Good morning, and welcome to Elliptic Labs Q2 results presentation. My name is Ola Sandstad, CEO, and together with Mathias Norderud, our CFO, I will present the results for the second quarter. In addition, I will give a deeper review of our work on new growth opportunities, and finally go through the outlook. As usual, we will conclude the presentation with a Q&A session. Many have been following Elliptic Labs for a long period and know what we represent. But this time I would like to start by giving a short recap on what we are all about. Elliptic Labs have been building and deploying AI-based technology for a decade. Our updated vision is really to maximize the value of edge devices by enabling advanced intelligence to be deployed seamlessly at scale.
To achieve this, we have employed what might be one of the most skilled groups of AI experts, coupled with embedded software developers in Norway. Our current customers build their products in Asia, so we have people on the ground efficiently managing the project execution with Tier 1 device manufacturers. I believe this position and potential is very strong for a Norwegian tech company. Our mission is to utilize this and bring the value to the market, resulting in our commercial success. Our core offering so far has been to provide sensing capabilities to consumer electronics, delivered through our software expertise and use of existing hardware as source of input. Today, we deliver this to the larger smartphone and laptop vendors of this world. Since Q1 of this year, we have expanded our target to include new growth opportunities, both in small and big form factors.
The hunger for contextual intelligence is real, in a space booming with devices that need to adapt and optimize according to the environment and situation it is in. Our embedded AI platform is a key ingredient in this venture. Through the presentation today, we will touch on where we are and where we are heading with our new offering to scalable growth opportunities. As a software company, we need hardware to run on. So during the last decade, we have been established and benefited from tight integration and collaboration with top-of-the-line hardware and chipset vendors in the consumer electronic space. We interact with a large part of these on a weekly basis. This enables us to go from a paper tiger to real production-ready solution in weeks and months, not months and years. We know that this position is crucial to achieve success in the market we operate.
My management team was recently completed with the hiring of Linn Gimmestad, joining as Chief People and Flow Officer. The stream is strongly motivated and focused on executing on our strategic growth opportunities. We are now a lean AI machine delivering on our strategic initiatives presented earlier this year. This includes further expanding business based on our core offering, adding new growth markets and device types to the mix, and ensuring operational efficiency, and doing this with an organization that is more compact and focused. Q2 was a quarter of high activity.
Our research and development teams have been locked on to the priority sets, and a large portion of real-world demonstration kits have been made. These have been used actively in dialogue with selected customer opportunities to get transparent feedback on our value proposition. We have been attending a series of industry and networking events to showcase our latest innovations.
Being a well-established player in the ecosystem has enabled us to reactivate some of our existing connections that now can benefit from our new offerings. Take a brief look at the recent operational highlights. We continue with our focused execution through a transition year, and we are seeing growth in laptop shipments. We have renewed the smartphone contract with a key customer. Our cost reduction is going according to plan. The new and adjacent verticals are seeing promising progress, and we have received positive validation from chipset and IP vendors on our Edge AI platform offering. Turning to the financial highlights, which Mathias will cover in more detail shortly. Revenue for the quarter was NOK 13 million, driven by a combination of milestone revenue and some incremental volume revenue. We continue to see strong underlying operational momentum. Laptop shipments grew 33% year-on-year.
This is important because growing shipment volumes are what ultimately drive cash generation and incremental royalty revenue as volumes move above the contractual thresholds. We also saw continued growth in our market footprint, with the number of smartphone and laptop models launched increasing by 14% year-on-year. We are now delivering growth from a leaner organization. Following the measures implemented earlier this year, we have reduced our annual operating cost base by approximately 15%. While reported revenues reflect the timing and structure of our existing contracts, the underlying indicators are moving in the right direction. Shipments are growing, our install base is expanding, and our cost base is lower. Looking at shipment volumes, as I just mentioned, laptop momentum remains strong, with shipments up 33% year-on-year in Q2. This reflects the contracts won over recent years now translating into devices shipping in the market. We have also significantly improved deployment efficiency.
