Earnings Call Transcript - CBUS Q4 FY2025

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to the SEBIS 4th Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note, today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Carlo Bruse, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thank you and good afternoon. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for CBIS' fourth quarter 2025 financial results and business update conference call and webcast. Presenting with me today is Peter Beetham, co-founder, interim chief executive officer, president and COO, and Greg Goetschel, co-founder and our chief scientific officer. Before we begin the call, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast, including those regarding future financial results and future operational goals and industry prospects, are forward-looking and may be subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the call. Please refer to SEBUS SEC filings for a list of associated risks. This conference call is being webcast. The webcast link, along with our press release and corporate presentation, are available on the Investor Relations section of CBIS.com to assist you in your analysis of our business. And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to Peter.

Peter Beetham, CEO

Thanks, Carlo. And good afternoon, everyone. By any measure, 2025 was a landmark year for CBIS. Not because of any single headline, but because of a convergence of key themes that are shaping the trajectory of the gene editing industry. Technology leadership, commercialization progress, scale, and regulatory momentum, all arriving at the same time. We have seven rice customers representing over $200 million in potential annual royalty opportunities. We received our first customer payment from our sustainable ingredients program, we were selected by the UK government as a technology partner for its farming innovation program and in a watershed moment the EU finally reached political agreement on new genomic techniques legislation, something we've been helping to shape for many years. Gene editing is no longer an experiment. We believe it's the future of innovation in farming, food and agriculture. And SEVIS has been positioned ahead of this innovation curve for a long time and we have shifted to a commercially driven company with a powerful technology engine. What makes this current moment particularly exciting is the intersection of our technology readiness and a change in how we believe seed companies are thinking about gene energy. For years, speed and scale were obstacles. Seed companies were interested, but the technology wasn't predictable enough to fit into their breeding programs. Our advancements in creating a more streamlined business with time-bound, predictable trait development have changed that equation. We can take a customer's elite germplasm, make a specific edit, and return it to them within 12 to 15 months. And because of that progress, we're beginning to see something important. seed companies don't necessarily just want access to a trait, they want to get more deeply integrated with our technologies. This is a natural evolution of what we mean when we say that SEVIS can be an extension of our customers breeding programs. We receive their elite genetics, we make the edits and we return improved material on a predictable schedule that allows for commercial planning and coordination that better align to their seed improvement and market growth strategies. Increasingly, the conversations we're having with potential customers are about ongoing genomic editing relationships. Not just one trait in one crop, but the possibility of a broader engagement throughout their entire portfolio, where Seabys can serve as a gene editing engine for their plant breeding capabilities. This is highlighting opportunities beyond traditional trait licensing, particularly in high-growth markets like India and Asia and Latin America, where we see potential for what I'd describe as outsourced gene editing, partners accessing our editing capabilities on an ongoing basis. As we explore these potential relationships, we are maintaining our core licensing and royalty framework surrounding the edits we make. The edits are the product. Debus edits the genome in elite genetics, and those edits are connected to royalty. Regardless of whether a partner comes to us for a single trait or for a comprehensive editing program, the value we create resides in the edits themselves, and we retain that value through our intellectual property and licensing structure. That is how we intend to build a durable, recurring cash flow that drives long-term shareholder value. So whether we are talking about trade licensing, editing services, or some combination thereof, the roads lead to the same payoff an annual stream of royalties on the edits sebus makes now turning to our rights program which remains the foundation for near-term revenue generation and the clearest example of our core trade business model I just described remember our seven rights customers across the United States and Latin America represents an incredible 200 million dollars in potential annual royalty opportunity through our herbicide-tomalant traits. Importantly, we remain on track for initial market entry in Latin America in 2027, followed by the potential U.S. expansion in 2028, an entry into India and Asia closer to 2030. Perhaps the most significant development was with InterOx. In January, we executed a non-binding LOI establishing a framework for commercialization of herbicide tolerant rice across key Latin American markets, starting with Ecuador and Colombia in 2027 and expanding into Peru, Central America and the Caribbean. We've transferred some edited material back to inter-rockal registration work. We have recently received an import permit so we can return their elite rice genetics with two herbicide tolerant traits and we expect to advance negotiations towards a definitive commercial agreement