Transcript below
Everything in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact will be forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings to better understand exozymes as a business, our risk factors, and as an investment opportunity.
And with that, welcome to our Q2 Earnings Call. My name is Lasse Görlitz and I'm your host today. And I will start this call by giving it to our CEO, Michael Heltzen. Thank you, Lasse. Michael Heltzen here, CEO of eXoZymes.
This is our agenda for today's call. We will use a reporting format called Highlights, Lowlights and Headlights, as we also use it internally for reporting, for example, on the board meetings. First, we will cover headlights that you can think of as the things that went right after how we hoped and planned things.
When we cover the lowlights, that is, on the other hand, what did not go according to plan, or at least is messing with our business enough that it's worth talking with all of you, fine shareholders and potential investors about.
So, that you can get a complete overview of our business. Last, we will talk about headlights. That is basically what is next on the horizon when we look ahead. Today, we will also have Folat helping to end the meeting with an overview of our financials before we go into the Q&A session.
Feel free to message us while we're doing the presentation so we can talk about your questions in the end. We have a lot of questions in the end. We have a lot to show you, so let's get started. Here we have today's team presenting for you.
Damien is going to cover the commercial aspects of our progress. Tyler is going to give you a flyover of how we use AI to optimize in science and therefore being able to build this next generation of bio solutions.
And Lesse will both give us some communication and marketing aspects, but also help me run this meeting. I'm Damien Perryman, Chief Commercial Officer at Exozymes. I'm sharing with you today a look back of our performance over the last year.
our performance over the last quarter in the commercial category. Our commercialization activities can be grouped into three primary categories. Grants, those non-dilutive public sector sources of funds that help to sharpen our R&D capabilities and also builds capacity for development while allowing us to unearth prospective development candidates for our accelerator.
In the accelerator targets of high potential, unmet need that uniquely aligned to our capabilities are placed to advance milestones that increase the speed of commercialization and our attractiveness to companies that will partner and join us in that journey.
In bio solutions, our capabilities are used to provide a new or better process for producing a target chemical that has been selected by a development partner that will in turn license and take responsibility for commercializing the technology.
Grants have played a pivotal role in the pre-IPO stages of Exozymes and will continue to help the company to develop cutting edge and globally competitive capabilities in some very important areas. We recently were awarded a CFIRE grant that will allow us to develop better methods for balancing the energy requirements of Exozyme pathways.
The BioClick grant is allowing us to develop new methods of making small molecules. Our BioMade grant is helping us to demonstrate capabilities that will support scale-up of Exozyme projects. And under the BDO grant, we've been providing support to demonstrate viability for biofuel production.
Collectively, these grants have provided $1.4 million in income through Q1 and Q2 collectively and allowed us to identify sandally as an interesting new development candidate. We have a new development candidate.
We have a number of products in the accelerator, initially starting with our biofuel project in partnership with the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. Beginning in 2025, our strategy expanded to include nutraceuticals.
The chart shown is a visual comparison of the relative technology readiness of our various accelerated products. In the past five months, we have moved NCT as our priority target from basic principle through lab scale validation.
This includes demonstration of our process under relevant lab conditions, verification of product quality, preparation of a techno-economic model, and plans to increase scale 100x. These milestones have demonstrated our conviction to accelerate development of NCT and the efficiency of our Exozyme platform.
Both are important features for attracting partners that will help commercialize and monetize our investment in NCT and as a roadmap for how other return on investments can be created with partners around other projects.
The speed of moving through development stages for a high-value product like NCT validates our current focus on nutraceuticals. NCT has been a growing interest for researchers for its potential role in supporting healthy liver fat metabolism.
gut barrier function and mitochondria, gut barrier function and mitochondrial activity, all of which are associated with broader metabolic and inflammatory conditions. Exozymes has demonstrated its ability to rapidly design and develop at lab scale, a method for producing high-purity NCT with high-conversion yields.
This lays a solid foundation for attracting partners for NCT, as well as other programs for Exozymes. NCT potentially addresses some of the largest unmet health and medical needs of our generation, with developing delivery options in both nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals.
The nutraceutical category is a $165 billion market, and prebiotics and probiotics that target digestive health dominate that with a 40% market share. Clinically backed NCT, marketed as a functional, or intervention ingredient for weight loss and digestive health, taps into the booming gut health market that appeals to over 21% of global consumers.
