Good morning, everyone, and welcome to LeddarTech's fiscal fourth quarter and year-end 2024 earnings business update conference call. Today's conference call is being recorded, and at this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Kevin Hunt of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning. On the call today are Frantz Saintellemy, LeddarTech's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Stewart, our Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, LeddarTech is an automotive software company that delivers a unified multimodal AI platform software solution that serves a growing market ranging from mainstream advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, to full autonomous driving, or AD, applications. Before we begin, I remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements based on management's current expectations and beliefs. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements contained in our business update release and the company's Form 20-F filed with the SEC.
During today's call, management may provide certain information that will constitute non-IFRS financial measures, such as adjusted operating expenses and Adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations to IFRS measures and additional information are also included in today's business update release available on the company's Investor Relations website, investors.leddartech.com. I'll now hand over the call to Frantz.
Thanks, Kevin, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. We are delighted to have successfully completed our first full fiscal year as a public company, and we are increasingly excited about the market opportunity in front of us. We believe we are taking the right steps to position LeddarTech to capitalize on a sizable market opportunity in ADAS and autonomous driving. The Texas Instruments deal we announced last week provides insight into why we are so optimistic about the future of LeddarTech. We view the TI deal as groundbreaking, that is, likely to be considered a key milestone for the industry on the path to increased ADAS and autonomous driving adoption. When we spoke after our mid-year results back in May, we highlighted a number of reasons to be optimistic about the second half of 2024.
Since that time, we have built an incredible amount of momentum across all areas of our business. I want to start today's call by reviewing some of the key highlights and accomplishments that demonstrate our momentum. In terms of some tangible business metrics, since June, we have responded to RFIs or RFQs equivalent to approximately $900 million in potential software revenue, bringing our total current sales pipeline to over $2 billion for the first time. We launched Leddar Navigator, a network of vehicles equipped with LeddarTech's state-of-the-art unified multimodal AI platform, demonstrating what we believe is the industry's highest-performing ADAS and AD fusion and perception software stack. Customer response was very positive at roadshows conducted in both Europe and China, allowing us to engage directly with leading OEMs and tier-one customers. We have now completed over 50 real-time on-road demonstrations in Europe and in China alone.
The feedback has been fantastic. Perhaps most important, we are now in the final stages of platform decisions being made by two OEMs. We expect this business momentum to accelerate into 2025 as we build our partner relationships and launch new products that will expand our addressable market and increase our value proposition to OEM and tier-one customers. As we previously stated, we believe that partnerships with leading SoC vendors are essential for accelerating market adoption of our AI software stack. And to that end, our AI software is now ported and pre-validated on five software processors with four already announced publicly: TI, Arm, Black Sesame, and NVIDIA. We expect to continue to extend our collaborations with these partners and others in 2025. We have also seen an acceleration in customer opportunities from partnerships with engineering firms like AVL, FEV, and TT Tech.
These partnerships extend our sales reach, and we believe will provide for additional catalysts that can move our business forward. Let me step back and briefly touch on a few of these partnerships. The first significant catalyst to highlight is the commercial and licensing agreement with Texas Instruments that I mentioned at the top of the call. We have been engaged with TI since 2022, when we first demonstrated the performance superiority of our AI software leveraging the advanced capabilities of TI's automotive-qualified TDA4 family of processors. The commercial milestone announced last week will enable LeddarTech and TI to showcase LeddarVision AI-based software bundle with TI's scalable TDA4 processor family. This groundbreaking solution is the first open ADAS and AD architecture that can serve implementations ranging from basic Level 2 safety systems all the way up to Level 4 advanced systems and eventually autonomous driving solutions.
This pre-integrated and pre-validated offering will be the cornerstone of both TI and LeddarTech's ADAS go-to-market strategies, and in our view, offers a compelling and cost-effective solution that can provide OEMs and tier-ones faster deployment, scalability, and best-in-class performance. We believe TI's willingness to commit advanced royalty payments is a strong indication of their positive outlook on the potential of this product offering. We are already jointly pursuing multiple design-win opportunities and hope to be able to update you on those efforts by our next earnings call expected in May. Next, we continue to advance our partnership with Arm that we formally announced in March 2024. We have optimized the LeddarVision to run seamlessly on Arm's automotive-enhanced compute platform. This integration enhances CPU capabilities of ADAS systems, providing OEMs and tier-ones with a robust, scalable, high-performance solution.