late in 2026. In addition, over the past year we've demonstrated important progress in life, particularly in Latin America. Remember this is a market that historically lacked access to advanced weed management solutions and the demand for what we're offering is strong. Our partnership with SEAT, or FLAR, which works with the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice and participates in the Hybrid Rice Consortium for Latin America, gives us access to rice farmers across the region through a partner that has launched varieties in 17 countries. As we have previously mentioned, we also have signed agreements with Semiano and Samias del Hula, two important Colombian rice seed companies, and completed delivery of rice lines with our HT3 trait to an existing U.S. customer. Beyond the current partners that include our long-term herbicide partner, RTDC, we are pursuing initial access to the Brazilian market, one of the most significant rice geographies in Latin America, and potentially Argentina as well, representing substantial additional acreage opportunities. In India, we continue to work with Agba and RTDC to build seed company relationships where rice cultivation is approximately 120 million acres. Greg recently travelled to India and met with a number of leading seed companies and even the former Minister of Agriculture. The demand there is significant. In some areas, farmers are growing two rice crops in a year, and India's regulatory acceptance of gene editing demonstrated by the recent first planting of gene-edited rice in the This positions India as a leading future market. We're initially targeting a commercial launch in India around 2030, and we'll keep you updated as we progress. On the development side, we're also expanding our trade portfolio in rice. Following successful 2024 field trial results for Stax gene-edited herbicide-tolerant traits, in March 2025, we expand out our efforts to include additional trait stacking to broaden weed management for crop protection. Stepping back, in just over a year, we've built a rice program that spans three continents and targets the world's most important rice-growing regions. That trajectory happened because our technologies deliver something seed companies have never had before, time bound predictable trait development in their elite germplasm. That's worth emphasizing as it is a central component to the value proposition that SEVIS is delivering to customers. Another great example of how this trait portfolio model works in practice is through our collaboration with John Innes Center on nutrient use efficiency. That partnership is a funded program where we're applying our technologies to their breakthrough trait with potential to apply this across our entire crop portfolio. Different structure, same endpoint, elite germplasm, C-Bus technologies, C-Bus edits, C-Bus royalties. Turning to sustainable ingredients, our biofragrants program uses our trait development capabilities applied to yeast fermentation to produce sustainable, low-carbon fragrance ingredients for a leading global CPG partner. Under a multi-year collaboration, we completed pre-commercial pilot runs for two biofragrance products in Q3 2025, demonstrating technical readiness for commercial scale. In Q4, that translated into our first payment. We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg in the global fragrance market, which is estimated to be valued at over $65 billion. We're working to expand this partnership into a broader agreement, and we're targeting commercial-scale production later this year. With the timeline dependent on finalising of product formulations with our partner. When fully commercialised, we believe that these natural biofragrance partnerships represent a $20 to $40 million annual royalty opportunity to Sebus. Excitingly, we believe we can target additional fragrances using the same yeast platform. Beyond biofragrances, we continue to advance our partner-funded crop-based loric oil program as part of the broader portfolio. The biofragments program serves as an important commercial bridge as our rice royalty stream builds and it demonstrates the versatility of our platform. The same core gene editing capability that's developing herbicide tolerance in rice has the potential to create value in the consumer products industry. Now regulatory, as part of this perfect storm of progress we've seen very positive developments occur in the regulation of gene editing in significant jurisdictions around the world. At SEVIS we have been patient because we understood that the global regulatory framework would determine how fast this industry scales. In December the EU reached political agreements on new genomic techniques legislation. This was a watershed moment. Europe represents approximately 100 million acres of greenfield opportunity because GMO technologies have been restricted for decades. The European Parliament plenary session is expected in late April. This is the next big milestone we're watching very closely. This comes on the heels of the UK's precision bred organisms framework going live last November. We submitted our first PBO filings in January and in February we were selected for a DEFRA funded consortium applying our RTDS technologies to light leaf spot resistance in oilseed rate. Being chosen by a national government as a technology partner is a powerful independent validation. Across the Americas the momentum continues. California authorized gene edited rights for planting for the first time. Ecuador confirmed our traits are equivalent to those developed using conventional breeding, and USDA APIS has now given us 17 positive determinations. Just last week, Peru also confirmed gene-edited products will be considered similar to conventional rice varieties. This regulatory harmonization is accelerating commercial conversations globally. And with that great news, I will pass the call over to Greg to discuss our opportunity pipeline traits and programs. Greg?

