Started here with our third, I would say, drone defense tech fireside chat of this morning. We're lucky enough to have here Ricardo Rodriguez, the CFO of Amprius. Amprius, I believe, has the holy grail in battery technology for the drone space. If you ask drone companies, the OEMs building them what they want their drone to do, they're probably gonna tell you, "Fly farther and carry heavier stuff." I would say Amprius battery solutions allows that better than anyone. I think just kind of to kick off the conversation, could you provide an overview of Amprius battery technology business model, and maybe kind of what differentiates you guys?
Absolutely. Thanks for having us again. Maybe, I think we had some slides that would be helpful to use as backdrop. I'll fast-forward. Yeah. Tom is pretty good at delivering this analogy, but in essence, think of it this way: we try to deliver you a, you know, double the jolt or the energy and power with the same package or, you know, or require half the weight or half the space to deliver the same amount of power and energy. You know, espresso works just like I mentioned, right? Compared to a cup of drip coffee. We've used this analogy to relate to folks. I'm a little bit more technical, and so I use a chart like this one.
I generally have to remind people that a battery is not just an energy storage device, but also a pump, right? Folks expect us not just to deliver double the energy density, but also to give them a flexible platform that allows them to swap that extra energy density for power, right? You actually need to depend on how much power is coming out of the cell as you know, move a robot, fly a drone, power a light EV, whatever the application ends up being. Going back to my previous slide, all else being equal, we try to give you know, double the energy density and, you know, proportionally a pretty high level of power more consistently over the same unit of space and weight, right?
You know, given this, we're chasing some pretty diverse and fast-growing end markets. You know, if we were starting a battery company today, we would probably see a chart from a consultant that says that 70% of the market is EVs. Another 15%-20% of the market is stationary storage. We're focused on the tip of the spear where this additional high energy density that we bring and additional power truly makes a difference and truly enables a duty cycle and a use case that otherwise wouldn't be there, right? The first customers who came calling on the company were the UAV suppliers, followed by the light EV customers. We're currently quoting quite a few state, satellite and space applications.
We're in the very early innings of robotics and have been involved with the eVTOL guys for about a year and a half, developing some custom cells for them. If you look at the lithium-ion side of the market for UAVs, we estimate that this is about a $2 billion market today, going to $3 billion by 2030. That doesn't factor in a lot of upside that we're seeing today from the likes of the new budget request from the U.S. and all the spending that they're going to have on drones within that. We like to say that we're fabless but not processless.
You know, our team in Fremont basically puts together and tests a range of materials to put together the optimum battery for the right application in the right size, and are coming from the right place in the right time. That requires quite a bit of coordination, right? We use a network of contract manufacturers to produce the batteries for us. We do all of our process development and validation in Fremont. One of the things that enables us to move fast and to scale quickly is that we can use standard lithium-ion cell production equipment. That, you know, enables us to have a new SKU on the shelf ready to go within a quarter, and to have it in full production coming out of our network of contract manufacturers for customers within a quarter and a half.
You know, we recently in Q1, we managed $28.5 million of revenue through 25 SKUs, and that, I think, is a sign of just how flexible and how nimble we are. We also, besides this mode that we created by developing SiCore, which is a silicon oxide battery, we are not stopping, right? We're continuing every six months throughout this year and next year to move our cluster of SKUs up in the energy density scale. We believe that we'll get to 600 Wh/kg by the second half of 2027. Our, you know, 450+ Wh/kg of energy density right now is best in class, right? A standard lithium-ion cell gives you roughly 270 Wh/kg, and the silicon doped cell gives you about 310 Wh/kg or 320 Wh/kg.
For those folks who really need to enable a duty cycle that otherwise wouldn't be there, thanks to being able to carry higher energy or to deliver power more consistently, we're there already with our portfolio of products. I mentioned contract manufacturing. You know, center of excellence for a lot of the stuff has been in China recently. That's where we have several of our contract manufacturing partners. We started producing cells in South Korea during the summer of last year. We're ramping that up this year as customers push to be NDAA compliant in advance of, you know, where full NDAA kicks in in 2028, and you need to be producing these cells in the U.S. starting in 2028.
