Kraken Robotics Inc

good morning and welcome to the crafting robotics second quarter of 2025 financial results conference call for the three months ending june 30th 2025. as a reminder all participants are in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded my name is jamie and i will be your operator today after the presentation there will be an opportunity for analysts to ask questions To join the question queue, you may press star and then one on your telephone keypads. Should you need assistance during the conference, you may say no to an operator by pressing star and zero. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Joe McKay, Kraken's Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Kraken Robotics Q2 2025 earnings release call. During the call, all the participants are in a listen-only mode. And then following management's commentary, we'll conduct a question and answer session with the financial community. Members of the media and retail investors should contact our PR staff and our investor relations staff listed on our press release today. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that certain statements in this call may be forward-looking in nature. Matters discussed on today's call, including guidance and outlook for 2025 and beyond, statements involving known and unknown risk, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements reflect the company's judgment based on information available at the time of this call today. Please see our forward-looking statements and risk factors included in our press release, our MD&A, and our AIF, which are all available on CDAR and our website. Today's call will include non-IFRS financial measures, and they are reconciled to our IFRS results which are within our release as well as the MD&A. Unless otherwise stated, all dollar amounts discussed today are denominated in Canadian dollars. With all that being said, I'll hand it over to our president and CEO, Greg Reed.

Thanks, Joe, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to Kraken Robotics' second quarter 25 conference call, financial earnings conference call. I'll start with a brief summary of Kraken Robotics. After this, I'll summarize key highlights across our products and our services. during our Q2 and the first half of 2025 and what we can expect through the year and beyond. Then Joe will run through our Q2 and first half financial results and provide our outlook. We'll finish up the call with questions from analysts. Kraken is an ocean technology company focused on transforming subsea intelligence through the provision of advanced imaging sensors, endurance solutions, and underwater robotic systems. Our technologies are used in both military and commercial applications with leading navies, defense contractors, and offshore energy companies such as the US, Australian, Canadian, Danish, and Polish navies, underwater vehicle manufacturers such as HII, Endural, Teledyne, and companies in the offshore service supply chain such as Ocean Infinity, Fugro, Subsea7, Saipem, Technip, and more. We're headquartered in Canada. We have manufacturing and service operations in Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany, and we have sales and R&D offices in Denmark and Brazil. With almost 400 employees, we serve the global market supporting defense, offshore energy, and marine science customers with solutions that enhance harsh environment underwater operations. We report two lines of business, products and services. Our product business focuses on subsea power solutions, subsea platforms, and advanced sensors, all tailored for underwater applications for both defense and commercial markets, particularly in maritime security and offshore energy. I'll start first with subsea power products, which we brand SeaPower. These subsea pressure-tolerant battery systems enable increased energy density for autonomous underwater vehicles in the demanding conditions of deep sea environments. Our sea power batteries are used by a number of Navy and commercial customers across the globe in their autonomous underwater vehicles. Our subsea power business is seeing strong demand driven mainly by defense customers with large underwater vehicles. Our subsea battery pipeline continues to be robust with opportunities across a range of customers from small to large underwater vehicles. We continue to expect additional large vehicle design wins in 2025 as new customers order initial quantities of batteries for their engineering test prototype underwater vehicles. On the battery development front, we will introduce a new higher energy density battery later this year and expect them to start initial production in Q4. In addition, new cell form factors will allow us to address the smaller and the medium sized AUV market. That's a segment of the market that we have not traditionally had solutions for. We're also pleased to announce that an initial subsea energy storage partner who will use our batteries in their subsea energy storage systems that they sell to the offshore energy markets for reliable seabed power. Finally, an update on our Nova Scotia production facility in Canada that we announced in February of this year. This facility is on schedule to open in late September, early October with initial training of new hires. Equipment is moving in place and we're fitting out the facility as we speak. In preparation for the move, these key hires have been shadowing our German operations where we build batteries and we're targeting to manufacture initial batteries late at the end of 2025 out of Halifax. Turning to our other products business, sensors and platforms, geopolitical conditions across Asia, Europe and the US are fueling defense spending across Western allies and interest in our sensors and platforms. Based on customer and industry conversations, the next 12 to 36 months will likely see a major increase in requests for proposals and contract awards around the world in the mine hunting and maritime security space. We anticipate the spend in this next phase will be significantly higher when compared to historical activity. Kraken has demonstrated the performance of our mine hunting sonar and systems capabilities within customers that include leading NATO and Five Eyes navies like the Royal Danish Navy, Royal Australian Navy, United States Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and others. Our