Hello, welcome to the February 18th, 2026 VERSES AI webinar. I would like to read our disclaimer. This presentation contains forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Collectively, forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as plans, expects, is expected, budget, scheduled, estimates, forecast, predicts, projects, intends, targets, aims, anticipates, or believes, or variations, including negative variations of such words and phrases, or may be identified by statements to the effect certain actions may, could, should, would, might, or will be taken, occur, or be achieved.
Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions of management, which are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which may cause the actual plans, intentions, activities, results, performance, or achievements of the company to be materially different from any future plans, intentions, activities, results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect our actual results include, among others, those that are discussed under the heading Risk Factors in our most recently filed reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and our current reports on Form 8-K. The forward-looking statements contained in this webinar represent management's best judgment based on the information currently available. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed, and actual future results may vary materially.
Accordingly, you are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements herein are made as of the date of this presentation only, and the company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. A recording and transcript of this call will be available at the company's website at www.verses.ai. With that, I will now turn over the call to James Hendrickson, VERSES President and COO.
Hello, I'm James Hendrickson, the President and COO of VERSES, and I'm delighted to have so many people on this webinar today. I'll be joined by our Interim CEO, David T. Scott, and our CFO, James Christodoulou. This has been a challenging time for the company, our staff, and for our investors. Despite those challenges, we continue to believe in the work we are doing and the strength of our technology. Thank you for your support, patience, and belief as we apply our technology in the real world. Now, let's get started. On this call, we're gonna cover three areas. First, we will provide more details on the changes to VERSES' leadership announced last week. Second, we will review the fundamental science behind the work at VERSES and how that work has led us to our focus on financial services.
Third, we will cover what this means for our go-to-market strategy. Finally, we will conclude with a short period of questions and answers. One area that we won't cover on this call will be our financials and financial results. We currently intend to release our quarterly and nine-month numbers on Friday, February 20th, at the close of market, and expect to have an earnings call with our CFO, James Christodoulou, on Tuesday, February 24th, at 1:00 P.M., Eastern Time, to focus specifically on our most recently filed financial results. Now, let's talk about the change of leadership. As I'm sure many of you already know, Gabriel René, Dan Mapes, and Kevin Wilson are no longer with the company, and Gabriel and Dan are no longer serve on the VERSES Board of Directors.
Gabriel and Dan built VERSES from an idea on a whiteboard into the public company that is VERSES. We are deeply grateful to Gabe, Dan, and everybody who has been part of this journey, and of course, to you, our investors, who are joining us today. Dave Scott, who joined our board in October 2025, has stepped in as the Interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent CEO. I'm gonna hand the mic over to Dave so he can introduce himself and share some of his background and experience. Dave, thank you for stepping into this role to help guide VERSES through this next phase.
All right. Thank you very much, James. I'm excited to be here, everyone. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. My name is David T. Scott, but most people just call me Dave. I spent most of my professional career building, scaling, and operationalizing technology businesses across enterprise software companies, venture-backed startups, and public companies. I began my career at General Electric under Jack Welch, working within one of the most disciplined operating environments in corporate America. GE shaped how I think about metrics, capital allocation, and execution. The foundation has stayed with me throughout my entire career. From there, I attended the Wharton Business School, graduating at the top of my class. After graduation, I joined the Boston Consulting Group, where I focused on go-to-market strategy for technology and telecommunications companies.
My work centered on translating innovation into revenue, designing commercial engines, monetizing intellectual property, and building durable growth strategies. I later held senior leadership roles at AT&T, PeopleSoft, and Oracle, leading teams responsible for pipeline growth and commercial execution. Navigating acquisitions and mergers inside large public companies taught me how to operate through complexity, align teams, and drive results in periods of change. At Intermec, later acquired by Honeywell, I led the global marketing unit across 20 countries, where I was responsible for streamlining our go-to-market processes and accelerating the launch of new technology products. Most recently, during my time at Amazon Web Services, I led global marketing strategy, operations, and analytics, where I oversaw planning, budgeting, and performance management for a multi-billion dollar marketing organization.
