I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. I've been speaking too much. Thank you so much to everyone for joining our 46th Annual Growth Conference. We're incredibly excited and honored to have the team from Amprius with us here today. From the companies, Tom Stepien, Chief Executive Officer, and Ricardo Rodriguez, Chief Financial Officer. They have a 10-minute or so presentation, then we'll have some questions. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you, George. Amprius is a battery company. Maybe the best way to remember what we do is to think about coffee. If you look at a standard drip coffee, we all know the amount of caffeine that it has. Amprius has the same caffeine in a smaller size. Or if you have a double shot, you can have twice the energy. We win because drone companies buy our cells, and they can, in general, fly twice as far with the same battery, and it's because of the silicon anode that's inside the battery.
The engineering geeks will look at the left-hand side and talk about energy density, both the gravimetric and volumetric. What we have is also a tunable platform. Some customers really want to max out in that quadcopter you see there for energy density. If you need power, often robotics applications need the power, especially if you're lifting things.
Think of a humanoid that's putting things on the shelf. If you don't care about cycle time like a one-way drone, that's a different type of design. An eVTOL needs power to take off and energy to fly. We have the ability to tune our batteries, the chemistries, for those different platforms, and that's where we win. We are serving five markets today. Most of our revenue is from unmanned aerial systems or vehicles. So drones, both offense, defense drones, used for war applications, the new wars that we all read about, as well as drone as first responder to help on the public safety side.
The idea is to get a drone on site of an incident, whether it's a fire or a robbery or a health incident, within 90 seconds, long before the police cars or the fire equipment can get there. There's also drone deliveries. We had a nice announcement in our May call about Matternet that is delivering food and medical supplies using drones.
That is all coming. The days of Amazon trucks will still be there, but drones are going to be delivering more and more over time. We've had some nice wins in light electric vehicles. Stark Future is Europe's fastest growing e-motorcycle company. They gave us a nice $100 million contract for three years to deliver batteries for their vehicles. Same story. The energy density allows those overall space for the battery. It replaces a gas tank that we're familiar with on a motorcycle.
That's where we win through the innovation that we provide. If you look at the surveillance drones, that's where energy density is super important. The ability to hover over the Strait of Hormuz, for example, for five hours instead of three hours is well worth the incremental price that you pay for our cells. We have a higher than average price.
We base our performance and our value proposition is all about how we can increase the customer's economics. We are at the top of the performance pyramid, and that's especially true if you think about this AALTO Airbus system that flew for 62 days. Solar panels on the wings during the day to charge our batteries, and then at night, we ran off of those batteries. Those missions would not be possible if it wasn't for our silicon anode technologies.
On the attack and counter-attack drones, as these segments evolve, drones are relatively new. They're starting to have different segmentations, and you need different batteries for different types. Amprius wins as you go further down this set of rows. If you think about an attack drone, a one-way drone, you're probably okay with a standard off-the-shelf battery.
If you need longer range, if you want to deliver a heavier munition, again, that's where we win. We have the ability to tune the platforms. There's a number of cells like the one that I have. We also have smaller versions. We have cylindrical cells that are very standardized, et cetera. We fit into any lithium-ion factory in the world. This is a second-generation system, so we can deliver from China as we do today. We have four contract manufacturers. We are standing up Korea.
During the call last week, we announced three contract manufacturers in Korea and the U.S., we have one and a half, one that we've announced and other ones that we're working on, so that we can deliver these high-performance cells from the countries that our customers are asking for. As I'm sure we're all aware, there's a large movement toward the National Defense Authorization Act to buy batteries from countries other than China. We are standing up to enable that.
We have a pack partner program. Say that three times fast. We have this gold, silver, bronze program because they are an extension of our sales team. About half of our sales go directly to the drone customers and other types of customers who integrate them into their craft. The other half go through pack partners, which is a very light lift for our sales team.
It amplifies our effort to make the sales available to our customers. We have nine partners that are helping us worldwide, and again, a gold, silver, bronze type of mentality, where we offer a slight discount to them if they deliver to us more business. We are always on the treadmill. We are moving up these three vectors as we get new cells that are announced.
