Hello everyone, and happy welcome to another quarterly update call today with some news on how we developed the company and the business, and the rollout over the last couple of weeks and months. With some updates also how we are progressing, given also the adjustments that we made in the last quarterly update, which was not necessarily only based around positive news, where we really decided to slow down the growth. I think today it is quite the opposite, where we can really show great progress. As a quick reminder on this format of the call, we have started to structure this call, called Circus Inside, as an operation update call, always around the whole element that there is a lot of interest in how our operations are evolving. It is not an earnings call.
There is no active participation from our new CFO, Christian, today, but really more an operational deeper dive so it is easier for everyone to understand our business, the KPIs, the operational metrics that we are focusing on to really drive the success and the growth of the new technology and the business overall. To get things started today, it is a bit of a special occasion. Today, our CA-1 is celebrating its first birthday. When we think back nearly exactly one year ago, so really actually not even exactly yet. So at end of October a year ago, we launched operations at REWE. In September last year, we launched operations with Meta. So one year ago, we were really starting at basically zero. Really understanding the dynamics of operational business, with all its ups and downs.
A lot of you have come by already and seen the technology, either at REWE or at the launch events at Meta or other customers to date. But really, a great reflection on what has happened and what we have achieved over the first year of commercial operations of an entirely new category and technology that is right now really about to shape and grow from our perspective. When we look today in how the customer perception is, which from our view is one of the most important elements. Do customers love robotic-made meals? That is the base question that stands above everything in terms of revenue growth, reliability of the infrastructure. And that is really something that we can today mark as proven definitely. And it does not matter if it is a REWE store, if it is a Mercedes-Benz location, if it is with the German Armed Forces, we see great adoption.
We see thankful customers that today get served with great meals at a great price and an exceptionally high availability, 24/7 across the locations. And we look at the ratings that we really gather from right now, a year of first operations. We are at a good momentum today with 4.4 out of five, which leaves a good room and enough room to improve. And when we think about the first year of operations, there is definitely always room to improve, given the really young nature of the technology. But one thing that we have definitely proven is that the market and the timing is right, and that customers are not scared to get food served from a robot. It is kind of the opposite, that they love it and that they see the true benefits of the technology.
Which when we look into other robotic industries, autonomous driving, humanoids, and so on, are still very much driven by fear and driven by regulation. While in our industry, we see a massive frontier that we discovered and right now really are building on. To give you a full overview of where we stand today in terms of our operational KPIs, I think that's something that gives a very good overview of how the company has developed right now, really 12 months into the business of operation deployments post right now, a few years of R&D and really getting the unit to perfection. We are operating today across eight countries, including our recent launch in the UAE. We have built a significant footprint across the European continent, are not only active in Germany anymore, and really targeting also the whole Central European market.
We see mass growth opportunities in other markets. That obviously also includes the U.S., the Asian market. There's a lot more for us to grow. For now, our decision has been to really focus on a market where AI adoption and the appetite for new technology is exceptionally high, which is the UAE as a great market to grow beyond our European base. And obviously building on all opportunities within Europe, with customers we are already serving and customers to serve over this quarter that has right now been started and the next year and the next years. That overall makes us, to date already, the biggest operator of an autonomous fleet of fully robotic-based systems.
Meal production on a robotic base is something that is fairly new, and this is something where we have spent a lot of time to really build the scalable foundation, which right now is really paying off in our speed. We are not necessarily there at a point where we want to be. Yes, we would love to grow faster. Yes, we would love to have more deployments. But that always comes at the trade-off of high cost of deployment and high cost of growth. So we're trying to really find the perfect balance of speed in growth, in deployment, so we really have time for iteration cycles and to adapt. We're serving today 19 enterprise customers across our eight countries. This will grow towards 30 accounts towards the end of the year.
Each of our customers, like every single customer, has the potential to grow far beyond its current potential. We are still at a point where we haven't changed the dynamics of our growth and sales strategy. We're targeting enterprise customers that can always grow with us in the double or triple digit area. So all customers we're serving today are really the starting point of each account, where it's all about really making the customer happy that is using our technology and making sure they can grow with us over time and get their complex operations on the food side resolved and change entirely to our technology and grow with us along the way. Which also means that over the course of next year, yes, you will see multiple accounts to be added.
The core focus also looking into the next year will definitely lie in also advancing existing accounts and making sure we really push on follow-on orders, international rollouts with customers who already won and deployed to today. On the fleet size, that gets us to 33 systems status quo to date with a ratio of 1: 3 CA-1s with the CA-8s where there is a clear differentiation on the CA-8 being more of a market entry product, which just sells and turns faster, and the CA-1 with a higher complexity, but obviously also a much higher revenue integration component that gets us to roughly one-third growth quarter-over-quarter, which I think gives already a good slide view on where we stand in terms of deployment pace, which is pretty much accelerating right now quarter on quarter.
