Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Pia Turcinov. I'm one of the non-executive directors of BrainChip, and on behalf of all of us at the company, I'd like to begin today by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of country on which the Sydney CBD stands and where we are hosting this meeting today. We pay our respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, acknowledging their ongoing culture and continued connection to the waterways, skies, and land, and celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal peoples and the contributions they make to the life of this region. We extend this respect to the traditional custodians of the various lands from which our virtual attendees are dialing in, and to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today and participating in this meeting. Welcome all.
Thank you, Pia. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, depending upon where people are. To everyone attending here in Sydney or virtually, welcome to the 2024 annual general meeting of BrainChip Holdings. For those of you I haven't had the privilege of meeting yet, my name is Antonio Viana. I am the Chair of the company. This is my third AGM. It's obviously my distinct privilege to serve as Chairman, and I thank everyone for the opportunity for being Chair of this great company. I look forward to both a productive and an informative AGM. A lot has happened this past year with respect to BrainChip. The board and the employees of BrainChip are quite excited and optimistic with respect to the work done this past year and where we have positioned ourselves in the market.
Lots on that to come in the time ahead. Please let me take a moment to make some introductions. Here in the venue at Sydney, off to my right is Sean Hehir, the CEO of BrainChip. Dr. Tony Lewis, our newly appointed CTO. Geoff Carrick, non-executive director, chair of the Audit and Governance Committee. Peter van der Made. I get to introduce him as non-executive director and the founder of the company. A little quick side note, I'm absolutely stoked Peter's here. Peter's been battling a little bit of an illness, but he is obviously charging ahead, and he's here today, and we thank him greatly for being here. Who just did our opening, Pia Turcinov, non-executive director, chair of our Rem and Nom Committee.
Tony Dawe, Director of Worldwide Investor Relations, and Errol Barkan, who is serving as our AGM moderator from Boardroom, right here to the front. Attending virtually on the platform, Zhilong Li, Non-Executive Director. She is attending from her home in Texas today. Ken Scarince, our CFO, he is attending from his home in California. Kim Larkin, our Company Secretary, she is attending from Brisbane, and also in attendance is Brad McVeigh from HLB Mann Judd, our auditors. It is my understanding that a quorum is indeed present, so with that, I'm happy to formally open the AGM. On behalf of the board and employees of BrainChip, I want to thank everyone personally for attending today, and thanks to those that are connected on the AGM online platform. As it is customary, I would like to remind everyone of our guidance with respect to forward-looking statements.
You can see that statement on the screens here in the room and online. The online AGM platform allows shareholders and proxy holders and guests to attend the meeting virtually. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting. In addition, shareholders and proxy holders have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. Regarding questions and comments, they can be submitted anytime. However, we do have a process as to how we're going to field those questions. More on that in just a bit. To ask a written question, if you're on the online AGM platform, please select the Messaging tab that's at the top of the screen, select the topic your question relates to from the drop-down list, and then type your question in the box towards the top of the page and press the arrow symbol to send.
A copy of your question, along with any written messages from our team, can be viewed by selecting My Messages. If you wish to ask your question verbally, click on the Request to Speak button at the bottom of the broadcast window. The audio interface will then display where you will be prompted to enter your name and the topic of your question. Submit your request and follow the instructions to allow access to your microphone, and you can connect to the queue. Please note that while you can submit questions or comments, we will not address them until the relevant time in the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated, or if we receive multiple questions on the same topic, we'll merge them together.
In fact, I'm going to tell you straight up, we've already done so with respect to a handful of questions that have already come in ahead of the AGM. Now, for those shareholders here in our Sydney venue, should you wish to ask a question when invited to do so, just raise your voting card that you received at the time of registration. We'll ask that you state your name and, if applicable, the shareholder that you represent, and then you can ask your question. Finally, due to time constraints, we may run out of time to answer everyone's questions. If this happens, where appropriate, we'll answer them in due course via email or posting responses on our website. Rest assured, we'll certainly give our best efforts to answer everyone's questions.
So before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I'd like to mention a couple procedural matters. For those of you here in our Sydney venue, you should have registered your attendance today. If any shareholder or proxy holder has not registered their attendance at the door with our share register Boardroom, we ask that you please do so now. Staff from Boardroom are obviously here to assist you. If you are a visitor, you're certainly welcome, but we ask that you also be registered electronically on Boardroom's meeting registration system. If you are a visitor and you've not yet registered, we ask that you please do so. And then lastly, in respect to everyone in the room, if you do have a mobile device, please make certain it is on silent. Voting.
Voting will be conducted by way of a poll on all items. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I am shortly going to be opening voting for all Resolutions. Those shareholders attending here in our Sydney venue will have received a voting card when registering your attendance, which I'll ask you to complete as we go through each Resolution proposed. Paul Cook, who is right there, Paul, has been appointed the Returning Officer, and he'll be collecting all the voting cards at the end of the meeting. For those of you online attending virtually, if you are eligible to vote, a voting tab will appear once I open voting. By selecting the voting tab, it will bring up the list of Resolutions and present you with your voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options.
Now, there's no need to hit Submit or Enter, as the vote is automatically recorded. You do, however, have the ability to change your vote online all the way up until when I declare voting closed. Once voting is closed, whatever option you have online will become locked, and that's your final vote. With all that said, I now declare voting open on all items of business. For online attendees, the voting tab will soon appear. You are welcome to submit your votes at any time, and again, rest assured, I'm gonna give clear warning before we close all voting. All right. With all the logistics out of the way, let's begin. So for the last two AGMs, I've given a presentation just prior to our CEO address.
Given what the company's been doing since the last AGM, we've decided to change the format up a little bit, and we're gonna do things a little bit differently. Today, we'll have two corporate presentations. One will be from our CEO, Sean Hehir, who's up on stage, ready to go, and from our newly appointed CTO, Dr. Tony Lewis. So with that said, I'll hand off to Sean.
Great. Thanks, Antonio. I think I better go with my glasses. All righty. Hello, and thank you for attending BrainChip's 2024 AGM. Joining me for this year's address is our Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Tony Lewis. He and I are looking forward to this session to share an update on our company, the progress we have made since our last AGM, our plans going forward, and most importantly, why I am very confident in the future of BrainChip. Let me acknowledge right up front that our revenue numbers are not there yet. The evaluation and design cycle are longer, deeper, and more complex than we anticipated as customers plan their strategic roadmaps. However, after hearing my prepared remarks, hopefully you, too, will share my conviction that we are a much stronger and better-positioned company, and share my optimism in our near-term and long-term success.
But before I dive into what we are doing at BrainChip, let me make some very brief comments about the market, which I believe is an important context. Three key trends are having significant impact, accelerating demand and growth in the edge AI market. The meteoric rise of generative AI has moved to the edge, as the cost of cloud computing for large language models, processing and data centers is inefficient and cost prohibitive. Industry-leading chip manufacturers have silicon plans that enable GenAI and LLMs on devices without a connection to the cloud. The push to the edge for LLMs is being fueled by the need for privacy, reduced latency, and to lessen the burden on data centers. All these areas where I contend BrainChip has market-leading capabilities that we will not only maintain, but extend. Secondly, applications and use cases for edge AI continue to grow.
Natural language interaction with computers, once science fiction, is becoming commonplace. Denoising and automatic speech recognition at the endpoint and device are becoming increasingly sophisticated, requiring powerful and efficient AI processing. Also, advances in medical devices enabling remarkably sophisticated detection and analysis, requiring distributed computing and new in-device semiconductor solutions. You will hear in a moment about our new neural network architecture we call temporal event-based neural networks, or TENNs, and its quantifiable impact in areas such as audio denoising and vital signs analysis, providing BrainChip with a leadership position in the edge market. I firmly believe TENNs is an immensely important innovation and critical differentiator for BrainChip. I look forward to the impact this technology will have on the edge market.
Finally, key vertical markets, including industrial for surveillance, GenAI, predictive maintenance, automotive, in-cabin ADAS, connected sensors, and general medical for predictive diagnostics, continue to push the limits of edge-first computing. In these use cases, the ability to scale up and down to exceptionally small configurations is a key requirement. Akida has a unique capability to scale down to less than a single node configuration, making it the ideal choice for this market. I know BrainChip is positioned to be the market leader to support all these trends. You will hear from Tony in a moment that we are a market-driven organization and are continuing to refine our offerings to capitalize on these trends. Now, let's take a look at the past year. I'm sure you have seen many of our announcements around new engagement, ecosystem expansions, and publications. We have announced a lot lately because there's a lot happening.
But let me share some of the critical activities that we've undertaken that are perhaps less visible, that greatly increase the commercial muscle of BrainChip. Last year, just prior to our AGM, we announced our Generation Two Akida IP platform. In my comments last year, I spoke of the importance of Generation Two platform, that has allowed us to address many more use cases and attract many more customers, and improvements that make it much easier to adopt and implement. I must stress, this was not an optional upgrade. We had to do it. We had to have it to win in this market. As I review our current sales pipeline, it is predominantly anchored on Generation Two offering. Over this past year, we spent literally thousands of engineering hours completing that platform and extending the original specification even further to make it more robust.
Improvements such as including programmable activation function to future-proof our platform for models in the coming years, and robust support for PyTorch and ONNX runtime. I want to express my sincere gratitude for all the hard work put in by the employees of BrainChip to bring this critical offer forward. I asked for a lot, and they responded. Important substantive advances were made in evolving our patented TENNs algorithm. This is a huge differentiator for BrainChip. You can expect me to direct more investments in growing this commercial interest. The impact of TENNs on many use cases, such as audio denoising, automated speech recognition, LLMs, is not to be understated. TENNs provides our customers with equal or better results, with a fraction of the operations, parameters, and power on the inference side of AI, and the ability to train on a much smaller data set on the training side.
All of these benefits equal tremendous cost savings to our prospects and customers. TENNs is a potential replacement for transformers, the foundation used by nearly every LLM today, including OpenAI's ChatGPT 2-4, Anthropic's Claude, Meta Llama, and Google LLMs. Our internal testing, compared to GPT-2, which has the same basic transformer architecture as four, we're seeing up to 5,000 less computations required and training 10-60 times faster on a comparable model. In my opinion, this is the definition of a game changer and can be the catalyst for the adoption of BrainChip technology. We're currently engaged in critical discussions with several potential key licensees based on the differentiated combination of TENNs plus our Generation Two platform. Tony will be up in a few moments and will elaborate on TENNs during his section of the meeting.
