Welcome to this Q4 webcast for Terranet. I'm very excited to be presenting for you today, the year-end report for 2022, and also give you a product development update. My name is Magnus Andersson. I'm the CEO of Terranet, and together with me today, I also have our Chief Technology Officer, Nihat. After this webcast, or in the end of it today, we will also have a Q&A session. Just so you know that. Let's move into the agenda. What we will do here today is first, but just give you a little bit brief about Terranet and what we do. Moving in and talking about some financials for the last quarter. Of course, exciting, talk to you about the activities, what we've done in Q4, and give you some highlights on that.
Nihat will continue and give you an update on our product development. Last but not least, we will also give you some insights in our focus areas moving forward. The website will also be available on the Terranet's websites afterwards, as well as on YouTube. Let's now talk a bit about Terranet and what we do. We really save lives, and that's very important. We do that by being an innovative tech company focusing on saving lives in cities. What we have as a product is called BlincVision. We focus on the customers of automotive manufacturers, OEMs, as well as Tier 1 suppliers. We have our headquarter in Lund, and then we also have an office in the automotive center of Germany in Stuttgart. Now let's move into the finance section.
If we look at the Q4 financials, and key numbers of that. Firstly, let's look at the Q4, and we can give you an overview here of the most relevant KPIs for our business. We start looking at Q4 isolated. We can conclude that the losses in during Q4 are significantly lower compared to the same period last year. It's explained by a larger write-offs of older capitalized development costs in 2021. The write-off had no impact on the cash flow, and operational cash burn is actually 20% less than last year's Q4, which is explained by lower external expenses. If we then move in and look at the full year, we can see that our tactical move to spend less on external consultants actually paid off.
The losses for this year, for the year, is significantly lower than last year. Consequently, the cash burn is lower as well. We can see that at the end of the year, the cash balance was 25 million SEK. Talking about the cost base for us, it's important to go full speed ahead on the development, and reach out with BlincVision as soon as possible and reach our targets. However, instead of relying on external consultants, we focus on building our own competence in-house. During the year, we actually increased the number of developers and reduced the number of admin heads. Let's continue and look at some of the financing and investment activities.
In spring of 2021, we made a strategic investment by acquiring a convertible note of $0.5 million in Sommer〃Robotics . Sommer〃Robotics is a key partner to Terranet, and this will strengthen our long-term cooperation to the company and its co-founders, Dirk Smits, who's also the innovator and pioneer in the sensor technology that BlincVision is based on. During Q4 then, for Sommer〃Robotics , it was finally converted to shares, and we're resulting in approximately 2% ownership. The other activity we have is that we completed the TO4 warrant program, as well as an incentive program for staff and board members. It's actually added around SEK 7 million to the company cash.
The last activity I would like to mention today is the, that we're getting closer to the TO5 warrant program, for subscription of shares between the 13th and 24th of March. Looking at the two most recent warrant programs, they've been very successful, where 80%-99% resulted in subscription of shares. Terranet has a strong base of owners, which, combined with ongoing dialogues I have with external actors, makes me confident that the willingness to finance our continued product development and commercializations exist. Okay. Let's move into the key activities and highlights for the quarter four and what we've actually been doing. First, let's talk about product development.
We really make really good progress in product development, and I'm very proud that we actually signed a partnerships agreement with Prevas and started to produce our prototype for the laser scanner. Secondly, in terms of other key component, the vision sensor, we also started several feasibility studies for this component, ensuring that we have different paths moving forward, and really soon can start producing the prototype also for the vision sensor. Really made good progress in these areas. The next activity I would like to mention is our partner company holoride. It's a startup company in Germany where we also are a large owner. The main owner is actually Audi, and then of course the founders.
Also we take a very big engagement to this company and the CEO of holoride is on our board, and I'm also on the board for holoride. holoride is doing an in-car entertainment product. You can see on the picture there, it's like VR solutions where the passenger can look at, play games and also look at videos. Also, actually, it follows the car's movement, so it prevents car sickness. It's a really exciting product. They launched this product in November with Audi in Germany, later on in U.S. at CES in January for Audi U.S., and also came up with a retrofit product which works for all vehicles. It's a really interesting development.
In terms of Terranet and the benefits for us, of course, holoride works very close with OEMs, so it's a good connection for us there. We can also see what can we do together on both of the products moving forward and, of course, also learn from each other in terms of launching a product to the market. The last activity and very close to me is, of course, interacting with the industry. During Q4, I've been out a lot on different conferences and events, attending AutoTech in Munich in November. I was also on the Suppliers Day in Stuttgart. We also did some investment presentations at the Redeye event. Also for me, also very important to meet a lot of OEM and Tier 1s.
