Welcome to the BrainChip Virtual Investor Roadshow. Following the formal presentation, there will be a Q&A session for investors and analysts. Participants can ask both text and live audio questions during today's call. To ask a text question, select the Messaging tab, type your question in the box towards the top of the screen, and hit the Send button. To ask a live audio question, press the Request to Speak button at the top of the broadcast window. The broadcast will be replaced by the Audio Questions interface. Press Join Queue and, if prompted, select Allow in the pop-up to grant access to your microphone. If you have any issues asking a question via the web, a backup phone line is available. Dial-in details can be found on the Request to Speak page or on the Home tab under Asking Audio Questions.
Text questions can be submitted at any time, and the audio queue is now open. I will now hand over to Sean Hehir, BrainChip CEO.
Thanks, Josh. Hello, everybody. It's good to be here. Let me begin by thanking all of our attendees and shareholders not only for attending today but their ongoing support of BrainChip. The format for today is I've got about 20-25 minutes of prepared content, and then I'll open up for Q&A. The goal here is, of course, to share as much information with everybody on this call, so the more questions, the better. I encourage you, if you haven't submitted a question, to please think of a question so I can answer it in the second half of this call. But before we begin with the presentation, I've got two important pieces of business that I want to cover first. The first one is I want to welcome to the broadcast with me, the newest member of the leadership team here at BrainChip, Dr.
Tony Lewis. As you all know, this company was founded with the vision and hard work of Peter van der Made. When Peter talked to me last year about his planned retirement and I began my search, I was looking for a candidate with very specific credentials, one with the academic background not only in AI and engineering but neuromorphic technologies. I was looking for a leader with very relevant industry experience. Additionally, I was looking for somebody with the right team orientation, somebody that had a background of bringing products to work and a maniacal customer focus, all the things we work with here at BrainChip. I could not be more pleased when I found Tony. With that, I want to welcome Tony. I'm going to ask him to answer a couple of key questions.
First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself, Tony, and why you decided to join BrainChip?
Okay. Yeah, thanks for that question, Sean. Well, I think my entire career has been leading up to this position as CTO at this company. I have a Ph.D. in brain-inspired computing and robotics, and you can think of robotics as the ultimate IoT device. I've led multiple large research groups at universities and industry. I ran my own research company in neuromorphic and robotics, and it was funded by the U.S. government and industrial partners. I've had experience across a wide variety of industries, and this makes me more sensitive to the needs of people not just in one particular market but in many markets. So I've had experience in defense space, biomedical, environmental monitoring, mobile phones, and personal computers. In particular, at Qualcomm, I was in charge of the largest research project outside of wireless in corporate R&D, and we were focused on brain-inspired computing.
This was about over 10 years ago, but deep learning at the time was just taking off. I could see that this was going to be big, and it was going to be something that was really going to take the role by storm. So I shifted the focus of this brain-inspired research group to deep learning. Right now, Qualcomm is really enjoying a lot of the benefits of deep learning on their devices. At that time, I also developed an interest in language models and modeling language, and I thought this was going to really start to take off. That was around 2017 or so, just at the invention of transformers. I moved to HP, where I was global head of the AI and Emerging Compute Lab in the office of the CTO.
And so we're looking at AI and compute paradigms and how we could exploit them to improve our products. But interestingly, working for the CTO, it's the perfect place to get training to be a CTO. So I got to see a behind-the-scenes look at the longest-lasting tech company and its great management practices. And what I have noticed across my work is that I do my best work when I'm working with a close-knit team. We're working hand in glove. We can complete each other's sentences. And also, I have the support of a great boss. And I think that I have those things here at BrainChip. And so I really think that all the necessary things are in place for me to really excel. Now, you asked me why did I join BrainChip, and it was sort of the obvious thing to do.
If you look at the macro environment for artificial intelligence, we're really in the golden age of AI. We've never seen such an explosion in AI that really seems to be sticking. Now, cloud processing, I feel, is just the first act. Right now, though, it's proving to be massively expensive. It's using too much energy. It's simply not green. And if you care about green, it's either the environment or in how much it costs for energy. It's not going to have a good impact. Latencies are always going to be large. You're never going to be able to handle real-time traffic. The internet itself was never meant to handle real-time traffic. And so your only choice, if you want to act fast, you want to save energy and save money, is to move to the edge. And that's firmly where BrainChip plays.
Now, the challenge, of course, it's not a perfect market. There is some market fragmentation. And so BrainChip could be in a good place to benefit from this. So we have highly customizable IP that can serve many different markets. And so we have one platform that can be exploited in many different ways. Also, I should mention that it's not just the macro environment. It's the particular people at BrainChip that attracted me. So I very much enjoyed talking to Peter before he retired. And I think we saw eye to eye on a surprisingly high number of items. That was really exciting, in particular, our long-term perspective on AI. And we both agreed that brain-like computing is the future, and we needed to incorporate more aspects of the brain into our computers. I met Anil, and I think he took a very pragmatic approach.
