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spk01: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rockley Photonics first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ms. Gwen Lauber. Please go ahead, ma'am.
spk00: Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone. This is Gwen Lauber, Vice President of Investor Relations at Rockley Photonics. Today, we released the results of our first quarter ended March 31, 2022. A copy of the earnings press release, along with supplemental financial tables, are available on the investor relations section of our website at investors.rockleyphotonics.com. With me on today's call are Dr. Andrew Rickman, OBE, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mahesh Karanth, Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast and will be archived on the investor relations section of Rocklea's website. Before I turn the call over to Andrew, I'd like to note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the anticipated features, benefits, scope, focus, status, and goals of our platform, technology, products, studies, and partnerships with third parties, our ability to bring and the timing of bringing our products to market, our product development schedules, our strategies, our research and development plans, our customers, our commercial and market opportunities and trends, our debt obligations, our costs and expenses, our cash resources, cash burn, revenue guidance, financial projections, and financial performance, and our outlook and factors affecting the foregoing. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to vary materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those discussed in our earnings press release and in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 10-K, as well as our other filings with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that are made on this call are based as of assumptions as of today. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. In addition to U.S. GAAP reporting, Rockley reports certain non-GAAP financial measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We believe these non-GAAP measures enhance the understanding of our performance. Reconciliation of these GAAP and non-GAAP measures are included in the tables found in our earnings press release. Now I'll turn the call over to Andrew. Andrew?
spk03: Thank you, Gwyn, and thank you all for joining us for our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today, I'll start by briefly discussing our results and then talk about our business. In the first quarter, we generated revenues of $1 million. Our gap net loss, which includes an interest payment for our debt and expenses from our data comms business, was $41.8 million. in the first quarter, compared to a total loss of $14.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, which benefited from a one-time R&D tax credit. After completing the financing, cash equivalents and investments will be approximately $118 million less fees. A summary of our financial statement is available on the investor relations section of our website. In a few moments, Mahesh will provide the details of our financials and our recently completed financing. I'll start with some comments about the transaction. Earlier today, we announced the completion of an $81.5 million investment in Rockley. with an option to purchase an additional $81.5 million in notes and warrants. Throughout the process, I was very pleased with the quality of the investors who expressed interest in our company and the excitement that they exhibited when we showed them our technology. I believe that their investment is an acknowledgement of our product development, the success we've had with our customers, and the many opportunities ahead of us. These investments will help fund the company as we move towards production, which we believe will begin in the second half of 2022. These new investors, along with many long-term investors who are listening into the call, understand the importance of investments that Rocky is making as we work towards fulfilling our goal of creating a unique solution that has the potential to improve, the health and wellbeing of people around the globe by allowing them to have a better understanding of their health and wellbeing. At the core of our business is our belief in the importance of taking a holistic view of an individual and their health. By monitoring multiple biomarkers and recording them over time, trends in health can be identified. Many practitioners, including Dr. David Plonoff, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a renowned diabetes expert, understands the important insights that this holistic view provides. They have devised methodologies to take this approach, but are often challenged to do this successfully. Patient compliance, high costs and lack of availability have presented insurmountable challenges until now. The world is just beginning to witness technological innovation in wearable devices. Wearables coupled with the information that machine learning and artificial intelligence can detect and analyze is impacting healthcare in profound ways. This information could potentially provide early diagnosis of diseases. It can understand a person's physiological state and provide actionable intelligence based on the person's needs. And it can help to manage chronic diseases. These innovations may lower health care costs and potentially save lives. Rockley's goal is to develop a solution which will harm practitioners and individuals with actionable personal intelligence by providing a holistic view of one's health. Our non-invasive continuous biosensing solution will identify, collect and