Seer, Inc.

today and thank you for standing by. Welcome to this year's first quarter 2025 earnings conference 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'll 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 being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Kelly Gura, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, CIRA released financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025. If you've not received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investor at CIRA.bio. In addition, during today's conference call, we will be referencing a slide presentation that can be accessed on the events and presentation section of CIRA's investor relations website. Joining me today from CIRA is Omid Farrokhzad, Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board, and David Horne, Chief Financial Officer and President. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are 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 materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in the Pressure and Security Issue today. For a more complete list and description, please see the Risk Factors section of the company's quarterly report on Form 10Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2025, and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, CIRA just claims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains prime sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, May 13, 2025. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Omid.

Thanks, Kelly, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. I will begin our call today by providing updates on our business, and I will then turn the call over to David to provide more detail on our financial results for the first quarter of 2025, as well as our outlook for the full year. Beginning with slide three, we have always believed that technology will redefine the trajectory of proteomics and make a meaningful impact within the scientific community. While near-term macroeconomics volatility, including the recently introduced tariffs, and ongoing government funding challenges are expected to persist and limit visibility for the balance of the year, our long-term vision and opportunity remains unchanged. In fact, I'm more confident in that belief than ever before. We delivered a strong start to the year with 4.2 million of revenue in the first quarter, driven by increasing demand for the Porter Graph product suite. We shipped as many instruments in the first quarter as were shipped in all of 2024, and saw continued traction for SEER technology and our access center or stack. Our impact is clearly reflected in the high-quality data our customers are generating and the acceleration of publication that further validate the power of our technology. Despite the heightened macroeconomic uncertainty and headwinds that our customers are facing, we're reiterating our full year 2025 revenue guidance of 17 to 18 million, representing 24% -over-year growth at the midpoint. As the policy landscape continues to evolve, we will closely monitor the impact of U.S. policy changes on our customers as we navigate through this dynamic environment. We continue to view our strong balance sheet of approximately 285 million in cash, cash equivalent, and investments as a key differentiator in the current environment, and we remain disciplined in deploying it. In this context, we're making highly concentrated and impactful investments in R&D to execute on our product roadmap and continuing our share repurchase program to benefit shareholders as we believe there is a significant dislocation between our core value proposition and what our stock price reflects today. While we've not seen direct effects on our supply chain to date from the recent tariff implementations, we are actively de-risking our business in two ways. For the near term, we have worked with our suppliers to ensure price stability at pre-tariff levels over the coming year, and for the longer term, we're evaluating our cost structure and taking steps to improve our margins. We're confident in our strategy, our operational discipline, and the growing demand for deep and balanced proteomics at scale. Now, I'd like to walk through our recent progress in our core initiatives of validating and enhancing access to the Protograph product suite in more detail. Starting with the validation of our performance on slide four, we proudly believe that the -in-class quality and performance of the Protograph product suite for deep and balanced proteomics at scale makes us a trusted partner for our customers. We started SEER with the vision to change the art of proteomics by providing unprecedented access at scale to the complexity of the proteome for widespread research. SEER is based on an extremely strong scientific foundation for nanoparticle engineering that formed the basis for the Protograph product suite. As I take a moment to reflect, I believe the growing body of evidence demonstrates that we have already executed on this vision by making the previously impractical unbiased proteomic studies readily possible today. Our customers have repeatedly demonstrated the power of our technology and the differentiated biological insight they get from the Protograph product suite. This is recognized in hundreds of abstracts, webinars, seminars, and talks. We now have 42 customer publications, preprints, and reviews showcasing the capabilities of our platform, with many appearing in high-impact journals. Our customers are discovering novel biology that will solve challenges in human health, growing existing end markets that leverage proteomics, and creating entirely new end markets that do not exist today. The combination of the Protograph and MassSpec is enabling the scientific community to conduct unbiased proteomic studies with a step change in scale and complexity. We see a future where millions of proteomes will be interrogated in an unbiased way, mirroring what we saw in genomics with increased throughput and accelerated adoption and a reduction in cost. But in proteomics, I believe the slope of adoption will be even steeper, the pace of discovery even