We actually won a bake-off last summer that the Defense Innovation Unit of the U.S. put together to develop an American-made high-energy density battery. We've gotten over $18 million from the DIU. They're funding the bulk of our CapEx this year. We also announced a contract manufacturing partner to produce at least 1 million cylindrical cells a month starting at the end of the summer of this year here in the U.S. It's no secret that we're out there working right now to find pouch cell capacity in the U.S. We will be fully NDAA compliant, not just now, but in 2027 and 2028.
This is, this is important to note because a lot of folks are out there right now saying that they're NDAA compliant, but in my view, they should put an asterisk to the sign that says, "NDAA compliant for now," because the NDAA compliant requirements do evolve. As I said, by 2028, you need to be producing cells in the U.S. This is all supplemental, right? We're not moving out of China. There are plenty of customers within China. Our business within China is growing. Our customers in Europe take product from China. This is all expansion. This is not replacing any of our value chain that we have today. You know, 2026, we told the Street that we'll do at least $130 million of revenues.
That's up from at least $125 million, which is what we told folks when we closed Q4 and reported Q4 of last year. Longer term, we wanna keep going, right? We do see paths from our existing relationships to be able to deliver at least $600 million of revenue. If you look at what we do for customers, we believe that we can earn a higher than 30% gross margin, that, if we keep the OpEx lean, will translate into at least 20% Adjusted EBITDA margins. You know, for us, the path is pretty clear, right? We've gotta keep winning commercially. We've been demonstrating early innings of execution, ramping up our network of contract manufacturers.
We continue to increase our supply position, particularly in the U.S., as we rush to be NDAA compliant. We're pretty committed to this capital-efficient model, right? You know, I think most investors wanna know what the share count is gonna be for a long time. We've shut down our ATM. We've walked away and addressed our liability with a facility in Colorado that we had previously signed the lease to back in 2023. We don't have that drag on our balance sheet anymore. Last week, you saw us announce plans to proactively address some of the warrant overhang that we had related to the public warrants that we had sitting out there that were well in the money, thanks to how the stock has traded and what the team has enabled us to kinda get to.
Well, Ricardo, on that, I think it'd be helpful could you maybe kinda like walk through kinda high level the mechanics of the warrant exchange and kinda like how much that actually kinda saved the company with related to dilution?
Totally. I mean, I think our math is now even higher than the $70 million that we thought we were gonna save investors and save dilution by engaging into this warrant exchange. In essence, the company had $16.5 million public warrants that expired in September of next year with a strike price of $11.50. When we started trading significantly above $11.50, they were all well in the money. We have the right to force redeem these cash or cashless when we trade above $18 a share for 20 out of 30 trading days.
You know, if you look in Bloomberg, roughly 10, 11 top institutional holders held roughly 7.1 million of these warrants, and they run a delta hedge on these warrants, which means that if we're trading below $18 a share, they're probably 70% short for every warrant that they hold. If we're, you know, racking up days trading above $18 a share, they increase that short to 100% of their warrant coverage. We just thought that since we don't need the proceeds and we believe in, you know, if we ever needed to place stock, we believe in better placing it in good hands with long-only folks.
We actually reached out to the top warrant holders and struck a deal to pay them $0.35 a warrant in order to agree to an exchange ratio that would be determined by a four-day VWAP of our stock price, right? That's being determined this week. I think instead of automatically issuing 7.1 million shares, if we call these warrants or if these institutional holders exercise them, we believe that we'll be able to give out less than 3.1 million shares. You know, we basically cut the dilution in more than half.
Well, thank you for the overview.
Absolutely.
I think now would just love to dive into kind of the core markets you're serving. Today, the UAS drone business is a big driver. I estimate 70%, 80% of sales are probably derived from that. Could you just kind of walk through where you're seeing the strongest demand today, maybe from a geographic perspective as well as an application perspective? I think in the headlines, a lot of people see like these small FPV drones. That's not necessarily the market you are focused on.
I think we can cover that market pretty well through the pack houses. You probably saw the Upgrade Energy announcement.
Yep
being acquired by UMAC here on Monday. We work with Titan, you know, ReBuild. A really interesting group of folks are getting into the pack business as well. You know, we can take care of all those drone dominants and smaller drones through the pack houses and not spend many of our precious sales and technical resources, right? They basically purchase cells from us in bulk, integrate them into relatively simple packs, and resell them to the drone dominants and the small guys. To answer your question, where we are seeing the bulk of the pull for customized cells, for really that, you know, nth degree optimized solution, is on drones that fly above 20,000 ft for surveillance and counterattack, right? Out of necessity, this started in Ukraine.