So it's not just we're going to import everything we know about the brain, but we're going to import particular things that we know are going to improve how modern machines work. Then, of course, there's Sean. So he was a great salesman. He was very transparent about what BrainChip was all about, and I found that very refreshing. Now, a very important aspect that attracted me was the capital structure. Most things involving hardware take a long time, and a lot of venture capitalists just are not engineered to have patience to fund hardware startups. So they don't make good long-term investors. But I believe the public market can be patient as we figure out this brand new market and how we can take a leadership role in it. So that's about it.
It just seemed to make a lot of sense for me to join BrainChip, and I'm pretty happy to be here.
Great. Great. Well, welcome to BrainChip. And all of you attending this will have a chance to ask Tony and myself some questions on the end. So with that, let's advance the slides, please, Josh. Please take a moment to read our forward-looking statements. And advance again, please. So the second piece of information or activity I wanted to cover before getting into the meat of the presentation was CES. A lot of presubmitted questions on CES, so I thought I would address it right up front. CES was a very important event in the history of BrainChip. It's the first time we ever were there as an exhibitor. We've attended in the past with one or two people as attendees to gather intelligence and interact with people. But this time, we did it right. We had a suite, a booth, manned by sales engineers, marketing.
We had demos in there from ourselves and our partners. We had a large number of prospective customers come in and have intense conversations with us. We had industry analysts come in and get educated on our offering, which is really important for them to spread the word of BrainChip. And then, of course, that very important ecosystem work that I speak a lot about with further advances. We had many ecosystem partners existing and potential new ones that have conversations with us there. And then we had amazing podcasts that came out of there. If you haven't listened to them yet, I would encourage you to do so. In those podcasts, you'll hear thought leaders in the industry talk not only about the AI edge, but they also talk about BrainChip and what they think about us. So please listen to them.
On the social media front, you can see some of the views on there. It was a tremendous impact and a great event for BrainChip and getting our awareness out. That's a critical part of our story, is getting the story out in these kind of events. We can talk more about it in the Q&A, but let's begin the presentation. Next slide, please. BrainChip, we're leading the generational shift to edge AI. Real-time AI inference needs edge compute. The cloud is no longer the only environment for AI. But just like the cloud, the cloud needed special hardware to run AI well, and so doesn't the edge. That's exactly what BrainChip does. We create intellectual property for companies that want to create a custom piece of silicon or a chip to run AI exceptionally well for their environment. That's what we do.
We augment that with some hardware offerings, which I'll talk about a little bit later, but it's that IP offering to help people build those unique pieces of silicon to support the edge movement. A couple of things I want to share before we go into our strategy. We believe that we're the first, and we know we're the first neuromorphic company to commercialize that. We have a robust and flexible IP business model. We have a growing ecosystem of partnerships with commercial momentum. I'll talk a lot about that later on, the commercial momentum. We have a world-class team and a world-class board, not only the executive team, but the entire company. I'll talk a lot about the people we have in this company as we get further into the presentation.
And then, of course, we have a very strong patent portfolio, which is critical to success when you're in the IP business model. Next slide, please. All this is to begin with beliefs. I think it's very, very critical to have those beliefs in place when you go in. One is what we know is true. AI will be the great next economic driver of this decade and future decades going on. Just like agriculture was, industrial was, actually, the internet was, AI is that driver right now. We can spend hours just talking about that, but it's undeniable, that trend. Equally undeniable is the movement towards the edge right now. With the edge movement, it's absolutely critical. That's an undeniable trend that workloads will happen outside the data center. That market is highly fragmented. Over time, like all markets, a leader will emerge.
We plan to be that leader or one of the two leaders in that market. We also believe a novel approach would prevail. Doing a me-too product is never a winning strategy. We have breakthrough technology and a novel approach that I mentioned earlier with the word neuromorphic. I'll talk about that in a bit and why that matters and why it fits so well for the edge. Our strategy is to enable the entire edge. When I talk about competitors here in a moment, I'll contrast it to those that really only focus on a little segment. We can do everything outside the data center. Also, when you have breakthrough technology, you really need to hit that fine balance, which is you want the breakthrough technology to happen, but you want to have it where very rich customer experience so it's easy to adopt.
I'll talk about our efforts to make things that are easy to evaluate, easy to implement, easy to emulate. Of course, in an industry where talent matters, hire the best talent. AI is all about the best talent. I spend a tremendous amount of energy personally in the company that's about hiring the best talent. BrainChip does have the best talent in this industry. I'll put it up against any company. Neuromorphic matters. That's that unique approach. The principles about neuromorphic, which really emulate the brain, the brain is the most efficient computational engine out there. Things that efficiency matter and performance matter, particularly outside the data center where battery life matters, and you don't have network connectivity. A little bit about our execution model. I mentioned Peter on the front end, and now Tony.
We have a very rich research organization, which drives a lot of our core technology. We marry that with a robust product management group, which takes in feedback from the customer constant interactions we have, the analyst reports that we have, the analyst interactions, the marketing. We mirror that into a robust product management group or, excuse me, product development plan. We have the best engineers in the industry creating our product. Next slide, please. A very brief introduction. I will walk through this not in a detail level, but at a high level on the next slide. But I really want to focus your attention onto the right-hand side of this page and talk about the platform. BrainChip has a broad platform to enable the edge, not just a small component of it.
