Earnings Call: Q1 2025

Mar 20, 2025

Earnings release

Okay, let's get started. Welcome everybody to our 2025 1st quarter results and business update. I'm Brian Stringer. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for 01 Quantum Inc. With me on the call today is Andrew Cheung, our President and CEO. The agenda today will be I'll turn it over to Andrew shortly, and he'll take us through our results and give us a business update as to where we're going with IronCAP and the future for the company. Following that, there'll be time for Q&A. We all know how to use the Q&A buttons now on Zoom. If you look at the bottom, there's a Q&A. Just click it, send it to me. I'll moderate the questions at the end and present them to Andrew. Now, before I turn it over, if you take a look at this disclaimer, which forms an integral part of this presentation. Take a few minutes to read it. Now, Andrew, over to you. Thank you, Brian Stringer. Welcome everyone. My name is Andrew Cheung, President and CEO of 01 Quantum Inc. Since January, I have talked to a number of new shareholders. I would like to welcome you all to the 01 Quantum community. Although it was just less than two months ago when we last met, there are already quite a bit of new development in the field of post-quantum cybersecurity. I'm excited to provide you with all the updates today. First of all, quantum threats are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. The white-hot announcement from Google in December about its Willow chip was only three months ago. It felt like prehistoric already. Shortly after that, in February last month, Microsoft announced its Majorana-One, which is the first quantum chip powered by topological core that can scale to 1 million qubit on a single chip. This is another significant milestone, the fault-tolerant qubit after Google's breakthrough announcement in December last year. I guess most importantly, they are not the only players in the world. For example, IBM is anticipating their 4,000 qubit version of new quantum computer later this year. Only 2 days ago, Honeywell, which is Quantinuum, says they're expecting their next quantum computer release in a few months is going to be 1 billionth times faster than the last version only 18 months ago. It's probably even more important is that there are many other players in the world, including national-level players in Russia and China who don't announce their roadmap. I am fully expecting a kind of like a DeepSeek, alike event coming out of nowhere or the most unexpected way that they have created a super quantum computer beating everyone very soon. Whether this is coming out of U.S., China, or whoever is not important. What's important is that the world must prepare for this to happen, or it would be a disaster for those who have listened to some self-serving, irresponsible comment saying quantum computers are decades away and caught unprepared. I basically have been saying this for many years because technically, 372 quiet qubits or 4,000 somewhat quiet qubits can cross the line of Q-Day already. We don't need millions of qubits for that purpose. Q-Day is the day when malicious users are using quantum computers to do dirty work by reverse engineering the public key of everything back to their private key. This allows stealing of password, eavesdropping sensitive communication, stealing cryptocurrencies, national safety measure being disclosed, et cetera, et cetera. The chaos happened several weeks ago in the Bybit, if you remember, that they had lost about CAD 1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrencies. I guess this incident is just a mild preview of what will happen on Q-Day. Q-Day is exactly not there yet today, or at least not on a commercial level, but it is awfully close. I personally hold a strong belief that Q-Day has arrived at least 2, 3 years ago on the national level because they are usually about 5 years ahead of the commercial world. Are you surprised if the U.S., Russia or China National Security have already contracted those, their quantum computing vendors to create a special purpose quantum computer that does nothing but cracking RSA and Elliptic Curve? Frankly, I know that it's misleading listening to what company says about Q-Day because the comment tends to be self-serving. Obviously, we say Q-Day has arrived because we bet our futures on it. Then those businesses who will be killed by Q-Day will certainly hope that it is decades away. I believe you should pay attention to what the government said instead. NIST is the semi-government agencies in the U.S. that they scrutinizes and standardizes the encryption algorithms while the rest of the world follows suit. They have started their study and standardization process for quantum safety since 2017, almost the same time when we started our IronCAP business unit focusing on post-quantum cybersecurity. Almost bang on with their anticipation, they have announced their first set of post-quantum cryptography, short form PQC, algorithms about 7 months ago. On March 11, less than 2 weeks ago, announced 1 more algorithm in the