I truly do think that even today, Ukraine and some of the more advanced names are the ones leading this field. Those are who our main customers have been historically. They're also the ones getting the bulk of the larger awards, and they're the ones that are driving our demand.
Yep.
Right?
It's fair to assume from like a geographic perspective, I think you guys published this, like as of 2025, like 75% of revenues.
is international, probably in that Europe region. U.S., 25%. I think in this last earnings call, like a reason for the uptick of guidance was, I think, the momentum that we're seeing in the U.S. Maybe could you talk about what's kind of implied in the new updated guidance from like a demand driver perspective?
Totally. I mean, obviously the beat was reflected in the updated baseline. When we look at the rest of the year, we do see demand in the U.S. Taking drone dominance and the upside from that aside, we do see demand in the U.S. being driven in the second half by sales to some of our main customers like AeroVironment, Kraus Hamdani , Teledyne, and others. We'll see how much of it still fits within 2026, and I think we were fairly conservative in what portion of it falls within 2026 itself, 'cause we still don't know exactly when, whether that'll land, you know, or whether all of it will land in 2026 versus a portion in 2027. That's obviously a positive sign. I mean, even in Q1, our sales in the U.S. tripled. Our sales in China also grew.
We truly do believe that the Nordics, Ukraine, Germany, and the rest of Europe are gonna ratchet up their spending as well. That has the potential of driving further upside for us in 2026, but definitely in 2027.
Yeah. Well, I think a unique dynamic with Amprius, and you have the number there, so I don't have to ask you, 600 customers you're working with.
What I think is unique is could you talk about like where your customers are in the adoption cycle? How I've understand it is like they value your solution, but it's really only been in like maybe like one variant or a couple variants, now what you're seeing is customers adopting your cells across the whole portfolio.
Could you maybe kinda talk about that dynamic?
Yeah. Adoption happens usually within a quarter, a quarter and a half, right? You know, my background's in the automotive industry, where there's a very clear line between development, prototyping, and when you actually go into production, right?
Yeah.
In the UAV space, I'm having to learn that there's more of a gray line, and half of the stuff that's flying out there could be considered a prototype, right? Which means that the validation hurdles are not that high. You can get swapped in, especially for the less expensive drones where we use the, you know, where we go in through a pack made by somebody else versus it being integrated by the OEM. The swap can happen in a week, within a week, right? For us, it's just a matter of getting out there, getting in front of these customers, and these customers having the appetite to replace standard cells with us, right? A lot of this depends on the duty cycle and their willingness to pay, frankly, right?
If you don't need the UAV to go that far, you may just use standard lithium-ion cells, and that's okay. Where we do play a very unique role is on UAVs that carry a lot of devices, right? If you're having to power multiple cameras, a gimbal, a bunch of communications equipment, you wonder where is there power left to make the thing fly? All right. That's where I think we play a critical role.
Okay, okay. I think, too, when it comes to your customers, where, like, going to that point, just kind of like to double down because I think just I want to make sure, like, our investors understand.
Sure.
Like Group 2 and Group 3, like the long range precision strike, loitering munitions.
You might not be seeing this yet, but what's the possibility of, like, a replenishment cycle? 'Cause batteries aren't going to last forever.
Correct.
If these things are out, still early, like you said, like they're just starting really kind of to scale this up. Has the company given any thought on, like, what that may look like as almost like a recurring revenue stream longer term?
There's definitely a bit of a razor blade model to this, especially on the drones that are kept within the fleet and that are upkept and they go out and complete a mission and come back. We do estimate roughly a purchase of two to three packs per year in our market sizing, right? It's still very early innings, right? We've been in these for a year and a half at most, and we are starting to see these come back. At the same time, I would point you to our slide where we had the tech roadmap, right? We're also not standing still. Some of these guys say, "Okay, I'm gonna buy as few batteries as possible for the initial installation," knowing that you are gonna get better over time, right?
Our head of sales actually talks about this frequently. We don't just sell a cell right now to get installed, we actually sell a roadmap. It's a roadmap on where we're gonna be, technology and energy density and power wise, and also where we're gonna be making the stuff.