When you read the words over there, the integrated, powerful solution that allows immediate data analytics and decision-making on the device with efficiency, reduced latency, ensuring privacy. That's exactly what our platform does, that middle paragraph on the right. Next slide, please. Let me call out some key elements of that platform that our customers value. Extensive model support. People only buy or build hardware is to support the models to do the task with what they want to do and their end product. And then it's very, very important that you support a wide variety of models. And you can see just some of those right now. BrainChip supports a very wide set of models and use cases in there. It's absolutely critical to have the ease of the software to allow you to evaluate, emulate, and implement. Again, I mentioned it earlier.
When you have breakthrough technology, you don't want to make it challenging and difficult for your customers. You want to make it easy for them to take that journey with you. And in our case, I think it's very important, too, to have hardware. And there's some questions that come up later in the Q&A about hardware. We absolutely have taken our chips, our IP, the silicon, to prove it works. And we know it works. We have two working reference chips. We actually have hardware platforms where people can use and develop and try. And we now, for the first time, have commercial-grade products out there with the edge boxes through our system integration partners. More about that edge box and a set of edge boxes later on.
Of course, all that comes down with a very flexible IP model that can address the smallest use cases in a single node or, quite frankly, even smaller, up to 256 nodes, allow you to address the large broadness of the edge market outside the data center. Next slide, please. So at the simplest level, the five pillars of our efforts. We participate in high-growth markets, and I'll talk about those markets. We have a competitive advantage that we plan to keep and extend. We have a robust and flexible business model, which I'll walk us through in a moment. Strong leadership and culture, which is core to the success of this company. And of course, we work incredibly closely with our ecosystem partners. Next slide, please. So we could spend the entire hour just talking about markets here.
But I'm going to just summarize these in two simple slides. You can see on the left-hand side a roll-up of a set of data from such credible sources as McKinsey and Forbes, 100 billion IoT devices, all of which need some degree of smarts and getting smarter every single year, smarter being AI inference outside the data center. $100 trillion of revenue in that AI/IoT market, very large market. And then, of course, the CAGR rate is growing very quickly. And part of that is absolute numbers from new devices and part of its workload shifting out of the data center at the same time. But I really like this chart on the right-hand side from Gartner. If you're not familiar with Gartner, Gartner is the premier analyst for enterprise companies around the world that talks about technology trends. This is a report that they put out in 2023.
In there, they have some really important elements in there. In the right-hand side, if you can't see it, it's critical enablers and productivity range in the bottom right-hand side. You see the two core things about BrainChip technology-wise, neuromorphic computing and edge AI, they say are critical enablers for the whole marketplace coming out. You've got a large addressable market, and you've got the characteristics of BrainChip on the right to talk about how well we're positioned to attack that opportunity on the left. Next slide, please. I won't walk through the numbers here, but I'm going to use the slides to just illustrate some of the use cases that we're engaged with today. We're engaged with customers and prospects in all of these four verticals and several others as well.
So with industrial, we're absolutely engaged with prospects around predictive maintenance and security right now, very applicable for Edge AI market. Automotive, the in-cabin experience, and of course, ECU control, edge case users that we're engaged with as well. The home consumer security, lots of interest in our product for security. Health and wellness, absolutely a perfect fit, particularly when devices that you wear are put in your ear and they have a very limited battery life. A very power-sensitive offering, like a neuromorphic offering like BrainChip, is critical for that. So we're engaged across all these sectors right now. Next slide, please. So like all new markets, people and enterprises usually try traditional approaches that exist. Of course, there are technologies that you could run in this to run Edge AI applications out there. But the cloud doesn't work well. You have latency in there.
You have security issues in there. You have cost issues associated with it. You could use traditional mini-servers in there with CPUs, but that's not the most efficient way to do it. It's certainly going to be very power-intensive. You need to have a power outlet to have it work. You could certainly use MCUs. But of course, you're going to get performance things, something that's not built for that, which has created this demand for a whole new class, just like it did in the data center, for things on the edge around neural accelerators. And these are a set of devices in there that are highly designed for that, to make machine learning workloads work optimally, very power-efficient and compute-efficient, low latency, very small footprint. That's where BrainChip participates in that part. Next slide, please.
Let me give you a very brief overview in our short amount of time we have here. If you look at the way this chart, what's important to take away from this is that no competitor other than BrainChip has all five of those elements in there. It's important that you certainly know you could find ones that do very low power at times. You certainly can have some IP ones that are configurable like us, but they don't have both the power and the configurability. But on-chip learning, which is something our prospects value deeply, is unique to BrainChip. And that means basically the ability to do something in the field once a chip is created without going back and having to train it again. The ability to work standalone, meaning the ability to have the models run distinctly on the hardware device, offloading the CPU in total.
Then, of course, minimal data movement. In a design like BrainChip, where we have our memory and our computer elements very close to each other, that minimal data movement, of course, helps in any latency concerns and power. These are the attributes that we plan carefully when we build our product. These are the attributes that our customers and prospects value. This is where we stack against the competition of these other neural accelerators. Next slide, please. Let's take a look at the neuromorphic elements of our competition. You may have heard about IBM and Intel. In this case, those products are not commercially available. They're research offerings. Of course, BrainChip is a commercial venture. But more importantly, is the things where we differentiate ourselves, of course, around the on-chip learning, which is distinct versus our competitors.
