Okay, good morning, everybody. Welcome back here to the Roth Conference. My name is Chip Moore, sustainability analyst here. Very excited to have the team from Amprius, Tom, CEO and Ricardo, CFO, on my right. Great slide up here to begin, Tom, with a little caffeine this morning. Maybe just give people a little overview of the company, you know, the evolution and what's proprietary, what's differentiated and you know, what makes that coffee, weak.
Exactly. Thanks for attending. The company's 15 years old. We started out with one foot in Stanford, where the tech came from and one foot in China. Some of that is our founding team and it is all about a silicon anode. Silicon can handle 10 times the amount of lithium, which translates to about a 2x energy increase. We like coffee and we like this analogy because size is important if you're flying drones. Weight is super important if you're flying drones, light electric vehicles, robotics, all of the markets that we're in. And because of the silicon anode, we can provide twice the energy, everything else being equal. We struggled with, well, how do we explain that to the layperson? And we came up with Express Cell . That's where we are.
I think you may know we did $73 million in revenue last year. That was up 3x. We've guided to about a 70% increase in 2026. We can answer all those questions. That's where we are. We have an outsourced manufacturing model, just to lay that out there. We design our batteries in beautiful Fremont, California and they're made in China, Korea and contract manufacturing partners in the U.S.
Excellent. You guys are both newer to leadership roles. I guess maybe talk to us about, you know, what drew you, what's been the most surprising, things that you've seen since joining.
Sure. Happy to start. I mean, I've been in and around batteries for the past eight years or so and I actually met Kang, our previous CEO and my predecessor about three years ago, through just through the conference circle. I always thought that Amprius' approach was pretty unique because you find a lot of battery technology companies that are working on one element or one component or even one process within making batteries. I remember Kang telling me pretty specifically, like, "Look, Ricardo, unless we're making cells and packaging cells as the end product, we don't have a product and therefore no revenues and therefore no company." The fact that Amprius was one of the few technology companies that was really putting it together as a cell, you know, kind of put it on my radar.
Fast-forward three years from now, I reconnected with the team as I was leaving my previous company and that's why I joined. You know, now seven months later, you know, that edge gets confirmed even further, right? That's a big difference in our portfolio. Like, we actually sell cells, not just separate battery technologies or processes. I mean, the nimbleness of the team and the resourcefulness of the team is what now energizes me quite a bit, actually. Like, to see what we're able to do with only, you know, $36 million of OpEx, which was our OpEx run rate here in Q4, is pretty amazing and that gets me excited.
Yeah, similar themes. Kang and I knew each other back when we worked at Applied Materials 16 years ago. We both left to start different battery companies. He landed Amprius. It was a very easy connection. I've been in private battery companies and as you may appreciate, it's a tough space, right? You need to do about five, six things as a battery company. Most battery companies do about four or five and that one is the Achilles heel. Amprius broke through and you see that acceleration over the last year or so and there's plenty to come. It's real. The distinction I draw is it's not a battery technology but it's a business, turns out, right? Adjusted EBITDA positive is a super important milestone that we hit in Q4.
Great. I think you sort of just answered this but you know, originally you were gonna vertically integrate with a facility in Colorado. Just talk about, you know, that shift and SiCore versus SiMaxx and why this strategy makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. We took a swing at the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law when that first came out about four years ago and we're an awardee. In process of negotiating that $50 million opportunity, we realized, oh, man, this is just overengineered, just did not make sense. At the same time, we realized that to really serve the market, you needed a variety of different battery types. Just like you have different flavors in your espresso versus Tom's latte over there, you need to have that variety. We have that with the 22 cells in our portfolio. Some energy focus, some power focus, some balance. That led us to making the decision to outsource the manufacturing. We would be in serious trouble today because whatever estimate we made 3 years ago is not what the market needs today.
We have the flexibility now to choose contract manufacturing in the U.S. because you have to obey what our customers want in terms of country of origin. We have the ability to continue to work in China because gosh, that's the best cost. It's super high quality. We have that flexibility with this outsource model that we would not have. Thanks in part to some heavy lifting under Ricardo. We unwound Colorado and we have that behind us.
You know, the funny thing, Chip, is if you would have asked the team back in 2023, what would you tool up this plant to make? And the team and in fact, some people are telling us this now, like, "Oh, just make a bunch of cylindrical cells." We're actually seeing the market go towards pouch cells. While, you know, speed and flexibility, we think are truly a differentiator here in driving our moat and separating ourselves from our peers and it's tough to do that when you've got this captive plant that you tooled up to make cylindrical cells.