Where we took the break over the course of summer, really understanding where we want to and can improve, and achieved a lot on that end, which right now is already reflected in the reliability of our technology, which was the hardest thing to achieve probably over the last years. With a good 93% uptime across mature systems. We are looking at mature systems and defining them as systems which are in the market for 100 days and longer. Which is really the time where it is important for us to look into the unit and see how things are going and have the processes evolve. Are the processes stable? Training dynamics and so on. That really the reliability is given on a daily and weekly basis, and the knowledge sits with the customer and not only with us and the dependency towards the customer.
I will dive deeper into that over the course of the presentation. On the revenue side, when you think back about the last quarterly update that we made, not necessarily with the greatest news of really radically reducing our guidance for this year to really make sure we can improve, and we did improve on all the ends we wanted to and took the time to do that, with a lot more growth to come over the next year and years for sure. But already great improvements right now with the targeted guidance that we are very confident in for this current financial year.
On the culinary side, what is really much growing right now as a foundation of our data that we will further monetize and leverage over the next years to come, is an entire massive pool of culinary data when it comes to the perception of ingredients, the perception of every ingredient element in the cooking process, what customers demand and what region, and how we can forecast certain supply chain elements. This is something that no company has ever really built before, and no company has that data to date. McDonald's might have that on cheeseburgers, but there is no really central pool when it comes to food and nutrition data across markets, across industries. Today, we are in a position where we own and leverage the data from soldiers eating in a barrack, to factory workers in Mercedes-Benz, to REWE customer, to somebody in the UAE.
Which really gets a great picture and creates a great opportunity for us to leverage that data and further optimize on culinary offerings, demand forecasting and so on. With right now over 230,000 meals and portions served and over 2 billion data points that we right now already start to leverage to optimize our operational process and supply chain automation further. On a cost base, something that I think is very interesting to see on how we're developing and how we're optimizing on our cost base, given the nature of a young deep tech company, we're not profitable yet. What we're really eyeing on is how to, even in that intense growth phase, optimize our cost structure on a running base. When we just compare the Q2 versus Q3.
Q2, we made some adjustments to our growth strategy, but at the same time, we also managed to make great adjustments to our cost structure. When we look at that's nearly 25% change and optimization on our cost base, while at the same time nearly tripling our deployment speed. Which just gives, I think, great proof of how we're managing to optimize processes, further automate processes, leveraging really AI across the entire company, and build a very clear path towards profitability mid-term. The whole operational KPIs really reflect on that and show where we're improving specifically and what is really pushing the cost down.
The cost on our end today, and the price to scale always comes with time to deployment, how fast and how many systems we can deploy in what time, and how we can bring more efficiency into the supply chain, which really much takes the majority of our operational efforts to make sure everything works perfectly and seamless in the day-to-day operations. On the lower KPIs in the corner, deployment time, one of the biggest improvements that we managed to achieve over the right now, the first half of the year, where we're really starting to grow across CA-1 and CA-8 deployments. We started from nearly nine days for one system to deploy. Today, we're at a point where from the point of delivery to first, we always call wet runs, right? First new service, we are roughly five days.
Within a week, you get a full new infrastructure installed, tested, up and running, and really onboard the entire customer, which right now allows us to scale multiple systems at the same time across multiple countries. You've seen that probably or hopefully over our last announcement with a parallel launch right now with two clinics, much traditional customers deployment, a launch in the UAE, where we launched new CA systems in Paris in parallel. There's a lot going on without right now growing the labor cost internally in the operation teams, but just by driving efficiency and more standardized processes as we grow faster and faster quarter by quarter.
On the Circus Pods, a bit of a related metric, which is really the metric and the one thing that we established after our Q2 update and really reflecting back on our first half year of operations, is the start of Circus Pods as our own white label infrastructure and ingredient platform, so we can really bring a higher level of reliability into the entire operations. What we learned in the first half year on this new technology is that if the ingredients are not right, then the rest will always struggle, right? It is a simple phrase of in, out, frankly speaking, which is something that we really focused on a lot, which doesn't mean that right now we're selling dishes.
We need to provide the infrastructure and the platform at the back to make sure that we can guarantee stable operations, push our costs down, scale faster, as we're building more standards across the entire value chain. Just to give you an overall number and a bit of a rough feeling, since right now establishing Circus Pods as entire infrastructure. Basically, weeks ago, we have produced and based on order, and based on volume from customers, over 14 tons of ingredients, which already run through our platform, which we expect obviously to grow massively right now over the next weeks and quarters. The big driver here is that we're right now also starting to making it mandatory to use our pod infrastructure and therewith also scaling our recurring revenue streams beyond software into ingredients and our related fee structures.
When you look a bit on what happened specifically in Q3, one thing that is hard to quantify, but something that has definitely driven a lot of the efficiencies across the company, is our massive efforts to push more into automation of entire company operations and departments, which is not only AI and automation across the robotic systems. Also really into the entire company and the organization on remote incident resolutions, demand-supply predictions. Today, we are already running our entire remote support operations from the Philippines, which we have completely outsourced, and which is only possible because entire processes are right now AI-coordinated on the first layer of communication. So we can really become smarter in understanding incidents, understanding challenges that we need to jump into, and optimizing everything on maintenance deployments more proactively. We launched the Circus Pods. We launched in the UAE.
