Quanterix Corporation

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Quinterix Corporation Q1, 2026 earnings call. 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. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joshua Young. You may begin.

Thank you, Priya, and good afternoon, everybody. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quintero's President and CEO, and Vandana Sriram, Quintero's Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Investors section of our website. During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements covered under the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, May 6, 2026. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that might cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. To supplement our financial statements presented on a GAAP basis, we have provided certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are used to evaluate our operating performance in a manner that allows for meaningful period-to-period comparison and analysis of trends in our business and our competitors. We believe that such measures are important in comparing current results with other periods' results and assessing our operating performance within our industry. Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with, not as a substitute for, the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures set forth in the presentation posted to our website and in the earnings release issued today. Finally, any percentage changes we discuss will be on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Everett Cunningham.

Everett. Thanks, Josh. Hey, I'm happy to be here with all of you this afternoon. My time at the company has been very exciting and informative, and I'm more confident than ever about the future of Quantarix. Now, in that spirit, I'd like to start off by sharing some of my key observations in my first 100 days with the company. First, we have a passionate employee base full of people who want Quantarix to win and be successful for the long term. Now, based on our customers' feedback, we remain the market leader in early detection of critical disease biomarkers, and that's a great position to be in, one that we must capitalize on. Next, we have an install base of over 2,300 instruments across passionate customers who appreciate the value of our products and services. Our market-leading technologies include Samoa, where we are the leaders in ultrasensitive digital immunoassays for protein biomarker quantification, and Spatial, where we have the highest Plex proteomic platform on the market. Now, these are both businesses where we can generate strong growth and build solid businesses moving forward. Next, our strong foundation positions us to be a leader in the Alzheimer's diagnostics industry. Now, it's early innings. But I believe in our capabilities, and I want to invest in them now. So in summary, I believe that we have a clear path towards profitability for our research tool business and a balance sheet to support our growth ambitions for our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics, with approximately $100 million in cash and no debt. Now, this journey I'm here to undertake is exciting, and I couldn't be more excited to be here. Now, moving from a high-level observation to more of a detailed strategic and tactical consideration, I've gathered a lot of feedback in my first three months here. The company has many strengths to build upon, but we're not currently fulfilling our potential. So as a result, I'm making some operational as well as strategic changes now and in the future quarters that will help us better capitalize on our compelling opportunities. One overriding philosophical change that we must move the company from a mode of integrating and realizing synergies to a mode of investing and growing our business for long-term growth. We are allocating resources to growth opportunities where we see compelling near-term returns while ensuring that we continue to hit our annual operating targets in 2026 and beyond. just as we delivered our $85 million of cost synergies from the ACOIA acquisition. In the first quarter of 2026, we reported $36.4 million in revenue as our end markets remained difficult. While our consumable revenues performed as planned, our revenues from our instrumentation business was slightly softer than expected. Now, some of the shortfalls related to timing issues. but there's also some changes that we're going to be implementing to bring more focus to our sales efforts. These changes will bring benefits as the year progresses. Now, in addition to investing in growth opportunities, we are hard at work at creating a culture of operational execution and delivering quarterly expectations as a key tenant of our organization we are building here at Quantarix. We've established good operational rigors. which can be seen in our gross margin performance, our disciplined approach to spending, and in our ability to consistently hit our cash usage targets. Now, during the last call, I shared details of my 30-year commercial background at companies, such as Illumina, Quest Diagnostics, and Exact Sciences. I know what best-in-class commercial organizations look like. and I've identified multiple opportunities to take Quantarix to the next level of operational performance. As a result, we're making several investments to improve our commercial effectiveness in 2026 