Aeva Technologies, Inc. Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good day. My name is David, and I'll be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to the Aeva Technologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. 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, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone to Aeva's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us 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 third quarter 2025 press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.aeva.com. 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 most recent Form 10-Q and Form 10-K. 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. The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the Investor Relations link. And with that, let me turn the call over to Soroush.

Thanks, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. It has been an incredibly busy and productive quarter here at Aeva. Following Aeva Day this summer, where we shared how our breakthrough unified perception platform is enabling new levels of perception for customers across a broad range of applications, interest in Aeva's technology has continued to grow significantly. Our focus has been on achieving important milestones for our partners and positioning Aeva to meet the expanding demand to adopt our differentiated FMCW technology. The key highlight this quarter is our progress with the top 10 global passenger OEM. At the start of the year, we announced that the OEM had selected Aeva for a development program and also issued Aeva a letter of intent for production, whereby, upon successful completion of the development program, the engagement would transition to a serious production award opportunity. I am very pleased to share that we have completed the development program ahead of plan and are now in late-stage contract negotiations for a series production award and more on that later. We also continue to make good progress on the Daimler Truck production program. Aeva's deliverables for the initial vehicle builds have been completed, and we are now shifting our focus to support Daimler Truck's growing vehicle fleet in 2026 and have already received the initial orders for next year's shipments of our Atlas final samples. Overall, we remain on track for Daimler Truck's planned market entry in 2027. Outside of automotive, we are pushing deeper into precision sensing. We have already started shipping against our first 1,000-plus units orders for our Eve 1D sensors. In just a few months, we have expanded our precision sensing product line with the unveiling of our Eve 1V sensor. This builds on the Eve 1D product by adding motion measurements to our product line to address what we believe is more of the multibillion-dollar manufacturing automation market. Reception has been really strong with multiple customers already placing initial orders with the opportunity to incorporate Eve 1D and 1V into their product portfolios. In Q3, we completed installation and bring-up of the production line for our Eve sensors in Thailand. The first sensors have come off the line and shipped to customers. We believe we now have the capacity ahead of time to fulfill next year's volume and we will continue to increase the capacity as the demand grows. To support our growing commercial traction across multiple segments and our scaling, we today announced a $100 million investment from one of the world's leading investment firms, Apollo Global Management, in the form of convertible notes. This comes at a defining time in the industry, and we believe it further positions Aeva to support not only the scaling of our existing programs, but to also win additional programs. This also follows our partnership and strategic investment from LG Innotek that we announced earlier this year, further reinforcing Aeva's leadership position in the next generation of sensing and perception. To sum up this quarter, Aeva continues to execute on the exciting and vast opportunities we highlighted at Aeva Day. We believe we are positioned to finish the year strong, including closing the top 10 global passenger OEM production program decision. With our differentiated technology and strong balance sheet, we see this as just the beginning with significant potential to continue our momentum into 2026 and beyond. Let's go into more detail on our key business developments. Starting first with our engagement with the top 10 global passenger OEM. As we shared at the start of this year, this OEM selected Aeva for a development program using our Atlas Ultra sensor for the OEM's next-generation global production platform. We expected to complete the development program by the end of this year, and I am pleased to say that we have successfully completed it in Q3 ahead of plan. The development program was focused on packaging and integration to be able to incorporate our Atlas Ultra as one standard platform across the OEM's multiple vehicle model lines. This is a global production program with a worldwide rollout plan across geographies, excluding China. The OEM plans to offer Level 3 across a broad range of their global vehicle model lineup, not just the top-of-the-line models. As part of our joint development, we also successfully completed key performance testing to help ensure that Atlas Ultra enables the OEM to introduce new functions of Level 3 driving, including both highway and city driving. In addition, we completed comprehensive manufacturing audits with our partner, LG Innotek, for this OEM and detailed out our industrialization plan for the OEM's planned production. All of this now paves the way for the OEM to make the series production award. As we disclosed earlier this year, we secured a letter of intent from this OEM toward the series production program award, where upon successful completion of the development program, the engagement would transition to a global production program opportunity for Aeva. We are now in late stages of contract negotiations and believe that Aeva is well positioned to supply for the series production program. Beyond this particular program, we believe that the top 10 OEM's selection of Aeva for their global series production program would represent one of the strongest validations of our technology platform, particularly regarding the superior performance and maturity of our technology. This OEM has a long history of leadership in the automotive industry with significant influence and a reputation for excellence in introducing industry-defining features in automotive at mass volume on a global scale. This would also be the first time a passenger OEM would transition from time-of-flight to FMCW to enable