Okay, let's get started. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter results and an update on our business. I'm Brian Stringer. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for 01 Communique (01 Quantum). With me on the call today is Andrew Cheung. He's our President and Chief Executive Officer. Andrew, if you could turn to the next slide, please. The agenda today will be a presentation by Andrew, who'll give you an update on our results and also an update on our business. It'll be followed by a Q&A. I think by now everybody understands how to do a—how to submit a question using Zoom. If you look at the bottom on Q&A, if you just click it and type the question, we'll receive it. I will present it to Andrew at the end of the presentation. I'll moderate the Q&A.
Now, before we get started, I just point you to our disclaimer. This forms part of the presentation. If you take a brief look at it. Now I'll pass it over to Andrew, and Andrew will give you our business presentation. Over to you, Andrew.
Thank you, Brian. Hello, everyone. How are you doing? I'm Andrew Cheung, the President and CEO of 01 Communicare. I guess three months is a long time in our industry. A lot has happened since then. First, IBM made an announcement of the expectation of a full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. We have completed another round of strategic financing, followed by the announcement of a co-development project with Hitachi. I will give you all the details later. Our value proposition is very simple. I won't go into the details about what quantum computers are and how they work. All I want to say is that their excessive computing power is going to render the encryption technologies currently used to protect the world of the internet totally useless. The world called this Q-Day, the day when hackers are using quantum computers to do the dirty works.
This means literally everything under the sun will be vulnerable, including the likes of email, financial, cryptocurrencies, AI, et cetera, you name it. They all need to be protected against Q-Day. We, with the IronCap product, are the leader in protecting them against the inevitable Q-Day. I guess timing is everything. Any kind of overnight success basically has six or seven years in the build. We have been promoting for a long time about the quantum safety for many years. The world has only been kind of waking up by the Google Willow chip announcement in December, about six months ago. We have been talking to a lot of potential customers for almost two years. They were mostly watching, but without commitment. The Google announcement seems to be a game changer, and these people are starting to move since then.
The good example was the announcement we had with Hitachi just several days ago was a typical example. This is giving us a huge endorsement of our technology. We have many other similar opportunities around the world currently in discussion, some in earlier stage, some in more advanced stage. I guess the reality is that quantum threats are accelerating at unprecedented pace. Only two months after the white-hot announcement from Google in December about its Willow chip, Microsoft announced its Majorana 1 platform, which is the first quantum chip powered by a topological core that allows scaling up to 1 million qubits on a single chip. This combined with the Google error correction they announced six months ago was a real game changer. Shortly after that, Quantinuum, which is the quantum arm of Honeywell, announced that they will release a new version later in 2025.
They haven't done it yet. They said later in 2025, we'll release a new version of quantum computers that will be about 1 billion times faster than the previous version. Obviously, IBM is not sitting still. Earlier this month, they announced their latest roadmap, which is calling for the release of Loon later in 2025, and then Kookaburra in 2026, followed by a full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Now, full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers really mean a guarantee of Q-Day on or before 2029. There are many other players in the world, don't forget, including national 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 soon out of nowhere in the most unexpected way, the most unexpected day that they have created a supercomputer, super quantum computer beating everyone.
Whether this is coming from the U.S., China, or whoever is not important. What is important is that the world must prepare for this to happen, or it will be a disaster for those who have listened to some self-serving, irresponsible comments saying that quantum computers are decades away and caught unprepared. I keep saying that, frankly. I believe it is misleading listening to business leaders commenting on Q-Day because their comment tends to be self-serving. I believe what we should be paying more attention to is what the government says. Let's see what the U.S. and our government says about the Q-Day. Fundamentally, Q-Day is not a problem of tomorrow, but today's problem, maybe even a yesterday problem.
First of all, the Executive Office of the U.S. President told the agencies to be mindful about the fact that Q-Day is today's problem because hackers can download the data now and simply wait until they got hold of a full-scale quantum computer and decrypt them. This is the infamous HNDL, Harvest Now, Decrypt Later attacks. Two months later, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, made a public comment saying that the world of cybersecurity will be totally broken if we do not act immediately. Finally, while the ink is still wet, our Canadian government also said during the G7 meeting that quantum technology is a priority topic. These are just some notable examples out of many, many, many more. Our business model is very simple. We have two parallel revenue generators.
