Solid Power, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Solid Power fourth quarter and year-end 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jennifer Almquist, Director of Investor Relations at Solid Power. Thank you, Jennifer. You may begin.

Thanks, Paul, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Joining me on the call today are Solid Power's Chief Executive Officer, Doug Campbell, and Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Papsiski. Copies of today's press release, as well as the presentation that accompanies this conference call, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.solidpowerbattery.com. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that parts of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements. as defined by US securities laws. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions about future events and are based on currently available information as to the outcome and timing of future events. Except as otherwise required by applicable law, we disclaim any duty to update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in our forward-looking statements, please see our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be found on our website at ir.solidpowerbattery.com. With that, let me turn it over to Doug Campbell.

Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, everyone. Today is the first earnings call in our newly established public company existence, and I'm really excited to be here today updating you on our progress. As for today's call, I'll begin with a business update. I'll then pass it over to Kevin, who will take you through the financials, and then I'll return with some concluding remarks. It goes without saying that 2021 was a phenomenal year for the company, and I am happy to report that 2022 is shaping up to be an even more successful year. In short, today, Solid Power finds itself in a favorable position thanks to the tireless work of our employees, the unwavering support from our industry partners, and the confidence placed on us by the investment community as reflected in our successful SPAC transaction completed late last year. As a result, we have listened to our key stakeholders and have made some key updates in our approach to product commercialization that can be broadly described as an acceleration on all fronts in order to take advantage of the very fortunate situation that we find ourselves in today. I'll begin with a quick summary of some of the key announcements and updates that we're making today. Beginning first with earnings, I am happy to report that we exceeded our projected revenues for 2021 and are projecting to meaningfully increase this revenue amount again in 2022. We ended the year with more than half a billion in cash and marketable securities, giving us ample runway and flexibility to invest as needed to be responsive to increasing demand. Second is our infrastructure investments, including Our EV line capable of full-scale cell production and our second facility devoted to scaled electrolyte material production, both of which remain on schedule despite the current climate of supply chain slowdowns. Third is our infrastructure investments where we have elected to accelerate certain infrastructure investments with the goal of reducing the risk of our commercialization plan as a result of expanded scope in our current customer cooperation agreements, continued strong interest from other potential customers and strategic partners, and inflationary pressure and ongoing supply chain risks that makes investing sooner rather than later highly advantageous. Fourthly, we remain on schedule with all of our operational targets, including meeting our 2 amp hour cell deliverables to our current customers that have already been met and subsequent deliverables will continue throughout the remainder of the year. 20 amp hour cell production is ongoing Preliminary data is being collected in-house and deliverables of those cells is still on schedule for the next quarter. Production of our full-scale EV cells is on schedule based on the current status of our EV line. As such, initial deliverables for these EV cells for later this year remains on schedule. Fifth and finally is technical progress. In terms of cell performance, while we are not conducting a data release at the present time, I am happy to report that we are making progress on every single performance metric. Our build quality on 2 amp hour cells is continuously improving, as reflected in our continuously improving measured performance. Further 20 amp hour cell builds are ongoing, and preliminary data is thus far highly encouraging. Getting into more detailed company updates, I'll begin first by reflecting on 2021, which was a transformational year for the company. In terms of operational targets, production of two and 20 amp hour silicon-based cells was successfully initiated. In terms of infrastructure investments, both the EV cell line and electrolyte production facility were initiated. In terms of commercial partners, we strengthened relationships with our key development partners. Specifically, we expanded our cooperation agreements with both Ford and BMW to reflect the extensive vehicle integration programs that we find ourselves involved in today. and added a new cooperation partner in the form of SK Innovation. In terms of fundraising, 2021 was a year that exceeded our expectations. We closed $136 million Series A or Series B financing, I should say, in May, followed by completing our merger with DCRC in December. This was a highly successful transaction resulting in less than 1% redemptions, providing more than half a billion in capital bucking a broader SPAC trend. I wish to provide a heartfelt thank you to our shareholders, investors, and our SPAC sponsor for their faith in our business model. As we continue to grow and strengthen our team at all levels of the organization, we are being careful to preserve this culture of high standards and