Biolargo Inc

Good morning everyone and welcome to the BioLargo annual second quarter 2025 earnings results. At this time all participants have been placed on a listen only mode and we will open for questions following the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during this conference please press star zero on your phone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Brian Loper, Director of Investor Relations at BioLargo. The floor is yours.

Great. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to BioLargo's second quarter 2025 Earnings Results Conference call for the months ended June 30, 2025. By now, everyone should have had access to the earnings press release. This call is being webcast and is available for replay. In our remarks today, we will include statements that are considered forward-looking within the meanings of securities laws, including forward-looking statements about future results of operations, business strategies and plans, our relationships with our customers, market, and potential growth opportunities. In addition, management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current knowledge and expectations as of today and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties and may cause the actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. A detailed discussion of such risks and uncertainties are contained in our most recent form, NQ, NK, and other reports filed at the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forwarding statements. And with that, I will now hand the call over to BioLargo CEO, Dennis Keller.

Brian, thank you very much, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. We're excited to be here and share an update on the current events at the company. I want to also point out that most recently we put out a press release just two days ago that also offers a brief summary of a lot of the content we're going to talk about today. And also just a few weeks ago, we put out a stockholder letter, which goes into a very deep dive. So those two pieces of information will be very helpful as you want to drill deeper into this presentation. Also at the end of this presentation, we did some bullet points summaries of some of those key points. It's so much. I really believe that we can lean on that as opposed to cover all that in this presentation. Okay, innovation engine for a better tomorrow. We make life better. Purpose-driven innovation, right? The pillars of our company rely on a high degree of purpose, impact investments, focused on the gaps in the market, cutting-edge technology, how to qualify people. And we've been doing this for quite some time, and we're now at the point of, we believe, harvesting the fruits of our investments over an extended period of R&D cycle and investing. Who are we? Innovator scientists passionate about sustainability and human health, driven by a purpose to make life better. It's a high calling, of course. Best-in-class solutions. We don't believe it's number one. We won't continue to invest. Number one is a big claim. It's always a debate. We understand it. And, of course, when you look at each of these technical platforms, there's a myriad of of claims associated with these technologies that we believe can make it number one. For example, it works, but it's safer, safety being a key feature, big claim. In each of those, that requires discernment, but we welcome the debate, and we do believe they have a chance to really transform markets. Focus where there's a gap, gap in the market, not being filled by an incumbent, and then aim for partnerships and capital-conserving strategies, leveraging intellectual property, supply chain, partnerships on really tackling a distribution challenge at a global scale. That's how we approach our business. In the portfolio, there's a number of commercial assets at each of different stages of development. At the parent company, of course, we've got our brilliant engineering team, seniors, it's a whole crew of people that hail from 25 and 30 years' experience at a global scale, very large, important projects, highly skilled people, R&D on campus at the University of Alberta, also an important component of our portfolio. These enterprises support the commercial activities. Remember our structure. We form a subsidiary. We license into it. We incubate, if you will, these technologies for commercialization. That allows for direct investment. It allows for partnership to be created and gives us leverage at the parent company to really focus on leveraging our core competency of science and engineering, the innovation cycle, and supporting these commercial efforts. Ultimately, they're all for sale. It's important to also know. I like this next slide. It's important because what's often missing is the unseen value. When you're incubating, when you're developing new technologies that take some time for adoption, for commercial traction, regulatory approval, all the myriad of of challenges that you must overcome to success, there's a reason. The reason is both impact and value, right, the unseen value. As they find commercial success, given our business model, our strategy, we believe the unseen value can be enormous, especially when you position these products for adoption where we might participate in a supply chain or partner for distribution, work for spread, and also build equity value that creates an exit. Because we have a portfolio, the exit value is super critical, and it's often missed. It's a mistake to think of our company as a function of the revenue or earnings only. This equation has to go into the equation. It's hard for people to do that. We understand that. It's difficult because it requires a technical deep dive. It's not a drive-by. You have to peel the onion, understand what Clear is doing, understand what our P5 solution means, understand what the battery technology means to really the electrification of the world in a trillion-dollar business. I mean, it's an astonishing value proposition. In each of these, as we said, unmatched technologies, capital conserving, HQP, highly qualified people, driven on purpose. As we dissect those The execution of that, of course, is the risk. We must execute, we must find the channel, get through regulatory burdens. The odor, O&M, is the most mature. We're going to talk about the bumps we've had in the last six months in some detail and the implications financially. We're still very hopeful about its future, by the way, so we'll highlight that. CLIRA, my goodness, 13-year march to success, a significant investment, just under $20 million total invested capital. now poised for significant success with distribution partners of global acclaim as well as regional. And two product categories going to market significant investment in the last 12 to 18 months in preparation of a launch of significance, dramatic significance. And we're preparing for that as soon as possible. We'll talk about the timelines, and I'm sure that will come up in the Q&A. Just want to remind you, The details on all these are in the appendix on this presentation, which we'll just mention and then share in writing so people can go back. EPOS, long slug, lower margin, very difficult market, strategic for both the United States and industrial nations on a global scale. We are the cutting edge. We believe we're number one in that space, and we're going to win. Battery tech. Battery tech is a big deal. Don't sell batteries, sell battery factories. A pretty basic business model. I'm going to detail some of that briefly because it's just an incredibly exciting component of our business, and we've been marching towards success for a number of years. I think our total invested capital is somewhere around $2.5 million to get to where we're at. Now, that's a dramatic number. It's dramatic because