Quantum-Si Inc Q2 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. At the close of today's market, QSI released its financial results for the second quarter, which ended June 30, 2021, and provided a business update. The release is currently available on the Investors section of the company's website at ir.quantum-si.com. John Stark, Quantum-Si's Chief Executive Officer; and Claudia Drayton, Chief Financial Officer, will host this afternoon's call. During today's call, we will be making certain forward-looking statements. This may include statements regarding, among other things expectations with respect to financial results, future performance, development of products and services, anticipated financial impacts and other effects of the business combination on our business, the size and potential growth of current or future markets for our products and services and the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business. We use forward-looking statements that are based on current information, assumptions and expectations that are subject to change and evolve. And there are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. These and other risks are described in our filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements and the company disclaims any obligation to update such statements. During this call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. These financial measures are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the results prepared in accordance with GAAP. The definitions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and the discussion of why we present these non-GAAP financial measures are included in today's press release. As a reminder, this call is being webcast live and recorded. To access the webcast, please visit the Events section in the Investors section of the website. A replay of the event will be available following the call. I would now like to turn the call over to John Stark.

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon everyone. I'm excited to be hosting Quantum-Si's first earnings call as a public company. This is a rewarding milestone for the company and the talented team who have dedicated the past eight years to our mission of transforming the field of single molecule detection and proteomics. We now have the resources from the completion of our business combination with HighCape Capital to push forward on our mission to be a market leader in the emerging field of single molecule protein sequencing. We aim to become the first company to commercialize a system that enables digital sequencing at amino acid resolution and are well-positioned to see the enormous opportunity we believe this market presents for years to come. Our technology has the potential to have a profound impact on advancing general health and personalized medicine. On today's call, I will provide an overview of the progress we have made in the first half of 2021 and discuss the momentum we are building across all areas throughout the company. We continue to recruit industry-leading talent and are on pace to double the organization's size this year to over 150 employees. Our commercial momentum is building as we have started to install platinum systems at external sites. I will further expand on these areas and provide specific details on the outlook and strategy for the company. Claudia Drayton will then review our Q2 2021 financial results. We will then conclude with a question-and-answer session. Before we move on to provide specifics on our progress, outlook, and strategy, I would like to discuss why advancement in the field of proteomics is critical and why we believe our technology will drive market expansion similar to how DNA sequencing impacted genomics over the past two decades. DNA sequencing has advanced our understanding of the complex human diseases and the response to treatment at the molecular level. The scale of genomic information now available impacts the lives of nearly every single person from routine prenatal diagnostics to insights about our rare diseases, how we treat cancer, and virtually all areas of life science and medical research have vastly benefited from a greater understanding of DNA. While DNA provides a blueprint for our molecular makeup, it only provides what could happen to us. Proteins, which represent the building blocks of life, tell us what is happening right now. Our genomics platforms have delivered impactful insights through DNA sequencing. The same transformation in the scale of proteomics has lagged. Current proteomic tools and standard amino assays are powerful, but are based on legacy technologies developed decades ago. Most of these systems are too complex, too expensive, have limited application, and high-resolution biology. These constraints have hindered the ability to gain insights at the protein level for improvements in drug development and diagnostics. A deeper understanding and routine monitoring of the proteome hold the promise of early detection and insight into the recurrence of disease. This is why we expect the next area of exponential growth in life science is the field of proteomics. To put this opportunity into perspective, currently, more than 90% of FDA-approved drugs target proteins, yet less than 15% of the human proteome has an associated drug therapy. Biopharma utilizes current proteomic tools to confirm if a target or a protein is present. This is especially critical in the development efforts within immunotherapy programs. However, advanced tools are required to accelerate development and identify novel targets and pathways. Quantum-Si’s protein sequencing solution measures low abundance changes at the single molecule level. Resolution at the variant level with absolute protein quantification provides a novel tool for assessing therapeutic impact, ultimately helping drug developers and practitioners choose the best treatment for our patients. Our platform has the power to potentially transform how we diagnose and treat conditions ranging from infection to cancer, to neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Recently, there has been an emergence of numerous new technologies in the field of proteomics. We believe this is a testament to the opportunity and impact that proteomics can have on research and general health. We stand