reputation within mine countermeasures is solid across the defense industry and we're positioned to win our fair share of this new business. We have been active on the demo front within water demonstrations for our platforms and sensors so far this year in countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Italy, and New Zealand, and we'll do additional demos in the UK and Turkey in Q3 and Q4. In September, our systems will be used by numerous navies at Bretmas in Portugal, building off our success in 2024 at Bretmas where five different navies used our sonar systems on their underwater vehicles. On the innovation front, looking at our product developments for our platforms and sensors, we have developed a new circular SAS product which we expect to be a requirement for the US Navy as well as several other large navies. We also have a longer range SAS for larger unmanned underwater vehicles under development and we're in discussion with potential launch customers. We will also demonstrate a new unmanned surface vessel or a USV launch and recovery system with a large defense prime and a Navy in Europe this fall. Our LARS are advanced solutions that streamline the deployment and retrieval of our catfish towed vehicle from unmanned surface vessels, enhancing operational efficiency in challenging marine environments. Our new LARS is significantly smaller and lighter than our existing LARS and opens the aperture to allow for integration on a greater variety of vessels of opportunity and USVs. Moving over to our service business, this is an important part of Kraken's growth strategy, capitalizing on the increasing demand for advanced subsea solutions in the offshore energy sector, particularly in the commercial offshore wind and oil and gas markets. Here, we provide clients with a variety of subsea survey and inspection capabilities that reduce client costs and risks across all aspects of marine infrastructure planning, construction, operations and maintenance, and decommissioning. In addition to being a high-margin, profitable, and growing revenue stream, the feedback loop between our offshore teams and our customers to our R&D and engineering groups adds significant value to guiding our technology roadmaps. In other words, we eat our own cooking. Similar to our subsea battery business, our service business had strong results in the second quarter and the first half of 2025. This was the first quarter from our acquisition of 3D at depth, and its contributions to our financial results, operations, and opportunities have been solid. Since the acquisition closed, 3D at Depth has had projects in the Gulf of Mexico, Norway, Guyana, Brazil, and Australia, to name a few. In addition to commercial customers, we see the applicability of their technology to defense customers and prospects, several of whom are already evaluating it. In addition to offshore energy, 3D also provides LIDAR services to the U.S. nuclear industry. While a small portion of their revenue stream, there are opportunities for growth in the nuclear sector in both services and potential product sales. 3D's precise measurements and high-quality service deliverables has a growing and highly repeatable customer base, with clients returning for new datasets, enhanced second-run data, comparative analyses, modeling and updates, on previous measurement deliverables years after the initial data collection. The company's average job size continues to grow as the company does more dynamic scanning work where the average job size is larger at over $500,000 per job. Beyond 3D at Depth, Kraken's other commercial service business so far this year has been active in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and Taiwan, where we've been conducting buried cable imaging and sub-seabed boulder surveys for offshore oil and gas and offshore wind customers. To support future commercial projects, we recently delivered a new service dedicated catfish to the UK and expect it to be in the water for customer demonstrations in September. Overall, our service business is recording strong asset utilization and to support future work, we're building additional sonar and optical systems, which are accounted for in our CapEx figures. The U.S. offshore renewables market has had challenges, as noted by companies like Orsted and Fugro. However, the renewable markets in other parts of the world remain strong, and with our diversification geographically with offshore oil and gas and unique technology tools, we see minimal impacts from the U.S. offshore renewables on our service business growth forecasts. Before handing the call back to Joe to discuss our Q2 financial results, I want to highlight just a few other points that occurred since the last call. First, we strengthened our Board of Directors by appointing Defense Industry Veteran and former Raytheon and Boeing Executive Kristen Robertson at our June AGM. Kristen brings more than 30 years of experience managing complex portfolios at top U.S. defense companies. As it relates to subsea technologies, she was Vice President and Manager of Autonomous Systems at Boeing, leading a portfolio of seabed projects, including the ORCA, Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle for the U.S. Navy, and she also served as Board Chairman for Boeing's Liquid Robotics subsidiary. In July, we closed the $115 million bought deal that was well oversubscribed and added a number of new long-term institutional investors. This strengthening of the balance sheet is beneficial for us on a number of fronts, allowing us to more aggressively pursue our growth plans across capacity expansion, new product development, and M&A. We have a good track record of selective accretive acquisitions and we expect our recent acquisition of 3D at Depth to continue that record. We continue to look at other M&A opportunities, running them through our strategic and financial filters, and we see opportunities across the spectrum for additional tuck-ins to larger transformative deals. Geographically, our M&A focuses on additional capabilities and customers in the U.S. and Europe. We are also pleased with the expansion of our institutional investor base and appreciate new analysts who launch research coverage on Kraken, bringing the total number of dealers covering our story to seven. With that, I'll turn it over to Joe for financial comments on the quarter and the half year.