The first one is direct marketing of our own quantum-safe end-user product on a recurring subscription basis. The industry called it SaaS, software as a service. We are way ahead of our competitors that in addition to the encryption engines, we have two quantum-safe end-user products commercially available with a third one in the pipeline. The first one is the world's first quantum-safe email security product. The other one is the world's first quantum-safe remote access product. The third one is a crossover between AI and quantum safety, which will be commercially ready sometime in 2026. I will talk about this a little bit later, and especially that it's kind of priming that we likely will make an official announcement or demonstration in the very, very near future. The second revenue generator is to help our partners achieving their quantum safety conversion journey.
The latest announcement with Hitachi was a typical example of this, whereby we are charging a one-time development fee plus an ongoing revenue share. We're currently in some late-stage discussion with many similar or larger opportunities around the world across different fields, spanning from financial, cryptocurrencies, to energies, digital signatures, et cetera. We're simply using our IronCap engine as a means to help them achieve their PQC journey by charging a fee, as I said, plus ongoing revenue share. It does not need a rocket scientist to figure that the market size that we focus on are extremely huge. Using exactly the same example, I'm going to give you some sense about the size of it. Even the smaller one being quantum-safe remote access has a market size of $500 million annually.
Quantum-safe email is a single math, as there are about 7.9 billion business email addresses worldwide. Let's say 1% is serious email-oriented and paying $2 per month for quantum safety. That market size is already $1.5 billion annually. The AI is even more crazy, expected by market analysts to be reaching $3.6 trillion by 2034. We will be using our proceeds from the licensing part of the business to fund the marketing of these three enormous markets, the SaaS market. Our licensing side of business is also like the concept is simple and it's sizable too. The best part of it is that there is no marketing cost associated with that. The recent announcement of the Hitachi project is a typical example in this slide. We collect development fee plus an ongoing revenue sharing, which can become big and recurring, recursive.
There are too many industries that we can serve, ranging all the way from energies to banks to cryptocurrencies, digital signature, et cetera. Needless to say, the revenue sharing in the cryptocurrency can be also enormously comparable to the direct SaaS market also. The licensing side of our business really relies on partners. Okay. We perfectly understand that large enterprises, banks, or governments likely will not work directly with us being a small company. That is why we chose to sign up with large big-name partners around the world who also believe in quantum threat. We spent the last few years and successfully signed up these people that we will simply become the SMEs, subject matter experts, so that when they are helping their customers in their PQC conversion, we are the company behind them in charging fees.
In the last two, three years, as I said, we have signed up a lot around the world. The more notable one would be like CGI in our backyard, TALOS in France, PwC, and Hitachi in Asia, right? Aside from these things, I'd like to also bring you to the attention about the latest activities within this quarter. The first to highlight, again, was the agreement with Hitachi whereby we are receiving one-time development fee plus ongoing revenue share with a mandate to convert their remote access product to become quantum-safe. Unlike VPN, their product, their remote access is application-level zero trust remote access so that even a hacker who managed to hack or crack into the accessing client, the corporate network that they are remotely accessing will still remain safe because there is no network layer trust involved here.
Let alone that it is also quantum-safe. The one-time development fee is good and profitable, but the upside is really lying in the revenue sharing arrangement. The most significant value to us really is the industry endorsement that we have a large company with a big name taking a long time scrutinizing the technology and chose to work with us. We have been in discussion, as I said, with them for almost two years. Finally, maybe partly triggered by the Google announcement in December several months ago, the decision, the discussion was accelerated. Another highlighted activity this quarter was a quantum-safe AI marketplace. I guess last quarter, I managed to briefly talk about that after filing our U.S. patent. This invention is simply revolutionary. Because in AI, the biggest business market is not LLM like ChatGPT, but special purpose AI model.
