Okay, we are live.
Yeah.
Thank you, everyone. Today we're welcoming back Coby Hanoch. He's the CEO at Weebit Nano. This is a business that is really interesting, really at the forefront of new memory chip design. I was just mentioning to Coby, this is the second time we've chatted, once about a year ago and once about six months ago. Rather than going over old territory, I'd really encourage you to go and look at those recordings 'cause that'll give you a really good primer in what this is all about. 'Cause frankly, this is some stuff that can get pretty technical pretty quickly, but the high-level picture here is pretty straightforward.
The traditional non-volatile memory, the sort of the flash memory that you'd be familiar with, with your USB drives and the rest of it, is kind of hitting up against its technical limitations. Weebit's developing some ReRAM technology. As you know, the, the, the, the bottom line here is it's faster, it's cheaper, it's more robust, it's got, it's got more capacity. And so the company's been working on this since about 2015 and really just been hitting a bunch of technical milestones along the way. And in the recent 6 months, some really interesting operational milestones as well. So that's what we wanna get into here today. The thing to highlight really is we, we s when we spoke to Coby back in October, he mentioned, "Listen, expecting some early revenues to come through," and the company delivered on that, which is exciting.
And we've seen the company license its technology to a Tier 1 foundry as well. So lots of, lots of good things to dive into today. As always, I'd really encourage you to ask some questions. It always makes it better. Otherwise, I've gotta come up with them, and, and you guys always have better questions. And the final thing, of course, is that none of this is advice. So all of that's out of the way. Coby, good to see you again.
Hi. Good to see you, Andrew.
Yeah. So listen, I guess with all of that kind of said, I kind of hinted at some of the developments that have happened in the last six months. How would you frame that out for investors? If people have been living under a rock for the last little while, what would you say were the major achievements of Weebit Nano since October?
Well, I think, you know, you, you mentioned probably the most important one, which was the agreement we have with DB HiTek. That's a Korean foundry that's one of the top 10. And that was a big step forward. DB HiTek have a lot of, I mean, they have hundreds of product companies that manufacture in their facility, including, you know, the big many big guys like Sony, Toshiba, even Intel and Samsung and Texas Instruments. And, you know, so there's many big guys that are manufacturing there a lot of different types of devices. And now we're exposed to those guys, so we're transferring the technology to them. We have actually an amazing relationship. I mean, you can see that these guys are serious. They're a serious foundry.
People were asking me about SkyWater and, you know, where we stand with them because we had an agreement already signed a while back with SkyWater. SkyWater is a smaller foundry, and they're struggling with a lot of different things. But here we're talking about, you know, a big, established foundry with so many big customers. You know, they know what they're doing, and they're pushing forward. So it's a great relationship. I was actually in Korea just, I guess, what was it, 3 weeks ago and 3 or 4 weeks ago, I don't remember. And we had a technical summit, and we had a management summit, and we already identified the profile of what kind of customers we want to go after as the first ones that we go to.
And now our sales team is working with their sales team on looking for those customers. So, you know, the theme that we'll talk about many, you know, along this discussion is things are just you know, they take a long time in semiconductors. Everything takes longer. We are now in the process of transferring the technology to DB HiTek, and that's moving, you know, according to schedule, even a little bit ahead of schedule. We're going to get to the point where we can tape out and have our first test chip manufactured. So everything is going according to plan over there, and that's really good. Another thing that kind of evolved and I kind of hinted our sales team, so we hired an industry veteran, a well-known guy called Issachar Ohana, as our Chief Revenue Officer.
He's going to be taking over all of the sales activity. He's, you know, really very experienced in selling semiconductor IP. He was in the same role at CEVA. CEVA is today the leading DSP provider. I won't go into the technical details, but that's a very important domain as well. He started at CEVA from zero, so he basically built it from zero. Today they're selling, I think, close to $140 million per year. You know, we're counting on him to build our sales channel in a similar way. He's already been bringing on board some salespeople in different territories. That's another important step forward that we made. It's not just me driving the sales with the help of our marketing. It's now we have a dedicated team.
We made a very important step forward also on the technical front. We announced that we can demonstrate now chips that are working at 150 degrees centigrade. That's already an important achievement. That's, for the automotive industry, that's a very important milestone. And it shows the robustness of the technology because many, many other non-volatile memories don't really achieve 150 degrees. O ne of the great things that happened, you know, as soon as that news came out, I got a call from a vice president in one of the top three automotive companies. And, you know, he was there like, "You guys really do 150?" I said, "Yes." And he said, "Great. You know, I can finally get rid of this MRAM. It's really bugging me.
And the only reason I was using this MRAM was because it managed to do 150 degrees." So, you know, now we're already diving into the discussions with them and looking how we move forward. And also we demonstrated that we can already achieve endurance of 100,000 cycles without going into the details. But that's already an important milestone as well, showing just how robust the technology is. So there's been really a lot going on. And maybe the last thing that I'll mention, you know, in this long list of things, but we also received finally the wafers from GlobalFoundries, which is one of the top five foundries that we're working with and we manufactured there. W e have good results, actually good enough that we now have a demo. And next week we'll be in a big trade show in Embedded World in Germany.