Maybe, you know, as a follow-up to that, talk about your tooling partners, particularly you've got one in the U.S. coming online in Northern California, how to think about that and then just how seamlessly you can actually drop in on these lines, right? I think you said you can almost do it in the same day. How's that process?
Yeah. We have four CMs in China that has served us very well and they will continue. We like China, we like the quality and many of our customers are insensitive to the manufacturing country of origin. We spooled up Korea. We announced it in May 2025. Four months later, our Korean CM was delivering cells to Teledyne FLIR, our customer that has the very small drone. We announced in December that there are several more CMs in China, several more partners. There are three today and we are in the process of standing them up, fully industrializing them. They will be delivering both cells made in Korea but also the contents are important. For National Defense Authorization Act, you care about the internals of the battery.
I think that Korea will provide 100% of internals and some of our customers, mostly DoD, W-type customers want true blue U.S. Fine. We announced in January our relationship with Nanotech Energy in California. These things take five, six months. We started working on that and you can imagine that there are other ones coming in the U.S.
Maybe more for you, Ricardo. Just talk about cost and profitability and maybe how you can use that as a strategic lever, right, to drive adoption and how you think about that.
Yeah. I mean, I think it really all starts with this picture. When you're delivering double the energy density on the same, size and weight package, you frankly enable duty cycles that otherwise wouldn't be there. A lot of these UAVs, you know, carry so many, devices on them. By the time you power a gimbal, two cameras, a radar, a lidar, a bunch of communications equipment, you wonder how this thing can even fly, right, with existing batteries. The duty cycle literally would not be there without a high energy density cell. I mean, even thinking, longer term, you look at an eVTOL. An eVTOL will not take off without high-power cells and it won't go far without high energy density cells. You need this blend of high power and high energy to enable these duty cycles.
We truly think that when you're enabling these duty cycles, you kinda earn your right to, you know, get paid for all of this development and logistic coordination that we do, along with the process development that we do to get up and running quickly with quality. As we mentioned here in our most recent earnings call, we believe that that can get us to the point where we can do 30%+ gross margins reliably. If you look at our SiCore business, which is what now makes up, you know, more than 90% of our revenues. From day one, some of our higher running SKUs have been doing 30%+ gross margins already. Our guide for 2026 has us doing at least 25% gross margins.
We believe that as long as we keep doing that and as we extend our technical lead as well, 'cause we're also not standing still, that'll enable us to maintain pricing power and, you know, get paid our fair share for enabling stuff that otherwise literally would not happen.
You brought up guidance. You gave guidance for the first time as a public company. Talk about your visibility there. What gives you the confidence? I think you need a little conversion in the second half of the year but how you're viewing that.
Yeah. I mean, the way we look at it is, we take guidance pretty seriously and, you know, you can't have it two ways, right? My previous company, we had three leading customers doing 90% of our revenues. Here we have over 550 customers and the revenues are pretty spread out across all of them. Within the quarter, we are herding cats and dogs. You know, this, in many ways, is still a bit of a cottage industry. There are a lot of UAV manufacturers, a lot of light EV manufacturers, a lot of satellite providers who need batteries within them. We've got very good visibility, you know, within the next quarter and a half, two quarters, as some of these guys start ramping up and getting more professional.
You know, given the base that was built up last year, we believe that growth within that can help us drive the guidance and then we're ready to capture any additional upside that'll come here in the U.S., as you mentioned, during the second half. You know, I'd rather spend my time and the team's time fulfilling it than you know, nerding out over sizing it. We'll size it with POs. We do believe that there's some additional upside there for us to take and we'll size it as we execute it.
You know, you talked about herding cats and sort of the analogy there. Just talk to us about how you go to market, right? Direct, with partners and how you see that evolving.
Yeah. Our end users are drones, light electric vehicles and then there's a couple other markets that are up and coming, a couple other segments, robotics, the eVTOLs is in its early days. Some of those end users buy cells from us directly and they vertically integrate. Others buy cells through pack houses. Cells get assembled into packs. They sometimes have cooling. They almost always have some circuitry to make sure that the voltage current is right. Sometimes they have a piece of silicon that runs something called a battery management system. You figure out, are you empty? If so, then you shouldn't try to draw more energy and vice versa. There are a lot of pack houses. Those also tend to be cottage industry type of companies.
about half of our cells go to pack houses, who in turn then provide packs to the AeroVironment and BAE Systems and some of our other customers. Nokia, we count in that same category.
