Unusual Machines, Inc. Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Greetings, and welcome to Unusual Machines Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and webcast. (Operator gives instructions on how to ask questions and notes the conference is being recorded.) I will now turn the conference over to your host, Christine Petraglia, Investor Relations for Unusual Machines. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. With us today are Unusual Machines CEO, Allan Evans; and CFO, Brian Hoff. During this call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements that our expectations concerning the growth of our operations, our business and our revenues, the growth of the NDAA-compliant drone market, our anticipated gross margins, our plans to scale manufacturing capacity, including the timing and success of new production lines for motors, batteries, cameras and headsets, our ability to achieve cash flow positive operations in the future, our workforce expansion plans and future acquisitions we may make. The results expected by some or all of these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that affect our ability to achieve these results include the risks that enough of our customers receive orders under the Drone Dominance program or other government programs and in turn, place component orders with us as well as potential funding reductions, program delays or changes in procurement priorities. Our dependence on a limited number of enterprise customers and the risk of customer concentration, the risks that our inventory buildup will become obsolete or that we cannot sell such inventory at reasonable margins; our ability to manage our rapid growth, including integrating new employees and maintaining quality control; risks relating to manufacturing bugs, delays or failure to achieve anticipated production efficiencies, the availability of satisfactory labor pool to meet our planned growth potential, supply chain disruptions or component shortages, the impact from tariffs, including inflation and increased cost of goods sold, the risk that our automated production equipment may not be operational on the anticipated timeline, any risk that our auditors may require us to make changes to our financial statements and the risk factors contained in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 6, 2025, prospectus supplements filed with the SEC on September 2, 2025, July 15, 2025, and May 6, 2025, and in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, which we anticipate filing in the coming days. Factors or events that could cause our actual results to differ may emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all of them. Any forward-looking statement made by us herein speaks only as of the date on which it is made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law. And as a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Unusual Machines' website at www.unusualmachines.com. Now let me hand the call over to our CEO, Allan Evans. Please go ahead, Allan.

Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us this Monday. During this call, I will discuss our 2025 annual performance and also emphasize results specific to the fourth quarter. In the year 2025, we generated approximately $11.2 million in revenue. This is 101% year-over-year growth from 2024. Over the course of the year, we raised $157.8 million through equity financings and closed out the year with $103.3 million as part of our $157.4 million in total working capital. This is a massive balance sheet increase from the $3.7 million we had in cash at the start of 2025. The 2025 results taken in aggregate don't clearly portray the dramatic changes that occurred throughout the year. The year was a turning point for our business as we underwent the transformation from an online retail store to become a drone components producer and enterprise sales business. This can clearly be seen in the quarterly percentage of our revenue that was attributed to our enterprise segment. It was 31% in quarter 1, 48% in quarter 2, 57% in quarter 3 and 81% in quarter 4. Hardware companies like ours that rapidly scale operations often see revenues follow operational scaling by a quarter or so. Our growth shift started in the third quarter when we went from 19 employees to 38 employees across the quarter. At the same time, we also began to expand our footprint from the 6,900 square feet to the 62,500 square feet that we had at the end of 2025. The fourth quarter financial results are representative of the start of this growth process because the growth process started in the third quarter, and I would like to cover them in more detail. The fourth quarter was our seventh consecutive quarter with record revenues, and it is not even close. We generated approximately $4.9 million in the fourth quarter, which represents quarterly sequential growth of 133%. While growing, we were also able to sustain gross margins of approximately 36%, which did exceed our internal expectations for the quarter. We continue to scale operations in the quarter, growing from 38 employees to 81 employees at the end of 2025, and we started production of our motors at some scale at our motor factory in November. We expect this operational growth from quarter 4 to be evident in the 10-Q we filed at the end of the first quarter of 2026. Even now, we are continuing to scale as quickly as we can to meet demand and are already over 140 total employees. Our IPO was only two years ago, and we went public with the plan to transform into a leader for onshoring the production of drone components. In a relatively short period of time, we have managed to undergo that transformation, and we are absolutely in the early phases of rapid growth. This success would not be possible without the work our entire team puts in. As we continue to grow, we now have a few older and many, many newer employees. Everyone is working hard and bringing incredible energy and ideas to all of the challenges we face. I am confident that we can handle the growth because I am confident in everyone I work with. So I want to say thank you to everyone working at Unusual Machines. I will now hand this off to our CFO, Brian Hoff, to cover our financial results in detail. And once he finishes, I will go into much more detail on what this looks like going forward. With that, I am handing the call to our CFO, Brian Hoff.

