Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Anna Snopkowski, and I am an Associate on the Life Science team here at KeyBank. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Sean MacKay, Chief Business Officer at Standard BioTools. Sean will be running through a presentation and overview of the business, and then we will open it up for Q&A in the final minutes. Feel free to email any questions to myself, or you can also post some questions in the chat box below. With that, I will hand it off to Sean to go over the presentation.
All right, Anna, thank you for the intro. Welcome, everyone, to the webcast, and special thank you to KeyBank for hosting us here today. As Chief Business Officer as background, I work closely with our CEO and CFO. I primarily lead M&A, our inorganic growth strategy, and I oversee product strategy as well, which is our organic growth strategy. Standard BioTools was founded with a bold purpose to set the new standard in the life sciences tools industry to empower researchers and to hasten the pace of discovery while rewarding all of our stakeholders. This includes our investors. We do this through discipline and determination while executing on our strategy. Just as background, our journey started a little bit more than three years ago with a thesis of consolidation in our space, a $300 million commitment, and a very small team with a blank slate.
Today, the strong team has turned much of that vision into a reality. We're two acquisitions in with $175 million in revenue, a highly diversified portfolio of exciting technologies that seek to help pharma develop better drugs faster. We have a very strong balance sheet with $295 million as of December 31st. Today, I'm going to talk a bit of the foundation I've laid for Standard BioTools, our strategy and our tactics, and what we're planning on doing over the next 18- 24 months to accelerate our mission. I will end our presentation today when I highlight what I believe is the area of life sciences with the highest ceiling and near-term growth. This is plasma proteomics, where we're exceptionally well positioned and together with Illumina about to launch a truly revolutionary solution. I'll come back and end on that note.
I will be making several forward-looking statements, so please review the above. Okay, now that you've all read it, I'm going to walk through our approach. We operate as owners, yet we think like investors. We're focused on getting returns on our investment and diversifying risk and really generating returns for all involved. A good example of that is in our M&A. We're deeply disciplined around using return on invested capital as a metric, which can ensure that we can create positive outcomes for our shareholders when we execute on M&A. The way we operate is through our business system, Standard BioTools Business System. This is our lean operating system, which is really anchored on the Toyota Production System. An example here is in manufacturing. We continuously improve on cost and quality. As a result, as we say, without margin, there's no mission.
We really focus on margin improvement, which is evidenced in our efforts on cost and quality. We're also business-minded here. Across the leadership team, we've developed a deep business background and mindset, and we take that to all our endeavors. We do leverage several technologies that are truly exciting, several in the omics space. We focus entirely on what the customer needs and serving it in a sustainable way while generating returns for our investors. Just to set as background our strategy, I have mentioned we've assembled a very strong team. What are we doing out there? Our goal from day one, we're really consolidating high-value products and solutions, and we're targeting high-growth, high-margin, attractive end markets. I mentioned this before, we're two acquisitions in, $175 million in revenue, and we have the cash to do M&A.
We're not the only consolidators in our space. In fact, many of the big companies have grown through acquisitions. In a way, we're one of the only, if not the only, companies that can target the types of companies we're targeting. We're really in a sweet spot to target emerging technology with high upside. We're not too big, but we're not too small either. In our profile, which is really a couple hundred million of revenue, portfolio of products with a strong management team and a cash balance to go execute, that's very unique. That's a compelling proposition as we go out to the companies in our market. Finally, we use a system. We're very disciplined. We leverage our Standard BioTools Business System. We relentlessly optimize every process. Of course, we take out OPEX so eventually we can generate shareholder returns and impact our earnings.
Across the two acquisitions, we've taken out $110 million in OPEX while investing and setting up the companies for mid to long-term growth. We are targeting being adjusted EBITDA positive in 2026, already next year, which is, as we all know, it's not that far away. Now onto our team. We have put together a very strong team, which has a diverse set of expertise, very deep scientific expertise in life sciences experience, but really over-indexed towards seasoned business operators, really reflects our approach. It's all people with at least a couple decades of operating experience that also think like investors as well. This slide really frames what we're doing on the M&A front. We have the mix of our portfolio and a lens towards where we're headed with M&A towards our future product mix.
First of all, we do view our portfolio as a value pyramid with consumables on top. This is our high-margin, high-growth, recurring revenue. Of course, we sell instruments. As far as our approach, we are targeting more instruments that have a lower ASP, which is not all of the instruments that we have today, but it's those with low ASP where pull-through is even more important. We have a strong foundation in the service business, partly it's field services, but a good portion of that's direct services. Again, in our industry, as you know, service is a great way to bring new technology to the market, especially today. Finally, with our M&A, a core focus of mine, we're moving up the value pyramid, and we're targeting that profile on the right.