On the sales readiness front, last year I came and spoke about the geographical sales footprint we had just developed around the world. This year is all about providing our team with the capabilities needed to engage confidently and respond quickly. We have automated the ability to simulate a customer's model performance on Akida. What was once a manual process that took our company a sales engagement weeks to complete, now takes less than a minute. This sounds something that sounds simple, but required a vast amount of work and is critical to success. The ability for customers to quickly evaluate model performance on Akida is foundational to its adoption. This is something BrainChip will never be satisfied with and will undergo continuous improvements. It will require ongoing investments and improvements, something I will ensure happen.
Investments were further made in silicon design tools like Synopsys, that allow our engineers to provide precise specification for the area and speed of any process node. Again, a foundational requirement for any engagement. We have developed a formal competitive benchmark program, where we acquire competitive products, run models, and measure results against Akida, a critical step in all sales engagements. This benchmark program also continues to give us confidence, and me personally, that Akida has a material competitive advantage in critical areas such as power use per inference and compute density. We have integrated Akida runtime into several microcontroller environments, demonstrating the ease of adoption and the immediate impact on the edge AI market. There are literally billions of microcontrollers in the world, and the market potential is huge. Proactively integrating their leading environments is an absolute necessity for BrainChip to bring this technology into this space.
I'm very encouraged by our progress here. You have heard me say in the past, an industry where smart people matter a lot. BrainChip continues to attract the best talent. This is an area where I spend many important cycles of my time as we continue to make our company stronger with every single hire. Our engineering department, CTO, and sales engineering departments all made critical hires that have made them substantially deeper. BrainChip prioritizes technical talent. Over 80% of our team is engineers, and 15% are graduates from - excuse me, 15% are PhDs from leading research institutions.
At the executive level, while we recently did lose a few executive, which is to be expected in this highly competitive layer- labor market we participate in, my recruiting efforts are always focused on attracting the absolute best talent and make sure every single functional area is even stronger after that hire. This year, we saw world-class talent join BrainChip, with Dr. Tony Lewis coming as our Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Thorne taking on the role of Vice President of Sales. Seeing the quality of candidates coming across my desk now for the recently opened Chief Marketing Officer role, I have no doubt that we'll hire a world-class CMO for BrainChip very soon. These are just a sample of the initiatives that we're undertaking to make us a stronger organization, anchored on an industry-leading product portfolio.
I will come back to the podium in a moment to share our plans for 2024, but I would like to ask Tony to come up this time and go deeper on our product plans for this year and next year, as well as his long-term technology vision for BrainChip. Welcome, Tony.
Thank you, Sean. Good morning, valued investors. When Sean asked me to speak at this AGM, he specifically asked me to discuss three key topics: the uniqueness of our Generation Two Akida IP, our groundbreaking technology called TENNs, and our future technology direction, both near and far, at BrainChip. Before I get into these exciting topics, let me share a little bit about myself. I joined BrainChip with extensive experience in neuromorphic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. When BrainChip approached me, I immediately recognized the chance to be right in the middle of the next revolution in AI. That is the principal reason I joined. Over the last six months of my tenure, my belief in the future of BrainChip's technology has profoundly deepened. In the rest of the talk, I'll explain why. After examining our Akida 2.0 IP, I was impressed by its efficient digital architecture.
Akida 2.0 is designed with five key attributes. One, event-based computation, which conserves energy by computing only when necessary. Two, Akida uses near memory compute, designed to minimize unnecessary data movement. Three, Akida 2.0 performs inference independent of any application processor. These three architectural features are the key to low power performance. All of this runs in the smallest possible area, reducing manufacturing costs for our customers. And finally, we have easy model simulation, development, and deployment. TENNs. TENNs is a unique BrainChip innovation that replaces the widely popular transformer architecture used in LLMs like ChatGPT. Practically, this means TENNs networks can be built with fewer parameters and significantly reduced energy consumption, a fundamental benefit of the Akida architecture. In some cases, this reduction of energy is truly phenomenal, as we will see in a moment. TENNs is the Swiss Army knife of neural networks.
This versatile structure not only excels in denoising, but can seamlessly transition to tasks like automatic speech recognition. This technology could transform your car into a smarter companion, enhance your home security system, and even revolutionize baby monitors. The possibilities for integrating such systems into the fabric of our daily lives are nearly boundless and exciting. Today, I'm also going to discuss its role in text generation, which underpins large language models. Imagine a compact device, similar in size to a hockey puck, that combines speech recognition, LLMs, and an intelligent agent capable of controlling your home's lighting, assisting with home repairs, and much more, all without needing constant connectivity, or having to worry about privacy and security concerns, a major barrier to adaptation, particularly in industrial settings. Let's look at some of the practical application of TENNs and where we are today. TENNs versus GPT-2.
Our TENNs architecture drastically outperforms traditional models like GPT-2 in terms of efficiency. Versus GPT-2, a predecessor to GPT-4, we see an astonishing 5,000 times reduction in power. As you might know, power being used for AI systems is becoming an economic and ecological problem. TENNs may unlock the possibility of moving high-performing LLMs to the edge. Let me show you a demo. On the left is our TENNs network, completing a sentence generation task. On the right is GPT-2 network. We can generate tokens at a word rate of 1,575 per minute, while GPT-2 limps along at a mere eight words per minute. Both networks had the same access to compute ability. Audio denoising. TENNs achieves near state-of-the-art results in audio denoising, with dramatically lower energy consumption.
Remarkably, TENNs can process raw audio signals directly, eliminating the need for significant data transformations required by conventional neural networks. We can achieve excellent denoising on a standard benchmark data set, but using only one-tenth of the power. Let me show you a demo. Here, we see an example-
According to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end.
Oh, that was an audio clip with a noisy background. Here we'll hear the same clip again with noise removed.
There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end.
This kind of denoising is particularly important for use cases like low power hearing aids. Future directions. We will lower energy of computation by leveraging more aggressively ideas from the brain, like sparse computation, to achieve efficiencies that seem to be beyond the limits of physics. Neuromorphic is one of the only pathways to automatically, on-the-fly, compute only what is needed. We will also leverage advanced mathematics to help us create compute engines with unprecedented energy per calculation ratios. What that means is that we will see powerful AI models running on battery power for weeks or months at a time, something that's just not practical today. We will achieve scale with multi-chip systems to allow our customers to address the rapidly increasing needs of edge computing.
We so we can eventually reach new markets like autonomous driving, smart robots, and if TENNs proves out, data centers will be in sight. We will broaden AI model support. New network architectures are introduced literally every day. We are committed to supporting advanced architectures of high value to our customers. We will knock down any remaining barrier to Akida adaptation. We will offer zero code programming options. We envision a web programmable system that will remove the need for highly skilled engineers to use our hardware, so that anyone from a clever high schooler to a medical doctor wanting to invent, say, a pocket device to detect skin cancer, can use our system. We will double down on TENNs because the combination of TENNs and Akida will be a combination that is flat out unbeatable.
The combination gives us differentiation that simply no one else can match today, and we must flesh out use cases to allow our customers to see the future with us. I've been putting intelligence into chips for over a decade. Even when I worked at a huge cell phone chip manufacturing company, nothing has excited me more than new possibilities of TENNs plus Akida 2.0 and beyond. Nothing makes me more excited to come into work and see the components of technology coming together so quickly. BrainChip is positioned to be at the center of the next revolution in AI. Back to you, Sean.
We're instructed to follow on a very tight script when we're up here, but I certainly want to acknowledge Peter right away. You know, when Peter retired, it was-- wanted to look for the right replacement. We couldn't be more thrilled with Tony Lewis. I think he's taken our technology and take us even further. So, thank you, Tony. At this point, you have heard a brief overview of the state of the market, a recap of some of the important initiatives that we undertook this last year, and Tony just shared our technology plans. So let me bring my prepared remarks to a close in the last few minutes by sharing the core areas of focus for this year and on to the next. First and foremost, I know we need to close license sales.
We have several engagements that have been in evaluation for over one year that are near closing in on a decision. These engagements are with leading companies in audio, IoT, and microcontroller segments. We have put a tremendous amount of energy, handholding, resources into these relationships and evaluations as we lead the change from traditional architectures with big brands backing to the future of a more performant offering. It is imperative that we win more than our share. Based on direct prospect feedback, I believe we are well positioned in some of the more critical engagements. In a number of cases, we've made it through the down selection process that eliminates many competitors and only focuses on the final two or three for the final round of selection.
I have personally spent extensive time with C-level executives in these accounts, an investment in time and resources that would have not occurred if they did not consider BrainChip a strong potential strategic partner. We now have the product and the ability to excel in detailed evaluations, the team and the deal structure to win strategic and lucrative deals. Secondly, BrainChip will invest and extend our leads in TENNs offering. You heard from Tony earlier about the promise TENNs represents. BrainChip will spend the remainder of this year refining the technical and market push for TENNs. I will focus extensively on increasing our marketing efforts. This past year, we built out a marketing engine. 2024 is a year of marketing acceleration as we focus on world-class product marketing and demand gen to drive our sales funnel even deeper.
I will aggressively drive our team to complete Generation 2 roadmap product requirements for the next generation of Akida, which will focus on adaptability, programmability, usability, and continue to extend our leadership in areas such as power, area, and performance. We must continue to invest in ourselves and innovate. This is how BrainChip remains in the forefront of the industry. Along with VVDN, our partner for the Edge Box, here with me, we'll co-sell aggressively to increase the workload of Akida. We'll also judiciously explore other hardware vehicles to augment our long-term business plan of IP licensing. These hardware offerings, like the VVDN box, offer two primary purposes: They accelerate the adoption of Akida for use cases that can be deployed, and they also serve to provide additional revenue streams as we build the IP business model.