Thank you, Allan. Thank you to everyone for joining our call this morning. I know you've heard it from Allan, but it's the absolute truth. 2025 was a transformational year for Unusual Machines. We started the year with the goal of bringing drone component manufacturing to the United States. And by the end of the year, not only have we accomplished this, but we did this with such dramatic pace and scale that's required for the industry. And this is starting to show in our financial results, as we will discuss, but a quick note. As we mentioned in our shareholder letter issued this morning, the numbers in our presentation are unaudited and subject to change. We expect our audits to be completed in the next few days. Revenue was $4.9 million for the fourth quarter, which is approximately 133% growth quarter-over-quarter, and fiscal year-end 2025 revenue was $11.2 million, which was a 101% year-over-year increase. This is the start of us realizing that operational scale and transformation that's driven by the shift from retail to enterprise customers, as Allan highlighted. And again, it's based on our enterprise mix starting around 30% in Q1 to over 80% in Q4 and really driven by our manufacturing coming online. And again, just to start. Gross margin has increased from 24% in the first quarter to 36% in the fourth quarter and 35% for the full fiscal year 2025. Our margins continually improve as our mix has also shifted from retail to enterprise. That being said, we do expect to see some margin fluctuation and decline in future quarters based on certain product mixes as we continue to scale up manufacturing, invest in growth, add team members and make our processes more efficient. Once our automated motor line is installed in the second half of this year, we expect to see operating efficiencies and the ability to increase our delivery of drone components to customers. Our operating expenses increased from $18.5 million for 2024 to $29 million for 2025, all of which are choices to enable us for this growth and, more importantly, even more growth in the future, and this increase is in line with our expectation. The largest increase in there is non-cash stock compensation expense, which was $15.6 million during 2025. We also increased our headcount from 15 at the beginning of the year to 81 by the end of the year, expanded our systems, increased our investor relations outreach, and made many other investments for enabling us for the future. We added additional facilities, which includes our motor factory, fulfillment center, headset factory. And I'd also just like to reference you to our GAAP Q4 net loss and our non-GAAP operating loss in Table 2 of our shareholder letter to provide more detail. In regards to other income and expense, we had interest income of $0.8 million and combined realized and unrealized gains for the year of $1.8 million and combined realized and unrealized gains for short-term investments of approximately $4.1 million during 2025. Shifting to our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is strong and is a reflection of our continued investment in growth and the momentum that we have heading into 2026. Our primary three items that we look at are cash, inventory and our investment portfolio. We ended the year with $103 million in cash and that included three different capital raises that netted approximately $157 million in cash. Our inventory, including prepaid inventory, is over $15 million at the end of the year, and we are continuing to make purchases to be in a position to help provide needs in the drone supply chain. As part of our strategic plan to develop strong and strategic partnerships within the industry, we made strategic investments in drone companies that we expect will drive additional liquidity. These three assets combined with no debt are setting us up for additional success, growth and scale for 2026. As Allan said, thank you to the entire Unusual Machines team. Everybody is working very hard. Strong growth as we couldn't do without them, and we look forward to making this a great place to work. Also, thank you to all of our shareholders and partners. Allan?