We'll be demonstrating that, the chips that were manufactured at GlobalFoundries. We have very good reception of this announcement. We have practically a full schedule already for next week of demonstrations and important meetings with key product companies and so on. So, there's really a lot of activity going on. And of course, the most important activity is, you know, continuing to push forward with the big foundries and IDMs. You know, that's by far the number one goal for us to achieve more agreements and businesses. I said it many times, these are very, very difficult and complex negotiations. They take a lot of time. You have so many little things that can stall them for months at a time.
But we're definitely at a better place in these negotiations now than we were when we talked in October. So, there's good progress being made.
Well, you said it's a long list, but that's what you want when you ask what progress has been made. So that's really encouraging. I guess I said before, we don't wanna go over old ground, but there is one point that I think needs to be hit because investors are in an impatient life. it's always show me the money, right? And last time in fact, both times we chatted, you really stressed the timelines that are involved here. These foundries are multi-billion dollar operations. It takes, you know, and you want them running all of the time, and you don't wanna stop them just for, you know, a meager dalliance here.
So, I guess what I'm asking here is, I think you mentioned before some initial revenues with some licensing fees and that, but you're really expecting that ramp-up to still be a couple of years away. I think you said 2-2.5 years before that sort of starts coming in. Do you still see that timeline as on track? Or I think you sort of said before maybe a little bit ahead of track. And just, yeah, any points that you would hit on that comment?
So first of all, let me elaborate a little bit more about, you know, all of these agreements with the foundries and IDMs. And for the audience here, just a very short definition. You know, you manufacture semiconductors in fabs. Fabs are extremely expensive to set up. They cost billions of dollars to set up even the simpler ones. And therefore, most companies, even the biggest ones, the Apples, the NVIDIAs, the Googles of the world, don't have their own fabs. So you have companies called foundries that manufacture, that give services, manufacturing services to these product companies. There are a few companies that actually have their own fabs, and those are called IDMs. So just so that people understand the terminology that I use. Now foundries are, as I mentioned, you know, their facilities cost billions, tens of billions of dollars to set up.
They are extremely cautious about anything that happens there. Even though we come in and we have been very focused on being very standard, standard materials, standard tools, standard everything, and, and we can actually go into their existing production line with minimal tweaks and adjustments, we can go and start manufacturing. This is still for them a big concern. And they need to evaluate and make sure that we don't cause any problems and, and everything and that everything works well. They want to make sure that what we are manufacturing fits the needs of their customers, you know, in terms of and that's when you start going into the technical details of how big the memory cell is and the voltages and the currents and, and all these other parameters. And so they take us through a very, very rigorous and thorough evaluation process.
Now, some of them, we hit all kinds of interesting situations where they have a crisis in, in another manufacturing line even, but they have to shift all of their focus and engineering talent or engineering, teams to, to that other production line. And, you know, now we're stuck for like 4 months or 5 months. We can't make any progress. They just don't have the, the attention for us. A nother case, one of them says, "Yeah, you're standard everything, but one of the machines that you need is already at full capacity in our fab. And so we need to buy another one." And, and that's a process of months and, and stuff and, and whatever. And so there are a lot of things that can happen. I won't go into everything. And, and it's really not trying to make excuses.
It's just that's life in semiconductor. And so these negotiations and evaluations and everything, they take time, you know, just to kind of give you a feel. We the first meeting I had with DB HiTek was in the end of 2018, and we signed the agreement last year. So now we're, we're engaged with the majority of the large foundries today. As we talked in previous calls, we're today actually the only independent provider of ReRAM. And so we have a very, very strong team that people recognize. So the majority of these foundries and IDMs are working with us and evaluating and negotiating and so on. We are making progress. It's just I mean, you know, again, it takes time.
Now, once you start working with them, the process again, this is the nature of semiconductors, transferring the technology to a foundry or a fab in general is something that takes roughly nine months. We're standard everything, but still, this is a very, very delicate. It's so hard to explain to people just how delicate it is to manufacture semiconductors and how every step there is it takes time, you know. And then once you manufacture it, you send a prototype to manufacturing. And just that manufacturing process takes about half a year. And then you finally get the silicon back, and you need to go through testing and, you know, what's called qualification. And that includes putting the chips in ovens for 5,000, 10,000 hours and do the math. I t's months.
Yeah,
so it's a long process before we actually are qualified and officially ready for mass production. N ow the good news is once we engage with the foundry, you know, that all of their hundreds of customers and all of those products are gonna be exposed to us. You can already see that light at the end of the tunnel. It just takes time. Yeah, so revenue in the beginning is going to be from license fees, from NRE, from these foundries. As we sign agreements, there will be more and more, you know. The initial deals, they won't even pay the license fee upfront. And, you know, it's normal. They wanna be more cautious. They tie, they break it down to payments that are tied to different milestones. So you'll see a trickle.