Thanks, Greg. For the second quarter of 2025, ending June 30th, the consolidated revenue totaled $26.4 million compared to $22.8 million in the year-ago quarter, up 16%. During the quarter, our subsidy battery business grew revenue by 26% and actually had its strongest quarter to date in terms of absolute dollars. Our service business grew organically by 27%. and this excludes the $5.4 million in revenue from 3D that we recognized during the quarter that closed on April 1st of this year. Our sonar business in the quarter did decline by over 50% due to the Canadian Navy RMDS project being largely completed in 2024 and timing of various catfish projects. Year to date, revenue was $42.5 million, down 3% from the prior year, with the strength in our battery business and our service business being offset by lower sonar revenue mainly related to the RMDS project. Gross profit in Q2 increased 27% to $14.8 million, implying a 56% gross profit margin compared to 51% in Q2 last year. Year-to-date gross margins were 59% versus 48% for the six months in 2024. The year-over-year improvement relates to revenue mix with a higher percentage of our revenues this year coming from higher margin projects in the current year compared to the prior year. Q2 2025 adjusted EBITDA was $4.7 million compared to $5.4 million in the comparable quarter last year, resulting in adjusted EBITDA margin of 18% compared to 24% in the prior year. For the first half of 2025, adjusted EBITDA margin was 17.6%. The lower adjusted EBITDA margin relates to increased admin expenses where we've invested in business development, particularly in systems and processes, as well as the numerous demonstrations that Greg had mentioned previously. Ultimately, we hope this increased business development will help us execute on our potential revenue pipeline going forward. CapEx intangibles in the quarter were $6.3 million and $9 million year-to-date, a significant increase over the prior year. The increase relates primarily to our subsea battery expansion that Greg indicated, as well as investment in additional marine equipment to drive service revenue growth. Our annual financial guidance for the year remains unchanged, with revenues ranging from 120 to 135 million, and adjusted EBITDA between 26 to 34 million. This guidance implies significant increase in our revenue and EBITDA in the second half of 2025, driven by growth in both our defense and commercial markets. With that, I'll hand it back to Greg.

Thanks, Joe. In closing, we focus our business on annual targets and note that our actual annual results are often back-end weighted. with this year being no exception. Our quarterly results can vary based on the timing of new orders, product shipments, and seasonality in our offshore business and our European manufacturing business. With that, we'll wrap up our prepared remarks by pointing you to our website, krakenrobotics.com, for more information. We update our website regularly, including our financial filings and other updates, and you can also find our financial filings on CDAR+. Please also visit Sofit Capital's website for additional information. Follow them on X, the former Twitter, to get links to announcements and other media. Thanks for tuning in. Jamie, over to you for analyst questions.

Thank you, Greg and Joe. At this time, we'll begin the question and answer session with analysts. To join the question queue, you may press star and then one on your telephone keypads. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. We'll pause a moment as callers join the question queue. And our first question today comes from Nick Boychuk from Comark. Please go ahead with your question.

Thanks, good morning guys. I wanted to start on the sonar and catfish business, specifically around the commentary that you had in the PR and these prepared remarks. It sounds like obviously the RFP environment for 25 to 27, it's very strong. What can you guys share on how that procurement process is changing? Are any of the navies looking to streamline how they're procuring equipment and get that into the field faster?

Thanks, Nick. Morning. I would say it's a variety. Yes, in some cases you're seeing activity pulled in. There's a lot more, I'll call them small opportunities, onesie, twosie, three-type systems, some smaller procurements on the AUV side that we're seeing an acceleration on. On the catfish, the bigger programs that are more complicated programs, I wouldn't say there's really been any change in the last quarter. There's a number of these that have been telegraphed for a number of years and there's 10 or 11 or 12 different sizable programs that are coming up for tender this year, next year and into 2026. Those have been well telegraphed in our industry and I think as I mentioned on the last call that we had seen a couple of those accelerate, but since then there hasn't really been any change. Just to say that there's a lot of activity and we expect to start to see these RFPs hitting the market in the not too distant future.