Maybe just more broadly, the qualification process that you need to hit for some of these applications, you know, how they vary.
Yeah. Oftentimes, customers come to us with an existing product that uses off-the-shelf batteries. Sometimes what you can buy on Amazon is good enough. When they realize, oh my goodness, I can fly twice as far just by changing out the cells, that qualification, if you're replacing, is within, you know, a quarter, right, max, because the testing is very straightforward. If you have people on the craft, think air taxis, then you have a longer qualification 'cause you got to worry about FAA cert, you got to make sure you freeze things ahead of time, you have to synchronize that qualification with other parts of your air taxi. That takes a little bit longer. We have a pilot line in Fremont that, thank you for your tax dollars, is funded from Defense Innovation Unit dollars.
We're the only guys in battery land that received money of this type last year. It's been increased lately, that allows us to win the sockets, to win the designs. With a quick turn, we can make 1,000 cells in a couple weeks in Fremont to get to the customer so that we can make sure that qualification can occur as rapidly as possible.
I think, you know, one of the interesting things we've talked about in the past is, you know, your revenues are just accelerating and the prospects for recurring revenues, right, via replacements. Just how are you thinking about that potential?
Yeah, I mean, that's frankly come out of just trying to understand our end markets and the market sizing more clearly. If you look at the UAVs where we play a role, right, those UAVs that are used on the front lines, kinda hold the line, tend to be pretty cheap. They actually use remote control car batteries like lithium polymer cells. The cost is the main objective. We are not necessarily on those UAVs. We're actually on UAVs where, you know, you're doing surveillance, you're doing counterattack and those tend to come back. On those, you know, an assumption of having to buy two-three battery packs, depending on the duty cycle, is very real and it's something that we're gonna see play out over time.
There is a bit of this, you know, razor blade model that'll play out not just within the UAV market but all of the other markets that we're looking at. You know, the notion of replacing batteries for devices that work to support space interactions or operations are there. UAVs will definitely need to swap out batteries given their duty cycles, robotics as well. Light EVs, you know, you see people swap the batteries on these electric bicycles and motorcycles and scooters, even within the day. Yeah, I think we're gonna get a much better understanding of that dynamic as we fulfill the market here.
Let's talk maybe Drone Dominance Act. You, Tom, you brought up Defense Innovation Unit. You know, first gauntlet winners I think were selected but it's not a down select. You know, they can reapply. Just walk us through how involved you are there.
Yeah. We're all over it. The U.S. is playing catch up on drones. We've seen this on a couple fronts. Most of our revenue, Amprius revenue, is in Europe for drones but the U.S. is quickly catching up. They changed some of the rules in the fall and they announced DDP. The first winners, there were 11 that won out of the 25 that were invited. Several of those are our customers. In the last six, seven days, we saw that Anduril got a $20 billion order, mostly on the what they call their Lattice infrastructure to keep track of drones and everything that's going on the battlefield. This morning, I read that AeroVironment got a $117 million for their Puma 550.
That is evidence that the U.S. is playing catch up and we'll see that 75% outside the U.S. on drone batteries from Amprius, probably better balanced. They come to us 'cause we got the go-to sell. If you can fly further, if you can carry more, everything else being equal and we think it is, we should win. That's what you need to believe. That's what we're working towards, making sure that we fulfill for you as shareholders.
Maybe, you know, if we switch, you're in a leading position here with your batteries but competitive threats, how do you view them? Solid-state batteries, you know, some materials plays. How do you view the competitive environment?
Yeah. We're silicon-based and silicon is gonna be a nice decade going forward. We are compatible with solid-state batteries. If you go back in our lab and our R&D spend and the team that we have, they're turning knobs and the pilot line that is being extended with some DIU dollars helps us do that on a more efficient basis. We're compatible with some of the lithium metal, silicon is and lithium metal has some advantages. Batteries are complicated, right? It's like picking wines from Napa. There's all these different varieties and they have different applications. The good news is that silicon inherently gives you better energy density. Silicon inherently gives you faster charging times.
As the industry evolves into moving from liquid electrolyte to more pasty, that's what solid-state battery is all about and there are versions of that, pseudo-solid, semi-solid, as they move to different cathodes, right? That is something that we watch very diligently and our inherent silicon foundation is compatible with that. Done well, we should win.