The number of people involved in a laptop delivery project is much lower than just one year ago. In smartphones, shipments were down 17% year-on-year, mainly reflecting a broader memory and cost constraints. However, our contract mix provides some protection against short-term volume fluctuations. Importantly, we also renewed an agreement with one of our major smartphone customers during the quarter. Model launches remain an indicator of future business development in our core markets. The continued expansion across both smartphone and laptop devices reflects the strength in our products and the relevance of our technology across portfolios and high-volume devices. During the quarter, we saw launches across several of our smartphone customers, with new launches from Vivo, Transsion, Honor, and Xiaomi. In the laptop segment, we saw dual sensor configurations in four of the new models. Providing insights in the business model and market dynamics is a key goal for us.
I will now hand it over to Mathias, who will go through the numbers and provide a deeper dive into some of the financial aspects.
Thank you, Ola, and good morning, everyone. Let's dive into the Q2 financial results. Starting with revenue, Q2 was lower than both the corresponding quarter last year and Q1 this year. This is in line with the communication of revenue mainly being back-end loaded to second half this year. Let me focus on what I see as the key question behind these numbers. Why is laptop revenue so low when shipment momentum remains strong? The answer lies in both the structure and the timing of our existing laptop contracts. The contracts driving current volumes largely remain within their minimum commitment thresholds this quarter. These shipments demonstrate continued adoption but generated very limited incremental volume revenue in Q2. The comparison with last year also matters. Q2 last year included a revenue from our laptop agreement, as well as a higher contribution from incremental volume revenue.
This makes the year-on-year decline in laptop revenue particularly pronounced. On smatphones, we did see lower shipment volumes year-on-year, reflecting the market constraints Ola touched on earlier. The contribution from incremental volume revenue was also limited. Smartphones, nevertheless, accounted for most of the revenue in Q2, primarily due to milestone revenue from the new smartphone agreement entered into during the quarter. As we communicated in Q1, incremental volume revenue for 2026 is expected to remain below 2025 levels, although we expect a higher contribution in the second half of the year. The development so far is therefore in line with our previously communicated expectations. The previous slide illustrates a dynamic that we know makes it difficult for outsiders to model future revenue, especially on a quarterly basis. Revenue is significantly lower so far this year, despite record high shipment volumes in laptop and growth in launches in both segments.
To understand that apparent disconnect, it helps to separate what is consistent from what varies. Operationally, the process is broadly the same across our customer projects. We deliver software, the customer deploys it, and the market demand ultimately derives shipment volumes. What varies is the commercial structure of the contract. This determines when we recognize revenue and when we collect cash. We broadly distinguish between three contract models. The first model, minimum commitment plus IVR, or incremental volume revenue, is particularly important for understanding our current revenue dynamics. It applies to all our active laptop agreements and a meaningful part of our smartphone portfolio. Under this model, the customer commits to pay for an agreed minimum volume regardless of how the product ultimately performs in the market. We generally recognize the value of that commitment when the software is delivered, while cash collection follows reported shipments.
This provides downside protection and the volume upside, but also a timing difference between initial revenue recognition and cash, illustrated by the revenue and cash profiles on the slide here. IVR is generated once cumulative shipments exceed the agreed minimum commitment thresholds. While shipments remain within the threshold, volume growth does not generate a new IVR. This is a dynamic that is particularly strong so far this year. Several active agreements are now approaching their thresholds, supporting our expectation of a higher IVR contribution in the second half of this year. We also have fixed-fee agreements, primarily within smartphones. Here, the contract value is independent of actual shipment volumes. Revenue is generally recognized when the software is delivered, while cash is collected according to an agreed payment schedule. This provides a predictable revenue and cash profile, but no additional volume upside if shipments exceed expectations.
The third and last model combines upfront cash with IVR. This is less common in our current portfolio. The upfront payment provides an earlier cash contribution, while subsequent revenue and cash collection are more directly linked to the shipments. The key takeaway is that shipments, revenue, and cash are connected, but contract structure and terms can cause them to develop differently in an individual quarter. With the contract structures in mind, the year-on-year decline in revenue of 48% is largely explained by timing effects and the different revenue profile compared with last year. We have already covered the revenue development in detail, so I'll focus mainly on the cost side here on the slide. Employee benefit expenses decreased by 39% year- on- year to NOK 11.1 million this quarter. This primarily reflects a lower headcount compared with last year, following the cost efficiency measures earlier this year.
