Representing BioLargo is Dennis Calvert, CEO. Just before I let Dennis get going, I want to emphasize that we're all about interaction with the people who have joined us today. If you have questions, please type them into the Q&A box. Dennis will try and address as many as he can at the end. With that, I'll get out of the way. Dennis, why don't you go ahead?
Hey, Michael, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We've got a lot to share. We've been on this journey now since the spring of 2007. We've been innovating across multiple industries, multiple products, really focused on just transformative technology. We make life better. It's a mission-driven company, and we have an innovation engine. We're going to remind everyone we do have risk factors to consider. Go to the K, most recent K, in fact. It's pages of risk factors. We're in a very high-risk business, and the challenge is always overcoming risk, managing for and overcoming risk, which we do quite well. It is a daunting challenge to say we're going to transform markets. The good news is that we've been planting seeds for quite a long time. We're seeing the fruit bear out.
We're going to talk about some of that fruit and also some of the things that we think are coming. Who are we, right? What do we do? Innovation. Innovators in science focus and entrepreneurs focus on human health and sustainable innovation for some of the big problems that face our planet and our people, driven by this make life better theme. Everything we have has a big cause behind it. Best-in-class technology. If it's not best-in-class, we probably won't invest. We've gone through, we've weeded some of the assets out. We've narrowed the focus on achievable targets that we believe we can do with our skill set and our talent and our technology. Focus on problems without a solution. Easy to say, hard to do. No good solution. We conserved capital really well. We're going to talk about that.
How do we do that? We focus on the things that are core competency: engineering, science, partnership, joint venture, licensing deals, distribution arrangement to see these assets go out and transform a market, primarily leveraging the balance sheet and the distribution channels of our partners. Easy to say, very hard to do, but pretty awesome when it works. In our company, at the core office, of course, we're focused on this innovation engine with a lot of science and engineering. R&D center up in Canada, the engineers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Don't forget the world-class people. They've had 30-year careers, a group of seniors. We've got about 27 engineers now on staff. It has grown. The total company has a little over 50 people now.
With that kind of critical mass, we bring great science and engineering that can surround some of these challenges in a multidisciplined, multi-approach way to develop best-of-class strategies. Okay. There are four commercial units. O&M is focused on odor and VOC. That is air quality, VOC control. Clyra Medical, cutting edge in infection control and advanced wound care, wounds that have a hard time healing, featuring some antimicrobial products. Fourteen-year development cycle, finally going to market in a big way. We are really excited about it. The engineering, the equipment group is focused on water, but with a really strong emphasis in PFAS, P-F-A-S. That is forever chemicals. Again, disruptive tech. Do not forget that. The battery tech, it is probably the youngest, probably the biggest. We have made some significant strides in the battery tech here of late and got a few more things coming to bear pretty quick.
Okay, what's the point of this slide? Some of the trouble people have with our company is some of this is hard to see, especially when things happen off balance sheet through partnerships, and you wait for partners to get ready and wait for them to launch and do all the things they commit to doing. There's a cornerstone of why this works for us. We focus on our core competency, science and engineering, and disruptive technologies that have a chance to transform a market. These little bullets up at the upper left are really the key to the business, to understanding us. Unmatched technical claims. I'm going to say it again. Unmatched technical claims. If they're not shaping up with the feature group to be number one, we're not going to do it. We really only want to do number one.
Capital-conserving strategy, that's that leverage opportunity. Highly qualified people, we cover that. Driven for impact. That keeps you going when the chips are down. It's important work, has a chance to transform markets and make a difference in the lives of people. Each of these has an enterprise value target, right? This is the kind of vision that we put on these. We believe Clyra will create an exit for a billion. I mean, and we can defend it. The equipment group, a billion plus, slower, harder, lower margin. We've got a great technology finding its way to market. The battery is the sort of the big gorilla. Of course, the odor and VOC control, as that continues to develop, we think there's a great exit for that as well. Last year was a great year.