Okay, understood. And then switching gears to the Halifax Battery Facility. um what's it going to take and when should we maybe expect commentary about a potential offtake agreement or min volume and if that is in the works to whatever extent it might be how are you thinking about customer concentration for what you're producing from that facility versus having spare capacity available to meet incremental spot demand as new vendors want to start using your product or adopting it into their systems yep thanks on the battery fronts yeah uh

At the end of the year, we'll start to be operational on batteries and then producing batteries in the beginning of 2025 that will go to customers. In terms of making any press releases on certain customers, as people know, we don't name customers and as business comes in, we will announce those awards if they're material. Obviously, that adds significant capacity on top of what we have in Germany today, so we're doing that with a view of discussions with various customers. We are running full out. All we can say is we're running full out to get this new facility up and operational. I think in my prepared remarks, or maybe in maybe it was in our press release, we are also taking on some additional capacity in our German facility. We've got the ability to add some space there now from another tenant. So overall, we're focused on adding additional capacity that'll help us meet all of our customer needs. And as I mentioned, there's some other customers that are coming on. We'll start to get initial orders on them later this year. And it's really a balancing act of trying to fit people, you know, various customers in.

Okay, understood. And then just rounding up the three legs of the stool, services business, is this quarter reflective of a full utilization of your equipment? Or is there some slack still within some of the utilization rates? Like I know you mentioned you're going to add additional things, but is this quarter representative of a full run rate of that business?

I would say the way the service business operates is you have ebbs and flows of the business during different seasonal times of the year. The utilization rates on the 3D equipment is fairly high on the laser side. We're building some, we've sent some equipment down to Brazil for the South American market there, Brazil and Guyana, and so as we sent some of those down, we are backfilling that with additional builds. So 3D is pretty tight in terms of high utilization, but we are building additional equipment. On the, call it the original core service business, our We've got a few different tools, as you know, in that market. One of them is our sub-bottom imager where utilization has been quite steady. We're actually having issues right now where we've got too many jobs and not enough kit, so it's a balancing act for the operations teams to manage that. If you remember last year on our acoustic core technology, we had a big contract and a few smaller ones. So we're chasing some of those this year. We haven't landed another big contract on the AC front this year. So that kit is available for use. So really that's a long-winded way of saying that parts of the business and services are full up right now and other parts have a bit of spare capacity.

Got it. Thanks, Rick.

Okay. Thank you.

And our next question comes from Doug Taylor from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead with your question.

Yeah, thank you. Good morning. You've maintained your annual guidance here for $120 million, $135 million, very impressive growth. As we stand here today, you've reported just 35% of the low end of that guidance range, and you've always been consistent. You expect to be back-end weighted as is typical. So I guess my question here is, can you help us you know, with, you know, the degree of visibility you've got, you know, to the low end versus the high end of the range and maybe talk about some of the opportunities that, you know, would get you, you know, between those two goalposts?

Yep. Morning, Doug. Thanks. I would, you know, breaking apart the three parts of the business as well, you know, we expect services to have a really strong year. We expect the battery business to have a really strong year. and I'll call it of the three legs of the stool, the one that's not had a strong year so far is the sonar side, so our SAS and our catfish business. All indications on the sales pipeline that we expect really strong activity in the second half of the year. A number of the demos that we already did this year, we expect a good chance that some of those will convert into revenue this year. And we have been building... Historically, we were more of a company that built to order as opposed to built to a forecast because we didn't have the balance sheet to invest in inventory. That's part of the reason for some of the raises that we've done over the last year or so. We're building to a forecast right now. We will have the equipment ready. There's a lot of pipeline discussions and negotiations with customers on contract deliverables. If we get those over the goal line, then we'll be comfortable with our guidance. I think that we don't want to get into too much detail of what gets us from the low end to the high end. There's a lot of moving parts and a lot of irons in the fire.

I think if you look at how we see the business, there's a lot of large projects out there And it really comes down to timing on when, and this is more going from the low end to the high end of revenue guidance. It really comes down to the timing of when we get to go ahead to start some of these projects and then revenue recognition, how much you can recognize in 2025 versus 2026 and stuff like that. Very sizable jobs that will really come down to revenue recognition and when the jobs, a good long line of sight that the jobs are going to go ahead, just when do they, the timing on when they go ahead.

