Amprius Technologies, Inc.

Good morning. Welcome to the Amperius Technologies First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us for today's presentation are the company's CEO, Tom Stepien, and CFO, Ricardo Rodriguez. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following management's remarks, we will open the call for questions. please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our financial and business performance, our business strategy, future product development or commercialization, new customer adoption and new applications, our growth and the growth of the markets in which we operate, and the timing and ability of Amprius to expand its manufacturing capacity, scale its business, and achieve a sustainable cost structure. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that may cause AMPRES' results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. For a more complete discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to AMPRES' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This presentation includes a non-GAAP financial measure, which is adjusted EBITDA. This non-GAAP financial measure does not replace the presentation of Amprius' GAAP financial results and should only be used as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Amprius' financial results presented in accordance with GAAP and may not be comparable to calculations of similarly titled measures by other companies. A reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net loss, the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, is included in our press release, a copy of which is filed with the SEC and posted on our website. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being webcast. A recording will be made available for replay on the company's investor relations website at ir.ampreus.com. In addition to the webcast, the company has posted a press release that accompanies these results, which can also be found on the Ampreus Investor Relations website. Before turning the call over to management, I want to highlight a few near-term IR events. On May 12th, Tom Stepien will be at Exponential in Detroit. Any investors that are attending the expo are welcome to stop by the company's booth. At the same time, Ricardo will be at the Needham Conference in New York City on May 12th and 13th. His fireside chat will be streamed online and will be available for replay on the company's IR website. On May 14th, the management team will be in New York City and taking investor meetings with KKR. The following week, Management will be attending the B. Reilly Conference on May 20th and 21st in Los Angeles. And to round out the month, management will be at the Craig Hallam Conference in Minneapolis on May 28th. Looking to June, the team will start off the month in Chicago for the William Blair Conference. Management will then attend the Jeffries eVTOL Summit on June 8th, the TV Cal and Technology Summit on the 17th, the Roth London Conference on June 17th and 18th, and the Northland Conference on June 23rd. We hope to connect with many of you at these upcoming events. I'll now turn the call over to Amperius Technologies CEO, Tom Stepien, for his comments. Sir, please proceed.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. Let's start with slide three. Last quarter, I compared the advantages offered by our batteries to the difference between standard brewed coffee and espresso. It's an idea that illustrates the difference between ourselves and those of our competitors. In this analogy, a standard graphite battery is like normal drip coffee and we're the concentrated power of espresso. Our batteries contain the same energy as standard cells in a much smaller package. If you match the volume and weight of standard coffee with a double espresso, you achieve twice the energy. When you double the energy in a battery, you can double flight time for an unmanned aircraft, for double the travel distance of a light electric vehicle. That's the Amprius Expresso advantage. Turning now to slide four. This energy advantage continues to drive robust financial performance, and in the first quarter, we sustained our strong business momentum. Our second generation Sycor silicon anode batteries are gaining broad adoption across unmanned aerial system customers and we are pleased to see the momentum we have built in Europe is now taking hold in the United States. U.S. defense spending is at an all-time high, with a growing emphasis on UASs, commonly referred to as drones. Three Ampris customers leveraging our Sitecore batteries have recently received notable multi-million dollar awards. First, I'll mention Krauss-Hemdani Aerospace. a Northern California based drone manufacturer. Their K1000 ULE is a fully electric ultra long range endurance UAS capable of 24 hour flight and a thousand mile range designed for autonomous intelligence, surveillance and communication missions across land, sea and air. They recently received a major sole source award from the US Department of War for their UAS and a separate contract worth up to $270 million from the U.S. Air Force Central Command. Then there's AeroVironment, a leading U.S. defense technology company and a long-term Ambrose customer. In March 2026, AV won a $170 million firm fixed-price U.S. Army contract to deliver P-550 UASs, designed to provide frontline units with real-time intelligence and targeting in contested environments. And then there's Teledyne FLIR, a global leader in thermal imaging, surveillance sensors, and unmanned systems, and another tenured Ambrius customer. They recently