I keep, you know, emphasizing because people have this expectation of, "Wow, you know, you guys are gonna have so many millions next month or next, you know, before the end of the year and whatever." It's gonna be a trickle of, you know, payments. We had our first revenue. You know, it's very nice, but as everyone knows, it's not, you know, millions. And it's, you know, an indication more than anything else. It's an indication. And that's what I'm trying to pass the message. And we will be signing more agreements, definitely. I mean, as much as I can commit to, of course. It's not all in my hands, but I believe that, these negotiations, we by the end of, during this year, we'll have more agreements.
Each one that we sign, by the way, makes it much easier to sign the next one, of course. T he key concern here is really yeah, people are already looking and saying, "Oh, wow, DB HiTek. That's already serious, if they decided to use you and they went through that whole evaluation process, okay, that's that sounds serious. But they still are very cautious. But once we have another one or two, I think that the level of objection, the level of, kind of, risk, averseness I don't know what to call it is gonna go down. People are gonna feel more comfortable, and it'll be easier to sign additional agreements. So this is gonna be, I think, the next announcement is gonna be a very important one.
I think that one will really help remove a lot of the blocks that we still have with other foundries and IDMs. And then, you know, once we have a following one so the next 1 or two after those, I expect it to be much easier to move forward. We're working hard at it.
Yeah. We see it across the board. I mean, it doesn't matter the industry or, you know, the product. It's always the same. Whenever a company is dealing with something that is new, it takes time. And I think what you're getting at there, it's the social proof. So, you know, these are very technical kinds of things. You would think that the science and the engineering would speak for itself. And eventually, it does. But people will just pay more attention when they see that, "Oh, others have gone through that. Okay, it's at least worth our time to sort of look at." So I think that's. I'm glad you hit that point.
And I'm really glad you've been very consistent too in terms of stressing the timeline because it is worth recognizing that. And I think you made the point last time as well. I mean, the silver lining to these long timelines is that anyone else who's coming up behind you has to go through all of this kind of stuff as well.
Oh, yeah. It's definitely, by the way, a comment that I made last week. I was in Australia, and I did the tour, and I realized there's a book that was written that's called Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.
Yes.
If you know that book, that's the Bible of startups kind of thing.
Yep.
It really defines very well the process that a new tech company goes through. You know, they describe there how you come up with this great idea, and at the beginning, everyone thinks you're crazy. Then you work, and you develop it. Some of the geeks and some of your customers like to tinker with things. So they will start playing with it and give you some initial feedback. You finally get to the point where you say, "Okay, I have a product." You rush outside, and you're saying, "I'm gonna sell it to the world." Poof, you know, you have that chasm there.
Yeah.
And the customers are on the other side. And, everyone is just so cautious. And I used to give this analogy of a bungee on a tree. You know, you have that bridge that someone put a bungee on for the first time, and you go and tell people, "Hey, you're the lucky one. You're gonna be the first one to jump off." And of course, everyone's hesitating. You know, nobody wants to be the first one. So, you go, and you really work hard until you find someone who's willing to take, quote, "the risk" with a new technology.
Yep.
Normally, it's not the leading company. It's you know, one of the number 2, 3, 4 that wants to become the leader and is willing to take that risk with a new technology because it can see the rewards, the potential reward. And then you finally get to that other side of the chasm, and you sell. And, you know, the book defines the bowling alley. You sell to the first pin, and then you work hard, and that pin kinda helps you drop another pin behind it. And you start dropping those pins. But at a certain point, you have enough of those pins that fall. You know, today, we use the term FOMO, right? Suddenly, everyone wakes up and says, "Oh, my God. he's using it, and he's using it.
And I'm gonna be left behind." Suddenly, everyone jumps on board, and you find yourself in the tornado, what they define in the book.
Yeah.
And I've been lucky enough to be inside the tornado twice already in two different companies that I was with. We started from zero, and we, you know, suddenly, it went, woo, you know, like crazy. And, and it's an amazing feeling. And, and what I can tell you is I'm, I'm seeing the tornado out there. I'm seeing it. It's, you know, it might be a year or a year and a half away, but I, I can already sense it. I can already sense it. I can already see it. And, and it's there. It's there. It's a lot of hard work. It's gonna be extremely frustrating getting there. And I know the shareholders are there like, "Okay, he's telling us to wait a little more.
And, you know, we're already waiting so long." I just try to be as, you know, as transparent as I can and to really help people understand what we're going through. This is the nature of semiconductors. But it is out there. It's very exciting. I can't, unfortunately, share with everyone all the stuff that's happening inside the company. I know that from the outside, it looks like we're frozen. And nothing's happening there. But actually, there's a lot happening. We have an amazing team, and we're making good progress. Next week at the Embedded World Trade Show, it's gonna be really, very exciting. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that tornado.
Yeah. I've really gotta reread that book. I read it years ago, and it's so illuminating. The other one that it reminds me of, there's a book called The Gorilla Game, which is talking about investing in technology and just how you tend to get a few dominant winners. And it's fascinating. And it's a story of gradually then suddenly. And those S-curve adoption rates are pretty crazy when they get going. Speaking of S-curves and early adoptions and crossing the chasms, I almost cringe to bring this up because in a lot of contexts, I think people are throwing these terms around for a desired halo effect.