We're, of course, changing the product mix over time, and we have done that through our subsequent acquisitions. We're also expanding the pie. We're currently in academia and biopharma, and we're looking to grow into these other markets as well, as long as it meets our core criteria. We do think the environment today is such that smaller companies, emerging technology, this overall market needs consolidation. Valuations remain down, funding remains down. From what we see in the world where we go every day, the innovation has not stopped. It's actually the companies out there in the tool space servicing the life sciences business are more innovative than ever. That's where Standard BioTools really comes in. We have the platform with a seasoned team and an operating system and the cash balance to go and consolidate.
It's really the best time to be here in this exact place we're at to go execute on our mission. This here is a pretty important slide because it's very illustrative of what we're doing in M&A. I'm going to walk through how we select our targets amongst all those exciting technologies out there. On the right side, we have a pretty accurate snapshot of our funnel. There's a diverse set of markets, really a different mix of consumables, instruments, and reagents, but with a focus on recurring revenue. The way we pick our targets is at the left. We focus on whether or not we can get the right margin profile first. It doesn't have to be perfect today, but we have to see a path with our team, with our system to get to that margin profile.
Equally important to emphasize here is we love science, but we're not looking for science projects. We're very focused on the business. What does that mean? We're focused on de-risk technologies. A lot of times, these are technologies where quite a bit of capital has already been invested that are now ready for prime time and have solved real customer problems. Both of our early acquisitions fit that profile. Finally, again, this gets to us being business-minded in our approach, we have to see a clear path to commercialization. Does the technology solve a problem? Is someone willing to pay for it in a way that we can make money while solving their problems? Many targets get filtered out through the above criteria.
Last but not least, we're always looking at where we can improve on a company, get it an attractive value, but increase the return based on applying our Standard BioTools Business System. I'm just going to outline a bit of what is our Standard BioTools Business System. Every asset we acquire, we take through what we now call the SBS Flywheel. Early on, we set a clear strategy. We focus on the critical few, the elements where we can make a business impact. This includes a lean transformation, focusing on quality, on-time delivery, and continuously improving the product while we take cost out and we grow the business. We do have evidence that this is working. A few snapshots at the lower left-hand corner show the impressive results.
So far, we've seen 33% improvement in adjusted EBITDA loss, 20% improvement in on-time delivery to 98%, which is really industry-leading. These are really good indicators that our entire operations are functioning at a high level. Importantly, we've cut the complaints by 50% in two successive years. We plan to do it again. This is a sign of what our team, coupled with our Standard BioTools Business System, can deliver. I just want to take you through, again, some evidence to show you that the system is working. These are case studies on the two acquisitions that we've done. You see some of the numbers around some of the improvement mechanisms. We acquired Fluidigm around three years ago, great technologies that have been around the industry for quite some time.
We went to work and unlocked some of the amazing technologies that were really core businesses that matter to our industry, effectively diamonds in the rough. We invested where we needed to. We have shown that in just the first 18 months, we have been able to really improve gross margin, reduce operating expenses, and reduce cash use as well, and really put both businesses on a path to profitability, where the genomics business is already on a contribution margin positive. Now, SomaLogic, we are very excited about that merger. This is our second case study. Not only did we acquire a great asset with a great cash position, but we do feel like we have unlocked what is now the crown jewel in our portfolio with the SomaScan technology. SomaScan is really now technologically the leader in plasma proteomics.
From blood, we can assay or evaluate 10,000+ proteins with great precision. That is very unique to what we do. Only we can do that today as proteomics scales to where genomics is at. Equally important, we again leveraged the SBS Flywheel. We took out $90 million in OPEX, so really $110 million between the two acquisitions while still investing for the future, setting the company up for growth. I will talk a bit more about why we think proteomics is our crown jewel and the big opportunity ahead. With these two transformative transactions, we have now set up and applied the Flywheel. We are at $175 million in revenue as a jumping-off point. The next part of our phase is growth, both inorganic and organic.