commitment to our vision. Looking ahead, 2022 promises to be another pivotal year for Solid Power. As we complete our infrastructure investments needed to support formal automotive qualification, which again remains on schedule, and kick off automotive qualification by our full-scale A sample produced on our EV line, which, as a reminder, mimics today's lithium ion manufacturing. By executing on these milestones, we are confident this will lay the groundwork for long-term shareholder value. I'd also like to announce that we have elected to accelerate our investments in our operations, production equipment, and product development efforts. I would like to emphasize that this is not a change or expansion in our overarching approach. but rather an acceleration of our previous capital plan and does not have any impact on our overall capital spend between now and vehicle start of production. Broadly, I would encourage you to think about these accelerated investments as increases in our bandwidth in terms of one, accelerating current cell development activities, and two, enabling us to onboard additional development activities with potential new customers as we see fit. The reason for this acceleration is threefold. First, we are reacting to increasingly expanded scope and aggressive timelines from our current OEM partners. We have some very exciting things currently in the works that while I can't disclose details today, I hope to be able to speak to these developments in more detail at some point in the future. Second, there continues to be no shortage of interest from other automotive OEMs and other prospective commercialization partners. While we remain laser focused on delivering to our current automotive OEM partners, Ford and BMW, By accelerating these investments, we believe we will have the necessary bandwidth to support additional cooperations should they make business sense. And third, given current supply chain constraints along with inflationary pressure risks, we felt executing infrastructure investments sooner rather than later was highly prudent. Broadly, these accelerated investments will enable more flexibility in meeting different customer requirements. Each auto OEM has unique vehicle product offerings, and as you might expect, this means unique cell designs. While it makes things easier for Solid Power to try and maintain alignment in cell development activities for as long as possible, establishing flexibility better positions us for expanding our market capture. Similarly, these investments will afford us more flexibility in onboarding new customers And finally, we believe these accelerated investments will accelerate our product development that ultimately lowers risk with respect to our commercialization efforts. It's important to note, however, that this accelerated investment does not necessarily accelerate our commercialization timeline. As a reminder, we follow the industry standard Advanced Automotive Quality Planning, or APQP, qualification process with well-defined customer processes and timelines. This is a process that all new automotive products must go through in order to be specced into a car, and this process takes time. Now shifting gears to cell production and performance, we remain on track with the technological development roadmap that we've established. Our development and validation process consists of the following. Step one, R&D delivers to manufacturing a cell design that has met or nearly met all of our automotive specifications. This demonstrates the chemistry's fundamental behavior. Step two, validate the cell design in a single layer cell format produced on our pre-pilot line. The smallest cell that we can produce is a 0.2 amp hour capacity cell, which is merely a single layer in our two amp hour cell footprint. This confirms that the cell can be produced using lithium ion gigafactory-like equipment and processes. Step three involves validating the cell design in a multi-step format at a relatively modest two amp hour cell capacity. This demonstrates the ability to perform in a multi-step cell format and obviously critical step in achieving EV scale battery cells. Step four, the final step achieved on our pre-pilot line is the production of 20 amp hour cells, which involves a larger footprint and more layers as compared to our two amp hour cells. Successfully completing this step demonstrates the ability to produce high quality, defect free, large scale electrode and separator coatings And indeed, this is the step where we find ourselves today. Step five, our next and final step is translating the cell design to an entirely different production line, in this case our EV line, that is under construction now and which remains on schedule to be fully operational in May. In terms of cell performance, I will broadly describe our current test protocol and discuss performance in qualitative terms. These are not all the tests we conduct, however, these are the key tests we use to measure our development progress. Today, our standard test conditions consist of evaluating performance at temperatures of 25 and 45 degrees Celsius. Measured cycle life performance for our 2 amp hour cells is thus far very promising, and for 20 amp hour cells, although much more preliminary, is equally promising. While we are not yet at our target charge rate, we are getting very close. Pulse power and rate mapping has thus far only been performed on the two amp hour cell formats. Similar to cycle life, the performance is highly encouraging, but areas of improvement are still needed, very high charge rates in particular. We remain confident in our ability to meet these requirements in future cell build iterations with progressively lower cell resistance. Testing on 20 amp hour cells is imminent. Regarding cell stack pressure, let me be clear. We will never have a non-zero stack pressure, and frankly speaking, any truly solid state battery will also likely require stack pressure. The reason that this is not overly concerning