Aeva Technologies, Inc. Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good day. My name is Hillary, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to Aeva Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. During the opening remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the opening remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and simultaneously webcast. I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Fung, Director of Investor Relations. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everyone to Aeva's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Soroush Salehian, Aeva's Co-Founder and CEO; and Saurabh Sinha, Aeva's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our fourth quarter and full year press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our Investor Relations website, at investors.aeva.ai. Please note that on this call, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative of our views as of any subsequent date. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2021. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Aeva's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. A webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the Investor Relations link. With that, let me turn the call over to Soroush.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon everyone. 2021 was a monumental year for Aeva in which we became a public company and raised more than $500 million in net proceeds. Over the course of the year, we achieved important milestones that moved us meaningfully closer to bringing our unique 4D LiDAR technology to market. I would like to highlight a few of our 2021 accomplishments, which are summarized on slide five. First, we significantly expanded our leadership position in 4D LiDAR technology with the largest portfolio of FMCW patents among peers in the industry. New advancements that raise the bar in perception and equally important matured our technology to our commercialization. In Q4, we completed development of Aeries II, the world's first 4D LiDAR offering camera level resolution with 500 meters of range and the crucial dimension of instant velocity, all in an automotive reliable and compact form factor that leverages proven semiconductor processes to enable mass scalability. Second, as more customers experienced the advantages of Aeva's 4D LiDAR, our commercial momentum has accelerated. We deepened our relationship with key partners, such as supporting TuSimple with Aeva 4D LiDAR under trucks that achieved the world's first fully autonomous run on open public roads, establishing a foundational agreement with our undisclosed customer for development through to production and securing a production win with Plus, which is on track to start initial deployment in late 2022. We also announced our first expansion beyond automotive with a collaboration with Nikon to bring Aeva 4D LiDAR to the $10 billion industrial automation and metrology markets. Third, we solidified our supply chain as we continue to progress towards production. This included selecting Fabrinet to manufacture our LiDAR chip module, which is the heart of our LiDAR with all core sensing components integrated onto a silicon photonics platform. The new production line is automotive qualified with plans to scale to support mass production volumes. And fourth, we more than doubled our team last year and have assembled a group of leaders experienced in developing and scaling these technologies. Combined with $445 million in liquidity at the end of 2021, we are well-positioned with the talent and resources to continue executing on our plan to bring Aeva 4D LiDAR to scale. Turning to slide seven. On our inaugural earnings call last year, we shared our key objectives for 2021, and I'm pleased to share that we accomplished all of them on or ahead of schedule. Our ability to execute on our plan is a testament to the strong team we have assembled at Aeva and our commitment to our mission, as well as the growing demand for our unique FMCW technology. Moving to slide nine. I would like to provide more detail on our key business updates. We are proud to have supported our partner TuSimple on their significant milestone of becoming first in the industry to successfully operate a fully autonomous semi-truck on open public roads. Aeva 4D LiDAR is the only long-range LiDAR on TuSimple's on-road fleet, and using our unique instantaneous velocity data, TuSimple's perception stack can classify objects and growth hazards at long ranges with greater confidence, which provides additional response time for the safe operation of autonomous trucks. We continue to progress well with TuSimple's development milestones and look forward to supporting additional driver-out operations and expansion of TuSimple's on-road fleet. Turning to slide 10. Earlier this month, we unveiled Aeries II, which is the world's first commercially available 4D LiDAR that is built for automotive-grade reliability and leverages silicon photonics technology to enable volume scalability. Aeries II represents a significant leap forward for LiDAR that we believe will open the door to accelerating autonomous programs where high-performance sensing is crucial to achieving the next level of automation. Aeries II provides new real-time perception capabilities enabled by Aeva's unique FMCW technology that are now possible with legacy time-of-flight LiDAR sensors. The first is Ultra Resolution which delivers camera-level resolution for the static world with up to a thousand lines per frame, or up to approximately 20 times the resolution of legacy time-of-flight solutions. At 4D localization, which leverages Aeva's unique velocity data to estimate the motion of the vehicle itself, effectively serving as an independent navigation solution and enabling redundant, functionally safe positioning for our customers. This enables Aeva equipped vehicles to always know where they are, even in environments where GPS can be challenged, such as tunnels or parking garages, an important capability needed for higher levels of automation. Aeries II is designed for automotive grade reliability across a variety of environmental conditions, and being a quarter of the size of our previous generation, it enables multiple integration options across diverse applications such as passenger vehicles, trucks, industrial buses, and more. With Aeries II, we utilize our breakthrough LiDAR-on-chip architecture, which integrates all core sensing components—lasers, detectors, and optics—onto a silicon photonics chip module. To our knowledge, Aeva remains the only company to have successfully achieved this level of integration and performance. By doing so, we are able to remove all fiber and significantly lower total system component counts. This reduces overall complexity, increases reliability, and allows for higher levels of automation in manufacturing scale. Importantly, Aeries II marks the next stage enabling our path to commercialization. In late Q2, we expect to begin deliveries to our customers for them to develop and validate for their programs. This includes deployment for Plus trucks beginning in late 2022. Over the course of this year, we also expect to build on our commercial momentum as additional potential customers begin using Aeries II. As we have noted over the past year, interest in Aeva's FMCW approach has accelerated, and we are very encouraged by the strong reception so far with Aeries II. We look forward to converting more programs towards production with a continuous focus on aligning with companies that have a shared determination and ability to deploy LiDAR on mass scale. Switching gears now to industrial applications, let's move to the next slide, which highlights an exciting development. Last year, we announced a strategic collaboration with Nikon to bring next-generation high precision solutions to the industrial automation and metrology markets, using Aeva's 4D LiDAR that measures objects at the micron level, which is about a thousand times more precise than can be achieved with typical legacy 3D LiDAR. We do this utilizing the same core chip architecture that we have developed for automotive, which we believe will result in a solution that is meaningfully smaller and lower cost relative to what is currently available. For Aeva, this also enables us to drive greater economies of scale across our different applications. Since announcing the collaboration, we have made good progress together with Nikon, including defining our first product in industrial metrology and achieving micro-level precision using our LiDAR-on-chip module. This enables us to pull forward the timing of our first product launch by one year, now targeting 2024. Beyond industrial metrology, the combination of high precision and small form factor of Aeva 4D LiDAR opens up a number of other unique applications for performance, size, and cost that have been limiting factors, such as machine tooling, infrastructure, and other manufacturing volume applications. Collectively, these applications represent a $10 billion and growing market, and we look forward to pursuing these opportunities. Moving to the next slide, I would like to share with everyone our plans and objectives for 2022. We have been highly encouraged by the growing demand to deploy Aeva's 4D LiDAR technology, and with the launch of Aeries II, we plan to build on the strong progress achieved last year. We believe this will enable us to accelerate our timelines to commercialization and to meet the increasing demand for our technology, as OEMs and autonomous players increasingly see FMCW as a key enabler to the next generation of autonomy. In light of this customer and market trend, we have made a strategic decision to proactively accelerate our shift from NREs towards scale deployment of the Aeries platform for commercial programs, particularly those we believe have the highest potential for success. As we have discussed before, our mission at Aeva is to bring the next wave of perception for everything, and our approach to partnerships remains focused on aligning with companies that have a shared determination and ability to deploy LiDAR on mass scale. By pulling forward our transition from NREs towards scale deployment, we can begin scaling volumes earlier. Importantly, we continue to progress towards production with all of our key partners and continue to deliver on program milestones. This is also the case in non-automotive, where we have defined our first product in industrial metrology with Nikon, and we are pulling forward the industrial launch by one year targeting 2024. We feel confident in our ability to continue to progress towards production and we plan to expand our commercial momentum in 2022. If we continue to execute this year, we believe the momentum will enable us to achieve our target of 2024 for volume production for automotive, as we have discussed before, as well as accelerate the launch of our industrial application. In terms of specific objectives for this year, our first is to deploy Aeries II to customers for qualification. We have already begun bringing up initial units and expect to start deliveries in the second quarter. Second, we aim to convert two additional programs towards production. We are encouraged by the growing interest for Aeva's FMCW approach, and we expect to build on our commercial momentum as additional customers begin testing and development with Aeries II. Third, we will accelerate the release of our first non-automotive application. Now that we have defined our first product with Nikon, we are pulling forward our timeline to 2024. We plan to leverage the momentum from our LiDAR-on-chip module as we continue to see strong inbound interest and put our focus and resources towards additional opportunities that align with our mission to bring Aeva 4D LiDAR to mass scale. And fourth, we will be working closely with our supply chain to prepare for commercial deployment. This includes ASPICE and applicable ISO certifications, as well as preparing our supply base for scale deployment. And with that, I will turn the call over to Saurabh to discuss the financials.