Let me bring my prepared remarks to a close, so we can take some of your questions. You can see the many advancements we have made, not only in our product offering, but in our go-to-market capabilities over this past year. You have heard about the substantial progress we have made on our key engagements and our unrelenting focus on doing everything possible to win. Tony shared his view on the unique advantages of Akida and how we will continue to enhance them to meet future AI market demands. Finally, I laid out a set of initiatives in 2024 and into 2025. All this work is supporting one simple goal: BrainChip winning business. I can assure you, I remain fully committed, and the entire company is dedicated, aligned, and working to make this one single goal happen, no matter how challenging the environment.
The board brought me on with a critical mission: to transform a promising technology into a successful product for a challenging market, while establishing a sales and marketing capabilities to drive its adoption. We are doing the right things. I know we're on the right trajectory. When I pair all these actions with the emergence of a true AI, AI market, I am more confident than ever we're on the cusp of generating sustainable revenue streams. BrainChip has the momentum in place and the potential to emerge as the undisputed leader in the exciting, continuously growing edge market. That is why you're invested in BrainChip. I and the entire board thank you.
Thank you, Sean. Thanks, Tony. So at this time, we're gonna take questions with respect to the CEO address or the CTO address. Again, I really want to stress, if your question kind of fits into that category, now is the time to ask it. However, before we open up, there were a handful of questions that have come through pertaining to more of the short-term activity, questions around short-term revenue, immediate licensing activity, that sort of thing. They're kind of all over the map, so to speak. So I thought before we get started, Sean, maybe you could make a couple kind of preemptive kind of comments around short-term opportunities.
Sure. Look forward to it. We're live? Great. Can you hear me? Good. I wanna go very slow because this is a question I know is on everybody's mind. I wanna go as slow as possible and share... Hopefully, you heard what my theme, about my confidence, and why I'm confident in the near term and the long-term future of BrainChip, and your, your- the questions around timing of deals and things like that. Okay? I put this over here that I can look at occasionally. You heard me say in my remarks and probably in a podcast or two, that the evaluation cycle is longer and more complex than we envisioned, okay? Let me go deeper here while we have the time in this room to do that, which is IP selection is a long process, generally, and that happens on traditional IP.
Now, when I say traditional, this is a more common, like, general processor IP that's known in the market. I look at the team we have at BrainChip, and I look at members of our board, including our chairman, who used to run the commercial arm, excuse me, the commercial part of Arm. He's probably done more IP deals than anybody on this Earth. It was longer than any of us anticipated, because, first of all, it's long, a traditional one. But why is this even longer? We have a new category. We're talking about neural acceleration. This was not something that was around a long time ago. For all the companies are evaluating, this is the first time they're doing it, most typically. So it's going to extend that timeline even longer to do that. So that's really important.
Secondly, if you heard my comments about brands, we're going up against big companies with big brands. We welcome that fight. We're not afraid of that fight. We're gonna win on our capabilities. We know what the evaluation criteria. But when you go against incumbents with big brands, you gotta be better, you gotta be scrappier, and we are, but that takes time, too, as we're earning our street chops, okay? So I think that's important to know. And I think the other thing that I think is really important, and I was having this conversation with a few people before the session, this decision by companies is super strategic on their part. This is not a consumer purchase. They're not buying something to consume. And it's not just an element that goes into their business as kind of enabling thing.
This is as strategic a decision a company will make, which is we're enabling their product lines for the future, and that is a very big decision on any company, okay? So it's not, it's literally their products, their revenue, and making them more competitive. All those things make the evaluation cycle go longer than we thought. I wanna make sure that's clear why. That's not an excuse, I'm sharing what's occurring. Now, let me share why I'm so optimistic, a little more than you heard some of my prepared comments in the speech. So it's just not a feeling, these are facts, okay? You heard me say a moment ago about the product. We had to have generation two to be competitive in this market. We have it now. We weren't gonna make it with generation one.
It was a good product, it proved it worked, but we needed this product to victory. I'm confident. The feedback we get from our customers and prospects is, it's the right product. It has the functionality, it's giving the performance metrics they want, so we have that. That gives me confidence. I talk about some of the changes we have done, which sound simple in a very prepared remark in terms of our sales engagement model. These are critical. When we bought some tools to squeeze the area down to make sure that our IP can fit in the smallest configuration, and Tony mentioned it, silicon is super expensive. And oftentimes, we're going maybe perhaps on a chip that's already designed. We gotta be small. We had rough ideas. Rough is not good enough. It's gotta be precise.
And by the way, we have to be iterative because they're gonna demand things, and they're gonna ask to be there. So we now have the tools to do this responsive and squeeze it down to the smallest area. That gives me confidence. People only build accelerating hardware for one purpose and one purpose only, to run models better. What was taking us a long time to simulate models to see the performance, not acceptable. We have now automated that process. And now when a customer says: How fast can my model, what's it gonna take? Can we do this? We can do it in a few minutes. That gives me confidence. And so those are tools, but let me talk a little bit about the customers themselves, because I think that's even more important.
When I joined, a lot of the conversations we had with customers were like, interesting technology, let's try to find a use case. That's not what we engage with in BrainChip at all. The engagements we start with is a company that has a defined chip and a defined tape-out date, doing a formal evaluation. We'll engage with those. Sure, we'll do some business development, but the ones I talk about potentially winning have defined dates by major companies with defined criteria, radically different profile. So that gives me confidence. I made the comment in my speech about down selection. We often go into this and with a list of eight or nine competitors. We've made the down select to two or three competitors in the final rounds on many engagements that we're in right now. That gives me tremendous confidence.
If we were getting dismissed, I would say, we have a problem with our product. I would say, we have a problem with our sales, but we're not getting dismissed. We're making the down select. That gives me confidence. I made some comments in the speech that I was personally am spending time with C-level executives in major companies. These are companies that have revenues measured in $ billions, multiple $ billions or hundreds of $ millions. They would not spend two minutes with me if they were to not thinking we were a serious contender for their strategic business. All these things give me confidence. I know the dates that they're projected to make their decision. Do those dates move? Absolutely. All strategic decisions move. They move a little bit, they move a lot, but they're moving, but we have dates.
That's why I have confidence, all those things that were happening. We know dates. They're not just science projects. Decisions were made, and we think we're well-positioned. Can I guarantee a win on every one of them? Absolutely not. But I think you, you listen to my words and listen to them carefully, I think you would hopefully share the same confidence I have on wins coming here in the, in the perceivable future here. Okay? Hopefully, that was clear.
Good. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate those opening comments. So we are, let's see, let's start with questions that we're getting on the online platform. So, Errol, what do we have on the online platform within the CEO, CTO address? There we go. There we go. I think we got it now.
Has BrainChip Management put on hold technology development for now on revenue?
I'm gonna have you ask.
I'll repeat it.
There we go.
Am I live? Errol, am I live here?
Yeah.
The question was: Has BrainChip Management put on hold technology development while we focus on revenue? Correct?
Yes.
Okay.
Correct.
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I would say, again, if you look at... You've got to do all of these things to be right. We're in a market-
Hey, Sean, I'm gonna have you stop for just a second. Sorry, I hate to interrupt you, but he is not live.
Try again.
I'm just, I see people in the back waving, so that's why.
Okay.
Try again.
So the question... Is it live now? No.
Okay, well, Sean, why don't you come over here while we figure it out?
Yeah. Okay.
Come onto this side.
So the question was: Has BrainChip management put on hold any technology development to focus on revenue? And the answer is absolutely not. There's no, there's no question. You-- If you hear my comments, we're doubling down our pace of innovation. This is a market that will not stand still, and it's, it's something that we're gonna continually to innovate. We have the right product right now, but if the market's not gonna stand still, we wanna win the deals we have now. We wanna win the potential deals in future years. So we absolutely have to do both, for sure. So innovation is the lifeblood of this company. We're gonna continue to do it.
Thank you. A question for Sean. With patents currently submitted for review and to be hopefully granted by patent offices around the world, how many patents have been granted to BRN in the last twelve months since the last AGM? Also, are all new patents or updates to patents announced to investors? And if not, why? Also, with current patents submitted to be granted, how many have there been any key issues with approval of any patents submitted?
Tony, do you wanna take it? Yeah. Well, I'm gonna let Pat... You, you come up and take it. Sorry, Pat.
Sorry.
Tony's in charge of our patent activity, so I thought, you know, Tony could come up and address it.
I, I don't have the exact number of patents granted since the last AGM, but it's like, you know, 3, 4, something like that. But don't hold me to it. What was the second part of the question? Do we have any-
Any issues? Well, do we announce all patents, new patents and updates on patents?
Yeah. So we're pretty consistent about giving updates. Now, there's sometimes, you know, you'll have a patent in, say, Australia or United States, and then you'll have another patent worldwide, and maybe some of those patents, which are essentially the same IP, are not necessarily announced, but typically, we announce everything. We're very proud of the work we're doing, so we have no reason not to.
I have another question for you, sir. In the example Tony provided, TENN's performance is compared to GPT-2, which was released over four years ago in 2019. How does Ten stack up against current state-of-the-art, e.g. GPT-4? Do you see us fitting in with other products being released with generative AI on devices such as the new Windows Copilot laptops?
Yeah. So this is, So we're trying to build, a device that's gonna run on, on something like the size of a hockey puck, but it's gonna be battery-powered, so it's not plugged into the wall, so it has to be very low power. And so the size of these networks are not gonna be GPT-4 size. They're gonna be much smaller, and they're gonna be able to do simple tasks. So you know, we're, we're not gonna be competing with OpenAI or, you know, anything like that. What we're doing right now is, yeah, we're, we're comparing ourselves against GPT-2 because we have models that are approximately the same size in terms of number of parameters as GPT-2, so that's why we made that comparison. We are scaling up.
We're making our models larger and larger, and as we do so, we're going to compare ourselves against other models of comparable size. But this is a process that's, you know, it takes time. It takes a lot of compute energy to scale up. But, you know, we're not gonna stop at two, but we're not gonna get all the way to GPT-4.
I have two more questions for you. Mm-hmm. How is the current competition for silicon impacting future estimates of timelines to manufacture at scale?
That's really... You know, we're an IP company, so, you know, I can't answer on the, maybe- Yeah. I can't answer on behalf of our customers, so.