Let me give you an example. What is the special purpose AI model? You will expect to feed some credit card transaction, for example, into ChatGPT and then expect that ChatGPT will tell you, giving you a prediction whether this transaction is likely a fraud or valid. That's the job of a special purpose AI model designed solely for credit card fraud detection. Another special purpose AI model example would be like provided by a pharmaceutical company giving advice to a health provider like a hospital using patient data and give advice on how and what to use for the drugs, right? Another example can also be network traffic hacking activities detection. You can see that all of these kind of special purpose AI would involve a lot of privacy because the data feeding is highly likely to be very sensitive and very personal.
That is why this huge market has not been exploded as of yet. For example, Visa would never want to feed their credit card transaction into a third-party credit card detection AI model for the same reason. Even in the reverse, the AI model vendor would also not want their customers to have direct access to the AI model because once the AI model is unencrypted, if they get hold of the AI model, they can copy it in no time, similar to how DeepSeek is using the open LLM from ChatGPT and just building on top of it, right?
What we have been working hard since 2024 was inventing a technology that can prevent this problem from happening so that we are encrypting both the user data and the AI model in a manner that is quantum-safe and so that they are not exposing to each other while can serve AI prediction operations. This is not only revolutionary, but we also greatly enhance the adoption of special-purpose AI with a market size of multi, multi-billion dollars, actually reaching trillion level. We have accelerated in the commercialization process and are very confident that we can kind of showcase a public demonstration on something like credit card transaction detection within a short period of time. Our activities, I guess, is squarely reflected by our quarterly financials. Revenue was recurring, which is more or less the same as last year.
After closing a new financing in January, we managed to accelerate on a few fronts, such as new patent applications in the AI platform. We also spent an extra $200,000 in this quarter to achieve all these additional activities. While we have zero debt, we have slightly more than $800,000 in cash while adding another $500,000 after the latest private placement earlier this month. We have also increased our IR activities in order to create more investor awareness to our stock. Our focus from the second quarter, or I would say second half of 2025 onward, will be towards building quantum-safe solutions, kind of like revenue-related to quantum-safe solution by expanding our R&D and sales and marketing activities. I would like to reserve a little bit more time for questions this time. In closing, I would say that, again, timing is everything.
Riding the momentum created by Q1 and Q2, we have more PQC projects in advanced stage discussion. We are also expanding the email support beyond Outlook users and accelerated the AI marketplace development with revenue expected to accelerate into Q3 and beyond. I also expect 2025 to be kind of like to be exciting year for 01, and it's going to be a massive year for us. I couldn't think of a better way because really that it seems to be ignited by the Google announcement in December that everything seems to have ignited in 2025. We believe it's going to be a massive year for us. I'm sure that you will be having a lot of questions. I'm going to take a quick pause here to reserve more time for question and answer this time.
As mentioned at the beginning by Brian, I am sure that people are familiar with Zoom, the Q&A feature. Please make use of that. Brian, as usual, will moderate your questions accordingly. Over to you, Brian.
Okay, Andrew. I do have some questions that have already come in. Please feel free to continue sending them. The first question, Andrew, has to do with our AI marketplace. Can you elaborate on the timeframe for your AI marketplace? When can we expect to see it? Who do you envision as your first customers?
Thank you, Brian. This is kind of loaded, but all related to AI marketplace. I can understand why people are interested in that because this is a very big opportunity for 01.
For the most part, as I said, for the most part of 2024, we have been working on this, but we kept ourselves in a stealth mode. As we have not filed a patent, we cannot talk anything about it. Otherwise, the patent application could be in jeopardy. What we have filed in March, only several months ago, was exactly the technology that would allow this to happen. With this, and we are completing a demonstration, like the proof of concept demonstration based on the patent pending technology. As I mentioned briefly a little bit earlier, I am very confident that we will conduct a demonstration of the technology and make a likely an announcement, official announcement of the commercial development very shortly. I could not put a date on it, but I have confidence that it is very, very shortly we will be making that kind of announcement.