Okay, okay. Well, I think kind of a key question here because you guys were very smart if, I think, going after this market early. I think there was speculation on if this cycle was actually real.
I think that's actually now they've proven the doubters wrong. Which probably has now attracted more people going after this market.
From a battery perspective. Could you talk just about kind of like the competitive landscape today, how that's maybe changed over the last six months, but like what you think can allow you guys to maintain this moat that you've already built?
Absolutely. I mean, frankly, the market came to us, right? We have only been doing outbound outreach since Tom Stepien joined the company in May of last year, almost exactly a year ago, right? This is a market that first came to us with SiMaxx. Airbus came to us for the AALTO quasi satellite drones. Then, that brought in AVAV, who was also an investor in the company before we went public. Then, you know, the outbound outreach really started just a year ago, right? We do see a lot of battery companies out there with trying to repurpose capacity that was originally intended for EVs or for stationary storage into these markets, right?
You know, the point that our CTO always makes and we make internally is like, you can't go after this market if you don't understand the duty cycle in detail. By that I mean, you know, in this spider chart that I showed on the right side, where exactly does the customer want to be for the application that they're building? We see a lot of EV type cells get repurposed. A lot of these are silicon doped cylindrical cells that, you know, may be good enough for some duty cycles. For those customers that are at the tip of the spear leading in terms of energy density, performance, durability, power output, et cetera, that's where we are. Doing this quickly and, you know, with flexibility and with speed, we think is what's gonna extend our lead even further, right?
The other bit that helps us is that we've consistently been delivering a little bit more than what we promised to folks. You can go ask the DIU. I think some of our investors have gone and asked our customers, "Hey, what are those Amprius guys delivering to you?" It's usually a little bit more than what they showed up here and promised. We've seen a lot of battery companies, either because they jumped headfirst to build the capacity, make a bunch of promises that they then can't sustain in the field. We believe that as long as we can continue sort of under promising and over delivering, both in our products and in the performance of the company, we'll be fine and we'll be ahead of the competition.
It all starts with really just understanding what exactly is the customer trying to get the thing to do.
Okay.
Right.
Okay. Well, I think an important part, too, like as demand continues to ramp, and I think we're in the very early stages, we still got this massive $55 billion in DOD funding.
Amprius is very well exposed to. What, can you walk us through your current manufacturing capacity and your ability to scale production to meet this elevated level of demand?
You know, what happens at the company at any given point of time is we look at what flavor the demand comes in, then we play this game of Tetris to fulfill it, right? Across 25 different SKUs and from all of our contract manufacturing partners. It is a pretty dynamic process, right? 'Cause we're trying to not leave any revenue on the table. At the same time have enough foresight to understand what flavor the demand is going to come in at. The question on capacity is a pretty theoretical one, but if all of our customers were to pick our top four flavors, we would have at least $600 million of capacity. The reality is that it doesn't work that way, right?
We are working to drive some convergence, for example, with DIU, we're looking at, only a couple of standard pouch cell pack sizes that will be made in the U.S. to try to not proliferate too much beyond 25 SKUs, but it's kind of easier said than done, right? If you want to optimize things, you may need a custom cell, we're totally fine as long as we get paid for all the work that goes into it.
I think one and kind of important question is, like, especially like with this drone, is, like, obviously the stock's performed very, very well. I feel like we're still very early kind of in this growth cycle.
Like, maybe walk through kinda like how you guys see this. You're guiding to very strong growth north of 80% plus, but how should we think about this growth cycle over the next two to three years?
Yeah. We see a multi-leg story playing itself out here, right? Just when you think that UAVs may slow down or that their growth rate may slow down, there are a bunch of other markets out there that have very similar requirements, right? Robotics, you know. We see it in light EVs, although we have to manage the mix of light EVs pretty carefully. I think eVTOLs, you know, once they get through their FAA certification, they're gonna start pulling hard in that 2028 timeframe we believe. For satellites in space, I mean, the experts have totally missed the potential opportunity that there is there to move from, you know, more exotic chemistries over to lithium-ion if you're sending stuff up there faster and more frequently.