Thanks, Brian. 2026 is going to be a year of rapid growth for the U.S. drone ecosystem. We believe we are extremely well positioned as one of the supply chain leaders for components for small drones. As Brian said, we have the capital to execute and the responsibility to demonstrate to our customers and shareholders that we can manage rapid growth. I'm about to go into more detail, but want everyone to note that my following comments are forward-looking and they are in no way guaranteed. Let's start by talking about demand. In general, right now, we view the current drone marketplace as being supply-constrained. We see demand outstripping supply this year and deep into 2027. This perception, this idea is the assumption that allows us to procure material, build capacity and otherwise invest in growth more aggressively than we traditionally would. For example, if we order extra material now, we see the constant increase in demand over the next 24 months as consuming any excess that we have and making it reasonably safe from a business perspective to be so aggressive that we could even overbuild in the short term. This supply and demand imbalance and it's dramatic is created by two factors. First, legislative and regulatory actions have removed foreign competition from the market and domestic capacity is nascent. Second, the recent success of drones in international conflicts like Ukraine has resulted in the Department of Defense driving demand for drones and a domestic supply chain capable of supporting the expected burst drone demand required in a potential wartime scenario. The legislation is walling off the garden and the Department of Defense is providing the influx of capital to quickly mature domestic solutions. There are several legislative actions that all layer in to enable domestic producers to succeed in the U.S. market while making it more difficult for competitors that are overseas to sell into the market. This has been true for the drone companies themselves for a few years with legislation like the American Security Drone Act, but this has recently extended to components providers with legislation in 2025. There were some smaller examples of government action that highlight how quickly this market wall has erected. In early 2025, T-MOTOR, a major Chinese supplier, was added to the entity list and banned from selling in the U.S. And then across 2025, there were tariffs on imported goods that increased the relative cost of our foreign competitors' products relative to our domestically produced goods. But the most substantial government action was the FCC ban on new licenses for all foreign-made drones and drone parts that went into effect in late December of 2025. The impact of this legislation on our business cannot be overstated. The U.S. drone market for small drones is about $10 billion in revenue annually. That represents somewhere between a $3 billion and $5 billion total addressable market for parts if the drone market stays flat. And it will all have to be made in the United States going forward or get a waiver from the FCC. This FCC action was unexpected, and it creates a huge marketplace vacuum in both the consumer and enterprise segments to go along with the demand we're seeing from the military segment of the industry. To repeat, we believe the FCC actions have created at least a $3 billion nondefense components marketplace that will require domestic solutions within the next three to five years and massively expand the total addressable market we can go after. The second government push that is driving demand is the injection from the Department of Defense. The DoD has recently initiated several programs to buy different types of small drones, including short-range reconnaissance, SRR, purpose-built attritable systems, PBAS, and most recently and most publicly, the Drone Dominance program. The Drone Dominance program is a very public example of how the Department of Defense is trying to drive scaling of the drone companies and the supply chain. They have communicated the entire procurement process publicly on their website. They plan on buying 90,000 low-cost drones in 2026 and 250,000 drones in 2027. This program alone represents about a $90 million component opportunity for us this year in 2026 and roughly a $250 million component opportunity in 2027. While the environment is set and demand is there, it really doesn't matter unless Unusual Machines is able to see and sell into that demand. As of right now, we have about $12 million in outstanding purchase orders that we are working to fulfill. About $9 million of those purchase orders are for programs that are not Drone Dominance. The first set of 11 winners for Drone Dominance were just announced on Friday. So I expect our sales team is probably reaching out, and we would see additional orders from them hopefully soon. For the record, more than half of the announced winners of Drone Dominance are already customers of ours in some form or fashion. This early demand for our parts from the marketplace gives us a high level of confidence that we can capture a significant percentage of the total demand and total demand growth as long as we deliver quality parts on time for our customers. Given this overwhelming environment of demand, we have started to scale as fast as possible to provide as many products as we can. In very late December, you see some of that on our balance sheet. And in early January, we placed over $15 million worth of raw materials so that we could receive elements from our supply chain to build motors and other products. We have scaled from 81 employees at the end of 2025 to over 140 employees today. We have started a second and third shift at our motor factory, and we're currently producing about 15,000 motors a month, while that number is regularly increasing as we generate efficiencies. We've also started a second shift at our flexible production facility where we kit and do other things to help our customers more effectively manufacture their drones. In addition to scaling our current products, we are working on introducing new products to capture more of the total component market. Some people might call that wallet share. In January, we produced our first U.S.-made Fat Shark headsets, and we are very quickly scaling to be able to manufacture 100 headsets per shift per day, and we expect to hit that run rate sometime in April. We are working on setting up battery pack production, which we expect to be online in the second half of 2026, as well as installing a very high-volume automated motor production line in the second half of 2026 that should get us to well over 100,000 motors a month. Finally, we anticipate manufacturing cameras in the United States by the end of 2026. Our explicit goal is to scale production so that we could meet the entire demand for every part that we sell from every company that would get orders in the second phase of Drone Dominance. And we expect that to occur in September of 2026, and we want to be ready. That second tranche requires drone companies to use domestic supply chains or at least NDAA-compliant supply chains and represents a major opportunity for our parts to get designed into their products. This is not mandatory for delivery of drones in this first phase, but it is for the second. We want to be available to all those companies to be a supplier and deliver on time even if every single one of them requires parts from us. We have enough money to do all of this. We finished 2025 with about $157 million in net working capital and over $100 million in cash. Our growth is not resource constrained, and we are doing a very good job of actively generating revenue as we scale. Our financial position is strong enough that we can consider potential acquisitions if the right opportunity presents itself without having to compromise our growth plans. We do view acquisitions as a meaningful way to go faster, and we would use the template that we used when we acquired Rotor Lab. We see the acquisition plus the build-out in conjunction accelerated our motor production by six to 12 months and has allowed us to scale faster. To summarize, 2025 tells the tale of our transformation. The fourth quarter demonstrates tangible outcomes from scaling we started in the third quarter. We are well capitalized, continuing to grow, and we believe that there is overwhelming demand for components that we make for the next two years. Unusual Machines is at the forefront of the domestic components market, and the market is undergoing rapid growth. Our business is capitalized and extremely healthy. We are continuing to grow as fast as we possibly can, and I believe we will capture a significant portion of this rapidly expanding market. I am so confident that our team can meet this demand. I want to say thank you again to our entire staff and all of our shareholders and our great customers. And with that, I would like to open up the call to questions.

