Vicarious Surgical Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Vicarious Surgical Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Brika and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question and answer session towards the end of today's call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Caitlin Broskow, Director of Investor Relations with Vicarious Surgical for some introductory comments. So, Caitlin, you may begin.

Thanks, Brita, and thank you all for participating in today's call. Earlier today, Vicarious Surgical released preliminary, unaudited financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those relating to our operating trends and future financial performance, expense management, market opportunity, and commercialization are based upon our current estimates and various assumptions. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these statements. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business, please refer to the risk factors set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2021, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31st, 2022. In our other reports, we may file with the SEC from time to time. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, August 8th, 2022. Vicarious Surgical disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will now turn the call over to Adam Sachs, Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Kate. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. With me today is Bill Kelly, our Chief Financial Officer. I want to start off by saying how very proud I am of what our team was able to accomplish since our last earnings call. We are thrilled to have executed Center of Excellence agreements as promised with not just one, but two of the top healthcare networks in the country. HCA Healthcare and University Hospitals. At the forefront of innovation, HCA and UH are widely recognized leaders in supporting and deploying cutting edge technology that delivers improved patient outcomes and advances the field of healthcare. And they will be monumental to the finalization of our surgical robotic platform, setting the course for our clinical trials, FDA clearance and commercial launch. Generally, Center of Excellence agreements focus on post-market surgeon training. However, our partnerships go much deeper. In formalizing these multi-year relationships, we are proud to establish powerful allies today to collaborate throughout the extensive development, clinical verification, validation, and launch phases of bringing our full product ecosystem to market. These partnerships epitomize Vicarious Surgical's objective to learn – excuse me, to leverage next generation robotic technology to deliver a solution that directly addresses the current shortcomings of open surgery, laparoscopic, and robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery. Despite advances in minimally invasive surgery over the last 40 years, it is estimated that more than 50% of the 39 million annual procedures addressable by surgical robots are still performed using open surgical technique. Trauma from large incisions associated with these techniques results in long hospitalization and recovery time, high long-term cost of care, and significant pain and suffering. While current minimally invasive techniques seek to address this substantial unmet need, these techniques also fall short for a number of reasons, including difficult manipulation of instruments, limited degrees of freedom and reach, and reduced depth perception and visibility as well as significant coordination required by surgical teams. Currently, marketed robotic systems offer some advantages as compared to laparoscopic surgery, but see limited adoption due to various technical limitations, extensive training requirements, high associated costs, and other factors. The significant technical advantages of the vicarious surgical robotic platform enabled by our proprietary decoupled actuators are designed to deliver a solution with advanced visualization and improved dexterity, all through a smaller trocar size. And by incorporating valuable insights from leading surgeons and administrators, we are able to collaboratively validate these technical features, further refine our system to meet the direct needs and wants of surgeons, and test our solution in hospital settings with these potential future customers. Additionally, our collaboration across system design, clinical and operational workflow, supply chain management, and procedural economics will enable Vicarious Surgical to better mitigate the intricate challenges faced by hospital systems today. In doing so, we aim to empower hospitals to improve patient standard of care with more efficient and effective procedures at a more attractive associated cost. Our Center of Excellence Partnership and the 200-plus hospitals they comprise play an important role in our overall development and commercial strategy, and we are sincerely grateful for each of these hospitals choosing to open their doors to us. I am confident that by working together with our unique strategy, leading technology, and our talented teams, Vicarious Surgical will provide hospital systems across the world a platform optimized to meet hospital needs and the needs of their surgeons and patients, and as a result, achieves widespread commercial adoption. Concurrent with our Center of Excellence partnerships, we are also leveraging further input from our surgeon luminary group. As we announced last quarter, this is a group of 20 of the most talented, experienced, and innovative surgeons in robotics. led by Dr. Igor Beliansky, and expands our access to leaders across an additional 10 hospital systems, providing ongoing development feedback. We continue to receive strong enthusiasm toward our platform from these surgeons. In that regard, we continue to make great strides in the development of our Beta-2 robotic platform. Updates to the previous Beta-1 system focus on ergonomic changes for surgeon comfort, improved visualization, enhanced sensing and motion capabilities, which enabled the surgeon to move freely within the abdominal cavity, further expanding their access and ability to operate. With significant and very positive feedback on the initial Beta 2 ergonomic prototype, we have completed the Beta 2 design and we are beginning the integration phase of the build. This is our next step toward bringing our robotics platform to market and ultimately demonstrating its capabilities through a cateteric ventral hernia procedure in a hospital setting, which we plan to share greater details around later this year. I would also like to take a moment to acknowledge the business environment in which we're operating. As we ramp up our operations, we increasingly face the same challenges that many of our peers have noticed. More specifically, we've experienced limited semiconductor supply and shortages of chips and other hardware in recent months. If these challenges continue, they can present a risk to our timeline. That said, I am tremendously proud of our team's ability to respond to and mitigate most of these challenges and supply chain delays to date. We continue to evaluate the details of our supply chain for opportunities to build internal redundancies, multi-source key components, and enhance our product design to address constrained supply chain risk. Given these factors, we believe we are well positioned in this environment. This has been an exciting quarter for Vicarious Surgical. We have significantly expanded our hospital and surgeon outreach, first with the Surgeon Luminary Group, as well as the more recently announced Center of Excellence Partnership. These relationships will help optimize the development of the vicarious surgical platform and will serve as the foundation for strong commercial traction. In addition, leveraging our unique hospital and surgeon access, we continue to enhance our differentiated technology, make meaningful progress toward delivering a disruptive vicarious surgical ecosystem, which we believe will be uniquely positioned for swift and effective integration into a hospital setting. I will now turn the call over to Bill for our discussion of our second quarter financial results.