One thing that we haven't really talked about that much, and I can only talk about that limited today, is something that you basically didn't see yet. We started the first batch of launches with REWE, Meta, and with the German Armed Forces. Right now, the German Armed Forces already operates two systems, and they have added a CA-A system, with a bigger press event coming next week, actually, and have already signed one contract extension with them as they're happy on how the soldiers adopted to that structure. We're right now growing on that and on the defense side are already in an active tender process for the next location with the German Armed Forces, which by DNA is not the fastest industry to work in.
But I think something where we have shown great proof that we went into that industry fast, and we went to that industry fast to stay there, and right now growing on our first cases and extending beyond the pilots, not only in defense but also on the commercial side with right now more news to come on the Meta side, not only for the German entity of Meta but also beyond that to new countries. The same thing on the REWE side. For everyone who is deep into the numbers knows we started with a pilot case, which was aimed towards six to eight months.
Right now, we are celebrating one year of operations, which I think already gives you a good feeling that there is no intention to right now end the pilots, and we will have some bigger news on that over the course of the next weeks, how that whole case on retail integration of food robotics will continue. On the fleet side, to give you a few insights, and I think something that has been heavily requested, how right now the structure is and how we are scaling across the different industries that we are targeting and how the overall fleet is growing.
One thing that I think is clear to everyone is that our growth, even for the next years, will always be back-loaded towards the third and fourth quarter, simply because there is a certain exponential growth as we really rapidly improve and evolve in the speed of deployment, speed of production, speed of winning customers. That is really driving growth always towards the second half of the year. When we look at the fleet today, there is a good 1:3 ratio between the CA-1, the CA-A. We will close the year right now as management target with 19 CA-1s, and beyond 40 CA-As. On the CA-A side, as we are just starting production, there might even be a bit more, and we are pushing to outperform ourselves in the plans right there.
What is interesting is the dynamics of the CA-1 and the CA-A, where the CA-A is the cheaper and the smaller product, which obviously sells faster and deploys faster. All you need is a standard plugin. You can start running the system, but it also creates a great market entry opportunity for us and a much faster way of adapting to a new technology, where we have right now multiple customers starting with the CA-A and then advancing towards negotiations and deployments on the CA-1 side, and planning a whole kind of structure and phases of deployments towards full autonomy, starting with smaller system and growing to the bigger ones.
Independent of the fleet size, on the revenue share side, 85% of our revenues are coming from the CA-1, which is still the unbeaten flagship of our operations, which will also continue to be that case, but on a fleet size that allows us to grow fleet much faster across more countries, more industries, and more use cases. On the fleet distribution, we've always aimed for a very broad distribution and broad industries of our technology, which I think also gives a great proof on the standardized use of our technology and the demand across industries. When we look at the share right now, retail and hospitality remains the biggest one. That's where we started. That's where we come from. That's where an upselling metric is also the strongest business case for a lot of customers we're serving today, and that's also where the CA-A comes from.
Just also by that acquisition and right now joint synergies of the fleet, that is really the biggest share to date. Health and care, right now, one of the faster-growing use case industries right now with the launch of Schoen Clinics, a lot more things coming on the health side, as we're also diving deeper into personalized nutrition and supplement-based nutrition on the CA-A infrastructure. Defense and public sector, our youngest sector, and a sector that we just start deployments with this year, already making 90% of our entire fleet, and also a great sector where we see massive demand and a ton of negotiations. Just by DNA, that sector remains to be slower compared to others, where retail, healthcare, office catering remain to be the faster ones when it comes to closing and implementing new technologies.
When we take a bit of a deeper look into customer deployments and basically really proving the case of a standardized technology that works across different industries, I think right now over just 12 months of getting our technology in the field, we have really proven that the technology is ready to be adopted, and there's a massive demand across sectors. We are focusing on enterprise customers and have won some of the most relevant and biggest companies probably in the world and across our sectors. That ranges from, for example, the deployments that you can see with Mercedes, Secura, Meta, more to come on that end. The start with the German Armed Forces, the add-on with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, one of the federal ministries that we're serving today, two police stations in Antwerpen, universities, and a lot more to come in that sector.
Retail and hospitality, where we're counting the largest share of accounts today, and we're just jumping deeper into also hospitality and hotels with two hotels actually right now, as we speak, in deployment in the German market, where it's a great opportunity for hospitality and hotel businesses to upsell customers with meal offerings they are not serving today, and increasing their revenue per customer independent of the bed they already provide, and give a better experience to every customer that stays within their facilities. On health and care, you can see Palm Trees, which is something that except the UAE, we don't really have had yet. One thing that you can see here is a modified version in a Chama Group location.
Chama Group, one of our largest customers when it comes to the CA-A deployments, where they are using our technology to serve customers within their spa facilities, an account that has been growing with us over the last years, and where the technology is directly integrated. You can just, as a guest, pay with your chip card and get a fresh drink out. We are diving deeper on the CA-A side into the care sector. Schoen Clinics right now with the CA-A One. All industries are basically right now live with both kind of systems.
