Quantum-Si Incorporated

Okay, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the 2024 Thurker Quantum SI Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. As of this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is pre-recorded. I'd like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Doug Farrell, Vice President of Investment Relations. Please go ahead.

Doug Farrell Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier today, Quantum SI released financial results for the third quarter ended September 30th, 2024. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Joining me today are Jeff Hawkins, our President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Jeff Kyes, our 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 laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially 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 date today, November 12th, 2024. 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 be referring to certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable gap measures as included in the press release filed earlier today. Additionally, I'd like to remind everyone that we'll be hosting an Investor Day in New York City next Wednesday, November 20th. You can find a link to register for the event on the Investor Relations section of our website. We'll also be participating in the Canaccord Conference in New York City on November 21st. We look forward to having the opportunity to meet with investors at both of these events. With that, let me turn the call over to Jeff Hawkins.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. On today's call, we will provide a business update, review our operating results for the third quarter of 2024, and provide our guidance for the balance of the year. After that, we will open the call for questions. I will begin with an update on our three corporate priorities for 2024, to accelerate commercial adoption, to deliver on our innovation roadmap, and to preserve our financial strength. Our first corporate priority is to accelerate commercial adoption. During the third quarter of 2024, we made continued progress in the commercial ramp up of Platinum. We believe that we are well positioned to be an industry leading company in the rapidly growing proteomics market. Our confidence comes from our best in class technology, first mover advantage, and robust intellectual property portfolio. We believe that our technology has the potential to create large new market opportunities that can drive our growth over the coming years. Consistent with the commentary from many of our peers, we observed some lengthening of the sales cycle in the third quarter. Our third quarter 2024 revenue of $787,000 was below our expectations. While we did not lose any deals, we did see customers that opted to push out their purchase of an instrument to a later date than originally communicated. At this early stage of commercialization, a small number of deals being delayed can be the difference between meeting our expectations or not. As we look to the fourth quarter, there are both headwinds and tailwinds to consider. I am pleased to report that we have filled most of the open sales territories I mentioned on our last call. That said, there is a ramp up period in our industry of around 90 days for any new salesperson to become fully effective. So we expect the full benefit of these new sales professionals to positively impact our results by early next year. Further, in September, we appointed Todd Bennett as our chief commercial officer. Todd brings an outstanding track record with more than 30 years of experience in life sciences and diagnostics, and his background includes commercial leadership roles at Luminex, Abbott, Roche, and Immucor. Todd has already taken steps to streamline our sales process, bolster our training programs, and enable new channel partners to extend our commercial reach. On the positive side, we are observing a rapid improvement in our sales force execution and an overall acceleration of our sales pipeline under Todd's leadership. Additionally, our industry often sees an uptick in capital spending in the fourth quarter as customers look to deploy any remaining budget by year end. While it is not yet clear how significant this uptick may be, we are well positioned to benefit from any end-of-year capital purchasing given our instrument price point. On balance, it is likely that we will not achieve our full year revenue guidance. That said, we are confident that we will generate a sequential increase in revenue in Q4 of 2024 and expect to surpass $1 million in quarterly revenue for the first time. We are laser focused on commercial execution with clear strategies in place to try to get as close to our full year guidance as possible. Beyond commercial execution, we have continued to push our scientific affairs initiatives, including adding resources to our scientific affairs group to help customers integrate Platinum into their research programs, as well as generate new publications that increase the awareness of the unique capabilities of Platinum. These efforts will result in customer data being released at industry conferences and through peer-reviewed publications and are important proof points that help accelerate adoption of our technology in the broader market. Last month, we had a very productive meeting at the Human Proteome Organization World Congress in Germany. This included poster presentations to highlight how platinum can address protein applications, such as detecting variants and post-translational modifications, as well as protein barcoding. We also hosted a session in which researchers from Northwestern University presented on integrating our platinum platform with top-down mass spectrometry to enhance proteoform analysis. Overall, we are making great progress on the commercial front. Given the commercial execution improvements being made under Todd's leadership are relatively recent, the full impact of these changes is still in front of us. My optimism about our ability to expand adoption of our technology across all market segments is as high as it has ever been. Our second priority is to deliver on our innovation roadmap. Since realigning our R&D programs last fall, we have jump-started an exciting new cycle of innovation. I don't want to preempt our investor day next week, but you'll have the opportunity to learn more about exciting initiatives we have taken on to expand our technology capabilities and really shape the long-term future of quantum SI. We plan to demonstrate groundbreaking advances in hardware, consumables, chemistry, and software that we believe puts us on a clear path to scale our output per sample to billions of reads. We believe these advancements will open large new market opportunities and will position us to become the clear overall frontrunner in proteomics. In addition, we will also showcase important new partnerships that will help accelerate the delivery of this cycle of innovation to the market. Next, I am pleased to report that our next version of library preparation kits and our barcoding kit are on track for launch during the fourth quarter. The new library prep kit is expected to reduce the starting sample input amount, expand the range of proteins that are compatible with our system, and increase the overall sample success rate. The barcoding kit is expected to provide customers a significant reduction in sample prep time prior to sequencing, while also improving the sensitivity and dynamic range of the application. Our continued innovation has not gone unnoticed. We were recently honored by Frost and Sullivan with their prestigious Technology Innovation Leadership Award. An independent panel of experts selected QSI based on our pioneering technology and contribution to advancing the field of proteomic research. They also recognized our ongoing commitment to innovation and the robust portfolio of intellectual property that is foundational to our long-term success. Additionally, last week we attended the American Society of Human Genetics Conference, where we showcase the collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz. Researchers from Dr. Felton's lab demonstrated how they are using next generation protein sequencing with platinum to augment genomic and transcriptomic data and better capture the full complexity of biology. Overall, our innovation pipeline is on track and very exciting. Once we complete our investor day on November 20th, we will be able to have deeper conversations on the details of our roadmap and how it is shaping up for the future. Our third priority is to preserve our financial strength. We continue to remain laser focused on financial discipline that balances maximum output of our innovation roadmap with preserving financial capital. Jeff will provide more details, but we are pleased with our progress and we remain committed to the sufficient use of our capital. I will now turn the call over to Jeff Kyes to review our financial results. Thanks, Jeff.