I just went through how we merged the two businesses, how we're improving the portfolio composition through M&A, and how we're applying the SBS Flywheel. Next up is organic growth, which we'll talk about, especially in plasma proteomics. We're also going after inorganic growth, as I said. It's possibly the best time to go do this. We're really in a situation where we're not too big, but we're also not too small. We have a hefty revenue base at a couple hundred million, as well as the cash balance to go execute a really robust M&A strategy. We're walking up that pyramid in terms of valuable businesses. We're focused on bolt-ons where we're really adding to our core, let's call it margin profile and our business profile and keeping on track to our core goals towards profitability in 2026.
With the last few slides, I'm just going to dive into what we have as our exciting product portfolio. Going into both of these acquisitions, we recognize the proteomics opportunity and concertedly focus on where we can participate in this transition from genomics to proteomics. As a whole, 80% of our products today play into the field of proteomics. As we've discussed, genomic research has laid a tremendous groundwork in oncology and gene variant diseases. The big opportunities ahead in disease, diagnosis of disease, and therapeutics, it really is this post-genomic era where proteomics is going to play a big part. You see a lot of these indications at the right side of the slide. Likely, the most important number to think about is underlying that core need for proteomics is the CAGR of the underlying proteomics business.
What we're seeing is a CAGR of mid-teens, which really creates a large overall opportunity over the next 5- 10 years where there's going to be multiple winners, where we think SomaScan is uniquely positioned to take the mantle from genomics and answer a lot of these questions that we need to to advance the right drug for the right patient. This is our overall portfolio. Just to review, the overall mix, which we've talked about moving up the consumable pyramid, that's all at the left. We have six different product lines. We do have single-cell immune profiling, which we've talked in the past quite a bit about. We have really exciting spatial proteomics products, a lot of innovation there in the last year, in 2024, new product launches.
Within spatial, we do know that 2024 was Nature's Method of the Year with spatial proteomics, always looked at as a tipping point for a broader market trend. We also have a genomics platform where we have multiple growth vectors. We talked a bit more about seeing recent wins in the past in pharma and also a variety of new applications for our existing genomics business. What I'm really going to double-click on today, though, is what we've called the crown jewel, which is our SomaScan plasma proteomics offering. Again, let's talk about some context. What is the proteomics area? Why is it here? What is this transition from genomics to proteomics?
As we know, for all of the reasons that we've seen over the last 15 years, especially, genomics is incredibly important, especially in oncology and looking at gene variants for disease diagnosis and therapeutics. To truly understand where a lot of these new therapeutics are headed and to understand cardio and immunological focused diseases, you really do have to study the protein where the action is. You actually have to look deeply at thousands of proteins to really understand the interplay between genomics and proteomics. From a detection perspective, thinking of DNA versus proteomics, DNA is more straightforward. You have four variables, A's and C's and T's and G's. Really, when you look at proteomics, you have to get distinct capture agents across 10,000+ proteins in our portfolio towards the 20,000 canonical proteins to match the genome. That's very difficult.
Historically, legacy technologies, which are antibody-based, have only been able to take you so far, meaning closer to the 10,000-20,000 mark. The fundamental problem is there's really only so many good antibodies out there. Once you've exhausted those numbers of antibodies, and we've seen this in a lot of recent papers, you're unable to scale past that number. Really, in sharp contrast, what SomaScan has now shown all the evidence of in paper after paper is because of these synthetic monoclonal DNA aptamers, we can scale basically in perpetuity. We're achieving 10,000+ proteins, really about half the canonical proteome, with no impact on CV, if you look at that top right slide. What you're seeing is we have unparalleled precision, which is that up and to the right relative to our leading competitor. In the last 1,000 proteins, we have the same precision as the first 1,000.
No one else in our industry can say that. We're seeing a lot of impact based on data released in a preprint last year, this most recent paper we released that our customer released with Alkahest coverage on this, and a variety of other papers to see multiple studies publishing some variation of the graph that you're seeing on the page. It really just cements that Soma's position as a leader in high-plex proteomics is here to stay. The question is now, where can we go with that given that the end market is growing? One of our core focuses is that this scaling of proteomics is very important therapeutically. It's very important to a lot of the therapeutic indications that are now coming of age and are incredibly important to therapeutic companies throughout the world.
The one thing you can do is, of course, you can always generate publications with proteomics. We believe we've reached a tipping point with more than 1,000 publications on SomaScan. More importantly, what we're seeing is the therapeutic impact, published, peer-reviewed therapeutic impact of our SomaScan portfolio. Earlier this year, the Novo Nordisk team and collaborators published a paper in Nature Med, leading journal for the application of medicine, using our SomaScan 7K version. They used it on a couple of cohorts that were treated with semaglutide GLP-1s, possibly the most exciting breakthrough in human health. We haven't tried to count how many GLP-1 companies exist, but it's very exciting, and we do know the impact these drugs are having. What the researchers were able to show is that we're beginning to elucidate other mechanisms, other indications where this wonderful drug class can now have an impact.