At the same time, I do think that for the next, give or take, two years, it's all going to be about the UAV growth, right? Given what's going on in the world, given increased NATO spend, increased military spend, I mean, even in China, in the U.S., et cetera, it's just a more efficient way to go out on the field, right? It's, it's this whole notion of bots before boots and we believe that that's got multiple legs. You know, the drone manufacturers are also just finding out their own reason for being, right? Which is why we can't discriminate on who we sell cells into.
We've got our pack partners sort of leading the front on one end with the, because this is kind of a cottage industry, and then we've got our specialized sales team dealing with the customers that are a little bit more advanced in framing out the requirements.
Kind of to piggyback off the slide here, robotics seems like one of the biggest type of maybe longer term growth markets, but it's such a big category. Could you maybe kind of focus, like, where do you feel like your cells are most applicable to? You got industrial robotics, humanoid robotics, consumer robotics. Any specific areas you guys will be targeting there?
Yeah. I think this is one that is obviously for untethered robotics, right? Starting with industrial first. We do see Asia already having a meaningful fleet of humanoids, we are trying to understand those requirements earlier 'cause those requirements will be the same requirements that the companies here in the U.S. will have. We're starting to see the need for, you know, even though they're all mostly using centralized battery packs today just to get the things to work, we're starting to see that get split up and go towards different parts of the robot itself to balance weight, to have power closer to where it's needed. You know, some of our power cells are perfect candidates for some of those applications.
Then centrally, you can use our, you know, high energy density cells to, you know, power the thing for longer, in the same way as we do with the UAVs.
Good CFO question here, capital allocation strategy. You talked about kinda cleaning up the balance sheet now. You basically kinda like operate break even on the net income side or you guys just now are just at EBITDA profitable?
We were, yeah.
Kind of investing, internally into expanding that CapEx. Like, how should we think about the capital allocation strategy kind of over the next 18 months?
I mean, the bulk use of our cash from the balance sheet, which, you know, we think is adequate relative to the opportunity at around $72 million as of the end of April, is going towards funding the working capital needs to fuel this growth, right? We are not using cash to fund negative gross margins, we're also not using cash to fund OpEx. That puts us in a pretty good spot. We're also gonna work to set up a debt facility that, you know, can flex up and down as we more efficiently work to fund this. The bulk of our CapEx is being funded by the Defense Innovation Unit in combination with our contract manufacturing partners. Our strategy would need to change pretty dramatically in order for us to need additional capital.
That's kind of where we sit. You know, five, six months ago, we developed our little punch list of six or seven things that we thought we would need to do to the company in order to get the stock to work. Of course, assuming that we continue executing this ramp profitably, and we keep working our way at doing them. I think it's only a matter of time before we continue progressing as we execute.
We got about a few minutes left. Are any questions in the crowd?
How do you differentiate versus, like, Sila Nanotechnologies or, like, Group14?
Are you making the actual power packs itself, and is it fully integrated into, kind of, existing manufacturing?
Sila Nano and Group14 are silicon carbon companies. Even though it's clearly a battery technology, I consider them more material companies. Very similar to, you know, Berzelius, which is a company that It's a former subsidiary that we buy the silicon oxide from. We don't discriminate. I mean, we've tested Sila's carbon product. We've tested Group14's product as well. We think that there's a potential use case for that kind of stuff. We also test other materials from Japan, from South Korea, but our product is the cells, right? Not the powder.
This is actually, a pretty interesting point because, you know, when we look at M&A or when we look at other opportunities out there were plenty of companies that raised a lot of capital in 2021 to develop battery process technologies, materials, and other things that could advance batteries. Now it's time to come back out to the capital markets to raise funds, and we're seeing that unless you have a sell, it's pretty hard to have revenues, or you're selling ounces of this stuff to try to work your way into a battery, right? You know, we will test all of these materials. In fact, that's one of the metrics that our CTO uses in his funnel. Basically, per unit of time, how many materials have I tested and validated and put on the shelf?
On the M&A side, it informs a lot of what we engage with and what we don't. Yeah.
Other questions? Well, Ricardo, with the last few minutes you have here, I just want to pass it back to you. Any kind of last-minute kind of key takeaways you just hope the audience takes home with them?
Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head throughout the conversation, talking about how this is still very early innings. You know, we did $73 million of revenue last year. I joke with our team, you know, average new car dealership in the U.S. does about $85 million, so we've got ways to go. Yeah, stay tuned.
All righty. Well, thank you guys for tuning in. That will end the webcast.