and beyond. Now, these investments include we're going to elevate our pharma partnerships in our accelerator business with an experienced senior leader. This important business has slipped in recent quarters, and we are changing that now. I expect that myself, the new leader, and our current professionals in this space will have frequent and candid dialogues with our pharma clients to understand how we can better solve for their needs. Now with our best-in-class technology and solutions, we expect significant improvement this year. Next, we are expanding our team of lead generation representatives to improve our outbound targeting and drive net new business. We're also going to hire new market development leaders that will support the sales team in training, systematic value propositions, and competitive positioning. This is intended to refocus our sales force on their customers while clarifying Quantarix's many advantages of our overall value propositions and our key in markets. We will be harder hitting on differentiation. For example, we will highlight our ability to detect proteins more accurately than others while doing it more consistently. Next, we're leveraging Thermo Fisher's distribution capabilities to improve our online presence. Now, this will have a dual benefit of helping our customers by easing their barriers to access for our products while reducing the manual work of our commercial team to provide pricing quotes. Everything that we're doing is centered on investments that will yield near-term returns to sharpen our focus, expand our opportunity set, and grow our top-line performance in 2026 and beyond. Now, our customers have told me repeatedly that we are the market leader. Armed with this feedback, we're adjusting our course, and importantly, we're moving quickly with a sense of urgency. Now, we're also increasing our investment in our Alzheimer's diagnostics business. Healthcare providers who treat Alzheimer's want a reliable, non-invasive test to drive earlier intervention of this terrible disease. We firmly believe, and industry leaders concur, that we have the best performing and most comprehensive Alzheimer's diagnostics test available today in Lucent AD Complete. And we expect to garner meaningful market share as blood-based biomarker testing continues to grow. So we're making the following investments in our diagnostics business. First, we are hiring a new diagnostics leader reporting directly into me to build and invest in our emerging diagnostics business. With this move, We are bringing in strong leadership to expand and strengthen our diagnostics portfolio as part of our commitment to advancing our position in the nascent Alzheimer's testing market. Next, we are upgrading our next-generation Samoa HDX platform and expect to file for IBD status with the FDA in 2027. Now, this will position us not only to serve research customers who increasingly request IBD solutions for their clinical trials, but it will also set us up to support the distributed IBD model for our lab customers. Next, we are investing in lab infrastructure and implementing new targeted sales and marketing tactics to increase mind share for our Lucent AD complete test in anticipation of FDA clearance in the second half of this year. Now, these investments will build on the strong momentum that we have in our diagnostics business. As a matter of fact, today, we just announced an important and exciting partnership with Tempest AI. Under this agreement, Lucent AD Complete will be integrated into EHR systems at select Tempest partner health system locations as part of the Tempest Next program. Now, patients who meet the clinical criteria will be flagged using a proprietary algorithm, and testing will be available for order at a clinician's discretion. Now, to help fund these investments, we're streamlining our product roadmap. Now, my engagement with customers and collaborators in this sector over the past three months has led us to prioritize our Samoa HDX platform and other investments, both on the research tools and diagnostic sides of the business. Also, we're incorporating learnings and enhancements from our next generation platform into the HDX upgrade. And additionally, We are continuing to gather feedback from our early access launch program that we expect to incorporate over time into the next generation Samoa program. Now on the spatial side of our business, our two key priorities for 2026 are to expand our PCF biomarker panels for discovery applications and to release new reagents for the AT platform to better support clinical applications. Now, from a financial perspective, we continue to expect to reach cash flow break-even performance by the fourth quarter this year. The entire company is committed to building a profitable and sustainable research tools business that are leaders in both spatial and ultra-sensitive proteomics. Now, we expect the investments that I discussed today will help drive commercial effectiveness in the second half of 2026. We are not waiting for better markets. Instead, we're making thoughtful and deliberate decisions to drive quantarics to where the industry is going. And finally, we are excited about our diagnostics business as we are delivering on key milestones this year while welcoming in a proven seasoned business leader to accelerate our performance in this space. Now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Bandana Sriram.