Greg Goetschel, Other

Thank you, Peter. I'll keep my remarks focused on the key technical milestones that support both our priority programs and our broader opportunity pipeline. What I'd add from the lab side is some perspective on the scientific results that help drive our progress. In Rice, in 2025, we realized an order of magnitude improvement in our editing efficiency that translates to regenerated edited plants. We've optimized the reagents, cell culture conditions, the delivery mechanics, and the regeneration process. And we continue to push those boundaries with our strategic use of AI and machine learning toward identifying the right targets faster, predicting precise edit outcomes with greater confidence, and feeding those learnings back into each successive campaign. Combined with our semi-automated workflows and robotic assistance, the trait machine process is becoming faster, more scalable, and more efficient. That's what's enabling us to take on the kind of broader relationships Peter described. The throughput and the consistency to serve as our partner's ongoing editing capability. Turning to our opportunity pipeline, I wanted to highlight our significant 2025 technical progress across programs that are all available for partnership and represent meaningful future value. Starting with our canola traits, our second-generation herbicide-tolerant trait, HT2, delivered positive field trial results in North America last year, confirming both acceptable herbicide resistance and similar yield to the unedited parent. It's important to remember that HC2 validates the path for developing not only for that particular chemistry, but for any chemistry in this family, and is a trait that can be stacked with other herbicide-resistant systems. For sclerotinia resistance, bioassays for plants there in two of our modes of action continue to demonstrate enhanced resistance, and our collaboration with Biographica using their AI platform has identified several new potential gene editing targets. Our RTDS platform gives us the precision to go after multiple modes of action for the same disease. That's something conventional approaches simply cannot do at our speed. And it's important to note that both HT2 and sclerotinia resistance have multi-crop, multi-geography potential. In the UK, we completed our second year of field trials for pod shadow reduction in winter oil seed rate, showing encouraging performance in several customers' germ plasm. With the PBO legislation now in effect, our gene-edited material can now be grown like conventional germ plasm, and we've submitted our first PBO filing. The DEFRA-funded Light Leaf Spot Consortium is a tremendous validation for our technology's ability to target resistance to another key disease in winter oilseed rate. 12 industry and academic partners with SEVIS selected as the gene editing technology partner. What makes this technically exciting is that we're applying our RTDS platform to develop durable disease resistance, a more complex challenge than herbicide tolerance, and one that demonstrates the increasing sophistication of what our gene editing system can deliver. On nutrient use efficiency, we continue our funded collaboration with the John Ennis Center on a breakthrough trait that has the potential to create significant commercial opportunities across our entire crop portfolio. This addresses the global fertilizer efficiency challenge where only about one-third of the fertilizer applied in the field is typically available to be absorbed by plants. This is a complex biological system that requires targeted specific edits, exactly the kind of problem our platform was designed to solve. On the wheat platform, we've previously disclosed in 2024, successfully regenerated plants from single cells in a wheat cultivar. Single cell regeneration is the gateway to applying our full RTDS editing capability in a new crop. Once we can do that, the entire trade development process for that crop opens up. That, in turn, spurs opportunity for further partner-funded development in one of the world's most cultivated crops. And as the European regulatory landscape becomes clearer, we're seeing increased interest. Similarly, in soybeans, in early 2025, the company achieved sufficiently high editing rates, enabling expanded development of its soybean platform in conjunction with partner-funded and or supported programs. The key message I want to leave you with is this. Our RTDS platform is performing across multiple crops and increasingly complex traits. Every one of these pipeline programs is available for partnership, and together they represent present significant optionality for the business. Our technical foundation, combined with growing regulatory evolution, positions us well to advance high-value trades through partnerships while maintaining focused execution on high-priority revenue drivers. And with that, I'll hand the call over to Carlo for the financial update. Carlo?

