3/3/2026

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Quantum SI fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Lindsay Rishi. Please go ahead.

speaker
Lindsay Rishi
Host

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier today, Quantum SI released financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31st, 2025. 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 the federal securities laws. 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 Relief. 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, March 3, 2026. 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 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, let me turn the call over to Jeff Hawkins.

speaker
Jeff Hawkins
President and Chief Executive Officer

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. On today's call, we will provide a business update and review our operating results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2025 and provide an outlook for 2026. After that, we will open the call for questions. Before diving into specific updates, I want to first frame at a high level how we are thinking about 2026. We expect that 2026 will be a transition year with revenue primarily driven by consumable utilization from our installed base and some new placements, very modest new capital sales, and a laser focus on Proteus development and preparing the market for a strong commercial ramp in 2027 and beyond. As a reminder, our three corporate priorities for 2025 are as follows, to accelerate commercial adoption, to deliver on our innovation roadmap, and to preserve our financial strength. Our first corporate priority was to accelerate commercial adoption. Our revenue for the fourth quarter was $451,000 as top line results continued to be impacted by the capital sales headwinds in the market. As we look to 2026, we believe that our placement program will continue to allow us to engage with new customers and capture consumable revenue, but that capital sales of our first generation Platinum Pro instrument will be very limited given the deliberate focus on market preparation for the Proteus launch at the end of 2026. We will provide more color on this topic throughout the call. As a reminder, during the second quarter of 2025, we announced the launch of an expanded set of instrument acquisition options that allow customers to have our instrument in their lab and purchase and run consumables without having to find the capital dollars to acquire the instrument upfront. By all measures, this program has been a success and we view it as a key market development program to continue with during 2026 as we build momentum into the Proteus launch. Since launching the program, we have secured 17 new customers spanning academic labs, pharma, and biotech. It has allowed us to access key opinion leaders in some of our direct markets that we had not had access to prior to this program. We view these labs as strong long-term prospects for Proteus, and we believe that being able to engage with them now and have their laboratory staff get hands-on experience with our technology will improve the prospects of them adopting Proteus once launched. In addition to capturing consumable revenue from these 17 customers, we are also building a strong publication pipeline that will help to further demonstrate the value of our technology across a range of applications. Turning now to scientific affairs, as we have previously shared, developing a publication pipeline takes focus and effort over an extended period of time. During 2025, we had five manuscripts submitted for publication and built a strong pipeline of additional studies and manuscripts for future publication. The time we invested in this area in 2025 continues to yield results, and we have already seen three new manuscripts released via publication or preprints in the first two months of 2026. More important than the number of new manuscripts is the range of applications we are beginning to see emerge. One of the papers from Dr. Low of Stanford University showcased the potential of our technology to be applied in the field of clinical proteomics to address complex conditions like hemoglobinopathies that are not easily resolved using current technologies. The second example of a new application of our technology was captured in a manuscript from the researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. They described a modified workflow that enabled biological sample to result in under 24 hours for rapid pathogen and toxin detection, an area that is underserved by existing technologies. We believe that these papers and others in the pipeline will continue to demonstrate that the potential opportunity for our technology extends well beyond the basic research markets that we operate in today. We believe that this is important since these new applications move us towards customers who typically have high consumable utilization rates and repeat ordering patterns. Beyond these initiatives, we continue to monitor and evaluate several partnership opportunities that may further accelerate certain components of our development activities, spanning from new customer applications to sample preparation and enrichment and applications of artificial intelligence tools that could extract deeper insights from the protein sequencing data our system generates. Novel enrichment technologies for very low abundance, high-value biomarker analysis is a key area of interest for us, and we are currently exploring some promising partnership opportunities in this space. As I stated earlier, our focus in 2026 is on the development of the market for Proteus, which we expect to launch at the end of this year's. This started in earnest at our October 2025 Investor and Analyst Day, where we show data demonstrating that Proteus is surpassing our first generation technology across all key performance metrics. While we indicated during the event that sharing the early Proteus data would likely impact Platinum Pro sales, we believed that sharing this data would allow us to more effectively engage with potential customers and channel partners about budgeting for Proteus well in advance of its launch. Based on customer and channel partner feedback to date and to continue to advance the Proteus pre-launch discussions, we decided to pull forward the announcement of our list price from the second quarter of 2026 to today. Accordingly, we announced that the list price for Proteus will be $425,000. We believe this list price strikes the appropriate balance between capturing the premium value of Proteus and the expected launch capabilities, while also making the platform more accessible to a larger number of potential customers than existing technologies. Our second priority was to deliver on our innovation roadmap. 