But I mean, given you're in the chip space and given what's happened with NVIDIA and AI and all of that, so I have to ask you about it. You know, what are you seeing on that front, and what relevance does that have to Weebit, if any, does that have to Weebit Nano?
Well, you know, AI is very exciting. And of course, I can go into I don't know how many hours of talking about AI and what's happening. And NVIDIA is just amazing. I mean, for me, watching NVIDIA over the last 15, 20 years and how they grew and how they made the right decisions, it's really exciting.
Yeah.
And by the way, part of their big success is also the acquisition of Mellanox, an Israeli tech company that really helped them move forward. T his is an exciting world. Actually, you know, these few companies that are dealing with AI are what kept semiconductors. And the semiconductor industry has actually been going through a downturn over the past year or two. That's part of our struggle, that there's really been a downturn. If it weren't for the AI companies who kept semiconductors kind of they balanced it out. And so, you know, you don't see that big drop in semiconductors, but it's really thanks to those few in AI. Weebit is obviously very closely monitoring this. We're, I think, very well connected into that, in several different ways.
First of all, a key part of AI is, and people are realizing, is today the edge AI. So you have, you know, those big, huge, data centers that know how to crunch things and actually learn, you know, the learning part of AI. But then a lot of what's called the inference using the AI is moving to the edge devices, the, you know, the cameras that are in all over the place that need to identify people or things, you know, the cameras in the cars that need to identify someone jumping into the road and everything. You know, and all of these edge devices, most of them actually have a few common requirements. They need to react fast. They need to be low power. And, in some cases, they need better endurance. And that's what ReRAM gives you.
So, when someone jumps in front of a car, you want the system to react as fast as possible and, you know, hit the brakes as fast as possible. I mean, recognize what's happening and do that. And again, ReRAM is much faster than Flash and enables you to do that. The same goes for a lot by the way, a lot of these devices work on batteries. I mean, even a car works on batteries. It's big batteries. But a lot of these , devices, sensors that are, you know, hanging on walls or, you know, in the middle of an agriculture field and there are sensors and things like that, they need to basically they have something that triggers them. They wake up. They do something. I mean, the sensor recognizes that something's moving.
They wake up. They need to recognize what that is. They need to do a little computation because you want to do that computation locally and then send only the digested result to, you know, the cloud thing. And then you wanna go to sleep as fast as possible. You don't wanna waste energy. Many of these things work on batteries. They work on ambient energy. And so you need a memory that does exactly that, that can wake up quickly. We wake up instantly almost, do that quick, you know, analysis. And again, our memory is much faster than Flash and go to sleep quickly and not waste energy. And so we're very fit for that. In addition, depending on the applications, but some of these applications need to be implemented in small geometries.
And because of different considerations, Flash cannot go below 40 or 28 nanometers if you really push it. And many of these want to work at 22 and even below at, you know, in the teens. So again, we have a big advantage there.
Yep.
and then , that's kind of with the AI that is already today, pretty much rolling out into the market. We, we already have these advantages. The next thing is and, and this is the future of AI. It's what's called neuromorphic computing or compute in memory or, processing in memory. There are different terms that are being used, but really merging the compute engine with the memory and not having them as separate entities. And, ReRAM operates, very much like a synapse in your brain. And there is a lot of research today going on in terms of how you can actually emulate a human brain using ReRAM, not simulated. Today, most of the AI is simulation, which is really much less efficient than emulation. And Weebit is supplying ReRAM to many, research institutions that are doing this research.
We're working with them. There were even some papers that were published already about that and so on. You know, we're involved in that. Once, you know, this actually gets ready to go out to the market, we wanna be there. Then we will be there.
Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting. I guess the other thing to sort of stress too is when I mention Weebit to fellow investors, they'll talk about, as we like to, you know, it's all about cash burn and this kind of stuff. But I guess another point worth mentioning here is that you guys had a pretty successful raise last year. And I think there's something like $70 million or so from the last quarterly in cash available. So there's a fair runway there as well. Yeah. Just any thoughts around capital management and that kind of stuff? I guess I would argue that it was a pretty well-timed capital raise, to be honest. I think it was $5 a share.
I think that there are numbers of different ways to look at it. I tend to take the approach that, like, when the market is optimistic, that's the time to raise. And you did. So yeah. Just your thought. I mean, and that raise has taken a lot of the pressure off and also allowed you to think longer term. Because I know one of the distractions with earlier-stage pre-commercial companies is that it's tempting to sort of raise a little bit and then get some work done and then raise some more. But it's a massive distraction for management. And investors tend to lose patience with that. So I guess what I'm saying is it seemed like it was effectively very, very well done. And yeah.
Just your thoughts on that runway that you have and how you think about sort of managing the capital sort of over the sort of next 2-3 years.