Speaker 5

Thank you, Greg. Looking at our financials for the fourth quarter, our cash and cash equivalents as of December 31, 2025 was $9.9 million. In January 2026, we raised $22.3 million in gross proceeds from our public offering. This capital raise meaningfully extends our runway and supports continued advancement of our rice program and sustainable ingredients work as we move toward our near-term revenue milestones. Taking into account the impact of implemented cost-saving initiatives, including those implemented last week, and without giving effect to potential future financing transactions that CBIS is pursuing, we expect that existing cash and cash equivalents is sufficient to fund planned operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements into late third quarter of 2026. Importantly, our streamlined focus is also contributing to our extended runway, and we're pleased to have reduced operating expenses by approximately $10 million across R&D and SG&A for the full year of 2025, moving to our operating results for the fourth quarter. Research and development expense was $9.4 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2025, compared to $12.4 million in the year-ago period. The $3 million decrease is primarily due to cost reduction initiatives that we have implemented as part of our streamlined operational focus. Selling, general, and administrative expense was $5.1 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2025, compared to $6.8 million in the year-ago period. The $1.7 million decrease is also primarily due to cost reduction initiatives. Royalty liability interest expense related parties was $9.4 million for the quarter compared to $8.2 million in the year-ago period. The $1.2 million increase is due to the recognition of interest expense on the royalty liability. Non-operating income net was nominal for the quarter compared to income of $0.4 million in the year-ago period. The decrease was driven by the fair value adjustment of the company's liability-classified common warrants. Net loss was $31.9 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2025, compared to $25.8 million in the year-ago period. During 2025, we completed consolidation of operations from our Oberlin facility into our San Diego headquarters and wound down operations at our Roesville, Minnesota facility. These actions, along with workforce reductions, demonstrate tangible progress toward our goal of reducing annual net cash usage to approximately $30 million or less in 2026. This disciplined approach to capital allocation, combined with the January race, extends our cash runway while positioning us to capture the significant biofragrance revenue opportunity ahead and meaningful commercial expansion from rice trades expected beginning in 2027. With that financial overview, let me turn it back to Peter for closing remarks.

Peter Beetham, CEO

Thank you, Carlo and Greg. Let me close by putting this year in context. SEVIS has been the consistent force in precision gene editing. We've built the technologies from the ground up with scalable and accelerated processes. We've engaged with many global regulators to provide technical guidance. We've established the customer relationship, and now those investments are compounding. 2026 is all about execution and momentum. Here is what we're focused on. On Rice, we're expanding customer relationships across the Americas and India, advancing toward a definitive commercial agreement with Interok, and pursuing discussions that could open Brazil and Argentina. We expect to report on field results from Latin America later this year, along with progress on chemistry registrations, supporting our 2027 commercial launch targets. On sustainable ingredients, we're formalizing our expanded partnership, targeting commercial-scale production, and I believe we'll be in a position to announce additional details on this program in the near term. This is a real revenue stream that's growing, and it demonstrates the breadth and broad potential of what our platform can deliver. On regulatory, the EU plenary vote expected in late April is one of the next major catalysts. That clarity is already re-energising conversations with European partners and creating new opportunities. and more broadly I'm excited about the evolution of our commercial model. The fact that we're bringing herbicide tolerant rice to a crop that feeds billions of people is exciting not just for shareholders but for global agriculture's future. I continue to see SEBUS as a coiled spring and I'm so proud to be leading this team into what I believe will be a transformative year. Operator, we're now ready to take questions.

Operator

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, press star 1 on your keypad. Delete the queue at any time. Press star 2. Once again, that is star 1 to ask a question. We'll take our first question from Matthew Venesia with AGP. Your line is open.

Matthew Venesia, Analyst — AGP

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my questions, and congrats on the progress. Firstly, I wanted to ask about the EU NGT framework. I know this is a long time coming, but does this change the company's thought towards CapEx, toward the canola WOSR program in the future at all? I know that that's a crop that's probably bigger in Europe than over in the Americas.