Level 3 for both highway and city driving. As such, we believe their vote of confidence in Aeva has the potential to accelerate interest in FMCW technology as a blueprint for other fast-following passenger car makers. To that end, we are already engaged with several other OEMs and industry players across RFI and RFQ stages looking to leverage 4D LiDAR for passenger vehicles, trucking, and mobility. Over the course of this year, our pipeline has continued to grow, and we expect our first passenger OEM win to further increase interest in Aeva as other OEMs view the top 10 OEM's decision as a reference design for implementing Level 3 automated driving functionality. Turning to our production program with Daimler Truck. We are progressing well on the OEM's milestones, keeping us on track to meet Daimler Truck's planned market entry in 2027. We have now completed sensor deliveries for the OEM's initial vehicle builds, and Daimler Truck, together with its subsidiary, Torc, are operating this fleet of trucks on large routes to validate production-intent hardware and autonomous capabilities ahead of commercialization. Aeva is the exclusive long-range and ultra-long-range LiDAR supplier for Daimler Truck's autonomous truck production program, with our Atlas 4D LiDAR playing an important role as the primary detection sensor. We're now preparing for next year to support the expansion of vehicle fleet rollout by Daimler Truck and Torc. We have already received the first orders for 2026 and plan to deliver our Atlas C samples to fulfill Daimler Truck's scaling of vehicle builds throughout next year and ahead of launch. Now moving to precision sensing, with the introduction of our Eve 1V motion sensor, Aeva is expanding into a whole new category of applications within the multibillion-dollar manufacturing automation market. Eve 1V uses our core FMCW LiDAR-on-chip technology to deliver high-precision contactless motion sensing, which means we can consistently do this more accurately, faster, and without the wear and tear challenges of traditional encoders and tactile sensors that are used to measure an object's motion in manufacturing today. We also designed Eve 1V for a wide range of applications and flexibility for users across multiple processes. This has the potential to be a game changer for the industry, and reception so far has been very encouraging. We have already received initial orders from multiple customers for our Eve 1V sensor. More broadly, our number of engagements for our precision sensing capabilities continue to increase since we first announced our product line this year. Precision sensing is a unique market opportunity for Aeva due to our technology's ability to achieve the needed micron-level accuracy that is not really possible with traditional time-of-flight LiDAR. We are working aggressively now to meet the growing interest, including ramping up manufacturing. Over time, we plan to expand our product lines for industrial manufacturing and robotics to new categories beyond 1D and 1V to address even more of this major market opportunity. Key to enabling this is the precision sensor manufacturing line at our partner, Fabrinet, a leader in the manufacturing of optical components. This quarter, we completed installation and bring-up of our line with the first sensors produced and shipped to customers. We now have the capacity in place to fulfill next year's expected volumes for Eve 1D, building capacity for our 1B sensors following its introduction. We have also started shipping against our initial orders of over 1,000 units that we received just a few months ago. Our ability to scale is driven by our chip-based architecture, which we designed specifically for fully automated assembly process steps. By integrating all optics onto a silicon photonics module, we have significantly reduced the number of components within a LiDAR that can be manufactured with greater efficiency and quality. Through our partnership with global manufacturing leaders, we believe that we can lean on their expertise to ramp production quickly without the need to invest significant levels of CapEx. With that, let me now turn the call to Saurabh, who will discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Soroush, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me share more about Aeva's third quarter 2025 financial results. Starting with revenue, it was $3.6 million in Q3, with a contribution from ongoing sensor shipments to multiple customers as well as NRV, such as for the Daimler Truck program. Moving to non-GAAP operating loss for this quarter, it declined by 13% year-over-year to $27.2 million, which largely reflects our target to reduce full year 2025 non-GAAP operating expense by 10% to 20% year-over-year. Aeva's gross cash use, which we define as operating cash flow less CapEx, was $33.6 million in Q3, which is higher than the prior quarter due to the timing of certain payments and working capital adjustments. In addition, we have received cash of $32.5 million in gross proceeds from LG Innotek upon closing of their strategic equity investment. This brought total available liquidity at the end of September to $173.9 million, excluding the Apollo investment we announced today. This is comprised of $48.9 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities and a $125 million in undrawn facility that is fully available to draw at Aeva's sole discretion. Let me talk a bit more about the capital raise we announced today. The $100 million in convertible senior notes will provide incremental capital for Aeva to continue to accelerate our ongoing growth. The notes have a coupon of 4.375% payable in cash or stock at the option of the company and a conversion price of 115% to the stock price. The notes are due in 7 years in November 2032. This represents a flexible source of unsecured capital, with no financial or maintenance covenants, and we will retain the flexibility to settle the convertible in cash, shares, or any combination at our election upon conversion. For additional details, please refer to the related 8-K. Including the new investment, our total pro forma liquidity position now stands at approximately $270 million, which we believe provides Aeva a strong competitive advantage to support existing programs as well as secure more wins. As we detailed at Aeva Day this summer, Aeva's unified perception platform enables us to bring new levels of perception to a broad range of large markets and applications. Our momentum has only grown since then. As we continue to execute, we believe that we are in a strong position to convert additional opportunities into wins. With that, let me turn the call back to Soroush for closing remarks.