We made a lot of good progress there and met basically more or less all the larger Tier 1 suppliers. Also for me, a learning to see how do you actually do a partnership with a Tier 1. We met both the ADAS expert, who very much appreciated the BlincVision product, but we also met with a startup and partner and investment organizations to see how we can quickly get a partnership going. Last but not least, also met with top management to get their senior support. It's very, very important for actually getting our product out there. Okay. Let us now move into product development, and I would like to hand over to our CTO, Nihat.
Thank you, Magnus. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nihat. I'm the CTO of Terranet and responsible for technology and product. Since our mission is to build and integrate an intelligent life-saving sensor into road vehicles, I want to give you a quick overview of the most important sensors that are available today. Today we have the three basic sensor classes that are integrated into vehicles that increase both driving comfort and safety, which is cameras, Radar systems, lidars. As we know, each sensor has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on the application, the use case, and the environment. At Terranet, we believe that only a fusion of different complementary sensors will lead to better road safety.
BlincVision is a kind of superhuman sensor that fills the gap between, for example, camera and lidar systems. When it comes to very fast response times, BlincVision is superior to the sensors listed here on the graph. The evaluation we present here at the right is according to our own assessment, of course, and judgment and knowledge we have. Let's move to the next slide, where I will illustrate the physical modules of BlincVision. BlincVision consists of three component types. We have two vision sensors located at the rooftop or alternatively installed in the side mirrors or headlamps, for example, of a vehicle. There's a single scanner, a laser scanner installed at the vehicle center. The unit can also be installed at the vehicle front or on the rooftop.
The scanner is not connected to the vision sensors at all. The compute unit is located anywhere inside the vehicle, so it could be in the trunk or in the back, and those vision sensors are connected to the compute unit. While we look at the physical components here, let's also spend some time into the logical, not physical components. On the next slide, we see that the emitter, which is a laser scanning unit, constantly emits multiple very short pulsed laser beams to the front of the vehicle. The sensor, which receives inflected laser beams on an event-based imaging device, we call it a fast vision sensor. That's the second logical component. We have the processor, which is responsible for noise filtering, beam or trajectory finding, spatial and temporal correlations, prepared to run on an accelerated, dedicated hardware later.
Finally, we have the recognizer, which receives those 4D events out of our processor and runs our object detection, object classification, object tracking software based on our own AI stack. The next slide highlights the status of our current scanner development. We have made substantial progress in the development of our scanner component. By end of this week, we will have 2 sample units, 2 prototypes of our scanner that will be delivered to our office by our partner, Prevas. These 2 units will be installed in our lab here in Lund next week. As you can see, or guess, inside this prototype, we have our laser units. There's a micromirror installed. We have optical lenses and mirrors of course, but also driver electronics and microcontroller, also some thermal management circuits in this scanning unit.
We have achieved to build a laser scanner emitting 5 pulsed laser beams sweeping in front of a vehicle with about 2,500-3,000 lines per second, which is like 500 lines for each beam. The lasers operate in the so-called near-infrared range. Each laser is powered with an average laser power of less than 25 milliwatts. The lasers operate with a very low pulse length, just a few nanoseconds. After shaping and collimating these beams, a MEMS mirror deflects our beams into two dimensions. An onboard microcontroller makes sure, you know, that these beams follow a continuous sweep pattern, similar to Lissajous curves, a pattern produced by the intersection of sinusoidal curves. That is all created inside this module.
Last but not least, we became eye safe according to Class 1 laser safety standards. Let's go and see what we did on the vision sensor side on the next slide. Today, there's no off-the-shelf event sensor or event camera that we could use for our final product. Our requirements regarding sensitivity, low noise, outdoor usage, field of view, or the image resolution is not met by any off-the-shelf cameras that we have today. Last year, we screened and talked to many high-end, beyond state-of-the-art CMOS image sensor companies who have the potential to build an event sensor that fits our needs. We have performed feasibility studies with the most promising ones, with the most visionary ones in Europe and in Asia.