code-based category. Let's jump right into what we do. Our focus is post-quantum cybersecurity, obviously, and our expertise is encryption, cybersecurity, and end user product development. After spending millions of CAD over the last five, six years, I would like to tell you how we are taking full advantage of our expertise and how we're going to capitalize on it. The bottom line is that we believe the huge demand on quantum safe enterprise end user applications will come many years before the demand on general purpose quantum computers. We are ready to capture that market right now, not tomorrow. We are ahead of our competitors in the way that our engine had been completed about two, three years ago, and we have already invested in PQC-compliant enterprise end user product development since then. While we will certainly license our technology for money for our partners such as cryptocurrencies players, post-quantum multi-signature, et cetera, for their journey of PQC migration, we believe revenue potential is way higher and way sooner for enterprise end user using PQC-compliant applications with existing demand such as email security, AI platform, remote access, mobile messaging, et cetera. These verticals are carefully picked for a 1 factor, that they have huge existing demand, but without quantum safety. In other words, we believe once effective marketing kicks in, revenue will start flowing. The reason we picked email as the first quantum safe enterprise end user solution is not only because it has a huge market with 700 million business email accounts in the world, but also email is the most insecure, but yet globally adopted business tool. Since its inception, we all know that emails are virtually sent unencrypted. Even the tiny portion that are sent encrypted, the encryption is really not end-to-end. Not end-to-end means it is really not secure because people other than the recipient can also decrypt your messages, such as these, the service provider, the agencies, well, the big brother. Let alone being quantum safe, they are just not secure. We took this opportunity to leapfrog an email security product that is not only quantum safe, but also truly end-to-end encrypted. In other words, it guarantees 100% privacy that even government authorities are unable to tap into. Even more important than encryption is authenticity of the senders. Virtually all email senders today are unauthenticated. That's why 91% of all ransomware attacks in the world are initiated by a simple phishing email. The end-to-end email signature in our product is not only quantum safe, but also allow the senders to digitally sign the message, proving the sender's authenticity. In other words, this alone can plug 91% of the source of ransomware because you know the recipient will know whether the sender is legit or not. IronCAP X is already available for public usage, and the first version is limited to Windows Outlook users. With the recent capital injection, it allowed R&D expansion to provide an email client for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android for cross-platform users and expecting commercial availability within this year. In previous meetings, I have mentioned about mobile messaging platform and remote access being other two major verticals. Remote access is so obvious because so many people today are depending on that for their remote working nowadays. None of the product in the market is PQC compliant. I believe a PQC-compliant remote access product with proper marketing will get a market very, very quickly. Similarly, the mobile messaging platform is another no-brainer. You may remember several months ago, the CEO of a popular messaging platform called Telegram was arrested in France. He was arrested for Telegram's non-cooperation with authorities in censoring the messages on the platform. Some people said the arrest was a pure political move. I'm not a politician, nor do I care, I'm just a cybersecurity guy knowing for a fact that Telegram is not truly end-to-end encrypted, whereby they possess the master key. Maybe this is the real reason for the CEO arrest, that someone was trying to gain access to something. The real motive is outside the scope of this discussion here, and we may never know, and I don't even want to know. All I know is that the world is strongly in need for a mobile messaging platform that is not only quantum safe, but also truly end-to-end encrypted, whereby there's no master key to share. We are committed to build this product. I guess saving the best to the last. I have talked about development in PQC AI platform during the last maybe two or three quarterly result. I was unable to say too much before we filed the patent application. Well, we did that two days ago, so I can release a bit more information today. Bottom line is that our invention is revolutionary. In AI, the biggest business market is not large language model, LLM, like your ChatGPT, but special purpose AI models. Let me give you some examples. Imagine there's a reliable AI model specialized in credit card fraud detection, whereby it will return an