In the pharmaceutical category, non-alcohol fatty liver disease affects 38% of the global population. The treatment market size for that category is estimated at $21 billion. Approximately 4.9 million people are living with inflammatory bowel disease.
And the treatment market is estimated at $24 billion. And the treatment market was valued at $24 billion in 2024. The global anti-ibesity market is projected to grow to a booming $105 billion by 2035, with a category of 18.3%.
Collectively, it's obvious the NCT appeal to a large and booming market is obvious, as long as the candidate itself can be developed successfully through Scalar and through Clinique. As for the partnering side, we have started tracking our lead generation and deal development via HubSpot from April.
Outreach activities have generated a number of leads for the team to process and screen through to viable opportunities. Moving discussions through technical alignment requires more involvement from the team and more coordination across multiple functional areas.
We have a number of deals in negotiation stage, and in due course, we can share details as they close. You can see the front end of our pipeline as they close. You can see the front end of our pipeline is quite heavy, as we've been active in publishing milestones and talking to companies, introducing to companies for the first time our capabilities.
Those leads in due course will move through the pipeline, and we'll have further technical alignment and deal term negotiation opportunities filling out the middle stages of this pipeline. Finally, the nurture category of those opportunities that did not make it through the deal screening stage and the work that has successful stages.
But relationships are being maintained to support possible future opportunities. That concludes my summary of the commercial overview for this earnings call. I look forward to providing further updates on both the commercialization milestones across our accelerator and BIOS solutions platforms, but also more details on those deals that we're closing and partnerships we're bringing into fruition.
Thank you. Thank you, Damien. Let's now move over, but still on the bucket of highlights, to how we are making progress with using AI and computational power in our R&D. First, I want to kind of remind everybody about what our competitive advantages are.
Basically, you have heard us talk a lot about how we are one of the few, if not the only company that can do true cell-free biomanufacturing, running the enzymatic pathways outside of the cell, making systems that are much more controllable from a process and system engineering point of view.
Some people will even argue that we have taken bio out of biomanufacturing, and it's actually a chemical manufacturing just using the power of nature and enzymes. This allows us to perform much more effectively.
It also allows us to be much better at purity, because there's not the million other things that you typically have going on inside of a cell polluting the end product. It allows us to simply scale better, allowing a lot of the problems of cell-based biomanufacturing to be last generation.
What we're going to talk about is today how we also have a different competitive advantage. We call it artificial enzyme evolution. We basically use AI-powered optimization methodologies to make better enzymes into exoscience, if you will.
We're doing that in a way that is speeding up both how we do the actual engineering work, but also allowing us to do things that humans will have a hard time thinking of, even if they had time and effort put into it.
Overall, we do this to allow ourselves to be able to build not just the natural products that are very valuable and a big part of our business, but also the analytes or the new versions of sometimes called new to nature molecules.
We're very excited about how this is benefiting us and turning into a competitive advantage because we have some unique ways of generating the data that is needed to make these AI algorithms powerful.
I'll now turn it over to Tyler for him to give you a bit more of a flyover how we do these things. Hello, I'm Tyler Korman, VP of Research and co-founder of Exoscience. I've spent the past 20 years engineering enzymes and developing technologies to enable cell-free biocatalysis.
The technologies that I've developed became the core of what you now know today as exoscience. Today, I'm going to tell you about work we've done using AI and applying it to enzymes to produce exoscience that we hope can become the next wave of biocatalysis and biomanufacturing.
So when we think about AI and how it's really expanded into all aspects of our life, it's really based off of data. So if you apply that to language, where you have an alphabet made up of letters, those letters can be combined to form words.
If you then pass those through a large or develop a large language model, you can then predict new words, new phrases. This ability to predict is kind of the basis of AI. If you then apply this, thinking to thinking to biology, thinking to biology, where you have the letters being amino acids that can be linked together to form proteins or enzymes.
If you then pass these sequences of amino acids through a large language model, you can now predict new proteins. This ability formed the basis of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the ability to now predict protein structure from sequence.
This software was called AlphaFold, and it allowed anyone to now predict what a protein structure looks like. There are gaps, however, and we believe exoscience has an advantage in being able to turn those structures into function.