When we think about why that whole demand is even constantly growing and that also across industries, across markets from U.A.E. to the German market to the U.S., Asia, end-to-end, that really comes from the perfect timing that we still have, and that is really unchanged and probably also unbeaten in the dynamics of growth of such a kind of new technology, which is always hard to adapt to and hard to get into the market. When we look at food service overall, the labor shortage just keeps growing. Costs continue to increase.
At the same time, automation is still below 4%, and that is really where we are tackling that metric and really driving automation, and there with also a lower dependency on labor costs and solving a massive labor gap at the same time, which are all metrics why enterprise customers starting to work with us today, even though the technology is so new and so fresh in the market. In that sense, our core mission, and our core kind of values that we are working on from a technology perspective remain completely unchanged since day one. It is all about affordability of food. It is about availability, serving meals through robotic technology 24/7 to every human. It does not matter the age, it does not matter the country, it does not matter the income, and doing all of that on autonomous level. That right now has, for the first time ever, transitioned right now beyond Europe for us.
We have, as mentioned, selected the U.A.E. as a great region to grow, as one of the fastest region to adopt to new technologies and build really future-oriented infrastructures. Where labor cost is not necessarily the core driver, but availability, hygiene, and a constant scalable infrastructure is. That is where we are very happy on the launch in the U.A.E., which we right now realized with a distribution partner in the area, which we are working very close with, and a great momentum right now to grow. We have already managed to establish an entire regional supply chain. We are serving meals like chicken biryani and similar things. So also implemented a local culinary setup together with Royal Catering as a leading partner, leading catering company in that region.
Serving everything from the army to catering facilities to government buildings, which gives us a perfect market entry and a strong partner where we can go hand-in-hand to right now scale within that sector and within that market. It is an early deployment for sure, but it is also, I think, a very promising deployment to show, and we definitely believe this region to become one of our most dominant within the next two to three years. On the logistics side and how this is possible to deploy, we spend a lot of time to optimize our entire supply chain process, everything on the deployment side.
Not only with complex deployments like the Secura that you can see in the picture, but also to make sure that the technology is developed and patent-owned within Munich right now, produced globally, and can also be shipped and deployed globally with ease and on optimized costs. We started last year with air as our first logistics channel, which is expensive, right? There it seems easy, but there is a lot of complexity that comes with right now building up multiple channels when it comes to sea, when it comes to rail, to air. That is something that we have achieved to date. What we did over this year and where there is also a lack of deployments in Q1 is where we switched to more of a multi-channel strategy on deployment and shipments of our technology and systems.
Today, when we compare air and rail and other channels, that pushes our logistics costs and deployment costs down by up to 80%, which is a massive improvement, and we do not really rely on a single channel on logistics anymore. Then it is up to the customer, to the market, to the case, which kind of channel we are using. But right now maximum flexibility to scale into basically every country that you can imagine. The scalability comes with a second element. That element is reliability, and that element is uptime. That is something that is probably one of the most asked question and something of the most demanded insights in these sessions to see how we are performing.
To dive a bit deeper into that slide, because I think it explains a lot on what is going on in the company, is that we right now achieving a very stable, far beyond 90% reliability and uptime across our mature systems. That is something that you can see in black, where we started in January with a good 70%, and that was kind of the hard go-to-market phase to really improve on stability, trainings, supply chain, ingredients, maintenance networks, which all is complex to build and is a certain effort when there is no blueprint for what you are doing. Right now, I think we have shown a great growth curve and a great stability across all units, all systems as they mature more and more.
What you can see is on the new systems deployed is as soon as we started to deploy more systems in June, this is where we saw not the best KPI performance. Which is also where, at the very core, the decision comes from to slow down on our growth. I think we've communicated a lot of detail on that before, but I think that gives a good insight on how we also managed to turn the ship around on that end. Take the time, take a hard cut, and all the consequences that come with it, but really making sure that we can grow even better and even stronger after that one cut.
What you can see here on the fresh systems that we're installing, where we launched fresh systems with a good 55%-57% uptime in June and have been really struggling with the operations and to really have the training, the supply chain stable and running. Right now across August, September, and an even better performance that we already see in Q4. The new systems run much more stable, onboarding is much easier, training is much easier, which all comes down to the pods, better trainings, much more stable onboarding, deployment, reliability, optimized manufacturing and testing processes.
All that coming together is kind of reflected in that metric, which is all what is about, that you really get a reliable technology that is not only more reliable than a chef, but really is always up and running when you want it, and we're working very hard towards achieving that and getting that to 100%. The second metric, which is kind of the second most important metric when looking at how we're developing from an operational perspective, is the handling time and how much you have to interact with the system on a daily basis. We want that to be the absolute minimum, and we want that getting down to a few minutes a day. The similar amount of interaction that you have with the coffee machine should be the case for autonomous meal production, even though you produce hundreds of meals on a daily basis.
There's still a path to go, but also here, it's great to see where we start in February, where you had to spend a good three, four hours and have a constant view on the machine to really make sure everything is up and running. We really improved a lot right now month by month as we optimize on our operational processes. Today, and with an average on Q3, we're averaging at a good one hour 47 minutes across all systems, which gives great proof on the optimization that we've done. That means to serve hundreds of meals a day, all you need is one person below two hours. Which often today with new customers is covered by the existing staff already. So there's basically zero new added staff to right now run a fully autonomous kitchen and canteen environment. Yes, we continue to support that.
