Getting my script, sorry. Well, I don't really need it. All right, so good morning, everyone. My name is Matt Larew. I cover life science tools here at Blair, and delighted to be joined by 908 Devices, Kevin Knopp, the CEO, Joe Griffith, the CFO. So really appreciate you spending the day with us. Thanks to the familiar faces I've seen in many rooms so far. I'll tell you the breakout after, 'cause I don't know what it is, but the compliance note is that for a complete list of disclosures, please visit williamblair.com. So again, very happy to have 908 here, and Kevin, take it away.
Thank you very much, Matt, and thank you, everybody, for taking the time today to let us introduce, reintroduce, or update you on 908 and our activities here. So we'll dive right in. So just a quick note on our forward-looking statement for your reference. But 908, you know, we've really been working to make chemical analysis simple, smart, and speedy to empower swift actions in life-altering applications. That's really been our thesis since day one, and we've had this vision to take the gold standard of chemical detection out of a central lab to the manyfold customers of the central lab. And since our public company debut in December 2020, we've grown from $27 million in annual revenues at that time to $50 million in 2023 year-end. That's an 85% increase.
That's really been driven by our handheld product portfolio that's serving the forensics applications, which has grown at about 29% CAGR over this period. As of Q1, we now have over 2,900 devices placed globally. We have a solid IP position with over 115 patents on our technology, and we're also been proud to be recognized by Fast Company as a great place to work for innovators. So we appreciate that recognition as well. Much like the continuum of a supercomputer onto a laptop or an application-driven tablet, we're really working to extend from that single, centralized specialist lab user to those that have the sample, have a vested interest in getting the response and answer from that sample quickly, fast.
They need to do so to move forward in their workflow. So we're introducing new product classes that provide these lab-grade answers, and we're changing how and where chemical and biochemical analysis is done and by whom that it can be done by. The applicability that we see for chemical detection is quite broad for what we call the point of need. It also allows us to serve a diverse array of markets and applications using common technology platforms. Our customers are wide-ranging, from the FBI to the FDA, first responders to frontline workers to biologists, process engineers, biopharma, QA, QC professionals. And all these customers are really looking to do the same thing, which is move forward with a...
with their workflow, faster and smarter and more efficiently, by having this information. We really don't need to evangelize on the value of having robust measurements at the point of need. Rather, it's more about customers really craving these answers so they can be more informed with insights that can impact their job and have their ability to move forward a bit faster and smarter. The diversity of customers that 908 has is a big differentiator as we see it. This has been proving strong for us during the times when the life sciences, instrumentation, and the bioprocessing space has been under some pressure.
Further this, we feel, creates some exciting, significant opportunity for growth acceleration as those markets' headwinds lessen and open up, and continue to grow. We're very proud of the long list of our key customers that we have shown here with them in adopting our devices. They really range from on the left there, the top pharma and biotech organizations, through to large enterprise government organizations, and then some academic customers as well, including all the top 20 largest biopharma companies.
For reference, about a third of our desktop devices are placed in those top 20 biopharma accounts, and our job now really is to leverage each of those placements and initial penetrations and really radiate out across these to other high-quality accounts and expanded with our portfolio now that has a greater number of products in it that we can bring to these same customers. We pair our innovative hardware with a proprietary set of consumables and premium support to provide our customers a complete solution. In 2023, about one-third of our full-year revenues were recurring. This is a bit of a testament to the value of our consumables, accessories, and the support we provide. We anticipate again that about a third of our full-year revenues in 2024 will be recurring.
Additionally, we have over $18 million of deferred revenue on our balance sheet due to the recognition of the value of the service and support our customers see in the value of buying these upfront. Many times, people will purchase a five year contract, a support agreement, or a consumable agreement from us upfront. On April 30th, we announced something very exciting for 908, and that was the acquisition of RedWave Technology, and we're now in the process of welcoming them into 908. There are really five key areas that I'd like to quickly highlight for you that give the strong rationale of what we see for this acquisition and how it came about.
First, RedWave as a standalone company is profitable and high growth. Unaudited 2023 full year financial revenue is about $13.7 million. They have attractive gross margins of about 52% and a positive operating margin of about 15%. Last year, they grew approximately 20% year-over-year, and they operated as a cash flow positive business. Second, it expands our toolkit of offerings for the handheld chemical analysis devices to serve greater and broader forensics workflows, and now that spans unknown solids, liquids, gases, aerosols, and initial detection through their identification.