We can actively learn and generate data very quickly, and this allows us to now change amino acids to now change proteins into protein structure to allow them to have new functions, allowing us to quickly design enzymes that are stable, functional, functional, functional, functional, outside of a cell for new reactions.
We think about the enzyme, the exoscience advantage. What AI allows us to now do is to start from better starting points to be able to predict those changes in structure that lead to function much better.
If we can do this many times, this allows us to iterate, iterate much faster. And so these better predictions now enable faster cycles. The core of what we've been able to do without getting too much into the details of the process.
We compare using traditional methods to our AI based approach. We've been able to improve functions such as stability very quickly. So using a traditional method took us four months to get a very small amount of improvement.
And with our new and improved method, we were able to design and improve stability more than 80% within three weeks. We've also been able to improve a function such as rate. We've also been able to improve a function such as rate.
And again, we were able to design and build an enzyme that had improved rate of greater than fourfold within three weeks. This shows the power of our approach. And it shows the power of AI and machine learning methods to allow us to now more quickly to design better catalysts that can enable that second wave of biomanufacturing.
Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed. Thank you, Tyler, for that overview. Now we're going to the last of the headlights. We just want to communicate that things are going well. Us following the Pareto principles that allows us to achieve a lot of impact without burning a lot of cash in the beginning of the company.
People also call it the 80-20 rule that you can do a lot with a little if you're very focused on what is neat to have versus nice to have versus just spent you shouldn't have done. It helps the company stay focused and super lean.
We are very capital efficient and we, despite building, as we talked about, two technical competitive advantages at the same time, we're not spending tens of millions of dollars as a lot of other companies would do to be able to do the same.
It comes down to relentless prioritization. We spent every dollar as if it was our last dollar and we make sure to put the effort in where it's the most needed to make progress to the next value inflection point.
A couple of examples here is how we expand our audience without paying a lot for marketing or other PR -style efforts that you're seeing other people do. So we have something that you've got. We have something that we get invited to a lot of the premier sites that can be, as Damien going to world biomarkets in the Netherlands and speaking on how we're using AI to further and progress how biomanufacturing is done.
and it can be podcast interview styles like the one you're seeing here to the left. Grow Everything is one of the absolute largest podcasts in the SunBio industry and we got a lot of good reach out of that.
Again, following the 20/80 rule, we're putting effort and time and money where we are getting the most return on the investment. We built biosolutions that allows us to make, for example, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals that are inspired by natural products, something that's happened out in nature, but you would deplete the world's resource of it if you try to put that molecule that maybe is already proven, but if you want enough to talk about being a treatment, then you would deplete the world's resources within a year.
And you would basically have cut down the tree you're setting in. And we basically built out all of the systems that you need to drive these multi-step metabolic pathways cell-free to have them run for long periods of time because that's the goal, right? You don't want something that just works for a little bit and then you publish and so be it.
You want something that's going to be robust, that's going to work for a long period of time. You can just walk away from it after you add things together and that's the ideal. Then moving really quick, things that I would expect a year to take, they're doing in weeks.
And that kind of blew my socks off. I started speaking to some of my colleagues and go like, what if we could actually move proof of concept so much faster than we did before? What does it mean to the type of partnerships that we could create? Or could we engage partners much sooner in the equation than we did before? Can we de-risk the program differently? Now to the Q2 lowlights.
What did not go according to plan or what has been the obstacles? We can talk about how there is a very high degree of uncertainty on a macroeconomic level. The markets that our partners are active in or want to push into, they have a hard time assessing what the future is going to look like for those markets.
And therefore, a number of our potential partners are much more hesitant and slower than normal in decision making and commitment when they are talking with us about these future focused investments into product development together with us.
That's obviously a headwind that we are taking very serious because it has the consequences that a number of our partners are in a wait and see kind of position. They want to wait for next year's budget or they are maybe even reorganizing their companies to a degree where it is for political reasons not a good time to bring up investments into the future.
The only way we are. The only way we are. The only way we can overcome this headwind is to keep pushing forward with our sales and business development efforts, making sure to get a front of a lot of people that will realize the value of the next generation of biomanufacturing that we are bringing to the table and keep pushing all the potential partnerships that are in pipeline forward.