First of all, I'll remind you that the raise that we did last year was done in the week that Credit Suisse collapsed.
Yes.
Actually, it was not such an easy one to do. I was told that we were the only raise done in the world that week, actually.
That's right. Yes. I remember you saying. Yeah.
It was, actually, I'll kind of just a small side comment. People talk to me about ASX and stuff. And we've had our issues with ASX. But the bottom line is that the ASX has been good to us. And you can see it in terms of this raise, $60 million on such a difficult week and everything. I'm very grateful for, for our shareholders and everyone who participated. And that did give us, you know, breathing room. So I can totally focus now on the business, on getting these agreements done. We have enough money to take us definitely into 2026. So at this point, we can just focus on getting agreements.
I mean, I am very, you know, I can't commit to anything, right, as you know.
Of course. Yes.
I believe that there's a high probability that we can close agreements, some significant agreements, even this year and definitely before 2026. You know, the market will see where we're heading and so on. Right now, we don't have any thoughts about, raising money. We're just totally focused on getting the business done.
Yep.
I have control over the spend. A lot of the spend is actually the money that goes into R&D and specifically into wafers that we run through the fab. I mean, theoretically, if anything really bad goes on, we can, you know, we can run fewer wafers and even have longer lifespan, if you wanna think of it that way. So we're, you know, I'm feeling very comfortable right now with the cash position, you know, and I'm sure I feel very confident that we will manage to get, you know, some significant milestones, hit some significant milestones, and move on. It's, I know some people are frustrated. They say, "Well, you did that raise at AUD 5. Now you're below AUD 5. We've been one of the most shorted shares or stock on ASX for the past year.
The shorters have really been pushing hard. Again, I'm glad and I'm proud of our shareholders that, they actually held on. And the shorting activity , as much shorting as there was, it impacted us, obviously.
Mm-hmm.
This is a longer-term, you know, investment. I believe I've been very consistent in the message. These things take time. I'm very bullish. This is a big market. It's a very difficult market to get into. T oday, there are only three companies in the world that have qualified ReRAM. And two of those are actually foundries that won't give it to anyone else. And by the way, all three of them, if you look at it, they've been working at it for, you know, 20 years plus. You know, Weebit is younger, but Weebit is cooperating with Leti that's been researching ReRAM for more than 20 years. And, we're leveraging a lot of their know-how. So it's not so easy to enter this market.
There are very few other players that are trying to get, actually, you know, almost practically none, you know, that are trying to get into this market. You know, even Intel and Samsung tried to develop ReRAM, and, and they abandoned it. I t's just a big investment that requires very significant management attention. And, it's not easy. So, so that's a key reason why I'm so bullish. I think we have a really good technology, a really strong technology. I think I dare say we have the only we're the only company that has the complete team that is required to really make ReRAM successful. We have the device and, and process teams, you know, the physics and chemistry teams. By the way, we have 13 Ph.D.s in physics and chemistry in the device and, and process team.
Many of them got their degree in non-volatile memory in ReRAM. So, you know, those guys are constantly working on improving the technology, pushing it forward, getting the technical parameters better. And then we have, on the other side, the analog and digital designers, that are really critical of not less important than even maybe more important than the device and process in some cases because they are the ones who really build the system that controls the memory and, and squeezes the maximum out of it. And we have all of these teams that are working very well together with a very focused management team. And, you know, you look at the other solutions out there, I mean, the foundries that are offering ReRAM, for them, ReRAM is a means to the end, which the end is selling wafers. They don't focus on ReRAM as ReRAM.
For them, it's just an enabler to sell more wafers. And so they, you know, they don't have a strong, analog or digital design team. They're not there to really tailor and get the maximum out of the ReRAM and tailor it per customer and stuff like that.
Yeah.
So again, another one of the reasons why I'm so bullish. We have—I mean, you look at our staff. And by the way, it's not only starting from the board, you know, people like Dadi and Atiq and Yoav. And I talked about them in previous discussions. I mean, these guys are luminaries in this industry. They're very well known. But you look at the vice presidents, you know, the management team that we have. And each and every one of them has, you know, decades of experience in non-volatile memory or in memories in general and in this IP domain. And even below them, you know, we have so many experienced people. We hired you asked in the last half year. We hired a person who was managing one of the fabs in Tower.
She actually grew up from being the very simple engineer at the bottom of the pyramid and went all the way up to being a fab manager. She knows everything about fabs. And we hired her. And now she's managing our relationship with the foundries and IDMs and, you know, doing an amazing she knows exactly what they're feeling, what their concerns are. And it's amazing to see her in meetings with these guys. So really, it's very exciting for us.
Yeah. That's great. I guess that's on your earlier comment with the shorters. That's one of the blessings of being well-capitalized because as frustrating as it is, I guess it doesn't really impact the operations of the business, which is nice. Yeah. So you touched on this before. There is a bit of control over the R&D spend. And generally speaking, it's not usually an even R&D spend. There's a lot of money that tends to get plowed into technologies as some early stages. It gets proven out. And then generally, R&D never goes away. And we should never want it to go away because you stagnate. You eventually die. But do you see that the hard yards or the harder yards have been achieved at this point?