Yeah, and I'd add one other point I'd add to Joe's comments is historically, you know, we've talked about some of the bigger programs that we've worked on, and most of the time we are providing our equipment on, you know, to various navies, and they already have their existing vessels. There are some cases that we've been evaluating where we've had customers asking us to deliver the full solution, i.e. unmanned surface vessels as well, so we're looking at that internally of how we move forward on that because we do have some customers asking us to prime the whole thing. That would be obviously some of the additional integrator contracts would be more sizable contracts.

To summarize there, just to make sure I'm understanding, we've got these large, you know, I think you said about a dozen substantial, these would be $10, $20, $30 million opportunities plus that could be percentage of completion. Some of those may hit this year, but it'll depend on revenue recognition. But there are other opportunities to ship catfish systems or other sensor kits. that would be maybe to existing customers who are adding on or something like that that could be kind of fast twitch and happen very quickly that may fall in the second half of this year? Is that a fair characterization of how you expect the rest of the year to go?

I think that's fair, but also it would be also not just on the products business. It would also be on the service business as well. Right.

Okay. Okay. You mentioned this new LARS or ALARS opportunity. This is newer to me. So just so I'm understanding, you're talking about getting into the business of selling these launch and recovery systems for third-party vehicles as opposed to Catfish. Is that a business that you've been in to date to any significant degree? And maybe you could just talk about your competitive edge and the opportunity size there.

Yeah, so maybe either you didn't hear me correctly or I didn't explain it properly, but yeah, it is LARS for our own systems, but what we're saying is that these are specifically for USVs. And to put it in context, traditional crewed ships or manned ships, you might have people that are operating, navies that are operating anywhere from a you know, a 30 to 80-meter vessel. So it obviously has more deck space for a bigger launch and recovery system. Now we're getting into a market where you're getting unmanned surface vessels, or USVs, which are replacing traditionally manned mine-hunting ships. And these USVs might be on the order 11, 12, 13, 14 meters. So they're much smaller vessels, They have no people on board, and hence we need a launch and recovery system that is much smaller to fit on that vessel. And we've been working on that for a year and a half or so. Our group that builds, designs, and builds launch and recovery systems are the Ex Rolls-Royce Marine Engineering Group out of Halifax. So we've got lots of experience. We've got a really neat design coming out that's lightweight, and we'll demo it. And effectively what it does is just allows us to access a whole bunch of programs that are coming that are going to be on USVs as opposed to the traditional big ships.

With a catfish at the end?

Yeah, with a catfish. We've had customers inquire. We've had AUV companies inquire about us building launch and recovery systems for them. While we have that capability, it would be a distraction to our to us, so we're sticking with our own systems only.

I appreciate that extra color. Thanks. I'll pass the line.

Okay. Thanks, Doug.

Thanks, Doug.

Our next question comes from Benoit Poirier from Desjardins Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning, Joe. Good morning, Greg. Yeah, with all these potential orders, could you maybe quantify what would be your bidding pipeline now and how it has changed versus previous quarters?

Hi, Ben Law. Thanks. Yeah, we're not going to quantify it. We've done it, we just started doing it last year and we were doing it once annually and I think we did it once at the end of April timeframe. I would say that overall, you know, the direction has been higher just as a general commentary and predominantly driven by the defense market. But, you know, what we talked about I think the last time we publicly disclosed it was roughly a $2 billion pipeline of which The figures were almost, you know, half of it related to, I'll call it the sensor and platform business. And then the next biggest piece was the subsea power business.

Okay, that's great color, Greg. And on the battery business, can you provide an update on the status of your discussion with other customers aside from the one large customers and your confidence to sign something by year-end?

Yeah, I would say that on the – If you think about the subsea battery business, what really drives the volume in the industry is the big vehicles. And there's a number of other companies. There's eight to ten different companies out there that have already made announcements or it's known in the industry that they're developing XLUUVs. And we've got various stages of BD discussions ongoing with almost all of them. And I would say that we're confident that we're going to be able to get at least one of them signed this year and be able to show that and potentially more of them. There's a handful of them that are in late-stage discussions on that front.

That's great. That's great. And obviously your Halifax will be live August, October, September. You also mentioned that you added some capacity in Germany. So could you maybe provide some color about your total battery capacity with those changes and also the timing where you think those capacity could be fully utilized and thoughts whether you need to look already at another battery plan in light of the bidding pipeline that you see for on the battery side.