So, as much as we can. It's only a matter of time before some of these partnership conversations will turn into deals. And of course, we are very, very focused on making sure this happens as soon as possible, despite the lowlights of getting overall headwind.
Another lowlights to talk about the funding. By the U.S. government. By the U.S. government. The grant environment, so to say, holds significant uncertainty. There's a lot of the grants and grant systems that have been built over the years that are being either closed down, reshaped, and it is not all of it that happens in a way where it's easy to see how they will be functional afterwards.
we have received unofficial indications that doe grant approvals are either slowing down or being put on pause and the timing and the impact of that is is unclear that's obviously as a company that have been really good at attracting grants not a great environment to operate in we do have encouraging perspectives in regards to that the department of defense is showing interest in a lot of the areas where we can positively impact with our new technology and the the dod also seems to be well funded respected and therefore the the grant environment that comes from the dod seems healthy we will continue to apply for new grants and especially the the dod ones for the reasons just mentioned um but always we have to take into consideration how well does these potential grants fit into our business objectives do they lead to products that fits into our portfolio do they fit into basically where we're pushing the the platform the coming quarters and years now it's time for hit lots okay so another update here on the projects uh our strategy and also a shift in focus around our branding and how that is all tied together so first when we launched nctx back in may that's also when we introduced this concept of powered by exosimes which is an integral part of our brand and our platform and our platform and you can think of it as our version of intel inside what we did here was also the first part in sort of moving from the rebranding which happened in february and we launched with a new name we got a lot of pr coverage when we rang the bell at nasdaq and we had the cover of gen biotechnology introducing the concept of introducing the concept of exercise so now we're slowly shifting towards not rebranding but actual brand building and that also means that we are moving away from having a very high focus on communicating the basics we'll still do that of course because there's a lot of people on the planet that still have so we haven't heard about exercise yet but we are going to start focusing more on our strategy and that is called nutraceuticals with a pharmaceutical potential and extraordinary business scales so let me just dive into that a little bit so nutraceutical maybe that's a word that not everyone know and it could be it's a little bit inside business jargon however the definition is very clear but there is another way to think of this and that's actually a highly valuable natural product that means it's something that we can produce in low volume but has a very high value and going back to thinking about the strategy and looking at our projects you'll see here that we have three projects you've already seen this previously in the present and iso and iso butanol that's an extraordinary business case and it's not a nutraceutical however nct is santaline is and future projects that we haven't talked about yet they are also that because that is the fastest way to market for us and i would like to add that it's only a matter of time before we can actually announce our first licensing partner that's of course something that we are very much looking forward to and that's going to add that and that's going to add that and build on top of it as last i said we have become even more focused on the benefits we are getting from following our new pharmaceuticals with pharmaceutical potential and extraordinary business cases strategy let's dive a little bit into that ...
Achille Achille w Achille aking Oh bar but it's more leaning towards licensing and milestone payments. I want to unpack how we want to build a portfolio of projects in this continuum. And as Damien have already nicely portrayed, we have our accelerator on the one side and our buyer solutions on the other side.
And sometimes they're actually overlapping. So some projects can be both. For example, we can have a joint venture that is not fully owned by us by definition that will license from us and therefore be smack in the middle of these two.
It can also be that it is an accelerator project like isobutinol that is built by design to be licensed out. And therefore, you see it located right on the edge of the accelerator, ready to go. NCT right now is, on the other hand, very fully owned by us, fully developed by us.
And as we find the right partners and so on, it will maybe migrate a little bit more to the right. The focus of nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential matters because it allows us to reuse a lot of the technology components, infrastructures and knowledge that we built for each of the projects.
So when you look at these two circles, it's very clearly meant as covering these nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potentials and the surrounding areas. And over time, we foresee that the biosolutions will be applicable in many other industries.
So the biosolutions side will probably grow in size and area much more than the accelerator will. So I foresee that we will be focused on nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals for quite a while when it comes to what we take ownership in ourselves.
And again, back to, because focus makes you master of certain elements when you do them over and over again. And it is a very healthy end of the market. Natural product nutraceuticals also fits us well, basically, because it allows us to start with often something that the broader community, the academic scientists have already figured out that there's this really interesting compound out in nature somewhere that if you could only get hold of it at scale, then you would have a massive business opportunity.