Today, we're very close deciding on the best development partner for this and best sensor design for BlincVision. What was initially considered as very difficult is now actually within reach. It was worth all the efforts and the resources we put into this short research phase. Finally, let's look at the processing unit on the last slide that I'm showing. The third logical module is the processor, where all the filtering, noise filtering, trajectory finding, and triangulation happens. Despite the fact that we use optical filters in front of our event cameras to only see the light that we emit, we still see ambient noise, especially when there's bright sunlight outside. We have managed to eliminate that noise and reconstruct our beam patterns on the chip in real time, using today's standard CPU processors.
In the coming months, we plan to put our existing algorithms to hardware-accelerated platforms to take advantage of parallel edge computing. For our product to be accepted in the automotive industry, we need to complete this optimization and integration process soon. Yeah, that's my brief overview. Thanks a lot for your attention and interest, and I would like to hand over to Magnus again.
Thank you very much, Nihat, really good to hear about the progress on the product development and also that we are on track according to our plan. Let's go in and talk about focus areas moving forward. Firstly actually, I will just tell you a few words how we see the ADAS market. It's really great to see that the ADAS market is growing rapidly, we see an increase of 235% up to 2029. Actually, ADAS is the segment in automotive industry that has the third-largest revenue growth, really great potential. This is driven by more and more electrical vehicles on the market as well as more digitalization in vehicles, last but not least, also regulations in regards to road safety.
We know that EU has a target for 2050 with zero fatalities in the traffic. Already on 2030, UN would see 50% reduction compared to 2021 in terms of road fatalities. Another key proof of the potential in the market is when I visited the CES trade show in Las Vegas the beginning of January. CES, as you may know, Consumer Electronics Show. Actually, it was actually more an automotive show. More than half of the exhibition was automotive. All the major OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers was there and had an exhibition booth. In most of the booths, there were ADAS or AD technologies. It was a really good trade show, and it shows the enormous potential and interest in ADAS.
I, of course, had a lot of meetings with the Tier 1s and also the OEMs. It was really nice to see also the uniqueness of our product, that it's really a big interest for it in the market. Okay, for us, moving forward, and we, if we look at the focus areas, the first focus area, of course, is to ensure we have good suppliers and partners. As you know, we have a partnership with Prevas, but we will also continue and sign up more partnerships, as you know, probably for the vision sensors and other ones to ensure that we do our product development fast and in the best and smartest way.
The next area that we focus on, of course, is to accelerate the product development because we really want the product out in the market as soon as possible. We are doing what we can, both internally and externally to speed this up. The third focus area, I would say, is to continue my dialogue with the market and especially with Tier 1 partners to ensure that we actually start doing some real partnerships with one or more of them. Of course, also we, as you know, we did the proof of concept with Mercedes 1.5 year ago, and we, of course, keep in touch with Mercedes and see how we can progress that now when the prototype is soon ready.
Last but not least, we also are joining a lot of networks in the industry. We probably will also join some accelerator programs which OEMs and Tier 1s have to also speed up the process of partnerships. The last area, of course, as we have a brilliant team. We've got highly competent PhD people, but we need to add developers, so we are focusing a lot on recruitment. I think currently we have 4 or 5 open positions on our websites and also engaging recruitment companies to speed this up, adding brilliant people to our already world-class team. Moving forward, please stay up to date with Terranet and also look at our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
Let's move on over to the Q&A sessions of this webcast. We have our CFO, Thomas, who will moderate this Q&A session. Thomas, let's see if we have any questions.
Hello. Yes, you do, Magnus. They're asking: What trends do you see in ADAS and for the lidar segments? If you can elaborate about that.
Okay. Yeah, if we talk at ADAS as a large, I guess CES was a big proof on that, right? There is more and more sensors being added to the car, you know. Some has 30 sensors. Some could have 50 sensors, right? The car design is also changing due to that, to fit all the sensors, okay? That's one trend. If you look at the major technologies, we see that radar is making very good progress. In terms of lidar, as you mentioned, lidar is quite expensive. OEMs are looking for alternatives, right? Cheaper and better options. Also there are a lot of lidar companies out there, and you're already seeing some mergers between some of them. Some will probably not exist anymore.
But especially on the near range, as we said in the cities, Terranet and BlincVision can really fill a gap for many of ADAS solutions. Great potential for that.
Good. We have some more questions here coming in. Nihat can probably answer this one. Why would car manufacturers spend additional cost and allow for even more sensors in their cars?
That's a good question. As we all know, the number of sensors in a cars increase year by year. However, we believe that multiple complementary sensors will lead to a more accurate, reliable, and last but not least, to a fast computer vision system. Vision is extremely important when you have self-driving cars, for example. Different sensor types have their proprietary advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to real life-saving technologies, I think there's no price tag that is too high. Today, we don't ask how much an airbag system costs or whether we can ship a car without seat belts. Nobody wants his or her child run over by a self-driving car or by a robot car. We have to prevent that case at any cost.