Our handheld portfolio grows now from 1 - 4 market-leading handheld products, and we expect to now accelerate penetration into the addressable forensics market, which we estimate to be more than $1.3 billion. And third, the RedWave products immediately add to the bags of the 908 direct sales team and applications team, really enhances our overall efficiency and scale while supporting RedWave's growth trajectory with our robust commercial platform and global reach. Fourth, RedWave's products also bolster what we're doing in building in the bioprocessing space. Their technology is based on an infrared optical spectroscopy platform called FTIR, and that is additive to our newly released Raman product called Maverick, and that operates on a related scientific principle.
Process Analytical Technology customers in pharma often leverage FTIR, Raman, and other related infrared spectroscopy technologies for QC, for upstream analytics and downstream applications. And then RedWave has a small presence already here, today, where we see future opportunity to leverage the technology to further enhance our existing bioprocessing portfolio. And finally, fifth, this combination significantly enhances our financial portfolio profile. RedWave is profitable and cash flow generating, immediately accretive to our gross margins, and we've identified more than $5 million in synergies, forecasted to be realized in 2026.
The contribution of RedWave revenue, the leverage of 908 sales infrastructure, these identified cost synergies are expected to accelerate our path to reach $100 million in annual revenue, and that accelerates our crossover to cash flow break even with a steeper profitability ramp on the other side. And importantly, we continue to expect that we're able to reach break even with our cash on hand. Our flagship product is shown here. That's our MX908 handheld mass spec. We have over 2,400 handheld devices fielded in the U.S. and internationally. First responders and frontline workers of all type rely on these devices to provide trace detection of chemical drugs and other priority toxic materials.
Without our product, our users generally would be sending samples to the lab and waiting, sometimes weeks or months in some cases, or they'd be employing some lesser technology, if you will, at that point of need, which provides more of an incomplete or partial picture, that's not quite as informing. It's usually sacrificing either on the selectivity or on the sensitivity of the results. An important application for the MX908 is to help combat the opioid crisis and used in the detection of fentanyls and the detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Now, RedWave is a leader in optical spectroscopy, and they have developed a compact and mobile variant of infrared spectroscopy called FTIR.
FTIR is really renowned for its specific substance identification abilities across a broad range of what we call bulk chemicals, so a visible amount of the compounds. Using the technology, RedWave products can identify more than 22,000 chemicals in these bulk visible amounts, white powders, unknown solids, liquids, drugs, and the like. This is very complementary as we see it to our mass spec detection capability, which is really renowned for its tremendous sensitivity, providing unparalleled detection and identification of a very focused list of toxic compounds at levels that are very, very low, nanograms or parts per billion. So RedWave products target the same types of customers as our MX handheld, including first responders, law enforcement, other frontline workers, customs agencies, postal inspections agencies globally.
And there's a long runway, as we see it, for opportunity, with the FTIR products here on the RedWave side, and we see an opportunity to replace more than 15,000 fielded legacy FTIR products that are more lacking in their modern conveniences, remote connectivity, apps, communication capabilities, and the like. But in addition to that significant opportunity to replace legacy FTIR products, there's quite an opportunity as we see it, for expanded use for unknown gas identification. RedWave offers products that can identify 5,500 toxic and VOC gases and help track down the source of a leak in an industrial or hazardous material situation.
They've built three innovative handheld products that really pair well with our MX908 and fortify what we do with our MX and our MX Aero, accessory addition to it and really bolsters the roadmap that we're creating in the air monitoring space. So our sales team is incredibly excited to put these product offerings immediately next to the MX908 and bring them to the field. And in fact, I just returned from last night in North Carolina, where we had a sales meeting, and we're doing a kickoff jointly with their teams and applications team, so we had about 50 people all gathered. So lots of good energy, and we're excited to be well underway in that process.
Just to clarify again, really, as I mentioned, these products, as we see it, are incredibly complementary in the way they analyze and detect and identify compounds. So forensics customers do use both mass spec and FTIR to assess and monitor their environment for dangerous trace chemicals and possible bulk chemical hazards. In the most general sense, again, our MX is really focused on the invisible, the unseen, targeting fentanyl, many analogs, hundreds of other highly toxic analytes. And FTIR products are really to expand the detection capability to more than 22,000 different analytes and are really suited for visible bulk sample identification. So together, the two technologies really offer a fast and comprehensive field forensics toolkit to support our customers' broader workflows.
By bringing RedWave's handheld products to 908 Devices, we really can leverage our existing scale and platform to serve new and existing customers more efficiently. Strong relationships and support through the whole sales cycle are really key to customers in this space. And bringing their team onto our existing commercial platform, we can better serve customers across that entire journey, across that entire sales cycle, and from the technology and applications, of course, but on to the world-class support and service.