It is incredibly important to our end customers that you can either show broader impact with patient or repurpose critical drugs using proteomics and the mechanism elucidation that you are able to get through with proteomics. I would say, in summary, a big impact that our unique scaling technology can see in likely the most important therapeutic types and indications that we have today. Additionally, what I would say is that we are now prepared. We have the core technology, and some of the benefits that we have talked about are unique scale. What we have really tried to do over the last 24 months and 12 months, especially, is diversify our customer base on the Soma business.
The real vector, the growth vector that we have for this is going to be in our partnership with Illumina, where they have talked about their excitement about the combination of SomaScan and NGS in reading out that SomaScan on their installed base of more than 2,000 NovaSeqs. This combination of unique data out, whether it's with Novo Nordisk or whether it's with other partners, the unique ability to scale, which now I think Soma is really showing itself to be this unique product in the broader proteomics portfolio, coupled with Illumina, offers us a really exciting set of growth factors. In summary, share with you the approach that we take, that we take when we think as operators and investors. I've demonstrated a bit of what we've done with our first acquisitions and what we can do with our Standard BioTools Business Systems.
But really, we're a business, and we have a set of solutions we think are going to matter going forward for our industry, and we're excited to take the next step. We thank you for listening. Hope that we've piqued your interest. With that, I thank you for your kind attention, and I'll open it up to Anna for Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you, Sean. That was a very helpful overview of the business and kind of a deep dive into some of the proteomics and the growth drivers there. Maybe to start, I thought it was very interesting about the cash position you have and the intentions of four to six acquisitions in the next two years. Is this based upon what you're already seeing out there in the market in terms of targets, or is there opportunities that maybe you'd go after larger acquisitions, maybe one or two, that are double the size of maybe those smaller targets?
Yeah, a good question. I mean, strategic M&A is a core part of our founding thesis. It's a core part of our strategy. As we said, I think the market's timed well for consolidation today. We do have tremendous discipline, and I mentioned using return on invested capital to define, will this fit into our growth profile and our margin profile? What we're doing is primarily focusing on moving up the pyramid, focusing on the highest margin sets of businesses we can. We do have a tremendous amount of opportunities.
We're primarily focused on bolt-ons right now, which is what we've told folks because we view those as being able to leverage our infrastructure and also really bring forward our goals to be profitable in 2026, specifically around adjusted EBITDA positive. We do think we have the platform. We've demonstrated the ability to apply SBS. The cash balance plus the focus of our team, it's a great time to be acquiring in the market, and we think we're a good home for a lot of companies, especially privates.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You've talked a little bit about this, but just the nature of proteomics, where it's going, starting from the genomic side, moving to proteomics. This seems to be the primary focus of your business, but just maybe how do you view yourself relative to others in the market, like Olink, for example?
It is our focus. We think about proteomics and the impact of the end markets with almost all that we do. Of course, we have a genomics business, but the vast majority of our business is proteomics. SomaScan is our crown jewel, as we've said. When we think about how our SomaScan platform has demonstrated superiority to scale relative to the antibody-based competitors, we do think that having that level of precision and then demonstrating it over and over again is incredibly important for, let's call it, taking the work that's been done in the 20,000, overall the genomics, what's been done, and taking that closer and closer to the 20,000 canonical proteins.
Soma has a unique opportunity to now leverage, let's call it, the need of the broader therapeutics industry to enhance how they feel, what they know about mechanism of action and where they take their products forward. For us, at the time of the merger, we knew we gained a strong asset and a hefty cash balance, but really, it's evolved to now where we think SomaScan, coupled with the impending launch into NGS as well, is uniquely positioned across a number of growth factors to take advantage of the CAGR we spoke to earlier.
Perfect. That's very helpful. Maybe sticking with proteomics, would you expect future product launches and/or acquisitions to fall within this same area, or could you move into other areas like transcriptomics or other adjacent categories?
We like to say we keep a broad aperture open for really good businesses, but we are very focused with, in the SomaScan world, the upcoming Illumina launch. We do think it's an inflection point for the broader proteomics industry and ourselves as well. It's a lot more insight into human disease with the precision that pharma can trust. Last year, we did focus a bit on spatial proteomics launches with our Hyperion XTi, with real benefits for throughput, which can enhance pull-through, as well as best-in-class data, which we term as the ability to see a wide dynamic range. You don't miss anything when you're analyzing your samples.