Thank you, Everett, and good afternoon. Total revenue for the first quarter was $36.4 million, an increase of 20% from the previous year. Organic revenue declined by 21%. Revenue from our diagnostics partners was $2.9 million, up meaningfully year over year from $1.6 million in the first quarter of 2025. This reflects increasing volume for our single biomarker test from our diagnostics enablement partners. During the quarter, both of our end markets and our consumables revenue were largely in line with our expectations, but we saw slightly weaker than expected results in instrumentation, with a handful of instrument transactions getting pushed into the second quarter. From a product perspective, Samoa contributed 24 million, a 21% organic revenue decline, and spatial reported 12.4 million, down 26% year-over-year. Instrument revenue was 4 million, comprised of 2.3 million from SIMOA and 1.7 million from spatial instruments. We placed 16 SIMOA and 11 spatial instruments in the quarter. Consumables revenue was 21.4 million. This consisted of 14.5 million in Samoa, and 6.9 million in spatial consumables. Accelerator lab services were 4.3 million, 3.5 million in Samoa, and 800,000 in spatial. Our customer mix was meaningfully skewed to academia, which represented approximately 65% of the business in Q1. On a pro forma basis, assuming Ponteryx and Akoya were combined for the full year, academic revenue for the first quarter declined approximately 16 percent. Pharma revenue declined 33 percent year-over-year, primarily due to fewer large accelerator projects and spatial instruments placed. As Everett already mentioned, we are adding resources and refocusing strategies towards the pharma end market, and we expect to see better results here in the coming quarter. Moving on to the P&L, Gross profit and margin for the first quarter were 15.6 million or 42.7%. Non-GAAP gross profit was 18.5 million and non-GAAP gross margin was 50.9%. The synergies from the ACOIA transaction are apparent here. Even with a reduction in pro forma revenue, we are maintaining non-GAAP gross margin over 50%. Operating expenses for the quarter were 56.9 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $22 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, restructuring, and purchase accounting. Notably, this includes a $19 million one-time write-off from an intangible asset related to the termination of an ACOIA diagnostics development agreement. Offsetting this, other income contains $22 million of liabilities written off, resulting in net non-cash income of $2.3 million from this termination. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $34.7 million, a decrease of roughly $2.3 million sequentially as a result of the synergies. We are now operating the new Quanterex entity at roughly the same level of operating expenses we had when we were a standalone company. As Everett mentioned, As a result of the ACOIA integration actions taken to date, at the end of Q1, we have delivered the 85 million of annualized spot synergies that we committed to as part of the acquisition. The combined entity is operating as expected, and while there are a few remaining actions to complete, we will not continue to report these synergies after this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of 9.8 million, a sequential improvement of $1.5 million despite lower revenues versus the prior quarter. We ended the quarter with $102.6 million of cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, and restricted cash. During the quarter, we used $19 million of cash, of which $4.2 million was related to one-time integration and employee-related costs. Adjusted cash usage during the quarter was 14.7 million. The first quarter is our highest quarter of cash usage, similar to many companies, due to approximately 11 million of annual payments, such as insurance renewals and annual bonuses. As we look ahead, we expect our cash usage to move meaningfully lower as these annual payments are behind us and we make progress towards our cash flow breakeven target. Finally, turning to guidance for 2026, we are maintaining our guidance for the full year 2026, and we continue to expect to report approximately 169 to 174 million of revenue. We expect gap gross margin to be in a range of 41 to 45%, and non-gap gross margins to be in a range of 49 to 53%. In the first quarter, we changed our accounting policy for classifying shipping and handling costs for product sales to record them within gross margin. Historically, they were recorded in SG&A expenses. We believe this classification is preferable because it better aligns costs with related revenue and is consistent with our peers. We reflected this reclassification in our GAAP margin guidance, but there is no change to the underlying non-GAAP margin expectations. We continue to anticipate achieving cash flow breakeven in the second half of the year and expect to end the year with cash in the range of $100 million with no debt. And finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect second quarter revenues to be roughly in line to slightly ahead of Q1, and we expect that the commercial initiatives that we're investing in will help to drive increased revenues in the second half of 2026. I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks.

Thanks, Vandana.

You know, we're moving quickly. We're making decisions that will improve our commercial effectiveness, streamline our product management priorities, and also enable Quadentarics to capitalize on a compelling opportunity in the Alzheimer's diagnostics market. And we're doing all this while moving Quadentarics closer to cash flow break-even performance. Now, with that said, I'd like to turn it over back to Josh for questions and answers.