We came in just under $18 million. Q1 was a little dip, primarily because of the sales at Pooph, which is a product we'll talk about. Net shareholder equity is still strong. Don't have toxic debt, sitting in a decent cash position. Really don't have a strong need other than to push sales through, which we're talking about. We're pretty optimistic about some of the assets finding their way. Let's take a minute, and we're going to come back to Q&A in a minute. We've done a series of announcements here for Clyra. The basic tone of all these announcements goes like this. We're ready to be in the selling product business, not the R&D business. We're exiting an R&D phase, heading into large-scale manufacturing, distribution, and sales. We've got a timeline. We can talk some details.
Somewhere between the next three and nine months, we're going to see a series of products come to market. They're pretty substantial. I just want to remind everybody, they're substantial not only technically, but financially. They're technically important because they represent a transformation in the way infection control is managed in a surgical suite, and they have a transformative opportunity in the way wounds, in particular, chronic sensitive, fragile skin wounds, right? Because we feature potent antimicrobial with no local sensitivity and no systemic toxicity. When you put all the claims together, including the activity, we've shown efficacy in biofilm efficacy and sustained release. It's got a feature group that easily positions it as number one as a disruptor and transformer in the marketplace. We've really tested everyone's patience. Oh my goodness, this has taken a long time.
This is 14 years of work and about $20 million invested. Again, the thesis is capital conservation, right? As we go through the R&D, we position these claims, we secure 510(k) clearance under the FDA, which is all done. We surround it with key opinion leaders. We've got a couple of just incredible people involved. When you look at the board, when you look at the Chief Medical Director, Chief Medical Officer on staff, these are just the most accomplished people in the field now leading the charge to position these for adoption in the market. It is just on the cusp of launching. It's huge. I think financially, everyone's going to be quite pleased. We're anxious to push these last few details to get to that sales opportunity. On the odor control, we've got industrial and Pooph. Pooph has just been killing.
It had a great year last year. Their sales were down this quarter. Everybody wants to know why. You know, I always say they've just done such a stellar job of growing over time. As they resort and shuffle for the next push, you know, we're praying they can continue to keep pushing that product to market. We're very optimistic about it because the product's that good. These are great marketeers. We're hoping to see sales continue. We don't have a lot of visibility to the why and the how. It leaves us very difficult on the forecasting because it's their business. We're a supply chain partner and a licensing partner. It's been great, and we expect it to continue in some way to continue to find market. Eight different SKUs. All of these products are based on our technology.
Remember the business deal, which we'll talk about in two seconds. Huge retail accomplishments. Again, showing that they're capable of penetrating such a deep retail presence. At last count, we were in about 40,000 retail outlets. It's quite a success to get to that mark. Again, we're hoping it will just continue the way it's supposed to. On the business deal, of course, we control the supply chain. We manufacture on a cost plus, make a little money, make a little royalty, and then we bargain for brand equity. Why is that important? Just remember, that's our model, right? If we can't get a piece of the equity that's created in the brand that's leveraging our technology, we probably wouldn't do it. It's critical.
In this case, as that brand establishes national recognition and value in its own right, we're an equity partner there. That is not realized until it exits. Okay? That does not mean it is not real. It just means you have to think about it before you can see it. One of the challenges in our business is to help people understand that we're building equity value that has long-term ramifications. We're going to talk about the Cellinity battery tech, this next one, because it is so big and we've got some significant advancements here of late. Cellinity, that is the cell on the right there. That is a big cell, cylinder cell. It is a salt battery, right? It runs hot. It runs at about 220 degrees Celsius. It is a molten, molten.