more accelerated, and most importantly, the biological insight that will be on lock will be truly unprecedented. In the past three years, we've started to see researchers move beyond pilot studies of tens of samples and opting to run studies of hundreds of samples, and in many cases thousands. To that end, I'm pleased to share that Discovery Life Sciences, one of our centers of excellence and a leading OMIS service provider, in collaboration with us, has secured a significant contract from a new customer to run a 10,000 sample study on the Protograph product suite and the Orbitrep Astral Mass Spectrometer. This customer conducted an extremely thorough and extensive evaluation process on the commercially available proteomic technologies and service providers. They concluded that the combination of the Protograph product suite, the Orbitrep Astral, and the Discovery's expertise in MassSpec proteomic services would produce the deepest and most robust data set. We are excited to be engaging in more conversations for larger scale projects, including multiple population scale studies that would leverage the Protograph product suite. As our platform gains broader awareness, there is a clear shift towards significantly larger studies, marking a key milestone for the proteomics market. While the size and timing of these projects may lead to some quarterly revenue variability, the momentum is encouraging. We believe Cere is uniquely positioned as the leading unbiased and scalable platform to enable the next generation of proteomics discovery. While we believe that we have already changed the arc of deep, unbiased proteomics, we're still at the very beginning of this journey. By leveraging the Protograph product suite, our customers are starting to uncover novel biological insights. Looking ahead, I'm really excited for our presence at the AFMS conference in a couple of weeks. The need for our scalable, deep unbiased proteomics platform has never been greater. Now moving to slide five to take a closer look at our progress with accelerating access to the Protograph product suite. We continue to see strong demand for STAC, which lowers the barrier of adoption of the Protograph product suite. STAC allows the Protograph user to run samples in their own lab and have free run-demand spec or alternatively, provides -to-end services from sample to proteomics data and analysis. Encouragingly, in Q1, half of our instrument shipments were acquired by customers who had previously accessed our STAC, representing the highest number of STAC to instrument conversions in a single quarter. Furthermore, nearly half of STAC customers in Q1 were new. Taken together, STAC continues to be an excellent source of revenue and concurrently serves as a strategic and marketing asset by allowing users to experience the power of the Protograph and for some of these users to bring their instrument in-house. Our customers are increasingly recognizing the value of our technology and the data that is being generated from it. Given the level of demand we're seeing, we have aligned our site into operational efficiencies that will expand the capacity of STAC. We look forward to seeing more data generated on the Protograph as more customers get access to our technology. Our Strategic Instrument Placement Program or SIPP continues to be an important catalyst for adoption. As a reminder, SIPP removes barriers by utilizing available operating budgets for our customers who are capital constrained, particularly in the current macroeconomic environment. Under this program, we will loan an instrument to a customer and an upfront purchase of consumable kits. A portion of our SIPP instruments in Q1 was through this program. Now moving on to provide an update on our expanded partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific to co-market and sell the Protograph product suite alongside their Orbiter of Astral Mass Spectrometer. As a reminder, this powerful pairing makes it possible for the time to achieve population scale deep unbiased proteomics with exceptional robustness and reproducibility. In addition, this partnership further strengthens our commercial reach and makes it easier for our customers to access a seamless -to-end solution for unbiased proteomics. We completed training of the Thermo Fisher US Salesforce in the first quarter and the next of our partnership includes the training of the European Salesforce. Our respective sales teams are increasingly collaborating to identify and capture opportunities that are mutually beneficial and we have already seen traction in several regions. In late April, Thermo Fisher Scientific hosted a compelling webinar featuring Dr. Brennan Keating that highlighted the impact combining the Protograph product suite with Orbiter of Astral Mass Spectrometer. This study demonstrated how deep unbiased proteomics profiling can reveal critical physiologic and immunologic changes in xenotransplant recipients. These insights provided valuable information on transplanted organ viability and host responses, which are key factors in advancing xenotransplantation as a viable solution to the organ shortage crisis. Looking ahead, we have a number of customer webinars coming up to provide further insight into what is possible using the Protograph product suite. On our last earning call, we highlighted the launch of our CellLycid application on the Protograph XT, which extended the power of Protograph XT beyond plasma and tissue analysis. We have been very pleased with the feedback around the newly launched CellLycid application. As a reminder, we now have over 10 Protograph protocols available to conduct proteomic analysis and a diverse list of sample types, including non-human plasma or serum, conditioned media, cerebrospinal fluid, and dry blood samples. We plan to continue expanding the capabilities of the platform throughout the year. I am deeply proud of the team's hard work and execution this quarter. Looking ahead, I'm even more excited for the new data and catalysts that are coming over the next few months and will serve as a tailwind for Seer. With that, I will now turn the call over to David. Thanks, Amid.