interpret biomarkers that will alert a practitioner or a person to changes in one's health, potentially long before the change might be noticed using traditional methods that provide a snapshot into a patient at one moment in time. We believe our solution has the potential to help with disease prevention, to lower the cost of healthcare, and to improve health outcomes. Thanks to the anonymized data that each person will provide, combined with the analysis of that data through machine learning and AI, users can potentially be alerted to changes to their health much earlier. enabling them to act much sooner, thereby creating the opportunity for better outcomes. We believe our solution will expand medical monitoring from a single point in time to a longitudinal measure of health, giving the user a much more complete view of their health. In recent months, I've spoken with many of you and even sat down with a few of you face to face. Through these interactions, I realized it might be helpful if I further explain our customer base to you. This insight may help you to better understand our strategy and opportunities ahead of Rotary. Today, we have 17 customers across the consumer wearables and medtech markets, representing six out of 10 of the largest wearable companies and two of the 10 largest medtech companies. We believe that this expanded customer base should allow us to not be overly reliant on any one customer. Our customers fall into two categories. The first category includes customers who prefer to work with multiple vendors who each supply a small part of a large design. These customers then put all the pieces together into their product. The second, much larger category, works with us to provide them with our entire solution. We work together to achieve their goals and to build a strong final product. We believe the second category benefits from our expertise in developing silicon photonics-based biosensory solutions and in measurement science. Unique, critical skills that are needed to be successful in developing this new technology. We have made significant progress in developing our product platform and believe that we are years ahead of any other technology and any competitor in our field. The second group of customers benefits from our innovations, allowing them to advance their product development strategies, giving them an advantage over customers who pursue a less cohesive strategy. For us, we believe the second category will provide us significant revenue and higher profits, particularly for our MedTech customers who are interested in our full-stack solution that includes our wearable bands. In the last few months, we've seen the beginning of the convergence of consumer wearables and medtech, two massive markets. With Rockley's biosensing technology well positioned at the center, we believe we will benefit from this convergence. I believe that we are on track in the development of both our VitaSpec solution for our consumer wearable customers and our Bioptic for our MedTech customers. We plan to offer our baseline and pro solutions to both markets. Now I'd like to provide some insight into our markets. In MedTech, I'm very excited about the opportunities we have in this market. A year ago, we had two assumptions about the MedTech market. We believed that they would be slower to adopt our solution and that they would only be interested in an FDA-regulated version. These assumptions were wrong. We're currently working with early adopters on multiple use cases, including certain pre- and post-operative solutions for our MedTech customers under the general health and wellness guidance for our baseline and probands They are interested in our full solution for patient monitoring, clinical trials, and other applications. We believe the economics of these solutions will be very favorable for Rockleaf because the full solution should provide higher average selling price and margins. We finished the first quarter by announcing that we entered into a development partnership with Medtronic, to jointly develop a wearable device that utilizes our bioptic biomarker sensing platform. This partnership combines Medtronic's strengths in providing inpatient care with Rockley's expertise in photonics-based health monitoring. I believe that this collaboration will help to advance our vision of providing healthcare professionals and end users with a holistic view of an individual. We are excited about this partnership because we believe it will help us develop solutions to enable round-the-clock, real-time, non-invasive monitoring of a person's biomarkers, empowering clinicians to personalize care through actionable data. We will explore future opportunities to expand our relationship with Medtronic and other medtech companies as we look to deliver the next generation of wearable devices that we hope will enable a new level of patient care. Also in the first quarter, we announced that we shipped samples of our recently announced bioptics pipeline to multiple medtech customers Bioptics is a full biomarker sensing platform for professional healthcare and offers the first of its kind non-invasive continuous biosensing wristband. The platform will enable measurement of an extensive range of biomarkers and will be supported by custom cloud-based analytics and AI. To meet increasing demand for our MedTech customers, Bioptics was launched two years earlier than planned. Customer interest in both general health and wellness solutions and FDA-regulated versions continues to be high. and we expect the first commercial products for a general health and wellness version of our baseline band solution to be available in the second half of 2022 with production ramp in 