Yep, on combined facilities, Europe and in Canada, we are in the 200 to 200 and upwards of 250 million revenue capacity. if we were humming along at both of those facilities when everything is fully operational and staff are trained. In terms of timing to fill those, that's a really tough question because we have our customers, many of them saying a lot of really good things, some of them giving really strong indications. They also have to convert their pipeline into orders as well. The only directionally commentary that we can give at this point is that in the last six months, we've had some of our customers talk about battery requirements that are significantly higher than they had been talking about a year ago. and indicating that what was a further out forecast for them was getting pulled closer. And that's really driven by a number of different geographies, both in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. So I know I'm dancing around at Benoit, but all the indicators are good. How quickly that gets filled up is to be determined based on customers.

Okay, that's great. And maybe last one for me. You mentioned great color also about the integration of 3D at depth. I was curious if you see an opportunity to leverage their relationship with the Department of Defense.

Yes. Well, our relationship, they've predominantly been focused on oil and gas projects. is the most of their end market with a little bit nuclear as well. They have had, I'll call them, one-off defense industry-related sales the last couple of years. And so taking some of those, the product they have and the relationships that they've been starting to develop, combining with a bunch of our relationships, and we're definitely seeing opportunities to use their systems on AUVs, towfish, other platforms. So it's early days, but they've got great technology and there's customer interest on the defense side also.

Thank you very much, Greg and Joe.

Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, Ben.

Our next question comes from John Schell from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. With a stronger balance sheet right now, I just want to ask about your capital allocation priorities in 2025 and beyond. I know M&A will be important, so how would you describe your targets and your deal pipeline at this point?

Yeah, I would say just specifically on the M&A front, as I mentioned in our prepared remarks, there's a range of tuck-ins like historically that we've done that have added additional technologies or customer bases and generally it's, you know, it's 50, 60, 70% gross margin type business. So that's the basic, you know, there's a number of opportunities. There always has been. That'll continue on. I think what's changed over the last year is as we've gotten bigger and as customers are looking for more complete solutions, that we see some opportunities to do some bigger transactions. Our criteria are there's a few geographies that we obviously want to be in. It's generally strong margin business. and has a strong management team that doesn't plan to go anywhere. So we're adding across all areas of the organization by doing some of these things. And from a financial point of view, I think the only thing we're really prepared to say is everything that we've done so far on the M&A front, which has been relatively smaller M&A, have been accretive transactions on a number of fronts, and we expect if we end up doing a bigger transaction or bigger transactions, that it will be the same criteria that would be nicely accretive to the overall business. Joe might have something to add here.

Yeah, nothing really much to add to that other than we've indicated publicly that we are targeting the U.S. or European markets.

Thanks for the colors. And you mentioned strong product demos and RP activities. I'm just curious about the geographic mix of those potential demands, given that Europe is increasing their military spending right now, when you talk to customers in Europe, do you get a higher sense of urgency compared to, let's say, two years ago?

Yeah, two years ago, yes, for sure. I mean, for the last two, three years, a lot of our business activity has been driven out of Europe, and the hotspots are The European market with the Baltic and then into the Black Sea. And then obviously Asia Pacific with China, Taiwan, and the geopolitical tensions in the region there are a big focus for the defense industry and a driver of RFP activity and customer activity in that area as well.

I think just with all the demos like Greg listed before, obviously we've got U.S., Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, UK, Turkey, and Portugal all this year. I think that really shows what's going on out there.

That's great to know. Maybe last question from me. Any comments on a potential graduation from the ventures into TSX?

Yeah, that's definitely on our to-do list. To make that happen, we need to integrate 3D, and it would be our goal to graduate.

Perfect, I'll pass the line.

Thanks, Sean.

Our next question comes from Richard Chu from Scotiabank. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey, good morning. This is Richard on for Kevin. We noticed that in recent weeks, one of your larger battery customers is increasing their presence in Korea and other parts of Asia. Can you just remind us on your presence in the region and any change in investments you may make? For example, sales and development. And on a related note, can you talk about what you're seeing in terms of demand for your broader suite of products from Asian defense firms?