From an M&A perspective, I just say proteomics is a category, but focusing on high-margin businesses where we think there are just strong growth profiles in the future, things where we can help improve, but very focused just on a broad range of strong businesses.
Got it. At recent conferences, it sounded like longer term you're targeting a much higher mix of consumables rather than what you have today. Is it primarily the Illumina product that's expected to drive that, or are you expecting other factors that could boost the consumable mix?
What I'd say is the distributed product, right, Illumina and our SomaScan authorized sites definitely is key to this consumable increases as we're working hard to drive pull-through. We're also driving pull-through, as I talked about, with some of the launches in spatial proteomics.
I'd say as we've worked to get our genomics business profitable, those OEM partnerships are really important for increasing the consumable mix there. Really, across the board, we're pretty focused on consumable improvement. We've seen that consumable improvement, as we discussed last year. Frankly, on the inorganic side, consumables is just such a big focus, right? Recurring revenue, if there is instrumentation, it's low-cost instrumentation with higher recurring consumable revenue or reagent businesses. We sort of sound like a broken record, but yeah, higher pull-through, higher consumables.
You talked about potentially moving into areas and instruments that are lower ASPs. Could you just give a little background on that and maybe an example of what a lower ASP instrument would look like?
Yeah, sure. I mean, even for us, we like smaller, lower ASP instruments because, again, our focus is consumables.
Even with our X9 product, that's a lower-cost, lower-footprint instrument, but really, from a standard margin perspective, high-margin product that the more we grow, we just think more and more labs are focused on getting instruments that are high value, but that are low on the CapEx end and that they're going to spend their money really on the reagent pull-through. That's the way we're thinking about it.
Makes sense. I believe you operationalized around $80 million in cost savings last year and then another $10 million early this year. Would you say these cost-cutting initiatives are now over, or is there potential for additional cost savings to be found as you execute throughout this year?
Y eah. In an environment where we all know growth has been difficult to come by, we've been very focused on what we can control, which is driving productivity and cost management across our businesses. Driven by our business system, we have taken out $110 million across the transactions. We're always looking for more. We exceeded our original cost synergy target from the SomaLogic transaction, running at $90 million, and we pulled it forward by a year. Very focused on efficiency gains, right? We improved full-year non-GAAP OpEx by 22% and adjusted EBITDA by 33% year- over- year. Plus, we're improving those quality metrics through our business system, as I've described. When we think about how to continue and commit to the goals that we've stayed committed to, we're still on a path to adjusted EBITDA break-even in 2026.
Really, a return to growth would be helpful across our industry. We have a plan and options to improve our profitability. We'll be disciplined stewards of our cash should the current environment persist. We have $295 million in cash and equivalents and a clean balance sheet. Look, we're well-capitalized, not focused on the current cap markets. This will enable us to keep our heads down, execute on our strategy, bring it to adjusted EBITDA positive, and fund future bolt-ons. That's how we're looking at it.
We're almost out of time, but I want to squeeze in one more question if I can. Just given all the noise around the NIH funding and academic weakness, could you just remind us again what your exposure is there? Maybe just quickly what you're seeing in terms of customer trends in terms of the market right now.
Yep. We'll close with that, Anna. I mean, it's a difficult environment. We came into the year expecting growth. We came into the year with a strong pipeline. Some of the items we've talked about with our SomaScan growth from last year, especially with the distributed customer base, as well as our pipeline for spatial proteomics. That all being said, now we do deeply recognize the macro challenges that are creating uncertainty in the market. It's definitely one of the most unique times I've seen throughout my career on Wall Street and within life sciences. Our direct NIH exposure, just to be specific, is limited to less than 10% of revenue. Our more broad Americas academic exposure is about 1/3 of our revenue. We do see the situation evolving day by day.
We know, right, because we communicate with our customers on a daily basis, that a reduction in NIH funding is likely to impact the overall academia spend priorities. Our team's done a careful analysis, right? We've focused, of course, on that academics Americas revenue. I think it's important to point out that while the environment has changed, our thesis has not. We're laser-focused on executing our strategy, protecting our P&L, and positioning our business for mid to long-term growth.
Thank you, Sean. That was great. With that, we'll close it out. Thank you, everyone, for joining.
Thanks, Anna.