Now we have the opportunity with a combined situational awareness view because we've got multiple technologies and we offer a part of the support contract I was mentioning, where it's a 24/7 reach back, where people can call us and talk to a chemist 24/7 to talk about their results and help them put in context of a response, of a hazard situation. Additionally, with the scale of the RedWave's cloud-based fleet management offering, we have the potential to add new data services for additional recurring revenue on our handhelds as we move forward. We believe the strategic rationale here is incredibly clear. First, we believe the acquisition will meaningfully accelerate our revenue growth in an end market that's been performing well.
Second, the overlapping customers and call points enable significant sales and marketing synergies. Third, it's projected to improve our scale and efficiency in a large addressable forensics market, opening access to a broader portfolio of capabilities to our customers. And fourth, forecasted to be accretive to the top line and gross margins, and we're acquiring a profitable cash-generating business, which accelerates our path to break even. And lastly, and importantly, it also expands our tech toolbox, generally, and now creates a really leading point-of-need analysis platform, mass spec, Raman, and FTIR, all in one company that we can bring out three lab-grade technologies. And that really supports a long-term, robust roadmap in bioprocessing.
Now, to that last point, we've been building since the time of the IPO. We've really been working to build out a complement of process analytical tools. We call them desktop devices into the biopharma and bioprocessing point-of-need applications. And these tools measure, monitor, and in some cases, control the extracellular environment in a bioreactor, which is very, very critical to the life of those cells. The extracellular environment consists of the building blocks of proteins, the essential amino acids, vitamins, carbohydrates, other nutrients that are needed for a cell to grow and prosper and to express the protein that's desired and needed. These are inputs and outputs, if you like to think of it that way, to the cellular metabolism, to the cell cycle. This extracellular environment, though, is a bit of a Goldilocks problem.
You can't have too much of one thing or too little. Too low, and you can starve a metabolomic pathway. Too high, you could foster toxic byproducts. So it's really critical to monitor and control these analytes to achieve the needed downstream critical quality attributes, the CQAs. Our desktops are designed to allow this through the rapid, near real-time monitoring and optimization of the environment. They're really designed to sit next to the bioreactor, as shown here, to be run by a process tech, a biologist. They're meant to be serving known and understood applications of process monitoring, media fingerprinting, media development, and enabling that next level of process optimization. Often, the alternative to our products is really a traditional central lab workflow, and that really doesn't scale. It's pretty untenable.
So in the case of the Rebel, that could literally take weeks versus about 15 minutes. So we really strive to simplify the entire process and remove the logistics to give someone an answer right there and then at that point of need. So our Rebel product is a mass spec. It can sit at line. It can be used by that biologist or process technician. Wide analyte range of coverage, consumes very little of a precious sample, and it's about 10x cheaper on a per-sample basis than a lab workflow, and it's still quite accurate. In fact, the FDA actually just recently published an article showing that the Rebel results are quite comparable to traditional LC-mass spec, but faster and easier, which helps enable larger cohorts to be monitored and measured.
But we're also not stopping there, and we're really trying to always make it continually easier and easier and simpler for our customers, and more automated solutions to democratize that chemical and biochemical detection broadly. And we've been working as well to move our sampling online to be actually integrated, plumbed in, if you will, to the bioreactor, and removing several steps and enabling really seamless sampling that you could do through the day, through the night or weekends when no one is in the lab. This really drives a convenience and cost savings for our customers, and then pull through ultimately for 908 devices. Acceleration is ultimately what the value of our 908 solutions is working to bring, and Maven and Maverick, both released last year, are working to do just that.
With a more complete set of information available in the near real time, in a push button, get answer format, you're enabling a next level of process optimization. You can then inform the feeding strategies to better your critical quality attribute output, and working to reduce your cost of goods of the process. And our ZipChip product can be used to measure such output, to measure the expressed critical quality attributes of proteins very quickly and easily. And ZipChip has been shown to be about 20x faster, 10 minutes versus 200 minutes, than an alternative HPLC in measuring such CQAs.
The pipeline of therapeutics has really been progressing from small molecules through to traditional monoclonal antibody large molecules that can be manufactured in large 10,000 L vats, but now on to advanced therapeutics, such as cell therapies and gene therapies that can be individualized, really resulting in multifold increase in the number of measurements as the number of batches that require measurement and QC increase and mushroom out. I believe that we're really nearing an inflection point for the industry as industrial process control is adopted at scale. The industry really needs to move to a more predictive and real-time control of the bioreactors through monitoring of critical process parameters and product quality attributes, the CQAs, in more real time to enable mechanistic models in silico to drive better and improved outcomes.