Perhaps from a more important practical point of view, the supporting of standard workloads. If you're selling technology to deploy in a field to do that, you want to train your new engineers or engineers on new technology. You want to make it simple. BrainChip supports standard machine learning workflows such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, which virtually the entire industry develops models on. Those are the things that make us unique against our neuromorphic competitors. Next slide, please. To recap on the competitor front, we think it's important. We know it's important to have advantages on two fronts, on the product and on the company. On the product side is the compelling performance, extreme efficiency, and talking about power, some unique features like on-chip learning, and to support the broad set of models that we do.
At the company level, I hinted about it, and I'll talk a little bit further as we go through it. This customer focus, the ease to evaluate BrainChip, the ease to emulate, simulate, the ease to implement, that incredible focus we have on customer satisfaction. The intense innovation cycle started by Peter and carried by Tony now. That will carry us forth because we know the market will not stand still, and we will continue and invest and drive hard in our innovation cycle. Today and tomorrow's model support, the industry doesn't stand still. BrainChip is designed to support not only the models of today, but the models for tomorrow, including native spiking neural networks, which are perfect for neuromorphic technology, and the industry will head there in time. And then, of course, strong IP protections, which are critical in the IP market. Those are our competitive advantages.
Next slide, please. So let's take a little bit and get away from the technology in the market, and let's talk a little bit about the business model. So we have a robust and flexible IP business model that's on the left-hand box of that slide. And for the first time in 2024, you're going to see us do some things in these other two boxes. You may have read about some of our work with the edge boxes as system integrators, and I'll talk about that. And then something I'm calling additional packaging, some work we do with customers on demand. All these things will add to our revenue model and help us advance our technology roadmap. Next slide, please.
The IP business model where we put the predominant amount of our energy and resources is characterized by a business model where we charge a large upfront fee, licensing fee, for somebody who wants to build a custom chip to get access to our intellectual property to run their neural networks on there. Once those chips are made, the chips will ship, and we collect an annuity in the form of a royalty, whether that's a percentage or a hard dollar from all the chips for the life of that product. That's the way to think of this company. I think what's really important from a business point of view is that agility as well.
When I talk about the competitors back two or three slides ago, if you're in a chip form factor and you get the chip factor wrong, maybe the wrong number of nodes, the wrong interfaces, whatever that happens to be, you're in trouble. BrainChip, because we're predominantly an IP company, we listen to our customers, and we can make modifications and rerelease different versions of our IP over time. That's a distinct advantage in the IP business model and very important in markets that are still forming and normalizing. Next slide, please. I mentioned just a moment ago, for the first time in 2024, and you can see it on our website, you're now seeing commercially-grade edge boxes. Those boxes are being developed with our system integrator partners. To be clear, we are not going to build boxes. We will work with our system integrator partners.
And those partners are seeing strong demand for those workloads. They came to request because they see the attributes of our product and saying it's ideal for their edge boxes, and are working closely with us to develop those boxes and get them out to market. So it's a wonderful opportunity for us in a lot of ways. And it can also stimulate more demand for IP as people see the workloads out there. And of course, it does provide us with an additional revenue stream and explore potential new business models. Next slide, please. What I call additional packaging. In this case, as we engage with world-class companies and thought leaders in the industry, we're often asked to do some certain things for them. Would we do something further than provide our intellectual property? And we are starting to say yes to them.
What you can expect us to do is some things that are going to be radically different or far from our core charter. We want to keep our resources focused on our core neuromorphic technology. We will build out some pieces of pre or post-processing around our accelerator and work with these partners over time. More on that later in the year. This is a very early concept for us, but it could certainly get some traction and open up new markets for BrainChip. Next slide, please. I've got just a few more slides to bring us home, and I'm really looking forward to taking some questions here along with Tony in a moment. Let me bring it back to a really important point, strong leadership and culture. Look at the bottom. Look at those logos.
Those are world-class companies, not only in terms of compute, but artificial intelligence, which is really, really important, big companies, small companies. That represents our leadership team. But I'm even more proud of the rest of BrainChip and all the team members I get to work with every single day around the world. 80% of our headcount is engineers, which really should make a statement to all of our investors about the quality of people we have in this company. 50% of them are PhDs from leading AI research programs. We have a wonderful workforce. And more importantly, is the culture here at BrainChip. We are maniacally focused on a couple of key things, which is our innovation culture, which is we're going to continue to do breakthrough innovation. We have a very strong teamwork thing. You heard Tony talk about the value of teamwork and where he excels.
That's exactly where BrainChip excels in teamwork. And then, of course, that maniacal customer focus that I personally bring that we want to do in all of our products and all of our engagements. That's the kind of workforce we have here at BrainChip. Next slide. You can't do this alone. And I could spend all day talking about this as well. But obviously, we have some licensees out there that we work closely with, early adopters that we continue to work with. Our partnerships, we put tremendous energy, and I'm very proud of the progress we made in there. And some of you may have saw, I'm going to call it one logo I'm looking at on the screen right now, Intel Foundry Services. Intel launched their foundry business last week. I was personally there.
