's first next-generation protein sequencing platform. Third, we have augmented our board of directors through the addition of three new independent directors, all with CEO or CFO experience from across life sciences, medical devices, diagnostics, and biotech. In addition, we established an independent chair of our nominating and governance committee as we strive to continually improve our board governance and performance. Fourth, we have completely retooled our reagent and consumable manufacturing model from one that was largely outsourced to one that is majority insourced. This has provided us with greater control over quality and cost and should result in improved gross margins as we achieve scale. Finally, we have completed a reorganization of our R&D team and focused our R&D projects on the capabilities and applications customers want most. We have shifted a greater percentage of our investments into near to midterm opportunities while retaining a focused investment into a compelling set of next generation technologies. Overall, the progress over the past 12 months has fundamentally improved all aspects of our business, putting us on a strong foundation for growth in 2024 and beyond. I would now like to provide an update on our progress during the quarter. Our first corporate priority is to commercialize Platinum and the 2M chip. Our sales funnel continues to grow and remains well ahead of our expectations for 2023. QuantumSI's technology addresses gaps in currently marketed technologies and it is clear customers are interested in using Platinum in their research. From a geographic standpoint, we continue to see interest across both the United States and Europe. During the quarter, we participated in the Hoopoe World Congress in Busan, South Korea. This event gave us our first opportunity to meet with potential customers and distributors in the Asia Pacific region. The team came back from this event energized about the opportunity to launch Platinum in the Asia Pacific region in 2024. In October, the first customer data using platinum was presented during a webinar. Dr. Tolman Ercik from Northwestern University leads a lab that focuses on protein engineering spanning both therapeutic and industrial applications. During the webinar, she discussed some of the methods they use for characterizing engineered proteins in her lab, and she presented data generated on platinum that was used for studying secreted protein variants. She also talked about how they plan to use platinum for other protein engineering applications, such as barcoding and selecting for genotype phenotype linkage in proteins. Beyond the specific applications of interest, the webinar also included discussion of the overall time savings of the platinum workflow that the lab has experienced. As we look out across the remainder of 2023, we expect the first customer generated manuscript will also be submitted for publication. We are excited about the momentum we are building in the market and believe it will position us well as we move from our current controlled commercial launch to full commercial launch in early 2024. Our second priority is to lead with innovation. During the quarter, we completed the strategic review of our research and development programs and our organizational design and capacity that we had discussed on our last call. I would like to share some key outcomes from this process. First, We reorganize the team to drive greater focus in product development. Post the organizational changes, we now have more than 60% of our team deployed against near to midterm opportunities. We believe this change will allow us to more rapidly deliver the technology capabilities and applications customers want most. As part of the reorganization, we are accelerating our efforts in biochemistry to further build upon our industry-leading next generation protein sequencing technology capabilities. We are already seeing positive early signs from this renewed focus and are confident that it will yield strong results in 2024 and beyond. Finally, we have retained a focused set of investments in next generation technologies to ensure we remain on the path to being the first company to deliver de novo sequencing in the future. Another goal of the R&D Strategic Review was to evaluate all of our projects and define a more focused and prioritized set of initiatives. As part of that process and consistent with our prior earnings call, we completed a review of the carbon program. After a comprehensive review of the carbon program, we have determined that we will not move forward with commercialization of the carbon instrument at this time. It was clear from our discussions with customers that carbon was not required for successful implementation of platform and that there were higher impact R&D programs we could work on to advance our customers' research. To that end, during the strategic review process, we identified several product improvements across our library prep kit, sequencing reagents, and chips that could improve the sequencing output per sample, coverage, and overall robustness of the full workflow from library prep to sequencing results. I am pleased to share that these improvements will be included in a version two of our kits, which we expect to launch in the first quarter of 2024. We expect that these improvements will also provide greater compatibility between our next generation protein sequencing technology and the range of sample prep methods, sample types, and even specific proteins our customers are interested in studying. Overall, we believe that the version two kit combined with the work we are doing around sample prep compatibility puts us on a strong path towards full commercial launch in early 2024. Given this, we have initiated a set of commercial activities to ensure we are well prepared for that event. While we are still in the early days of operating in this new structure and against the more focused set of R&D projects, I am optimistic that we are well positioned to deliver a steady cadence of new technology capabilities and applications throughout 2024. Our third priority is to preserve financial strength. As we have stated on previous calls, we remain committed to continuously improving our fiscal discipline. We are committed to ensuring that the capital we have been provided is utilized to maximize shareholder value and our financial runway. Given our efforts to date and our commitment to continuous improvement, we remain confident that our current capital can support operations into 2026. I will now turn the call over to Jeff Kyes to review our financial results. Jeff?