apart in this rapidly evolving market as the first company that has shipped the complete suite of tools that prepare, analyze, and interpret single molecule protein sequence information. Additionally, we believe that our streamlined benchtop platform allows for a cost of entry that nearly any lab can access, with the potential to democratize access for both the scientific and clinical community. Finally, we have developed a portfolio of 87 issued patents and approximately 500 pending patent applications that creates a very extensive intellectual property position in the proteomics and single molecule fields. DNA digital sequencing companies were able to return tremendous shareholder value over the last decade. Quantum-Si is focused on following a similar path by digitizing the analysis of proteins at unprecedented scale and resolution. This, coupled with industry advancements in semiconductor fabrication and single molecule insights, positions Quantum-Si to capture significant market share in this field, unlike any other company. We are now on the cusp of providing the scientific community with the ability to unlock novel biological information and imply advanced understanding in proteomic applications in ways not previously available. DNA sequencing rapidly scaled in system placements globally from the enhanced ability to provide insight into the treatment of cancer. These platforms have become essential in disease monitoring and clinical trial enrollment. Driven by the need to understand the complexity of a patient's immune system provides an analogous adoption opportunity for Quantum-Si for potentially impacting advancements in immunotherapy. Let's now review our top accomplishments and momentum. I would like to take a moment to highlight some of the progress we have made in the last few months. As you are aware, this past June we completed our business combination with HighCape Capital and now Quantum-Si Class A common stock and warrants trade on the NASDAQ capital market. We believe we now have the capital, with over $500 million in cash, that enables us to expand and accelerate investment into product readiness and puts us on a solid path to near-term commercialization. As previously announced, there have been numerous additions to our senior leadership and executive team, with Claudia Drayton, who joined the team as Chief Financial Officer and Lindsay Thompson as our Head of People. The company will continue to expand in 2022, as we build out the commercial organization. We have assembled a very experienced Board of Directors with the appointments of Dr. Marijn Dekkers, former CEO of Bayer AG and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Dr. Michael Mina from the Harvard School of Public Health, and Brigid Makes, who brings a decade of financial leadership experience and is Chairman of our Audit Committee. Dr. Jonathan Rothberg remains a key member of the board as Executive Chairman. We also recently announced our expansion in San Diego, where we entered a lease agreement to develop a 25,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility. The new facility will be operational in Q3 2021 and is designed to scale production, commercial, and R&D efforts. We expect this site will play a key role in expanding the company’s recruiting efforts in product and application development as we prepare for commercial readiness. As previously communicated, we intend to follow a systematic and phased approach to scale commercialization efforts heading into 2022. In the first quarter of 2021, we successfully delivered and installed our first two early access Platinum systems to key thought leaders in the proteomics and single molecule community. Building off this momentum, we have now shipped three additional early access Platinum systems, with a total of five external placements. Key sites like Northwestern University and Vlaams Institute of Biotechnologie (VIB) in Belgium are providing extremely useful feedback to the Quantum-Si product development and commercial support teams to validate the system performance and initiate study designs to demonstrate the power of single molecule protein sequencing. We remain confident about our progress towards commercial readiness and remain on track with our internal development programs and ability to scale production. We will continue to update the investment community on our progress as we expand our external instrument footprint and demonstrate performance and utility. We are very enthusiastic about the progress and momentum we are building heading into the second half of this year. As I said, we have initiated pre-commercial access by providing limited release instruments to external users. We continue to attract key talent as we build out the team and remain on track within our product development efforts. However, there’s still a lot to accomplish as we head into full commercialization efforts in 2022. We are focused on four foundational goals as we head into the second half of the year to accelerate our path to full commercialization. First, we are continuing to scale and expand the organization. These efforts are underway, and facilities in Connecticut and California will be the cornerstone of our expansion in both product development and commercial efforts. Second, we want to ensure our supply chain and product inventory are ready before the end of the year to meet 2022 revenue projections and to ensure the ability to scale production levels over the next several years. Third, we will continue to provide instrumentation and support to external sites as part of our early access program to optimize system performance and demonstrate the utility of single molecule protein sequencing. Finally, we plan to continue expanding our efforts through industry and academic collaborations, further cultivating the ecosystem around the platform. As we focus on becoming the industry leader in the single molecule protein sequencing market, we are exploring additional applications, harnessing the power of single molecule detection that will help drive the accelerated adoption of the platform. In summary, we believe we are well-capitalized and scaling all phases of the company and are executing on our commercial launch plan. Thank you for your time. I will now turn the call over to Claudia to review our financial results.