Suraj Gajendra, VP of Products and Automotive Software Solutions at Arm, recently said, "Software has become ubiquitous in modern vehicles, but traditional timelines can't keep up with the pace of innovation. Our global partnership with Arm can help speed up the development process." We also expect 2025 to be a breakout year for the development of cloud-based solutions, which addresses major industry challenges by enabling faster iterative ADAS system design and providing simulated training and validation scenarios that mimic real-world data. The demonstrated performance data with Arm has also been impressive, as it shows that by using our software with Arm's hardware, detection performance increases by close to 50% right out of the gate. Finally, on the engineering side, I would like to highlight our collaboration with AVL, where LeddarTech's advanced fusion and perception capabilities are being combined with AVL's automotive ECU and ADAS drive and control systems.
This model leverages AVL's extensive automotive engineering support network to engage with OEMs in custom developments based on our AI software stack for ADAS Level 2 and Level 2+ applications. Together, we have seen an increasing number of customer inquiries, which we believe can lead to joint design wins in the very near future. Let me turn next to recent product innovation. 2024 was pivotal for both LeddarTech and the industry. At our mid-year update, we indicated that we would have several product announcements coming in the second half of the year. In June, we announced the availability of the LeddarVision Surround for premium highway and city pilot applications. This embedded platform for L2 and L2 + applications offers real-time, high-performance perception, ensuring safer and more intuitive driver experiences.
We believe this marks a leap forward in autonomous capabilities with a very highly efficient surround view system that enables high performance on lower-cost sensor set and SoC compared to the leading products on the market today. The LeddarVision Surround will be on display at CES in a few weeks. The feedback from customers on the performance of our LeddarVision Surround has been overwhelmingly positive, and the consensus view is that this product breaks key industry benchmarks. This breakthrough performance is enabled by LeddarTech's highly efficient AI-based multimodal raw data fusion and perception engine that is the basis for all our solutions. At CES, Texas Instruments will demonstrate the LeddarVision Surround utilizing their TDA4 processor family, which will provide an example of edge AI-driven ADAS and autonomous vehicle applications that delivers the industry's highest performance at the lowest cost.
Arm will also be demonstrating the LeddarVision Surround 2+ on the AWS G5g cloud platform, highlighting SOAFEE integration. SOAFEE is an industry collaboration to create an open-source architecture for software-defined vehicles, and Arm will demonstrate cloud-based AI-driven solutions that offer OEMs and tier-ones a scalable, flexible system made by our LeddarVision software. Looking ahead now to calendar 2025, we are even more optimistic about the future of LeddarTech, and there are several key milestones you should be looking for. We expect to make additional announcements with TI and other partners. We expect additional product introductions, including cloud-to-the-edge-based solutions and tools that will significantly decrease development time for OEMs and tier-ones customers while reducing cost of data collection, annotation, and processing to accelerate the industry's goal to achieve a software-defined vehicle, also known as SDV.
We expect more customer projects, and most important, we expect one to two business wins that will generate significant future revenue. Our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Stewart, will provide some additional insight on our year-end financials in a minute, but I wanted to highlight some recent financial milestones that we believe demonstrate high confidence from the investor community on how LeddarTech will progress. The biggest vote of confidence came from Texas Instruments with their nearly $10 million in advanced royalty payments. In October, we also secured $3 million in additional bridge financing from existing investors to support our strategic initiative. These same investors also participated in convertible note conversions at an above-market price of $2. We successfully renegotiated the terms of our credit facility and bridge loans, ensuring operational stability and flexibility to execute our long-term vision.
And we continue to work on additional carefully planned financing activities that position LeddarTech to achieve our long-term growth plan. In conclusion, I would like to thank the entire LeddarTech team for their tireless work toward achieving our goals in 2024. It was an exciting year with a lot of great progress behind the scenes, and we are very excited as 2025 approaches, and we expect to see more tangible progress and design wins over the coming 12 months. We will continue to focus on executing our long-term strategic plan, and we believe we remain well-positioned to lead the industry in AI-based software for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving while helping OEMs achieve their goal for performance, reliability, and cost to make driving safer for everyone. With that, I will now turn it over to Chris to provide some comments on our financial results for fiscal 2024.
Thanks, Fran, and good morning, everyone. I will provide an overview of our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results, and then highlight what we are focused on as we head into what we expect to be a very exciting fiscal 2025. Note that all dollar figures are Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted, as this is our functional currency. As of our fiscal year end on September 30, 2024, we shipped the final last-time buy orders for LiDAR component and module products. Therefore, LiDAR results have been presented as discontinued operations for all periods reported in our financial statements and MD&A. With the fiscal fourth quarter ending September 30, 2024, revenue from continuing operations totaled CAD 51,000, consistent with the CAD 52,000 recorded in the year-ago quarter. With LiDAR now excluded, our revenue is primarily derived from paid proof-of-concept projects with LeddarVision customers.