Today, I'm the CEO and founder of Evil Genius Games, a game studio that brings television and movie IP to life through rich role-playing game experiences. Across all of these roles, and as founder who has built and exited several venture-backed companies, there has been one consistent theme: creating value by turning complex technology into scalable, repeatable revenue. That's why I'm genuinely excited to step into the Interim CEO role here at VERSES AI. Before I speak about the path forward, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary foundation that has been built here. Professor Karl Friston's visionary scientific research on active inference forms the intellectual backbone of VERSES' long-term potential. His work represents deep, foundational thinking about intelligent systems.
Dr. Hari Thiruvengada, our CTO, and his research and engineering teams are responsible for translating that scientific vision to day-to-day technical execution, building real systems and real operations that operationalize that research. I believe that this bridge between advanced science and practical engineering is one of VERSES' core strengths. Importantly, I want to recognize our founders, Gabriel René and Dan Mapes. Founding a company around frontier technology takes courage, conviction, and resilience. Dan and Gabe were instrumental in assembling the scientific talent, raising the capital, and articulating the long-term vision, and advancing the technology to its current state. I want to personally thank them for their leadership and their commitment to this mission. Their contributions to VERSES are meaningful and lasting. The opportunity in front of us remains significant, but opportunity alone is not enough. My role here is very clear.
I intend to bring operational rigor, financial discipline, and commercial focus to this organization. I will focus on translating R&D into revenue, and I intend to ensure that we will simplify where necessary, prioritize where required, and move with deliberate speed. From this day forward, you should expect three things from me and VERSES. First, communication. We intend to communicate our strategy, milestones, and measurable progress clearly. Second, focus. We intend to align resources to near-term commercial opportunities, particularly in financial services, while building on the core intellectual property that differentiates VERSES. Third, accountability. We intend to strengthen execution across the organization. We're going to be deliberate about how we deploy capital and clear-eyed about which initiatives truly move us toward sustainable growth.
We've heard from our investors that you want more direct communication from VERSES management, and that's exactly what we're beginning today, and we intend this to be an ongoing commitment, not just a one-time event. This call and our earnings call, scheduled for Tuesday, February 24th, is the first step in demonstrating our commitment to have a more consistent dialogue with the market. On today's call, we're gonna focus on three areas. First, a brief update on the progress of our research and product development. Second, a deeper look at our growing focus on financial services and why we believe that market represents a compelling near-term opportunity. Third, an overview of our go-to-market strategy and our business model, specifically how we intend to convert our differentiated technology into scalable revenue.
With that, I'll now turn it back over to James, who will provide greater context on what we've accomplished and where we're going. James?
Thanks, Dave. I would like to start with a review of what the VERSES team has done and why it matters. Several years ago, we started on an ambitious journey to approach AI from a different and more fundamental perspective. We started with the work of Professor Karl Friston, one of the world's most widely cited neuroscientists, who developed the theories that best describe how the human brain works. We looked at the human brain, which evolution has made enormously efficient, and believed that if we built an approach to AI using the same principles as those used by the human brain, that we would get the type of AI that people actually want in the world. An AI that is very accurate, is more reliable, trustworthy, and efficient, doesn't consume a lot of power, handles uncertainty well, and can learn in real time.
Under Professor Friston's direction, we built an AI platform, which we called AXIOM, the digital brain, that is based on the fundamental elements of a human brain. We demonstrated this in June when we announced that AXIOM had beaten Google's DeepMind in a benchmark test, playing 10 different video games. We then adapted the underlying technology to enable robots to think ahead and plan independently through a series of routine human tasks in a simulated household environment. This benchmark was called Habitat. Our success at these two very different thinking tests proved that we built a set of tools that think and learn like the human brain. These tools are now being deployed in our product, Genius, and we are deploying those tools into financial services. Our R&D team is now focused on applied product development, specifically on capability deployments for financial services.
Many of these capabilities are likely to apply broadly in the way that the AXIOM work supported both video games and robotics. We will also continue to apply these capabilities even more broadly to the ARC-AGI 3 challenge, to show the wide applicability of AXIOM to the AI industry at large. According to the ARC Prize website, ARC-AGI 3 is the first interactive reasoning benchmark designed to measure human-like intelligence in AI. This competition starts on March 25th. To put this into perspective, I want to use the analogy of around electricity. Professor Friston's work is comparable to the discovery of the fundamental principles of electricity. Early pioneers didn't just invent devices, they uncovered the laws that explain how electricity, and later how electrical systems, behave. In the same way, Professor Friston identified foundational principles that describe how natural systems think, learn, and make decisions.