The analytics we see are key to this industry transformation. AI modeling require data, they require sensors, they require tools to get that data. We at 908 are really working to enable this by creating a connected and comprehensive sets of desktop devices that can stream both these process and product quality attributes, and leveraging our novel aseptic sampling technology, as shown in the middle there, to enable that online connection. Simply put, ultimately, you're really striving to make a tricorder that's connected, a multi-sensor scanner, where you can be streaming out all these process and quality attributes.
Today's separate boxes, different price points, but we're on that journey, and everything we do with our handheld to reduce the size of those, certainly helps as well as we progress down towards that vision. At the end of Q1, we've got 2,900 devices that have been fielded into high-quality accounts across 55 countries. Consumable chips and kits expand as we do more in bioprocessing or at their desktops, with a higher pull-through opportunity. 45% of our Q1 revenues were from recurring elements, and we expect for the full year that to normalize to about one-third of our revenues for the full year, very similar to 2023. And now, with the existence of adding in the RedWave existing devices, we've already significantly expanded our base.
Now, collectively, we have over 3,600 units fielded, and collectively, we have more than 18,000 trained users. Over the last few years, we focused on creating a portfolio of desktop devices to serve the biopharma industry, and we released two products just last year, in fact. So we've got all the products we need to really be a significant contributor as we move forward. But now with the RedWave acquisition, we've added in three products, and we're really creating a light portfolio on our handheld devices. Again, that really gains us efficiency and scale from what we're doing there. So for both our desktops and our handheld devices, we really do see great benefits of having a complete portfolio and a complete suite of products for the workflow of our customers.
We have what we think is an attractive financial profile. We remain in the early innings of our market penetration with some differentiated technology. We have a pretty diversified business with strength of our handhelds and forensics, can be offset the near-term weakness in the in bioprocessing. For 2023, we grew our product and service revenues by 12% and total revenues to $50 million, with a third of that being recurring. Revenue from our desktop products represented about a quarter of our 2023 total revenues, and this offers a great opportunity for us to accelerate the growth as the life science instrumentation and bioprocessing headwinds abate. Then for Q1, we reported $10 million in revenue for product and services, growing about 8% year-over-year.
We're pleased that the gross margins played out where they did, about 400 basis points higher than they were in Q1 2023. We expect full year gross margins to be in the low 50%s, and slight improvement year-over-year on a full year basis. We try to be very cash conscious and maintain a pretty solid balance sheet. Going forward, we really project favorable financial impact from the RedWave acquisition, including higher growth, some improved margins, and a faster path to profitability. Over time, we expect RedWave to contribute strong gross margins above 908 Devices corporate average. And remember, we're absorbing a cash-generating, cash flow positive, I should say, business. Going forward, we've identified more than $5 million in forecasted annual cost synergies to be realized in 2026.
The acquisition was fully funded from the cash of our balance sheets, and any additional consideration to be paid in stock, meeting a minimum growth target of approximately 22% over the next annually, over the next 24 months. Further, we continue to believe that our cash on hand is sufficient to reach cash flow breakeven. We see significant growth catalysts for our end markets, which are expected to really fuel our long-term growth. Due to the opioid crisis and prevalence of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, U.S. forensics labs are under great pressure, and processing times can be six months or more.
Our handheld participates in a $1 billion market where these lesser techs reign, and we believe there's an opportunity to take share here and begin that penetration, which we're only in the single digits percent overall. And then likewise, seeing increasing complexity of therapeutics, the demand for cell-based products, and the push towards Bioprocessing 4.0, we see those as significant catalysts for our growth, and our TAM is significant there and is rooted in the number of process development sites, which is believed to forecast and grow significantly in the coming years, particularly in... as cell therapies and cell therapy pipelines continue to expand and gain traction. So many favorable market catalysts here and we've got a pretty large opportunity in front of us.
So just to conclude, we've really been operating our business with the goal of building a solid financial foundation for a durable, long-term, profitable growth. We now have multiple lab-grade products, analytical platforms to power future point-of-need chemical analysis and well into the future. We do have a consolidated portfolio of handheld and desktop devices to address this greater $6 billion of forensics, research, QA/QC, and bioprocessing TAM, which is all significant. We believe we've accelerated our path to reach more than $100 million in annual revenues and improved U.S. and international scale. Further, we continue to project the ability to reach the cash flow breakeven with our cash on hand.
And we think that the robust lab-grade chemical analysis and detection at the point of need and unshackling it from a centralized lab model is an incredible opportunity, very timely to be pursuing, in fact, given the global insecurity and uncertainty out there. And thank you, and I'm really excited for, for where we are in our journey and, and to welcome the RedWave team and, and for the next steps and next phase. So thank you for-