Thank you. Prila, please assemble the Q&A roster.

And your first question comes from the line of Kyle Nixon with Canaccord. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for the questions. Good to hear all these updates here, changes and so forth. I guess Everett, the one that sticks out to me is the preparation for the IBD submission for HTX in 27. I guess the question is kind of like, why do you need IBD for that system? You talked about I think pharma, important there as well as a distributed model, but maybe just dive into is this needed more for Alzheimer's, neurology, or oncology? Is that part of the aspiration here? And then maybe like a decentralization strategy internationally? I'm curious if that's in the works as well, because, you know, when you think about this compared to some other platforms that we know of, it could be interesting to think about long-term.

Thanks. I appreciate the question. And I can just go back to my last three months of, you know, being out in the market, talking to customers. You know, we're investing in our HDX platform because it's our workhorse. We have a really good, robust install base. It's our business install base. the timing of it fits nicely to our diagnostics build-out. And also, you know, with making the machine more reliable, it's also going to benefit our research customers too. So, you know, when we build the machine, it's for two reasons. First of all, it will solidify our research-only business. It will get us ready for diagnostics. And it will give us what I would just say optionality to have a distributed plan, you know, for our lab partners, both domestically and internationally. And that's why we've made the choice of really prioritizing our focus in getting that machine IBD ready in 2027.

Yeah, okay, that was great. And then maybe just to follow up, what's the status of the Samoa One platform? And honestly, I think you were talking about like an early access last quarter. And that platform, I believe, had some translational use cases, like maybe higher Plex. And so I feel like given the focus on pharma going forward, it could have actually aligned with that. So could you just give us an update there?

Yeah, absolutely, and thanks. We're still very focused on being technology leaders in the marketplace, and Samoa One is part of our next generation. We are still doing early access with Samoa One. We're getting feedback from our customer, and we're looking to take that feedback and actually help us with our HDX next generation and our HDX upgrade. So Samoa One still is part of our portfolio, and we're getting really good feedback.

Awesome. And then finally, on proteomics competition relevant recently, obviously, you guys obviously targeting low-plex, a little bit of mid-plex, and you got the sensitivity advantage that probably is driving this firm hold on the low-plex market. Can you just talk about what you're seeing competitively over the last few months and maybe going forward and just speak to your conviction level that you're going to maintain this share or increase it?

Yeah, we feel, and I'll have Bond to help me, too. We feel really good about our position in the spatial low-plex market. You know, we have 10 times the number of low-plex assays available in the marketplace compared to our competition. Our install base in this space is, you know, is larger than our competition. You know, Quantarix focuses on part of the translational research market that includes later stage clinical trials of which reproducibility is really, really important. Again, feedback from our customers, we lead in that space. Where I see benefits of our spatial business moving forward, our tools, our technology is market leading. We're going to improve our reach to our customers. We're putting in more marketing investments. We have amazing, exciting launches in the spatial space. And we feel that that's going to give us a boost in the second half. I don't know if you want to mention anything else.

No, I think that's exactly right. You know, on the similar front, while there's been a lot of talk of competition, I think all of the data and all of the research suggests that we have the broadest menu as well as the greatest level of sensitivity, as well as lot-to-lot and lab-to-lab reproducibility versus anyone in the market. And then on the spatial side, you know, with a concentration both in the research and in the clinical side, there's a lot of exciting things going on there. As Everett said, we're now going to kind of turbocharge that to make sure we're getting the right share of market that we deserve.

All right. Super helpful, guys.

Thanks.

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Puneet Soda with Learing Partners. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi Everett and team. Thanks for taking my question. So I'll ask my questions in one. First, Everett, great to see the actions you're taking on the diagnostic side, bringing in leadership and investing into that business. Just wanted to get a sense of the level of investment that you need there. And how should we expect, you know, what should we expect for Alzheimer's in the overall guide here? This looks like a second half weighted guide. So just wanted to get a sense there. And then could you maybe also elaborate, you know, as you transition some of the business or the focus from the core tool side to the diagnostic side, Is there a chance for any air pocket? Obviously, that's a question that we frequently get from investors. Thank you.