answer of fraud or valid to any credit card transaction being fed into it. This would be very useful to the credit card company, but practically unachievable today due to security because AI operations are unencrypted. As we all know, each credit card transaction contain highly confidential customer information such as name, credit card number, expiration date, billing address, amount, merchants, et cetera, et cetera. Feeding those information into a third-party credit card fraud detection AI model will constitute a significant violation of privacy. The banks will never do that, period. Similarly, the AI model vendor also do not want the unencrypted model in the hands of users risking a simple, easy pirated copy being created. Another recent example is malicious activities detection for, say, data center by monitoring the network traffic, which is again, extremely confidential, and they can never be sent to an AI model unencrypted. Okay. The other quick examples. The sky is the limit, basically, you know, like the facial recognition, anomaly detection, privacy-preserving machine language. These examples are just tips of the iceberg. What we have, what we have been working hard since last year, was basically invented a technology that can preserve both the confidential data of the users as well as the intellectual property of the AI model vendor in a manner that is quantum safe. This is not only revolutionary, but also greatly enhance the adoption of special purpose AI, which is a multi-billion CAD market. We have accelerated in the commercialization process and are very confident that we can showcase a public demonstration within the next few months. The demonstration we expect to be to be around some real using example on credit card transaction. Carrying forward from the pivotal years in 2024, I have to say that it's fair to say that 2025 has kickstarted a positive term for 01 Quantum. First of all, we received a strategic non-broker equity financing in January. While our Q1 continued to operate in an essentially breakeven position, the strategic equity financing really allowed us to accelerate and expand on our PQC compliant product development. The innovative AI marketplace solution that I just talked about is an exciting area that we are firing up. The reliable recurring revenue from our legacy product, although suffer slightly by the unfavorable exchange rate, continue to fund the part of our operations. Our focus from 2025 onward will be towards building quantum safe solution-related revenue by expanding our R&D, sales, and marketing activities. In closing, I expect 2025 to be an exciting year for 01 Quantum. We have patent-protected technologies, patent-pending technologies, and mass market ready products. While we are inching closer to Q-Day, the world really need to start its journey of quantum safe migration, not today, but actually yesterday. 01 Quantum is poised to be the leader, the industry leader in offering PQC compliant enterprise end user product. We are confident 2025 will be a massive year for us in achieving major product milestone and kickstarting the revenue. I believe revenue growth will accelerate once sales and marketing activity begin in the latter part of this year. I'm sure you have a lot of questions, so I am going to take a quick pause to reserve more time for question and answers. As mentioned by Brian at the beginning, I'm sure you guys are very familiar with Zoom already. Please use the Q&A feature at the bottom, and Brian will moderate your question accordingly. Over to you, Brian. Okay. Thank you, Andrew. First question, it's a combination. There's two questions here. Because it's on AI, I'm gonna combine them together. First one is technical, Andrew, it says: How is your solution different from other homomorphic, if I've got that word correct, solutions in the market? Some claim PQC like Duality. What is unique about the patent in the field of homomorphic. The second part, which is the second question, large financial transaction monitoring and AML firms are looking for homomorphic solutions now. Are you speaking with them yet? Yeah. I think this is a loaded question. Rather technical, but I'm trying to answer in more English than just the technical terms. A homomorphic encryption is one type of computation preserve encryption, which allows the mathematic computation in encrypted data. We are not. Our patent is not about the encryption technology, but it's about the application of math preserving encryption in an application process, in a method that can allow something that is not able to function today, such as AI platform. What we have filed a patent for is actually a platform that would allow us to bridge between the AI users with sensitive data and the AI model vendor with sensitive AI models, and they don't want to disclose to each other, and we provide a platform that would allow them to happen. That's basically what we did. From the second question is about really, like, the end users. You know, we expect the sky's the limit, you know. Like, I was just using credit card as an example because it's easy