Peter Beetham, CEO

So, Matt, thanks. Thanks so much for the question. You know, the EU regulatory progress is really a watershed moment. You know, it has been the gold standard in regulatory globally for a lot of plant breeding work. In the past, it was GMO. But now, we're opening up the whole gene editing world. And, you know, essentially, we're going global, which is amazing. You can tell why I'm excited about this is because it's taken a long time. And that has been some of our frustration. But it really does open up opportunities. For example, Europe is 100 million acres of greenfield opportunity. They've never had traits through genetics with novel traits before. So here this opportunity opens up. And to your point, one of the major crops there is winter oil seed rape. And for us at SEBUS, we've been developing a platform and a production system in winter oilseed rain that is really efficient. And this is what I was saying in the earlier remarks is when things come together like they have for us, all of a sudden we are in a situation where the EU regulatory fits, we've got a production system, we can do it in a time-bound and predictable way, and we can cut years off timelines in plant breeding programs. So what we're seeing is really a lot of interest from the major seed companies in Europe, but also that opens up the rest of the world. And with that, I'll hand it off to Greg because I'm sure he's got a few extra comments.

Greg Goetschel, Other

Yeah, thanks, Peter, and thanks for the question, Matt. So just a couple of extra comments. So as you know, we've been running field trials for Podshatter in the UK for the last couple of years, And we see that there's excellent performance of that trait in customer material, where some of those customers feed the EU market and are using the regulatory system in the UK to be able to advance that material more quickly. And then the last thing I'll highlight is the Light Leaf Spot Collaboration or DEFRA Sunded Consortium, where we're the gene editing partner, but many of the seed companies involved are seed companies that are core within Europe.

Matthew Venesia, Analyst — AGP

Thank you guys for that. And then next, I just wanted to ask if you could take us through the next steps to commercialization in Latin America for rice and what the milestones will look like that you will report to the street as that process gets closer when we get into late 26 and into 27.

Peter Beetham, CEO

thanks matt um let me give you the context of where we are uh on our commercialization path because this goes back to understanding that um cebus has been able to um build a process in rice in elite genetics and what i mean by elite genetics is the genetics that are really the coalface of breeding programs and so our partnerships our seven partnerships in the Americas the five in Latin America the genetics that we're working on and have worked on are their best genetics their elite genetics and so the first step in that process is getting that material in and editing that material and getting it back to them within this 12 to 15 months timeframe so we've been able to do that already and we've made those edits in delete genetics and that is the first step in that path to commercialization also earlier this year we were really you know excited to to work with interrock who's been a great partner for us on a letter of intent with regards to the full commercialization of the first two traits, HT3 and HT1, starting out in Ecuador and Colombia. And so we came to agreement with that, and that is opening up the path to launch in 2027. So they'll take on the road of chemical registration for the herbicide to over top of our traits in those countries. and then the material that we'll report on during the year is the progress on that chemical registration and also the trait work that we're doing in their elite genetics and getting ready over the next winter to go into launch into 2027. Great. Thank you guys for taking my questions and

Matthew Venesia, Analyst — AGP

congrats again on the progress. I'll hop back in the queue. Thanks, Matt. We'll move next to

Operator

Lawrence Alexander with Jeffreys. Your line is open.

Lawrence Alexander, Analyst — Jeffrey

Good afternoon. I just wanted to touch on a couple of things. Can you give a sense for the kind of the trend line for the total number of acres touched by your technology? Maybe 25 versus 26 versus 27, if you have any kind of rough framework on that. Thanks, Lawrence.

Peter Beetham, CEO

And let me go back to where I was with Latin America. I think the key here is that we're targeting 5 to 7 million acres in the Americas. And within each of the companies that we deal with, they take up a portion of those acres. And so over the first three years, we'll see that growth and that scale to those number of acres with the two traits. And so, you know, that's the exciting part for me is that, you know, once you're in that market, it is the stickiest business in the world because they're going to continue to take those elite materials into that marketplace and expand into those acres. And as I mentioned in my remarks, you know, that represents potential of over $200 million annually for us. So building to that is going to take a couple of years through that process, and I think that is just the bright acres in Latin America and the U.S. to start. What we also achieved in 2025 was the development of a relationship with AgVaya, with RTDC support to look at the Indian market, which is a much bigger market, obviously, which is 120 million acres. We're not going to see in the first few years royalties come out of India. It'll be towards the end of the decade in 2930 that we'll start to see that progress. But that opens up, you know, again, another over, you know, potentially another $200 million of annual royalties. So I think it's, no, Lawrence, to your question, it starts once you get into the market, and that's our goal in Latin America in 27, it really builds over the first three or four years.