Now, when you say salt battery and you say hot, a lot of the competition runs at about 800 degrees Celsius. So it's not that hot. 200 degrees Celsius is pretty good. But it's a different design than lithium. Lithium wants to be cold. Keep it cool. Don't let it get hot. If it gets hot, it's dangerous. Okay, we're the opposite. Keep it hot. It's really good. Insulate it to keep the heat in. We've done a lot of work. Now, remember, we bought this technology. When we bought the technology, we knew that we had to revalidate the claim set because we didn't make those claims. And we presented that information to the market and said, "These are the claims we believe are true." But we had to redo them. And we thought that'd take about a year. And about $1 million was our budget.
It took $2.4 million in two years, a little over two years. That is sort of indicative of the nature of the business. We have done it. We are now at the point where we can say these technical claims are true and true. The technical breakthrough that the Cellinity battery represents is real. Now it is time to begin the commercial march through third-party validation and business deal-making, which is what we are doing. This article was published. I do not need to summarize it except other than to say the economist says this is the next trillion-dollar business. We believe that to be true. The thematic claim is really simple. The demand for this design, for this solution, there is a gap in the market, long-duration energy storage grid scale. There is a gap in the market. It is the fastest-growing sector in the energy industry.
We have a piece that we can carve out for us. We believe we have a plan to take a major position in the marketplace. I'm going to describe that for you. Lithium has a bunch of issues. Just want to make it real simple. Fire is one of them, of course. Everybody knows there's a fire issue to be careful about because they create what's called a runway fire. The real issue is global supply risk. That's the issue actually that needs the attention. The fires, got it. That's not cool, right? You don't want your, you don't want the battery on the side of your house to catch fire. In extreme situations, they can, all right? What you really need is a supply chain to meet the insatiable demand that's being demanded by big data.
AI and big data has a consumption appetite that no supplier can meet. No supplier can meet it. It is insatiable. Okay? What if you had a better battery? That's our thesis. A better battery, safer, sustainable, durable, more efficient. A battery that can actually operate in a grid-scale storage environment with exceptional claims. These are the claims that are part of the early validation work that we're doing just now and we'll be publishing soon. The punchline is really simple. It's an extraordinary high energy density and voltage, 2.9x that of lithium. That's sort of like the power with the weight punch, mass punch. It's a measure of the energy that you can deliver. It also is highly efficient. You know, so a lot of these batteries that have ion exchange have what's called internal degradation. We have none of that.
There's no perceptible, perceivable degradation internally, which means that the battery can last 20 years. It's a 20-year battery. It uses recyclable components with no global supply chain risk and no geopolitical risk of mining and all the other things that go with that. The trick in all that is to scale manufacturing. That's really where we're at at this next stage. These put-ups on the left are great examples of competitors' products. We're not at that stage yet. We're at the cell level. Cells go into racks, racks go into packs. Packs make modules. That's how it works. The cell design is the art of delivering the energy in a consistent design that allows you to replicate manufacturing. That's what we're doing. You can make any pack you want. You got to perfect the cell technology and make sure that you can scale manufacturing.
That's what we're doing. Where are we at in the process? Right here, underway now, complete third-party validation. We're talking about the numbers because I want to give people the order of magnitude of what we're talking about. You know, we believe we can command a valuation now somewhere in the $43 million-$150 million valuation. Okay? When you look at the business model of how this scales and the way we're scaling, which is very unique, and that is we made a decision not to sell batteries, but sell battery factories, franchise battery factories, franchise battery factories. Why? Because we can build hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. You say, "Really?" Yeah, that's right. You do need one. You need to get through the validation. You got to do this heavy lifting on the proof of claim.
We built a model on 10 factories at $140 million a pop, $140 million CapEx. It takes about two and a half years to build a factory. Once those go operational under a franchise model, our partners put up the money. We get paid to build a factory. We participate in 19% carried interest and a 6% royalty. It's a good model. With that model on 10 factories, we command a net present value around the $1.5 billion range. On maturity, about $2.5 billion. The rhetorical question, I say it rhetorically because there's a lot of things to still unfold. If we can build 10, why can't we build 100? The answer is we can. The market's big enough with this insatiable demand. It starts with a better battery that scales to manufacturing. That's what we're doing.