We continue to support the rollout overall, and we continue to really care and work hand-in-hand with the clients to make sure that we can further learn and improve that. One metric that has improved right now rapidly as well is the cooking failure rate. Everybody who has tried our systems in the first month has definitely experienced things on dispensing not ideal, meal not coming out, all these kind of things that happen in a very early phase of a new technology.
It's something where we're right now around 1% failure rate, which is something that is acceptable given the phase and the maturity of the technology, but something that we're further improving to really make sure every meal that is coming out of the system is perfect, delicious, and at the right temperature, at the right nutritious profile, everything you can imagine to really make our culinary intelligence even stronger and even better. As a last but not least, what you can see here is also the massive improvements over the course of August and September, which is really where we started to take things slower on the growth for a certain period of time, implemented Circus Pods, implemented new processes, and that right now on saving 20, 30 minutes a day.
That is also the effect of Circus Pods and a white label infrastructure platform for the ingredients, which is very much driving efficiency and higher scalability, reliability of the systems. On the consumer side, as a second metric, which we're always looking at and I think which is very interesting to see, we don't necessarily always know the retention because we don't collect consumer data from a customer on a personalized base. What we can see is how fast customers approach the system and how fast they place an order and get a meal. Today, we had a median order time of 19 seconds. That means you go there, you click what you want, and you get it within seconds.
That is entire process from I start a session at the robot to I have my order placed, with a waiting time that averages right now around five to seven minutes to really get a fresh meal based on your preferences, out of a fully autonomous system. Something that is a great proof of how we manage to find also the right menu, the right fit of an audience to what they're requesting, and further improving that we always match the right trend based on our culinary data of what customers want and to really make the decision process super easy and create a great match of what a customer expects from our systems and the technology overall. The whole foundation of that, and to get some insights on where we're improving right now on the software and hardware level, is and will always remain the CircusOS.
Without right now diving into every feature, and we've done a couple of live demos on that one, is the growth along the entire supply chain. What we have today and what we right now established over the last quarters is, for example, a product called Tracy, where right now with a simple scan of an ingredient package, you can basically track the entire supply chain of the ingredient. You can see where it comes from, you can see the nutrition values, you can see when it goes bad and retrack everything, which goes far beyond the robotic system itself, but really to make sure that we have an entire intelligence supply chain end-to-end, from buying the ingredient, to putting the ingredient into the robot, to serving it to a customer.
On that base, further optimizing the demand prediction as a base, optimizing culinary control and also a central unit control, where right now we're in the process of also integrating the CA-A into our fleet. So you have a single interface where you can manage best case hundreds of systems that you run and control. It doesn't matter if it's a CA-1, it's a CA-A or a CA-M to come. On the supply chain, on the pod side, I've shown a few of the packages before. That is really the biggest driver that right now makes our entire ecosystem complete. Right now, handling time down roughly 70%-80%. We're right now live with only 30 SKUs, which from our perspective is not enough to really cover a full holistic menu. We started with our most prominent categories, with pasta, with veggies.
Right now adding rice, adding more elements to the entire structure. But that right now is the big driver on the recurrent piece and something that we have basically established in rapid time, not only within Europe, but also already live with that set up in the UAE and right now across all countries and nearly already all customers, including the defense sector by the way. On the CA-A, the youngest product of the family, and something where we're right now building on top of the success that the Alberts team has built over the last years. What we're right now doing is focusing more on our most prominent sector, which is everything when it comes to performance nutrition and the overall health and care sector. Right now, we start to work also with powders.
So we're not at the point anymore where we're dealing with fresh or frozen ingredients, but also with powder bases, so we can have things like protein, matcha, creatine, arginine boosters, all kinds of things you can imagine to really drive personalized nutrition at tap, and not only on a blender or pod base. Which further right now increases the use case for us, and there will be a lot of great news and deployments, where, A, we'll be able to explore it, and B, which really will give a great proof of how things are used for athletes for sports centers, wellness facilities, everything where today you, if even, still have a guy standing there with a blender trying to mix some stuff together.
We are making that an entirely scalable infrastructure to actually serve not only the main dishes and meals, but also the entire nutrition for your day-to-day around it. You can see a bit on the one picture, we started volume production already, which is rapid speed. It took us, I think, a good two and a half, three months right now to set everything up, shift the production, and use the synergies that we have with our own supply chain, with our own suppliers. Right now, given the success of production with the CA-A, we can directly leverage the knowledge that we already have, the supply chain, all the production knowledge to boost that product further. Currently with the first batch of 10 right now live in production, that's a picture that's a few days old, and more to come.
As we right now scaling with that system in a right now aimed three-digit range already the next year in case of new deployments just from a CA-A, as it is a product that is obviously scaling much faster and is incredibly easy to scale and implement. On the CA-M side, the most complex product for sure that we've ever built, and I think a true groundbreaking product where we continue to improve further and further, and to build something that is not only on a prototype level, but really serves the purpose of soldiers in their day-to-day. Which is not only about a container with a cooking robot inside, but also everything that you need in terms of features around it. That goes into the area of an integrated generator, solar powered roof panels, platforms, so you can really cover the area around it. Light modules, shock absorption.
