Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to day two of the Sidoti conference. My name is Aashi Shah, and I am an analyst here at Sidoti. With me today, I have Forum Markets Incorporated. It trades under the ticker FRMM. I am happy to welcome John Saunders, the CFO of the company, and John Kristoff, SVP Corporate Communications and IR. With that, I will lend the floor to you guys. John. Sorry, just as a reminder, we have 30 minutes today, including the Q&A. If you have any questions, you can submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Thank you.
Thanks, and welcome everybody, and thank you for joining our session today. I am John Kristoff, Head of Corporate Communications and IR, and I will just provide a brief company overview, including our business model, talk a little bit about our competitive moat, and the team behind the company. Then I will turn it over to John to walk through our verticals and wrap up with a summary of our financials. Just a quick reminder, we will be making some forward-looking statements today, and we would refer you to the more detailed information that has been filed with the SEC. Just at a glance and very quickly in terms of Forum's core thesis, our business model is really to own and operate cash flowing assets with the option to fractionalize or tokenize those assets to broaden access, and increase liquidity for these types of real-world assets.
The asset classes that we are focused on have a few things in common. We are looking for assets that have high risk-adjusted returns in markets that are large and scalable, and asset classes that have, let us say, moderate to high complexity, durable demand, and very high-quality counterparties, and we will get into those asset classes here in a few minutes. Our business model is to really acquire these assets, generate the cash flow from these assets, distribute any appropriate returns to token holders or co-investment partners, and then reinvest and expand to grow that asset base.
One thing I want to emphasize that is important to note is that these assets are intended to generate cash flow first, with the option to tokenize on regulated digital infrastructure second, as the market for tokenized real-world assets develops and the regulatory environment becomes a little more clear, and John will touch on that a little bit more in his comments. When thinking about Forum's competitive moat or our advantage, first and foremost, the company has built proprietary, scalable pipelines into high-quality asset classes that are otherwise difficult for investors to access directly. Typically they have high minimums. You have to write a very large check to get into the asset class, and then you are locked up for a multi-year period. We have built the legal and technical infrastructure to bring more liquidity to these assets through fractionalization and tokenization.
We will talk a little bit about that infrastructure and our distribution strategy in John's comments here. I think with any relatively new company, it is important to understand the driving force behind the company, who is running the company. I will not spend a lot of time on this, but I think it is important to highlight that we have our board of directors in particular, has a long tenure in capital markets experience. Actually, all of us, the management team and the board, with a lot of depth across compliance, finance, private credit, and fintech, such as myself. You are talking about deep institutional pedigree on the board. You can see some of the firms listed here, Lazard, Blackstone, Evercore, UBS, Credit Suisse, and so on.
The key takeaway that we are trying to communicate is that this is a veteran team with an established track record, and you are not dealing with a startup that is kind of learning as it goes. Quickly touching on the verticals, and then I will turn it over to John. We are talking about aircraft engines, AI infrastructure, modular home financing, and auto credit. What do these things have in common? As I said earlier, they are all very large markets. Some of them are difficult to access, moderate complexity, and high risk-adjusted yields with excellent counterparties. With that, I will turn it over to John to talk briefly about each one of these verticals and then run through our financials, and then we can jump into the Q&A. John.
Thank you, John. We will talk first about the largest verticals where we expect to put the most assets cash to work. The place that we have had the most success and deployed most capital so far is in aircraft engines. These engines, specifically the CFM56-7B and 5B engines, are some of the most common engines in use on narrow body jets, commercial jets. These are in extremely high demand currently. We have focused our portfolio specifically on this engine. We have looked at some other engines, but currently we are focused on the CFM56 engines. We believe these engines offer a very good risk-adjusted return. That is because we have control over the acquisition. We do inspection testing on these engines when we acquire them. We bore scope the fan blades and review all the FAA logs and records.