Okay. With the Akida power consumption benefits, is there a use case to add Akida to data center architecture?
Oh, I have a smile on my face. I'd love to say that, but, as I said, we need to prove out, our, our TENNs because we feel that that's our, our real competitive advantage. We have to see that we can scale up, but it, it would be wonderful if we could do that.
I'll have one more. If TENNs is so good, can you give me the number of customer engagements requiring TENNs application?
Requiring?
Requiring.
Well, so TENNs is a competitor against existing neural networks. And so people, you know, I'm not—I don't... I wanna say that our customers have a view of the world that is pre-TENNs. They have to be introduced to the technology, and they're being introduced in a staged manner. We're going out, we're talking about TENNs, we're publishing papers, we're getting people familiarized. I believe that once they're familiarized with TENNs, they're gonna see that we can use it for all sorts of things. So we're proving out how we can use it for, you know, audio denoising, as you saw there, but also ASR is on our agenda, processing biomedical samples, that's on our agenda, and also these large language models.
We're proving out what we can do with TENNs, and once we have those proof points, we can go to customers and say, "Hey, guys, this is gonna be. You should go with TENNs because it's gonna be a lot more power efficient than what you're using right now. It's gonna be good for you. Eat your vegetables and, you know, learn about, you know, our technology.
I don't have any other questions for you, Dr. Lewis.
Great.
... I'm gonna make a comment or two before the next question comes. A couple of themes that came out. If you heard in my speech, we're, we were gonna put more resources in patents, so more, more development to his point about more, more work coming in the future. The other thing about patents, I would say, and again, Tony's in charge of this, we're absolutely focused on innovation and filing patents and driving that, the pace of innovation up in the company.
Any other questions on the online platform before we move to the Sydney venue? Before I move to the floor here in Sydney, any other questions off the platform?
I have questions on Renesas and MegaChips.
Okay.
We're combining two here. After all the talk about Renesas and MegaChips bringing our products by the end of 2023, what happened to that? What is a realistic timeframe to start seeing revenue from Renesas and MegaChips?
You know, you've heard me comment in the past. Is obviously that's their business. We can't comment on the future plans for their time.
If we can't get a demonstration retail product out there with a partner, will the company consider making its own, perhaps with an Akida 2 chip?
Could you repeat it?
If we can't get a demonstration retail product out there with a partner, will the company consider making its own, perhaps with an Akida 2 chip?
You're saying retail? Is that word right?
Retail product.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we're looking at one right here, so that's exactly one of the target markets for this, is a retail product. VVDN state. Again, this, let's be clear, this is, we enable VVDN. They're the primary sales agent. You know, we have it up on our website as a way for the smaller volumes. This has much higher volume expectations for VVDN. One of their target markets, and in fact, the video should be released today, is retail. They envision this thing having two primary purposes in there. One is security in the store for theft, and the other one for looking at volumes real-time in the store. So that's a primary use case that this box is targeted for VVDN.
Okay.
Another question.
Yes.
Some have publicly stated they are using Akida or actively developing products, e.g. ESA, MyWAI, EdgeX, et cetera. With no revenue, are you allowing companies to use BrainChip technology for free? How are we remunerated, and how is our IP protected?
Yeah. No, we absolutely don't let people use our products for free. Now, we have ecosystem relationships, and that's what many of those are, and we will sell them at a discount, and of course, we're just looking to build the ecosystem and the relationship. Or we have limited use licenses. When certain companies make references to considering deployments, we're looking at them, and they're—we're putting our IP in there, but no, we would not let them take them to a production without revenue.
A shareholder has asked: What are BrainChip's sales and marketing plans in Southeast Asia?
Well, specifically in Southeast Asia, you know, in fact, we were having dinner last night. We have presence in certain countries, and we're going to expand our sales efforts in there. Certain countries that we're trying to hire in right now, I'd prefer not to tell you, but we will expand our sales presence for sure. And of course, when you're trying to sell in there, you have to market in those regions. You know, it's interesting, when you look at what we do, you go to the markets that have high propensity to build chips, and a lot of those in Southeast Asia. So yes, we're gonna increase our sales effort there.
Okay.
The other questions are more general.
Okay, I tell you what, let's give the Sydney floor the opportunity to ask some questions. So I just ask that you just put your card up in the air if anybody has any questions. There's a gentleman here to the left, Tony. My left.
Well, thanks very much for all the information, Mr. Hehir. The curiosity is actually how do the sales and marketing people function? Because where we stand today, it's not an impressive view. So I'll give you a couple of scenarios. We've got an Australian drone defense company who's inquired about the suitability of the Akida 2000 chip in their radar system. Do you open BRN Communications, or do you refer this drone defense company to Dr. Joseph Guerci of Information Systems Laboratories, knowing his groundbreaking development of radar systems using Akida? The second one, a US transport company is planning to drive driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston by year's end. The navigation system is well-developed. However, they would like to see if Akida 2000 can improve the performance of the 24 sensors carried on each rig.
Do BRN operatives introduce the prospect to Arm or one of the partner companies, or just wish them well, or is BRN tightly involved in the development process?
The way when we engage, when I made the comments earlier in my speech on closing, we look for qualified deals. I can't comment on those particular ones, meaning particularly on the IP side, are they a large company? Do they build chips? Do they have a chip on the roadmap? Do they have the money to build it? If they don't, we don't engage. Now, if they're smaller volumes of chips, we do have our test or reference chips. We will engage those with a junior salesperson and consider those for those kind of smaller chip opportunities. But unless they're large volumes of chips, ones that are worthy of a potential future tape-out, that's not the business we're chasing. It's not the way to build it.
the way we're building it is on IP licenses that I demonstrated or described the qualifications to engage, and/or if somebody wants to buy massive amounts of chips, perhaps for something like a box. But for smaller use cases, no, we would not engage.
Another way to answer that question, if you don't mind-
Yeah.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump in on that one. If you think about being a drone company, right? You're gonna have macro requirements that you want for your drone, and then you're gonna have a slew of vendors that you're gonna tap into to basically create the drone that you're trying to create. Everything from plastic manufacturers to the fins, all the way down to the circuitry, right? There's no drone company right now on the planet that actually creates its own silicon, right? They don't. They'll engage with a ST, they'll engage with a Samsung, they'll engage with a Broadcom or somebody like that to have custom silicon made for their drone. And then that chip or subsystem essentially becomes one element of their manufacturing process for the drone.
So the way BrainChip would engage with a drone company is, we might talk to them at a very high level, like Sean may talk with, or to Dr. Lewis or somebody may engage, and then what happens is, we basically showcase to them what BrainChip could potentially bring to the equation, and then we wanna find out from that drone company, "Who is your source for your silicon? Who are you buying your silicon from?" And then we would wanna work with that silicon provider on creating a custom solution for that drone. Or if the requirements were such that they could use some silicon that's effectively off the shelf, so to speak, well, then that would point them into that direction, right?
So we're kind of in terms of the value chain or the supply chain, we're kind of one level below that, in terms of using drones as an example. However, as we go forward, right, what we should be doing as a company is creating a pull. We should be talking to our customer's customer, right? And when you talk to your customer's customer, and you sell them on what we bring to the table, they then go to their suppliers and say, "Hey, we really like that BrainChip stuff. Please go take a license from BrainChip, so I can buy product from you." That's how the commercial cycle works, right? That is kind of part of the overall growth and initiative plan of BrainChip. That's exactly what we're doing. We internally, we refer to it as segment strategy.
We are putting together marketing platforms that answer the question: Why BrainChip in drones? Why BrainChip in automotive? Why BrainChip in industrial? And that's kind of part of this evolutionary process that we've been going through over the last couple of years in terms of revamping our architecture and revamping our product. I'm looking around the room. There we go.
Yeah. Marty, I'm a shareholder. Sean spoke about competitive analysis that we, as a company, often do, to the point of even acquiring competitors' products, and I guess, you know, pull them apart the best you can. I was reading about a company the other day, and I thought, for sure, I was reading about BrainChip. Spoke about, you know, spiking neural networks and massive power savings and all the catchphrases that as someone who does a lot of reading, you know, you pick up on. Turned out I was reading about a company called AON Devices, and further reading about that, they spoke about hearing aids and, you know, so I guess the things that we were talking about before, about noise canceling and whatever, you came to my mind.
And it turned out the founder of that company had spent a time with BrainChip, six or nine months, I think, in the early days. So I was just wondering if the company are aware or can comment on that company, if not now, or maybe, you know, release something a bit later, because it sure sounded like I was reading about BrainChip.
Yeah. So, I think the right answer is, you're right, we'll, we'll comment a little bit later on it, but I had a lot of questions out here about competition. Let me talk about it. We welcome competition because it certainly signals the interest in the, in the market, right? You would be worried if you didn't have competition because you would say, "Well, we're the only ones seeing this market, then there must be something wrong." So, we welcome the competition. The idea with our benchmarking is to ensure that we're always better than the competition. Can't answer specifically about that company, but we'll certainly add it to the list to take a look at it.
Follow-up question. Go ahead. Yeah. Oh, we've lost the mic again. There we go.
There we go. And relates, I guess, a bit more to Tony regarding the technology side. I wished I'd sort of had the facts to tell you now, but I thought I read it on social media, a statement that says, "We are embedding our IP into everything, everywhere." Well, it turns out, anyway, it's also a statement that's on your website in the technology area. ... So I guess as a shareholder, I'm curious, what am I meant to interpret from that statement in terms of sales and revenue? You know, we are embedding our IP into everything, everywhere.
It is simply a statement of usability and the broadness of the use cases. It's not a statement of fact that we're in actually everything, everywhere. It's saying that the flexibility of our products is we can work virtually anywhere. That's all it says.
Um. Hi, guys. Dimitri, private shareholder. Just a couple of questions. One, have we closed-- are we able to close any deals yet on, on sales? Or we've reached the point of partnership, trial, and testing, yada, yada, yada. Have we started closing one deal, any deals? And with now knowing the marketplace and knowing how AI takes a bit more longer to understand, even new companies, it's a, it's an endeavor front, new frontier, when do you expect to see positive revenue coming in from, on a conservative level, not a one you know of, even conservative, and you know, that moves down the track, and I understand the physics of all that . Seeing some positive revenue coming in?