I was very proud when I saw the BrainChip logo up on this very important stage at a very important event. That's the power of ecosystems, the partnerships, to work closely with a leader with Intel is a great example, not only for brand recognition, but for our potential licensees to feel comfortable with the portability of what we do, and it can be transportable to any foundry service in the world. And of course, our university program, which we're very proud of as well. This is not all, but it's some of our universities that we're part of. And it provides a lot of great things for our company. Obviously, we get to use their minds and bounce off some ideas. We had 15 interns in here last year as a result of our university program.
Of course, it's a great opportunity to screen people and then hire them into BrainChip. It's just a wonderful set of industry leaders who we work with every single day. Next slide, please. Let's go ahead and bring this to a close and get to some questions, please. BrainChip is leading the generational shift to edge AI. Hopefully, you've heard my comments that talk about that shift is real and that we are participating in incredibly large markets and incredibly high-growth markets. The competitive advantages we have today are very real, and we plan to keep and extend those advantages. That's a core tenet of our strategy. A flexible and robust IP business model, I think, is very, very important in a market that's still shaping and growing right now. Of course, strong leadership and culture I just spoke of.
Without the people, this company would be nothing. We have the very best people, and we will continue to hire them. Then, of course, working as a team with all of our partners. With that, I want to bring it to a close, and I look forward to taking some questions. Of course, I will ask Tony to join me on some of the Q&A. Josh, where are we at?
Thanks, Sean. If you have not yet submitted your text question or joined the live audio queue, please do so now. For live audio questions, I will introduce each caller by name and ask you to go ahead. You will then hear a beep indicating your microphone is live. Our first question today comes from Emil B., who is a private investor. Emil says, "That was a great introduction.
The observation that neuromorphic/edge computing landscape is very fragmented resonates with me. Could you please bring additional focus on this and highlight the key competitors/competing technology trends in the business from the BrainChip's perspective? What carries most traction? How do customers deal with the risk of investing their capital into solutions that will not gather sufficient traction? What is the competitive threat of NVIDIA moving into the computing edge space where BrainChip is?"
Wow, that's a lot of questions wrapped into one. So I'll try to certainly get it all in there. The state of the Edge AI market is exactly what it should be like, all markets. When opportunity comes, it brings interest. And if you remember, there's even existing solutions that are not, I'm just going to say, a poor fit for that market. And so it's exactly where it needs to be in the early parts. What makes it unique for a neuromorphic company like us is that we have the attributes that the market desires, which is very low power and very high performance. And also what I mentioned around that business model, which is allowing people to be flexible in that. That's what gives us confidence in winning in this market in here. And Tony made some opening comments in here too around hardware.
Hardware is something that is a long game. And it certainly is a long business cycle that we are participating in. But the rewards are very high in the long run in here. So we plan to view that standard as we come out, or one of those standards as we come out in the backend. The risk about, I'm not going to talk about individual competitors. That wouldn't be appropriate at that particular point. But there's always risk that anybody could come in this market. My personal belief, of course, NVIDIA, we have a great degree of respect for, seems highly focused more on the data center than the edge at this particular point. But we're highly confident that our competitive advantage in terms of neuromorphic stacks up very well.
Thanks, Sean. Our next question has come from a number of shareholders. They've asked if you could provide some commentary on how Akida 2.0 differs from AKD1000.
Sure. First of all, let me maybe rephrase that a little bit with the question because the Akida 1000 is a chip, right? And when you call Akida 2.0, we should talk about generation 1 and generation 2 of our IP. And I'll make some comments, and I'll maybe ask Tony to make a comment or two. So if you heard my comments at the last AGM, when I came here and we looked at the product, it is, and it is, and it still is a very good product. It's just limited in its use case, meaning it could not hit the broad set of use cases in the industry that we needed to do in terms to build a lot of engagements.
So with generation 2, at its simplest level and non-technical way, we now can address a much larger set of use cases in the industry, some of the ones I talked about when I talked about the four verticals, which were not possible before. The other vector where generation 2 is different from generation 1 is we got feedback from customers, and this is a good thing, and prospects with good companies do, that while we are a breakthrough in performance, it was too challenging to adopt at times. So we only supported 4-bit in that. Customers wanted to have 8-bit, so we now support 8-bit and 4 and 2 and 1. People wanted to make sure we had PyTorch support. We've added that support. They wanted things such as long-range skip connections, which we have added as well.
Two really important differences, the ability to address a broader set of use cases, that's one. Then, of course, making it more aligned and easier to consume with the rest of the industry. Tony, anything you want to add to that?
Right. I think that's a good summary. There were customer-driven requests, more support for a broader range of models, of course, higher performance per area. Those are all great things that customers want. There's also some stuff that we did that was leading in a way. In particular, we have support for our technology, which is called TENN. And that's a way of handling sequences of data. That could be audio data. It could be data from vibration sensors. It could one day even be data from language models. And so we're able to support that on-chip, and I believe we're the only company that can do that. And that shows our commitment to leading the market as well as listening to our customers. I think this is a really exciting module that we're putting into Akida 2.0. Sean?