Thanks, Saurabh. At a pivotal time for the industry, Aeva is increasing its leadership position in next-generation sensing and perception. We are firing on all cylinders, achieving major milestones on existing programs, progressing towards additional wins, and strengthening our balance sheet to scale multiple programs across many markets. I would like to thank the Aeva team for their continued dedication and our stakeholders for their ongoing support. Together, we are in a strong position to realize Aeva's vision to bring the next wave of perception to all devices. And with that, we will now move to Q&A.

We'll take our first question from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer & Company.

Can you talk a little bit about the ramp in Metrology sales? I mean, certainly, it looks like you have a pretty meaningful opportunity there in a number of applications. I'd just love to understand kind of how that cadence of product rollout really starts to hit as we get to the balance of this year and into 2026.

Yes. Colin, this is Soroush. Happy to answer that. Obviously, as you know, we're firing on multiple cylinders here. We announced our Eve 1D sensor just a few months ago earlier this year. Since then, we've talked about how the traction in the market has been very strong. Following that, we started getting initial orders. We talked about the first 1,000-plus units orders. In the past 2 or 3 months, we pulled forward our setup of our manufacturing line for the Eve sensor due to this increasing demand. Our team is engaged with multiple customers in this space. Each one represents significant opportunity volumes for us. In this quarter, we talked about how we've now been able to set up the line quickly within a couple of months and started building out units and shipping the first unit against those 1,000-plus units order already. This is very important for us; it means we're starting to crank that gear around shipping units towards those customers. Separate from that, we're also getting feedback from customers about the capabilities of our sensors. Beyond measuring micron-level accuracy for distance sensors, we've been able to provide an initial SKU or a new type of product with our Eve 1V sensor, now measuring speed on the manufacturing line with very high accuracy, right? So sub-millimeter per second precision provides additional opportunities for us. We've received some orders for that as well from existing customers, also new customers. To give you a rough sense of the market, it is about 2 million sensors a year for these displacement sensors, and ASPs are higher than in automotive, so it's multibillion dollars, $4 billion going up to $6 billion in the coming years. We are partnering already with some of the key leaders in the space, including SICK and LMI. Those represent a double-digit percent market share, such as SICK shipping 200,000 or 250,000 sensors annually. The way we see the ramp-up is that it’s not going to be overnight, but it will be faster than some automotive applications. This also helps fill in revenue growth and pipeline for the company.

Okay. Perfect. And then as a follow-up, just the L2 ADAS and L2+ ADAS opportunity on the trucking side seems pretty substantial. Those involve some longer sales cycles, but the articulation of the insurance needs and all the other value capture for the truck OEMs seems pretty substantial. Can you talk about the breadth and depth of customers looking at your solution for that L2 and L2+ application in the trucking market?

Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned on the call earlier, we've been focused on creating one unified perception platform that can allow us to enter multiple market segments with one core technology without a ton of optimizations using the same hardware platform with adaptive software for addressing multiple markets across automotive for Level 3 driving and entering into Level 2+, especially in commercial vehicles. One of the biggest debates we've discussed in the past few years is the need for LiDAR. I think over time, that argument has shifted. Level 3 is very clear with our progress and the successful completion of this top 10 OEM that Level 3 with LiDAR is going to be standard and a key enabling feature for making vehicles and driving customers' choices. For Level 2+, we have a unique opportunity at Aeva, given our technology allows measuring velocity and performing some of the perception, reducing the need for and cost of other modalities in the Level 2 traditional stack, which is typically cameras, image sensors, radar, and some compute box. A partnership we have is with Bendix, the market leader in North America, providing Level 2+ ADAS, particularly automatic emergency braking. This company ships 200,000 to 300,000 fusion systems every year, serving flagship models of many top OEMs. We see an opportunity here together with Bendix to provide a next-generation Level 2+ solution leveraging our 4D LiDAR technology, reducing the need for other components while combining image camera technology and 4D information processing on the edge. We believe this could be another marquee win for us, especially closing out with the top 10 passenger OEM, setting a reference for other OEMs.

Congratulations on the progress here. My question is really around the length of the design cycle for additional customer opportunities. Looking at the Tier 1 you're on the brink of signing with; I'm wondering what’s involved in proliferating the design across their model line. I'm curious how detailed a process that is and if there can be learnings from what you're doing here, building a catalog of placements and tweaks and software updates that would be leverageable to shorten the design cycle for future customers.