Those are obviously beneficial for us because a lot of the pre-work have been done on the discovery side, but frankly, even more from the natural side. So when we look at a small molecule that some plant or some natural product organism can make, then we can go and see what is the DNA that leads to those enzymes that leads to that small molecule.
And by borrowing that blueprint, it's much easier for us to get a fast start with our AI and cell-free capabilities that Tyler for example, for example, talked about today. So this allows us to take natural product nutraceuticals to market much faster.
And it allows us also to address a very big and growing part of the markets that are in wellness and health and longevity. All of these things where natural product fits really well. Damon gave a really good example of how big and multiple places in CT can actually be applied.
And that's basically also what we're looking at here on the next slide that is an expansion of the first slide that shows that even the projects can sometimes be broken up into sub-bits. It doesn't have to be one company that works on the pharmaceutical and the nutraceutical in CT.
It could, in principle, it could, in principle, it could, in principle, with time be two. And let's just say for the sake of playing around with the slide and the model here, that NCT pharmaceuticals would end up in a licensing relationship, then that would migrate to the right.
And maybe nutraceuticals stays with us and becomes something we keep taking forward ourself, then it stays much more to the left. Sandaline. Sandaline, that is what Damon talked about. That is the new small molecule we will be building a biosolution for because we got financing from the National Science Foundation under the CIFIRE grant.
This small molecule is a highly valuable natural product that is found in nature in sandalwood tree oil. So it's the active component in this very, very expensive oil that is super hard to get hold of.
We're obviously excited to have gotten financing so we can start building a new biosolution. And for this specific molecule, we can foresee at least three different areas where it could end up as a product.
It's already known that sandaline is a component of the really expensive perfume fragrances. And it's one of the reasons why we know it's a very, very valuable small molecule. It's very valuable also because it's very limited in production.
So at the same time, sandaline can also be used as a potential nutraceutical and as a potential pharmaceutical. So again, you could see these development packages technology-wise be built, but actually be applicable with small optimizations.
So remember when we do pharmaceuticals, we do often analogs and improved versions of the natural product. If we do a nutraceutical, we often stay very close to the natural version, if not exactly on the natural version, because it allows us these much faster grass generally recognized as safe and other forms of approval.
So we also have other forms of approval that makes us able to go to market much, much faster. Okay. So another thing that comes from us focusing in the same space and being able to reuse these things is that we get to set the new standards for how these things are built because we are pioneering the cell-free biomanufacturing.
And we actually aim medium to long-term to become the standard in regards to how you do cell-free biomanufacturing. So if we go to the next slide here, we can talk about how that is actually a type of IP. As you all know, we have a very healthy patent portfolio, still growing it on a quarter by quarter basis.
And we have even more trade secrets. So for example, when Tyler is talking about how we do AI, yeah, we are using AI algorithms that are developed by others, but we are not proprietor. So we are not proprietor. We are not proprietorally trained on the data that only we can generate.
That's a good example of a trade secret type of IP. Only we have access to it. Only we know how to generate it. Only we therefore know how to harvest the opportunities from it. The third kind of IP that very few people talk about, because the first two ones are frankly, what is something you could get as a service, if you call a law firm, if you call a law firm, and the third one you cannot.
So people typically only talk about the two, but the third one is actually when you get to influence, or maybe even control what industry standards looks like. Because if you do that, and you build it so that it fits your technology exactly, it's very difficult for someone to come with a different version of a similar thing and incorporate that.
They will have to follow the standards. So what we do specifically to get into a position of setting the standards is we have engaged with Biomate, that is where we have one of our grants from and a very big biomanufacturing interest organization industry connector.
And we are heading up the self-free biomanufacturing group, where we are helping other people to wrap their heads around how it's possible to do self-free and so on. Of course, it's a fine balance. We don't want to give away our trade secrets by definition, and we don't want people to infringe on our patents.
But on the other hand, we want them to use our technology and adapt our technology so that we have the opportunity to build biosolutions for them and basically licensing opportunities. We are also via the Sanderlean project.
That's actually only, as Damon showed, a component of what we got our $3 million to do. We have other modules that can be reused. So basically, the module in our biosolutions that is about how we use energy and let the enzymes and exoscipes have energy.
That module will be upgraded to a new version so that it can be a new version so that it can be a new version so that it can much easier be plug and played into new biosolutions, making it even easier to develop self-free biosolutions in the future, again, if you use our standard.