Stay tuned between now and Christmas. There will be additional cells that are announced about our ability to deliver our strength, energy density on an increasing basis so that we can serve more of those segments that we talked about earlier. Korea is super important to us. It's the next obvious place, other than China, for battery companies. LG, Samsung, and SK On are three of the largest manufacturers in the world. The top four or five are in China.
That's why we set up shop there, that's why we have three contract manufacturers there, because that's where the supply chain for non-China materials, anode, cathode, separator, electrolyte, are present. That's where folks and companies that put the cells together for us in this capital-light approach that we have. I turn it over to Ricardo, who's helping run the show on the financial side of things.
Yeah, we're in the very early stages of our revenue ramp. To give you an idea, last year, the company only did $73 million of revenue. I joke with our team, average car dealership in the U.S. does $85 million, and they don't need the sharpest and brightest, so we got ways to go. I think that we'll actually get there, and more, because we've guided to initially $125 million of revenue this year. Increased that to at least $130 million when we reported Q1, and then just last week, we raised that again to at least $140 million of revenue this year.
On the margin side, first we said, we'll do roughly 25% gross margin, seeking to break even on adjusted EBITDA. Now, as we've worked our way through half of the year, we think that we can do at least $4 million of EBITDA, and the gross margins should be above 28% when you look back at the year. Again, I think it's very early, but evidence that this fabless but not process-less model works pretty well and enables the ramp, thanks to some of the things that Tom covered on the pack partner program with the go-to-market side. We're on more than half of the drone dominance winners here in the U.S., but at the same time, not necessarily driving a lot of CapEx.
We'll invest less than $10 million this year, and the bulk of it will be funded by the Defense Innovation Unit, and that's in essence just increased prototyping capabilities at our facility in Fremont so that we can coat our own electrodes and again, continue being fabless but not process-less. So, we're pretty focused on not screwing up this cadence. As we look further out, our long-term targets, and every quarter we've reaffirmed these. I truly do think that with the contracted capacity, we can have at least $600 million of revenue. Demand will tell on how quickly we need to use all of that.
Then, it's pretty easy once you take all the mixed factors into account to turn this into a 30%-plus gross margin business. I think we're well on our way there. If you look at the first half, even ahead of our own expectations.
If we manage the OpEx, I think we can have at least 20% adjusted EBITDA margins as well. It is still very early. I do think that whether you look at the defense super cycle plus all the other markets that Tom Stepien mentioned, I do think that right now we are all talking about UAVs, the transition to producing the cells in South Korea and in the U.S. to not miss out on a lot of incremental demand in 2028. Then you have robotics, satellites, eVTOLs, light EVs, and other markets that are either already there or are going to pick up in 2028 and beyond. Right now, we are just basically focused on delivering our performance, which ultimately sells the cells. Winning commercially, the pack partner program is one example.
More OEMs working directly with the DOD and the defense departments to drive procurement and some standardization of the cells. We are obviously increasing our supply position as more demand calls for it. Then we are pretty committed to this capital-efficient model. We actually walked away from a facility that the company had leased back in 2023 with some incentives from the Department of Energy to build a place in Colorado, and we decided to completely walk away from that. We do not have any of those obligations left, and so free and clear to ramp up in this fabless model that has been working out so far.
Great. I will move up there to make it a little less awkward. Beautiful presentation as always, Ricardo Rodriguez. Maybe you can start with the chemistry. Why is this the chemistry that you are bringing to market specifically geared towards applications like drones? You had this espresso analogy earlier. It is pretty good. I might steal it. Maybe broadly, what does bringing silicon to the cell do for a drone, for example?
Yeah, this is your high school chemistry coming back to haunt you. Silicon can handle 10 times the amount of lithium compared to graphite. That is what we replace, a graphite anode. In practice, that is about 2X, by the time you figure everything out at a cell level. The challenge has been, because silicon has been long recognized as a go-to anode, but the challenge is it swells and it breaks, and you slam lithium into that lattice at a microscopic scale, and it stretches and breaks. We were able to figure out how to deal with that, how to handle that, how to build in some compliance into that lattice so that the batteries work.
That is why drone companies use us, because Nokia is my favorite example. They are bouncing 5G signals using drones into hard-to-get-to cell reception areas. With a standard graphite cell, in order to have 24-hour coverage, you got to send up five drones a day. Because it is only about four or five hours and you need 24-hour coverage. With our cell, you go three drones a day. So dramatic savings operationally. Yes, our battery is a little bit more expensive, but that is the value we bring because of this silicon anode at the microscopic scale.