How do you see that R&D spend evolving over the coming years? Is it still pedal to the metal kind of stuff for the foreseeable future? Or do you think that that might moderate a little bit? What are your thoughts on that?
There is still so much to improve in this technology.
Yeah.
that it's definitely gonna continue to be pedal to the metal for a long, long time. You look at flash technology, their biggest achievement happened maybe 20 years after they became production-worthy. You know, the 3D NAND that everyone talks about today took about 20 years after they already went into mass production until they finally managed to develop it. You know, you could say that the equivalent in our world is developing a new selector technology, which, again, I talked about maybe in some of the previous discussions in just a few words. You know, the big advantage of ReRAM is that it's bit addressable. You can actually access every bit separately.
Yeah.
It gives you a lot of power. Now, the way you do it is every bit has what's called a selector that selects it when you want to access it. Now, today, the selector that's used by everyone, by the way, is a transistor. That's the simplest one, easiest one to use. But it's not an efficient one. We definitely can see much more efficient selectors. It's an extremely difficult technology to develop. We've been working at it for a few years already. We still have definitely a few more years until we'll actually we're working on different options of selectors, by the way, looking at different ways of making this happen. But that's just one example of, you know, a breakthrough that once we have it, it's gonna be a huge breakthrough.
By the way, I don't really see anyone in the world, potentially maybe one other company that is really working on this kind of technology. Weebit has again, Weebit has that team, that critical mass of engineers that are experts in this domain that are constantly researching also, you know, the selector technology. And not just that. I mean, I talked about getting to 150 degrees. I talked about getting to 100,000 cycles. We wanna go up to 1 million cycles. We wanna push the envelope further on many parameters. There still is so much work to do. And, and as you said, in, in the tech world, the moment that you start slowing down on R&D, you're basically falling behind. And, and we just wanna be the leaders in the world.
We wanna be the recognized leaders, with the strongest technology in a position that it's gonna be extremely hard for anyone to come and challenge us.
Yeah. Yep. Desperately trying to find something here. Wait a sec. Bear with me. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know how you can answer this question, but I'll put it to you anyway. It's, it strikes me as, what are you, AUD 670-odd million market cap? And the accumulated losses on the business, AUD 117 million. So in other words, what I'm getting at here is that you guys have spent a lot of money in getting to where you are. Do you feel as though that is a potential? I gotta be careful how I word this, but I guess there's always the potential that an Intel or someone else goes, "Well, thanks for doing all the early stuff. We'll take it from here." Is that something that you would entertain?
Or do you feel as though this is something that you'd like to sort of run through to completion? I know it's a silly question as I say it because it, the answer is it depends.
It's a very natural one.
It depends, right? If someone says, "Coby, he's $1 trillion," well, you're gonna say, "Yes." If they turn around and say, "Can we buy it for $10?" you'll say, "No." But I guess I'll put it to you anyway. What are your thoughts there?
So I'll give you a few answers. I mean, the first answer is, you can see the gray hair already. I've been through so many startups. The biggest mistake that I've seen startups make is start thinking about the exit. The moment that a CEO and we're not a startup, of course, but smaller companies in general.
Yep.
You know, when a smaller company starts thinking about the exit, the CEO stops focusing on what's really important.
Yep.
And at that point, they, you know, they don't invest in the things that they really need to. They invest in what they think is good for the exit. And so.
They invest in making the numbers look good rather than.
And then, when an offer comes in, they don't really have much of a choice. They have to take it.
Yeah.
So we, in general, are very focused on building a big, strong company. That is my focus. I really, honestly, am not thinking about the exit because to me, it's irrelevant. Now, you know, at the end of the day, if you look at this industry, you know, the vast majority of the smaller companies eventually gets acquired. I mentioned Mellanox earlier. You know, they were acquired for I don't remember how many billions they were acquired. But, you know, when an offer comes in, the board, first of all, we're a public company. The board is obliged.
Yeah.
To take a look at it and see. The board will be looking at it from the eyes of the shareholders. By the way, you know, many board members have significant holdings in the company. And they'll be definitely looking at it in those eyes. And, you know, if there's a good offer, if there's something big, you know, it'll be brought to the shareholders for a vote and so on. So.
Yep.
So, I guess, and I think that's the answer for any company that will be giving you. So, I am really not thinking about it. I know that eventually, you know, it's the probability of us getting some offers like that, you know, it's definitely there. When those offers come, we'll bring it to the board. They'll take a look. They'll see if it makes sense. We'll, you know, obviously, if it's a good, a good offer, we'll have to bring it to the shareholders. And we'll see.
Okay. Yep. Excellent. Gosh, this is flowing. I've got some questions here from some of our members. I'll put them to you. Alex asks, "Are there use cases for Weebit's ReRAM obvious to your potential customers already, or do they need to figure out how to use ReRAM as they become more familiar with its capabilities?" In other words, do you have to really emphasize the value prop here? Or do people see the need for it, but they're just waiting to sort of see more validation, I guess?