And what I also want to point out is that other than us getting $3 million, it was actually a $9 million grant. So there's five universities where the most prominent and lead, one is Georgia, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, that got $6 million between them to start looking at how to make tools and how to make processes and how to educate people for self-free biomanufacturing.
Again, inspired by how we share our knowledge and so on, and therefore, a way for us to help set the standards for the future. We are now coming to the last agenda point before the Q&A session, financials.
We'll now be talking about the financials and how we plan to attract more investors to our stock. We have been talking with more than 15 investment banks to learn about all their different services and things they offer.
We're very happy with how MDB capital is helping us as our investment bank. And what comes in addition to that is that some of these other investment banks has access to some large long-term investor networks that are very interesting that we will start engaging with.
We will not be signing up any one specific investment bank at this point. We are talking with the cream of the crop of the 15 about engaging if we need an investment bank at some point. We are also starting a number of non-deal roadshows.
We will basically be going out to a number of investors and investor networks to introduce ourselves so they get to know about our company, our stock, and the potential we hold. We have been lucky and have a number of investors come and offer us investments and or access to capital.
We have not accepted any of these offers yet as we are very focused on getting the best possible deal and only getting high-quality long-term investors into the company as all of you that have already invested.
And now over to Vlad. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Vlad Nooz and I'm the VP of Finance at Exozymes. Our financial results for the second quarter are detailed in the press release that was issued.
I encourage you to read the report and I'll take a moment to review those results. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus remains on prudent financial management while making targeted investments to drive long-term growth.
As of the end of June 2025, our cash and cash equivalents did at $6.99 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support ongoing operations and key initiatives into the end of Q1 of 2026. Our total operating expenses for the quarter were $2.55 million, which represents an increase of approximately $1.2 million compared to the second quarter of 2024. The increase in 2025 was primarily driven by R&D investments, personal expansion of the leadership, and the R&D team, and the R&D team with a focus on further developing our internal infrastructure.
Net loss for the second quarter was $2.36 million, with a year-to-date net loss of $4.22 million. We remain disciplined in our spending approach, ensuring capital is allocated to maximize shareholder value.
Additionally, we continue to explore non-dilutive funding opportunities, strategic partnerships, and potential government grants to further strengthen our financial position. That concludes my presentation of the financials.
And with that, I will pass the call back. Thank you. All right. So, if you're on our website reading all the exciting news that we share fairly frequently, and you're wondering, how do I keep myself up to date? Well, actually, you can go under the Investors tab, and you can click Email Sign Up.
And here you can sign up with your email, and then you select the preference of what kind of updates that you would like. If you haven't signed up already, if you haven't signed up already, I would highly suggest that you do it.
We will have a lot of interesting news coming out moving forward, and this is the way to keep yourself up to date in the fastest and easiest way possible. And that brings us almost to the end. I just want to give you a summary of the most important things that makes me very excited about what we're doing and the future just in front of us.
Our commercial efforts is developing and progressing fast. Despite the microeconomics headwinds that we're experiencing, Damien joining our team as our CCO has been nothing less than a success. Our focus on development of highly valuable natural products are moving fast forward.
And NCT is definitely our lead and most successful program. So we are very happy with that one. We have not just one, but two technical competitive advantages that sets us apart from all other companies in the world.
It means we're very difficult to mimic and follow. We also have a lot of IT protection. We even talked about how we, as the only company are in a company are in a position where we can actually help set the standards for cell-free biomanufacturing.
Our ability to go full scale on the advantages of cell -free biomanufacturing and that we're the only company doing in-time optimization via AI. The way we do it, because the way we generate our unique data is something that allows us to be fast, good, and cheap.
And those are all the things you want to have as competitive advantages. On the next slide here, Team ExoScience is super capital efficient. It's so important in this market. We're not spending tens of millions of dollars on technology development, yet we're making progress as if we were.
So this is a true statement of how much four-wheel drive we have in our R&D. We are setting standards for the future. It will hugely benefit us. That will release a lot of value to our shareholders step-by-step again and again over the coming years.
The last slide here is a promise that I'm making to you as our shareholders. We want to build a better system for our shareholders to get an overview of the progress we're making, both on our accelerator product development, projects, and also a better way of development projects, and also a better way of getting an overview of the licensing negotiations and the partnerships that will be coming out of those.
