Alpha Teknova, Inc.

And thank you for standing by. Welcome to TechNova's first quarter 2024 financial results 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 your first speaker today, Jennifer Henry, Senior Vice President of Marketing. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to TechNova's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me on today's call are Stephen Gunstream, TechNova's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Matt Lowell, TechNova's Chief Financial Officer, who will make prepared remarks and then take your questions. As a reminder, the forward-looking statements that we make during this call, including those regarding business goals and expectations for the financial performance of the company, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual events or results to differ. Additional information concerning these risk factors is included in the press release the company issued earlier today, and they are more fully described in the company's various filings with the SEC. Today's comments reflect the company's current views which could change as a result of new information, future events, or other factors, and the company does not obligate or commit itself to update its forward-looking statements except as required by law. The company's management believes that, in addition to GAAP results, non-GAAP financial measures can provide meaningful insight when evaluating the company's financial performance and the effectiveness of its business strategies. We will therefore use non-GAAP financial measures of certain of our results during this call. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in the press release that we issued this afternoon, which is posted on both Technova's and the SEC's website. Non-GAAP financial measures should always be considered only as a supplement to, and not as a substitute for, or as superior to, financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation may differ from similarly named non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. Please also be advised that the company has posted a supplemental slide deck to accompany today's prepared remarks. It can be accessed on the investor relations section of Technova's website and on today's webcast. And now I will turn the call over to Stephen.

Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon and thank you everyone for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. Technova is a leading producer of critical reagents for the life sciences industry that accelerate the introduction of novel therapies, vaccines, and molecular diagnostics that will help people live longer, healthier lives. We manufacture high-quality customer agents with short turnaround time, and we can scale with our customers as they advance their products from discovery to commercialization. We had a strong start to 2024 with revenue, adjusted EBITDA and cash outflow in line with our expectations. From a revenue perspective, we saw sequential improvement of $1.4 million for 18% versus fourth quarter 2023 and growth over prior year of 2% overall with 7% growth specifically in clinical solutions. We were also encouraged that our first quarter 2024 revenue was driven by a diverse set of customers with no direct customer representing more than 10% of revenue. Our clinical solutions customer count continues to increase, providing a positive indicator for the long term as these customers migrate their therapies towards commercialization. All told, we remain confident in our $35 to $38 million full year revenue guidance for 2024. In addition to the solid performance on our top line, we are executing ahead of plan from a cost management perspective. Matt will provide more details on our operating and capital expenditures, but at a high level, we've already started seeing the benefits from our cost control efforts within the first quarter of 2024. Our first quarter adjusted EBITDA was a $2.3 million improvement over prior year, a quarter with similar top line revenue, and we expect to meet or beat our cash outflow guidance of $18 million for the full year. Operationally, we are executing well. Our new facility is now regularly generating revenue with more than four times the work orders completed in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. The combination of our new state-of-the-art facility, quality management system, and purpose-built process using equipment are enabling customers to receive custom research or clinical grade reagents in weeks instead of months. As an example, in January, we onboarded a new customer that needed a large number of different custom reagents delivered in single-use bags. We were able to deliver nearly 20 custom buffers in less than six weeks from when the customer placed the order. We believe this rapid turnaround time, particularly for first-time orders, is substantially faster than other suppliers in the market. Most important, we allowed our customer to keep its clinical trials on schedule. This quarter also proved to be successful with respect to the launch of new products and capabilities. First, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy last week, we launched our latest product in our AAV tech solution the AAV Tech AAV Stabilizer. This proprietary formulation protects the capsid throughout the AAV downstream filtration and purification process. After testing multiple serotypes, we have shown up to a 50% increase in AAV titer yield when using the stabilizing reagents. We also launched BuildTech. a first-of-its-kind custom configurator providing access to high-quality customizable buffers with exceptionally short turnaround times and no minimum order quantities. Our custom configurator is easy to use, and by leveraging our modular manufacturing platform, BuildTech products ship in a matter of days. We believe this will enable the customization of multiple iterative buffers needed during early-stage research and design of experiments. Ultimately, this allows process development scientists to focus on advancing science instead of spending their time mixing buffers. Finally, I'd like to take a moment to provide my view on how the market is evolving. I believe we are seeing a stabilization in what has been a very challenging biotech environment over the past couple years. Recent biotech funding improvements combined with our own positive leading indicators, such as increased engagement and quoting with customers previously focused on preserving capital, support a more optimistic outlook going forward. Given that we typically see about a four-quarter lag between changes in industry funding levels and revenue recognition, we think these indicators point toward a more positive market environment in early 2025. In summary, we had a strong start to the year. We are excited about the progress we have made over the past couple years and believe we are in position for long-term success. I will now hand the call over to Matt to talk through the financials.