announced a European order for their Black Hornet IV, a palm-sized nanodrone measuring just 25 centimeters long with a 200-millimeter rotor diameter. The Black Hornet IV provides soldiers with live video feeds, target data, and real-time situational awareness for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in both dismounted and vehicle-integrated operations. We commend these three customers on their recent wins. Their success boosts our visibility into future purchase orders for Psycorps cells. We look forward to continuing to earn their trust and business. We are pleased to announce that our silicon anode cells were selected by a leading light electric vehicle customer based in China. This customer placed a $21 million multi-quarter purchase order for batteries for two and three wheeled vehicles. China is home to many of the world's most successful battery companies, which makes it especially satisfying to win business in this highly competitive region. Meanwhile, our ongoing project with the U.S. the Fence Innovation Unit continues to expand. In July 2025, Amprius won a development contract from the DIU. In the March quarter, the contract was increased for a third time and now totals $18.1 million. This recent increase adds delivery of three types of silicon-handled cylindrical cells and four standard-sized pouch cells. Standardization is really critical for the government. It reduces costs, simplifies logistics, and ensures systems can use the same safe, reliable, NDAA-compliant power sources. It is gratifying to receive awards from credible and independent media and trade groups. After winning a competitive CES Innovation Award in January, we were recently named a top 100 green tech company by Time. Turning now to our financial performance, I'm pleased to report Q1 revenue of $28.5 million, up two and a half X year over year, and 13% higher sequentially. The strong results give us the confidence to increase our revenue guidance for the full year to at least $130 million, five million above our previous forecast. While it is not a practice to provide specific guidance for the current quarter, I would note that a revised annual forecast implies a reacceleration of sequential top blind growth in the June quarter. Ricardo will provide more highlights on our financial performance and outlook shortly. He will also share details on our press release earlier this morning in which we announced an agreement to exchange our outstanding public warrants for common shares, which will simplify and strengthen our capital structure. Let's now take a look at slide five. Taking a step back, I'd like to review our substantial opportunity set in five principal end markets. The first is UASs, including drones used for defense, public safety, security, and logistics. Defense platforms that require high energy density typically support long loiter missions and are primarily targeted for ISR, intelligence, surveillance, or reconnaissance. Public safety drones include DFR, drone as a first responder, systems integrated directly into emergency workflows. DFR programs are expanding nationwide because they deliver faster situational awareness, reduced response times, and materially improved public safety outcomes. As more agencies adopt DFR as a core part of 911 operations, Demand for higher performance, longer endurance batteries continue to accelerate, and that plays directly to our strengths. Our second market segment is satellites in space, where our high energy density cells directly improve launch economics. Satellite launch providers charge customers by weight, making our ability to deliver the same energy at roughly half the weight, our expresso advantage, extremely valuable. The $21 million multi-quarter purchase order I mentioned earlier is an example of our traction in a third segment, light electric vehicles. The customer advantage here is fitting more capacity into standard packs or constrained spaces and enabling range. We're optimistic about the opportunity in a fourth segment, robotics. Robot performance is closely tied to battery characteristics as our CTO Ian L. Stephan recently shared with a leading battery journal. Quote, balancing the extreme discharge demands of actuation with the computational intensity of real-time AI processing requires a new generation of energy solutions. He said, high silicon anode cells represent a breakthrough delivering the energy density needed to extend operational run time, while minimizing the weight penalties that constrain efficiency, unquote. Our fifth market segment is EV toll, electrovertible takeoff and landing aircraft. EV toll and other advanced air mobility customers are developing autonomous point-to-point regional transport for both passengers and cargo. These vehicles only work with high energy density batteries. because aircraft must lift a heavy structure, a pilot, and three to four passengers. Without enough energy per kilogram, the vehicle simply can't achieve the required range, payload, or safety margins. If standard cells are chosen, the aircraft can likely get off the ground, but it likely cannot perform the required mission. Working with a third-party research firm, we size these five end markets as shown on the right-hand side of slide five. Lithium ion battery applications across these markets are estimated at $7 billion this year, growing to $13 billion by the end of the decade, nearly doubling in just a few years. Looking further out, we expect growth to accelerate meaningfully, reaching $35 billion by 2035. Let me now turn over the call to Ricardo to review our Q1 results in detail.