2023. To this end, we confirmed the design of our baseline band prototype, having received input from our partners, customers, and global healthcare leaders. We are working with our contract manufacturers to support our production ramp for the baseline band in the second half of 2022. Turning to our consumer wearables, we recently achieved a very important milestone. Shipping VitaSpec Pro technology for the non-invasive measurement of alcohol, glucose, and lactate to an early access Tier 1 consumer wearables customer. The shipment of this advanced biomarker sensing technology is important for Rocky because this is a significant step towards integrating our biosensing technology into smart wearables. We believe this integration will provide a holistic view of one's health and has the potential to transform health outcomes by enabling early detection of certain conditions, allowing for improved management and treatment of illnesses. We also have opportunities with our consumer wearable customers for general health and wellness and FDA regulated versions of our baseline and pro solutions. As health and wellness becomes more of a focus with end users, these customers also want a standard and a medical grade solution that they can offer their end users at different subscription levels. As a business, we believe we are taking the right steps and demonstrating to our customers that we are building a product portfolio that has significant potential to change healthcare. This milestone further demonstrates that our vision is the right one. At the heart of what we do are our human trials. These IRB approved studies bring together people and technology, creating real world scenarios that provide us with insight into the efficacy of our solution. I'm truly delighted to say that our initial work in the labs has been validated by these studies. producing results that both exceed the generally accepted methods of measurement, and in some cases provide the first primary method to measure what could be life-threatening conditions. These studies are where our solution moves from theoretical to revolutionary. In December, we released the results of our first preliminary human studies, In this core body temperature study, we were able to achieve results far closer to the gold standard than any of today's generally available devices. The study was the first human study in a series designed to evaluate and refine the performance of Rotary's sensing platform to measure this biomarker. Since the initial study, we conducted additional core body temperature studies, completing a second study and working towards finalizing the results of a third. I'm very pleased to say that by fine-tuning our solution through these ongoing studies, we are achieving results that are even more accurate than our previous results and closer to the gold standard than any of the commercially available devices. In the first quarter, We also announced that we successfully completed the first stage of our human studies, examining the measurement of blood pressure using Rotley's biomarker sensing platform. In addition to demonstrating that a photonics-based sensor wore on the wrist to measure blood pressure non-invasively, The study showed that Rockley's risk-based platform produces strong correlation of heart rate and heart rate variability measurements with results from commonly used electrocardiogram or ECG equipment. Since that time, we increased the number of subjects in the study so that we can continue training and test more robust machine learning models. And finally, just a few days ago, we announced the results of our preliminary study measuring hydration levels using Rockley's non-invasive biomarker sensing platform. Our study showed that a Rockley wearable device was able to correctly predict dehydration in humans 99% of the time and detect the normal state of water content 82% of the time. The ability to monitor changes in body hydration levels on a routine basis through a locally powered device has the potential to help people and help healthcare professionals make better informed choices about their hydration needs, including the amount and timing of fluid consumption. We also announced that we created a hydration index, a powerful new measurement scale designed to provide a simple way to understand personal hydration levels. Until now, there was no single gold standard method for measuring hydration. Instead, healthcare professionals use a combination of costly and time-consuming laboratory tests to assess the cosmolality and electrolyte concentration in patients' fluids. Core body temperature, blood pressure, and hydration biomarkers, along with heart rate variability, respiration, and blood oxygen levels, will be measured in our baseline solution. We are also conducting early-stage studies for our pro solution, which includes the measurement of alcohol, lactate, and glucose, in addition to the biomarkers available in our baseline technology. We are very pleased with the results. Our plan is to release the results of these human studies as we complete various stages of these programs throughout the year. And now I'd like to discuss the opportunity that we created through our ecosystem. In speaking with our customers and partners, we realized that the power behind a solution is not just our unique biosensing technology, but also the data that naturally flows through the Rockley devices. Today, we are building a framework for collecting measurements across large populations over long time periods that will enable our data scientists working with partners to discover new patterns in the data. These patterns can be turned into cloud-based services for healthcare recommendations and predictions