Maybe I'll start out with just the diagnostics investment, Puneet. Listen, I feel good about bringing in a seasoned leader. I'll give you a little bit of background. I can't name the person specifically yet, but in a couple of weeks, we'll be able to name it. This leader has 25-plus years in diagnostics. I've worked with this leader before. They know not only the sales side, but they know important customers in this space. They've had really good payer and reimbursement interactions. They know the blood-based biomarker business. And so it's like the perfect fit for Quantirix and where we are now. So that's one. And this person, along with many others here at Quantirix, are going to help me build out that end-to-end plan. What we're investing this year I feel is really appropriate. We're adding right now feet on the street that will help us sell Lucent AD complete and also help with our lab partnership that we have going now. We're investing in clinical utility studies. Those clinical utility studies we'll read out in the second half. And we're thinking about what is the next phase that we need also to continue to move this forward. And then just, to me, I look at this as a surround sound type thing when I think of diagnostics. Our lab infrastructure needs to be ready for order to cash. And so we're investing in our lab infrastructure, too. We will be ready once we get FDA, you know, clearance in the second half. We will be ready to what I would say scale. The last thing I'll mention for a diagnostic standpoint, and I've always thought this way, even back in my exact sciences and quest diagnostics days, we're not going to do this alone. We're going to have smart, unique partnerships to help us scale this business. And we started now. Our partnership with Tempest AI is a great example of what we're doing and how we're creating scale in the business. We have lifeline screening. Again, more scale in helping us get our Lucent AD and our Lucent AD complete test out there. We'll do the same once we get FDA clearance of how do we organically build scale, but how do we create really smart partnerships moving forward.

Yeah, and to address your questions on what this means from a financial perspective, I We've always had a baseline level of investment in Alzheimer's diagnostics, frankly, for the last three or four years at this point. What we're doing in this plan right now is being very, very deliberate on where our investments go. We've streamlined projects in other parts of the business where perhaps that payback was not as immediate as these are. And that's what's helping us fund both the commercial acceleration as well as the acceleration in the diagnostics platforms. And then from a revenue perspective, as you know, we did almost 10 million of revenue from our partners in 2025. Our expectation is that we'd have about the same level in 2026. We'll probably have less instrument sales, but an increase in consumable sales as our partners start to do more tests. We're not counting on revenues from direct testing in 2026. We think it'll take some time for that to inflect. If that happens sooner, that'll be helpful to us, but we're not counting on that picking up very quickly.

And, Puneet, the last part of your question in terms of, you know, how do you balance both? You know, my first three months here, I've had a lot of interaction with our commercial colleagues, with Ben Meadows, our new chief commercial officer. We have a solid research business, research tools business. The relationship that they have with the customers and the academic space and the research space, it's really, really deep. And we're going to help them get even deeper with the enhancements that I talked about during my remarks. It's an and. And we're going to build up that same expertise on the diagnostic side. You know, today we have the appropriate size of our diagnostics business just based on where we are. But the new leader that's coming in will build a plan That will assume, again, FDA clearance. We have a good price crosswalk. We're going to get scalable reimbursement. We will be able to toggle very quickly to build out scale in our diagnostics.

We're going to balance on both research, tools, and diagnostics. Guneet, are you still there, or why don't we go to the next question, please?

Yes, the next question comes from the line of Dan Brennan with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you. Thanks for the questions. Maybe first one just was already kind of asked in one way in terms of the guide. So if you're kind of flattish in Q2, it implies almost like a 40% back half sequential, like second half, first half. So could you just break down a little bit more What would be the drivers of that? Do you want to share any color, maybe instruments, consumables, and service? Maybe core, quantaric versus spatial? And then I can have a few more questions. Thank you.