From a chemistry perspective, silicon traditionally makes a cell swell a little bit.
It does.
Because a drone is pretty big, you do not have to worry about the swelling as much in that application.
Exactly. The same is true, right? There's silicon in your iPhone battery today, in the iPhone 17, single-digit percentage, and that's increasing. Other folks have been able to figure out within small devices how to handle that. We're 100% silicon active material, so we got there first, and we're higher than those, but it's also, again, the ability to deal with that is becoming increasingly common.
Yeah, so the cell still cannot swell in a drone, but we're different in the sense that having come from our first product, SiMaxx, which was 100% silicon, the team learned to, in essence, set up the rest of the cell, so separator, electrolyte, cathode, so that the cell can manage the swelling. I honestly think, if you talk to our CTO, SiCore, which is what's driving 99% of our revenues today, would not exist had it not been for all the learnings of SiMaxx.
On this, if you want to put silicon in a cell, you kind of have three paths. The first one is what Tom mentioned, the silicon doping, which most of our phones have single digits of silicon blended in the graphite. That you can sort of manage the swelling because you have very little silicon in it. Our path has been there's silicon oxide. You probably know of Sila Nanotechnologies, Group14 Technologies, these companies are working on silicon-carbon composite powders that try to do the same thing.
We've tested those materials. They can become part of our platform if we choose to bring them in. Then you have the path that we were on, which was 100% silicon. Getting the anode right is sort of half the story. If you can't figure out what the rest of the cell is, then you can't squeeze all the performance out of the anode, which is what we've demonstrated to do. Then you have swelling and other things that make it basically a non-starter, and you can't sell it.
Your IP runs from anode to cathode to separator. It's all-
Yeah, there's quite a bit of IP and know-how on, in a sense, what it takes to make the cell work if you have high levels of silicon.
You also have a fabless model, which is, I think, interesting, fairly unique. How do you manage your IP, in other words, when you're shipping cells to be made in Korea, when you're basically asking someone else to build the cells for you? I understand that we've talked about this, Ricardo Rodriguez, the logic of doing that, but do you think there's any risk to some sort of IP theft over time from using some external partners to build the cells for you?
So far, we've been fine. We compartmentalize, right? The magic is in the powder. We privately mix before we provide those completed mixes of the anode powders because it's mixed with binders and other materials before it's put onto the foil that becomes part of the battery. We also are able to make the anodes in only one spot in the world, right? That also gives us some compartmentalization. It is a systems problem, as Ricardo Rodriguez mentioned, right?
It's not just the anode. It's getting everything right. Our separator's a little bit stickier. We have special additives to the electrolyte. We have patents, 80 some-odd granted patents. So between those three or four different knobs, we're able to control the IP and be comfortable with using outside folks.
The other bit is also just what we emphasize on this slide. Frankly, IP is sort of for wusses in some ways. Ultimately, it's the speed and your flexibility what enables you to go to market and have a relationship with the customer and solve their problems day to day. What we have found is that a lot of these companies that produce the cells for us, their specialty is production, not necessarily system-level solving, understanding the duty cycle of the device that the battery's ultimately going into, solving that for the customer. We do a lot of customer-facing work that, I'm not sure how a company in China or in South Korea or name the place could do it for a U.S. UAV customer, for example.
Interesting.
Right. We all have our distinct roles in the chain, and we have no problem paying a relatively generous toll for having the cells made while we focused on, as Tom Stepien mentioned, the treadmill, right? Making sure that our designs for the cells continue evolving in a way that we're market leading and really setting the pace for the performance in these tip-of-the-spear markets, and then coming back and doing it again, right?
That's why we're not afraid of laying out these internal targets. They're all realistic if you ask our CPO around, "Okay, where are you taking the power cells? Where are you taking the more balanced cells and the energy density cells so that we keep moving up on the performance line?" Heck, if the chemistry has to evolve to deliver it, we will do that pretty flexibly.
If you did have a dedicated facility to building cells where you owned it, you wouldn't have the flexibility to make all the different cells that you do currently. Is that accurate?