if you showed me a company that had a breakthrough technology for battery tech with prototypes in hand and basic proof of claim on the technology as we have, And that was published just a couple months ago, third-party validation. Those companies probably spent either a career or $25 to $50 million. And we've done this with a couple million, $2.5 million. It's an astonishing achievement with such low capital. It is slow. It's taken some time. It took us a while to redesign, revalidate, and improve upon the work that was done by the original inventors. and we're fortunate to have one of the co-inventors on our team, and we're marching towards success. The business model itself is really critical. We present a breakthrough technology for long duration. Long duration storage is the idea of grain batteries that are grid scale on a fixed site that can be used to balance a grid, offload renewables, provide emergency backup for mission-critical-like data centers or the fastest-growing segments in the world, and then arbitraging energy, right? From the time you buy it to the time you use it, you buy when it's low, you use it when it's high, you use the battery technology to store that energy so that you can arbitrage the spread. All of those need applications are expected to grow to approximately between a $3 and $4 trillion market over the next 15 or so years, 15 or so years. It was published by The Economist in September of last year. Just two weeks ago, an article came out from Fortune magazine talking about the next trillion-dollar investment cycle, and that's in energy and energy storage combined with big data, data centers, AI-driven, AI-driven. This is a tool that has an insatiable demand, and with that demand, we believe the thesis is pretty basic. If you have a good battery, and even if you have a better battery like we do, A good battery, by the time you get to scale, you can sell all you can make before you can make them. And so with that premise, we're out recruiting partners to form joint ventures to create battery manufacturing facilities. We've indicated in our prior disclosure that we've executed four MOUs for a myriad of clients, but I want to go up to a little bit higher level and share that with you real quick. There's really three categories that are sort of shaking loose on that business deal-making. One would be impact. So what does that mean, impact? People that want to see employment. They'd like their 500 to 1,000 people employed in their community. That's one. Workforce development, workforce training, high-tech job creation, right? This initiative to bring back high-tech manufacturing to the United States of America to support this global transition, right, to the demand to supply energy real-time all the time with resiliency, right? to back up the grid, to back up the emergency use and the need to be live real-time all the time, right? That's resilience. Redundancy is what that's called. When you look at the impact, there's people that want to see that happen that are willing to put financial resources available to see these factories come to their community and solve some of those big problems. What's fascinating is, over time, it begins to look very much like a real estate. Of course, it's manufacturing. It's got some high-tech components. But there's basically project-oriented financing. And we believe that the public funding available in both states, regional, national, international, is substantial because people want the answer. It's part of a national agenda. And we can see that as evidenced by historical tax credits and many incentives to bring these high-tech jobs to a community, to a country, to a region. So our plan is well designed to leverage that type of financing, that's impact financing. The second would be financial opportunity, right? Developers. Think about developers. They build, they develop, they create equity value, and they sell. That's a developer mindset. There's a whole world of developers that want to see, want to leverage, have the opportunity to leverage the kind of opportunity that we bring for selling battery factories, not batteries. And then finally, the third, which we call more of a strategic. So who would be a strategic partner? Well, energy companies, data center developers, big data, people that are really in the business of providing A.I., They have such significant capital base and high growth trajectory. I would argue, and it is an argument, we're actually working on some article to this effect, but I would argue that if you listen to the financial news regularly and you listen to all the chitter-chatter about AI and data centers and this exploding industry and the demand, you're going to notice the caveat that the CEO will always say, And he says, if we can get enough energy or enough storage to meet our demand, then we can meet our target. Then we can meet our target. Okay. And when you go into this industry and you peel back the onion on supply and energy and access to the grid and this issue of resiliency and redundancy and access to storage that can not catch fire, that can be drawn upon for long extended period of times, because the grid is unable to meet the insatiable demand for energy, that's what we're talking about, then you'll see what we see, which is a massive gap in the market that we intend to fill. And we believe we can fill it. We've got the right people, the right strategy, and we're executing on a daily basis. So it's very exciting. And the next step for us is really pretty basic, which is to take our MOUs and move towards definitive contracts, Defensive contracts will become then hard money in the real estate lingo. So he's going to write a check to make sure that we have the tools to execute in a specific location. And then in that business model, right, we're getting actually paid to design, project manage, build these factories in exchange for a piece of income on a royalty and an equity participation that we negotiate as a minority equity stakeholder. This is a very capital-conserving strategy that has the ability to scale at a global level. Just think about it, right? Where are we limited? Well, we're limited by capital, just like everybody else. The difference here is in the benefit of the bargain. The benefit of the bargain for our partners, we're actually giving more than we're taking. Why can we do that? Well, because we're thinking globally. We think that this is the kind of technology that needs a global rollout. It needs a global scale. The world needs it. These data companies, these data center managers and big AI providers need energy and energy storage in an insatiable way. So we think it's an extraordinarily rare moment in a corporate journey to be well-positioned. Now, remember, one of the common questions we always get is, who are you and how in the world do you have a technology for long duration that's, quote, better than and what's available in the market. And, of course, that goes to the tribute to the inventors that spent almost a decade inventing this technology with all that R&D prior to our involvement. And it really is a complement to the work, the work of discovery, the work of testing and failing, expertise, of course. And so we're fortunate. We're fortunate to be here, to take up where they left off, to then revalidate that technical achievements, prototype, scale up, develop the scaling model, develop the business model, develop the way to produce at scale manufacturing. That's where we're focused, and we're leveraging on technology that is an absolute winner, an absolute winner. I'm going to drop that. We'll come back to those questions in a minute. I'm going to turn this next topic over to Charlie to review some of the basic economics of our performance over the last quarter and year to date. Go ahead, Charlie. Well, thanks, Dan.