(Operator gives instructions on how to ask questions.) Our first question is coming from Austin Bohlig with Needham & Company.

Congrats on the solid quarter. First question was just around kind of the backlog number. So I think you guys said it's around $12 million. Is that the right way to think about total backlog?

Yes, Austin. So my whole team is cringing, Austin. Thank you for the question because I don't like the word backlog. It implies we're not delivering on time. But that is the outstanding volume that we're working toward delivering to, and we're still hitting delivery schedules. So $12 million is what we have purchase orders for right now, and then we have forecasts further out from customers.

Got you. Got you. And then congrats on the high exposure to Drone Dominance tranche 1. Could you maybe walk through with these customers how much content per drone you guys are working with? Are they buying the whole portfolio of content? Is it primarily motors? Would just love to get a sense of how you're exposed for this first tranche.

Yes. So very few customers across all of the entrants have placed full Drone Dominance orders yet. So that's being discussed this week now that they've found out that they've won. So our blend could be anywhere from one part for a customer all the way through a large chunk of them. But even over the weekend, we had some of these customers asking about other parts we offer. So I don't know what the mix is. I trust Stacy and our whole revenue side of the house; we'll do whatever we can to serve as much of their needs as possible.

And then just kind of last question, a sense of how we should be thinking about the ramp throughout the year. Should we be modeling sequential revenue growth throughout 2026?

We're still scaling as quickly as we can. What I would say is there could be hiccups. Supply chains could be tough; for instance, there's currently a challenge getting barometers. And as demand for Drone Dominance, I think, sucks up a lot of parts, we have to get further in front of it. But I would expect sequential growth over the course of the year with maybe some supply chain acquisition challenges if demand continues to outstrip supply. So the goal is sequential growth. Our procurement team is in front of it, but you have to be material complete to make a part. And if you're waiting on one component, there could be a delay that could cause revenues to slide one way or another.

Our next question is coming from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group.