Turning to slide 6, total revenue for the first quarter of 2025 was $4.2 million, representing an increase of 37% compared to $3.1 million in the first quarter of 2024. It was primarily due to higher instrument consumable and service revenue. Revenue recognized primarily consisted of sales of Protograph instruments, consumable kits, and service revenue, of which $52,000 was attributed to related parties. Product revenue for the first quarter of 2025 was $2.9 million, including $5,000 of related party revenue, and consisted of sales of Protograph instruments and consumable kits. As Amid mentioned, while we continue to see pressure on CAPEX budgets and elongated sales cycles for the outright purchase of new instruments, we were pleased by the traction we saw in terms of instrument shipments in the first quarter. Service revenue was $1.2 million for the first quarter of 2025, including $47,000 of related party revenue, and primarily consisted of revenue related to stack service projects. We continue to be encouraged by customer interests in running projects through stack and their ability to gain access to Protograph data, including a significant number of new customers. Sample volumes increased on a -over-year basis. As we have stated previously, we may continue to undertake projects for key strategic studies and other marketing efforts that will result in additional presentations and publications in the near term, but are conducted at a lower price point than our typical stack service projects. Other revenue was $60,000 for the first quarter of 2025, and consisted of lease and shipping revenue. Total gross profit was $2.1 million for the first quarter of 2025, representing a gross margin of 49%, compared to $1.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, representing a gross margin of 44%. Gross margins were driven by a higher mix of service revenue in the first quarter of 2025, relative to the first quarter of 2024. We continue to expect variability in our gross margin on a -by-quarter basis, since the proportion of instrument consumable and service revenue will fluctuate in any given quarter. We continue to expect overall volatility in our gross margins on a quarterly basis. At scale, we continue to believe our long-term gross margins will be in the range of 70 to 75%. Total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $22.8 million, including $4.5 million of stock-based compensation, a decrease of 14% compared to $26.6 million, including $7.2 million of stock-based compensation in the first quarter of 2024. Research and development expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $11.4 million, a decrease of 7% compared to the $12.3 million in the first quarter of 2024. The decrease in R&D expenses was primarily due to decreases in stock-based compensation and laboratory expenses. Selling general and administrative expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $11.4 million, a decrease of 20% compared to $14.3 million in the first quarter of 2024. The decrease in SG&A expenses was primarily due to a decrease in stock-based compensation expenses. Net loss for the first quarter of 2025 was $19.9 million, compared to $20.7 million in the first quarter of 2024. Free cash flow loss was approximately $12.1 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2025. We continue to expect free cash flow loss to be range of $40 to $45 million for the year. In addition, we continued our share purchase activities in the first quarter of 2025, since we continue to believe that there is a significant dislocation in our share price. In the first quarter, we repurchased 352,000 Class A common shares at an average price of $1.91 per share. As of May 6, 2025, we had approximately 54.8 million Class A and 4 million Class B common shares outstanding. We ended the quarter with approximately $285 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. Importantly, we believe that with our current cash, cash equivalents, and investments on hand, we have sufficient capital to reach cash flow breakeven. While a long-term target is to become a profitable company, we are balancing that goal with the investments needed to innovate and build the company to drive sustained growth in We aim to continue managing our significant cash balance in an extremely prudent manner and believe that our strong balance sheet puts us at a significant advantage to capture the massive opportunity ahead. Turning now to our outlook for the year on slide seven, we continue to expect revenue to be in the range of $17 to $18 million for 2025, representing growth of 24% at the midpoint over the full year 2024. Our guidance range assumes our customers continue to face budget pressures, government funding uncertainty, and macroeconomic volatility as it relates to tariffs. The NIH and government funding environment remains extremely uncertain and dynamic. As a reminder, in 2024, revenue from academic and government entities represented approximately 30% of our overall revenue. Any fluctuations in NIH government and academic funding may impact these customers in 2025. In the last week, we have seen potential tariffs for pharmaceutical companies to be discussed, which will add additional uncertainty for our commercial customers, the impact of which remains to be seen. While we were encouraged by our results in Q1, particularly around instrument shipments, we also saw some customers pause spending given this uncertainty. Therefore, we remain cautious due to this significant macroeconomic uncertainty, but are reaffirming our revenue guidance at this time. In terms of tariff impact on us, we have not seen any direct effects on our supply chain since our key suppliers manufacture the products we purchase from them in the United States. However, we are actively monitoring this rapidly evolving environment and our supply situation could change. On the revenue side, we do see potential implications and impact from the tariffs imposed by other countries on products originating in the United States, especially as it relates to China. We do not expect revenue related to our stack services to be impacted by tariffs. While the majority of our product sales are in the United States, approximately 25% of our total revenue is derived from product sales to customers who reside outside of the United States. While we do not anticipate a significant impact of sales to these customers and our current exposure to China is limited, the environment remains extremely volatile and uncertain. We will continue to

actively monitor the current environment for changes that could impact us. At this point, I would like to turn the call back to Amit for closing comments.