Lawrence Alexander, Analyst — Jeffrey

Okay. Now, secondly, can you help me with a couple of things around scale? First, given the progress you've made the last couple of years on the gene editing platform, if, you know, following the EU regulations, potential partners are coming to you with gene edits as a service, what would be the kind of maximum throughput that you could do without doing a significant increase in your R&D expense or other investments?

Peter Beetham, CEO

So this is the great thing about building it from the ground up. The team here has done a wonderful job of combining cell biology with automation and also the genotyping and automation. And so it doesn't take an enormous team to run through genetics pretty quickly. So there's some real synergies. And we're seeing that one of the experiments we tried essentially was at Oberlin, which paid huge dividends because that really changed our production system to be more like manufacturing. Why I'm telling you that, Lawrence, is because that's what drives the scale and scalability. And then you put on top of that automation and experience we've had now, you add in AI and, you know, we see some real efficiencies coming in the next year or so. So as we've reported over the last six months particularly, we've really refined and streamlined our business and that has been our major focus is building a system that we can scale to address the editing services as people come to us. And that's the exciting part of global regulatory opening up, seeing companies come towards us with some really great ideas. Greg mentioned UK Innovate. So that's a really good example. We've also worked with John as a center with nutrient use efficiency, which allows farmers to use less fertilizer. So there's some really great things coming. But I'll hand to Greg because he's in charge a lot of the scale up.

Greg Goetschel, Other

So thanks, Lawrence, for your question. A couple of things to add to Peter's comment. So remember, because we're focused on using single cells from all of the crops that we work on, and because we're working with elite genetics, what we've seen both for canola winter oilseed grape as well as for rice so far is that most of the lines that we work with from customers, many seed company customers, those lines are performing well in cell culture. We also are in a place where in addition to the royalty downstream, we'll get some funding to cover those editing expenses as we make edits for either traits that we're licensing or traits that we develop ourselves into those materials. So with modest increases in the size of the team, we can manage multiple crops and multiple lines, whether they're parents for hybrids or whether they're varieties within the platform for a wide variety of traits. So, they may be traits that we're developing, they may be edits that a customer or a partnership wants us to make, or they may be edits that we have a partnership where both the partner and SEBUS work together to determine what those edits are. So, excellent question and thank you.

Lawrence Alexander, Analyst — Jeffrey

and then separately can you help with the sort of when people come to you with gene edits as a service if there is a kind of known value add let's say a certain percentage increase in yield on a kind of you know with a rolling average crop price to keep it simple what is a plausible like What kind of royalty rates are you discussing with customers now, and how has that changed compared to a few years ago?

Peter Beetham, CEO

Thanks, Lawrence. I think it's a great question because, you know, what we're seeing is an uptick in the idea behind getting gene editing done more as a service. But what really sets us apart at SEBUS is the speed and scalability, as we just talked about. Speed is critical. Now, one of the things that I think has been challenging in the trait market previously is a trait may be handed off to a company, but you go through five or six years of backcrossing and testing before it gets to market. What we're seeing now with gene editing is we can do an elite genetics and hand it back in a year's time, and that allows them to integrate it into their plant breeding program as an extension. And so that, you know, so you stay ahead of the yield curve. You stay into their elite genetics, and that allows them to see the value add very quickly. And so when you can see the value add quickly, the negotiation on a trade royalty is very, you know, favorable for SEBUS. And so, you know, we're in this to help the farmer. We're in this to help the seed company. And we share in that value together. And when you can see the value add on an accelerated basis, it's an easier negotiation.

Lawrence Alexander, Analyst — Jeffrey

And then just lastly on the fragrances, similarly, can you give a sense for the scale of how many fragrances you could work on in one year if customers are interested at your current cost run rate?