Great. Thank you.
Thanks. Our next question comes from Eric Yang, who is a private investor. "Hi there. Thanks for the opportunity to raise a question. Is the Akida still involved in the Mercedes EQ vehicles and the revenue estimation if the answer is yes?"
I think it was Eric was his name. Eric, we're not allowed to comment on any customer engagement at all. Obviously, when a customer like Mercedes announced what they did, that's their choice. But we're not allowed to comment on the progress on that. And in fact, it's something that our prospects and customers greatly value is their confidentiality. They view technology and AI as their unique competitor differentiator. So we are not allowed to comment on the progress of any individual customer or prospect we're working with.
Thanks, Sean. Another question that's come from a number of attendees today. "Please, can you provide some comments on what you saw at CES 2024 conference in Las Vegas and describe some of the key themes emerging around AI at the edge?"
Yeah. I'll start. And again, I'll ask Tony to join me. He was there with me, actually. So it was great. In my opening comments, I said a lot of it, which is it was unbelievable. You could not find a single booth virtually in all of CES that didn't have the words artificial intelligence with it. And this is why I made my opening comments that AI is proliferating across all industries globally. This was the year of AI at CES. Equally prevalent was that shift towards edge AI. So there was tons of use cases that even I couldn't envision besides the normal wearables, the things like that. We saw things such as pillows. Tony and I went to a very fascinating, huge display by AARP and many smaller companies in AARP with lots of individual edgy use cases going on.
So the trend was undeniable that people want to do inference outside the data center. And that was a very clear signal. Auto companies, there was a pavilion in autos who walked through the autos. It was fascinating, all the zone capabilities and use cases that were showing up. Tony, what would you add to that?
Yeah. I think riding on the comment about the AARP, that's an association here in the U.S., which concentrates on older people and their needs. And so what's interesting there is there's a lot of use cases for AI. If you want something that's going to be an elder person's home, you don't want something which is essentially going to take your data and then send to the cloud, who knows where. You want something that's going to be able to serve you, but it's going to maintain your privacy. And that's where Edge AI is going to have a really big win. We did see AI everywhere. And I think that AI has become a sexy term. In my opinion, it's an aspiration everyone is trying to get to, but it's hard to get there.
Part of our business model is that we do a lot of handholding, and we're able to help people realize their inventions. I think that's going to put us in a good spot when we start to create more pool for IP. But it's not a conference I would recommend going to because it's just crowded with every possible consumer device known to mankind or humankind. Like Sean says, everything is AI. Maybe we're going to be able to really help people realize this in tangible ways in the future. Sean?
Great. Thanks, Tony.
Our next question is from Jesse Chapman, who is a private investor. "What is Sean's thoughts about the surge in BrainChip's share price and what that says about our upside potential?"
Sure. So Jesse, I think you know me well. The energy that I focus on is the execution of this company. Obviously, none of us are happy when the stock price went down, and we are happier that it went up, for sure. But my focus is entirely on the execution of this company, which is creating the very best products and running the very best sales organization and best engagements that we can possibly can. The stock will take care of itself if we do our job here. And that's where I really focus my energy on. I'm often asked the second part of that question about the value of the company, which I'm sure will come, so I might as well talk about it now, is I believe this company has a lot more value to unlock in terms of market cap.
We have a very large addressable market, and we have a very applicable, compelling solution in here. If we do the job we're supposed to do here in terms of keeping our technology focused and selling really hard, I believe there's absolutely more opportunity here.
Our next question comes from Isaac Town, who is another private investor. "The IP licenses held by MegaChips and Renesas allow end users to purchase BrainChip products without having to release announcements to the ASX. Does this mean it is unlikely we will sign additional IP agreements, and thus shareholders need to wait for revenue updates to determine material progress?"
No, that's simply not the case. In fact, hopefully, my presentation made that a little clearer. It is the primary focus for our sales organization is to sign new licensees. I'm looking at it as a compound question. So absolutely, it is a primary focus of this organization to go sign more licensees, to get more chips, and create more products for the market. There's plenty of room for licensees in this market, plenty of room for us to participate. Relative to revenue updates, of course, the right way to look at that would be through our normal filings and announcements.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jesse Chapman. "In the 2022 annual report announced 12 months ago, it was stated that Renesas was taping out with the Akida for IoT and edge devices and would be available 2023. How is that coming along?"
Well, similar to my comment earlier, we are simply not allowed to talk about the business of our licensees or our prospects whatsoever. It's something that our licensees and prospects not only expect, but they're requiring of us. I just can't comment on the progress of their work right now.
Our next question is from Roger Manning, who asks, "Given BrainChip's business model is to largely sell its Akida IP, will it be necessary to prove each new version of Akida in silicon?"
I'll let Tony start with that one, and I'll add to it at the end. Tony, why don't you take that one first, please?