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I'm happy to report that Amperes had another record-breaking quarter. As shown on slide six, we delivered $28.5 million of revenue in Q1, which translates into 13% growth over the fourth quarter of last year and 153% increase year over year. As Tom mentioned, those results give us the confidence to increase our 2026 full-year revenue forecast by $5 million to at least $130 million. I'll provide more color on the outlook shortly. As Tom noted, our revenue growth was driven by continued expansion in our Sitecore customer base, combined with increasing order volumes from existing customers as they scale their own deployments. Sitecore represented 97% of product revenue in the quarter, continuing our transition away from our legacy Symax platform. In the quarter, we generated 58% of our revenue from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 21% from North America, and 21% from the Asia Pacific region. The North American share increased meaningfully, both sequentially and year-over-year, consistent with the growing interest we're seeing from U.S.-based customers. While we expect this mix to fluctuate over the course of the year, we think the US business could accelerate in the second half. Now moving on to cost of revenue and gross margins. Our Q1 gross profit was $5.7 million, producing a gross margin of 20%. For context, Q4 gross margin was 24%. So we did step back quarter over quarter, and I want to be transparent about why. Overhead costs associated with our Fremont facility are being absorbed across a larger cycle revenue base, while the Symax product line continues to wind down. Our Q1 Symax related overhead costs were of more than $3 million. Essentially, these are fixed costs against only $618,000 of revenue. That created a material but temporary drag on the blended margin. We also had one month of expenses from Colorado in the quarter, which our gross without which our gross margin would have been 22%. Turning over to operating expenses. Quarterly R&D expenses were of $3.8 million. SG&A was $8.6 million, bringing total operating expenses to $12.4 million, which was down approximately $19 million quarter-over-quarter, though that comparison is heavily distorted by the $22.5 million non-cash impairment charge for Colorado in Q4 of last year. On a clean basis, our adjusted OpEx run rate is up modestly quarter-for-quarter, driven by targeted investments in our sales and go-to-market organization as we build a team to support the commercial momentum Tom described. Putting these elements together, our Q1 operating loss was $6.7 million, compared to a clean operating loss of approximately 2.9 million in Q4 after removing the Colorado one-time charge. The increase reflects the gross margin setback I described and the continued investment in commercial and R&D capabilities. The one adjusted EBITDA was negative $1.8 million, which compares to negative $5.2 million in the same quarter of last year. After two quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA, we had expected a modest step back in Q1 due to the Symax phase-out and the one-month Colorado cost carryover that I described. Our Q1 gap net loss was of $5 million, or negative 4 cents per share, based on approximately 136.9 million weighted average shares outstanding. Now turning over to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended Q1 with $62.4 million of cash in no debt. Our cash position is down from $90.5 million at year end due to several factors which consume $37.3 million of cash in the quarter. First, accounts receivable increased by $11.5 million, reflecting the strong revenue growth we experienced near the quarter's end. Over $6.5 million of that figure has already been collected. We also paid approximately $20 million to settle our Colorado facility lease obligation as previously announced. That agreement settled what would have been an expense of more than $110 million in highly favorable terms. Largely due to that transaction, our liabilities were reduced by $29.8 million in the quarter. Capital expenditures were of $980,000 funded largely through the DIU contract. Total shareholders equity stood at $109.4 million at quarter cent. Before turning the call back to Tom, I'd like to spend a moment framing our outlook and commenting on the one exchange agreement transaction that we announced this morning. Let's also please turn to slide seven. When we communicated our 2026 baseline of at least $125 million of revenue, We said we would rather size the upside as it happens than commit to it ahead of time. We continue to see healthy demand indicators, a growing backlog, higher production volumes at all of our manufacturing partners, and increasing urgency from defense-related customers around NDAA compliance supply. With this in mind, we are raising our revenue guidance to at least $130 million in 2026. The setup for the rest of the year is constructive for our economics, particularly as our collections normalize and additional capacity from our Korean and U.S. manufacturing partners comes online. We continue to expect 2026 adjusted EBITDA of at least $4 million and the net loss of no more than $8 million or less than $0.06 per share, assuming 136.9 million shares. Our capex will ramp up over the course of 2026, but remain below $10 million for the year. And we expect this to be funded by our contract with the Defense Innovation Unit. Finally, I'd like to briefly comment on the recent announcement of our agreements to convert over 7 million public warrants that were held by institutional investors into common stock. This agreement reduces future dilution by converting warrants that would have been exercisable at lower prices into a fixed number of shares on terms that we believe are favorable to existing shareholders. It is consistent with the broader optimization of our capital structure that we've been executing, such as closing the ATM, settling the Colorado lease, and now managing our warrant overhang proactively. We're constantly looking for opportunities to simplify the balance sheet and optimize the capital structure as their operating performance gives us the leverage to do so. Thank you to everyone who worked with us on this and to the Amphish team for enabling it thanks to the prompt execution of our plans. Now, I'm happy to turn the call back to Tom. Thank you all for your continued attention and support.

