Hey, everyone. Glad to see everyone has made it to the last day of the TD Cowen Healthcare Conference. My name is Chad Wiatrowski. I'm with the Tools and DX team here at TD Cowen. Sorry. Yeah, I have here today with me, Kevin Knopp, CEO of 908 Devices, and Joe Griffith, the CFO of 908 Devices. And I've been following the story for a long time. You know, there's been some pivots, and recently, yesterday, they just announced the sale of the bioprocess analytics portfolio to Repligen, which really marks a new era and enables the company to reinvest and double down in sort of what's really been outperforming in this handheld business. It is a perfect time to hear them present, which we'll start with, and then we'll just have a free-flowing conversation. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at chad.wiatrowski@tdsecuritys.com.
That's spelled W-I-A-T-R-O-W-S-K-I. With that, yeah, feel free to present.
All right, thank you. Thanks so much, Chad. Thanks for having us here today, everybody. We appreciate it. We got a lot of exciting updates that came out yesterday, so appreciate your time and going through it here. Quick look at our forward-looking statement. For those of you that might be a little bit newer to the story, 908 Devices is really creating next-generation tools designed for point-of-need use in critical health and safety applications. These products are based on innovative mass spec and spectroscopy technology. We serve a multitude of critical-to-life use cases. That includes the fentanyl and opioid response, with users spanning from frontline workers to law enforcement. It includes informing life safety, with where they use to detect and identify toxic industrial materials and volatile organic compounds to help prevent acute exposure of emergency personnel to carcinogens.
It's a platform technology, so we have opportunity across the broader life science application space. Some of this we're addressing today through OEM and other funded partnerships, and that includes in the areas of pharma and industrial QA/QC. Yesterday, very excitingly, we announced that we realized a strategic transformation of our business. This is a bold step forward for us, yet a natural step. It really sharpens the company's focus and strengthens our financial position quite considerably, and it accelerates very dramatically our path to profitability. We're doubling down on our higher growth handheld markets, where revenue growth there has outpaced our desktop devices about 2x since the time of our IPO. Our installed base is over 3,000 units of handheld devices, and our pipeline is very much aligned with some powerful secular trends across the opioid crisis response, across defense, and across border security.
At the same time, we're divesting our biopharma desktop portfolio to Repligen for $70 million. This nearly doubles our cash reserves and eliminates any financing or NIH-related overhangs on us here. It very much paves the way for a positive adjusted EBITDA by Q4 2025 and cash flow positivity by 2026, driven by stronger margins and a more streamlined, agile organization of operations. Importantly, we have a platform technology that I previously mentioned, so we retain all the flexibility to operate in these broader life science markets and ensuring long-term opportunities beyond the divested bioprocessing and PAT space. Now, I wanted to walk you through how we're really realizing this transformation and what that means and kind of the multidimensional aspects of how this impacts our business. Yesterday, on our earnings call, Joe reviewed in detail our Q4 and full year 2024 results.
Our Q4 is very solid, and it's helping us build momentum as we enter 2025. I think it is quite informing, like if you actually just look back at where we were when we ended 2023. We had one product. We had one handheld product. We had a solid cash balance, but we were consuming about $30 million of cash annually for our operations, providing a limited but yet a multi-year runway at that time. Now, if you fast forward to 2025 and our expectations for the company, we've gone from that one product to now four products, four handheld products. We did so through an acquisition of RedWave in 2024, which now, as of year-end, we've fully integrated the RedWave portfolio into our commercial operations.
As of the end of 2024, we now have over 3,000 handheld placements, which is an increase of about 25%. We are guiding our revenue for our continuing operations to be in the range of $53-$55 million, and that represents about 11-15% year-over-year growth. We have dramatically improved that path to profitability, where we are now targeting adjusted EBITDA by Q4 of 2025. We have secured our cash balance, and we have passed through an anticipated low at the end of 2024. If you look ahead to 2026 and beyond, we will have gone from that one product to six products. There is a massive opportunity, as we see it, for device placements.
We estimate that there's tens of thousands of device unit potential out there, including 15,000 FTIR product opportunity that are a bit more dated and really ripe for an upgrade cycle, which we're bringing a very modern approach and modern solution towards. Our top-line growth is projected to really accelerate from here up to the 20%+ range, and we have three very clearly defined growth catalysts to enable that. We have equipment modernization. We have the launch of our next-generation MX mass spec device, and we have progression into full-rate production for our U.S. Department of Defense AVCAD program. Additionally, we anticipate further gross margin expansion with year-over-year improvement as we have a full-year benefit from that consolidation of a facility move that we're doing and announced in November to Connecticut.
