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spk10: Welcome to the AVA Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call over to your host, Andrew Fung, Investor Relations. Mr. Fung, you may begin.
spk05: Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to AVA's Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Joining on the call today are Soroush Salahian, AVA's co-founder and CEO, and Saurabh Sinha, Ava's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our third quarter press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our investor relations website at investors.ava.com. Please note that on this call, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative of our views as of any subsequent date. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of AVIS performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the investor relations link. And with that, let me turn the call over to Suresh.
spk07: Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. Over the past quarter, a major focus for us has been ramping deployment of Ares II, the world's first commercially available FMCW LiDAR, offering high performance and reliability. This is resulting in rapidly growing commercial momentum as more customers experience firsthand how the unique capabilities and scalability of AVA's 4D LiDAR can enable next-generation automation across automotive, industrial, and beyond. I would like to highlight some of our key accomplishments in Q3, starting with slide five. First, we made meaningful progress in bringing up our manufacturing and shipped Ares II to more than 25 customers across automotive, industrial, and other applications. Interest for AVA's unique FMCW LiDAR continues to rise to the upside, and we are working diligently to further scale manufacturing. Second, we have significantly grown the number of engagements we are involved in, and they are across an extended list of applications, reflecting the unique flexibility of our technology that is attracting more inbound interest. Importantly, Ares II's combination of high performance and product maturity has enabled us to progress to advanced or RFQ stage on multiple automotive and industrial programs. And with our integration on leading development platforms, such as NVIDIA SIM and Intempura, More OEMs now have the ability to validate and implement ABUS differentiated capabilities. Third, we are on track with our industrial collaborations and continue to target launch in 2024. With Nikon, we signed a joint development agreement in the past quarter for our first high precision industrial product. This important milestone solidifies the plan through production. Elsewhere, we are off to a strong start with our SIG-AG collaboration. and continue to pursue additional opportunities with industrial automation. Fourth, we've continued to strategically build a leading team to bring Ava 40 Lidar to mass production. In particular, we are pleased to welcome three new leaders to Ava's board of directors who offer invaluable expertise in product commercialization, strategy, and public company experience. In addition, we continued our expansion globally into Germany, India, and Thailand with sales, development, and manufacturing teams to support our growing commercial momentum. And fifth, we further cemented our leadership in FMCW technology. With more than 130 granted patents, we expanded our industry-leading portfolio of FMCW technology IP, built on years of development and on-road deployment that has resulted in our proprietary 40-liter on-chip solution. Turning now to slide seven, I would like to provide more color on key business developments over the past quarter. Since announcing ARIES II earlier this year, we have seen a sharp rise in interest in AVA's FMCW technology. The unique combination of high performance, product maturity, and scalability of our solution is a first for the industry and drawing inbounds from a broad range of customers looking to implement our 4D LiDAR for passenger vehicles, commercial trucks, mobility, and industrial automation. A key priority this past quarter was bringing up manufacturing in order to support qualification with our partners and meet the growing demand from new customers. Commercializing a new product is not trivial, and the AOL team made good progress in the first full quarter of Ares II deployment, enabling us to increase the production output by 300% and ship to more than 25 customers globally in the third quarter. While we don't intend to provide an update every quarter, we plan to build on this as we continue to bring up manufacturing. Because our proprietary silicon photonics platform integrates all key optical elements of LiDAR sensing onto the chip module, it allows us to significantly simplify and further automate the manufacturing process. We also continue to work closely with our supply chain, including securing materials needed to support the planned growth and volume. As recently announced, We continue our expansion globally, and we have established a local team in Thailand that will enable us to work alongside our partner, Fabrinet, in manufacturing a LiDAR chip module. As such, we are on track to continue increasing our volumes quarter over quarter in Q4, and look forward to meeting more of the growing demand for our products. Now onto slide eight. ARIES II is growing our number of commercial engagements, and importantly, moving them forward toward production. Since announcing a receipt back in February, AVA has progressed to advanced or RFQ stages on multiple automotive and industrial programs. In automotive, we continue to see a growing appreciation among OEMs for FMCW's fundamental perception advantages that are enabled with direct velocity measurements and how they can address many of the challenges affecting time of flight or 3D LiDAR solutions. This is the case for passenger vehicles for ADAS, all the way to autonomous