Our Q1 performance bodes well for a successful 2026. Revenue increasing at double digit percentage points quarter over quarter. continued gross margin at or above 20%, and with our warrant exchange underway, we are removing a potential dilution overhang. Competition in the lithium-ion battery space is fierce, and we embrace it. In 2026, the team is driving next-generation silicon anode performance with higher energy density and sustained power without sacrificing safety or reliability, while meeting all manufacturing and country origin requirements. We're expanding our portfolio to reach new markets and converting more customer engagements into formal qualifications and deployments, particularly in mobility-focused platforms. We remain deeply bullish about the opportunities in front of us, and we look forward to meeting and reconnecting with many of you at the investor conferences we'll be attending in the weeks ahead. Thank you for your continued interest in and support of AMBRIUS. And with that, I'll turn it over to the operator for questions.

Thank you. And at this time, we'll open the line for questions from the company's publishing research analysts. The company requests that each participant limit their comments to one question and one follow-up. To ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Now our first question will come from Colin Rush with Oppenheimer. Please state your question.

Thanks so much, guys. Tom, you've been with the company now about a year, and one of the big focuses was around driving better visibility on customer volumes so you could plan out production. Given some of the fluctuation that we're seeing with mix and margins here, I just want to get a more fulsome update on where you're at in that process and how much there is to go in terms of being able to drive increased volumes with key customers and do a little bit more work around planning and supply chain optimization.

Yeah, thanks, Colin. There is a lot of upside going forward here. We are in early days. we are starting to see some of the one big beautiful bill dollars. The bill was signed, what, 10 months ago. The three customers that we referenced in the call are starting to receive contracts. The suppliers to those customers, including Amprius on the battery side, are next. We see that also in some of the light electric vehicle work. We announced a win. We've been a little bit vague about that in the past. because it's been smaller purchase orders, but now there's larger ones coming in. So there is a lot of opportunity out there for us. We are going to robotics conferences that we have not attended in the past. So we're going on offense. We're adding people to the team. We have some additional firms that are helping us. We just signed up a new group in South Korea that's helping us get started there before we establish our own business. team in place there. So we are very bullish about this market in general, and we are making plans so that we can capture as much as we can get.

Thanks so much. And then for my follow-up, I just want to focus in on some of the mobile robot opportunities here. Given the form factor and the flexibility that you guys have with the different SKUs and the potential for multiple zones within some of these bots, particularly on the humanoid side. Just want to get a sense of kind of product market fit, what you're seeing from a competitive standpoint and the evolution of that opportunity to move into more substantial production.

Yeah, it's early days on robotics. We don't have any real meaningful revenue in our Q1 numbers. We're starting to have some really good discussions with folks in the U.S. and in Asia about what really is ideal. And to a certain extent, some of these companies are learning for themselves. One thing that we have learned is Ambrius' strength, our high energy density, really helps us in unstructured environments. If you have a warehouse robot and you can go around the corner and plug in, okay, maybe we're not as strong. But if you have a variety of different power needs, I reference ENL's analysis, in the call where you have some intense power needs if you're lifting and then you have some low energy needs for extended use those play to our ability to have blended batteries some that are power focused some that are energy focused a lot of which are balanced so we're getting started we have some really good conversations with customers and done well that will start to show up in terms of revenue toward the end of this year, early next.

Thanks so much, guys.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Mark Shooter with William Blair. Please state your question.

Hey, gentlemen, thanks for letting me ask the question here, and congrats on the progress in the quarter. Thank you. Last earnings call, I believe we had just entered the Iran conflict. I'm wondering how have your conversations developed over the last three months, especially with the U.S. military and the defense contractors? Has there been any increase or a sense of urgency from these drone programs that you can talk about?

Yeah, again, we're starting to see some of the flow in. We referenced some over the weekend calls, I think in the March quarter, and that has translated to some of the business. One of the customers that we talked about in the call was one of those customers. So we as a nation here, the U.S., is getting serious. I think we've seen that in a number of public announcements, and we're starting to see that flow down to us. Um, it will, uh, it will likely continue the gauntlet two in the drone dominance program. Uh, the gauntlet itself starts in August. There's some qualifiers next month in June. Uh, we know the 11 winners in gauntlet one, there's more that are entering into gauntlet two. So really close with that community and, uh, intend to stay close, uh, and intend to, uh, emphasize Our ability to have a longer loitering time, which for many of the scoring in these drone contests is super important.

Thanks, Tom. One follow-up for Ricardo about the warrant transaction I hit the tape this morning. Can you unpack a little bit more of the strategy around the transaction, and is there any more color you can provide to us on what the potential delusion would have been and what it will be now?

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, just to get us all on the same page, right, so there were basically just nearly 16.5 million public warrants issued that were issued back in 2022 in September when the company went public with a strike price of 1150. And here what we're basically doing is we took 7.1 million of those warrants and negotiated with the holders of those warrants to convert them into stock at an exchange ratio that will be determined here next week. Per our math, we are basically saving shareholders at least $70 million of dilution that would have otherwise happened if those warrants were exercised. The other bit is when these warrants are held by institutional investors, they manage a hedge, right? They generally just want the performance from the warrants rather than the performance to be linked to the stock and its volatility. And given where the stock has been trading meaningfully above $18 a share, which is the level at which we can call the warrants, if we trade above that level for 20 out of 30 trading days, they in essence had a 100% short position relative to those warrants. So I do think that this should relieve some of the short interest on the stock to the tune if you believe the math, of about 7.1 million shares at least.

That's really helpful, thanks for the call.

Absolutely.

Your next question comes from Derek Soderberg with Kantor Fitzgerald. Please state your question.