We thank our existing shareholders, you guys, for co-owning our company with us and for growing up together as a company to get to where we can reach our full potential, both short, medium, and long-term.
We really believe there's a big, bright future for us. And, of course, we welcome new shareholders and investors to consider joining us all. As long as you remember that we are a public venture investment opportunity, lots of upside potential, but also a road to get there.
And those ups and downs that is a part of any venture journey is something you have to be able to stomach. We look forward to making the future. We look forward to making the future a better place. We want to enable a new way of making chemicals for humankind, new natural products and all kinds of chemicals.
That is our long-term goal. The medium and shorter-term goals is this strategic focus on natural products that has a high value. That is our focus area. That is our focus area. That is our focus area first.
We are very excited about the things we are already bringing forward and the things we will be working on and sharing when they have ripened up to a degree where they are ready to talk about. Now it is time to go over to our Q&A session.
Great. So, Lasse, did we get any questions today? I don't hear you, Lasse. Maybe the rest of the the crew doesn't hear you, Lasse. Maybe the crew doesn't hear it either. You know what? Why don't you text me the questions and I will read them out loud.
I saw the first one here that I can start with. So, let's see. So, we have a question. There seems to be a large push to onshore pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the U.S. with billions to be invested.
Is Exocymes planning to try to capitalize on this tailwind? Thank you very much for the question. Yes. And finding that exact sweet spot where we are not going to end up in just building APIs, the active pharmaceutical ingredients that other people can also build, but focusing on where we have a competitive advantage so we can have healthy margins also in the future and that we can in a fair way ask for licensing relationship.
It is not going to be all APIs that are going to be relevant. Some, especially the ones that are being brought back from China is petrochemical based chemistry and the reason why they were sent to the U.S.
in the first place was because of how polluting and frankly expensive they would be to make in the U.S. We're not going to try to compete on molecules where it's just going to be moving things from, let's say, China to the U.S.
We're going to focus on where we can make highly valuable small molecules that can either not be made at all or we can make them in a significant better way. Okay. But yes, biomanufacturing is becoming really hot here in the U.S.
And if you follow some of the proposals that are being proposed by U.S. politicians from both sides and even collaborating, one of the few areas where there still seems to be collaboration, biomanufacturing is receiving a lot of financing and grant financing.
That is also why the DOD and organizations like Biomate is getting significantly more value. Okay. Question number two that I'm getting here. How long is your runway and what are you going to do when you need more capital? So, we basically covered this a little bit in Full Art's presentation, but let me outline it.
So, we basically have a burn right now that allows us this quarter, the next quarter and the first quarter of next year. So, up until end of Q1, 2025, if nothing happened, if we just basically spent money and didn't take any extra liquidity flows into our bank account.
What have already happened that is not put into that is that we got our CFIRE grant that is $3 million. We haven't incorporated that in our cash flow because it's not completely understood exactly how we can draw down that money in which order, how fast, how much of it.
It's not a lump sum payment upfront that you get. Until we know that, we're not going to put it into our cash flow. But of course, $3 million matters a lot to a company like ours. So that in itself will help expand the runway.
We've also been offered basically investments by multiple investors, everything from large groups and professional groups to ultra high net worth individuals that would like to become a part of the co-owner circles of exoscience.
So we have some different options we can consider. I'm working closely together with Chris, our chairman from MDB Capital, to sort through and actually also a couple of other board members are helping out to sort through our different options to find out what is most relevant for us.
But we have not taken any choices yet. We do feel comfortable and confident about being able to raise more financing if and when needed. Let's see the next question here. What percentage of the NCT market do you think you can capture? And are there other competitors? That's a good question.
Let's see what... So it's too early to put numbers on yet. But we are confident that our bio solution that we are building for NCT will be competitive with any other solutions that might come to market for this very interesting business opportunity.
You saw the enormous market potential that basically is a reflection of that these are some of the largest unmet medical needs. 30% of the largest unmet medical needs. 30% of everybody has non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and bringing a nutraceutical and or a pharmaceutical to market for that is obviously huge, huge business opportunities.
We do have competitors in that market. There are other people trying to get to NCT by isolating from natural product. Those guys are really struggling. There are other companies that are really struggling.