I exaggerate a little bit, as you noticed, but I think the biggest challenge is not that we have more sensors on a car. A common challenge is, however, to cope with all the data and additional processing requirements that we need inside vehicles. People talk about, you know, driving computers, right, or a big driving, massive computing power on the roads, but that's how the future will look like. I hope that this answers the question.
Good. Thank you, Nihat. We also have a question here, I think for Magnus, about the Disney, previous Disney deal. Still any deal with Disney?
Yes. Yeah, Disney was a product we did a while ago. Circumstances did change. As you know, the pandemic came in, of course, it affected Disney as well. We don't have any current project with Disney and no plans to pick it up at the moment. I think we put all our focus on developing and getting BlincVision out on the market and in the automotive sector.
Thank you. Question for Nihat, this one. Can the technology be the key to self-driving vehicles?
Our technology?
I presume.
Yes. I think, as I said, self-driving vehicles, will not just require cameras and the brain behind that because, we wanna make driving as safe as possible. Seeing more means that we can react to different traffic situations, which means that, you know, a radar is very good when it comes to bad side, when we have rain and snow out there. Cameras are great for object detection. We're going to combine those different sensor signals, fusion it, but BlincVision is going to be one of the fastest, reacting sensors. The car will still ask for the opinion of other sensors, other systems, and then make up the mind, you know, whether to break or dodge, you know, to steer away from an obstacle.
Self-driving cars need to have 100 times, 1,000 times more safety features than today's cars have because, as I said, you know, nobody wants that a self-driving car causes an accident on our roads, and this applies to cities in particular. Today, these autonomous driving systems, they can handle highways, you know, when you drive like 60 kilometers an hour, sometimes even more, but they are made to operate in well-controlled areas. Today's self-driving vehicles, they could not cope inside cities because there's too much going on. Too many micro-mobility, too many vulnerable road users, the situations are very complicated. The computing power on those vehicles is not enough, the neural networks, the trained networks are not well enough yet to operate there.
I think this is the goal for all of us, for the OEMs, for the Tier ones, Tier twos, and technology providers. That's something that will happen. It's very hard to tell when it's going to be in our cities as well.
Let me add to that as well, Thomas. I think as Nihat says, it is a challenge to have self-driving car in cities. Surely, it's being tested in some cities. As you know, maybe in San Francisco, in the U.S., but you don't see it in all cities. The challenge is there is what is the safety concept? What safety systems do you have in the car, right? The cities or whoever is approving the self-driving car are hesitant. They don't believe there is enough safety systems. If BlincVision can be the system adding to the safety concept, then we would have more self-driving cars in the future. We really fill a gap there.
Good. Thank you. You ready for more questions?
Sure.
We have a question about holoride here. They wanna know, the share that Terranet owns.
Yeah. We have around 10% ownership in holoride, as we say. Audi is a rather large owner and then of course the founder of the company. We are a large shareholder.
Good. We take, I think, another question here to Magnus. What's your view on the Terranet's cash situation? How will you be able to do everything you say you will?
Yeah. That's a very relevant question, I mean, we briefly touched on the cash situation earlier in the financial highlights. In terms of what we've done in the company, the management, together with the board, as, which also include the largest owner, done the calculation on how much money is needed to actually put this product on the market over the coming years. We know that numbers, and therefore, also the board is continuously working on financing to secure this. Huh? In the near term, you know, we have the warrant program TO5 coming up in March, of course, the board is looking at financing options continuously moving forward.
Good. We have a last question then, before we close this Q&A. It's about BlincBike. What is happening there?
I guess I can answer that. BlincBike, that's a product we did before, and that product is on hold. Okay? It's not totally closed, it's on hold. Now, we put the focus on BlincVision for the automotive sector and ensuring we can deliver that first, right?
Well, thank you Magnus and Nihat for the Q&A. I think we close the session. Back to you, Magnus.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Just to sum up today, we do see a large need of a BlincVision product on the market. We still see that we are very unique. Our technology is unique, and it is protected. We see that we are still up to 10 times faster than other solutions, so we believe that adds a value. Of course, most importantly, we can save more lives. We look forward to continue reaching our goals for 2023, and keep on track on our development. Thank you very much for tuning in today, and keep in touch.