Full fiscal year 2024 revenue from continuing operations were $480,000, compared to $200,000 for fiscal 2023. We did not incur any cost of goods sold associated with this revenue. For the fiscal fourth quarter ended September 30, 2024, EBITDA loss was $78 million, compared to an $8 million loss in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2023. The higher loss was attributable to a $69.3 million non-cash impairment charge recorded in the fourth quarter. This impairment of goodwill and intangible assets was not the result of any fundamental change in our business outlook, but rather the expected timing of revenues and the recent volatility in our stock price. Adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2024 was a loss of $6.3 million, compared to a loss of $9.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The lower loss was primarily due to lower operating expense.
For the full fiscal year 2024, EBITDA loss was $157 million, compared to a loss of $42.7 million in fiscal 2023. The higher loss was attributable to costs related to the listing of our common shares and warrants in the first quarter and the impairment loss related to intangible assets recorded in the fourth quarter, both of which are non-cash expenses. FY 2024 Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $30.4 million, compared to a loss of $34.8 million in the prior year. The improvement was primarily due to lower operating expenses. Net loss from continuing operations for the fiscal fourth quarter ended September 30, 2024, was $80.9 million, compared to $9.1 million in Q4 2023. The increased net loss was primarily due to the $69.3 million impairment loss related to intangible assets recorded in the quarter. At fiscal year end, we had approximately 30.2 million shares outstanding.
Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the year with $5.3 million in cash and $79 million in long-term debt. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we raised approximately $23.9 million using a recent exchange rate of CAD 1.43 per US dollar. This includes a $5 million advance royalty payment from Texas Instruments, $2.8 million from additional bridge financing, and $9 million from stock issued under our standby equity purchaser agreement, or SEPA. Our cash balance as of Tuesday, December 17, was approximately CAD 20.8 million. Note that an additional $5 million is expected to be received from TI when we achieve the milestones described in our licensing and collaboration agreements. The entire $10 million prepaid royalty will remain as prepaid revenue until we begin shipping the bundled solution into vehicles.
We also intend to continue to prudently leverage our SEPA to raise funds when we believe it is in the best interest of our shareholders. Turning now to our outlook for 2025, we are laser-focused on three key objectives in the near term. First, we will continue to progress our commercial efforts towards winning one or more OEM opportunities. Second, we intend to secure the capital we need to strengthen our balance sheet. And third, we will continue to control costs and ensure that our investments are contributing to near-term commercial success. Our expectation is to keep spending roughly flat to current levels until we win a customer. Finally, note that we expect to report fiscal first quarter 2025 results for the quarter ended December 31, 2024, in mid-February, but will not hold a conference call to discuss those results.
Our plan remains to hold conference calls in conjunction with both our mid-year and end-of-year results. Operator, you can now open the line for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. And if you'd like to withdraw that question, again, press star one. Your first question comes from Joshua Buchalter with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Congrats on all the progress, and thank you for taking my question. I think you called out two OEM platforms that you felt like you are pretty confident in, sort of in the you're close to the front of the line with and getting that over the line.
Can you maybe provide the timeline and scope of those projects and expectations for what applications you're using there?
Operator, it looks like Fran's line may be muted.
Frantz, go ahead.
Can you hear me? Hi. Can you hear me?
Yes. Can you hear me now, Fran? Thank you.
Sorry. Thanks for your question, Josh. Yeah. These are standard ADAS platforms. These OEMs are trying to achieve regulatory demands and safety requirements, and they have to redesign their platforms. Current platforms don't meet the performance necessary for them to be able to achieve the safety requirements safely and also economically. What we are providing to them is actually a complete stack that allows them to not only execute today but also have a future-proof solution. In terms of timing, we expect decisions to be made relatively soon. That's our expectation.
We think we're well-positioned, but obviously, until it's done, it's not done. At the same time, what I would say is we do see the same, call it the same problem across the board. From where we are, we see OEMs and tier-ones scrambling to find solutions that will economically allow them to meet the performance for the safety systems. In terms of scale, we see opportunities that are in the millions of units, but we also see opportunities that are in the thousands and hundreds of thousands of units. So it's really across the board.
Okay. Got it. And I know a big part of the LeddarTech pitch is lowering the sensing and computing cost and also democratizing the hardware decisions.
I mean, as you get closer and there's more firm architectures out there with some of these RFQs, can you maybe talk about, as it comes to real-world applications, how the sensing cost is coming down? And in particular, how much, for instance, are your customers—what's the investment, for instance, in LVF-E running on a TDA4, and how that compares to competitive solutions? Thank you.
Right. So what I would say is if you look at what we are able to do, basic entry Level 2 for basic NCAP and as well as basic GSR, General Safety Regulation requirements for 2026, 2027, we're able to do with a processor that's an eight-tops processor from TI, what competing solutions require 24-30 tops. So it's not just the sensor hardware cost. It's also the computing requirements to execute the software, the safety features.