Thank you, David. Moving on to slide 8. Our performance in the first quarter is a testament to the value our technology brings to our customers, especially given the challenging and dynamic macro environment. Looking ahead, I continue to believe we are well positioned for the future. We remain focused on four key growth drivers in 2025, which include expanding our user base and continuing to enhance access, driving larger cohort studies, continuing to drive product innovation, and enabling more customers to generate meaningful and actionable biological insights. I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress, and with that, we will now open it up for questions. Operator?

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.

Again, that is star 1-1 to ask a question. We have a question from the line of Rachel VanStal

with J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks so much for taking the questions today. So, one thing you talked about is the discovery of life sciences project. Can you walk us through the magnitude of this on the discovery of life sciences project that you called out, and how long do you expect that to last for?

Thank you so much. Let me have actually David comment on the DLS project. That is the relationship David has been managing for the last two years. It is a very exciting project.

It is a very interesting project that has been evolving over a number of quarters in that this particular customer wanted to look at a large 10,000 sample cohort in deep proteomics and to really try to understand potential biomarker signatures and other things. I cannot go into a ton of detail yet. They are going to have a press release likely coming out over the next month or so that will go into detail. But really, it is the first of its kind database that we know of that is going to be created. I think as Amid mentioned in his remarks, this is really something where they did an extensive analysis of all the available proteomics technologies and came to the conclusion that the protograph with the astral performed, the service will be performed by discovery life sciences, would give them the best, most robust data set for this cohort such that they could then mine it for potential targets and biomarkers. So we are really excited about this. It is the first real kind of population scale study and I think it is going to be really impactful in terms of the overall scientific impact of it. It will take some time, I would say over the course of the next kind of 12 to 18 months I imagine. But it really just depends on how quickly they kind of bring together the cohort and things like that. So we are excited about it and more details to come here over the next month or so.

And Rachel, let me just add to David's comment in that about nine months ago in September, and this was at the Morgan Stanley Conference, I alluded to the fact that 2025 is the year where we are going to start seeing population scale deep unbiased proteomics go live on the back of the Protograph product suite that enables them. So this 10,000 sample study is the first. I expect over the course of the coming months you will hear other announcements of even larger studies. So we are in a new paradigm in terms of deep unbiased mass spec based proteomics really taking the scale. And I think the platform and the roadmap that we have, even 100,000 samples or hundreds of thousands of samples are completely within the realm of reality in terms of cost effectiveness, in terms of feasibility. And so I am super excited to keep you informed over the coming months.

Great. Thank you both on that color. Then maybe just in terms of the academic and government weakness, obviously you talked a little bit about that in the prepareds, but can you give us the updated expectation in terms of what are you expecting your US academic and government customers to decline for the full year? And then can you unpack for us a little bit in terms of the trends that you saw in March, or excuse me, in the first quarter and maybe just the month of March as well, but also what you saw in April, have you seen orders and trends across that customer group continue to get worse or have they kind of stabilized at this point? Thanks.

Yeah, and Rachel, maybe let me open up and then I'll hand it to David for kind of a deeper color. So as we had discussed with you at your conference, academic and government together is about 30% of our revenue. And that 30% breaks down into roughly 18% academic and 12% government. So and the guidance that we provided actually represents our expectation of weakening in terms of these two market segments in 2025. Now that said, if I look at the Q1 of 2025, there was actually a very nice balance both in terms of revenue and in terms of instrument placement between academic and government and biopharma. So I think to answer directly, I would say we're now stabilized, but that said, I would only caveat it by saying it's such a moving target that maybe next week I would have a completely different perspective. But if everything stays as is, then I think we are more or less stable and our guidance for the year holds. David, do you want to add additional color, please?

Yeah, Rachel, thanks for the question. In terms of the trends we're seeing, obviously we're very happy with the first quarter. I do feel like people are getting more cautious with things in terms of just the general trends out there, whether it's tariffs or NIH funding or even now with the commercial side with some of the drug pricing control proposals that have been floated in the last couple days. But again, I think given our customer base and given our installed base and the prospects and the funnel we have, we feel like it really will come down to kind of a -by-case basis. I do think it's important to remember that any reduction in the NIH budget will likely impact future grants and not exist at grant funding. So what we are hearing from some of our customers is they do have funding for the balance of the year and it's a question of whether they seem to be able to have access to it, but it's going forward after that that I think is the big question mark. So it kind of remains to be seen, we are seeing a little more weakness here in the second quarter relative to the first

quarter. Perfect, that's it for me. Thanks so much you guys.

Thank you.