Well, I think I addressed that in my opening comments in there, and that's why I went through all my opening comments that we threw, which is all the signs are indicating that we're tracking in the right direction on several key engagements. Can I absolutely predict a day or a week or a quarter? I can probably predict a quarter, but I certainly can't predict a date. And so but, you know, we are tracking all those points. Down selections are there, the meetings are there. We're winning, you know, on benchmarks. We know that they've got tape-out dates, so all the signs are pointing in the right direction. Can I guarantee a date or an absolute when? No, but all the signs are pointing towards something coming.
Dimitri, you had a follow-up question, right?
Sean, I'm not committing to a date, but I'm happy with saying 2027, 2026. I know it's a three-year term.
I'm not, I'm not happy with those dates, and I don't think the board's happy with those dates.
No, but I just—it's just, it gives me a strategy to invest more, invest less. You know, I'm—not a speculator, I'm an investor, I don't speculate, but it gives me some chance. Well, if the—the price drops, I'll just get in and buy some more, hoping, and I'll take—I'll just bite my tongue for two years. That's the sort of stuff that I'm sort of-
Should we-
I guess everybody's looking for at least.
Should we put the forward-looking statements back on the slide here? I don't-
That's very interesting.
It's a fair question. It's an absolutely fair question.
Yeah, I really believe I've shared as... Let's see, what else can I add to my comments? When people plan chips, they typically, and I'm looking over Antonio, somebody in this industry, they typically plan a horizon at a two-year horizon. So everyone we're working with was in that window. We know that, 'cause they typically, you know, unless they're going strategic roadmaps for 15 years. So you can envision everything's within that timeframe. Now, you can also envision that we've been in some of these engagements for over a year, so somewhere in between that window is, you know, if someone's in a two-year planning cycle, and we've been engaged for over a year, you can get the sense of when we're expecting some things to happen.
Okay. Oh, wait. No? So a couple more. Well, I think there's one over here, Tony. Why don't we, this gentleman, I see a gentleman raising his hand.
Sean, you've been saying we'll be getting some deals. I mean, how many deals do you expect a year? I mean, really, be on the sensible side of it. You need at least 6-8 IP licenses a year to cover costs, a year.
I'm sorry, what was the question in there?
The question is, how many IP licenses are you expecting to sign in a year? Because technically, we need between 6 or 8 to just cover costs.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So again, my comments are gonna kind of leave them where they are. We're gonna try to win as many as possible at that point. I understand if you do... With your, I think you're saying you need 6 or 8 probably to fund the company. Is that what your comment was? Okay.
That's right. Yeah. How many years do you expect to do it? 1, 2 years?
I can't hear you, Tony. You took the microphone.
How many years do you expect to, you know, get some of these IP licenses? I mean, we know that we're spending $4.5 million-$5 million a quarter.
Yeah.
In 12 months' time or 9 months' time, you're gonna come back: "Oh, we need, need more funding.
Well, I think that was a variation of my comments and this gentleman's question, right? Which is-
Yeah, but I'm asking you, how many licenses do you expect to sign up?
How about-
-this year?
How about... If you don't mind, let me rephrase your questions.
Yeah.
I think we'll give you the answer you're looking for.
Yeah. Go on.
Sean, do you believe, based on our progress to date, that we are sufficiently building our pipeline such that we can turn enough licenses to turn profitability in the next, say, two to three years' time?
Yes.
No. So you are saying that we, as shareholders, are gonna be funding you for the next two or three years before you actually-
That's not what I said. Just to be clear, mate.
Well-
That's not what I said.
I'm looking at that, that line... is that it will take at least 12 to 2 years before this company actually starts making any revenue?
The reason why it's difficult to answer that question is because in four months' time, there could be a large semiconductor company-
Well, you're gonna have 6 licenses signed up.
No, no, that wasn't what I was gonna say. Here, here-
What you're talking about, the way Sean's talking about that, he's got maybe two or three licenses coming- Mm-hmm. - signing up.
That's right.
Okay, how far is that gonna go in revenue to paying, paying the wages?
To paying the wages? If we just do-
Yeah, they're $5 million every quarter, they spend.
If we just do two or three licenses, that's not good enough.
That's right.
That, I'm in complete agreement.
That's what I'm saying-
Or is it?
You're prolonging it. You're not actually bringing anything immediately. For the last three, four years-
Right. Yep.
You've been signed up two licenses.
That was... Yep.
You signed up 2 licenses.
Right.
And we've been funding you- Mm-hmm - for the last $50 million over the last 2, 3 years. Mm-hmm. Okay, and you brought in $3 million or $4 million, whatever it was.
Right. That was the reason I rephrased your question about the pipe-
I know why you rephrase it. I'm just putting it out to you, what I'm actually saying to Sean-
I, I-
to explain to everybody that there's not any immediate revenue that will cover any of our costs.
I'm here to tell you that is not true. That is not a true statement.
So you're saying that is, in the next 6-12 months, it's gonna cover all our costs?
I am not saying that either. Let me explain why I, I'm being... I'm not trying to be divisive to your question.
You better put that disclosure thing out, up front.
I'm not-
On the screen.
You might have... One of the licensees in our pipeline may come to us and take a five-year subscription license. They're that big. Okay?
Yeah.
That's only one license, but if they take a five-year architectural license to what we're developing, that'll make us profitable overnight. Or I might have three or four licensees that only take a one-time use license to our technology.
Yeah, you say might. See, you say might. You just keep saying might.
There is no way any-
These people here really want to hear-
Right
Is when are you going to start producing some revenue? That's, that's all.
If we could tell you, to Sean's point, if we could tell you a date at which we are flipping to profitability, we'd be happy to tell you that. The reality is, we don't know the answer to that question.
Well, okay, so why are you... Well, anyway, maybe sidetracking. So why all these RSUs you're giving out, dishing out everybody? For what? Nobody's done anything, really. Surely, the people joining maybe in development and all that.
Right.
But what about the other people? What actually do they do? What, why do they deserve 800,000 RSUs?
Okay, so hang on a second. On the, on the RSU front, let's, let's take that one separately when we get into REM and we can get into comp and we can, we can take questions on that. Let's focus on your first question first, and that is, you were asking us point-blank, first and foremost, based on licensing, it would take 5-6 licensees to reach profitability based on covering costs. And while I can understand somebody saying that statement, I'm just simply clarifying that that's not necessarily the case, because we don't know the license type that someone necessarily would take.
Yeah, but-
That's all I'm saying, right? I, I'm not asking you to accept the answer. I'm telling you what the answer is.
For the last three years, it's been like this, smoke, smoke and mirrors, you know? And I think it's about time that you, you people start to, you know, come up with some of the goods.
Noted. Noted.
Craig Jennison. Question for you, Antonio.
Please.
Are you more confident of commercial success today than you were twelve months ago?
Am I more confident of commercial success today than I was 12 months ago? That's a super question. Mm-hmm. All right. As a board member, we have a unique advantage, right? Because we get to look under the covers. We get to, we get to pull the curtain back, right? And we get to ask deep questions to a Dr. Lewis, to a Sean Hehir, to a Steve Thorne, about what they're working on. All right? And I will tell you this: behind the scenes, we give Sean a lot of crap, okay? We do. We give him a lot of crap, and I'm sure that's gonna end up on the front page of some newspaper, but okay, right? We do, and we recognize that we're not happy with the pace. Okay? We know that, right? Everyone in this room knows that, right?
And all the shareholders know that. All the employees know that, all right? Us as a board, we have visibility of how hard the employees of BrainChip are working. They are busting their tails on this, okay? The reality is, the marketplace is filled with people in tech who like to reuse existing technology, and they're very risk-averse, right? I mean, think about it. If you're an engineering manager of a large semiconductor company, and you're risking millions upon millions of the company's dollars on a specific project, you want to de-risk that as hard as you possibly can, right? That's the reason why people will use, say, ARM, along with a simple DLA and some software, and write a simple neural network and call it AI and put it out in the marketplace. Right? I mean, there's even golf clubs that have AI on them.
Please! I mean, come on, right? I mean, everyone's just using the term AI and pushing products out to market. BrainChip is different. We are out there telling people of a different approach, right? And some people are gonna take that approach, and some people aren't. And as we have pushed that approach to market, right, we have altered our product offer. We've absolutely altered our product offering. Our 2.0 architecture, the development of TENNs, this is radically different stuff we're putting out into the marketplace. Now, look, I wanna be respectful to those of you that have been with BrainChip a very long time, right? I'm not ignoring that. My horizon is looking after the last couple of years, in particular, 'cause since I came on board, we have kind of overturned the architecture. Now, with all that said, here's the answer to your question, right?
I get to look at what the team is doing, right? As a board, we see, right, the level of engagements that are going on inside of the company, right? I see the fact that Sean recently, a couple of weeks ago, didn't just have a meeting with an engineering manager and an engineering VP. He is meeting CEOs and COOs of the largest tech companies on the planet who are actively engaged with us right now, looking at our technology. But at the same time, there is the reality that there aren't a bunch of people out there that have BrainChip-based technology into the marketplace. So who are gonna be the trailblazers, right?
The great thing about selling intellectual property and being new to the market with technology is once you get over that hump and you start working with the industry and they say, "Well, how do I know it's gonna work?" Well, then you simply point to a couple of other people that have products in the market. We're not there yet. And so right now, on a benchmarking case, and a technology case, and an opportunity case, and a positional case with respect to segments, we're pushing that story forward. And what I see, and here's the, here's the long-winded answer to your question, right? What I see is I see the depth at which BrainChip is engaged in the market. I see the attention that we're getting. I see the questions that our potential partners are asking of us.
We all on the board see that, and that's what puts us in a position to have more patience with the team, and it's because of our position as a board. So the answer to your question is yes, I am far more confident this year than last year, and the main reason is I have visibility of our depth chart, right? I have visibility of a pipeline. Am I happy with the pace? No. No, right? And it is not lost on anyone in this company that the pace has to improve. And the gentleman in the back who you can, you can sense, echoed a bit of frustration, he has every right in the world to be frustrated. He has every right in the world to be frustrated.