to understand that the credit card company can be a user, and then the credit card fraud detection AI model would be the seller, and we are bridging them in between. Kind of like a platform. You can imagine that it's like an Amazon platform bridging buyer and seller, only that here the product is AI model. Yeah. I hope, you know, this would be easy to understand answer, although it's a bit winded, you know, a long-winded answer. Okay. The next one on AI again is, seems that AI is moving forward at light speed, and you used the example of credit card detection. I think everybody can understand that. The question is, could this be used to prevent fraud related to cryptocurrencies? Absolutely. You know, I think the quick answer is absolutely. It can be a detection, you know, of happening, right? To protect a cryptocurrency, they don't need. It's not about using AI to protect. You know, to protect cryptocurrencies, as we mentioned before, it would have to be a complete overhaul on the digital signature and, which we are in discussion with a number of potential partners in the marketing that. Extending, you know, towards detection of fraud, you know, it is definitely possible. Another, you know, easy to understand example of AI would be, maybe I'm digressing a little bit into other examples, such as healthcare. You know, it's a typical place where the pharmaceutical company would create an AI model specialized in their drug, you know. The healthcare provider can be the user providing patient data in order to seek advice of how to use the drug. You can very quickly picture the huge usage on that and the huge privacy issue that can be derived and needs encryption in order to make that happen. Yeah, the sky's the limit. Okay. I'm conscious of time, so I try to get through these questions quickly. Andrew, there's quite a few. In your AI use case, do you rely on NVIDIA GPUs and software, or can you work with any AI infrastructure? Well, this is a very good question. First of all, in the, as I think I mentioned, in a few months, we are expecting to host a public demo. We have already created a platform here, which is using normal computer without GPU and anything, and it's working perfectly. Obviously, applying GPU, like NVIDIA GPU, into the operation will significantly enhance the throughputs of the platform. Which means, like, we can handle more customer and more transaction using less hardware. Quick answer is yes, definitely. A GPU-type hardware platform will be significantly enhancing the throughput of the system. Okay. The next one. Is there any update on Real Matter? Yes, and no. We have not announced anything. The partnership was just signed up about a month ago, and they are a prominent cybersecurity provider in Asia. At this moment, I cannot release the name of the people they talk to, but they have been talking to a number of major banks in that geographical area that we expect some serious discussion to be happening fairly soon. Yeah. It's safe to say we're in close contact and working with them. There are two more questions. This one, we have a new shareholder in Antanas Guoga, a recent financing. The question is he's seen what he did with sole strategy going forward. Do you communicate with him at all? If so, does he provide any input on 01 Quantum's business strategy? I guess short answer is yes. We are in constant communications. While I cannot disclose too many non-public information, we are strategizing a lot of things as we speak. I think I would just stop at that line, but we are in constant communication. It's very simple. Okay. Great. Cognizant of time, we got this last question, which I think is kind of a fun question. Andrew, how big do you see 01 Quantum growing in the next 5 to 10 years? Wow. Yeah. As a visionary, I have been preparing 01 Quantum to this stage for so many years. Because this is basically our chapter 3, and I am the betting chapter 3 to be a leader, not only a leader, but evolving as the unicorn in the PQC world. That's what I expect this would happen, 'cause we are, as I said, not only leading the world in the engine development, but we are really leading the world in PQC enterprise applications development, which is where I believe the majority of financial benefit would come from. You know. Like licensing, as I keep saying, licensing the engine for money, yeah, is, is some kind of a good source of revenue. The major source of revenue, I believe, will be coming from our PQC compliant, enterprise end user product. I'm expecting 01 Quantum to become the unicorn in this field. Yeah. Andrew, I think it's safe to say the sky's the limit, right? Well, yes. Okay. I thought you'd like that one. Okay. That's about it. Cognizant of time. Andrew, I'll turn it back to you for closing comments. Thank you everybody for attending. Okay. Yeah. Once again, thank you, Brian, for moderating the questions. I guess closing, I just wanna say that we have entered a very exciting moment. Please stay tuned for all our upcoming news. Thank you for joining our corporate update, and I'll see you again probably at our AGM in April. Thank you.