2026 also really marks our anticipated first full year of being cash flow positive, and we believe that that will really allow us to preserve that cash balance and provide a healthy margin of safety and eliminating any financial overhang from the equation there. We really view it that we're not just evolving. We're really transforming our business, and this is how we're doing it. Again, it's hitting a multidimensional space of 908. To us, we're really today announcing that we're launching 908 Devices 2.0. So many dimensions have been improved to the positive. In many ways, it's been a step change for the better. Again, we're moving from that one product to four. We're now preparing for six, and it allows us to service more of that TAM, that TAM being increased and accessible to us.
We now have a reduced customer concentration. If you look back in time, the majority of our handheld sales would be centered around large government customers at the time of the IPO, really centered around one large government customer. We now have a much more balanced approach. About a third of our customers are coming from those U.S. federal accounts, but we have enabled significant opportunity across state and local and across international accounts. International accounts and international expansion is very topical with world events. We are seeing that in our pipeline. We are seeing that across Europe. We have seen some sizable wins in Q4 that we did talk about on our earnings call yesterday. We are building a nice base of revenue with the placements that we are doing that we can leverage for this accelerated growth.
At the same time, our adjusted gross margins have had a stepwise improvement over a multi-year period. Now we have additional forecasted for 2025 and again planned for 2026 for our products and services and drives more contribution to that bottom line. If we look at our OpEx, if you think about it in terms of a productivity measure and a percent of our revenues, that's accelerating for the better our path to profitability. Again, we're targeting reaching our adjusted EBITDA positive by this year. Our cash that we now have is very solid. It's providing us an unlimited runway of ability. I think you might see why. We really believe that this is a transformative moment for mass here, a value creation.
We're absolutely laser-focused on these handheld opportunities because we see so much opportunity across these public and health crises that are out there: fentanyl, carcinogens, critical security threats. I really believe we're well-positioned with this broader portfolio to achieve it and really kind of seize that opportunity. I appreciate your time to go through it and look forward to Q&A. Yesterday was a big day in the journey of 908 announcing this transformation.
Thanks, Kevin. I just want to jump into sort of the 2025 outlook now post the sale. You guided to $51 million-$53 million for the handheld revenues. Can you just kind of walk through what the assumptions are at the lower and the higher end of the guide and maybe where there's some upside?
Absolutely. The 51-53 is kind of our handheld product and service. There is another $2 million that is more kind of OEM, strategic, a little bit on the life sciences side today with some partners. We add Repligen to that mix. That is the other $2 million. For AVCAD, we do not have anything, kind of minimal impact in 2025. To answer your question on the 51-53, a lot of it is on that balance, how state and local and international feeling really good. A lot of that is work, but it is run rate. We know the business. We have folks out there. It is the Fed government. If anyone knows what the government is doing these days, let me know.
We are trying to be very thoughtful in the baseline in our range of pilots and enterprise opportunities that we've talked about through the years. We saw a build at year-end around those opportunities that set us up for this year. Being thoughtful about what we bake in, that could bring us over or maybe to the low end of the guide. That's probably the biggest lever. Excited by the products. Really, the four FTIR products from the RedWave acquisition are fully integrated, up and running with our collective sales team going after the opportunity. That's a key growth driver.
Yeah, and I think that's very much key to the situation on the U.S. federal government side. As Joe mentioned, we now have that broader set of tools. I briefly mentioned in the presentation that now we have about a third coming from the U.S. federal government, which is very important and very much aligned to these secular trends that you're hearing out of the new administration. We also have great growth drivers internationally. Again, you're seeing things there across NATO countries. We're seeing it. We talked that we had a 90-unit opportunity that we fulfilled partially in Q4 for Finland for an EU stockpiling program. Another third of our business is the state and local. Yeah, I think it's very exciting that not only the portfolio has expanded, but kind of that range of customers for 2025 has really taken a step forward.
Just to double-click now on the combined portfolio and handheld, like with all the RedWave instruments and then your MX908 legacy handheld instrument, are there opportunities to cross-sell? Is there a shared customer base? And can you kind of leverage your existing channels to sell those RedWave technologies? Are there any examples of doing that so far? What does the opportunity look like?
