Right, we are back. Mike, thanks for getting here early with the screen up already. It's fantastic. I'm going to let James take it away with a brief intro. James, you want to just go over the format real quick with Michael here?
Sure will, Mike. Good morning. How are you, sir?
Good morning, James.
Pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining us. We are going to have about a 20-minute presentation. Just keep an eye on the time. We will not start to filter you out with Oscar-style music, I promise. Then we will have about a five-minute Q&A session. Just a lot of questions coming in as you present. Then we will wrap it up at about 11:25.
This meeting is being recorded.
Fine. I'll try to keep my presentation to 15 or so minutes, but maybe leave a little bit of time for Q&A. You know,
I'll do a quick introduction just to everybody because we're going to have this recording that you can have and post on your own website. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to day three of the Aegis Virtual Conference 2025. Up next to present, we have BIO-key International, company trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BKYI. Here to present this morning, we have Chairman and CEO, Mr. Michael DePasquale. Michael, pleasure. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you. Thank you to the entire Aegis team for inviting us today to participate in the conference. I'm going to spend the next 15 or so minutes giving an overview of BIO-key, and I look forward to answering any questions that any listener may have beyond this. BIO-key is a provider of identity and access management solutions. The company has been in existence for over 30 years. We've been a public company for over 25 years. Our key differentiator, what differentiates BIO-key from others in this space, and as we continue to go through the presentation, you'll see that's evident, we provide phone-less, token-less solutions for authentication and access to all kinds of information. We are right now a very compelling investment opportunity. We're on the Nasdaq. We're a Nasdaq-listed company.
and if you look at our stock price and the range that it's been trading over the past year, it's been anywhere from $0.50-plus all the way up to $3.60. we have about 6.3 million shares outstanding with a market cap a little over $5 million, and our LTM revenue, slightly over $6 million and growing. but what's really important and compelling here is our ARR, or our recurring revenue, continues to grow and is based right now at approximately $6 million. So there's an awful lot of upside for us, in the coming year. And by any statistic, as you can see on this chart, we are grossly undervalued, in relationship to our peers and others in this space, from, again, as I mentioned, literally every metric.
We're trading at about a 70% discount to the average tech sector multiples, which are anywhere from, you know, 2.2 times sales all the way up to, you know, in the 10-plus range. As I mentioned, why are we such a compelling opportunity? We are in a very high margin business that has recurring revenue and our base is growing, and we expect it to continue to grow even sequentially quarter over quarter this year. Our blended gross margins, because we do sell some hardware but mostly software, are greater than 80%. We have over 40 million global users that authenticate with BIO-key solutions on a global basis. We've reduced our loss and our operating expenses at the same time. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on.
We are expecting continued growth in 2025 and 2026 with a new shift in our business on the EMEA side to our solely BIO-key branded solutions. Our Q1 2025 revenues grew 10% sequentially to about $1.6 million from about $1.4 million in Q4 2024. Again, we continue to expand our reach on a global basis. There is no doubt that in this market today, there is a growing demand for cybersecurity solutions. One of the key mandates for cybersecurity insurance, which everyone is seeking at this point, is a solid multi-factor authentication solution being in place in your company, in your enterprise. Amazon Web Services is also mandating the same thing. If you look at Microsoft and Google, all the largest tech companies are really forcing people now to utilize multi-factor authentication.
Whether from an enterprise or a business perspective or a personal perspective, you're accessing information, even again, your social media accounts, you're likely using multi-factor authentication. If you're not today, you're going to be using it very, very soon. Our use cases are universal. Any place that you're using a password, a PIN, a token, a card, or a key, you can utilize BIO-key solutions to, number one, reduce your cyber risk. Number two, improve usability because a biometric is much easier to use and to utilize than a PIN, a password, a token, a card, or a key, especially a PIN or a password where you have to change it every 30 or 45 days. It must be 10-15 digits long, have all kinds of symbols, upper and lower case, and so forth and so on.