Yeah. So I think the big question was, will this event-based paradigm going to be done, and will it yield some benefits to customers? And I think we achieved that by taping out our earlier generation of products. And so we've already achieved that. And it's my belief that there's only marginal benefit in taping out the next generation. We've already proved the main points of it. And clearly, we don't want to start to manufacture chips on a large scale. We'd be competing with our customers, and that would really break our business model right now, so.
Yeah. And to be clear, a lot of work has gone on with our ability to simulate workloads in generation two as well. As Tony said, we certainly have reference chips in generation one. And the typical engagement, of course, that we work with IP license prospects is we allow them to run models on there and/or simulate them in our simulation tools that we have for generation two. So Roger, I would say stay tuned. We may or may not. But right now, there's no need for us to do that.
Our next question's from Tony Cooper, who asks, "What are the milestones BrainChip is aiming to achieve this year and then within three years?"
Yeah. So we certainly have milestones within the company, and the board of directors has approved those milestones. And as you can imagine, those milestones are across all the vectors of any particular business. We certainly expect a higher revenue trajectory and higher bookings this year. And we certainly have milestones around development needs, around particular dates, feature functions, things like that. There's also milestones about making things even better in this company relative to understanding our competition, our formal benchmarking programs, and things like that. We don't share those outside the company, but yes, we have a set of benchmarks that we work very robustly on that the whole company is judged upon and that the board of directors has approved.
Our next question comes from Nirav Patel. "Is the company looking for a capital raise?"
Can you repeat the question? I'm sorry. I may have misheard that, Josh.
Yeah, no problem. It's from Nirav Patel, who asks, "Is the company looking for a capital raise?
Okay. Sorry about that. I thought I heard something the opposite. As we announced earlier this year, we signed our third addendum with LDA. We certainly will fulfill those obligations as outlined. I think it was in early January we put those out. We have sufficient cash now. That certainly will allow us to operate fine. Having said that, we are always looking opportunistically if something is there, but we're not actively out looking for any capital raise per se, like you're asking.
Thanks, Sean. Next, we have Mark Clark, who says, "What is the likelihood of Akida technology being used in any product moving forward?
Well, I think it's quite high, actually. That is the entire goal, right, is to have it in product going forward.
Our next question comes from Simon Killier. "Good morning. Is there a timeframe around when Akida 2.0 will be taped out, and what foundry will be used for the process? And also, are you able to provide any details about Akida 3.0, for example, timeframe on when it's released and how it will differentiate between Akida 1, 1.5, and 2? Thanks again, and keep up the great work.
Thank you. I think we talked about the potential for another piece of silicon just a moment ago, so I will just not go there right now since we already answered that question. But around generation three, if you will, I mentioned early in my slide deck when I talked about our product planning and our execution cycle, if you will. You can see we are always planning on this product, and we are always looking for improvements on our IP offering right there. Now, whether we call it formally generation 3 or 2-something X, but yes, we're in the middle of a planning cycle right now to make some changes, and we will make announcements over time.
Our next question comes from Miles Dozhanovsky. "Hi, Sean. On page seven, you show BrainChip silicon IP now addressing the entire edge market. Can you identify a use case where 100+ nodes are required?"
Sure. I could, but I think, again, in the interest of sharing some airtime and giving my voice a rest, let's have Tony to answer that one.
Yeah. So I guess the first thing is you can never anticipate how much power can be useful on the edge. You're always going to want things that are more intelligent, whether you're adding features to automobiles, you're making smarter drones. You can never get enough. Once people have an appetite for AI, they can never get enough of it. And having a very large number of nodes on a piece of silicon doesn't preclude us from sticking to the edge model. We can also maybe one day look at data center applications where we're just concerned with inference, not with training. That's not what we do. But we would be able to offer much lower costs in terms of energy, which translates into far lower operational costs. So there's possibilities. So I would look at the 200 nodes as an interesting possibility, and we should open up exciting doors.
Our next question comes from Boo Hicks. "Does MegaChips have access to the second-generation IP under the current license agreement?"
Similar to other questions, I really cannot answer any specifics about the terms of an engagement with any licensee or prospect.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sandra Briar. "After the annual report, when will we stop relying on LDA for cash?" We know you'll be positive, Sean. You need to be in this role. However, we want hard facts, information, no more fluff and hiding. She continues, "No more hiding behind all these NDAs. There must be some info, even crumbs, that can be shared as the relationship progresses. Do you think our NDAs will come out from under the cloak of darkness?"
There were some comments in there and questions. So I'm looking at the questions over here so I can make sure I get the actual question in there. Well, let's take the NDA question first. The NDA is a critical part of a trusted relationship in a business. So that's not a matter of hiding under a cloak of darkness whatsoever. It's a normal course of business between two companies, particularly for those who view AI as a competitive weapon in their marketplace. So it's an essential part of the way we have to do business. So it's certainly not hiding in a cloak of darkness. It's an essential way and, quite frankly, would put us at a disadvantage if we broke that confidence and trust that our prospects have put in front of us in there. Around LDA, again, I mentioned that earlier.
We announced, I think, on January 2nd or 3rd of this year, we will fulfill those obligations as stated in our agreement. We're not going to comment on any particular future plans with them whatsoever, but we have plans to do that throughout the end of 2024, which is our commitment.