These insights became the basis for what is now known as AXIOM. AXIOM is like the early development of electrical infrastructure. Once the core principles were understood, progress shifted from scientific discovery to large-scale engineering. Building generators, power grids, and electrical device was still complex and demanding, but the challenge became one of implementation, optimization, and scale, rather than uncovering entirely new laws. We believe we are at a similar moment today. Just as early electrical systems powered specific factories, neighborhoods, or machines before electricity became commonplace, we are applying AXIOM in Genius to solve targeted, real-world problems. These early applications demonstrate what's possible, but significant work remains before the full potential of this technology is realized. So with that context, let's look at how we are applying Genius at VERSES. We see tremendous opportunity to apply human-like thinking to real-world computer problems.
We applied Genius across many industries, verticals, and markets as part of our commercial beta program in 2025, many of which showed strong potential for early adoption. With so much interest from various customers and sectors, we had to make some important choices about where we deploy this technology to prove it out in application, but also to deliver returns for our investors. This ultimately means that focus areas like the spatial web, robotics, supply chain, and other areas will take a back seat for a little while, while we focus on the financial services space. So customers in the financial services space showed significant interest, and we entered into several paid contracts during the past few quarters and have received strong customer feedback.
Financial services is a market that has great interest in using AI to automate processes, but to date, has really struggled with the reliability and accuracy of the results. With this background, I want to turn it back over to Dave to dig into the market size and our planned go-to-market.
All right. All right, now let's discuss the practical path forward. Based on our work over the past 15 months, particularly through beta testing and direct client engagement, we believe we have an immediate opportunity to commercialize within the financial services with an initial specialization in portfolio management. We chose portfolio management deliberately, because when you're managing portfolios measured in the billions, even small improvements in risk-adjusted returns translates into real economic value. At a 1% improvement on a $100 million portfolio alone can justify a meaningful investment in better decision support systems. From a market standpoint, financial services represents a large addressable opportunity in the multi-trillion dollar global asset management market. Within that, portfolio management is a highly focused entry point where the economic case is clear and where our differentiation and value proposition is strongest. The feedback that we've received has been consistent.
Target customers see our approach as highly differentiated. Current AI systems used in finance often operate as black boxes. Portfolio managers cannot afford to allocate capital based on model results they cannot explain, particularly during regime shifts such as recessions, inflationary cycles, or periods of extreme volatility. Investment teams don't struggle to find models. They struggle to trust them. Our Active Inference-based technology is designed to explicitly quantify uncertainty and risk and provide transparency when other technologies cannot. By measuring uncertainty and providing transparency, we help portfolio managers and investment teams make more confident decisions. That transparency is what we believe builds trust, and trust is the foundation in financial markets. Over the past 15 months, we have worked closely with a global portfolio manager overseeing more than $100 billion in assets under management.
In collaboration with the client's senior leadership team, we've executed three targeted pilots and are now in discussion about additional work that will lead to sustained long-term engagement. Since August of last year, these engagements have generated recurring revenue and delivered impactful and measurable results. We view that progress from paid pilot to enterprise-level engagement as a positive indicator of product-market fit. Importantly, we now have what we believe is a more robust and repeatable product. What began as a highly collaborative project has matured into something that can be commercialized and deployed systematically. From here, we see three commercialization paths. First, we plan to pursue a land and expand strategy with our existing financial services customer, deepening integration and broadening use cases.
Second, we intend to target comparable institutions, particularly portfolio managers with more than $100 million in assets under management, where the economic value proposition is the strongest. Third, we plan to explore further channel partnerships to expand distribution and accelerate enterprise adoption. As for the business model, our experience so far suggests a hybrid approach. In the early stages of our development, there is often a service and implementation component: onboarding, integration, customization. Over time, as the platform becomes embedded, a greater share of revenue shifts to recurring software licenses. Over time, we expect that mix to shift forward toward higher-margin, recurring license revenue as our relationships deepen and our channel partners expand. From an economic standpoint, we believe that several things are clear. Our technology has been validated in real enterprise environments.