2025 was a successful year across all of our development programs. We launched our version 4 sequencing kit and an expanded set of 24 barcodes during the third quarter of 2025, our version 3 library prep kit in the fourth quarter of 2025, and most importantly, demonstrated sequencing on a prototype Proteus system which exceeded our current system across all performance metrics at our November 2025 Investor and Analyst Day. We also shared our progress and plans for expanded proteome coverage and PTM analysis capabilities, as well as the feasibility of a controlled cleavage chemistry, a critical piece of core technology that ensures we have a clear, executable path to our long-term goal of enabling de novo protein sequencing at scale. As we look to 2026, our full focus is on Proteus development. I am pleased to report our instrument development efforts remain on track. Our prototype systems continue to perform well and are fully deployed within our internal R&D efforts. We have also received our first fully integrated Proteus instruments and are working with our partners to continue to manufacture and deliver additional instruments to support the scale-up of our internal development work. I want to provide an update on our efforts to improve proteome coverage, which spans two key areas. One, expanding the number and frequency at which we detect individual amino acids, and two, the sequencing read length we achieve. I would like to take a few minutes to touch on both areas. First, during our November 2025 Investor and Analyst Day, we shared details about our proprietary amino acid recognizer development program, specifically, We shared about how we had recently seen a significant improvement in our performance of developing new amino acid recognizers through a combination of applying state of the art artificial intelligence tools trained on our proprietary data and by scaling up the throughput of our candidate screening and selection process. At the November 2025 event, we stated that we believed that we would be able to launch Proteus with detection of 18 amino acids and would further demonstrate detection of all 20 amino acids in 2026. I am pleased to report that we are progressing ahead of expectations on both goals and expect to provide a more quantitative update on this topic in the near future. The second component to proteome coverage is sequencing read length. Prior to sequencing, customers prepare their protein sample using our library prep kit. The library prep process digests the proteins into smaller pieces called peptides. and then attaches a linker that allows the peptides to bind to the nanowells on our consumable. Based on the method of digestion our library prep kit deploys, the average length of the peptides generated is approximately 18 to 20 amino acids. As we shared at our November 2025 event, the early data on Proteus indicated that the average sequencing read length on Proteus was superior to our existing platform. This means that the number of amino acids we can sequence per peptide was more than we can with platinum. A longer sequencing read length is important as we look to unlock certain high-value applications for customers like deep PTM analysis and profiling. I am pleased to report that we are continuing to observe longer sequencing on Proteus, and based on continued promising results, we have dedicated some members of our R&D team to focus on maximizing sequencing read length. We look forward to providing more quantitative updates on this area in the months ahead. Finally, I want to take a moment to review our progress and forward plans with library prep. We launched our version 3 library prep kit during the fourth quarter of 2025. The version 3 kit enables customers to sequence samples with as little as 1 to 2 nanograms of protein. Overall, the version 3 kit delivered a more than 100-fold reduction in input required over our prior library prep kit. As part of that development effort, the R&D team identified some potential avenues to explore for even further reduction in input requirements. We have a small team working on technical feasibility now and we'll have more updates to provide on our next earnings call. Our third priority was to preserve our financial strength. We believe that the data will continue to demonstrate that Proteus is not only a new architecture with greater throughput and automation, but also a significant leap forward in terms of sequencing performance and application breadth. We also believe that Proteus is well positioned to be the long-term driver of commercial adoption, revenue growth, and our path to profitability. We are fortunate to have a strong balance sheet that allows us to execute on this strategic plan with a focus on long-term value creation, but also acknowledge that the Proteus focus in 2026 will impact top-line results. We are committed to continuing to operate with a high level of fiscal discipline while ensuring the core strategic initiatives are appropriately funded to deliver on time and with the capabilities customers are asking for. I will now turn the call over to Jeff to review our financial results.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-