There's a whole stack of features that goes beyond the scope that we're already serving. That is something that requires time and requires efforts and a very close relationship with the defense partners that we've already built up. We're working in very close exchange with our active accounts on that end. We completed the first concept prototype right now a few months ago. I think a couple of you probably saw that already in our old headquarters in Munich. Right now started with a so-called shell production, which is kind of a custom-based framing that we're right now developing, integrated generator, as mentioned, energy components, shock absorption covers and so on.
That really we not only getting a kind of CA-A in a box, but we're really getting a great new level, and the whole revolution of a field kitchen, which then will scale beyond defense operations into overall disaster relief and more related cases, with a lot of things to come there. We're right now planning to launch the first system and really get out with a lot more prominent event to come over the first half of the next year. We have shifted a few things on that to really much focus on the products that we have today and improve on that first, before we're going too crazy on additional products, but continue to develop on the CA-M side. Last but not least, the known face of our portfolio of autonomous physical AI systems, where we're constantly evolving on the CA-A side.
Right now, for example, with updated cooking profiles, cooking stations, to really make sure we can work with a better heat distribution, shorter cooking times, avoid pot burns even at high temperatures that some ingredients require. We are constantly optimizing on our technology, filing new patents and making sure we are keeping our pioneering, and right now also from a technology perspective, market leading position. At the same time, making sure that the remote interaction with the system and the infrastructure works well across every country. As mentioned, we are running international teams for international fleet, which not only allows us to bring the cost down, but also will allow us to rerun every system 24/7, and also have the perfect support for every imaginable case in the middle of the night. We will be active right now over the next weeks on a couple of conferences.
We share some more news when it comes to additional new deployments. Right now, with a great fleet that we are closing the year with of, as said, roughly 19 CA-1s over 40 CA-A, really scaling the fleet. There will be a couple of news also related to the locations right now that we will be active in, with London right now and being quite present on our end with those deployments coming up in that region, and share more about our progress. Obviously also share more on the view ahead into 2027, which we have been fairly quiet on.
Coming from a very simple thing that, as Albert Einstein says, "A stupid man is only man who does the same mistake twice." We are really making sure that the plans, the guidance, the deployment structure for the next year is more reliable, and more customer and country oriented, so we can give a lot more detail on the overall scale across the systems, across the different regions, across the sectors and customer base over the quarter to come. Over the course of Q4, obviously there will be more insights. Right now already in the deep plans with Christian as a new CFO who has just joined the company. For that, thanks a lot for listening and thanks a lot for joining in. There is always a constant invite that stands for everybody who is joining.
If you have not explored or tried food from one of our systems yet, at the very end, the taste remains the most important. We are always very happy to host you here. We have a system here in our Munich R&D center and headquarters, so always happy to welcome anyone, where lunch is on me. Thanks for joining. We will update the track back in the transcript after, and are very happy to take more questions on the operational side of things now. I think there should be a box right now, and you can submit questions if you want. Okay, I am just getting the first questions. Give me a second to read. First question that came in. Do you provide performance guarantees to customers for CA-1, especially for uptime? What are main reasons for downtime? Super interesting question.
On the one side, yes, there's a guarantee for the system, which also comes as a guarantee from Celestica on the overall produced unit. On the uptime and stability, yes, most of our contracts include that, where we guarantee a minimum uptime of 80%. That is something that I think is very fair, and we should achieve that. Which doesn't mean that customers necessarily can cancel contracts when we don't achieve it. But there are certain rules which work against our recurring fees. If a unit is not performing or not working at all technically, you don't have to pay for software that should run it and should do exactly that. There is a financial risk for us.
But right now, when you look into the performance metrics, that's nothing that is a reality, and that's also nothing that is right now calculated on a daily basis. Then only becomes active if that really goes over a certain time. Main reasons for downtime, two things, which is food and people, honestly. You can really build a robot to perfection and 100% uptime in the lab. As soon as you go out into the market, that's where you really see and explore the things that will go wrong. There's always a ton of things and things that we have never thought about and never thought about that that could even be an issue.
That's where we come from with the Circus Pods to make sure that the input has a certain standard and quality, which at the very end leads to a higher reliability and stability of the system. The second thing is to basically hold hands for the first weeks of deployment and really make sure that the training and the onboarding of such a new technology works seamless and can be handed over to the customer. Going to the next. How many employees are you now, and how many do you expect to grow? We're around 85 FTEs right now, with right now a handful of people who joined through the Alberts acquisition. It is nearly exactly the same amount of employees we have been last year and the year before.
Right now, with the shift between operations, R&D, Tech Ops, we are always making sure that we reallocate the resources where they're needed most. But we don't expect to right now massively ramp up our teams. With definitely very strong growth expected within the next year, we might crack 100, but we're also very much in love with lean organizations. With all things that are working right now against scaling headcount on the AI side, we probably balance and keep the headcount very lean. On new regions, for example, with the UAE, right now we have two people who are supporting us there on ground, which is one person for supply chain and culinary and one for technical service and maintenance, but on a fairly acceptable cost base. The rest is always realized with partners on ground who scale with us on a distribution partnership base.