Its computational efficiency means our operating costs are relatively low and stable compared to many alternative AI approaches. And we operate in a high-value segment of financial services, where explainability and risk quantification are not optional, they are essential. Early implementation will reflect deployment phase economics. Over time, as recurring license revenue grows, we expect that model to scale more like a SaaS business, with expanding margins as adoption increases. Over the past several years, we feel that VERSES has achieved meaningful technological breakthroughs and taken important steps towards commercial validation. Now that we have a product exhibiting strong signals of market fit, the priority is clear: we intend to lean into commercialization. That will be our overwhelming focus in the months ahead. So what does that mean in practical terms?
It means that we will endeavor to maintain disciplined execution with our current enterprise customers and deliver measurable value. It means striving to expand thoughtfully within financial services, where our differentiation is strongest. It means continued focus, applied research. Not research for its own sake, but research that we believe enhances product capabilities and strengthens our commercial advantage over time. We are moving from possibility to execution. We look forward to speaking with you again next week as we host our earnings call, and in summary, this is a pivotal period for VERSES. We believe that we have differentiated science, we have technical execution, and we have meaningful intellectual property. Now, we will strive to build the operating engine required to unlock its full potential. We're confident in what we're building, and we're committed to running a disciplined, performance-driven company.
I want to thank you for your trust and continued support, and I look forward to updating you on our progress. All right, so before we close, we have some time for questions. Wow, we've received a significant number of questions through our thoughtful inquiries, through our Reddit community, incoming emails, and even throughout this webinar. And so what we've done is we've selected a few of the most common themes to address today.
All right.
James?
Yeah.
Take it away.
Thank you, Dave. All right, so the first one is a pretty easy one. It's come in a couple of times. Is Karl Friston still the Chief Scientist at VERSES? Dave, do you wanna take that one?
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I just saw this question come up on the Q&A again, just a few seconds ago, and the answer is absolutely yes. Professor Friston continues to serve as Chief Scientist and remains actively engaged. In fact, I spoke to him this morning. As you saw in Karl's Corner last week, he discussed his current work, including applications in financial services. This research is directly informing the architecture and the capabilities of our financial services product today.
Great, yep. So there are several questions that have come in about some of the legal cases that we have previously disclosed. Dave, can you comment on any of these cases?
Not really, James. Because of ongoing legal matters, we really cannot comment beyond what's already disclosed in our public filings. Which, by the way, we will continue to update regularly.
Yep, great. The next one here, as I'm looking at this, there's a number of questions around our cash position and additional fundraising, so I'm gonna just take that right now. That one we will cover. As we mentioned several times, our financials will be published in the 10-Q on Friday, after market, and our earnings call is scheduled for Tuesday, February 24th, at 1:00 P.M. Eastern Time. So you should expect that to be covered at that point. Let's see here. Here's another question that has come up a couple of times is about our staff. It's worded, "I read online that there are no more engineers and researchers at VERSES. Is this true?" No, of course it's not true.
We have the right number of engineers and researchers to deliver on our commitments. I also saw a question come in about the structure of our staff. We are, and have, remain a fully remote organization. That gives us a lot of opportunities on who we can hire, and the skill sets that we can have globally. So I think that's and that one, let's see here. There were several questions about this. Dave, I'm gonna let you address this one, and I think this might be the last one, 'cause we are at time. How long is David Scott likely to be Interim CEO, and what is his plan in the meantime?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, the board has already formed a committee to be able to find a permanent CEO through a search, but in the meantime, I'm fully committed to this role. I'm excited to be here, and I'm excited to help the company execute on the commercialization priorities. Once, of course, a new CEO is permanently appointed, I'll go back to my regular duties as an Independent Board Director of VERSES and happily support that person during the transition.
Great. Thank you. I think that's all the time we have. Rob, did you want to do any concluding thoughts, or do you want me to do that? Never mind, I'm doing it. So, you see on the slide here, the earnings call that we've mentioned several times is scheduled for Tuesday, February 24th. You will be able to sign up for that on our website, I believe beginning now, and it will be on our homepage later in the day. Also, the recording of this and the transcript of this will also be available on our website later today, so that if you had missed this or missed part of it, you'll be able to go back and listen to it.
And the last thing I think we just need to highlight is that our 10-Q will be filed on Friday after market, so look for that, and then we'll add additional color and context around that on the webinar on Tuesday, that's on the screen right now. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for your patience, your thoughtful and interesting questions, and your support as we guide the company through this transition and into this next phase. I think we're all extremely excited about that. And thank you for attending today's webinar.