driving for commercial trucks and mobility applications, as OEMs look to achieve more reliable performance, especially in corner cases across all levels of automation, as well as the ability to increase automation over time. As such, OEMs have been eager to evaluate ABUS 40 VITARP and our advancement to more RFQs is a testament to the OEM recognition of ABUS' unique ability to offer high performance in a scalable solution designed for automotive reliability. We expect decisions for some of the programs to be made in the coming months. While we do not anticipate winning every opportunity, we believe we are well positioned to convert additional programs towards production. Let's turn to slide nine. We are excited to be the first FMCW LiDAR integrated with NVIDIA Drive SIM and Intempura RT-MAPS, two leading autonomy software development tools that we believe will enable OEMs to accelerate development and adoption of FMCW LiDAR. Our customers utilize these platforms to simulate scenarios and validate performance of AVUS 40 LiDAR alongside other modalities as part of their multi-sensor autonomous stack. And because some OEMs require compatibility with platforms such as Intempura for development, our integration broadens AVUS reach, introducing additional OEMs to AVUS unique performance and capabilities that they can now directly implement into their vehicle stack. Switching gears to our industrial progress on slide 10, I'm happy to share that we have entered the next phase towards commercialization with Nikon. In Q3, we signed a joint development agreement with Nikon, a critical next step that defines the development and validation milestones for our first high-precision industrial product through to the start of production in 2024. Within this, we are also on track to complete, by the year end, the development of our LiDAR-on-chip perception platform for industrial automation. Reflecting the performance flexibility of AVA technology, we are leveraging our same LiDAR-on-chip for automated driving, but with different software to achieve micron-level precision. To our knowledge, this level of precision is uniquely made possible by AVA FMCW technology and enables us and Nikon to jointly bring to market a high precision product that is more accurate, yet smaller and lower cost than Mega-Z solutions. Beyond the first product with Nikon, we continue to see opportunity to expand into additional applications to our high performance and small chip based form factor. Moving to slide 11, Ava's proprietary FMCW technology is the driving force behind our commercial traction and we continue to extend our technology leadership with our granted patents now surpassing 130 globally and with over additional 135 patents pending. And this further solidifies our moat in the sensing industry. Our industry-leading portfolio of FMCW IP reflects breakthrough innovation in numerous areas, including silicon photonics, algorithms, system design, and 4D perception. Our IP is how we are able to solve the challenges facing traditional FMCW approaches, such as their ability to simultaneously deliver millions of points per second on a per beam basis at 500 meters of range. Together with direct velocity measurements, this differentiated capability enables classification of objects and road hazards at long ranges with greater confidence, providing critical response time needed for the safe operation of automated vehicles. It is also how we are able to introduce new levels of perception leveraging fourth dimension of velocity, such as our proprietary 4D perception and localization software. This capability provides real time six degrees of freedom vehicle motion estimation to enable accurate centimeter level vehicle positioning and navigation without additional sensors by costly high performance IMUs or less robust methods like visual SLAM. Even in future deficient environments, such as tunnels. This provides OEMs the ability to meet ASOS D redundancy requirements for positioning solutions. Our technology is built on multiple generations of development and years of on-road deployment. We believe this gives us a material lead over others who have attempted to develop FMCW technology or are at earlier stages of FMCW deployment and look forward to expanding our moat as we continue to innovate. Let's now turn to slide 13, which summarizes the strong progress we have made on our key objectives for 2022. With one quarter remaining this year, we have completed the majority of the goals we laid out for 2022 and are focused on accomplishing the remaining. I would like to share a bit more on each one. First, on ARES II deployment and qualification with customers. We have made meaningful progress bringing up manufacturing, enabling us to deliver ARES II to more customers and work on qualification, with existing strategic partners. Looking ahead, we continue to scale up manufacturing and meet more of the growing demand for AVA 40 LIDAR. Second, on converting two additional programs towards production. One of the two programs was met with SICK-AG collaboration, and we are encouraged by the progress we're making on our advanced engagement towards an additional program towards production. Third, on accelerating the release of our first non-automotive application. Our signed joint development agreement with Nikon is an important next step that moves us forward towards the 2024 SOP. And as previously announced, the SIG-AG collaboration further solidified our expansion into industrial automation with the SOP also targeting 2024. And fourth, on preparing the supply chain and processes for commercial deployments. We continue to work closely with our supply chain partners to continue increasing our production and scale up manufacturing. In addition, efforts also continue on track towards certification in automotive spice ahead of production. With that, let me turn the call over to Saurabh, who will discuss the financials.