I think today, the market recognizes the value of ReRAM. You know, the fact that we are so much faster, lower power consumption, etc., people see the value. But, you know, the devil is in the details.
Yep.
Each one of them wants to dive in and make sure that the different parameters fit their specific needs.
Yep.
Now, I mentioned, you know, the automotive company. You know, I got a call from an automotive company that, you know, says, "Hey, this is interesting for us." You know, I didn't reach out to them. They reached out to me. So that can give you that feeling. And it's one of the top three. So, you can understand. I think the product companies understand the big potential. They are each one of them comes to us with their specific needs. And they want us to demonstrate those specific needs. And obviously, they want to know that there's a foundry that will manufacture that and all of that. So.
Yep.
This is really in the past. I would talk about this golden triangle where Weebit is supplying a technology. There's the product company that needs to take it and embed it into their product. They need to make it fit their specific product there. Then they need to go to a foundry and manufacture. We need to make this whole thing work. In the beginning, it's just a lot of work to tie all of these things together and make this work. Once we have the triangle working, then it starts flowing. You have more and more products going through the line. So people can see we have so many advantages over Flash that it's pretty obvious to people that this is what they want. I don't think we really need to convince people.
It's going into the details and showing them, you know. Some of them want to have low leakage. Other wants to have ultra-low power working in, you know, or based on ambient power, you know. It's those kind of things that we need to work with them to show them that, yeah, we actually are so low power that we can even work off of, you know, power from thin air, you know, kind of thing.
So I need to remind me I'm looking at my notes here. So this there we were speaking of revenue sources last time. And so, and this leads me into a question that someone has asked here. So you've got the license revenue. There's royalty revenue that potentially comes with some of the products that are based off this. And then there's this NRE revenue, which stands for non-recurring engineering, which is someone says, "Hey, we wanted to do this." And you say, "Okay. Well, let's see if we can make it work for you." So I guess what I'm getting at there, in some situations, company and we've actually in fact, we spoke to a radiator company last week, really.
They were sort of saying that this can be difficult in the sense that you'll spend a lot of time trying to sort of make people happy, but you end up working in use cases that's good for them but maybe doesn't have a broader commercial applicability. When you charge for the NRE, the non-recurring engineering work, I guess that's not a bad thing, right? Because wherever they decide to do with it, or if it's just for them or for broader applicability, you still get paid on that. So I guess your comments on that and the question that I'm leading to here from Rob, which is basically asking, when you sort of go out five years, how do you sort of see the revenue split between license, NRE, and royalty?
So, to that, by the way, this is a very good question because the challenge is you don't want to just charge money. I mean, obviously, the NRE payment will cover our costs.
Yep.
But you want to have a large enough margin and show good money good results on your financial report.
Yep.
And, you know, the licensing and the royalty, you know, your margin is practically 100%. And it's really nice. When you start doing NRE, obviously, the margin is much smaller. And that's. Did I mention that we have such an experienced team?
Yes.
One of the things that our design team did from the very first day when we just started designing our very first module, we made sure that it would be very configurable, very modular, very parameterizable so that once we start ramping up, we actually will be developing what's called a memory compiler where we can automate a lot of this work. We can actually feed in the parameters of what the customer wants. And the compiler will automatically generate the module for the customer, which is tailored to the customer demand. And we might need to do a little bit of manual work at the end. But the vast majority of the work will be done done automatically. So that's how we'll improve on that and enable ourselves to have nice margins also on the NRE side.
Yeah. I know it's a big crystal ball gazing. But how significant is that NRE, you sort of say, in 3-5 years' time? Do you see as a part of the overall pie?
Well, obviously, you try to and, and there's a chicken and the egg type situation here. First of all, the more modules you build for different customers, the more , you have a larger offering and, and the less NRE is needed because you've already done that work before. So at a certain point, there's also less NRE required because there was already a big offering.
Yep.
You know, you want to make the vast majority of your revenue from royalties. That's really the key. The key is that you will just get a certain percentage of the revenue from any product that has the ReRAM in it. That's our focus.
Yep.
So license fees are nice. And, you know, we want to get nice license fees. The royalties are really the critical element. The NRE is an enabler to that. And of course.
Yep.
We won't jump in and do NRE on projects that, you know, have very little potential revenue. And it might not be worth our efforts. And by the way, one of the things that we'll do as we grow, we'll train some consulting companies, some engineering subcontractors to do the NRE for us. And, you know, we'll just send customers to those contractors to do it so that it doesn't fall on us. If it's a big, you know, whatever, Apple, Google, Facebook, Qualcomm for the world that wants to have something that is very strategic to us, we'll do that NRE ourselves.
If it's a smaller, you know, research institute or startup or someone, you know, we can have them work with one of these consulting companies, the services companies that will do it for them and move on with that. So, you know, we'll be focusing on getting a good bottom line. That's for sure.