Thank you, Soroush, and good afternoon, everyone. I would like to start with a summary of our fourth quarter financial results. Revenue in the fourth quarter was $2.9 million, reflecting consistent progress we continued to make on customer development milestones. Non-GAAP operating loss was $25.7 million in the fourth quarter, driven primarily by R&D expenses related to product development and to a lesser extent, G&A and sales and marketing expenses. Growth cash use, which we define as operating cash flow less capital expenditure, was $26.6 million for the fourth quarter. As a result, our balance sheet remains strong with cash, cash equivalent, and marketable securities totaling $445 million at the end of the fourth quarter. Finally, our weighted average shares outstanding in the fourth quarter were $214.3 million. Turning to full year 2021 results, revenue was $9.3 million, representing 91% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP operating loss was $81.9 million and growth cash use was $86 million, which is at the low end of the $85 million to $95 million range provided last year, demonstrating continued discipline in how we invest for growth. Now on our financial outlook for 2022. We continue to progress towards production with all of our key partners and remain on track with their development milestones and timelines while also pursuing opportunities with new customers. As Soroush mentioned, we are accelerating our path to commercialization. While strategically speeding our transition from NREs towards scale deployment of Aeries will reduce contribution from NREs in 2022, we believe this will enable us to begin scaling commercial programs with product sales revenues earlier than previously contemplated. As such, we expect revenue in 2022 to be in the range of $8 million to $12 million, representing up to a 30% year-over-year increase depending on the scaling of Aeries deployment. Based on the timelines of our customers' development milestones and the expected Aeries ramp, we expect revenue to be back-end loaded in 2022. Turning to non-GAAP operating expense, which excludes stock-based compensation and other potential non-recurring charges, we expect this to be in the range of $140 million to $150 million in 2022, which primarily reflects our growing team and incremental investment in product development and initiatives to accelerate towards commercialization. In summary, the results in 2021 highlight our ability to execute on our plan to bring Aeva 4D LiDAR to market. Looking forward, we remain well-positioned with our balance sheet to continue investing to support our expanding number of customers and accelerate our timeline towards commercialization. With that, I'll turn it over to Soroush for closing remarks.