spk02: Thank you, Saurabh, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's turn to slide 15, which summarizes our third quarter financial results. Revenue in the third quarter was $1.4 million, driven by progress scaling of Ares II deployments. Non-GAAP operating loss was $31.7 million in the third quarter, which was largely driven by R&D expenses for product development. Gross cash use, which we define as operating cash flow less capital expenditure, was $27.2 million in the third quarter. Reflecting our ongoing discipline to capital allocation, we ended the third quarter with 350.8 million in cash, cash equivalent, and marketable securities. And lastly, our weighted average shares outstanding in the third quarter was 217.9 million. Overall, our third quarter results reflect the ongoing execution of our plan. We continue to be deliberate in our ramp of Ares II and believe we are on track to further scale manufacturing, support our existing partners, and pursue expanding interest for AVA 4D LiDAR. And with that, I will hand the call back to Suruj for closing remarks.
spk07: Thank you, Saurabh. In summary, we are making significant strides in commercializing AVA's unique FMCW technology already with our rapid pace of increased production. and the customer feedback leaves me even more excited and convinced of the opportunities ahead. I want to thank the Ava team for their tireless focus and delivering every day. I am confident that with a strong team we have assembled, the growing demand from our customers and our progress to meet the demand, we will continue to execute on our objectives. To our customers and stakeholders, we appreciate our ongoing partnership and look forward to continuing the work to bring perception to everything. Thank you, everyone, for your time today. We will now open up the line for questions.
spk10: If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad now, and you will be placed in the queue when you are received. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question so that all analysts will have time to ask a question. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your phone now. And our first question comes from Colin Rush from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead, Colin.
spk04: Thanks so much, guys. You know, it's great to see all of the customer engagement here, and I'm curious what sort of feedback you're getting in terms of the design of the product so far and any sort of changes that you might make to the form factor or any other elements from that process.
spk07: Sure, yeah. Thanks, Colin. Thanks for the question. So, first of all, I think the feedback so far has been quite positive. Actually, we're seeing interest from folks to implement a number of our sensors on their platforms so that they can leverage our unique capabilities, such as the instant velocity, which is important, especially for detecting hazards before they become an issue, as well as some of the unique 4D perception features, such as ultra resolution. And to your question about the form factor, actually, so with ARIES 2, since we are dramatically reducing the size of the unit since our ARIES 1 system, It's actually some of the first times that I think the customers are realizing, oh, wow, the maturity and the size, in addition to the performance, for an FFCW technology, which was never possible before, is now possible with what AVA is driving and delivering. So that, I think, is, I believe, some of the feedback and the surprise, the positive side for what we have seen so far. And this is also, again, across automotive and ADAS, all the way through to high levels of automation, as well as some of the industrial applications right so that's that's what I can say I think separately also we are also talking to some of the OEMs who initially actually yet decided to go with some of the time-of-flight or 3d solutions for some of the pilot programs but now we're looking for better capabilities in both performance a reliability as well as ability to deliver so hopefully that answers question
spk10: Our next question comes from Antoine Cheban from New Street Research. Please go ahead, Antoine.