Congrats on the strong year. Can you touch on the investment needed for the automated motor production line? And do you expect it to be kind of tuned and yielding at its expectation this year? Or is that kind of a 2027 event?

So the CapEx has already been made and is already accounted for on our books. We're targeting having it in-house right now in July. It's a little bit uncertain. At the same time, the major cost you'll see is the material component. If you're going to run 100,000 motors a month, you have to procure the material for that six months ahead of time. So you'll see inventories match the requirement for that, probably two to three months out, and then it will turn on slowly. We really expect to see it running a reasonable scale by quarter 4; if we're faster and get it done in quarter 3, that would be great. You'll see the added cost as us scaling inventory. But since we're already moving toward 20,000 to 30,000 motors a month, you'll just see that carried as inventories and prepaid inventories probably at the end of Q2.

Got it. Okay. And then you mentioned outperforming your internal expectations for gross margin in the quarter. Can you maybe give us some thoughts on how that trends as you make the additional investments and expand into — I think you mentioned battery pack production sometime this year. So where does gross margin trend?

Sure. I'll explain why, just so everybody can be aware of how gross margins work. When you scale operations, you don't really start to see revenue until a quarter delayed. You don't really see the gross margin impact until even a quarter after that. In many ways, gross margin because the people doing the work are in gross margin, but it doesn't show up in the financials until the product is shipped. For instance, as we had people and we're building motors in November, we shipped many fewer motors that we made in November versus what we would in January. When you start new processes and new people, they're not as efficient as they become with training and expertise and new processes. So I would expect whenever we turn something on like the motor factory, the biggest impact to gross margins will be a quarter delayed, so you'd expect those in quarter 1 and then recovery from that as efficiencies and processes and scale come in. We thought we'd see more of a dip from the rapid scaling, but the employees that came on were more productive and learned quickly and our team did a good job of keeping the dip lower. But I would still expect our weakest gross margins as we go through this to be somewhere in the quarter 1, quarter 2 time frame as we've just brought on so many new people and created so many new processes that the natural impact to COGS will be in those quarters.

Very helpful. Final question for me. Maybe you could touch on what the competitive environment in components looks like today. You've kind of been going at this for a few quarters now, and I'm curious if anybody is kind of following a similar playbook or starting to catch up in components.

There are several other small private companies out there doing different types of parts. In addition, some of our customers choose to do their own parts. For electronics and PCBs, there's a really great supply chain in the U.S. For everything else, there is no one doing higher volumes than us. Because we think this is a supply-constrained market, it's mostly about us growing as fast as we can without worrying excessively about competitors because there is this much larger demand where we collectively can't fulfill it all. Everybody can go as fast as they can to secure market share. I do think there are a lot of other companies trying to enter some of these segments in the U.S. If you looked at who some of our competitors were last year on the retail side, you'd look and say Lumenier for good FPV. Many of them set up NDAA-compliant but foreign supply chains, and the FCC ruling was a big surprise for that. We've been very aggressive about onshoring production and still are. I think in many categories right now, we're the largest producer.

Our next question is coming from Jonathan Siegmann with Stifel.

Great color on how supply constrained the market is. I appreciate that. Just with your capacity being so valuable in this environment, can you talk a little bit about how you allocate your resources to customers? How do you choose winners in this dynamic marketplace?

Jonathan, I appreciate it. A lot of people ask why we don't increase our prices, so I'd like to start there. We're trying to build relationships in a pricing model that's sustainable and we try really hard not to pick winners. We try to work with as many people as possible. That's where I'll use my statements about Drone Dominance as an example. We are building capacity to build components for every single winner of Phase 2. Will we be able to supply every single winner? Will they all want to buy our parts? Probably not, but I hope they do. We'll talk to and work with the 30 potential companies when Drone Dominance only selects 10, and then we'll have capacity to supply 10, and we won't be forced to make companies that may not have won that program take components. We think by building to match the end customer demand, we're in a better position to shift material streams from us to the customers based on how effectively they compete. That's really what we're trying to do: meet the entire U.S. components demand so that none of our customers have a dependency on any specific individual program.