Thank you, John. I will now take you through the details of our Q2 financial performance and then end with a high-level spending outlook for the remainder of 2021. Total operating expenses in the second quarter of 2021 were $32.2 million, an increase of $24 million or 292% from $8.2 million in the second quarter of 2020. Research and development expenses for the second quarter of 2021 were $13.1 million compared to $6.6 million in the same period of 2020. The increase in R&D expense was driven primarily by increased compensation costs related to hiring additional R&D personnel, as John described earlier, and one-time expenses related to the merger with HighCape. Selling, general and administrative expenses for the second quarter of 2021 were $19.1 million compared to $1.6 million in the same period of 2020. The increase in SG&A expenses was primarily driven by transaction costs incurred to complete our SPAC business combination, increased compensation costs, and other expenses related to being a publicly traded company. Net loss for the second quarter of 2021 was $35.7 million compared to a net loss of $8.2 million during the same timeframe in 2020. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $14.6 million in the second quarter of 2021 compared to a loss of $7.5 million in the same period of 2020. Adjusted EBITDA reconciliation calculations to GAAP net loss can be found in today's press release. Moving to the balance sheet, as of June 30, 2021, cash and cash equivalents were $522 million. This balance reflects over $511 million of net cash proceeds we received upon the closing of the business combination with HighCape late last quarter. We believe the company is now well-capitalized to support the next stage of development and is in a position to invest aggressively to expand Quantum-Si's market readiness. As we go for the remainder of 2021, we expect to continue to invest in scaling the organization, advancing our technology, and preparing the organization for the commercial launch in 2022. Accordingly, we expect operational spending to continue to grow sequentially in the next few quarters. I will now turn the call back over to John for closing remarks.

Quantum-Si is now entering a phase that brings us closer to achieving the mission established by the team's founding members over eight years ago, to transform the field of single molecule proteomics. We are well down the path to enable the scientific and eventual clinical communities with commercialized tools to sequence proteins at amino acid resolution. We are excited about the opportunity to take leadership in this field and advance the understanding of how we treat disease. We are fully committed to executing the company's near-term goals and building off the momentum of the first half of the year, as we focus on executing our commercial roadmap. We will continue building a world-class team, scaling production efforts, and reporting on progress with external partners’ insights. Finally, we expect to continue to pursue new application areas to explore the power of our suite of products. I look forward to our next update and I will now turn the call over for questions.

Thanks. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on the first quarter here as a public company, and congrats on the five placements, I guess, from quarter two. And it sounds like most of those are for academic customers. But when you think about the rest of the early access program, I'm wondering where the rest of those shipments will go? Do you assume any commercial labs, things like that? And one other question about that this program, will any customers receive carbon? It sounded like platinum is going to be the main instrument. And then finally, are any of these users currently using the instrument yet? Thanks.

Hey, thanks, Kyle. Good to hear from you and look forward to catching up with you later as well. First, let me answer the middle question about carbon: So the initial placements are all platinum system analysis systems. The platinum system will begin shipping carbon in early 2022. As far as the five, you're absolutely correct. The majority of these early access systems are with key opinion leaders in the single molecule space. They tend to be technologists and that will really round out the first ten. On the next phase of additional placements, we will expand our commercial activity. There will be two paths: one, we'll still have strategic placements, which will be with groups that we develop applications with, such as translational medicine centers and clinical research centers linked to pharma. And then we'll also have a more transactional type approach where a traditional buying process will occur where a purchase order is placed, we ship an instrument, and the customer will use it according to current capabilities. Just finally, I think there was a third question there, which asked about actually utilizing the systems. I can confirm that the first two systems were installed, trained, and we've had protein sequencing data run on those systems, and we look forward to the results that we see out of the next three placements.