spk03: Hi, Suresh. Hi, Sourabh. Thanks for the question. Can you maybe comment a bit on the production ramp? It's really great to see that you increased production by 300% versus the end of last quarter. And so, yeah, I was wondering, is everything playing out as planned? How do things compare to your original expectations, both in terms of volume and cost? Thank you.
spk07: Yeah, sure, thanks for the question. So I think overall, actually, we are progressing as we planned on the shipments with the units. As I mentioned, the initial shipments really started at the end of Q2, and we started this ramp-up processing in Q3. So overall, we are pleased with the ability to really ramp that up so far by that 300%, over 300% that I mentioned since the beginning of the quarter. And at the same time, of course, we're nowhere near done, right? So we are continuing to make progress, ramping up that output, with our supply chain and working closely with our manufacturing partners and the operations teams are really focused on driving all that. And at the same time, we're actively working on securing the additional capacity to meet the growing demand that we have seen. And this is across automotive again, but also some of the stuff on the industrial stuff that is coming into picture more and more now. So that's, you know, overall, we feel, you know, pleased and also confident with the progress we have made and continue to work on increasing that output quarter over quarter moving forward.
spk10: And our next question comes from Suji De Silva from Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead, Suji.
spk01: Hi, Suresh. Hi, Saurabh. So congrats on the progress. So as these customers make decisions in the coming months, as you said, and potentially select AVA, would you be able to clarify, you know, which customers have selected you, how will that communication take place? And as you ramp up this production, the 300 plus percent, I presume there's some visibility into the units that would be expected from those wins. So how would you communicate that would be a pipeline or some metric that annually or some so forth that helps us understand how you have commitments to that production? Thanks.
spk07: Yeah, sure. So a couple questions there. So overall, as you pointed out, yeah, we are seeing an increased number of engagements. We're now multiple across automotive in late stages, including RFQ. So I think we are seeing an interest around adopting our technology. You know, what we're looking at here is programs that are, you know, generally from 2025 and onwards from SOP target. And, you know, in terms of who these kind of some of these customers are to your question. Obviously, you know, the customers working with here are amongst really the top players in their respective fields. This is both in automotive as well as in industrial. So, and as I mentioned, you noted, you know, we expect some of these decisions to happen in the coming months. And, you know, as we secure those wins, of course, we'll be communicating those and the details to the extent that we can. And to your point about metrics, of course, we are evaluating a number of metrics as we progress forward, and we'll decide on what makes the most sense to share with the broader community as well.
spk10: And our next question comes from Arvind Ramnani from Pipeless Sandler. Please go ahead, Arvind.
spk08: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. So yeah, I just had a question. Two years back, you know, the competitive environment was quite, you know, was quite active with a number of players. And, you know, certainly kind of the chatter in the space has kind of died down over the last six months or so. Can you just give us, and we're just kind of looking at it externally as investors, But, you know, if we were to sit into the rooms of decision makers who are buying LiDAR technology, can you just give us a sense of how some of those conversations are involved as it pertains to the competitive environment?