Our next question is coming from Barry Sine with Litchfield Hills Research.

I want to ask about the B2B sales pipeline coming up for 2026 and a couple of parts to the question with a lot of numbers. How many B2B customers have you shipped to over the last year? How many are in that $12 million backlog? And looking ahead, what does the process look like? I know Stacy was promoted to Chief Revenue Officer. What does her team look like? I assume with the Drone Dominance announcement, it's all hands on deck right now to get those orders. If you can give us a little visibility that would help us looking out over the next year.

I think the number of customers we've sold to depends on how far down the line you want to slice it. We've sold to hundreds of enterprise customers at small scale for R&D and some of that even through our retail channel. At large scale, it's constantly shifting with some of these programs, but we don't have single customer concentration. I'm not positive where the exact blend is today. Where we see Stacy's team continuing to drive this is not so much new customer outreach but being sure all the customers we have are satisfied. I believe in the last year, our sales team has done a really good job of driving awareness and getting small numbers of parts and being designed in for most of the drone companies that we think have any ability to scale and even some that are smaller. Now it's really relationship management and starting to look more past what they need today to what they need tomorrow. We don't aim to service 200 customers long term; we think the market will consolidate to maybe 50 customers. We want to be sure those 50 customers have a great experience working with us and get what they need.

Maybe a little visibility on what Stacy's team looks like? How many folks are underneath her now? How many in sales, how many customer service? What does that team look like?

There are five or six people right now doing the combination of sales and customer service, really more relationship management. We're actively looking for more account managers. The nice thing is it doesn't need to be a huge team because we don't have to go door-to-door, and they're doing a great job.

If I could shift gears, I know it's no longer the focus, but on the retail part of the business, are you still looking to grow that business? How important is it? I know you added a new person in charge of that. I'm actually seeing Rotor Riot TV commercials now. What's the strategy for the retail business?

The strategy is to use it as a sales funnel and provide parts out there. The goal is to keep it healthy. We don't expect significant growth there; we expect it to move with the marketplace. But it acts as an amazing sales funnel. A lot of our customers will go and buy motors off of there for R&D, knowing that they can buy them at scale when they go to production. From that perspective, we think it's an important part of our sales process. It minimizes the need for people to ship small orders all the time. Our hope is to see it continue where it's at with some growth and energy, but right now, it is not the priority of our business.

Our next question is coming from Josh Sullivan with JonesTrading.

With the start of Operation Epic Fury, Allan, what have been your observations relating to Unusual Machines and future warfare and how you're positioned? I get mostly larger systems at this point. But if you look at lessons learned so far, curious what your observations are.

I'll start and say that conflicts tend to accelerate technology adoption, and in this case I think Ukraine is still the largest driver of what has caused people to look at drone component supplies. When you look at Epic Fury and Drone Dominance, the Department of Defense realizes not just that drones are going to matter, but counter-drone capabilities are also going to matter and that they have to understand both sides. I think they'll procure a range of drones to test counter-drone systems and to understand what adversaries may use against us. You're seeing the solidification of the next paradigm of how conflicts will be operated with robots and particularly aerial robots.

And then a question on the funding side or your customers' funding side. What are customers seeing on contract adjudications — has the environment picked up? Is funding getting out to them?

I don't track many of them too hard. Most of them are large enough that they make money and they pay their bills on time. I haven't had people say, 'We can't pay you for components because we're waiting on payment,' which we'd be fine with. So I assume they're getting paid. We don't dive too deep into it beyond that.

In the shareholder letter for '25, you painted a picture of two halves for '25. How would you characterize '26, particularly as you scale here to capture this big demand environment?

I'll use an analogy. '25 was fuel in the rocket. In mid-25, we lit the fuse. Like any rocket taking off, it starts really slow and begins to lift off the pad. I think '26 is going to look like the next part of the launch.

As we have no further questions in the queue at this time, I'd like to hand the call back over to Mr. Evans for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate your time this morning. Please reach out if you have additional questions. And again, I'd like to say thank you to the entire team for making all this possible. I hope you all have a great morning. Bye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.