Vicarious Surgical Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vicarious Surgical's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Tia, 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 Brosco with Vicarious Surgical for a few introductory comments. Please proceed.

Thank you, Tia, and thank you all for participating in today's call. Earlier today, Vicarious Surgical released financial results for the three months and full year ended December 31st, 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 Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, February 13, 2023. 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'll turn the call over to Adam Sachs, Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Kate. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our full-year 2022 earnings call. In 2022, our first full year as a public company, I'm pleased to share that we made significant progress toward our objectives of finalizing the vicarious surgical system, preparing for regulatory review, and expanding our surgeon and health system relationships as part of early commercial readiness. I'll start by reviewing our key accomplishments before discussing our early progress and outlook for 2023. First and foremost, we met our development timelines and made substantial progress toward a commercial-ready system. Following the completion of Beta-1 in 2021, we collected considerable hospital and surgeon feedback from our partners and performed extensive cadaveric testing to inform the finalization of Beta-2. Our development work culminated in the use of Beta-2 to successfully perform cadaveric ventral hernia procedures at Tufts Medical Center. The procedures were performed by Dr. Igor Beliansky, a world-renowned expert in robotic abdominal wall reconstruction, and leader of our Surgeon Luminary Group, which I'll touch upon in a moment. We were pleased to showcase the video of these procedures during our December System Demonstration Day, at which we hosted representatives from university hospitals to highlight the potential future application of the vicarious system in a hospital setting. Next, we established partnerships with innovative providers, to meet the needs of surgeons and hospitals and ultimately build the foundation for accelerated adoption. Early in the year, we announced the formation of our Surgeon Luminary Group, 20 of the most talented, experienced, and innovative surgeons tasked with providing critical expertise to guide all clinical aspects of our technology. Later in the year, we announced agreements with three of the top healthcare networks in the country, HCA Healthcare, University Hospitals, and Pittsburgh creates. Through these multi-year agreements, we were able to leverage the resources and expertise of our partners to support system development, regulatory clearance, and commercial launch. In addition, we added critical expertise to our leadership team with the appointment of John Mazzola as Vice President of Operations and Beverly Huss and Victoria Carr-Brendel as members of the Board of Directors. We are thrilled to have these industry veterans on board to guide our company through the next phase of development to launch. In sum, 2022 was a transformational year for Vicarious Surgical. And although it's early in the year, I'm pleased to report that our progress continues into 2023. With the Beta 2 system complete, we are diligently working toward our next system, V1.0. As part of these efforts, we have hosted conversations and Beta 2 system experiences with our surgeon luminary group and each of our center of excellence partners at our headquarters to capture further feedback on which we can iterate. Feedback remains positive, and we are now in the phase of utilizing constructive takeaways to execute modest adjustments to the system arms, improvements to the patient cart docking, and our approach to patient access. Today, we are excited to share that we remain on track for V1.0 finalization in the first half of 2023. While our team remains hard at work advancing the system, I'd like to provide an update on the steps we are taking as a company to optimize our cash runway in adaptation to today's macro environment. As everyone here knows, we are operating in a very different economy than two years ago when we took our company public. The cost of capital has dramatically increased. particularly for pre-revenue and emerging growth companies, and thus the meaning of efficient use of capital has dramatically changed as well. While previously it made sense for the company to deploy greater resources and parallel path multiple contingencies in order to absolutely minimize timeline risk wherever possible, in the current market environment, fiscal discipline requires a much more lean approach focused on growing equity value and minimizing dilutions. With that in mind, we have taken thoughtful steps to optimize our burn and extend our cash runway. We have streamlined our internal teams via a measurable reduction in total headcount, predominantly across SG&A, and we have reduced external spending as well. In this way, we are reducing our burn while focusing investment on our critical business initiatives. While we have intentionally structured these changes to preserve our development and regulatory timeline, understand that the reduction in resources, specifically the reduction of future plan spending, does naturally introduce additional timeline risk. That being said, we are confident in the team we have in place and their ability to execute, innovate, and adapt when required, as they demonstrated throughout all of 2022. Closing with our regulatory progress, our conversations with the FDA have remained enthusiastic and we are pleased with the level of collaboration and support of bringing our differentiated technology to market. Our process has involved significant open dialogue with the agency, and we are pleased to share that we are nearing the completion of our latest pre-submission. We look forward to providing further updates once our clinical protocol is finalized and we are able. With that, I'll hand it over to Bill for a discussion of our fourth quarter and full year financial results.