Peter Beetham, CEO

Lawrence, a great question. You know, we've been working on a couple of fragrances to start with. I think what we see is, again, acceleration once you have a platform to be able to build out an organism with those edits. And so in our case, it's yeast. Yeast genetics are quick. I think what we've been focused on is making sure that all the downstream production work with our partner has been done and we've been able to show that. And I think that's the exciting part. is once you have that, the process can be accelerated. We know that there's probably about 17 fragrances out there that we'd like to go after. We've been focused on the first few, but I think we can scale that pretty quickly.

Lawrence Alexander, Analyst — Jeffrey

Okay, great. Thank you.

Greg Goetschel, Other

Thanks, Lawrence.

Operator

We'll move next to Alex Hantman with Sidoti & Company. Your line is open.

Alex Hantman, Analyst — Sidoti & Company

good afternoon and thanks for taking questions to start um just on the results um the collaboration revenue and earnings um came in you know a little bit below consensus and and what i projected could you talk a little bit about what did you know and did not convert in the fourth quarter and you know maybe anything that didn't come through um that might come through in the next couple of

Speaker 5

quarters? Thanks, Alex. This is Carlo. A great question. This is really timing. So from a cash perspective, we're absolutely on track. We talked about this before, but this is the revenue recognition really linked to time spent by our people. If you look in, if you hear about upcoming numbers, you'll see that we're absolutely on track as we've talked before. Spirited timing, Alex.

Alex Hantman, Analyst — Sidoti & Company

Okay, thanks. And then maybe to follow up on timing, you know, congrats again on the initial commercial biofragrance sale. Can we talk a little bit about the, you know, potential to expand with the current customer and, you know, what conversations you're having with other potential customers and, you know, how we get to that ramp that you gave of $20 million to $40 million a year?

Peter Beetham, CEO

Thanks, Alex. This is Peter. Thanks for your question. I think that, you know, the opportunities are broad when it comes to a sustainable ingredients program. And what we're seeing in the fragrance side of things is different sectors we can go after. Fragrance is used very broadly across industries, and so we're obviously always looking at that. We've got a strong partner right now, and we're working closely with them to build out later this year to full commercial scale, but also to expand that opportunity. It doesn't preclude us from going and looking more broadly. So I think your question is very correct in that there is this opportunity that SEBUS would love to expand on.

Alex Hantman, Analyst — Sidoti & Company

Great. Thank you. And then last one from us. I know you mentioned current funds into late 2026, third quarter. um could you talk a little bit about you know how you're thinking of uh financing from here and you know your flexibility with that and and um you know just kind of sort of the the range of

Peter Beetham, CEO

options that you're thinking about thanks alex um i'm going to hand this off to carlo in a minute but i do want to say a couple of comments up front because it's a really important question around how we're streamlining the business. You know, the last couple of years have been all about efficiency and running to the near-term revenue. And I think the team here has done an excellent job, some tough decisions along the way, some consolidation around facilities. but streamlining the business has been very much a focus for the management team and a focus across the whole organisation and so we continue to refine that we continue to look for synergies in the organisation but what we're also seeing is opportunities ahead of us And so for us, the idea of automation, the idea of really utilizing the best parts of AI, not only in the science, but also in the back office and the administration of the company, is allowing us to sort of really manage that cash burn. And with that, I'll hand off to Carlo to add some comments.

Speaker 5

Yeah, I think you said it well. I think two important things happened. In 2025, the streamlining, and now even recently, more streamlining. And this allows us to focus on near-term revenues. So that's the big thing. And then, of course, we had a January financing transaction. And, yeah, that all leads to proceeds, as you said, late into the third quarter. But for me, most important, this allows us to focus on near-term revenues and rise and

Peter Beetham, CEO

Great context.

Operator

Thanks, Alex. Thank you. It does appear that there are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand back to management for any additional or closing remarks.

Peter Beetham, CEO

Thank you. I've only got a couple of closing remarks today. I think we went through the details of the business and showed that we have had an amazing year. And gene editing in general, the industry is, as I said before, it's not an experiment. This is happening now, and we are totally commercially driven going forward in 2026. I'd like to thank you all for joining today as well. Some great questions, and I really appreciate that. And for the three of us here, we're really proud to represent the team here at SEBUS. And we're really looking forward to a strong future here in 2026, and we'll keep you updated as we make that progress. So thank you all.

Operator

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.