Okay. That was great, John. Thanks so much. And you talked about the hiring recently, and obviously that was reflected in the expenses. Can you talk about maybe how many people have been hired for the sales organization yet and maybe kind of the plans there? How are we going to go to market correctly?

Yes, absolutely. First of all, we've started building the inception of the commercial team at the end of last year, bringing on key talent, not only in marketing but also in commercialization. We're now in the process of hiring our first few dedicated sales and support individuals. We can support basically the first 50 systems with current capacity, but we're really building out into the second half of the year. The real momentum will really start to occur in the first half of next year as we build out the commercial team.

Okay. That was great. And then maybe just touching on some of the targets that were talked about in the past. I know it's tough to meet all these goals, right. But just curious about the placement targets that were set, especially for maybe the first couple of years and as well as the number of protein targets. I think a number like 50 has been thrown around in the beginning. Is there a reason you can't get to 3,000 or 7,000, something like that over time, like competitors have said?

Yes, absolutely. We'll continue to expand yield as we go forward with future versions of the chip. That's one way to expand density. Our first customers will be getting the millions of available wells to isolate single molecules and we'll be moving into the tens of millions. As far as your second part of the question regarding some of the targeted sites? I mean, take a look at this market as far as who will be adopting the technology early? We've already talked about the first ten as really controlled release, focusing on more technologists. As we go forward, we will also target pharma and dedicated translational medicine groups. Seasonal ones will really look at content. And while we work with pharma, especially in early clinical research phases, we want to understand alignment of content to both targets and markers, because those help build out future assays used in clinical testing labs. Most importantly, I would say is you've got basically a 2,000 to 3,000 customer landscape in the academic sector where this will be the first time they can sequence proteins at amino acid resolution. Look at variant frequency, as well as structural biology. So while content is hugely important to our strategy, especially down the path of working with pharma companies and immune characterizations, we have a tremendous pharma opportunity in the basic research space, where it's going to be more about unlocking biological information.

Great. Okay. That was great. And you alluded to some of the PTM analysis stuff there too, but I think you talked about in the prepared remarks something about generating data, maybe publications with some of these early users. Do you have an outstanding IP portfolio and tons of issued patents and pending patents? Could there be maybe next year or two, some papers submitted for publication or even white papers for some tangible data? I'm wondering because it would help accelerate the types of applications as well as just the awareness.

Absolutely, that's the goal. And again, when we partner with early access groups, we always talk about study designs and potential applications, and resource them accordingly. The reason we're now at five placements midway through the year, and we'll be accelerating into the back end of the year with a minimum of ten placements, is because we feel very confident in the instrument. We’re now focused on providing products; we’re focused on scaling the commercial organization. But you really hit it on the head that's one of the key areas of focus, which is to finalize the optimization of the system, but also to show real, meaningful published data that represents the application, and we'll continue down that path here for the foreseeable future.

All right. Great, John. Just one last question from me, obviously there's some supply chain issues that we're hearing about recently, and you're so early in your kind of development of the instruments and systems. So are there any semiconductor supply chain issues? Do you see that affecting your business maybe next year when you start to ramp commercially speaking?

Currently right now, Kyle, we're very confident in delivering product for the next couple of years. We're obviously very aware of the environment and monitor it closely. But we've secured strong relationships with our suppliers and feel good about, as we go into the next couple of years.

Okay. Great. Thanks. Thanks again, John. I really appreciate it.

Yes. Thank you, Kyle.

Thank you, Mikson. There are no additional questions waiting at this time. I will now turn the conference over to management for any closing remarks.

This is John Stark. Just like to thank everybody for joining the call today. If there are no more questions, we'll conclude the call.

That concludes the conference call. Enjoy the rest of your day.