This has resulted in a structurally leaner operating cost base. Other operating expenses were somewhat higher year- on- year, partially due to approximately NOK 1 million in non-recurring legal and patent-related costs. Overall, operating expenses before depreciation and amortization decreased to NOK 18 million this quarter from NOK 23.9 million last year. The lower cost base did not fully offset the revenue decline, resulting in negative EBITDA of NOK 5.1 million this quarter. Looking ahead, with a leaner cost base now in place, we expect operating leverage to improve gradually as incremental volume revenue becomes a larger contributor over time. Moving on to cash flow. Cash decreased by approximately NOK 50 million during the quarter, leaving us with a cash position of NOK 59 million at the end of June. Cash flow from operations was -NOK 8.5 million, an improvement from the previous quarter.
The outflow reflected the operational loss this quarter, in addition to scheduled payments of holiday pay and board remuneration, as well as payment under severance arrangements recognized in prior periods. Those effects were partly offset by a decrease in trade receivables. Please note that the cost measures implemented in Q1 will have their full cash effect from H2 2026. Turning to investment activities. We continue to make selective investments in our core technology and strategic growth opportunities. Going forward, we remain highly focused on operational efficiency and cash flow, while continuing to fund the technology and commercial opportunities that we believe are important for future growth. Turning to the balance sheet. The asset mix remains broadly unchanged from last quarter, with cash, intangible assets, and trade receivables as the main components.
I have already covered cash and our investments in technology, so let me focus briefly on the trade receivables. Trade receivables declined both quarter on quarter and year on year. Day sales outstanding increased, but this primarily reflects the lower revenue base over the last 12 months, rather than any significant change in customer payment patterns. Collections and cash conversion remain a key focus going forward. Overall, the balance sheet remains well capitalized with a strong equity position and no borrowings, providing financial flexibility to support our ongoing operations and strategic priorities. With that, turn over to you, Ola.
Thank you, Mathias Norderud. A key focus for us this period has been to further develop and validate our strategic growth opportunities. Looking at the adjacent verticals, we are seeing commercial progress with new customer opportunities within wearables. The new customer relationships are strategically interesting and represent a new avenue for our company. The use cases center around proximity sensing, combined with agentic AI, and the general aim of making devices easier and more intuitive to use. Our features are enabled by our flexible and efficient Edge AI platform, which is built for embedded devices with limited compute and power. The customer dialog is an encouraging proof that a market exists for the company's technology in this new vertical. Within smart glasses, we continue to progress opportunities where our audio-based sensing approach offers a more privacy-friendly alternative to camera-based solutions.
This development reinforces our view that the category remains commercially interesting. Smart TV customer demonstrations are providing our technology's ability to detect how many people are near the screen. The commercial track is developing according to plan. During Q2, we continued validating our Edge AI offering and its path towards commercialization. We received positive feedback from chipset and IP vendors and progressed discussions with potential lead customers. It is important to underline that the platform capability is not limited to sensing functionality provided by our company. It can be utilized for any AI-based application that needs to combine logic and inference and run in a capacity-constrained environment. This could easily be application sensor fusion, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, acoustic event detection, health signal analysis, and motor and energy control.
We are working from an angle of empowering our hardware partners and their customers, providing an interesting channel and route into new market segments. Now let us take a look at the outlook going forward. Looking ahead, our outlook remains largely unchanged from what we presented in Q1. We remain focused on cost discipline, with approximately 15% reduction in our annualized operating cost base now implemented. The full cash effect of these measures is expected from the second half of 2026. Within smartphones and laptops, we expect continued operational momentum through new launches and growing shipment volumes, particularly in laptops. We also expect revenue to improve gradually through the second half, supported by a combination of milestone and incremental volume revenue. For Edge AI in new verticals, progress remains on track.
Our ambition is still to reach commercial execution during the second half of 2026. With that, we are ready for the Q&A. Let us get the system up on stage and take a look at the questions we have. Stay tuned. We have now put our laptop in front of us with the online system for the questions from the Q&A. We have a good list of questions here. We will try to categorize them somewhat. The first one is from Pernilla. Your revenue is down both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. Was that lower than expected? Are you less confident in your 2026 total revenue ambitions now, given the weak Q2? Maybe you can take that question-
Yeah
Mathias.
I can try to answer that. I think we addressed some of these topics also in the presentation regarding H1, first half of the year, and that the revenue levels are in accordance with the expectations for us. For the rest of the year, we haven't put a specific number on the table for what to expect for the rest of the year. But what we anticipate or expect is that we will end up broadly in line with 2025 numbers, as previously discussed as well.