Sure. Morning. I would say in general what you're seeing is you're seeing a lot of announcements out of some of our customers about different areas of the world. So specifically in that region we talked about China and Taiwan, but all the countries there, whether it's Australia or New Zealand or Japan or South Korea or Philippines, there's a lot of activity happening in terms of how we address the market. It's really a combination of, in some cases, we get brought in by our prime defense customers In other cases, we have the navies that come to us directly and ask us about our technology and then ask some of the bigger primes to use our technology. In some programs that we bid, we're on multiple consortiums with several larger primes. So that kind of covers how we go to market. In terms of specific sales and support offices in the Asia-Pacific region, We haven't press released it, given details out yet, but we recently signed, we've got a few, I'll call them reps and agents in the region, one in Australia, one in Taiwan, one in South Korea. The Australia one is new, and the Taiwanese and South Korean ones are probably a year or two years old. So we address the, you know, we talk to the end customer and some of the primes via some local presence there. And I expect that we'll, over the next two months, we have a key hire coming on in that region who's, you know, very experienced in the defense space with a lot of customers in that region. So he'll be He'll be based out of that region, and he'll be an additional key BD person that we have. No manufacturing or in-country service facilities today, but it is at the discussion phase with us and several of our customers. And the second question was? Patrick, can you say the second one again?

Yeah. Um, just, can you talk about what you're seeing in terms of demand for your broader suite of products, uh, from Asian defense firms?

Yeah, I would say, uh, a lot of the refer to Asian defense firms, uh, in some cases in the region, you know, there's domestic, uh, defense companies. Um, there will be domestic manufacturing requirements or joint ventures that'll be required. In other parts of the region, it's really a lot of the U.S. defense primes or European defense primes that are selling the equipment into the Asia-Pacific market, and most of those companies are our customers. Yeah, I mean, I think that's macro-wise, it's an area of quite a lot of activity.

Got it. Thanks for the detail. Just circling back to your 3D at Desk acquisition, you know, it's a quite strong performance this quarter. So was that within your expectations or are there any one-time items to think about? And I know you mentioned pretty strong utilization for that business. So is this a good quarterly run rate to think about going forward?

Yeah, I think the revenue 3D generated we're happy with was in line with the forecast when we acquired the company and No, there was no one-time special items. There was the transaction costs on 3D you'll see outlined in the MD&A. But no, the in-line quarter, a great start for the company, and I think the trajectory would be relatively within that $5 million to $6 million envelope for the balance of the year per quarter.

Good. Thanks for taking my questions. Thank you. Thank you.

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. Our next question comes from Stephen Lee from Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question.

Thanks. Hey, guys. The sales and marketing investments you're making on the Sonos side, is it linear? I mean, the more feet on the ground, the more onesies and twosies, or does it really depend on budgets, how fast the customer move, and so on?

Thanks. It's a combination, Stephen. Definitely having more feet on the ground helps in the sense of there's a lot of areas of the world where you have to be in front of the customer. The customer has to know your product, understand your product. And if you're not there, then you don't get a shot at the business. There's that, but then there's also bigger programs, you know, march at the pace that they march at. In terms of is it linear, it varies throughout the time, throughout the year as well, depending, you know, there's certain times of the year. Generally, call it Q1 and Q2 are probably the busiest times of the year in terms of BD and demo-related activity.

Okay, got it, thanks. And then, Joe, in that S&M, the increase in the sales and marketing, there's no one time there, right? So that's a good baseline going forward?

Yeah, it's a decent baseline. As Greg said, Q1, Q2, and I would actually say Q3 is also busy. We have the big retinas program where we have a large team in Portugal in Q3, and then it will lighten up a little bit into Q4. But as Greg mentioned, you know, Just globally, we've added a number of BD folks to our sales team, and that is something that wasn't there last year. And so we're trying to convert that pipeline. But as Greg mentioned, all the demos and a lot of the conferences and all that kind of stuff are Q1, Q2, but we do have a number of large demos going on this year in Q3 as well.

Got it. Very helpful. Thanks, guys. Thanks, David. Thanks, Steve.

And ladies and gentlemen, at this time, in showing no additional questions, I'd like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thanks, Jamie. I wanted to close again. I wanted to acknowledge the hard work of all Kraken employees. These people are the core of our innovations, creating products and services demanded throughout the world by the most recognized defense companies and militaries. There's many positive growth trends supporting our defense and commercial customer activities. With many countries seeing a renewed commitment to defense spending and customers increasingly incorporating high-end sensors and on-demand systems into their fleets, we're well positioned to continue the solid growth So thanks for continued support for our investors and our employees, and thank you for joining the call today, and we look forward to chatting with you again soon.

And, ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call. We do thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.