I am also expecting the commercial availability to be sometime in 2026, likely around the second quarter or something like that, plus or minus. Andrew, the second part of that question was, who do you envision as your customers for? Like customers, like this is the AI marketplace is kind of like an eBay or Amazon that bridging the customer and the users. Sorry, bridging the vendor and the users. In this case, say in Amazon, the vendor is a seller of some product and the buyer is the buyer of the product. In the AI marketplace, the seller is the AI model vendor. There are tons of AI models vendor around the world, credit card fraud detection, medical advice, network traffic, facial recognition, audio text detection, whatever, you name it. There are tons of them. And they all worry about the model being copied.
The user of these vendors is also worried about data being looked at, which is very confidential. We expect the customer, so the so-called customer is a long-winded answer. The so-called customer would be, first of all, the vendors to list, to allow them to list their model on our platform to be sold, say, how much per use or whatever. The user who comes into the platform will search for the AI model, put in some keywords exactly the same way how you search for something you like in Amazon or eBay. You will find the model you like. Based on the fees, based on the user comment, based on whatever, you choose one to use and you pay, and then we take a cut.
The first, I would not say who would be the first customer, but we expect a lot of AI model vendors would start listing. Listing fee is zero. Listing the AI model on our platform, and then the user will start coming to search for whatever they need without worrying about disclosing their sensitive data. We, being the middleman, would just take a cut, similar to how eBay and Amazon take a cut from the fees, charging the users before depositing into the vendors' accounts. Yeah, that is kind of like a long-winded answer, but that is what I envision.
Thanks, Andrew. The next question has to do with investor relations. It says, you have been spending money on investor relations or started to, which is good. Can you elaborate a bit on what is being done to increase shareholder value with the new IR firm? What is your plan going forward?
Again, the IR activities is very important alongside with product marketing. We have been relatively quiet in the last two years simply because the market is everyone knows about quantum, everyone talks about quantum, but has not received attention. Since, as I said, since the alarm clock triggered by Google in December, the world attention has been waking up. Since then, we believe with all these activities going on, it is the best time for us to start spending money on IR. The step one was signing up with OKO to provide IR activities, mainly to increase the awareness of our company to the investors' world related to quantum. A lot of people like the quantum sector and would like to know where are the hidden gems.
They're looking for the hidden gem, and 01 is a typical hidden gem because we are seriously undervalued. The market cap is only $45 million. Compared to all these market sizes that we're going into and the opportunity that we have signed up and will be signed up and doing it in the near future is really tiny. That is why we have decided it is the best time now to start investing in IR to increase awareness of the company moving forward.
The next has to do with partnerships. It's a simple question. Are there more to come? What is the progress on those that you have signed up? I think during the presentation, I have mentioned about that already. We have been talking to a lot of these people in the last two years. They are watching.
They understand the need for quantum safety, but they are watching. The message around the world is very mixed and confusing. You hear some people saying that quantum threat is here already, Q-Day is here already, but then you also hear a lot of people saying, "Hey, it's 15 years, 20 years away." They decided to wait. As I said, the alarm clock seems to have gone off in December, six months ago, and suddenly all these people that we were talking to are waking up. Some wake up faster than others. The typical example was Hitachi starting to re-engage in the discussion, and we signed the agreement and made the announcement. Some we are in discussion with right now, and some are in very late-stage discussion, and some just started. A lot of things are happening as we speak.
I have no complaint about that. It's very busy, and I wish we have 48 hours a day. Yeah, that's how I feel.
We've got a couple more questions on it, Andrew, which I'd like to get to. This one has to do with cryptocurrencies. There's two questions here. I'm going to combine them. The first is, if Bitcoin or any other currency gets cracked by a quantum computer, what will be the result? The second part of that, another question, which is the same area. Can you elaborate on the opportunity in the crypto market and explain how your technology would work to address issues in this market and the timing of when you expect to see evidence that 01 will be a player in this market?
First of all, yes, this is a very, very loaded question.