Yeah, good morning everyone and thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to start with the $500 million in defense orders awarded to your longstanding customers. What's Aprius' typical attach rate look like on those programs, and can you sort of frame the timing of when those might translate into POs?

Yeah, so we haven't traced – Attach rates because some of these programs are brand new, right? We enjoy those three customers, and these are longstanding customers, right, that have been with us for a number of years. So we are in some of the programs, but not all. And then some of the companies, of course, have changed over time. There's different divisions. AV bought Blue Halo, so it's a bit of a different company than it was when we first got close to them four or five years ago. So the good news is that we are a known quantity, and the groups tend to talk to each other. We're getting to the point where we're starting to share roadmaps. As these companies are concerned about getting to U.S.-made batteries and U.S. content, we're able to share our roadmaps on exactly when we will get there, who will build those for us, That gets us closer and that allows us to have the right kind of discussions with the engineers and the program managers that are selecting different components, batteries, motors, cameras, et cetera, for these unmanned systems that they're either producing today or have on the drawing board for release in future quarters.

And there's maybe just to add, I think, a rough guide when thinking about what this could mean for us. is the batteries are usually 5% to 15% of the built materials, depending on how advanced the UAV is. And the timing, we do think that this will have to be fulfilled in the second half of this year, spilling over into the following year. But that's being determined by the manufacturers right now.

Got it. Super helpful. And then just on the gross margin guide for 26, 25% for the full year, it looks like Q1 came in around 22% ex-Colorado. What specifically gets you back to that 25% for the full year in the back half of the year? Thanks.

Yeah, I think there are three points that are worth considering here. The first one is our U.S. mix uh continues accelerating due to what we just discussed right u.s customers pulling demand uh ahead of even our own schedule and and really driving quite a bit of the growth of the business there's also the mix of china within that which we are working to to manage as well our sales there along with the rest of the asia pacific region are accelerating too And so if you look at what the team basically does every single week, month, and quarter, we're kind of playing this game of Tetris where the demand comes in in a certain set of flavors, and then we work to sprint to supply it across our different SKUs and manufacturing partners within a certain period of time and not leave any revenue on the table. And so... You can gear that for profit or you can gear it for revenue, depending on what growth rate you're managing to. And we are managing that process pretty extensively, day by day, literally. And so, you know, we're there another three to four percentage points of gross margin on the table. If we had the logistics, coordination capabilities of a couple hundred million dollar revenue company, I think so. And so this is just a matter of us sharpening our acts when it comes to that regard, developing those capabilities, and in essence, getting that margin back into the company. It's easy to fulfill as much revenue as possible and then have all of your profits go to the FedEx and UPS if you don't manage that. And so we continue sharpening our acts in this regard. The team is pretty focused on it. And we do believe that the 25% gross margin target that we set externally is still pretty well in sight. And we'll catch up mainly in the second half of this year.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Austin Bolig with Needham. Please state your question.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the nice quarter. Um, first question, uh, has to do with kind of your current customer base. I think last quarter you guys revealed like a customer base of 550 curious on what, like the new customer ad was in the quarter. And then secondly, um, it sounds like you guys continue to go deeper with these, with these current customers. So just wanted to talk about, or if you could talk about, um, the cadence on how that is going with current customers.

Yeah, on the first part, the count, Austin, thanks for the question. It continues to be robust, and more than 50% of our shipments in the first quarter were for new customers, which certainly bodes well for the future. It's a little bit of a misleading statistic, the actual number of counts, so we're going to tend to move away from it. But it's very robust. Lots of interest will be at Exponential, the drone conference that is coming up starting Monday in Detroit. So that continues to go well. And we're starting to see, again, increased interest, some of that because of the mandates for U.S. Batteries National Defense Authorization Act approved batteries. Korea is coming online. We have three CMs there. There's work underway at the one cylindrical CM in the US and more coming. We're not ready quite to announce who's next, but we are getting ourselves organized in order to intersect that demand that we see.

And Austin, maybe just to add, I think the reason why the customer count metric has sort of run its course is we are seeing a lot of scalability with small customers by leveraging our battery pack partners. So if you look at a lot of the folks that were competing in drone dominance, even some of the ones who won, they're buying ourselves through our pack partners. And so that's giving us even more scalability than we thought of only a couple months ago. And it does tend to... over time, you know, maybe give us a lower customer count that's kind of meaningless when the real customer count is actually increasing and accelerating relative to where we were in the last quarter.

Okay. Well, thank you. And then I guess, Ricardo, one follow-up for you, like a modeling perspective. How should we think about OpEx kind of progressing through the year off of this Q1 number? Should we expect it to grow sequentially? or kind of taper off as maybe CIMAX continues to roll off?