Correct. Honestly, even in the whole world, I don't think you can find one facility that makes all these different sizes under one roof. Right. For example, if you look at the capacity problem that we're working to solve here in the U.S., the U.S. went headfirst building the wrong capacity. A lot of EV plants that we are all familiar with, a lot of them make prismatic cells. There's no demand for those cells. If it isn't going into the stationary market, there's no demand. There's plenty of actually pouch cell supply for pouch cells that could be potentially partially converted to making our small pouches.
It's no secret that we're seeing how we convert some of that. Even the economics of building a dedicated cell plant at the current volumes to produce for us, it'd be too expensive. You almost need to share the fixed costs with broader demand from these other markets that can help you do a lot more than what we're procuring from all of these CMs.
The different form factors lend themselves to customer stickiness and being able to be the solution provider that you talked about earlier with.
Totally. I think on the form factors, a lot of this was just the initial market grabbing. I do think that we're going to work to pare them back a bit and drive some standardization. For example, if you look at a place like the U.S., I don't see why all of these UAV and military applications can't run on five different sizes of pouch cells, maybe even three. If we're able to do that, then that's further upside beyond our current expectations.
You were very early, and kudos in identifying the drone market as a sizable end market to concentrate on. A two-part question. First, it is a big deal now, and so is this inviting competition to potentially enter the space, and how are you managing that? Second, beyond drones, you sort of alluded to it, but what are the other applications that you see gaining traction over the next, call it, five years or so?
Maybe I will take the first part. So competitors. Yeah, we were early. We had some really good insight from AALTO and others that encouraged us and were working closely with us to develop the initial version of these cells. The second generation increased even more. So we have seen any folks we talk to at the drone companies, if we are 20%, 30% better, they will take the engineering effort to requalify the cells and go to us. They will not do that against us because to date, there is nobody that is 20%, 30% better. It takes a bit of effort for AeroVironment and others to actually do that engineering work.
So look, we have to stay on this treadmill. We have to stay in the lead. There is more coming in terms of those charts that we showed about increasing power, energy, and cycle life. We got a strong team that is doing that. So we are not resting on our laurels, but that is where we are doubling down and continuing to invest. In terms of other segments, Ricardo?
Yeah. Another thing to highlight is a lot of these UAV companies were early investors in the company as well. Airbus was an investor in the company. AeroVironment was an investor as well, even before the company had to raise its pipe and go public in 2022. It's somehow that market also found the company. To answer your question on the other markets, frankly, today, probably three-quarters of our revenue are from UAVs.
The other quarter is from kind of a catchall of light EVs mainly, but there's also some little satellite applications where people order sample cells, and we fulfill them pretty quickly. Looking ahead, I do think that the UAVs are just going to keep pulling really hard, especially in Europe. For all we read in the U.S. about drone dominance, the new budget request, the reallocation of the budget into UAVs, thankfully, there's not a lot of conflict here in the Americas.
We're mainly stockpiling and changing our capabilities versus Europe, who's actively investing in this space. That's going to continue driving a lot of growth. We're also having ourselves tested by many of the eVTOL OEMs, and we do expect that market to start pulling in 2028. On robotics, we're seeing some early innings with the requirements really being framed out in China, frankly. Heck, if we wanted to really lean into that in China, we could already do that to drive some initial demand and then get better educated on what their requirements are for when the West gets its act together on robotics, which we see a ton of investment going into and, by 2029, it's fair to expect that being there. On satellites, it's pretty interesting.
Right now the upside doesn't capture things like the Golden Dome, and that has some requirements for cells as well. The requirements have completely changed. If your goal now is to send the lightest load possible and you can send it more frequently, rather than having some hydrogen battery that has to last 30 years, you could actually send a high-performance lithium-ion battery that you can replace every five years or so. We're seeing those requirements drive requests for our cells. We have a team looking at the application of buffering power in data centers as well. That's not on this slide because it's still pretty early. I would say stay tuned on that.
Before you go, you may have heard this last time. I was doing riddles with my daughters this weekend, and the way we're ending every fireside is to ask a riddle of the entire audience, and you're welcome to participate as well. Whoever gets it right in 10 seconds gets a CG Hydro Flask. I have one up. What can travel all around the world while staying in the exact same corner?
A stamp.
That's our winner right there. Our intern, Luke, gets it. Congrats, and thank you so much, Amprius team. Appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.