Greetings, and welcome to Digimarc Corporation's fourth quarter 2025 earnings Q&A call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. Please note, this call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Charles Beck, Chief Financial Officer of Digimarc. Sir, you may begin.
Welcome back, everyone. Charles Beck, Digimarc's CFO here, and I'm joined again by Riley McCormack, Digimarc's CEO. First off, apologies for the technical difficulties last week. That was quite unexpected and unfortunate. There was an extended outage by our conference call provider's ISP that caused the issue. Today's conference call is intended to be a question and answer forum related to our Q4 2025 financial results and business update, including any questions anyone might have after reviewing our gift card investor supplemental. While we've had a chance to connect with many of you since the call, we still felt it was important to reconvene to answer any remaining questions.
We do ask that the questions related to our Form S-4 filing and annual proxy wait until the proxy is made effective by the SEC, at which point both management and the board look forward to engaging with our shareholders to answer any questions and gather any feedback as part of our normal proxy outreach process. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that have risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our press release for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Now I will open it up to Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star and the number two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For any participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing your star keys. We will take a brief moment to queue for questions. Our first question comes from Jeff Bernstein with Silverberg Bernstein. You may proceed.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having a rescheduled call for the gift card supplemental, lots of great information in there. I had a couple questions on that. You show a company, STL, that I guess prints some of the packaging elements related to the gift cards. They look like sort of a single point of potential success in the supply chain. Can you just talk about your relationship with them and how important that will be?
Hey, Jeff. Thanks for the question. Yeah, STL is the dominant label provider for the gift card industry and extremely well respected and thought of in the industry and a wonderful partner to us because, you know, a lot of our solution is software-based, where we're, you know, putting down our watermark, and we have our detection software that incorporates not just watermark detection, but AI. A lot of it is also building the Digimarc spec, what kind of labels to use, things like that. Where STL really excels is not just producing the labels, but a lot of material science, knowledge and know-how. They're a wonderful R&D partner to us as we advance our spec. Wonderful company.
You know, as you point out a single point of opportunity, I like that phrase. You know, dominant share in this industry and a local Oregon company, actually, so wonderful to have one of our neighbors as a partner in this.
Terrific. If I could just get one follow-up. You know, Blackhawk Network and InComm are in there and I think somewhat familiar to people in the gift card industry and other related cards. You know, how important are those two guys? I know there are others as well, but they seem to come up a lot.
Yeah. They're, you know, the gift card networks and again, put all this in the investor supplement. Everybody's got full transparency about all these, who all the players are in the ecosystem, but the networks, you're right, InComm and Blackhawk are the two largest gift card networks in the U.S. and massive globally as well. They orchestrate the delivery of cards to retailers, so incredibly influential in the industry, have you know deep relationships with the brands as well as the retailers, as well as the whole ecosystem. You know, two wonderful partners to us as well. We wouldn't be where we are without the two of them. Wonderful partners and very influential.
That's great. Thanks. I'll get back in the queue.
Great. Thanks, Jeff.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. We will take another moment to queue for questions. Our next question comes from Scott Kimelman with Kimelman & Baird. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. I actually thought the summary on the gift card business was very, very helpful, in-depth. It was great. I'm more concerned with bottlenecks, right? I know you made some press releases, and I know you said some positive things. I think you used a term like weeks, but where are we really in the firmware updates on the scanning side at point of sale?
Thanks, Scott. Yeah, great question. Two, I guess, technological barriers that we've been working on, you know, last couple quarters. First is, as you mentioned, with the scanner vendors. I think we classified it in our earnings call last week as the prepared remarks is greatest source of historic risk. There are three dominant scanner vendors in the industry, Zebra, Datalogic, and Honeywell, and then the fourth NCR or white labels, different models from those three vendors. As we highlighted last week, two things. One, it's been our greatest source of historic timing risk. But two is you all saw the press releases we put out with those three valued partners end of Q4, early Q1.
We've mentioned on the call last week, you know, it's not just what they put out a couple months ago, it's also they're endeavoring to bring these commitments to the retailers, which are obviously very, very important customers to them as well. As we've mentioned, you know, for the relevant models, we think we're weeks away from having this behind us. That's on the scanner side. Then the other one is the printers, which we also talked a little bit last week. You know, we spent the time with the printing industry, making sure that there's more than enough capacity ready to print these cards. While we haven't quantified any guidance for this year, the capacity we've built on the printer side is multiples more than we're projecting this year for gift card volume.
Fully understand your focus on potential bottlenecks. On those two, we feel very good.
Yeah, I mean, obviously the opportunity is very exciting, so sounds like we're getting there for sure.
Awesome. Thanks, Scott.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time, and this now concludes our question and answer session.
Okay. Well, thank you, everybody.
Oh, sorry, Charles. It looks like, Jeff Bernstein is joining in for another question with Silverberg Bernstein. Please proceed, Jeff.
Yeah, great. Yeah, just a couple other follow-ups. Can you talk a little bit about the second leak detection win and go through a little bit about that application and how that was brought in. Did you know, did the customer come to you or do you have any you know resellers in this area? It was a direct sale.