spk07: Yeah, Arvind. So, I mean, overall, you know, we're having, you know, a number of conversations across the board with both OEMs and passenger commercial vehicles and mobility companies. And some of the partnerships also that we've had that we have talked about, for example, with Nikon, SICK, and others, you know, continue to make good progress, and we hope to actually continue to strengthen those. But overall, you know, the decisions are really around – the discussion is really around our progress that we've made with the OEMs in terms of delivering Ares II. And at this point, you know, of course, the biggest factor has been around, hey, can you deliver a technology of such a performance And our answer with Aresys so far has been yes, and we are seeing that feedback from the customers. Of course, as I mentioned also to Colin earlier, we are also having discussions with some of the folks that had made some of the initial decisions around pilot launches with time-of-flight solutions to really upgrade for the next generation sense of technology. I think this in general is really increasing the recognition for the industry for the fact that what is out there today is not quite sufficient. And to achieve higher level of automation, to continue improving the safety and increase overall volumes across the vehicles, they need to move on to next generation technologies such as FMCW. And with the progress we've made, with the number of innovations, the patents, and also now our ability to deliver on manufacturing, We're further establishing and solidifying our position as a leader in FMCW technology, and we continue to do that.
spk10: And our next question comes from Joe Moore from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Joe.
spk00: Great, thank you. I wanted to ask about, you mentioned in the slide deck, the LiDAR on-chip platform for industrial automation by next quarter. Can you talk about the applications for that? Is that for the existing couple of customers that you've talked about in industrial, or does that open up new opportunities for you?
spk07: Yeah, hey, thanks, Joe, for the question. So, actually, this is quite interesting. You know, we see this lighter-on-shift technology platform as really a foundational perception platform that can go into many different applications in industrial and some of the others. So, obviously, for example, this is the approach we're taking in our partnership with Nikon, in which we have now, you know, solidified that path through the milestones all the way through to production. We are making good progress on that. There, the application really is around inspection and metrology for automotive manufacturing, aerospace manufacturing, and some of the others. But the same core chip technology with obviously tuned algorithms for those applications can achieve micron level precision, which is not really possible to our knowledge with any type of flight or 3D solutions, right? And we continue to see also interest from folks around other applications, both around manufacturing, for example, volume, electronics, things like that, as well as some of the players that are looking to deploy that in some of the other applications in the industrial field. So at the end of this year, we're on track to finish that development of the wider ownership platform for the industrial applications, and we expect that completion to continue to drive additional inbound and potential new businesses for us that we can use leverage to expand across the industrial fields.
spk10: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your phone now. And our next question comes from Sam Peterman from Craig Hallam Capital Group. Please go ahead, Sam.
spk09: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask on the Nikon JDA that you talked about, can you describe in a little more detail just how this differs from, I guess, kind of the previous announcement you made about your work with them? and kind of why you took the path of JDA versus maybe other options that were available?
spk07: Yeah, sure, Simon. I can take that one. So obviously, yeah, we announced an initial kind of collaboration framework with Nikon. With this joint development agreement, we have now further solidified our milestones all the way through to production, right? So we continue to make good progress with Nikon since the announcement of the initial collaboration. The JDA really defines important next steps for development milestones, including sample development, validation, all the way through to production. And that's the solidification that now we have done. This also gives us added confidence that we are tracking well to our target of the accelerated SOP from 25 now to 2024 with the SJD and the progress we're making. That's number one. Number two is with the LiDAR on chip module development, completion by the end of this year, again, you know, we expect to leverage that to both for the NICOM program and as well as expanding our reach across partners to do that.
spk10: And our next question comes from Kevin Gerrigan from West Park Capital. Please go ahead, Kevin.
spk06: Yeah. Hey, good afternoon, guys. You know, just to ask one part of Suji's questions a different way. the 25 plus customers that you shipped ARIES 2 to already, you know, you mentioned broad applications, but are a majority of customers kind of more industrial customers or is the customer base kind of split evenly between industrial and automotive?
spk07: Yeah, that's a good question, Kevin. So overall, actually, this is, you know, obviously this is the 25 customers we can even ship beyond that, but this actually is more automotive rather than industrial because we had a strong backlog and demand from the automotive customers that, you know, we're now fulfilling and and continue to fulfill. But at the same time, as I said, there is an additional advance from industrial applications that we will continue to also fulfill now that some of the initial deliveries have been made. But initially, it was more automotive, that's right.
spk10: And at this time, there are no further questions. This now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for attending.
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