Thank you, Saurabh. Before we start with Q&A, I would like to thank the Aeva team for their significant contributions that made 2021 the monumental year that it was. This culminated in the early release of Aeries II, the world's first automotive reliable 4D LiDAR that we plan to leverage to accelerate our path to commercialization. To all of our stakeholders, thank you for your ongoing commitment and confidence in our breakthrough 4D LiDAR technology. We're off to a strong start in 2022, and we look forward to sharing future developments as we work to bring our 4D LiDAR to market. And with that, we will now open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question is from Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead with your question.

Thanks so much, guys, and congrats on all the progress. Could you talk a little bit about the process with Fabrinet from here? Obviously, getting them onboard is an important benchmark, but they're known for bringing a lot of value out engineering to the processes. So just curious how closely you're working with those teams and what benchmarks you guys are watching for or signposts for us to be thinking about in terms of meaningful progress with the preparations around.

Sure. Yeah. Happy to answer that. So, we have recently been setting up a dedicated product line there with Fabrinet to bring up our production for scalability. This is definitely crucial for our ability to scale up Aeries II later on this year. One of the key drivers that we're working through with them is really enabling a higher level of automation for manufacturing. So, that's going to be one of the focus areas for us with the team this year that we're going to concentrate on.

Our next question is from Suji Desilva of ROTH Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, Soroush. Hi, Saurabh. Congratulations on the progress here in the first year. So, I was curious in the industrial market, how you were able to pull in that program a year, was that a customer driven pull-in, or was that your technology advancing faster? I'd be curious on the color there. And also, can similar pull-ins be contemplated or achieved potentially in the automotive market versus the industrial? Thanks.

Yeah. Suji, sure. Happy to. So, first of all, I think it's both. We're obviously excited and continue to make progress on the collaboration opportunities we have, especially in this existing $10 billion industrial metrology market. We have made significant progress with Nikon in the past quarter. As I mentioned on the call, we have defined our first product there with them. It is the customer pull that we see as a key driver for that. In addition to that, we've been able to achieve micro-level precision using the same LiDAR-on-chip module that we have developed for automotive that we talked about last year. So, there is a combination of both reaching a point where we see the opportunity to now pull that in further. We can gain better efficiency with the LiDAR-on-chip module that we have already developed for automotive to enable those applications. So, we continue to work with Nikon and also expand collaboration there, and we'll also be looking at additional opportunities there beyond industrial metrology where we plan to capitalize.