I think this final PFAS, and I want to spend just a few minutes. The PFAS is a big component in our business. Remember, in each of these, the capital-conserving strategy, right? Don't sell batteries, sell battery factories. It's capital-conserving. Do a medical product so that we do all the heavy lifting technically, find the great partner, let it go. Contract manufacturer. Don't build manufacturing. Buy manufacturing. Rent it. You can pay on a per-click. Okay? Similar here. The PFAS is all about the technology. It's such a good technology. We've got our first adoption. That installation is scheduled in New Jersey in August, September. Say a prayer with no more delay. It's been delayed almost a year because of weather and because of permitting, things that we don't control. We've had the unit ready to install. It's beautiful. PFAS is forever chemicals, right? Forever chemicals.
When you look at the impact of PFAS, now there's two markets. One is the materials themselves. That's the supply chain of the chemistry that makes non-stick coatings. That's what we're talking about. The other is the cleanup. Fifty years of contamination, fifty years of cleanup. Don't miss it. It's a massive market. Litigation is still going on all over the world. It's a hot topic with the EPA. Pronouncements are coming out, not weekly, but on a steady basis, on a monthly basis. We are in it to win it. We believe our component is positioned so well so that we can scale the supply chain through contract manufacturing as we scale the distribution channel through partnerships with companies around the globe, actually. Mostly U.S., though, we'll say. There's the unit. Look at the picture on the left. This is the unit that's going into Lake Stockholm.
What you see is each one of those is a module. Remember the technology. You push it through an electric field, electrostatic field, migrate the PFAS to one side, collect it across a membrane in front of an electrode. The membranes last about a year. You have a razor-razor blades model. This is extraordinarily cost-efficient as compared. Notice the little picture at the bottom. We make a little pailful versus a truck full of waste, 140,000. 140,000. I got an image. There it is. How about a beaker of contamination versus a truckload of carbon? It's a big deal. It's a big deal. The challenge is not, does it work? The challenge is convincing the market it works. It's all about credibility. It takes time. Now, we're working with the EPA, which is awesome.
The federal branch, as well as the local branch in New Jersey, we've done about 15-something trials. What we're building is a tool that can be used by the entire industry. We'll sell the toolkit to people all over the industry, right? We don't have to do all the vertical integration. We can outsource manufacturing. We can take orders. What we have to do is seed it in the market. In order to get it seeded in the market, we went vertical. Once we get it seeded, we don't have to be vertical. We can partner. It is a heavy lift to get it seeded. That's the challenge. Once it goes, then it can go big. We think it also becomes a wonderful acquisition target for some of our partners. This one is going to win. We're convinced.
Most recently, I was also invited to join an environmental trade technology trade advisory committee to the Secretary of Commerce for the U.S. Federal Office. It's awesome. It's great for our company. It's great for the impact that we can have on a contaminant of the decade for the United States of America and the globe. Recent case studies in leachate are remarkable. Leachate is another source of water that has PFAS in it, often called a passive receiver. There's a bunch of technology going on there. A passive receiver is someone who didn't create the problem, but they collect it. That is a landfill. They didn't make the PFAS. They just happen to have all this stuff with PFAS in it, come to the landfill. That passive receiver is an evolving field in the regulatory scheme. We win there too. Again, very unusual.
Our technology has the ability to serve multiple markets in the field. We don't need to focus on one. We need to focus on the perfection of the art of the electrostatic concentration and destruction. We have two bundles there, the collection and the destruction. Don't miss that too, offering a complete solution to the marketplace. Sold through partners. We have one environmental engineering firm that has specified our solution in 26 projects. 26 projects. It's about $45 million worth of business, just so you get perspective. We're not going to get them all. It's a very competitive field. We're really relegated to the early adopter market. In the scheme of technology innovation, right, you have to get adoption and build credibility as you go. That's what we're doing. We're doing quite well at it, actually.