We contract them with one of a handful of the largest U.S. commercial carriers, typically Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, or American Airlines. They fly routes in the domestic United States or in a few cases to the Caribbean. They do not fly into any third world countries. We control the flight routes. They are insured for the entire time, from the acquisition to the date we sell them. They are maintained meticulously to FAA maintenance standards. If anything is wrong with the engine, it is immediately repaired. If there is any impact damage to the engine from a bird strike or anything else, which is very rare, it is insured completely. We have also taken the additional step to negotiate a guaranteed residual purchase price for these engines at the end of the contract.
What we've built is a very nice risk-adjusted return where we know that the duration of time that we'll hold the engine, we know the exit price of the engine, and we're able to get very nice returns over the hold period of that asset. Additionally, we have the optionality of putting debt on these aircraft engines to drive higher returns. As well, something that we're working with to present is tokenized equity within an SPV that holds these engines so that we could get an additional enhancement to investment returns from the tax depreciation on these engines. Most of these engines can take advantage of bonus depreciation in the first year, and we can distribute that depreciation on a K-1 out to investors, and the time value of money of that tax deduction enhances the investment return.
Currently, the net returns after we take a management fee, if we were to tokenize these things, are expected to be in the mid-teens. That's with debt taking into effect some of the depreciation. On a gross IRR, it can be even higher. We're very fond of these engines. We've built a partnership with a couple of companies in Southern Florida that we've worked with to acquire all five of these engines. They refurbish the engines and sell them themselves. Through that partnership and relationship, we get a first look at a number of these engines, and we get a pipeline to acquire a number of those engines. Recently, we've just acquired two additional engines. We've 8-K'd that after quarter end. We now have a total of five of these engines that are on our balance sheet.
All five are contracted and earning rent as we speak. AI infrastructure, we believe this is going to be our second-largest or eventually our largest vertical. We've been doing a lot of work in the space, both in terms of bridge financing for acquiring GPU chips, but also in looking at AI compute. We've been working to announce a deal with a partnership in the coming weeks or months, and we are very excited about that. We think that'll showcase the work that we've done in this vertical. For clarity, that will be a compute deal, not a bridge financing deal. What we're looking at there is ways to provide immediate compute to answer the question of demand and as well, look to differentiate that compute, trying to provide inference compute.
Currently, we believe the real issue there is lack of power and ability to immediately plug in GPUs and meet the coming demand. In the future, we believe that demand is going to be more localized and regional. We're really excited about the opportunity to invest into the AI compute space. That also gives us the opportunity after we've been able to announce that transaction and scale that vertical to eventually tokenize fractional ownership within those projects or actually ownership of the compute chips themselves. We're very excited about this project. We can't talk too much more about the details until we finalize the deal, but this is something that we've spent a lot of time on, and we think that there is some very good returns in this space. Another vertical that we've worked to build is the modular home mortgage vertical.
Currently, modular homes, the mortgage origination is largely held by Triad, which is backed by Berkshire Hathaway. We believe this is a capital inefficient vertical and one which will grow. The affordability crisis in America is very real, and first-time homebuyers are looking more and more to mobile homes and mobile home communities to become first-time homebuyers. We have partnered with Zippy, and we believe Zippy is going to become a dominant player in mobile home origination as they look to compete with Triad. They are building a platform there with AI underwriting to reduce losses. They have also negotiated a community recourse for the first five years of any of their loans that are originated. There is recourse from the community if there was default from the mortgage holder. This package is a way of getting a much lower default rate on these mortgages.
Additionally, in the instance where there is a non-performing loan, it is a lot easier to repossess the asset because you do not have to go through a traditional foreclosure process with real property. You can repossess the mobile home. We think that given the rate of return, the 9%-11% annualized yield, the AI underwriting, the community recourse, we believe this is an attractive vertical that is capital inefficient, and something that down the road will be very conducive towards tokenization or packaging off and securitizing to larger institutional buyers. Auto financing. This is probably the vertical that we put some work in, but we have deployed the least amount of capital to date. We think there is a very interesting space, but largely, it will require a large balance sheet to get into buying, acquiring, and securitizing the loans.