What we tend to do when we have to do that is we use the same passwords over and over and over again for multiple accounts. That creates risk. Again, utilizing the BIO-key solution that I'm going to get into a little more detail about soon, you'll see offers tremendous flexibility and usability as well. Also, our solutions reduce cost, the cost to constantly change passwords, the cost to allow users to re-engage back in an account after their password has been compromised is very, very expensive. The standards that are being driven are also very, very expensive. Our biometric, tokenless, phone-less solutions provide a great option to reduce that risk and lower cost. Mainstream authentication today is typically multi-factor authentication utilizing a phone. You probably are using that now. You're trying to log into your account.
You're getting an SMS or a text message to verify that it's you. You're given a code. You enter that code and then you get access to that account. Again, whether it's an enterprise account or it's your own personal, social media account. You know, phone apps and user tokens are certainly a good option, but there are so many use cases where device-assisted authentication just doesn't work and it can't work. We're providing, again, that phone-less, tokenless, and password-less option. That's really where the future is. We're playing right to the future. As I mentioned before, phones work and they work for us personally, but think about different situations within the enterprise venue where a phone just doesn't work.
You're in a call center where phones are restricted, or you're on the manufacturing floor and you've got to verify a process where phones, again, can't be used. You're in a very secure location where, again, you can't utilize your phone or you don't have access to it. There are many, many use cases where phones just don't work. In our country here in California, there are labor codes and mandates that are being driven, forcing companies to pay for mobile device access fees for employees that have to use their phone to authenticate to an enterprise or that company's solutions. Here comes BIO-key, and our identity-bound biometrics.
Utilizing biometrics, whether it be on your laptop or your tablet or your desktop computer or on your mobile device, utilizing a palm scan or a facial recognition scan to authenticate you provides, again, that much more secure and much more convenient option. Keys, FIDO keys, YubiKeys, you may have heard of those. Those are little devices that plug into the USB port on your computer. Again, for some of those use cases that I just described, that really doesn't work. We are providing, again, that full and complete MFA offering, and we are doing it across the board in every, virtually every sector of the economy. We have customers in banking and finance and healthcare. In education, we have about 100 colleges and universities that utilize our multi-factor authentication solutions on a daily basis, representing tens of millions of users.
We're finding a very, very powerful and significant niche in banking and in international defense agencies where security is top of mind and convenience and the availability of biometrics are really starting to take hold. We're adding customers on a quarterly basis in those segments. In the first quarter, we added a brand new customer, the National Bank of Egypt, with over 30,000 employees that's going to utilize our biometric solutions for access to all of their portals and information. Again, we're an ideal solution in those venues where a phone or a token just doesn't fit. Gartner, one of the authorities in technology and the technology space in general, has been touting our solutions as a fundamental game changer and a real significant imperative to get to the next step and to provide a much, a more elaborate level of security for enterprises.
This is just a brief list of the customers that are utilizing our solutions today. Every, again, as I said, every sector of the economy, state, local, federal government agencies, defense ministries and agencies around the globe, as well as some very, very large banking customers. What is our path to the market? In the U.S., it is kind of a hybrid where we are selling direct to some larger customers, but we are utilizing our channel alliance program, resellers and VARs, value-added resellers and MSPs, managed service providers to sell BIO-key solutions into their customers, into their prospects, into their accounts. In our EMEA business, that is Europe and the Middle East, we are solely selling through partners. That tends to be the business model there anyway for technology solutions. Our channel alliance program is growing. We are expanding.
You may have seen an announcement from us earlier this week about a new company in the Middle East, Cloud Distribution Inc., that's going to be representing our solutions across the Middle East and Africa. They're actually dedicating three resources to solely sell BIO-key solutions in that territory. They recognize the benefits of our biometrically differentiated solutions and are stepping up and committing money, resources, time, and energy to help us expand our base there. What's our growth strategy for the future? Clearly, we've continued to launch new products and enhance our solutions. You may have seen our most recent announcement about Passkey:YO U, which is a biometrically enabled passkey, which is becoming the standard across the technology space. We're going to continue to expand our global reach.
We're going to continue to expand our channel alliance program, and our partner network and our business development initiatives as well. Recently, again, we've, through partnerships and business arrangements, we're expanding our reach in the food services business as well as the AI and drone-based markets as well. Access control, managing who is behind the utilization of these devices that are driven by AI or that are autonomous in nature, is a very, very important security risk and an important security opportunity for us. We have taken on an investment in that space and we continue to invest in solutions to expand our portfolio in those markets. We have a rich patent portfolio and we continue to expand on that, especially in the next generation authentication space utilizing biometrics.