100%. Maybe I can start, and Joe, you probably have some specific examples for us, but absolutely 100%. Our sales team now, as we have it integrated by the end of the calendar year 2024, we're able to go back to those 2,800 customers, if you will, units that are placed out there and then introduce the three RedWave products. We really do a lot of work pre and post-sales with people to really kind of be a partner to them. We have very nice training and workshop programs where if a customer purchases an MX908, for instance, it comes with a training, which might involve five or ten people at an event, but we'll be showcasing kind of a workflow solution where we'll bring in other products at that time to help seed that pipeline and help drive a flywheel effect.
We're absolutely introducing it and being able to leverage that installed base with the RedWave product.
Yeah. We saw it in 2024 where there were some specific opportunities where we were selling our MX alongside the Explorer, which is a gas-based detector, one of the products, able to realize that tens of units sold together in a package deal, which is exciting. Saw an order that's coming together here in Q1 where we had an installed base of MX devices, 10, 15, where now they're looking for Explorers and capability. An example of selling together and then selling after the fact on the installed base as Kevin described. I think we're just getting started on that, and it's really an opportunity to accelerate that growth.
Now with the biotech headwinds in sort of the rearview mirror and kind of escaping some of those elongated sales cycles for those bioprocessing instruments, when you look at the handheld portfolio, what level of visibility do you have when you're looking at your outlook and making guidance? Are there any advantages to the handheld dynamics compared to some of those bioprocessing headwinds that are in the rearview mirror?
I'd start by saying absolutely the handhelds are aligned to those secular trends that you're hearing about every day: fentanyl, defense spending, concerns about homeland and international security, border crisis. That's definitely allowing us to have conversations with customers and build a pipeline. Now, we update every year. We update kind of what we think of as the number of units that are in the pilots programs that then can convert into larger enterprise accounts. We saw a lot of expansion in 2024 of those pilot programs. We went to having more than 700 units. We went from about 100 units to having 700 plus units of potential in those pilot programs. Each of those can scale to enterprise accounts. Enterprise accounts, we estimate there's another 1,100 units of opportunity.
This is in our pipeline as of now, real named accounts all lining up for us. Yeah, I think we do have quite a good visibility. That said, we are selling to the federal government. We are selling CapEx. We always have to take the appropriate steps. I do think we've got a top-notch sales team that tries to have those right conversations and tries to understand the timing and cycles of the budgets as best they can with our customers.
Could you guys just give a little bit more color on that land and expand strategy? How do you actually execute scaling up to those larger enterprise accounts?
Yeah, it often starts with the pilot adoption. A pilot adoption might take an account of a five-unit purchase, a ten-unit purchase. They would be using it in a segment of their business. They'd be using it in an area for an evaluation. Yet they know they have a number of sockets, maybe 200 in a particular account. You might see them come back and get another 25 or 50 and kind of outfit another portion of the organization as they work towards a full fulfillment within their particular departments there of, call it again, a couple of hundred. We kind of see that. That helps to your question around visibility because as you can build out that pipeline of pilots, which is why we think those metrics are so important.
Across to enterprise, our team is absolutely chasing on, yep, that one has 250 units. We only have 50 in. It's good experience. How do we work with them to get the next to get full penetration in that account?
You guys referenced the AVCAD partnership. That's one, for example, that really could become a super material opportunity for you guys. I think you've mentioned $10 million plus annually. Could you kind of explain what gives you the conviction to execute on that in outer years? Obviously, there's those secular trends of fentanyl, increased border security, but it's also in light of federal budget cuts, Department of Defense budget cut. Could you kind of just explain what gives you that conviction in the outer years?
I think it's some of the framework, and feel free to jump in, Kevin. But yeah, we've been working on the AVCAD program for a while. We've been partnered with Smith's Detection almost since the day I started at 908, which is almost 11 years ago. But it's been a replacement program opportunity on the AVCAD side. And we've moved through and we've finished up low-rate initial production, and we're on the verge of the full-rate production opportunity. We expect to hear by the end of the government fiscal year, so by 9/30 at the latest, possibly by mid-year. So we're kind of in very close touch with the happenings and the timing of different meetings. But yes, it could, as it scales, kind of grow to be $10 million plus a year.
Not maybe in year one, but it could be a five- to seven-year opportunity of multiple millions of dollars a year. Super exciting. It is a program of record from a funding perspective. From a budget perspective, it is in there and the government feels confident in moving through and that funds are already identified, but trying to move quickly to get it over the line. The timing right now, our expectation is that we'd start delivering in 2026, but we'll assess as we understand the exact timing.