Our next question comes from Peter Sillon, who is after the Nasdaq listing timeline.
Peter, obviously, no decision has been made about listing at all, changing at all. We are an ASX-listed company. That's how we operate. I'm neither confirming or denying any conversations would happen at all. But right now, we're an ASX-listed company, and I'm focused, as I said earlier, on running this company to create great product and sales, not really focused on listings.
Our next question is from Mee Fives. "Has BrainChip been contacted in regards to a buyout or large investment? If so, what was your response? And what are the BOD's various thoughts moving forward, i.e., sell at a price, partner with a large company, list on Nasdaq if all things dictate? Other thoughts. Where do you see BrainChip in five years, 10 years?
Sure. So there was a lot of questions in there. My obligation, if approached with any of those options, is to bring it to the board for consideration. And I can't comment if we were or were not on that. Obviously, that's very confidential information. But of course, any offer that comes into this company, I'm going to bring it for the board for consideration in there. I'm looking at the question over here to the side, including any partnerships and things like that. "Where do I see BrainChip in five or 10 years?" Hopefully, my comments were clear. My focus is operating this company and building the best product, getting as many engagements, and building a large ongoing operation. That's the vision. This is not something that we're thinking short-term. We're thinking about building this company on a really solid foundation for the long term.
Our next question comes from Lance Lupton. "Hi, Sean. Last year, in your interview with the ASX investor, you made a statement that BrainChip intends to be one, two, or three in leaders in the AI market. Can you say at what level of confidence you have that this can still be achieved? And more importantly, what exactly gives you this confidence?"
Yeah. Sure. So I think part of its market dynamics and part of its BrainChip dynamics again, markets start. I think if you look at any industry, they start when there's a large need in there and you have many entrants. But over time, the normal state of any market consolidates down. What gives me confidence that we're going to be a leader in that market in the long run is all the things I just shared. There's attributes in the edge market that we fit perfectly for. In the edge market, you have got to do things with exceptionally low power, and that's exactly what our neuromorphic-based technology does. Also, the ability to get incredibly high performance in a small footprint or area on that piece of silicon, that's exactly what we do. The ability to do some things in the field once chips are made with on-chip learning.
So we have the attributes to do that. I also believe the fact that, again, that I said earlier, that we have an IP-flexible business model serves us well in a market that's still forming and settling down. If you get wrong in a chip form factor as your primary business model, you're going to miss the market. So it's all of those things that gives me confidence that we're in this for the long run. And quite frankly, too, it's the reaction I get every single day from the analysts and ecosystem partners and prospects. I know we are in a much better position than our competition.
Thanks, Sean. And just a notice that we have two minutes remaining. Your next question comes from Greg Shea. "How many chips were/are available for the EdgeBox release? Any comments on how the working relationship between Anil and Tony is progressing? Sean mentioned that 2024 is a critical year for BrainChip. What catalysts do the team need to achieve in 2024 to allow shareholders to feel comfortable in their continued investment?" There are two further questions, but I might just hold on those for a second.
Yeah, yeah. With only two minutes, that's a lot, and I want to have some comments. So a couple of things. Of course, Anil and Tony, two great technical leaders in the company. I mentioned when I hired Tony, one of the key things was his orientation toward teamwork. And of course, Anil is the same. So that relationship is going very, very well. And I would expect nothing less. And of course, the two of them have to drive the technology of this company. Relative to the chip supply, I think was the question on the EdgeBox. We have adequate for the projections that we have this year. Of course, we have a supply arrangement if we need more, but we're totally comfortable that we have in there. Around 2024, I'm looking for the question, "Why do I think it's critical?" I think it's absolutely critical.
If you look at 2023 and what we did last year, it was a lot of focus on that second-generation product and a lot of energy into building a large salesforce that we did not have in place and maturing our marketing lessons. That's a lot of things to take advantage of the market opportunity. We're now in a position to do it. So my personal expectations and the board's expectations is better execution on that commercial front.
Thanks, Sean. That is the last question we have time for, so I'll hand it back to you.
Great. Thanks, Josh. So let me bring it to a close. First of all, I want to thank all the attendees and shareholders for not only attending today but their continued support of BrainChip. And let me bring it back with a couple of comments about this. Hopefully, you heard from the dialogue between Tony and myself about a few key things. It's undeniable that AI is proliferating across all industries globally at this time. It's also equally undeniable that there's a movement towards workloads outside the data center, towards this thing we call edge computing, edge AI. That's an undeniable trend that's shaping and forming and growing every single day.
BrainChip has the right offering for that for the reasons I talked about earlier in some of the Q&A, the attributes of the core product around power efficiency and performance and our strong design that allow us to be flexible and scalable from the very smallest to the very high end. Also equally important, the ease of adoption and evaluation of our product. You put that together, these are really important things. I talked about the team. I'll put this team against any team in the industry. We have hired the best. We will continue to hire the best. We will nurture with the best. Then lastly, I would simply say the level of engagements this company is in right now are broader and deeper and more mature than they ever have in their life excuse me, in the history of this company.
These are the factors that make me highly confident in the future of this company. Thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to talking to many of you in the near future. Have a great day.