All I can do is say I share the frustration, but at the same time, I have the visibility, and the rest of my board has the visibility to see the progress that we're making, right? Between Tony, Sean, myself, and a couple of others at BrainChip, we can get audiences with anyone in the global tech market. We can, and they're listening to us, and they're asking the right questions, and they're intrigued by what we're doing, right? And we're trying to get them over the line. This gentleman here.
Yeah, my name is Chris-
Hi, Chris.
Chris Brown, and I've been a shareholder in BrainChip since you, you actually took over, the reverse takeover many, many years ago. I have to say that BrainChip is probably the most frustrating company I have ever, ever invested in. And I say that with all sincerity. I'm not trying to be picky in any way, shape, or form. I think from day one, we all realized, with, with Peter's work, how groundbreaking the whole thing was. We've seen in the last, you know, 8 or 9 years, that the same thing has happened. I don't think any of us have any, any doubts whatsoever, how frustrated we may be about the, you know, lack of income. We're all very, very sympathetic with the, the, the job that you have to do.
We realize, because we've been told this now for quite a few years, this takes some time, and we understand that fully. However, after having spent 40 years in marketing and advertising and public relations, I have to say that you are making an incredibly bad job in terms of public relations of this company. I see so many different things where you could really and truly make so many headlines, so many headway with so much to talk about. David and Goliath, space race. You know, none of this is being taken into consideration. If you had a high-level public relations team working, your job would be so much easier because people would understand it. Your shareholders would pick up the paper, look at the television and see what's happening. This is BrainChip. This is the company we're invested in.
You won't have the frustration that you have here at this meeting, and with other people that we see on chat rooms and things like this, who are very frustrated because they put their money in, and they're not seeing a return for it. But again, we see the quality of the people you have here. Top, top quality. We see the product, fantastic. But in terms of public relations, guys, you are doing an abysmal job.
Okay. Noted. Thank you. Yeah.
... Yeah, I would, can I make a comment?
Please.
Yeah, no, thank you for that. And obviously, as a new CMO coming in, we'll take your comments there, too. But I wanna make kind of another comment, which is, yes, we can do more, but it's also what we are trying to do is be really practical. We are not trying to overhype. I think when I came in, I think this company had more of a hype. We're focused on delivery, and when we have more confidence, you'll see more noise at that point. We're focused on execution. I understand your point, but I'm just letting you know that was a conscious choice to ensure whatever we say, we can do, so.
Right. For those of you that still have questions with respect to the CEO address, I'm gonna ask that you hold those questions. You can deliver them to Tony, Errol, or myself after the AGM. There's more Q&A and more stuff to discuss moving forward, and I'm happy to take those questions. So let us move on to the general business. I would like to propose that the notice of meeting be taken as read, and so we will now proceed with the discussion on the proposed Resolutions, including questions from you and those on the online platform, with respect to each Resolution as we go forward. The notice of meeting was distributed to all shareholders on the seventeenth of April, 2024, and so therefore, the notice of meeting is read.
Item one on the agenda deals with the receipt and consideration of BrainChip's financial report, the director's report, and the auditor's report for the year ended December 31, 2023, which are incorporated in the 2023 annual report, and was sent to all shareholders who have requested that report. I would encourage any shareholder who has a question on these reports, or any questions of our auditor, to please raise them now. Let's start with the AGM platform. Are there any questions with respect to the financial statements or reports? Errol, are there any questions with respect to the financial statements or reports? No. Are there any questions here in the Sydney venue with respect to the financial statements and/or reports? Hearing none, I'd like to move that we now go forward to the formal motions of the meeting.
I refer you to Resolution one of the notice of meeting with respect to the adoption of the Remuneration Report of the company. This is a non-binding Resolution. The company's Remuneration Report is contained in the 2023 annual report. I would highlight that in accordance with the Corporations Act, no votes may be cast on this Resolution by or on behalf of a member of the company's key management personnel or their closely related parties. I'll refer to these people collectively from now on as prohibited voters. A prohibited voter may, however, vote directed proxies, where they do so for another person who is not themselves a prohibited voter. As chairman, I may also vote undirected proxies for a person that is not a prohibited voter, in accordance with my stated voting intention, and that is all available proxies are in favor of this Resolution.
However, it should be stated that in the interest of good corporate governance, the BrainChip Board has chosen to abstain from making a recommendation in relation to this Resolution. Before we open for questions on this Resolution, I'd like to take a moment, similar to what Sean did before his CEO address, to answer some questions regarding structure of our compensation models. There are a slew of questions that have come through with respect to structure of the comp models and how we vet them. So I'm gonna try and answer all of those questions here in one shot. With respect to our employees, including the executive staff, part of the company's regimen is to ensure a competitive compensation structure. As I've stressed to you all many times, while Australian, we compete in a global market. That is the reality.
Overwhelmingly, the majority of our employees are outside of Australia. As a global norm, compensation structures are expected to have three elements: base salary and incentive pay, and some form of stock or share remuneration. The levels of pay obviously correspond to one's position in the company. Our pay schemes are vetted against third-party studies and analytics from companies such as Radford and Compensia. With respect to incentive pay, there are multiple levels. Usually, most incentive pay models call for a combination of stated corporate goals and personal MBOs. MBOs are management-based objectives. These are individual based objectives that you apply to employees. Typically, for most of the employee base, these are the individual contributors, rank-and-file type employees. Typically, roughly around 50% of their incentive pay is based on MBOs. This could change, but that's what it's typically.
For senior and executive team members, the overwhelming portion of their incentive pay is tied to corporate objectives. These corporate objectives are usually a combination of top-level financial targets, budget goals, and engineering development milestones. Here's the most important part: the content of these corporate objectives are proprietary and confidential in nature. With respect to engineering goals, they most likely tread on NDAs we have with respective partners regarding development work. To understand the scale, individual contributors in our company, based on seniority and position, will have an incentive pool around 10, maybe 15% of their salary. For senior members, this will be higher. For our executive team, it can reach as high as 50%. In 2023, each employee only received about 27% of their eligible incentive pay. Given the company's performance, this was due to a lack of achievement on the corporate goals.
Some incentive pay was paid based on their personal MBOs. Understand, personal MBOs are individual goals that management sets on individual members for work above and beyond their regular job. Let me give you an example. If you have an employee that has an annual salary, say, of $50,000 a year, and they have an incentive pay of 10%, the maximum incentive pay is $5,000. Based on 2023, that employee only received $1,350. As for directors, the company has implemented a compensation model for directors that is in line with global standards for a public company of our size. We properly vetted the model. All directors receive a cash payment along with an annual grant of securities.
Unlike other regions globally, in Australia, the annual grant must be presented to the shareholders, even though it's part of the company's remuneration policy. Again, this is an Australian rule, and we will abide by it. A hold requirement for shares held by directors was recently added to the policy. This is described in detail in the remuneration report as contained within our annual report. We added this requirement to ensure we are in sync with global standards and in accordance with third-party vetting. Again, the company recognizes that our overall remuneration may not align with Australian norms. However, while we acknowledge this, we must accept that we compete on a global level for talent, all talent. This is the key reason we have the policy as described and implemented. Thank you for allowing me to make these general statements.
Now, I'd like to open the floor for questions with respect to the remuneration policy. So with that, and I should say, and Resolution One. So Errol, I'll start. Let's start with the online AGM platform. Are there any questions received in relation to this Resolution?
There is one question.
Go ahead.
Yes, we have all suffered a significant decline in our shareholding value. Have directors considered deferring some of the remuneration so that they too share the pain? Such an action would send a strong message to shareholders, demonstrating, demonstrating faith in the future of the company, while not diminishing the total remuneration flowing to directors.
The first part of that question was, have we considered it? Okay. The answer is yes, and that conversation continues. Any other questions on the online platform? Errol, any? Is that for Resolution One? Okay. So with that, I'd like to turn to the floor here in Sydney. Are there any questions with respect to Resolution One? Going once. No questions. If there's no further questions, I propose the Resolution that for the purposes of Section 250R(2) of the Corporations Act, and for all other purposes, approval is given by the shareholders for the adoption of the remuneration report as contained in the company's annual report for the year ended December 31, 2023.
Votes and proxies received for and against this Resolution, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. Please submit your vote or mark your voting card in respect to this Resolution. We will move on to Resolution number 2. I refer to Resolution 2 of the notice of meeting in respect to the re-election of Ms. Pia Turcinov, AM, as a director of the company. Ms. Turcinov retires in accordance with Clause 16.4 of the company's constitution, and her biography is included within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting. The BrainChip Board, with Ms. Turcinov abstaining, unanimously recommends that you vote in favor of this Resolution. Errol, do we have any questions or verbal comments received via the AGM platform in relation to this?
None.
None. Here in the Sydney venue, are there any questions in relation to this Resolution? There is one.
Thank you. Look, I'm sure that everybody here realizes what this person does and you know, her credentials, but what has she actually done for BrainChip?
I personally sat on about 9, 10 boards in my career, right? In various capacities. In my opinion, the best boards are those that have and I'm not gonna use the word diversity. They have a completely different scope of experience and a completely different perception on how to approach business. Some people on our board, like myself, are completely tech-focused, right? I am 100% tech-focused, right? Other people on the board come from other industries with different approaches in terms of how they see things and how they bring things to market. And I'm not talking about a technical person, a finance person, a legal person, you know, whatever, an HR person, whatever, all right? I'm just talking about people that bring different perspectives and unique approaches to the marketplace, right? And unique approaches to BrainChip.
Pia is an incredibly valued member to our board. Because what happens a lot of the time, and I... Look, I, I'm gonna, you know, whenever you point a finger, there's always three pointing at yourself, right? I am very quick to instantly gravitate toward the tech side of the business, why we do things in tech, and this is it, right? This is how you handle anything in tech, whether it's HR, whatever, right? Whether it's legal, it doesn't matter, right? Then I rely on the other board members to, quite frankly, reel me in, right? Reel me in from a legal standpoint, reel me in from a governance standpoint, reel me in from a broad public relations standpoint, as you mentioned earlier, right? Pia brings those perspectives to us. Pia is a counterbalance on the board. That is incredibly vital.