We believe that it's not just a question of hardware. It's a question of system implementation and how you develop edge AI using embedded software development. So that's really our superiority. The quality of our performance is directly tied to our ability to implement software features that the industry has struggled for decades, actually.
Okay. Got it. But are you able to share what ASP you expect to generate on, for instance, that type of solution? That's my last question. Thank you.
Yeah. For sure. I mean, it depends on the customer and on the project. But at the entry level, you're talking about double-digit dollars. But some of the super high-end products, depending on the volume, it could be high double digits. So from low double digits to high double digits. So it definitely is in the high double digits, those applications that we are talking about.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Suji Desilva with Roth Capital. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Frantz, Chris, thanks. Let me ask a question here. And along those lines, I guess you're working with Amazon AWS instances and G5g. Can you talk about what functions the customers are running there to try to feel out your product and whether it's something they want to use? Thanks.
Right. So think about it as it's a virtual ECU, Suji. So basically, they would be running any of the applications that they would run using an embedded or a desktop development platform. So now they're doing that on a virtual environment.
And the ability to do that, having the software fully ported on the SOAFEE architecture, allows them to use not just our software but also standard state-of-the-art automotive development processes, as well as development on automotive systems. So from our perspective, they could be running AD, pedestrian detections. They're running all of the features that you would normally run on a traditional embedded development platform. All of that is done in the cloud. The reason to do that is plenty. But I think the main thing is you want a bit parity. So once you started running on the cloud, you want to be able to actually do all your function validation and verification on the cloud so that you have zero gap to simulation and that you're able to implement these features on the SoC, on your target SoC, without any deviation from what was running on the cloud.
That saves significant trial and error efforts. That also saves significant risk and execution time.
Okay. That sounds very differentiated. I don't think your competitors have a similar way of production or differentiate you guys.
To be honest, I mean, we don't necessarily care so much about what the competition does. What we focus is on value creation and differentiation for our customers. We know what problems are, and we're working with our partners to address these problems. What we know is, obviously, in the market today, time to market is a problem. OEMs and tier-ones spend three, four years to get a new platform out. And it's out of phase. Once you start developing, from the time you start developing to the time of having a car in the market, it's out of phase with state-of-the-art safety and software.
Actually, even on the processor side, if you think about the clock speed at which SoC vendors are coming out with new products and then the speed at which our software is evolving in the context of ever-dominating AI and AI capabilities, two to three years is a lifetime. It's not sustainable anymore. You need a better way to actually manage the development cycle and as well as to address some of other costs associated with data collection, annotation, and processing. We are working with our partners to address that, but also by making our solution pre-ported, available earlier on these types of platforms, we believe addresses this issue. Now, it doesn't mean that it's the only way to do it, but we think that it's a hell of a better way than the current way.
Yeah. No, I agree. It sounds great.
Then a quick question, Chris. The initial wins, I'm presuming the revenue will come off as NRE initially and royalty in the future. Let me confirm that framework for me and what sort of time frames with royalties follow, and how do we think about the sizing of the NRE? What's the framework for that as well?
Yep. You're absolutely right. All of the projects that we're responding to contain an NRE element, right? That's to support the extensive design and work that our engineering team would be doing along with typically going to be the tier-ones supplying the OEM. What we're quoting now is high single-digit millions, so anywhere from, call it 5 to we've quoted up to 20 million. What drives that variability is the size of the overall opportunity. So how many vehicles?
Fewer vehicles means a higher NRE charge and higher complexity or deviation from kind of our standard product drives a higher NRE charge. That translates into or that transitions into royalties as we hit startup production. We're currently bidding on projects with startup productions as early as 2027, but a lot of them are 2028 timeframe that we're looking at now. It's a good two to three-year design and cycle that we're seeing. I think that's a function of the fact that it is a new architecture, and so we think subsequent design wins will go into production a lot quicker. I think the OEMs that we're working with now, the OEMs and tier-ones now, recognize that this is an architecture change. It's a meaningful effort to get that first design into production.
Okay. All right. Thanks.
Thanks, Suji.
And we have no further questions at this time.
I will now turn the conference back over to Frantz Saintellemy for closing comments.
Thank you very much, Operator. As you can see, we are very confident in our business going forward. We have a lot of key milestones that we are working on that we hope can provide more color in the very near future. We absolutely believe that the future looks bright for LeddarTech, and one of the things that's important to pay attention to is we will be showcasing some of the products that I did talk about at the onset of the call at CES in a couple of weeks, and we are seeing the excitement from OEMs and tier-ones alike about our product lineup, as well as some of the new announcements that we are expecting to make on our new platforms both directly by LeddarTech as well as to our partners.
Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing you next.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.