Yeah, yeah, that program of record point that Joe brought up is what gives you more confidence on the security of the budgets because that's funding that's put in by Congress over a many, many multi-year period. Even in the case of a continuing resolution, that's an example of the type of funds that can continue to flow because they're multi-year funds.
There is obviously a lot happening in the handheld end markets. Kind of looking elsewhere, you still have some exposure to potentially QA/QC, these large markets like environmental monitoring, applied markets. How are you going to access those markets in sort of the post-bioprocessing world? How are you viewing your exposure to some other end markets like that?
Yeah, to us, it's a very exciting time because we not only have a mass spec platform, but we have an optical spectroscopy platform with our FTIR products now through RedWave. Those are very, very broad application-oriented products. Those are a platform that can serve a multitude of areas and applications. We're absolutely excited for the core use cases we've been talking about thus far. You're right, there's so many other things that are interesting to us: GMP production, inspection, materials validation, impurity analysis, clean validation, small molecule chemical analysis in pharma, small molecule process monitoring in areas there. Some of that we're serving today through partnerships and OEM. It represents about nearly 5% of our forecasted revenue for 2025, this broader set.
To me, it's exciting because it's a little bit of a toehold there in a very efficient manner to market, where we don't have to have all the direct sales expenses when we see such a massive opportunity for the existing handheld. These areas and opportunities through an OEM and partnership kind of set up some future growth vectors for us. It's great today. It's about 5%. It's starting to contribute.
Just to again double-click on kind of growth drivers for next year, you've referenced there's an MX908 2.0 kind of in the works. Could you just explain sort of what the improvements you're making on that instrument are, what customer feedback you've gotten to make you pursue those improvements, and how do they address bottlenecks that are maybe causing people to hesitate on buying a 1.0 version of the instrument?
Yeah, great questions. I mean, we are an innovation-driven company. We started it with a game-changing mass spec that's a complete new category by itself, a handheld mass spec. We really have a strong base there, 2,800 or so units. We released it in 2018, which was its full year of launch. Customers generally expect a five- to seven-year capital equipment life out of such products. We are coming up to that. We have been working hard behind the scenes to develop a next generation. Obviously, when you do that, we want to outpace our own innovation and really create a step change in simplicity and size. We are working on a solution that's about half the size and half the weight and much simpler to operate.
Already, our handheld mass spec, being the only one out there in that format, is capably being used by law enforcement and frontline workers. It is fairly simple compared to any sort of laboratory equivalent. We can do better. We can do better. People have high aspirations with your tablets and phones that are out there everywhere that you can just keep making the user experience simpler and simpler. We see a lot of value of kind of creating an ecosystem of these products and connecting them together. One area that we're also working aggressively on is more of the team leader, we call it. It's an application that connects to the RedWave products and is expanding to connect to the MX908. It's an application that allows you to do fleet management of the devices.
It allows you to pull the data, see analytics, what's happening on those devices. It allows you to make reports. It allows you to have better insights. We even have some AI modules now to provide support on the fly to these customers, kind of best practices. We are really leaning into that. I get excited personally for that because I think it sets us up for a sticky situation of that ecosystem and more recurring revenue opportunities. For our handhelds today, it's about a third of our recurring revenue. Can we expand that with these connected services? I believe we can. We have got a roadmap for all types of new things from hardware to software to these connected services.
Are those software solutions what could drive kind of a replacement cycle in the legacy FTIR device like RedWave install base, which is like 15,000 at this point?
Yeah, there's a lot of features to our products that can drive and are driving the adoption of these to that replacement cycle because they're a modern solution compared to what's out there. You're right. They do connect to such a team leader application. They're Wi-Fi. They're brighter screens, better displays, user interfaces, all those types of things you're working to build in there, faster processors, things of that nature. All of those are really driving it. With the Explorer device that Joe briefly mentioned, it's a new category out there for FTIR where it's doing that gas detection and identification. That's also been a driver, as Joe mentioned.
Obviously, there's a lot of these growth drivers, but there's been a real prioritization of profitable growth. Can you just speak to kind of where those targets were and then where they are now post the Repligen sale and how we're looking?
Absolutely. As we thought about it historically, we need to be north of $100 million, managing two sales cycles, the leverage on the bioprocessing side to scale. The exciting part, I think, for Repligen is the fact they can plug it in with their CTEC and other opportunities to really drive that revenue. In their hands, they saw the value and they paid on the multiple. For us, one element is that kind of focusing the business, right-sizing the cost, getting visibility in the short term to Q4 adjusted EBITDA positive if we can get above $20 million in that quarter, full year cash positively in 2026. It is in the front seat now from an opportunity. We do not have to wait to $100 million plus to get there. That is exciting. We think it is needed based upon where we are.