tailored to an individual wearing a Roxy sensor. Developing the cloud and machine learning stack jointly with our hardware and sensor IP allows us to optimize the performance of the entire system. For example, enabling us to iterate quickly on sensor designs informed by our growing collection of data from wearable sensors. This library of datasets is seeded by our human studies, our partner studies, and eventually our customers. Finally, we are building a subscription-based machine learning and software ecosystem that will enable our customers to integrate our analytics services into their applications and even to create their own models from our center data and deploy these as services to the rest of the Rocklea Center community. We believe this platform will help our customers to be more efficient in monitoring their patients, more successful in their drug development, and will provide them with new revenue-sharing opportunities. I strongly believe that Rockne is pursuing the right path for our future. we continue to develop a highly sophisticated solution that will provide individuals and healthcare professionals with a powerful, holistic view of the human body through insights into multiple biomarkers. This will allow both audiences to monitor and track trends in an individual's health. I believe this will allow the current market to move from sick care to true healthcare. The insights we will provide have the potential to change one's daily life by providing a deeper understanding of the impact of lifestyle choices in real time to help physicians identify serious health conditions and possible disease states earlier, allowing for more affordable prevention measures and to provide a real opportunity for remote monitoring of patients and the elderly. I believe our solution, which utilizes our very powerful technology, will help to profoundly change healthcare for the better. Finally, I want to offer my sincere thanks to the entire Rockley team. The team is working extremely hard as we move towards production in the second half of 2022. Their support is making our vision a reality, and I believe their work will forever change people's lives for the better. With that, I will turn the call over to Mahesh for a review of our financial performance in the quarter. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, I will discuss some key topics that will provide you with a deeper understanding of our business. I will end by providing an update on our outlook for 2022. We recorded revenue of approximately $1 million in the first quarter. Revenue for the first quarter is solely related to non-recurring engineering services from our customers, and revenue is recognized based on mutually agreed performance obligations and acceptance. Cost of revenue was $3.4 million, resulting in a gross loss of $2.4 million. It is important to note that expenses are recorded as incurred even if revenue has not been recognized. R&D expenditures increased because of a slight increase in headcount as well as other expenses as we build our infrastructures to support our product efforts ahead of our second half 2022 production ramp. Q4, R&D does not provide an appropriate comparison because of a R&D tax credit in that quarter. As I mentioned last quarter, we implemented a number of programs to preserve capital and reduce our cash flow. This enabled us to decrease SG&A expenses from 12.4 million in Q4 to 10.9 million in the first quarter. For the first quarter, our cash burn was impacted by several expenses, which resulted in higher cash outlays. These expenses included a debt plus interest repayment of $7.5 million to our lenders and other one-time expenses, including expenses for our Datacom business of approximately $3.6 million. Excluding these expenses, cash used in operating activities during the quarter totaled approximately $34 million, in line with the fourth quarter as we supported programs to enable our production ramp. We believe that our cash burn will be lower in the second half of 2022 as we work towards reducing expenses. Recurring operating expenses for our Datacom business are approximately $2.5 million and mainly include salaries and FAP partner spend. We expect these expenses to wind down once we monetize the Datacom business. Since announcing our plan to monetize the Datacom business, we have had strong interest from companies interested in that business and technology. We will provide an update on these efforts when it is appropriate. We ended the quarter with $36.4 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. We did not utilize any funds from our key lock. As a reminder, we believe that we will receive additional funds from UK R&D tax credit and from monetization of our Datacom communication business. Subsequent to quarter end, we raised $81.5 million through a convertible loan note, which, as Andrew mentioned, will enable us to advance the development of our biosensing solutions for the consumer wearable and medtech market. Looking ahead, For 2022, our revenue guidance is $20 to $30 million, which we continue to expect to be primarily driven by monetizing our data communications assets, NRE, and product sales. In wrapping up my prepared remarks, we are pleased with our operational progress so far this year, and believe we remain well positioned to execute on our roadmap ahead. I will now turn the call back to the operator to open up the calls for questions.
spk01: Thank you, sir. The floor is now open for your questions. If you do have a question, please press star 1 on your touch-tone telephone keypad at this time. We will take our first question from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
spk03: Yes, we can. Hi, Quinn.