Yes, Suji, happy to answer that. First of all, I hope you can hear our excitement. We're very thrilled about the successful completion of this top 10 passenger OEM program. To recap, earlier this year, we were awarded a development program from this top 10 passenger OEM, along with a letter of intent for the series production award. We outlined milestones for developing a scalable modular platform for their global production platform to apply across multiple vehicle model lines. Since then, we have completed all the key milestones satisfactorily, including packaging and integrating our sensors to ensure compatibility across multiple vehicle model lines. The aim is not just for a top trim or premium model but as a standard platform across their models. Additional goals included aligning our performance to enable Level 3 driving. We have also developed a clear industrialization plan with LG Innotek. This initial phase of the series production development is complete, and the OEM is eager to move forward faster. We're in late stages of commercial negotiations, and we feel confident about securing this program. This OEM is a significant player, and we believe this program will serve as a blueprint for others looking to provide Level 3 functionality with FMCW technology.

Okay. A quick follow-up on the applicability to mobility, I guess, urban scenarios; where is time of flight sufficient versus FMCW? Curious about your thoughts as you address both highway and mobility.

The OEMs, including this one and others, are making technology choices that will impact hardware for many years. This will be a long-term production decision going into the next decade. They are future-proofing their technology stack, and we believe we are at an inflection point. This will be the first time a passenger OEM transitions from time-of-flight to FMCW LiDAR. This transition showcases both the capability and the maturity of our products. It is significant because consumer buying decisions will increasingly hinge not just on specs or entertainment features but also on the usability and time-saving advantages in daily commutes. Level 3 driving will drive sales, and ensuring that customers can get easily from point A to B—including navigating urban environments—is essential. The vision is that they will opt for one hardware solution applicable to all their use cases, ensuring the software will evolve to enable highway and city driving, with firm functionality for Level 3 from the start.

You have Matt here on for George. Congrats on the quarter. Could you provide more color on the timeline with Daimler? What's needed for the program to reach validation ahead of production? And what about the Torc relationship? They seemed to be seeking a capital partner, do you foresee any slippage in the timeline?

Happy to answer that. Daimler Truck and Torc have publicly stated their commitment to autonomy, which is a key growth driver for them. Their timeline for market entry in 2027 remains on track. We are pivotal for their technology and perception detection. We're progressing on track with clear line of sight to vehicle build plans for 2026 and have received initial orders. We've monitored the situation closely but want to emphasize that Daimler and Torc are resolute in their commitment to autonomy. As a significant player within this ecosystem, they're eager to make this happen. Their capability and resources make us confident in the timeline set for 2027.

Great. Switching gears, you raised $100 million investment from Apollo. Could you provide more color on its intended use and how that aids in pushing commercialization at a faster pace?

Matt, this is Saurabh. The $100 million in convertible notes is intended for general corporate purposes. We've made tremendous progress with our customers. Our unified perception platform enables us to execute on multiple wins and bring new customers without significant increases in spending. We have been disciplined in capital allocation and plan to reduce our non-GAAP operating expenses this year by 10% to 20% while increasing our commercial momentum.

To add to that, having Apollo as a partner is significant. It reinforces our growth momentum at an important time for our company and our industry. The structure we have put into place, from automotive and trucking relationships to industrial partnerships, indicates we are ready to execute and scale effectively.

I have a two-part question about the top 10 OEM. First, are you in an exclusive negotiation position? Second, can you elaborate on the timeframe for ramping?

I can't comment on sensitive information, but we feel confident about our position in late-stage negotiations. As for the ramp-up, the initial development program focused on ensuring a solution that will apply across the OEM vehicle lineup. To hit the ground running, we completed all key milestones, ensuring scalability and functionality for Level 3 driving. We believe we are on track for a late 2027 to early 2028 launch of this OEM.

Appreciate the detail. Finally, you mentioned growing interest from other major OEMs for L3 automotive applications. Is there a catalyst or event driving this related to the market or Aeva's technological developments?

We have engaged numerous programs across multiple stages from RFIs to RFQs in automotive and industrial. Several factors have contributed, including our clear path to winning business, partnerships with leaders in their respective sectors, and leveraging our perception platform for multiple segments without the need for heavy CapEx investment. The successful completion of the development program with the top 10 OEM has opened doors, making it a key reference design that we believe can drive further engagement and interest in our offerings. The consolidation in the market also creates additional opportunities for us as OEMs look to future-proof their technology with a transition to FMCW systems.

Thank you. That does conclude the final question we have for today, and this will conclude Aeva Technologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.