Just do the quick ones first. When we start operations in the U.S. Honestly, I would already love to. I think the opportunity there is massive. We are right now seeing that the dynamics of autonomous food production is very different there. We are right now, if you are following the market, you have seen two capital rounds, one $650 million from Google Ventures, one $1.7 billion, with two really renowned entrepreneurs who are kind of tackling and dipping directly into our market with a little bit of a different approach, but still in R&D mostly. We want to leverage the position that we have and to grow globally as fast as we can. Honestly, for us, it is a question of capital and focus. Right now, we see great momentum in Europe, and we also see great momentum with the UAE. That is the focus for now.
U.S. is on the plate, but we do not have an exact date for it yet. Yeah, small one. Why is the CFO not attending any of the conferences? Good point. He will attend a few. Depends a bit on the meetings, honestly. There is a few where I am just as a keynote speaker, there is a few where we do one-on-ones, and he will definitely join that. Sorry, give me a second. How do you see the competition with GoodBytz that recently opened up location in Leipzig and gas station in Bavaria? Honestly, I love every new system from any kind of competitor that right now is getting to the market. One of the hardest things to achieve for us is make, A, adoption, and B, even realizing that our kind of technology works, tastes well, works reliably in the market.
There is a trillion-dollar opportunity, and that will not be won by one player. Honestly, I love every player right now that is getting into the market and increasing the dynamics, which always gives us a good platform to show where we are better and where our system maybe make more sense or pricing is more attractive. How many CA-1s can Circus produce per month now? If you think back into Q1 on our growth strategies, which we adjusted a bit over the year, we have the capacities to ramp right now up to 16 CA-1s per month, technically. That is not what we are doing given the volume for the year. The peak that we have been building is right now six in parallel with a capacity of eight.
Right now we make sure that we are leveling that out, always with right now, roughly a handful of systems in production. Right now, currently, there is, for example, three in production and three in production preparation. What we are making sure is that we are trying to keep it very steady and flat. What we do not want in production is that we produce 10 at the same time, and then the next batch, we want to improve something and the whole team needs to stop production. From a labor structure and the plans with Celestica, that is not ideal. We are trying to be very even across different months and quarters, which is right now good. A handful of units that we are running and prepping, producing in parallel. Maybe a bit related, prospects for working with REWE. How can you ensure that the required production volumes are secured?
Production volumes is something that, honestly speaking, probably is one of our smallest challenges in growth. Given Celestica as a global partner with right now production in Asia and a lot more factories that we can access to rescale to hundreds and thousands of systems on an annual basis, that is something where we are very confident that we can always meet the scale of customer orders. What for us is most important to really make sure that the entire infrastructure also in the back works, and that is something that we have been focusing on for this year. Let me go through it. There is a few. You have recently introduced the Circus Pods. What has been the initial customer reaction and acceptance? What feedback you are receiving regarding operating time and ease of use?
The whole idea on the Pods is to create an Nespresso reality where everything you have is a pod that you plug in. We are not exactly there yet, and there will definitely be a next generation of the Pods. Right now it is still a bag that you need to fill into the silo. So there is still this tiny, small last step missing that we want to improve on. So that it is more like a Tetra Pak you plug in and that is it. So it can be further improved. The overall acceptance is super high. Right now we changed already across Secura, CEDES, Rayven right now shifting to it. Boom Sphere is running on it. The core clients are all running on it already and shifted their entire setup. Every customer that is new will by default be running on that structure.
Which for customers who have something existing might be a bit of a shift. But everybody realized that this makes their life easier instead of right now trying to experiment with their own ingredients and own recipes with a system that has already a defined standard and is there to do exactly that. Our customers, mainly are customers who best case don't want to deal with food at all, or not specifically. So we are making their life just more easy given the Pods. Related to the Pods, where are you producing the Circus Pods? Circus Pods right now are produced in Germany, and in Belgium, also through their history with the Alberts acquisition, and UAE is produced locally as well. So there is a ton of questions still. We won't manage to go through all. I am just trying to go top-down, basically.
I think, yeah, one question that pops up multiple times, can you give us insights on financing dilution and so on? The short answer here is, for us, it is not necessarily about equity, it is about a more diversified working capital structure. Right now, we have raised two capital rounds last year, and both have been pure equity. One is $20 million, one is $30 million. And just also honestly speaking from my own perspective as the largest shareholder to date, there is no active interest in maximizing dilution. Not at all. What we are right now getting a lot better on and where multiple things are right now will be introduced very soon, is on the working capital side, debt, more financing partners, stronger partnerships on the leasing side. This is all something that we weren't even able to do last year.
We had to really pre-finance hardware production, sometimes from expensive equity, which is just not an ideal setup, as it is not really cash flow friendly. That is something that we are looking on most, on how we can re-diversify and have more options on the bond side. Different financing and leasing partnerships that we are right now extending. Does that mean we will never raise equity again? No, it does not. When we look right now into the dynamics of the market, from my humble personal opinion, the company right now, given what we are doing, given the customer base, given our growth and stability, the valuation of the company, I think can be questionable when you compare it to other players, specifically in the U.S., which are reaching $5 billion-$7 billion valuations pre-revenue, pre-product.