What we have done to date is create a warehouse facility where we are generating 12%-13% annualized yields. What we are doing is we are getting interest originating loans over the weekend, which is an interesting differentiation from what traditional banks are doing. Because of the warehouse facility, we are able to originate loans over the weekend. These loans that are put into the warehouse facility are seasoned, so they can be acquired by a takeout partner. The originator is contractually obligated to take any non-performing loans out of the warehouse that do not get acquired by the takeout partner. We, in effect, have a virtually 0% default rate on this facility. The facility also gives us the optionality to acquire the loans out of the warehouse facility.
As our business scales and we have more opportunity to distribute these vertical products, we can acquire the auto loans directly off of the warehouse facility, thereby giving us optionality to scale into this vertical. Again, we have partnered with Karus. They are an AI underwriting company that has reduced defaults on auto loans. Again, we think this is a nice differentiated way to enter the auto financing vertical. We have talked a bit about tokenization. We also have some partners that are interested in a more traditional institutional distribution vertical or strategy. But the primary purpose and primary goal of structuring these products and selling them off is to take advantage of the higher margin within a retail distribution. Now, that does not necessarily mean that we have to sell to retail investors.
This could be in credit investors, Reg D offerings, but they're buying it through the exchange. They're not buying it through a bank. They're going online, looking at the tokens, and acquiring in single units or high units. We see a much higher margin through the retail distribution, and that's because we can generate an origination fee, a management fee to continue to manage those real-world assets while they're in the SPV. Additionally, we're able to split part of the trading fees with the exchange because we have taken an equity position and negotiated a unique contract with Liquidity.io. Any secondary trading in our tokens, we split the trading fees with the exchange. We have three different ways that we can make profit when we distribute these structured products through a tokenized offering.
But we also have the ability to charge co-invest and bring larger institutional investors into these projects alongside us or distribute package security, the offerings into those institutional distribution channels. This is what's on the horizon for us. Currently, we have been focused on making partnerships and gaining durable access to these verticals. Now we have focused on deploying capital into these verticals, and on the horizon is structuring these products so that we can distribute them through institutional and retail distribution channels. Disciplined financial, capital allocation, driving shareholder value. A number of things that are important here. We have deployed capital into cash flow, generating real-world assets. We have a project that we're going to announce in the next couple of weeks and months that will generate significant cash flow with the intent to become cash flow positive by early 2027.
We are looking to generate free cash flow and not consume cash to run the business. The first priority is controlling costs, managing yield, and getting the business to a cash flow positive position. Then continuing to expand that infrastructure and partnership, and then in the future, originate distribute assets through blockchain-based markets, thereby generating fee revenue and recycling the capital back into these verticals. I think another point that we will probably hit on in the slide deck later, but the company has done a significant buyback because the stock was trading at a very low value to the intrinsic value.
We've been focused on driving the immediate shareholder return from buybacks, and then in the last couple of months, we've been focused on deploying capital into these verticals, proving out the verticals, and beginning to put ourselves in a position to distribute these assets through the aforementioned distribution channels. I just talked about the repurchase.
You did, yeah.
It was very significant, approximately 35% outstanding shares. Obviously, the stock price has reacted very affirmatively. The board has reviewed a number of strategic options, and we continue to see high-quality investment opportunities through that process. As I mentioned before, we are excited to unveil an AI compute partnership deal in the coming weeks or month or so. We would urge people to look for that, and we will have more information as we finalize that deal. We just closed our quarter. We had $1.4 million in revenue. We expect that number to increase significantly in Q3. We acquired our third CFM56 in Q2, so it was only performing for part of the quarter. We acquired two more aircraft engines immediately after quarter. Both of those engines are currently on contract and earning rental revenue income.