There are other companies like Brightseed, for example, that have spent a lot of time and money on finding ways of getting NCT. And we picked that market specifically because of both the size of the opportunity, but also because we actually don't mind being compared to the alternatives to the cell-free biomanufacturing.
So we went after a market where other people are also in the market or at least trying to get into the market by building their kind of solutions so that we can show the benefits of being cell-free and how things scale better and the purity we can provide and all of these beneficial factors that in the end is competitive advantages.
For the pharmaceutical application of NCT, it's only us that has a system where we can basically exchange a number of the exosymes or the building blocks the exosymes are working with to make these analogs that can be built to the potential of being more potent or being more bioavailable and other things.
things having longer treatment times, having longer treatment times, all features that might be necessary for a pharmaceutical track of this business opportunity. We're the only ones that can build these analogs.
We can get patent protection on these analogs and that part of the market opportunity, we have a real chance to own ourselves. Okay, let's see the next question here. What is the undisclosed product development project hinted at in the product accelerator slide? Okay, someone was paying attention here.
So on the product accelerator slide, we showed basically our isobutinal SAF program that is, despite being the one that has progressed the longest, we have used a lot of time on. Then we had NCT that is almost catching up in maturity levels to isobutinal, despite that it is a much, much younger program.
It's moving much, much faster. Then we had Zandeline. Then we had Zandeline. And then we had a gray box saying undisclosed. Of course, by definition, I can't answer that yet, because we want to announce it in due time.
But we do have a number of conversations with potential partners and internally about what is the next natural product that we're going to build. And we are in the R&D, in the research side of the product.
And we're in the R&D phase, working on different things that will become the next thing. So it's equally much to communicate to you that there are new things coming up, both potential licensing things and potential natural products we would commercialize or co-commercialize ourselves according to the accelerator model.
It wasn't to communicate to you that there are new things coming up. It wasn't to communicate a specific thing that was coming up. It was more generally to communicate there are more things coming up.
Okay. Why license out the product and business opportunities instead of owning them 100% yourself? That's a good question. And it touches our strategy specifically. There's a lot of things that goes into the strategic analysis of what things we're working on and how it basically adds up as a portfolio.
So if we were to just take one or a few projects and drive it all the way to bringing it to market to the end customer, the end consumer, and taking that whole journey, we would only get one or a few shots at goal.
So by using this licensing and partnering opportunity, despite we have to share some of the cake, we get many more shots at goal. So for example, we for sure need a licensing partner for the isobutinal SAF biosolution where NCT is a product that we in principle could go along with ourselves.
And it therefore depends on what we're talking about. Sustainable aviation fuel is just such a big opportunity that it will take a long time. There will be a lot of build. There will be a lot of reasons for why we are not the optimal company to bring that all the way to market.
Other than we are the optimal company to build the technical solution of that part. And therefore partnering makes a lot of sense. We can also stay capital lean and effective by doing what we're exactly good at and then teaming up with companies that have market access, market knowledge, maybe even brands and existing sales into the right market.
So instead of us becoming the newcomer in a new market. So instead of us becoming the newcomer in a new market, we can team up with who is best suited to take the competitive advantages we have created and then applying them to the market.
I can even imagine some markets where there's big dominating players and therefore coming in is not even an option. And therefore if we're not partnering up with one of those, companies, then there will be no access to those markets.
And the last argument I would add here is basically there's so many opportunities and it is so important for us. We focus on what creates the most value and it is us bringing those product development projects through from identifying the opportunity to ending up as a product that has a competitive advantage that can lead to healthy profit margins.
That is basically where we are creating the most value. Other companies are better at creating the rest of the value chain and therefore partnerships is our preferred method. Okay, I'm getting a signal here that we have passed the one hour and that we need to wrap up.
Last question for the day here. Let's see. Any plans to do more regular podcasts? The Grow Everything one was excellent. The Grow Everything one was excellent. Hoping for more. Well, thank you very much.
And yes, in fact, there is. And we have already been invited to speak at a couple more podcasts already. So there is more of that in the pipeline. And with that, I think we will wrap it for today. Thank you very much for your time and attention.
We really, really appreciate your support. and you co-owning this business together with us so we can make the impact on the future that we are so hardworking to deliver on. Thank you very much.