That's based on new contracts coming in, and also contracts in the pipeline that we signed last year with the revenue recognition in the second half of the year on laptop previously discussed, and also improvements in launches and growth in shipments that will increase the incremental volume revenue, also pointed out in the presentation.
Good.
There's always a space there where depending on timing of contracts and so on, but that's what we expect at this point in time.
Yeah. Good. Let's look further down. There's someone about-
Yeah, I can take this one.
Yep.
The new strategic opportunities are reasonable, but it is difficult to understand the progress since last quarter. Are you still confident in the strategic direction, and can we expect this to meaningfully contribute to revenue in 2027?
Yeah. It's a good question, and it's a very correct question. Yes, we are absolutely confident in the direction we set out in Q1, and it's now six months down the line. During that phase, we've done a lot with the organization in both terms of reorganizing and focusing teams on what their effort should be used against. We've been out in the market validating this continuously. Instead of sitting in the Oslo office in a black room and just hearing our own voices, we've really been out in the market. Whether that's through industry events, customer meetings, partner negotiations, all these type of things has been ongoing. During those six months now, we've really seen positive answers to a lot of the things that we've pitched and offered and seen as a value proposition.
Yes, I absolutely believe in the strategy that we set out and the things we are doing and really plan and hope for things to materialize even further during the second half of this year. When it comes to 2027, we've talked about during this presentation today about the structures of our contracts. This will, of course, impact how we see the revenue developing. It goes without saying that we're a company looking to grow into new markets to get the proper deal and the setup to move forward in the growth phase. We do expect revenue to materialize in 2027 from these new initiatives, but also, of course, the growth on the existing markets that we cover. Good. There's a question here regarding cash. Your cash flow is improving, yet it's still negative.
Can you please talk us through how you'll get to a positive cash flow? Maybe that's for you.
Yeah, sure. The cash position and cash flow going forward is a key item for us on the agenda, definitely. From my perspective, there's some building blocks to that. We have the outflows that we more or less can control, and we've done some concrete measures on that in Q1 and forward regarding reducing the cost. We're seeing some of the effect in Q2, but we expect, as previously mentioned in the presentation, full effect of the cost measures from Q1 in the second half of the year. That will help us going forward. Adding to that, we have the existing business and existing active contracts that contributes to shipments and payments from customers, and that helps us improve the cash flow as well.
Depending on market conditions in second half of the year and shipments, that will impact us as well. Also, as Ola just talked about, the new initiatives and growing the existing business as well will help us improve the cash flow in the future. We haven't put a specific timing on that statement yet, but we're focusing on that definitely.
Good. Let's see further down. Scroll a bit here.
Yeah. Maybe I can have a final question for you as well.
Are we going through all questions?
Yeah, sure.
No questions is left out.
Are you more or less confident about the potential from new verticals now than you were in the beginning of the year?
I am more. Absolutely. When we set out, as I already talked about a bit, set out in Q1, we had a hypothesis on what our value could be in those markets and the trends we are seeing. Take the example of smart glasses, where one of the main pain points for glasses today is the size and the design and how much you enjoy using them. Reducing weight on the smart glass is a really important metric for the customers that we are talking to. That is one aspect. Another thing which we have all read about in basically all newspapers nowadays, is the use of camera on these smart glasses. That is, to a large degree, invading your private space, and that is a topic. We are actually seeing this being reflected in the discussions we have with customers.
It is not that we believe that smart glasses will never have cameras moving forward, but our capability of doing audio-based sensing, whether that is for detecting how you touch and actually interact with the smart glass, whether that is to sense what is happening around you, which is typically audio or ultrasonic-based, that we can do. This then services as a real good alternative to some of the privacy topics that have been raised during the last year. We are absolutely confident that this will materialize. Timing-wise, we know there is a lot of things developing nowadays. It is a booming market and a lot of growth. Of course, we are trying to inject ourself into that. Absolutely, I am more confident.
Great. The next question on smartphone. You had a few quarters with lower shipments. What can we expect from growth in smartphone shipment going forward?