First of all, I have to say that the short answer is whether quantum threat will have a negative effect or crack these cryptocurrencies. The short answer is absolutely yes. Okay. And the cryptocurrency is based on elliptic curve. The whole cryptocurrency concept is based on elliptic curve, the public, the key pair. The public key is the address, and the private key is the signature that you sign your transaction. This has been assumed to be safe because it has been safe in the last 50 years. Only when Satoshi invented, whether it's he, she, or they, when Satoshi invented Bitcoin in 2009, no one talks about the quantum computer. We recognized quantum computers already at that time, but no one talked about quantum computer. It was still at least a decade away at that time. He never recognized the threat, but the threat is real.
If the signature can be forged by reversing from your wallet address, the whole thing is toasted, basically. From a technical point of view, it's not easy to fix because this is the fundamental bedrock of—it's like you have a building, and there is a layer at the very bottom that is vulnerable. If you deal with it, the whole thing would collapse. It's very difficult to be done. That's why you hear a lot of people either saying that we will be doing something on it, but that's nothing. Or they would say, "This is decades away. Don't worry about it," kicking the can down the road, right? I am holding the same comment since day one that it is a problem that they have to deal with.
If they are not quantum safe before Q-Day, I can guarantee that it will be cracked. Your wallet would become zero one day when you wake up if it's not quantum safe. As a matter of fact, we have been talking to a lot of partners in the sectors that are not considering or actually having plans to do something converting coins to become quantum safe. I have to also say that we are a technology company. We build technology, okay? We build product, but we are not a cryptocurrency marketing company. We are not Binance. We are not Bitcoin. We have to partner with someone in that industry, and we provide the technology for them.
Again, if you remember, this falls squarely into our second revenue generator, which is that we are providing the technology, helping the cryptocurrency player for a fee and revenue sharing of the quantum-safe token in order to help them market the quantum-safe token. We are in some very, some are early stage, some are very late advanced stage discussion in that sector at this point as we speak.
Thanks, Andrew. There are several questions, but I'm cognizant of time, so I'm going to, this will be the, this is the final question we'll table today. For those of you who have other questions outstanding, please don't hesitate to give myself or Andrew a call or an email, and we'll respond. Andrew, the last question today has to do with Q&A.
It says, "Andrew, I know 01 is not a quantum computer, but I expect when Q&A comes, 01 will certainly benefit. What is your personal opinion as a guy knowledgeable in technology and quantum on when Q&A is coming?" It is asking for your personal opinion.
Yeah, personally, I believe the commercial Q&A, commercial Q&A, there are two Q&A. One is commercial Q&A. One is national Q&A. I am not going to comment on national Q&A because I do not know. Likely the national level technology, like from the NSA or the FBI or whatever, usually they have some special equipment that they contract their vendors to do it. With this, they usually are about three to five years ahead of the commercial level. There is a chance that national Q&A has already arrived two years ago at least.
I am only going to focus on commercial Q&A because, as I said, I do not have provable data in national Q&A. It is only my own personal guess. For commercial Q&A, there are all kinds of writings on the walls already. A few months ago, I would still say that it is a belief that is coming in a few years. The IBM announcement maybe a week and a half ago really confirmed my belief. IBM says, as earlier put up in my presentation, they are expecting a full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. A full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer can guarantee the Q&A. That means from IBM's roadmap alone, Q&A is at the latest 2029. All the other competitors are going to strive to beat IBM.
Again, we fully expect some people who never published their quantum computer roadmap, such as those people in Russia or China, they could have one coming up all of a sudden out of nowhere. If I were to put a guess, I would take that the gap between now and 2029, cut it in half. Sometimes around late 2026 to late 2027, within that 12 months of time, very likely something would happen and would have a quantum computer allowing Q&A, a commercial Q&A to happen, right? That is my best guess from deriving from all the writings on the wall.
Thank you, Andrew. That wraps it up for today. I will turn it back to you for closing comments, Andrew.
Okay. Thank you again, Brian. Thank you, everyone, for joining our corporate update.
Again, as I said, I'm fully expecting 2025 to be a very, very massive year for us. I couldn't wait for the next meeting in about three months. Hopefully to see you again in three months and giving you more good news and more updates on the development on the company. Again, thank you very much for joining.