spk05: Hi. Hi, Craig. Obviously, you guys are making a lot of progress on the products and solutions both for the consumer and the MedTech markets, but I just wanted to get some more clarification on the financing that you announced this morning. Mahesh, I guess first, can you give us some sense of the number of shares underlying the convertible notes and the warrants issued? And then you mentioned there's an option for another $81.5 million. Who has, you know, what is the timing sort of associated with that option? Is that something you would expect to potentially, you know, happen pretty quickly? Or is there a timeframe on that option for the second round of notes?
spk02: Yeah. Hi, Glenn. We have actually released the 8K, wherein we have put out all the details. So I would encourage you to take a look at that. At a high level, as we said, we will be raising $81 million now with an option to raise another $81 million over the next year. The pricing for this round was $3.08 per share. We still have a $50 million of ELOC in place. So the company, which will provide the company approximately about $200 million of liquidity. Very good group of investors, we can't mention the names, who spent a lot of time with us understanding the business and the future opportunities.
spk05: Understood. Okay, great. Okay. Oh, please continue if you had more.
spk02: No, no, no. More details about the deal structure and the coupon or the warrant, everything is mentioned in that 8-key.
spk05: Okay. I guess the second sort of question is sort of around the expense reduction. that you mentioned programs to reduce expenses in the second half. Is that mostly just the monetization of the Datacom assets and that $2.5 million of associated expenses going away, or are there other actions on the biomarker sensing side where you also see an opportunity to reduce the level of expenses in the second half?
spk02: It's predominantly on the Datacom side. The Datacom side, as we said, we have got very good traction at this stage. We should be announcing something shortly. Once that is done, unlike the previous deal, if you recall the deal we were talking with the JV partners, we would continue to have the headcount and also do the FAP partner spend. and get a higher amount, whereas with this, we may get a lower amount, but we will not be spending any more money as we move forward. So that, from a company's point of view and the shareholder's point of view, we felt this will be the right move for us as we bring the cost down. That is probably the main thing. Then there are certain biomarkers which have an impact in the 2025 timeframe. Those biomarkers, we will not be taking a very active step at this stage, and we will push that out to next year. So that is how we will combine all those expenses reduction as we move forward.
spk05: Great. And then just for Andrew, you mentioned of products moving into production in the second half of the year. Is that both on the consumer wearable and the MedTech device side, or is that mostly just on the bioptics and the MedTech side for the second half of this year?
spk03: It's both, because the chipset that goes inside the bioptics band is essentially the vital spec chipset to go into consumer wearable customers as well. So it's both activities.
spk05: OK. Great. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.
spk01: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, it is star 1 if you had a question or comment at this time. We'll go next to Tim Savignon with Northlink Capital. Your line is open, sir. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hi, good afternoon. I'm wondering if you might be able to, you know, you mentioned kind of gearing up with the supply chain contract manufacturers for production volumes of those baseline bands here in the second half. At this point, you know, can you characterize what those production volumes might look like? Or are we talking about kind of an initial seeding of the market or, you know, what you'd consider to be, you know, full or meaningful, uh, production or any color on kind of the scale of that ramp, I think would be great.
spk03: Would you like to take that back?
spk02: Yeah, thanks. Uh, at this stage for this year, um, uh, Our production ramp will be less than a million units. For the next year, it will be in multi-million units volume. So if you look at the next years, you'll be talking north of 1,000 wafers.
spk04: And again, you expect that to be kind of spread across Yeah, I guess, Andrew, you mentioned, you know, you expect both markets to be targeted, consumer and medtech, but would you, you know, expect a bias either way? And in addition, you know, given your comments that the baseline unit, you know, contains the same optical sensing engine, as part of that ramp, do you expect shipments of that engine to turn ramp up as well outside of the baseline.
spk03: That's correct and yes.
spk04: Okay, thanks very much.
spk03: Thanks, Jim.
spk01: And one final reminder, it is star one for questions. All right, with no other questions holding, that will conclude today's Q&A session. I'll turn it back for any additional or closing comments.
spk03: Thank you for participating in our call today. We're very excited about the opportunities ahead of us, and we're looking forward to providing you with updates in the near future. Thank you, everybody.
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today's call. We thank you for your participation.
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