for us is that we have established a requirement with our auto OEM partners that allows for a reasonable stack pressure while preserving the energy density and specific energy value propositions that all solid state batteries are expected to deliver. We currently have an extensive parametric study on stack pressure underway, and results are thus far very encouraging as we drive towards our stack pressure requirement. Calendar life testing, which measures a cell's stability at high temperature, and thus a measure of whether or not a cell must be cooled in order to deliver on its lifetime requirement, are being conducted at 45 and 60 degrees Celsius, and as expected, superior performance to lithium ion continues to be demonstrated. And then finally abuse testing on two amp hour cells is continuing by an external commercial testing house. Results are consistent with what we have previously disclosed and testing on 20 amp hour cells will be initiated in quarter two. The bottom line for performance data is that we remain confident of our ability to enter APQP, what is essentially a sample validation later this year based on measured performance on production line built cells versus our OEM-derived requirements. While we are not releasing data at the present time, we plan to do so only when we can have a truly comprehensive data package, and this does not necessarily happen on a quarterly basis. To add further, our definition of a comprehensive data package consists of the following. One, data collected on relevant scale cells manufactured using proven scaled production methods and equipment, thereby reducing manufacturing risk. As I say over and over to our team, we think it is critical that cell performance is measured when it can be produced at scale and in a cost-effective manner. Two is data collected using fixed and industry standard test conditions. Three is data collected on a sufficiently large sample set and with relatively low data variability between samples. And then finally, four is data collected on cells where the full bill of materials is known and disclosed Again, so as to provide confidence to investors, customers, and industry stakeholders. Now, why are we making this decision? Solid Power has and always prided itself in its honesty and transparency. We do not want to compromise on our ideals and release what I will refer to as half-baked data, wherein one or more test variables may be compromised or varied between tests that ultimately result in confusion at best and be misleading at worst. Further, it's important to keep in mind that what's important to our industry partners may not be what the market perceives to be important. Also, what's important to our partners is sometimes proprietary to those partners, such as their unique cell and pack specifications. And at the end of the day, we believe that the ultimate judge on Solid Power's progress is our customers and partners. While our industry partners have made many public statements regarding their support of Solid Power, I would like to draw your attention to a statement made by BMW's CEO, Oliver Zipsa, just last week at their annual conference, and I quote, we are collaborating with the best tech players in all regions of the world and with partners from other industries. When it comes to all solid state batteries, we believe we have the strongest partner in this field with solid power, end quote. I cannot think of a stronger endorsement of solid power. So, in short, we believe our technical progress is continuing at a very good pace. There are still some improvements needed, specifically in high charge rates, low stack pressure, and very low temperature operation, but we remain confident of our ability to meet all of our performance specifications. This, combined with our approach of using industry standard lithium ion manufacturing processes and equipment, thereby enabling us to leverage all of the massive capex investments for lithium-ion production that have been made or are contemplated to be made, we believe greatly helps in reducing risk related to our commercialization strategy. Now switching gears to our infrastructure investments, beginning first with our EV line, which I am happy to report is on schedule to be operational by next quarter. As of today, the dry room has been erected and is nearing completion. I'll refer you to images that we have in our accompanying slide deck. The EV line equipment is in place and we are going through acceptance testing with the vendor as we speak. The fact that we started construction on this line in late 2021 and we're already nearing completion is a testament to the strong planning and execution by our team. Unlike our current highly flexible pre-pilot production line, this EV line is designed to produce only EV scale cells in a relatively high throughput manner. We currently expect our first full-scale EV cells to roll off this line in the second quarter. These initial cells will be used for internal testing and refinement prior to delivery to our OEM partners later this year. Our second infrastructure investment, which is our second facility, largely devoted to scaled electrolyte production, is currently undergoing construction. Facility occupation, electrolyte powder production validation, and production at full rate will be performed throughout the year. As we continue to drive towards these operational and technological targets, we will also continue growing our team and laying the groundwork for success as a public company. We are cognizant of the trust our stakeholders have placed in us and remain committed to delivering value, but also meeting the high standards we are setting for ourselves. Needless to say, 2022 is going to be another busy but pivotal year for Solid Power. We are energized by our progress, and the large and valuable opportunity in front of us to build in our leadership position in the industry. With that, I'll pass it over to Kevin. Kevin will take you through our 2021 financial results.