I think of where we were when we went public to where we are today, now north of $50 million, knocking on the door of $60 million with an opportunity to be profitable. It's pretty exciting versus that greater than $100 million.
There was a previous RIF. With the Repligen transaction, there's an additional like 33% RIF. Can you just level set where's the selling organization? Yeah, there's some manufacturing transition. Once all of these transitions are complete, what does 908 look like?
Yeah, we're working to get it all done so that we can get into the back half of 2025 with a clean slate per se. We did take some restructuring back in November of last year. A lot of that was commercial-driven around our desktop portfolio, right-sizing it a bit based upon the growth profile in the current market. We also announced moving facilities. Boston, our handhelds to Danbury, Connecticut. The desktops at the time were going to go to North Carolina. Now they're going to, as I understand it, Marlborough or Waltham under the Repligen brand. That's all still in the works. It's happening. That was about 12% of the workforce moving the facilities. Now it's a little bit more opportunistic with the multiple and kind of closing the deal as of yesterday.
We will be reducing headcount naturally about a third, so about 80 folks. A good chunk of those folks, approximately 60, are going over to Repligen. We will work through the others as we provide transition services agreement in some folks that maybe were duplicative in the Repligen environment. It gives us that opportunity to streamline costs and have focus and drive on the growth of the opportunity ahead.
Just given the major strategy shift, how does that kind of change the way investors can view 908 now going forward just with maybe the peer group and the end markets?
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, if you look at it from a revenue perspective, the divestiture represented about 20% of our total business. 80% has always been focused on these handheld applications. Removing that 20%, monetizing it at an attractive valuation really opens up this new pathway for 2.0 to be profitable and have some of these better metrics that we've been talking about. From a comp perspective, that's also a very great question. When we look at it and say, who are we really out there selling against on a tender situation, tender or tender type of competition perspective? There are two areas of the market. We're really in what we think of as this advanced chemical detection area of the market.
Who is in that market would also be the larger analytical tools providers, your Thermo Fishers, your Bruker, your Agilent, Rigaku, such innovators on the analytical instrumentation landscape. Really, those larger companies are often the ones that we have a tender competing with. It is very interesting that that analytical tool space is the right home for this type of advanced chemical detection solutions that we have.
It's been a sort of a theme throughout the conference, just like the emergence of AI. It's kind of permeating all things. You referenced some software solutions and how you could layer that with fleet maintenance and things. What are some of those maybe predictive or preventative maintenance type insights that you could see if this all reaches its potential?
Yeah, we kind of see it on two sides. First of all, our customers are very worried about bad actors creating and synthesizing new substances to evade regulations, to evade detection, import something at a border crossing, beyond concerns with a chemical warfare type structure that could be synthesized. They would be doing that and enabling that through some of these AI type tools. Our technologies are actually quite interesting in that regard because they're very adaptable and reconfigurable. There is a machine learning element on our MX908 to be able to look at backbone structures to tell you that it suspects that there's a fentanyl-like class of product there. It's not in a particular way, in some instances, saying that I know it for sure.
It is using its machine learning to say, out of the thousands of possibilities, I think there might be something here that has never been seen in the environment before. We did a nice testing with the FDA on that a couple of years ago now at this point where they did that. They tried to look through that space of those thousands of compounds and showed the effectivity of our algorithms on it. We have that element of it that some of our customers are very concerned with the impact of AI on what they do and their threat scape. We have the machine learning elements built within our product to help respond and be adaptable. Fundamentally, the hardware is very broad-ranging in its analytical capabilities. You are right, there is a third layer to it. That is this layer around our applications, service, support.
I mentioned we are trying to integrate more AI bots inside of it so that you can just provide people with service support recommendations. I do think all of that drives value for a customer. It really just reduces the friction to get an answer. The more of those common tools that we can take advantage and provide in this, again, your question around the why modernize with our technologies, that would be a piece.
Yeah, there's just a lot of exciting things going on here. Just in the last moment here, what are the next things to look forward to in the next upcoming 12 months? What can investors look forward to?
Execution. I mean, I think we really, really believe we have the right plan in front of us here. I think we really do believe we've taken a transformative step forward and really do believe that we can execute on that slide in front of you here. We've made major strides to it and major announcements to it yesterday. Joe and the team and operations, we got some things underway to make it all happen. We're feeling strong about that.
Great. Thanks for the time, Joe and Kevin.
Thank you.