We expect to see a significant increase in aircraft engine rental revenue in Q3. Additionally, the OpEx of the company, we are working to reduce cash OpEx. Last quarter, we had $3.8 million of stock-based comp and $1.8 million of transitional costs related to exiting the biotech business and the digital asset treasury company business. On a forward run rate, we think that is coming down to somewhere in that $4 million-$4.5 million per quarter, and we can continue to further reduce that number. We are looking to showcase that aircraft rental revenue in Q3 and then bring online the AI compute project in Q4, probably later in Q4, and that underlies the revenue guidance for 2026. We are still looking to exit 2026 with between $100 million and $175 million in AUM, with a full year revenue of $18 million- $22 million.
Again, a lot of that is back-loaded into Q4 as we have the capital deployed, and we have taken time to deploy into these verticals. That revenue, you will see it growing in Q3, and then additionally, growing significantly in Q4. As mentioned before, we expect to be cash flow positive in early 2027 with significant revenue increases, ramping by 50%-100% from 2026 guidance levels. Now we would like to open it up to any questions from the forum. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today.
Thank you so much for the presentation. I would like to remind everybody in the audience, if you have any questions, you can submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Can you talk to us a little bit about the airline customer, and why is the airline the customer and not the plane manufacturer like Boeing?
Yeah. The customer are the airlines, and we have only contracted with the top two or three airlines, and that's an intentional position. We feel like those are some of the highest creditworthy counterparties that are out there, and that's a big part of the risk-adjusted returns. That speaks to their business model and to Boeing's business model. These airlines don't purchase any of the airframes or the aircraft engines. Interestingly, really, the engine pool is separate from the aircraft. They buy these aircraft and operate them and will interchange engines on the aircraft. That's done so that when they have heavy checks or overhauls and the engine goes down for weeks at a time, that airframe continues to operate.
These airlines are all looking to lease engines and airframes, and the manufacturers are really focused on selling them to the lessors and folks that are out there buying, acquiring, and holding, and then leasing out to the airlines. It's really a nature of the major airlines' business model and them not wanting to deploy massive amounts of capital into the airframes. Yes, that's the reason that we contract specifically with the airlines.
Right. The key to tokenization is distribution, the ability to sell the token to retail investors. What are you doing on this front?
Yeah.
Can you please discuss.
A number of. It's a good point, and I think there's a couple things that are relevant to the tokenization conversation. The first part of the piece is regulatory clarity. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is making its way through Congress, and we think that will provide, no irony here, a lot of clarity to the regulatory situation. The SEC has also adopted this as one of five areas that they're going to provide guidance on. So getting guidance from the regulatory body will help to push tokenization to become more mainstream. We believe that that's the first part of the puzzle. Specifically getting to retail customers, and I want to be careful here because I think accredited investors through a Reg D offering that are coming through an exchange are going to still give us retail margins.
Eventually we can do Reg A+ and other types of offerings that allow us to sell directly to retail. I think that the answer there is, one, getting regulatory clarity. Two, the exchange has to be able to operate seamlessly. We expect that Liquidity.io is doing a relaunch, partly because they wanted to address a number of these user interface questions, but also to be able to assure that you have a highly regulated security first exchange. Getting volume and flow through that exchange, getting the clarity from the regulatory bodies, and then increasing the number of offerings on the exchange, and marketing. We've talked to the exchange both about what they're doing individually to market their product offerings to both retail and accredited investors, and then we have our own marketing campaign that we intend to use when we place offerings to target retail.
There's a number of different strategies to go after retail versus accredited, and that's more John's space. He's an expert in going out and marketing these products. We have a number of different tools at our disposal when we decide to launch a marketing campaign. It's all of those things. It's the regulatory clarity. It's the product offerings and the volume, the foot traffic on the exchange, and the marketing campaigns.
I think, John, it's also important to note that we've set up the business to where tokenization is beneficial, but it's not necessarily core in the near term. As this market develops, and we know it's going to take time to change behaviors, we're focused on building these assets. John mentioned previously, we have five aircraft engines now. We're still sitting on $25 million or so in cash yet to be deployed. We haven't layered any debt on these assets. We've created a model. The aircraft engines and now looking at the AI compute, that's more of an operating model, where we can layer debt on the engine and go buy more engines, and then that cash flow comes in, we can buy more engines and scale up. Same thing with the AI compute.