That is something that we are right now looking into on how we can boost on that. We can definitely optimize on the valuation and the share price, and not get into a situation where we would raise equity at such a low valuation. Partner here is Royal Prestige. The location for if somebody wants to note that down is Marina Square, in Abu Dhabi. It is open daily, so you can just walk by and grab a meal there. Maybe because there are multiple questions also on the U.S. market. What we are doing and what we feel is the leanest strategy, to enter the U.S. market is through customers and kind of U.S.-based customers that we already have now. We right now, I mean, the most renowned is Meta, and there is a couple of companies who operate globally.
Hospitality gives a lot of great examples, on the health side as well. That we build up accounts in our already active regions and then basically scale with them towards more markets and more countries, which makes it a lot easier for us to scale because we are not starting from zero with new accounts and new structure, but can already really build on top of some existing relationships. That is right now the plan, and there are great negotiations on that already. Also great question. When will there be the new version of the CA-1? We are not reinventing the wheel every time, and it is similar to, I think, a car, I would say. When there is a new model S coming out, it is not that they really throw everything away and are building a new car from scratch.
There is constant way of optimizing, which is a much leaner and a much more modern approach, I would say. That is something that we are doing. If you just compare the two units behind me, there is already probably 10 differences. Not every element is visible, and that can be the angle of cooking stations. The newer systems do not have a back window anymore because it is lighter and not necessarily needed because often in front of the wall. So we are constantly doing refinements, and right now are technically at a 4.5 already and not a version four anymore. We will continue to do so. There probably will be a new generation at some point, but that only makes sense to really scale when there is a different production volume, which also allows to use different materials and reinvent more elements. But there is R&D constantly ongoing basically.
Great question, I'll solve that. The challenge of humanoids. If humanoids become more stable and robust, if that is not something that will take over. We believe it's exactly the opposite. Right now, humanoid robots, there's a ton of hurdles, right? It's the same with autonomous driving, where the technology might have been already ready five, 10 years ago, but it's also a matter of regulation, of acceptance, of approval in different regions, which really will be a massive hurdle for humanoids to scale independent of their technical capabilities. What we have today is a system that is trustworthy, and it doesn't matter if it's a small child or grandma. Everybody loves it. Everybody comes and tries out. It's not scary to approach. It's certified, from hygiene perspective, from a CE perspective. It's scalable, and the easiest fact here, you don't need legs for cooking.
It will never be as efficient to run a humanoid in a large-scale kitchen environment where it's all about volume and space efficiency. So we do have the arms, but we make sure that the entire environment around it also matches what the arms are doing, and you don't need to run around and find the right pan. That's where the human form is not necessarily the best to scale from our perspective. There's a ton more question. Next one here is biggest obstacles right now. Biggest obstacles right now is really growing the ecosystem further. Which means not only the pods and deployment and so on, but for example, think about service and maintenance. We're right now in multiple discussions also with really large known enterprises who operate thousands of service technicians globally to train them on our systems.
Because right now, a typical field technician in a third-party company that you would usually hire to do that in different regions, they've never heard about a cooking robot necessarily. So that's something where we make sure that also the knowledge how to run our system, how to operate our system, there's a great knowledge transfer and a scalable knowledge transfer, which is something that just comes with a lot of effort. But that right now is really the biggest that we are not getting at a point where we need to build up hundreds of people globally to train and onboard and deploy the systems. But we have partners we can do that with. There's a couple of longer financial questions. We will make sure that we answer all questions and put them into the transcript as well.
Some might also need a financial check and not necessarily ad hoc answer. I think maybe one, because I was also asked multiple times, the last one on the bond structure with Finexity, which is a very interesting one. So we structured the first bond with Finexity earlier this year, which has been great proof of alternative financing for us. I've just shared the stage with the CEO, Paul, earlier this week on their Capital Markets Day, which really shows the gap of financing for a company like us, honestly. So we're not profitable and bankable. We just managed to onboard the different leasing providers right now a couple of months ago, basically, as we start to scale. But still there's demand for production pre-financing, for working capital to really make sure that we can improve on the economics.
Yes, we can always order one robot by one robot, but we will never get great economics on a system that we order. There is a certain buy that is required to get to profitable production economics, which at the very end is working capital that is required to do so. Finexity has been a great support on that. Right now there is also plans to extend that. That is what I can say already. We have signed already a framework up to $50 million. We do not want to right now extend to a $50 million directly necessarily, but we make sure that we extend that across the portfolio and across our customer base and can really offer better, easier ways of financing compared to the leasing structures that we have in place today, which goes kind of hand in hand depending on what the customer wants.
There is a lot of great questions. We make sure to answer all of them. It is across topics, yeah. I will sit later today and make sure I answer all of them as we are already beyond the time, and probably some of you have a hard cut on that. Thanks a lot, everybody, for joining and tuning in to our quarterly update call. We will share everything on the website, and you can probably find the latest on Monday. Thanks a lot, and have a great weekend.