I have a very strong management team that's been in the company and with the company for many, many years, and it's a global management team. We have offices in Madrid and Lisbon. That's where our EMEA headquarters is, an office in Dubai, and one in Hong Kong as well. With that, I'll turn it over to anyone that has any questions for me.
Thank you, Michael. Excellent presentation. Always love hearing your story. We've had a number of questions that have come in here in the chat. First up, the recent partnership with Cloud Distribution Co. aims to expand BIO-key's presence in the Middle East. How have the outcomes of this partnership been and what is expected from this partnership in the near future?
As I briefly described, Cloud Distribution is a very large distributor, distributor-valuated reseller in the Middle East, and they are dedicating resources to sell BIO-key solutions. I think very, very soon you're going to see announcements around the types of contracts and engagements that we're participating in with them. We have a very, very high level expectation that that relationship is going to be worth millions for us in the coming quarters and coming years.
Fantastic. Excellent. Next question. Could you guide us through some of the potential challenges the company could face in the upcoming 12 months?
You know, we have invested very, very heavily in advancing our technology to the point where everything that we have available today is available on-premise for our customers to run in their own environment or to run in the cloud.
Most of that investment has taken place and therefore you're seeing that we're reducing our operating expenses. We're getting very, very stable from an expense and a support perspective. We don't anticipate raising any additional capital at this point. I think it's all about scale for us. It's about leveraging the partnerships that we've developed, similar in nature to what we just spoke about with Cloud Distribution. I think what you're going to see is continued sequential growth. I think you're going to see our marks to profitability this year, and a very rapid expansion of our business on a global basis. I'm less concerned about the headwinds today than I was over the last two years. I think we're very well positioned to take advantage of the growth opportunities.
The other thing that's really, really important for us is I mentioned in my presentation, we're finding great success with international defense ministries and defense agencies. In EMEA, in Europe in particular, you may have read or seen that most countries are doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling their defense budgets. Security is a very big component. Intelligence and security is a very big component of the expansion of those budgets. In fact, Germany announced that they'll spend $1 trillion over the next 10 years enhancing their defense strategy and posture. We are very well positioned to take advantage of that as well.
Excellent. Great answer. Thank you. Next question. Could you highlight some of your competitors and how does BIO-key plan to take market share away from those guys?
I think, not only take market share away, but also take advantage of the new opportunities that are going to require what we provide and our differentiator, our biometrics. Our stronger, mostly strong authentication, meaning stronger authentication with biometrics, is really becoming more mainstream than it ever has. Our goal and objective is to, you know, get our unfair share of that business that requires that stronger authentication. Even some of these larger competitors like Okta, SailPoint, ForgeRock, Ping, they're also partners at the same time because they don't offer the biometric option in their authentication factors. They're partnering with us on some of their larger opportunities to bring us in to do the authentication while they're providing the overall governance and provisioning and maybe some of the higher level cybersecurity solutions for a particular customer.
It's interesting how we can be competitors with some of these larger players, but we could also be partners.
Excellent. Great answer. Next question, slightly political. Are the recent DOJ cuts causing any delay in order flow or evaluations?
Absolutely not. In fact, it's interesting, as I mentioned, security is top of mind everywhere. And as agencies, particularly here in the U.S., continue to contract and become less resource heavy, security and technology become a more important factor in ensuring that these agencies are secure. We're not seeing that at this point, and we're not seeing any impact on the tariff side as well.
That's great to hear. Michael, that does conclude the Q&A portion for today's presentation. I'd like to thank you for your time, everybody listening. You can track BIO-key International trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BKYI.
We look forward to monitoring your progress for the rest of the year. Thank you so much for your time today, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.
Thank you very much, James. Thank you again to the entire Aegis team for inviting us to participate.
No problem. Warm Aegis thank you to you. Have a great rest of the day, and we'll see you soon.
Thank you. You too.
Thank you.