It's not that we don't believe in tokenization, or we're trying to downplay it's just we understand it's going to take time for that to really scale up, and we need to, as John mentioned earlier, we need to generate cash flow and be cash flow positive in the near term. I just want to emphasize that, yes, tokenization is our long-term strategy, but in the near term, we can still scale up and become cash flow positive and start to grow revenue as we transition into 2027.
Right. You mentioned the $18 million-$22 million in revenue outlook, but the first half revenue was about $4 million in the first half of the year. Can you walk us through the key asset developments that bridged the first half revenue level to the full-year target?
Yeah, absolutely. John and I, we have been clear talking about this all along, the revenue ramp is very heavily in the second half of the year. With five engines deployed for the second half of the year, you will see considerably higher aircraft engine rental revenue in the back half of the year. The remainder of the guidance revenue is anticipated in Q4, and we expect a very large share of that to be contributed from this AI compute project. To close the guidance to revenue, it is aircraft engines, five aircraft engines operating for six months on full utilization. Then the AI compute project coming online in Q4, probably in November or December for material revenue on that project. That will make up a pretty significant piece of the total guidance for 2026.
Right.
We actually have a question on AI compute, Aashi.
Yeah, I was just going to ask. How quickly can you scale the AI compute GPU ownership portion, and how do you find those customers?
Yeah, this is something we have been focused on specifically with AI compute is looking at two different things. One, how we can get deployed quickly and plug in those chips right away, and then where we think the compute space is going in the future. The answer to that question is by focusing on power-ready facilities today, where we can go and acquire the GPUs, and we have the permits, the cooling, the power in place. What is the backlog on a lot of new projects is the approvals, getting the interconnect agreement for the power.
We are focused, and we think when we announce this partnership and this investment that it will showcase that very nicely, that we have positioned ourself to be able to take advantage of immediately available power and locations where we can plug in these GPUs and start to earn revenue very quickly. The second part of that is really trying to figure out where the compute needs are going to be. We think today there is a lot of demand specifically for compute, but that demand will shift in the future. We also believe that this project, and a part of that will showcase a nicely differentiated play within the AI infrastructure.
We think by putting the compute where customers want it and meeting their demand in the future, as well as having immediately available compute, is how we are going to meet those customers' needs and be able to sell that compute. Because we do see a shift in where the compute is being used by companies, and we think being positioned ahead of that is a great way to be able to profit off of the AI compute space.
Thank you so much. John, if you would just like to give any closing remarks. We are at time, but if you can sum up the value proposition for investors who might be looking in this space that we are in.
Well, look, I-
Yeah, I mean. Go ahead, John.
Go ahead, John.
Sorry.
Kristoff, if you want.
No. You go. There's two Johns.
Yeah. There's two Johns, so you're lining us up. Look, fundamentally, we're trying to access some verticals that are capital inefficient. As an investor, you're typically not able to go out and buy a share of an aircraft engine or a data center. We're positioning ourselves to be a profitable company here without the tokenization, and we think the tokenization is a massive upside to the business. We believe this AI compute will be an operating business of itself, and that there is a very nice business around these four verticals. It positions us to be able to deliver a product that meets a very nice demand profile for accredited and retail institutional and retail investors on the blockchain.
We're building a business that is durable, that generates free cash flow and profit, that then also has a very conducive to tokenizing, and selling or distributing ownership within these verticals, that then gives us non-dilutive capital and fee revenue to grow the business. John, do you have any other comments?
Yeah. Honestly, I think that was a really good summary, John. I just want to thank everybody for joining us today. If you have follow-up questions, want to learn more about the company, you can reach out to me directly, ir@forum-markets.com. Be happy to set up an additional phone call one on one or what have you. Thank you, Aashi, for hosting us, and thank you all for joining us today.
Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, and also, I'd like to thank everybody in the audience for listening and spending time with us today. Thank you. Have a good day.
Thank you.