She has an enormous amount of perspective, an enormous amount of experience, and most importantly, she has an enormous amount of credibility and respect, and people listen to her. And I have to admit, I gravitate toward people like that. She commands a presence in the board, and when she speaks, people listen. And I think BrainChip is extremely lucky to have her, and that is my opinion. And what's great is, as shareholders, you guys get to decide for yourselves. But I love the fact that Pia is on this board, and to be honest with you, I look forward to maybe serving on a board with her in another capacity in another company. Any other questions with respect to Resolution number two?
Okay, so with no further questions, for the purposes of Clause 16.4 of the Constitution and ASX Listing Rule 14.4, and for all other purposes, Pia Turcinov AM, who retires by rotation and being eligible, offers herself for reelection to be reelected as a director of the company. Votes and proxies received for and against this Resolution, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution are as presented. I would ask that you please submit your vote or voting card in respect of this Resolution at this time. Resolution number three. I refer you to Resolution three of the notice of meeting in respect of the reelection of Peter van der Made as director of the company.
Mr. van der Made retires in accordance with Clause 16.4 of the company's constitution, and his biography is included within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting. The BrainChip Board, with Mr. van der Made abstaining, unanimously recommends that you vote in favor of this Resolution. Are there any questions on the online platform?
Questions.
Okay.
A question for Mr. van der Made: Could Mr. van der Made comment on how he has found the transition from executive to non-executive director in the last year? Does he still maintain an office of the company? And what are his plans in relation to his 157 million shares in the company? Is he a long-term holder?
I am absolutely a long-term holder. I have confidence in the company and what Sean as has said today highlights my my confidence in in the future of the company. So, I think the transition of from from me as CTO to to retirement has been very smooth. I think Tony here is extremely capable and brings a new, fresh perspective to the company, which is very valuable.
Thank you, Peter. Are there any questions here in the Sydney floor? With no other questions, I would like to now propose the Resolution that for purposes of Clause 16.4 of the Constitution and ASX Listing Rule 14.4, and for all other purposes, Peter van der Made, who retires by rotation and being eligible, offers himself for reelection, be reelected as a director of the company. Votes and proxies received for and against this Resolution, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. Please submit your vote or mark your voting card at this time.
I'd like to refer you to Resolution number four of the notice of meeting in respect of the ratification of the prior issue of 15,756,540 shares on the terms contained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting, including the voting exclusions applicable to this Resolution. The BrainChip Board unanimously recommends that you vote in favor of this Resolution. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions with respect to this Resolution?
We do have a written question.
Okay.
Does the board anticipate further share dilution in the future?
Sean, you want me to take that one, or do you want to take that one? We had that one. You want me to answer it?
I'm sorry. Yeah.
You sure?
I think so.
I thought we-- The dilution issue. You want me to cover dilution, or are you gonna cover dilution?
Yeah.
Okay. The only issue with that question is that are we expecting some dilution in the future? I would have to be the dumbest chairman of all time to say, "No, we expect no further dilution in the future." So I'm not going to say that. You know, as we go forward, depending upon, you know, how we progress our 3.0 architecture, which is gonna come beyond that, where we stand with licensing, you know, we have to basically keep all avenues open with respect to, you know, how we're gonna raise capital for the company. So do I anticipate it? Well, no, I'm not anticipating it, but could it potentially happen? Would it be fair to expect it to happen? Yeah, there'll be some dilution.
So, that may sound like a long-winded answer, but it's the practical answer. It's a sensible one. I'm not gonna lie. Any other questions here in the Sydney venue with respect to this Resolution? Okay. Any other questions online? I should have asked that. No. Okay. Right. So I'd like to propose the Resolution that for purposes of Listing Rule 7.4 and for all other purposes, approval is given for the ratification of the prior issue of 15,756,540 fully paid ordinary shares, which were issued pursuant to the put option agreement between the company, LDA Capital Limited and LDA Capital LLC, and as varied, as announced to the ASX on the thirteenth of August 2020, and the thirteenth of October 2021, and on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum.
Votes and proxies received for and against this Resolution, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. At this time, I would ask that you please mark your voting card or place your votes. On to Resolution number 5, a similar Resolution of similar nature. I refer you to Resolution 5 of the notice of meeting in respect of the ratification of the prior issue of 40 million shares on the terms contained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting, including the voting exclusions applicable to this Resolution. The BrainChip Board unanimously recommends that you vote in favor of this Resolution. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions with respect to Resolution 5?
We have one text question.
Mm-hmm.
Part of the question has been covered in terms of dilution.
Yep.
The shareholder comments that seeking to refresh the 15% capacity at AGMs sends a signal that the company prefers non-pro rata capital raisings, which are generally unfair to retail shareholders. He further asks, "When is the company next going to do a share purchase plan offer to the 44,000 plus retail shareholders?
Sean, you wanna, you want, you wanna take that one? You want me to take that one, or should we have... Ken, Ken is on the line. How do we want to handle that one?
Repeat the question and I'll take it. I just want to make sure I got it, 'cause it was compound questions are-
There was one question. There were some comments on dilution, but the main question was: When will you next do a share purchase plan offer to your retail shareholders?
Share purchase plans. There are no plans to do a share purchase plan at this time. Just wanted you to say that.
Are there any questions? Offer it. I'm sorry. What? Are you ever gonna offer it to the shareholders? I can't... He's asking if we would ever potentially offer it in the future.
You've been using LDA to sell off shares. Why don't you offer it to shareholders? It's- I mean, when you look at it, you're paying $500,000-$600,000 to LDA to sell the shares, to raise the capital. Why don't you just put them on the market yourself?
Well, all options... We will examine all options for any potential raise, but LDA has-
Yeah, I'm just looking at the perspective of it. Why give $600,000 every time you raise money It, it- -when you can, when you can put it out on the market, which is the same thing what LDA is doing?
Hey, Sean? Yeah, go ahead, Ken.
There he is.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy to comment on that. Look, we're reviewing a number of different options to raise capital. We always are. Some of them do include opportunities for share purchase plans. We haven't moved forward with one yet. We haven't felt it was the right opportunity, but- ... It's, it's being considered. It's a more complicated raise, which is one of the reasons why we haven't done it, currently. But, Tony Dawe keeps us informed that that's one of the things that he hears about a lot. So, I, I will just say that a number of the opportunities that we are currently reviewing, include that kind of an opportunity.
There's a Steve.
If I can just add a bit of background to that. For those who don't know me, I'm Stephen Liebeskind, I'm a former director of the company and a large shareholder who have actually put money into the company. In regards to a share purchase plan, it was done in the early days post the RTO, and it was very challenging to get that across the line. That was some time ago. Secondly, when you have in the order of 45,000 shareholders, of which there's a significant number below 50,000, the take-up is very low. So it is a difficult exercise to perform, and I think the cost benefit, et cetera, with all the regulations and paperwork required, I think it's something to consider.
But until we do have a change, you know, effectively, we have four groups that represent 25% of the company, and I'd say of those four, I know two of them will not contribute to a raise. It just makes it challenging. So I think it's time and place for everything.
Thank you, Steve. Ken, before I move on, anything further you wish to add?
No, actually, Steve did a wonderful job of summarizing that. Thank you.
Any other, any other comments before I move on? I would like to propose the Resolution that for the purposes of Listing Rule 7.4 and for all other purposes, approval is given for the ratification of the prior issue of 40 million fully paid ordinary shares, which were issued pursuant to the put option agreement between the company, LDA Capital Limited and LDA Capital LLC, and as varied as announced to the ASX on the thirteenth of August 2020 and the thirteenth of October 2021, and on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum. Votes and proxies received for and against this Resolution, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented.
At this time, please submit your vote or mark your voting card in respect of this Resolution. We'll now move to Resolution six. Resolution six A, B, C, D, and E of the notice of meeting relate to the approval of the issue of restricted stock units to myself, Zhilong Li, and service rights to non-executive directors, Pia Turcinov, Peter van der Made, and Geoff Carrick. The issuances are annual grants in accordance with the company's stated director remuneration policy. Given the Resolution's nature, and in accordance with good governance, I'm gonna invite Sean Hehir to chair the meeting from this point forward, for this Resolution. Sean.
I refer you to Resolution 6 A, B, C, D, and E in respect of the issuance of restricted stock options to non-executive directors, Antonio Viana and Zhilong Li, in service rights to non-executive directors, Pia Turcinov, Peter van der Made, and Geoff Carrick, on the terms and conditions detailed in the company's stated director remuneration policy as contained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting in relation to these Resolutions. The Board, in the interest of good corporate governance, abstained from making a recommendation in respect to those Resolutions. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions received via the online AGM platform in relation to this?
None.
Is there any shareholders in our city venue who wish to ask questions or make comments? If there are no further discussion, I now propose Resolution 6, that pursuant to the Listing Rule 10.14, the shareholders of the company approve the granting of 697,674 restricted stock options to Antonio Viana, a Non-Executive Director and Chairman. 697,674 service rights to Pia Turcinov, Non-Executive Director. 697,674 service rights, Geoffrey Carrick, Non-Executive Director. 697,674 restricted stock units to Zhilong Li, Non-Executive Director. 697,674 service rights to Peter van der Made, Non-Executive Director, under the company's equity plan and terms outlined in the explanatory memorandum.
Votes and proxies are received for and against this Resolution at the proxy's discretion, including me, as interim chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. Please submit your vote or mark your voting card in respect of this Resolution.... I will now hand the chair back to Antonio.
Thanks, Sean. Resolution seven of the Notice of Meeting relates to the approval of the issue of restricted stock units to Executive Director Sean Hehir, on the terms and conditions as explained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the Notice of Meeting in relation to this Resolution. I would like to stress that these shares represent the maximum number of shares that could be issued. The BrainChip Board, in the interests of good corporate governance, abstains from making a recommendation in respect of this Resolution. However, it should be said that the board fully supports the CEO's compensation package, including the share grant to him. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions received via the AGM platform?
None.