Yeah, so through the year, and I think we have it there on slide seven. So through the year, we do expect it to, in essence, top out at $50 million for this year. And with the main change basically being this reallocation of roughly $1.4 million of costs, from cost of goods sold over to OpEx. Some of the main hires that we were looking to make this year actually started in Q1 already, so they're reflected there. And then any incremental ones will be managed below this level of roughly $50 million a year. Okay.

Well, thank you, guys. Good luck the rest of the year.

Thanks, Austin. We'll see you around.

Your next question comes from Ryan Fingst with B. Reilly Security. Please state your question.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Could you provide some commentary broadly on how you've progressed with Nanotech to gear up for production with them and where you might stand related to signing up additional U.S. or other allied manufacturing partners?

Yeah, so Nanotech is a cylindrical provider in Chico, California, north of Sacramento. Step one with them was to validate the cell and make sure that they can handle our silicon anode materials and produce a product that is on par with some of our CMs that do that in Asia. They've done that already. Percentage-wise, they are about 10% better. We have a 6.8 amp hour, those who are keeping score here, which is above the 6.6 amp hour cell of its kind. This is a 21700 cell. It can handle up to 20 amps, and some of the competing cells can handle less. So we are pleased with the technical performance of the cell that they make for us, that we make together. And we are in the process of scheduling demand. There is demand for that cell. There is demand for U.S. cells, and they're our go-to company to do that. The second part, others, we have numerous discussions underway. We are being encouraged by the Department of War to continue to advance those discussions, and we are. We're not quite ready to announce anybody yet, but we are actively working on that. It will be focused on the pouch cells. The pouch cells are about the size of a teabag. That's what the DIU has funded us to advance, both in Fremont with our prototype line, as well as manufacturing in Korea and in the U.S., So stay tuned. We are hard at work, and we will eventually be able to share news of who we're working with there.

I appreciate that detail, Tom. And then secondly, curious if you can talk about the potential opportunities that the recent defense budget request might provide you guys.

Yeah, so... As we all know, the big, beautiful bill puts in about a trillion dollars in defense spending, and a couple analysts have commented that that is heavily weighted, more biased to the unmanned aerial systems, which, of course, is our strength, as we have commented in the call and previously. The proposed $500 billion addition has more of that coming. There's this group called DAWG, Defense Autonomous Working Group, I think it stands for. And that group is the proposed budget is something like $58 billion, which is the size of the Marine budget today. A lot of that is, again, with drones and counter drones. So that is our sweet spot. So we're starting to see more of that come. We are in the right discussions. Ricardo and I were just on a call with some guys from the DOD just yesterday about some of this. So we are in a privileged position. It's wonderful when the market is expanding and the product characteristics that we have line up. So we're seeing really strong product market fits. We got more work to do. There's areas that we want to reinforce, but it's coming together and we feel good about where we are.

And the other thing there, Ryan, is basically that you can apply the same rough rule that we mentioned to Derek, right? Roughly five to 15% of the bill of materials is the battery inside of it. And I don't think our current market analysis captures the effect of this budget request if it were to be approved.

Understood. I appreciate it, guys. I'll turn it back.

Anytime.

Thanks, Ryan. Thanks.

Your next question comes from Eric Stein with Craig Hallam. Please state your question.

Hi, Tom. Hi, Ricardo. Thanks for sneaking me in here. Hey, Eric. Morning. Hey. Good morning. So I know last quarter you talked about or highlighted that for the 11 key components of your battery that you had reached NDAA compliance. And I know that an objective there, a near-term objective, is to get those suppliers under long-term agreements. So just curious where that process stands, I guess, a couple months later.

Yeah, so getting the 11 components, the internals, anode, cathode, separator, electrolyte, et cetera, is super important. And as you commented, Eric, we checked that box last quarter. We have several under contract, several of the major components, not all, but several. And the nice thing is that we have primary and secondary components. and we have a very good understanding of the landed cost. What will it take to get Japanese anode powder to Korea? What would it take to get Korea anode powder to the U.S.? So we understand the details of that. We understand what they should be costing, and those that we have not entered into long-term agreements with, we're having the arm wrestling on the should cost versus the landed cost. So we're progressing well. We have shipped, the company has shipped full NDA cells. And then as we bring on South Korea and really get them hitting their stride. One of our CMs there is delivering to customers, including one of the customers that we talked about in the call and on slide three of the deck. We need to get the other ones up to speed. Nanotech, as I mentioned, in the U.S. checks a full box on technology. We need to get them up to the delivery cadence that we want to get to. and a lot of that will occur with these suppliers. So progression on track. The DIU is pleased with where we are, as evidenced by their continuing to provide us some incremental funding based upon good work done today.