Yeah. For sure. For sure. I guess some technical ones here from Rob. And I'm mindful of the time. So I'll let you go in a few minutes. But he's asking here in terms of these foundry licenses, are they perpetual or renewable? Or what kind of terms are involved here?
They're very creative. There aren't a lot of them. And each foundry wants to have different terms. So we're working with them. You know, in you, you can understand that a foundry wants to know that once it starts working with us, and it starts manufacturing products for their customers, they'll be able to continue. I mean, many of these products that the customers manufacture, you know, sometimes they continue to manufacture for 20 or 30 years, right? Some products have a lifetime of a few years. And by then, you know, they're already replaced. Some of these whatever, sensors or, or other types of things, they're actually manufactured for, for a long time. So, you know, these agreements in any case have long term. And some of them have a certain term, which then they can be renewed.
I mean , the term part of it is defined in different ways. But at the end of the day, we all have the same interest of continuing these agreements for a very long period, and being able to support the customers, kind of quotes indefinitely, right? You want to have these products, continuing to manufacture and as to continuing to get royalties, of course.
Yes. Yes. And follow on from that. Are they single umbrella or multi-licenses per foundry? Is there any information on that?
The normal way of doing it is having a separate agreement for each geometry in each foundry.
Okay.
Having said that, one of the reasons with one of the guys that we're talking to right now, we actually were almost at the point where we closed an agreement with them on a specific geometry. And then they came back and said, "This is so strategic. We wanna have a license for all of the geometries that we manufacture." And they suddenly opened the agreement to what we call, an architecture license. I mean, to a much broader agreement. So I was there like, "Great. This is great. Oh, shit. Now, the shareholders are gonna have to wait a little more until I can finally announce an agreement," you know? So sorry for the language here.
No, no, no. In place. Go ahead.
So it was kind of, I was really happy. And then I said, "How am I gonna explain to the shareholders that there's yet another delay in getting one of these agreements done?" So we're negotiating with them now, you know, a broader agreement. And I don't know how long it's gonna take us to close that one. But it's a good sign. But, so yeah, some of them actually want to make that leap forward to a broader agreement that covers more than one geometry. The majority normally will start with one geometry and move on. So again, the level of creativity here is unbelievable. Issachar has a lot of experience in these things. And he's an amazing guy. So he knows how to structure these things. And you know, together, we work on building very creative ideas.
Each one of these agreements is gonna be, you know, quite different from others in, in some cases. Yeah.
Excellent. Excellent. Okay. The last question I've got here is we may have touched on this last time. But I know that Weebit's talked before about a potential NASDAQ listing. I mean, the U.S. is by far the largest, deepest capital market in the world. So, if you could, why not? But would you retain your ASX listing or a dual listing in that scenario?
I'll correct you first.
Oh.
Weebit hasn't been entertaining a NASDAQ listing, at least not up to now.
Oh, okay.
It's everyone's asking me about it all the time.
Okay.
You know, I, I joke that if I would get $1 for every time I'm asked the question about NASDAQ, I wouldn't have to raise money ever. So people ask about it. It's natural. I mean, the natural home for Weebit is NASDAQ. Having said that, you already mentioned, last year, we had a very good raise here on the ASX. I, you know and it's not a secret. We've had some issues with the ASX. But it's very important for me to clarify. And especially with the you know, two weeks ago, there were these absurd articles that came out about, you know, Weebit is an ASX hater. And, and I, I don't know where these reporters did get that.
They didn't say this. Right. Okay.
It was just so absurd. But, you know, yes, I think many companies have issues with ASX. We are working with ASX to resolve these issues. I think overall, we're in a good discussion with the ASX. We had one of the ASX VPs join a retail meeting in Sydney.
Okay.
I wanna make it clear to everyone, you know, we are not in a war with ASX. We're happy. I mean, look at how much money we raised up to now on the ASX. Look at our great shareholders and the support team and everything. I don't really have a strong reason to leave the ASX. And right now, it's not really something that I'm focused on. W e're happy where we are. Is it normal for us in the future? Will we consider it? T he future is the future. And.
Yep.
These kinds of things, when they're relevant and whatever, I won't say we won't consider it, right?
Yep.
But we're definitely, and it's really important for me, especially I know that many people have been asking themselves after those crazy articles. You know, what's going on here? You know, I mean, editors can write whatever they want. And they can, you know, present things. Nobody lured us to the ASX. We went to the ASX because it made good business sense for us. And we're not looking for ways out. I mean, if we would wanna leave the ASX, we could leave the ASX. It's not such a difficult thing technically to do. So all of those statements, and definitely not ASX hater or anything like that, I mean, that's such an absurd comment to make. I don't even know where to start with that one, but.
Maybe just clickbait. And we should treat it as such. Listen, you've been very generous with your time, Coby. It's always informative. The technology just makes my head swim. And I love that kind of stuff. So I know you guys have been working long and hard at it. It's great to see the milestones being ticked off. And yeah, we'd love to touch base again and check in on progress.
Always. Thanks.
Excellent. I'll let you get on with your day. Thank you so much.
Okay. Have a good afternoon.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.