Our next question is from Tristan Gerra of Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good afternoon. I have a question about your revenue guidance for this year. If I look at the quarterly run rate from last year and considering your comments that 2022 will be back-end loaded, can you explain why you anticipate lighter quarterly revenue in the first half or possibly the first three quarters before returning to last quarter's run rate by the end of 2022, especially since you plan to start ramping deliveries early in Q2?

Yeah. Tristan, this is Saurabh. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, our revenue comprises both NRE and ramp of Aeries II. The ramp of Aeries II only starts towards the end of Q2, and therefore, it'll be back-ended; Q3 and Q4 will be heavier quarters, and our NRE revenues depend on customer development and milestones.

Our next question is from Joe Moore of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. You mentioned scaling up your manufacturing volume capability towards the end of this year. Can you explain what that means for 2023? I assume you are referring to lower volume applications that you are manufacturing for, but could you clarify what you mean by scale manufacturing and what kind of capability that will provide you?

Yeah. Sure, Joe. So, we're obviously working closely with our supply chain to scale manufacturing capacity. What this really means is a couple of areas. First, we're going through scaling of Aeries II in terms of volume scalability later this year, and that is, of course, supported by our supply chain, including Fabrinet that we were talking about earlier on the call. We will be leveraging the Aeries II launch to deploy to our customers who are looking to do their initial deployments later this year, including Plus, where we have a production win, and their deployments will actually start at the end of this year. This is why we need to scale up our Aeries platform. What this really means for us is that, if we continue to execute, we believe that momentum carries us through to actually continue hitting our target for 2024 volume production. Of course, to do that, we have to start the scaling throughout this year.

Our next question is from Sam Peterman of Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. As your revenue shifts away from NRE this year and more towards product, can you talk a little bit about what the gross margin impact will be? I think you guys exited the year over 50% in your stack projections, and it looks like you were aiming for over 50% again. Is that something that's feasible as you ramp up manufacturing with Fabrinet and others?

Yeah. Sam, this is Saurabh. As I mentioned before, our gross margins are expected to fluctuate until we reach production in 2024. As of now, we have a mix of both product revenue and NRE. The fluctuations are expected to continue, and we will provide more updates as we proceed.

Our next question is from Arvind Ramnani of Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I really appreciate the update on the sort of leaping forward with the Aeries and the color on this year. But as we look over the next two or three years, and considering some of the projections you provided as part of initial discussions, how should we think about some of the projections into 2025 and beyond?

Sure. Yeah. Arvind, thanks for the question. First of all, we are not commenting on financial outlook beyond this year. However, we are seeing strong interest in technology and plan to expand our commercial momentum this year. We are on track with all of our customers that we have talked about for production. In fact, not only have we hit our milestones but are also accelerating some of those programs, including on the industrial side that we talked about today. Overall, we are seeing strong interest in our technology and plan to expand that momentum. With Aeries II, interest has been quite strong, and we are planning to leverage that interest to capitalize on it later this year to work towards converting additional new programs towards production. All-in-all, if we continue to execute this year, we believe we will be in a really good position to carry the momentum for all of our programs and achieve our target of 2024 for volume production for automotive. As previously discussed, we are now also able to pull in industrial production targets from 2025 to 2024, so whole production volume targets are now starting in 2024.

Our next question is from Pierre Ferragu of New Street. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to come back to your second objective you outlined for 2022, converting two additional programs to production. So, just to make sure I understand, where today, which are the programs you consider already converted? Is that just Plus, or is there more than that? And then, when you talk about converting two or maybe none of them actually, does that mean production starting this year with Aeries II? Or is that just putting on the planning production milestone for programs but beyond 2022?

Yeah. Sure, Pierre. So, first of all, as we talked about in previous quarters, Plus, of course, is one of the programs on the production side that we have converted. We also have an undisclosed customer that we talked about last year, which we continue to make progress with and are hitting our milestones while working together through development into production. Similar types of programs are what we're talking about in terms of conversion to production. Those are effectively the types of programs we are referring to.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a great day.