Are there any questions here in the Sydney venue? Seeing none, I would like to propose Resolution 7, that pursuant to the Listing Rule 10.14, the shareholders of the company approve the granting of 3,171,247 restricted stock units to Sean Hehir, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, under the company's equity plan and on the terms outlined in the explanatory memorandum. Votes and proxies received for and against these Resolutions and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. I would ask that you please submit your vote and mark your voting cards at this time.
Resolution number eight of the notice of meeting, which relates to the approval of the equity plan on the terms and conditions as contained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting in relation to this Resolution. The BrainChip Board, in the interests of good corporate governance, abstains from making a recommendation in respect of this Resolution. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions on the online platform with respect to Resolution eight?
None.
Are there any questions here in the Sydney venue with respect to Resolution 8? Seeing none, I would like to propose Resolution 8, that for the purpose of ASX Listing Rule 7.2, exception 13, and for all other purposes, the company's equity plan, as described in the explanatory memorandum, be approved for the issue of securities under the company's equity plan. Votes and proxies received for and against these Resolutions, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intentions in favor of this Resolution, are as presented. I would ask that you please submit your vote or mark your voting card in respect of this Resolution. Then we come to the last Resolution, Resolution 9 of the notice of meeting in respect of the approval of a conditional board spill meeting.
The terms and details of the conditional spill meeting are contained within the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting. The screen shows proxies received for and against this Resolution and at the proxy's discretion, including to the chairman, to vote against this Resolution. Errol, do we have any text or verbal questions received via the online platform with relation to Resolution nine?
No.
Are there any questions here in the Sydney venue? There's one there in the back from Steve.
Thanks for the opportunity to have a quick chat. I was actually not wanting to have a talk today, but got started, and it was enjoyable. Look, in regards to today's presentation, and I thought it may be appropriate now to talk regarding the spill motion, at the time of the spill motion. I've got a holding, and I'm not a happy shareholder. Same way as you're not necessarily happy as in what's the-how the company's performing, in the results that you would anticipate. Having said that, I've absorbed the various questions that have come through. I enjoyed the comment from the gentleman over there regarding communications.
While you use the word PR, I think IR, or investor relations, is one of the key things that has been talked about for a period of time, in the particularly last 12 months. But what came out today for me was a number of things. Firstly, Dr. Tony Lewis's presentation, his understanding, his commitment, and the ability to get the story across. Very excited, particularly about TENNs and also the modeling capabilities. Short, sweet, to the point, and very helpful. In regards to Sean, I thought your freelancing post the initial presentation of your report was very good and put relevant points across as well. Now, I've not been quiet.
I've been relatively quiet in the foreground, but in the background, I've certainly had opportunities to talk to Antonio and to a lesser extent, Sean, over various period. To that extent, Antonio, I'd like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to communicate with you both, in person, through emails, on and in voice communications. Now, to that extent, I would like to start by saying, in regards to the spill motion. It doesn't help the company for there to be a spill, so I'm certainly against that going forward. The remuneration report is a tool where shareholders can communicate to the directors and the company if they're not happy, and I think that's been utilized today, and we'll find out later when the final votes come out.
But I do I would like to think I still have an opportunity to continue communicating with Antonio the way we have been before. I've certainly put a lot of points across at various times, and at which time I have called a spade a spade, and it may be points that he agrees with and points that he may not agree with, but I think it is relevant to get those salient points for the company. I've got a lot of background in the business. I know exactly what's good and bad, and I stood down at a time when I thought there was good continuation of what's going forward. Now, but what I am like to say is, I've got a lot of confidence in the senior management that I've spoken to.
I do know that people are working hard, and I don't think anyone's ever challenged the amount of work. There is loss of communication in regards to various bits and pieces, whether it's RSUs versus options, and I still haven't got my head around that. I think this is one of the points that Antonio and I will have to agree to disagree on, because I'm dead against RSUs. I appreciate them as performance related, but as a general business criteria, stock options, you get rewarded when the stock price goes up because of the disconnect. To me, RSUs are free carries and can be for whatever it is and when a person leaves. But anyway, I just wanted to put across that, I'm support the against motion for the spill. I believe there will be changes.
I look forward to an opportunity to continue sharing my voice with Antonio and anyone else. I certainly do receive a lot of continued correspondence from shareholders who've known me during my time as a director, also in my capacity as a consultant for the company. As Peter knows, I was there when he started the business. I helped, you know, effectively, it was... I wouldn't call myself a founder because he was the brains of it, and has taken it to a level that I never thought it could be achieved. I've been there from various days, and I got heavily involved within three months of the RTO. So, let's see how we go forward and how we can work together. Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Steve. I see no other hands up. The following Resolution is conditional upon at least 25% of the votes cast on the Resolution proposed in Resolution One, the Remuneration Report, being cast against the adoption of the remuneration report. If there is no further discussion, I would like to propose the Resolution that one, an extraordinary general meeting of the company, spill meeting, be held within 90 days of the passing of the Resolution.
All non-executive directors in office when the board Resolutions were approved, the directors report for the financial year ended December 31, 2023, was passed, and who remain in office at the time of the Spill Meeting, cease to hold office immediately before the end of the Spill Meeting, and Resolutions to appoint persons to the offices that will be vacated immediately before the end of the Spill Meeting be put to the vote of shareholders at the Spill Meeting. If you do not want the Spill Meeting to take place, you are to vote against this Resolution. If you want the Spill Meeting to take place, you would vote for this Resolution. Votes and proxies received for and against these Resolutions, and at the proxy's discretion, including me as chairman, to vote in accordance with my stated intention, are as presented.
Please submit your vote or mark your voting card in respect of this Resolution. Right. That concludes the formal part of our meeting and the discussion of the items of business. Please ensure that you have your vote cast on all Resolutions. I'm gonna pause here for just a bit. For those of you that are online, to make certain that the votes you have checked are the ones you want. For those of you in attendance here in the Sydney venue, please place your voting cards in the poll box held by the boardroom representatives, and so I'm gonna pause while that takes place.
So once again, for those of you online, our Sydney attendees are placing their votes into the voting box, and this is an opportunity for those of you online just to make certain that your votes are correct, as you want them, for once we close voting, everything will be done. Oh, there's one there. Okay. All right, so at this time, I'm going to declare voting closed. For those of you on the online platform, you will see that those votes will now be locked in. We will publish the final voting results with the ASX and on our website shortly.
Last comment, on behalf of the board of directors and the employees of BrainChip, again, I want to extend our thanks not just for attending, but for your feedback and your continued support of BrainChip and the mission that we're on. One quick side comment that I feel like I should communicate, and that is there's not a single member of the board of this company, let alone the executive team, that, you know, is ever gonna take a position that we are right, we are right. This is the way it's gonna be, and just lock ourselves in concrete, right? You know, we've made some mistakes, like any company. I don't care who you are.
I laugh when I hear people talk about how, you know, how they believe that they always make the right decisions, and everything's absolutely on par, and, and that's not the way it works. That, that- that's not the way it works. The reason that that's not the way it works is because at the end of the day, we're a collection of humans that have different ideas and different approaches, and the trick to being successful is to come together and to execute on a mission, execute on a purpose, and that's what BrainChip's doing, right? BrainChip takes the approach that we always wanna take a couple steps forward, and you know what? If we take a step backward, that's fine. Take a quick step forward. The way you operate effectively in that manner is through communication. I do want to acknowledge Mr. Liebeskind's comments.
I wanna acknowledge it in the context that we try and be open. We hear what people are saying. We do, right? Now, what I don't appreciate is when somebody says we're not listening. There's a reason why we do things, right? And there is a collective manner in which we make decisions, right? But we absolutely do listen, right? Tony Dawe heads up our investor relations. His door is always open, right? We will take that feedback. I will do everything in my power to answer every single question that comes through from every single shareholder. I do my best to figure out how there can be 30 hours in a day instead of 24, and I will continue to do that, and that is my commitment to all of you as shareholders of the company. Sean is at a completely different level.
This guy has figured out how to get 50-60 hours in a day, and he never sleeps, right? And he does that on behalf of his commitment to the company and his commitment to the shareholders. Does he get everything right? No. Trust me, I'm the first person there to tell him when he messes up with something. Hey, and that's my job, and I love doing it, right? And then he has -- he, in turn, will come back and tell me I'm full of crap. That's just kinda how it works, right? And then in the end of the day, cream rises to the top, right? And that's the mission that we're on.
And I just wanna say thank you to the shareholders, because three years ago, when I came into the company, right, I was faced with a daunting task, and that daunting task was, wow, I actually think we need to turn over this architecture in order for us to better position it to the marketplace. Great technology, not a good product, right? And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. When I say not a good product, I mean it's difficult to sell, it's difficult to place, it's difficult to get people to integrate it, it's difficult to get people to model it, it's difficult to get people to overcome the norms that they're used to in terms of how they put technology to market. And that required change. And I had to find somebody who was up for the task to drive that change.
That's that guy, and he has come in, and he has done that, right? And we're in the midst of that right now. And if you're sensing some, you know, kind of excitement in me, it's because, again, we're seeing the progress. Now, I recognize there are some of you out there that don't see it yet. I'm not trying to pull the wool over your eyes, right? But in the end of the day, I challenge you. Look at how far we've come. Look at the evolution of the technology. Look at what we are putting into the marketplace. And if that doesn't make sense to you, if that doesn't align with you, if that is just something that's not sitting well with you, life is too short. Put your time and effort and your money into something else, right? Because if you don't believe us, that's a problem.
And if 51% of you don't believe us, that's a bigger problem, right? So, I'm genuine when I say that. We're on a mission to drive change. We're making that change happen. We recognize the pace needs to be stronger, and we know we're gonna make some bumps along the way. We are going, we heard the message. The message, loud and clear, out of this AGM for me is we need to do a better job on the PR and the communications front. I keep hearing that. And you know what? We're gonna go back to the drawing board, so at next year's AGM, you don't stand up and make that same comment. That's what I'm taking away from this AGM, and that's what I'm gonna go try and do. Thank you. Sean, any final comments from you?
No, I just wanna thank everybody again for their support, and, I feel it every day, so thank you very much.
Great. Thanks, everyone.