That's great. Thank you for that. And then for me, my follow-up, you know, just on light electric vehicles, I know that that obviously UAS, drones, robotics, all of those other end markets, the growth profile is quite significant. But I'm just curious. I mean, you're now into the Chinese market. I mean, it's not even arguably. It is the best electric mobility market. Is there a scenario where light electric vehicles could match, could exceed that? the growth in some of these other end markets, which arguably right now might be more top of mind?

Yeah, so it is a nice win, and it's a nice win as we come at it in that region because it's super competitive. And there are other areas, right, India, Vietnam, right, a lot of two-wheelers and three-wheelers there, and they care about some of the same things. So We have aspirations of expanding our technology into those. Will it be dominant? I think at least for the next year or so, it will be second, maybe third place, if some of the other segments that we show on slide five, if we get some of the traction that we aim to get, right? So today, LEDs are number two. We'd like to think that as some of the other ones come on, robotics in particular, even some of the space activities, that they would rival LEDs. They are very early today. So it will probably stay at number two for the next year or so.

Okay. I appreciate that. I guess good problem to have because some of the other end markets' growth is that significant. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Eric.

Your next question comes from Chip Moore with Roth. Please state your question.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to go back to that importance of standardizing for the government customers. Just maybe talk a bit more about that process and then the cells you called out, any sense of size of opportunities those specific cells could translate to.

Yeah, so the cylindrical cells are standardized, as many of us know, so that flashlights and headlamps and night vision goggles all can be interchangeable. That does not exist with the very popular pouch cells. Pouch cells tend to have a little bit higher energy density, and they're very popular with drones. And that is exactly why the DIU funded us. And we're the only company, as we've talked about in the past, that was funded under this program last year in a very competitive situation. The goal is to make pouch sales in the U.S., to make them at our prototype line. Some of the funding that we received is to increase the capability and capacity about the prototype line in Fremont. Standardized has been talked about and in the discussions during Q1 that got solidified with the incremental $3 million to our grant. It's all about making standard cells in the pouch format, and they are the size of the pouch cells. So, again, a teabag is one of the smaller size ones ranging to an iPhone size pouch. pouch cell. It's about the same thickness, by the way, as an iPhone, so just so folks get a sense of what we're talking about. We are maybe the first, certainly among the first, that are pushing standardized cells. We want to make those available so that that interchangeability that we enjoy on the cylindrical side can be done. You don't want to have to worry about batteries for a lot of these components. And to get the friction out, that's a big part of what's happening in the defense land these days, is just to make it easier to source components, batteries, cameras, motors. There are websites, Amazon-like websites, for the military where these components are available, just to add some of the efficiencies that we all see on our daily lives to the military side of things. So we're all over that. Standardized pump sales certainly make sense to us. We will deliver to that incremental funding, make these sales available. It's very much in line with our interests as a company and certainly the Department of Work's interest for the reasons we mentioned.

Very helpful, Tom. And maybe for my follow-up, I think in your closing remarks, you talked about mobility books, platforms, and qualifications. Is that mostly LEVs, to your point on the last question, or should we think about broader mobility applications?

Thanks. It's LEVs. It's also some of the robotics, right? I mentioned that we're going to some of the first conferences. It's certainly early days. We're getting smarter. We have some really good discussions going on. But look, anything that moves and we all know that we have that in our daily lives, should be able to benefit from higher energy density, which is our claim to fame. And sometimes it's also better volumetric energy density. You don't have so much space, but if you can get more energy out of that space, out of that volume, then that should win. These are higher-performing cells, so we're at the high end of the market. That's okay. So we're not... We don't make sense today for large electric vehicles like we would drive, but for the light electric vehicles, that certainly makes sense. For robotics, it makes sense. As we said, when you pay per kilogram to get something up in space, if you can save some kilograms but you have the same energy, that should be a win. That's how we think about these markets, and that's how we try to reference our advantage and then listen to customers to see, of course, if it resonates. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Ted Jackson with Northland Securities. Please state your question.

Thanks very much. Congrats on the quarter. So my first question is around the Fremont plant and the overhead costs with Cymex. Is there a point where you do an asset impairment and write it down? How does that play out? You've got equipment in there that's very bespoke for the manufacturing of that product. That product's clearly fading out. It's at some cost. It's not like it impacts cash flow. But at some point, is there a case to be made to where you either write down the assets that are in there? You know what I mean? Or just get rid of them as you get rid of Cymex. That's my first question.

Yeah, that's a good question. The asset impairment actually happened in Q4 of last year. You may have seen our DNA went down pretty meaningfully from well over a million dollars to only about 800K. And so this was in essence just You know, this is where accounting is really an art more than a science, but we literally allocated the cost of Fremont by square foot and what that square foot is used for now to drive the allocation. And we feel pretty good with where we landed here for Q1 and carrying that going forward until we start producing a little bit of site core in Fremont again late this year, early next year.

Is there a roadmap to just get out of that product, or are you just kind of tied to it because of the customer base that's already there?