We've always said we think we're the only commercial installation of an alternative to carbon or ion exchange technologies in the market that's actually had a commercial sale. Here's the thing. It's long and slow, and it's not massive margin. Once you get through that adoption cycle, it's a business that'll run for 50 years. This is going to go on and on and on. It'll outlive me. Again, great technical innovation. We did this case study work. We published it recently. We've got copies. It's published in a number of different areas. The punchline to the story is we can save roughly 80% in recurring costs for an operator. 80%. 80%. Don't miss it. It's like an 80% discount. Really? Yeah, for real. What happens is it's now convincing people that's real. That's the challenge. You have to convince them it's real.
We get it. And so that's a methodical process. This work we're doing with the EPA is really critical. It's slow. It's not fast. It is at the highest mark. You know our role in that trade advisory committee, this is one of the highlights of that, which is this combination of policy and incentive. Policy, which is regulatory framework. Incentive, which is tools and resources to help innovators like us find their way through the jungle to success. It's extraordinarily difficult. It's unpredictable in timing. When you do it, you take a market. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about taking markets, okay? It's worthy. All of these are worthy of a career. I believe that we've done been incredibly well with relatively small amounts of capital and positioned ourselves for a global impact in multiple arenas.
I'm going to leave it on this slide because I think it really drives it home. This one right here. The underlying value is these assets we believe will find commercial adoption. Some of them are hard. Some of them are easier. They all will work. They're all going to find some adoption. We've weeded this down to the ones that we believe represent the pathway to success and significance in a meaningful way. Again, we've been doing it a long time. We're now able to say to investors, "You're coming in at a time when the hardest work is done." The technical validation, the seeding in the market. There's more work to do, though. Don't miss it, especially in the battery tech. There's a lot of work to do.
We've achieved some critical mass and some financial critical mass that allows us to do things other companies simply can't do. I'm going to quit. I know that's a big mouthful. Let me turn it over to Q&A and see what we got.
Very good, Dennis. Very informative. Such a broad portfolio of interesting things. Why don't we start with the Clyra product, though, since that one's kind of near to being released? You'll be working through the distributors. Do you have a sense of how big the marketing budget will be for Clyra?
That's a good question. That's a really good question. The answer is no. They're all a little different, right? Some of the smaller distributors who are technically highly trained are focused on bringing us into distribution channels where the need is obvious. That's a technical selling proposition.
We will leverage essentially the tools of our distributors for their footprint in the marketplace as a disruptive tech that is now introduced through a clinical setting. In the medical field, especially in med device products, the selling is really done at conferences and done by technical experts who lead the way with writing papers and have clinical experience. We have already made a significant commitment to that, and that will continue through trade events and through technical meetings. That is where the selling actually occurs. Physician to physician, physicians who want best of class of care, patient outcomes is the key. They then take it back to their communities and help distribute it with the knowledge that better patient outcomes are possible. What I can say is some of the competitors are coming under regulatory pressure because of their toxicity.
The void in the market is becoming increasingly clear. That's going to bode well for us. That's the small ones. On the big ones, you're talking about big guerrilla partners, people that already own the market. In that case, often we can come alongside with an existing distribution channel and have another tool in the toolkit of the bag that the reps are carrying into the field. It's feet on the street with massive presence to recognize leaders that actually makes it work. That's the strategy.
Okay. Interesting. Let's turn to some of the other products in the portfolio. When we think about the battery factories, where I understand you have several people kind of ready to go.
Of course, I know you can't release names, but maybe for the benefit of the people listening in, can you talk about when you expect groundbreaking for the new factories?
Yeah. There's a lot of work to do. There's a couple of phases. The first phase is validate the technology, the cell design. That's what we're doing now. The next is to then begin working on the scale-up of the manufacturing technique itself. We have the engineers to do that. We're already working on that. That's a next phase. That's essentially R&D, but it will continue to advance us to the point of saying we're going to specify processes that go into the manufacturing themselves. At the same time, we're selling the opportunity for a partner to become a franchisee. Okay.