You know, we talked about drones from the defense angle quite a bit but what about the other applications, right? Where you call emergency services and they send out a drone, infrastructure inspection, all these agriculture, right? How do you think about those markets?
Same story, right? If you have a drone as first responder and what they do there in municipalities is pre-position the drones in certain parts of the building or certain parts of the city and if there's a 911 call, the goal is to get the drone and the camera on site within 2 minutes. That way you figure out, is the fire real or did the guy actually put out the fire at his barbecue by himself with his hose and you know what right equipment to dispatch. That's growing. Something like 1,800 police departments in the U.S. use that. They also want more flight time. If you can get there further, if you can carry additional cameras, maybe there's an infrared camera. They're finding kids with infrared cameras, right, that wander off from the backyard at dusk.
Beautiful stories but same story. We should be the gear provider. We should be providing these batteries to all of these applications because we think that it provides this value that is very much in line with what they wanna do, which is to fly longer, to carry more, to be more productive for their end customers.
You know, another announcement you made in the past, you were chosen by Amazon, part of their accelerator program, one of a small number of companies. Maybe just an update there. You've got a seat at the table. What's the potential of that?
The potential is huge. We have nothing yet to announce publicly. There's a lot of work being done. Amazon, as we all know, is delivering by drones. You can think, "Okay, well, maybe there's an opportunity there." Amazon has robots running around their warehouses. Well, okay, would they care about a battery inside those vehicles? There's other things that Amazon is doing. Amazon makes tablets and would you care if a tablet was maybe a little smaller and lasts a little bit longer? Those are all things that are in discussion. Nothing yet to talk about but we do have a seat at the table, which is super important, right? It's hard to break into some of these big companies, right?
If you can get to them and have these discussions, engineer to engineer, project manager, you got a better chance of winning the business than otherwise.
We've got a couple minutes here if there's any audience questions. Roma?
Thank you. Thank you very much. Too bad you don't have to sign the name of the company. In any case, you're saying that silicon is much better than lithium?
A silicon anode from Amprius is inherently better than a graphite anode. Graphite is what is everything today. 98% of the lithium-ion battery market uses a graphite anode with typically an NMC or a cathode. Batteries have two parts. We replace the graphite anode with a silicon anode and that allows us to have this twice performance that we speak to.
Have you considered vanadium?
Vanadium is interesting. There are a couple companies that use vanadium as an additive. Vanadium is super expensive, right? $200 a kWh and that's a challenge there.
That's very interesting. Thank you.
Sure.
From a product development standpoint, are you guys working on advancing kind of the technology from, you know, like two times the capacity to three times or anything like this?
Go for it, Tom.
Look, we have laid some of that out in our investor deck, where we're showing three different vectors. One is to continue the lead. The 450 watt hours numerator and kilogram denominator is about 50% higher than the 300 you can get from standard graphite batteries. We want to continue that lead. That's our onlyness. We're the only guys who can do that. We want to continue. At the same time, we wanna make sure that we have the power that the eVTOLs need. Ricardo spoke to that. Go ahead and look at the investor deck and that tries to lay out where we're going at a macro level.
Why has no one used silicon anode before?
I mean, they have just in different ways, right? If you're trying to put silicon in the anode side of the battery, as Tom was mentioning, you can take one of three paths. The first one is you use silicon doping and in fact, you know, your iPhone battery probably has single-digit percentages of silicon blended within the graphite in it. The second path, which is the one that we are on, is silicon oxide. There you can use anywhere between, you know, 30%, maybe 90% silicon. The third path is silicon-carbon, which there are some, you know, relatively well-funded private companies that we're not strangers to silicon-carbon.
We've been testing those materials but they are relatively expensive and, you know, the yields in making those products are not that high, which makes them expensive and so we'll see if they'll catch on. You know, frankly, even if you get the anode sorted out, what we truly do believe is that, like, what does the rest of the cell need to look like? That's where the bulk of our know-how, IP and trade secrets is and what does the separator need to be? What do the electrolytes need to be? What does the anode need to be? As we continue to optimize that, we're gonna be able to continue making more and more, you know, the most out of the silicon. Let's not forget, the company started with 100% silicon nanotube chemistry, right?
We all saw in our margins for SiMaxx that was not gonna scale.
I think we got to wrap up there at time but Tom and Ricardo, thank you so much.