Well, we'll definitely be out of it here in Q1. So the last $600,000 of revenue were delivered in Q1. Quite a bit of that was inventory that was produced in Q4. And so we should be out of the woods on Cymex.

Yeah, we converted all of our customers from Symax to Sycore. Okay, okay, that's good news.

Excuse me, my second question. On your battery-packed partners, I know that, you know, that's a good way to leverage your business and, you know, grow revenue. I guess my question on that is can you kind of walk us through maybe a timeline and, you know, like maybe how many partners do you have? You know, maybe kind of what percentage of your revenue is coming from that and where it's come from? and how you see those partners helping drive your forward revenue.

Thanks. Yeah. So some of our customers are vertically integrated, take our cells, build them into packs, add some electronics to manage the battery to worry about, okay, is the battery full? Is it empty? What is the state of charge, et cetera? Other of our customers do that through PAC partners that we have who in turn receive our sales, so they're an intermediary. There are about 40 different PAC companies that we work with in any given quarter. About six to ten of those are major volume PAC providers, those that we have under a certain program. There's three or four on our website that we have worked with. We're formalizing that program so that there are standard gold, silver, bronze type of partners where we share our roadmap with the PAC partners. Those that we are close to will be in our booth at shows. We've had joint press releases with a couple of the PAC partners that we work with closely. They are a multiplier, a force multiplier for us because they often are asked by component companies, gosh, whose cells do you recommend? So they will listen to their customers and then say, well, look, if you want to optimize your energy density, there's really only one choice here. So they help pull and add to our customer base. We like that relationship. It allows us to focus on what we do really well, which is make these industry-leading cells. It allows them to add the level of customization. We want this connector. We have this battery management system. We need it in this size or shape. You'll often hear that you need to match voltages to the voltages of the systems. So they'll put six of our batteries in series and then put two of those groups in parallel in order to do that. They do all that customization. So they're great partners, and we're formalizing even stronger our relationship with them.

Is it fair to say that as a percentage of your revenue, have they grown in terms of how they, you know, the percentage of revenue that's coming through them and, you know, you talk about them being a force multiplier and they're allowing you to, let's just say, reach a customer set that you might not be able to reach otherwise?

Yeah, for standard cell sizes, they're a key driver and we do expect their portion of sales to increase on some specific cell sizes

Okay, all right, thanks very much. Got my two questions.

Absolutely, thanks, Ted. Thanks, Dan.

Your next question comes from Ahmed Dayal with HC Wainwright. Please, see your question.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. On the pout cell performance, should we expect... Hey, hey, hey, Ricardo, good morning. The pout cell performance, should we expect this to match or even improve over the cylindrical format?

Yes, so... Because the pouch cells have less overhead, they don't have a metal can, you take a little bit of weight out and the gravimetric energy density tends to be higher. So if you look at the 450 watt hours per kilogram, those cells are pouched in format The cylindricals tend to be 330 to 350, so a bit lower, again, because of some of the overheads. That's where the pouch lines up, and that's why the pouch are preferred for some of the high-end drones because you're really trying to eke out any weight that you can. If you can use a carbon fiber pouch, for the PAC housing versus metal, a little bit more expensive, but it's lighter. Those choices, again, back to the last question about PAC partners, those choices would be made with the PAC partners. So that's super important. So if you're trying to max energy density, you would choose a pouch.

Understood, Tom. Thank you. And just as a follow-up to that, Um, once the pout cell is, you know, uh, cemented and, you know, confirmed all the design, et cetera, is that when you get a little bit more aggressive about sort of building the pipeline for maybe the U S non drone defense opportunity?

Yeah. So, uh, that's where some of the standardization comes in. So standardized cells and then putting them into standard packs, um, can really make a lot of sense. There's standard voltages in automotive, right? We all know 12 volts and then 24 volts and then even in data centers, 800 volts standards that are either here or emerging. The same thing is happening in drone land where there are preferred voltages and components and then if you have standardized cells, you can put them together into packs that meet those voltages so you can be part of this ecosystem. Again, all that's focused on adding some of the efficiencies, taking out some of that friction on the engineering side so you can get these iterative, better drones available with using off-the-shelf, but in our case, premium products to maximize the missions that these crafts might be addressing.

Thank you. Great to see the execution, guys. Congratulations. I'll take my other questions offline. Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you. Take care.

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. If you have any additional questions, you may contact Amprius' investor relations team at ir.amprius.com. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Tom for his closing remarks.

I want to thank all of our shareholders, employees, and partners for their continued support. At Amprius, we believe the next decade belongs to those who push the limits of what is possible, and that's exactly what we intend to do. Thank you for your time and attention this morning. Operator?

Thank you for joining us today for Amprius Technologies' first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.