We are seeing, like the rest of the world, that the memory pricing, reading out this morning as well, that even NVIDIA has an issue with memory costs impacting their production rates. So they see they will be slowed down by the fact that the access to memory chips is limiting them. We see the same in the smartphone market. This is a key ingredient in any type of electronics that is doing some type of compute or memory. How does this impact smartphones? Well, people will not stop buying smartphones, that is for sure. It is a big market. It is absolutely potential for us to gain more ground in that market still. As we have talked about a bit during the presentation, we have different pricing models.
This is something we do to get a proper payment for the value that we bring, and not necessarily always then risking the impact of shipments. We think, the risk assessment we are doing in this market, the pricing models we decide to go forward with together with the customer, somewhat hedges the outcome of that. From shipment-wise, last quarter, we cannot go into details, but we saw some of our customers going up, some of them going down. So the width of our portfolio of smartphone customers does indeed impact the total game. Good. Other than that, I do not have a crystal ball to say how the shipments are actually going to do.
I know that we are doing what we can on our side to control, of course, the cost that we are putting in, the resources we put in, and also the pricing models that we set forth for the customer. Good. Seem to be coming to an end, maybe, Eskil, any final one?
There's one more question with regards to Edge AI. Can you please explain in short what the Edge AI product from Elliptic Labs is?
Yeah.
It's a big question, but-
Yeah, it's a big question. Main thing, it's an important ingredient into achieving something efficient and quickly in the market of today. What we see is that we've been good at doing logic plus AI models, basically merging those two worlds, where the outcome on what an AI model says, you're going to do something about that, and maybe you'll make decision through that path. This is something we've been doing in our products for a long time. And this is definitely a need in today's AI-driven products, physical AI products, whether it's consumer electronics or robotics or whatever. What we bring to the table is a capability of actually being able to do this quickly, iteratively, in a very efficient way when you do the developments. And also after deployment into the field, you can easily update the AI model on that device.
Where that typically today needs a lot of actors to get together and make that happen, we have a really efficient way of doing that. Our delivery into the Edge AI markets is a compiler. It is a system. It is a full ecosystem of how to run and implement logic plus AI models. That can be deployed on anything. Meaning that any customer that wants to build a product today based on chipsets, based on systems that are going to do something at the edge, typically not connected, or they are connected to the cloud, but they are not processing in the cloud. What we bring there is a software component that makes that a much more enjoyable journey and quicker journey. Where a typical customer could today use maybe six months to get something actually running, with us we are talking about weeks more than several months.
We see when the customers get this in their hands and they see the benefits of this, they really see the value, and that is what we are going to do now. Since we have built this now, out in second half of the now, we are going to put this in more hands of our potential customers to actually get this to materialize to commercial agreements.
Good.
Okay.
I think we start to run out of time, but we have time for one more last question.
Yeah.
From Jonathan here: What initiatives are you implementing to establish new runways for corporate revenue growth?
Yeah. So initiatives we are implementing to establish new runways for corporate growth. Basically, the revenue of our company is largely driven by the devices shipping to the market and the deals we do with that. So we have two established markets today, smartphone and laptop, and that is where we have been living for the last 5- 10 years. So we are absolutely trying to expand that to more customers with more features and more capabilities to win more designs. In addition to that, we launched initiatives to do wearables, meaning whether that is the type of AirPods or your earbuds, your smart glasses, or your smart wrist or something like that. We are going into that with our existing technology. I mentioned smart glasses. That is also a dedicated track we have. So that is the second initiative.
More of a third one is larger screens, whether that is smart TVs that might benefit from having insight what is happening in front of the TV. For instance, how many people are watching the current show, or whether there is digital signage out there doing commercials that need some type of contextual intelligence. So that is roughly the tangible markets we are going towards. The final one, the Edge AI, which I just talked about, is more of a horizontal offering. So today, we primarily focus on verticals, features where we need to be intimately involved with the customer and understand the use case and everything. With the Edge AI offering is more of a horizontal offering.
So we do not need necessarily then to be so hands-on on the feature that is being implemented by the customer who is buying our technology. So totally, that is three main tracks. There is the existing markets, it is the adjacent verticals, and then it is the horizontal offering to the wider markets.
Just to add to that at the end as well, for the new verticals, we have ambition to have some commercial contracts this half year, so before New Year's. And we expect that to materialize in revenue in 2027 at some point.
Yep. Good.
Okay.
I think that's a wrap.
Yep.
Thank you for today, and stay tuned for more updates from Elliptic Labs moving forward.