The beauty in the business model is if we can convince the franchisee to adopt our technology and partner with us, then when we start, a portion of the CapEx is paid to us in the form of services and equipment, generating revenue along the way. When we start, we make money, as opposed to most other battery companies that start after they spent the CapEx and they hope they can sell them. Different game. Very different strategy. Much better, I would say, especially when you have a better battery that has a chance to really transform a market. Okay. Groundbreaking. Start to finish on a signed deal is about two and a half years for a factory. Two and a half years to go live and produce batteries to scale. Okay. Groundbreaking then can happen probably within the next first six to nine months of funding.
We're now at the stage of securing MOUs and working with our partners who then bring the primary financing to build the factories to the table. We can assist, of course. We're intimate with them. It is their capital source that makes it work because the franchisee wants to be in the battery business. The rhetorical question is, who wants to be in the battery business? It turns out there's a lot of people. To just name a few, big data would be number one. People that are in the big data business, they need lots of energy storage. If you're in the data center business, you need lots of storage. If you're in the renewable energy business, you got to have it. If you're in the grid-scale deployment of energy, you got to have it. There's also resiliency. Hospitals, military installations.
They need storage to be resilient so that when the grid does go down, they're not out of business. Okay. Huge markets. Insatiable. I like to tell the story of Eos. EOSE, that's a competitor. It's a nice comp. It took them a long time, over 10 years, to get to market. They started from scratch. Okay. They went vertical. They've had massive inflow of capital. They're well over a $1 billion market cap now. And what they have done is commercialize a zinc bromide battery. It's a good battery. It does what it's supposed to do. Okay. So they're doing great. Still operational. I'm sure a lot to deal with as they scale their business. The markets recognize value because they went vertical, and now they're in a commercial launching. Here's the key stat. They report about $13 billion in backlog. Did you hear that? $13 billion in backlog.
Okay. So what's the story? It's insatiable demand. You can sell the batteries before you make them. That's what we're doing. We're selling the batteries before we make them. We're selling franchises that can sell the batteries because you got to scale, right? And so there's like a hybrid we're working on. It's part licensing like a Broadcom. It's part vertical integration like Tesla, right? And it's part brand like McDonald's. I mean, you think about it, you go, "Really?" It's like, "Yeah." We've put the pieces together to allow us to do something that most companies can't even dream of doing. And so we're at the stage now where there's a lot of interest. There's MOUs that have been put together, subject to financing, of course. And so now I got to do the battery validation. I got to come back to the market and say, "Okay.
We got a validated tech. We're ready to start building factories. Who wants to go? That's next. It's hard to predict the timing of the first win, but it sure feels like it's close. We just got to get them into go mode and shore up the financing and make sure they're ready to execute. Still risky, but less risky than it's ever been before. The prize is so significant. We certainly have the battery tech, the model, the talent, and the mission, right? That's our pitch to do something pretty special in a global market. We're hoping to get some deals under contract where the financing is secure and we can say, "All right, first factory, here's the break ground target." Hopefully we can do that this year. That'd be our target. Give everybody the expectation, right?
We're almost out of time, but let me slide in one more question. Can you talk about Pooph and potential expansions of distribution or expanding the product line?
I don't really have much to say there. You know, what happens is we're in the innovation side of the business. We have a number of product designs. So there's an extension, brand extension capability. But really, those are decisions that are made by our partner. And so we're going to just have to wait and see how it goes.
Okay. Great. Informative as always, Dennis. Thank you very much. I see we didn't get to all of the questions. Folks, if we didn't answer yours, I'm sorry for that. Please contact your [audio distortion] representative. We'll in turn follow up with BioLargo and get you some answers.
Absolutely.
Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again.
Thank you, everyone.