Yeah, Dan, let me... Let me talk about the investments that we're making that these aren't investments that have a, you know, a year ROI. You know, I'm just taking this from my past experience of, hey, we need to build out momentum, you know, within the next few quarters. These are the investments that we're making. Let me just maybe give a couple of them color to give confidence of our second half ramp. Our lead generation reps are critical to our growth. Our lead generation reps are working with our marketing team and taking our robust leads that we have and making them credible, making phone calls to ensure that when they hand them over to our sales reps, those leads are ready to buy. We've already instituted lead generation reps, and in the first three weeks, we're seeing a market difference in terms of net new opportunities. So I look at, in the second half, our net new opportunity growth to be absolutely better than it was in Q1. Secondly, our marketing. We have appropriately put investments in marketing on both the Samoa and spatial side of the business to develop more of a multi-channel approach. So I always like to say we're selling when people are sleeping. So we feel that that's going to be a major benefit to our business. And then lastly, what I'll add is, You know, we are looking strategically at areas to where we could put just more feet on the street on the commercial team today. And like I said, Ben Meadows and team have done a good job of, again, not overhauling so we create disruption, but strategically putting more feet on the street so we can get more opportunities in the second half.

I think the only thing I'd add there, Dan, is there's also a lot happening on the product side. We recently announced a new molecular barcoding option for customers, which gives our spatial customers a whole new channel for self-serve opportunities on the assays. We also have a handful of assay launches, as we generally do, that are now coming online and are expected to have more of an impact in the second half of the year.

Great. Okay. Are you guys assuming end markets improve as part of the outlook? Obviously, it's been challenging, but we've heard various signs of things getting a little bit better here. Just wondering how you think about that as you contemplate like the improvement, in addition, obviously, all the critical company specific things you're doing.

Yeah, so on the end markets, on the pharma side, you know, we do think that the end markets are strong. It's really been a little bit of the focus that's been lacking on our side, which we've already started to correct and we're starting to see the results on. The academic side was a little bit slow in the first three, four months of the year. As you know, overall funding flowdown has been a little bit slow. So, you know, we're not counting on a big rebound over there, but we do think there might be a small amount of improvement as we get towards the end of the year. But we're not assuming markets change materially. We're really assuming that a lot of the growth is going to happen from our actions, both on the product side as well as on the commercial side.

And the only thing I'll add, again, just from an execution standpoint, in the first quarter, has been very, very solid on our side. We're not waiting for markets to improve. And I think those conversations, that consistent, you know, relationship connection that we have with our critical customers, when markets do improve, we will be there to capitalize on that.

Great. And then you list, I think, four studies in the press release or maybe in the deck. Are any of those going to be – I mean, obviously, I'm sure they're all important. Otherwise, you wouldn't have listed them. But do any of them stand out more than not in terms of either that'll play in the FDA, play into the label, or they all just be pieces of the puzzle as you build, you know, the marketing plan on your diagnostic assay?

Yeah, listen, I like the studies that we have. First of all, they're with three credible partners. The study dynamics that I've been reviewing on a weekly basis, you know, we're hitting really good enrollment rates. The settings are mostly in that where people are being treated in the specialty care and primary care setting. It demonstrates how Lucent AD Complete changes clinical decision-making and patient outcomes. So we're looking at the right things from a clinical utility everyday diagnostic standpoint. I will also add, too, I'm excited about the timing. The timing is spot on for us to read out in the second half of 2026. And that will just bolster our meetings with payers to get, you know, widespread reimbursement.

If I can see one final, and just on the spatial side for Akoya, since you do break it out, like, is there an implicit assumption, and maybe you've already done this at 4Q when you set the initial guidance, but how are you thinking about kind of the contribution organically for spatial in 2026? Thanks a lot.

Yeah, we didn't break out the guide between Samoa and spatial just because, you know, they are starting to, we are starting to kind of report them all together. Our expectation of mix between Samoa and spatial between 2025 and 2026 was relatively consistent, though.

Terrific. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, that's not This now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining Yumi Now Disconnect.