A couple things. Yeah, we have two versions. Thanks again for the question, Jeff. We have two versions of our leak detection solution. One is for web content, the other one is for discrete media. The Fortune 100 company that we've been talking about the last couple of quarters and put the press release out was for the web content. That's the one we spent a greater amount of time talking about on the call. The other win we got in Q4 was for the other version of leak detection for the media assets. Again, if you go to our website, you can see a greater description of all of these.
That was a company that came to us. They had a problem with they were releasing media assets to their partners under embargo ahead of big releases, and some of those were making their way to social media before they were supposed to. This is a real problem they have with their business. You know, look to grow that relationship over time. I'm sorry, Jeff, you had a couple questions. Did I hit them all?
Yeah, a little bit more on kind of what's the go to market there now then.
Yeah.
Do you have some sales folks who are dedicated to this or how is that working?
Yeah. We do have people dedicated to this space. We think it's a really exciting space. There's actually a conference that some of the team's going to, I believe, on Wednesday of this week, to talk to more prospects and, you know, do demos. This is an area I think you're right. You talked about partners. This is an area that would be ripe for partners, right? Of our three focus areas, this is the one that lives completely in the digital domain. It allows a lot of the benefits of, you know, more traditional SaaS software where we can have reselling partners, we can have technological integrations.
You know, this solution would be great for either security platforms or, you know, well, a lot of SaaS applications. There's sensitive information being shared on those applications. This is an area that we do have a direct sales motion right now, and as we're building this out, we think partners should be a wonderful source of either both leads as well as technological integrations and let them resell it as part of their solutions.
Great. That's terrific. Just one on HolyGrail and just some, you know, stuff around timing there. You've got a second countrywide deployment, I guess, happening that they're calling a commercial deployment. It kind of feels like it's still a trial. You know, I guess Belgium is doing flexible packaging, if I've got that right, and the solid is Germany. There's the sort of 2030 banner over all this. How should we think about this actually becoming, you know, real commercial where there's real money getting paid to Digimarc ?
Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. I think the term is an end-to-end market demonstration is what the industry is calling this. It's, you know, we have a truly tested technology in terms of our efficacy. What they're doing in Belgium and Germany is, again, these are real products appearing on shelves, getting bought by consumers, and working their way through the sortation and then the recycling facilities, which is what HolyGrail has done to date. Now they're gonna take that output and actually create new recyclates. They're calling it a cradle to birth to rebirth, I think is the term they're using for this, and actually showing it, you know, you can actually touch, feel, hold the actual recyclate at the other end.
The timing for Belgium, the expectation, you know, there's already a critical mass of stuff on shelves that needs to work its way through the shelves, through pantries, and then into the waste facility. That's the expected timing of that critical mass sometime in Q2. Germany's a quarter behind that and expecting critical mass in Q3. As you pointed out, there's the 2030 sunrise of the PPWR. There's a whole list of requirements that the industry's going to need to commit to or be able to successfully do in order to hit the requirements in the PPWR. One of them is new fractions of recyclate. So of all the benefits, right, we help produce a higher quality as well as quantity of recyclate, right?
More recyclate, but also higher quality recyclate. With our deterministic sort, we can also do new fractions of recyclate, and that's just the tangible benefits we can bring to the plastic stream. The other real benefit that we're excited about, and we think the industry's excited about, is data, right? Because take any item that is scanned, you know, 10x before it reaches that front of store scanner, and then it goes dark to the world, right? Any data, any post-purchase data is all qualitative or survey data. We provide the ability to actually get quantitative data to feed back into marketing or more and more these days, obviously into an AI engine. You know, what learnings can a CPG or retailer gain from having actual consumption data brought to them by the end of the life scanning.
You know, when this leads to real commercialization, this is, you know, part of our focus strategy we talked about last year was focusing on the stuff that we think is right in front of us, but maintaining our position for things that we think will be future really, really big opportunities for us. This is one of them. It's, you know, we can't make the industry move faster. All we can do is support the value that we can bring to the entire industry and be there ready when they're ready to move forward.
Great. That's great. Just the last one, you had a win in tax stamp authentication. Can you just talk about that application as well as how that win came through and what the selling motion is in that application, which seems like it would probably be a pretty big one?
That one is through one of our partners, who's taking our solution and applying it to a tax stamp solution that they're rolling out. You know, we do have the ability, as we talked about, we put out a press release probably about a year ago. We do have, I guess, for lack of a better term, a higher grade solution. What this company's doing is they produce tax stamps as it is, and so they have a whole solution that has multiple layers, and they're using us as not a standalone solution for tax stamps, but as a layer, security layer in their tax stamp solution.
We, you know, have a option we could sell directly that is a lot higher that has a lot more capabilities and features than our traditional anti-counterfeiting solution. This specific win was through a partner who just wanted our more off-the-shelf offering as a security layer in their total solution.
Thank you. This now concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the call over to Riley for closing comments.
Great. Well, thank you all again. As Charles said, we apologize for the technical snafu last week. You know, I know we've had a chance to talk to a lot of you in the intervening time, but appreciate you all dialing in and rejoining us today for the Q&A session. We hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks a lot.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today's conference. Please disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.