Devices, CEO Kevin Knopp and Joe Griffith, CFO. Great to have you guys at our conference.
Yeah, thanks so much for having us. Appreciate the opportunity.
Awesome. I think you had a couple of slides, Kevin. Do you want to present?
We do, yeah. We just have a few we'd love to walk through. Shall we start there?
Yeah, let's start off.
Thank you again, and good afternoon to everybody here. Thanks for having us. We put a few slides together to talk about some of the transformation we announced last week. For those newer to the 908 Devices story, really what we're doing is creating next-generation tools designed for point-of-need use in critical health and safety applications. Our products are based on innovative mass spec and spectroscopy technology. We're really working to take these lab-grade analytical instrument platforms out for mobile and field use. We serve a multitude of what we think of as critical-to-life use cases. That includes the fentanyl and opioid crisis, with users spanning from frontline workers to law enforcement. That includes informing life safety, where we use our products to detect and identify toxic industrial materials and VOCs. That's really helping to prevent an acute exposure of emergency personnel to carcinogens.
Lastly, being a platform technology, we really have broad across life science market use cases. Some of these applications areas we're serving today across pharma and industrial QA/QC through OEM and other funded partnerships. Last week, we announced something pretty transformative to us here at 908. Really, to us, it's a massive step forward. It's a bold step, in our opinion. It's also quite a natural step for us. It sharpens our focus and strengthens our financial position. Importantly, it dramatically accelerates our path to profitability. In short, we're really doubling down on the higher growth handheld markets, where revenue has outpaced our desktops by two times since our IPO. Importantly, we now have an installed base of over 3,000 units and a pipeline that's very much aligned to some powerful secular tailwinds in the opioid crisis response, defense, and border security.
To enable that, we are divesting the biopharma desktop portfolio to Repligen for $70 million. That nearly doubles our cash reserves. It really eliminates any NIH healthcare-related or financing overhangs for us. Importantly, it also paves the way for us to reach adjusted positive EBITDA by Q4 2025 and full cash flow positivity in 2026. This is driven by the stronger margins and a more streamlined agile operation as a result. It is a platform technology, as I previously mentioned. We do retain all the flexibility to operate in the broader life sciences market, ensuring that we do have broader long-term opportunities beyond the divested bioprocessing PAT segment.
Now I'd love to just take a few more minutes to walk through a set of slides that maybe by the numbers tells a little bit why we view this as a pretty positive multidimensional impact here on our business. Joe went through on our earnings call the Q4 and full year. We felt it was a pretty solid Q4 set of results that's really giving us momentum into 2025 that we can talk about here in our Q&A. I think it's pretty informing if you step back to the year-end 2023 and see where we were. From a handheld portfolio, we had one device, just one product. We did have a very solid cash position at the time. We were consuming approximately $30 million annually of cash for operations. It provided a limited but a multi-year runway.
Now, if you fast forward a bit to today, into 2025 expectations, we've gone from that one to now four handheld products. That was driven through an acquisition of RedWave in April of 2024, which is now, as year-end, completely integrated into our commercial channel. As of the year-end, we collectively have over 3,000 placements, which is about a 25% increase. We're guiding revenue from our continuing operations to be in the range of $53 to $55 million, representing 11% to 15% year-over-year growth. We've dramatically improved our path to profitability. We have a target of reaching that by Q4 of 2025. Importantly, we secured our cash balance. We passed through what we anticipate as the low at year-end 2024. If you think about what's beyond 2026 and beyond, we've gone from that one product to now six.
Massive opportunity, as we see it, for additional device placement. We estimate there's about 10,000, including an estimated 15,000 FTIR customer placements that we're targeting for upgrade. We have laid out in our prepared remarks last week details around three clear growth catalysts. One is around equipment modernization that we're seeing across the globe. Two is around the launch of our next generation of our handheld mass spec. Three is progression of our U.S. Department of Defense program, AVCAD, Air Monitor, into a full-rate production milestone. So additionally we do expect further gross margin expansion, year-over-year improvement of that, as we get the full-year benefit from the facility consolidation that we're doing right now into the Connecticut facility out of Boston.
2026 also, very importantly, marks our anticipated full first year of being cash flow positive, which we believe will allow us to preserve that cash and provides us a really healthy margin of safety for crossover. Again, eliminates any financing overhang, in our opinion, from this equation. We really do look at it that this isn't just a simple announcement. We're really not just evolving. We are really changing in a stepwise way. 908 Devices 2.0 and in many dimensions of the business that we tried to articulate here, you can see that step change. We went from one to four products, preparing for six. It's allowing us to serve a larger total addressable market.
It's allowing us to diversify our customer base, which is very, very important, going from a more singular customer, large military, federal accounts into much broader customer being more balanced, with about a third from U.S. federal customers, another third from international customers, and a third from U.S. states funding. Significant opportunity there with that diversification. The international opportunity is quite topical, obviously, with world events across Europe. We did see some sizable wins in Q4 for our products in EU stockpile programs, where this is chemical detection programs that have been there. In fact, this morning, we announced a $1.7 million order for our analytical technology to the Ukraine Ministry of Health, really to monitor air around them for health concerns. We're building off a higher base of revenue, a higher base of placements that we're leveraging now for that accelerated growth.
Our adjusted gross margins have also made a stepwise improvement year over year in a few years now in a row. We have additional expansion forecast for 2025 and then 2026. The OpEx has gotten more productive as a percentage of our revenue. That further helps us reach our profitability goal of adjusted EBITDA positive this year. Now we've got a solid cash runway with a balance sheet that's providing us an unlimited resource there in terms of a runway time horizon. To us, again, as I started off, I think I hope you can see that this is why we view it as much more of a transformational moment for mass here. We're really focused on these handheld problems, which are going against some of the most urgent public health and safety application crises of our time: fentanyl, carcinogens, and other security threats.
We believe, with our expanded portfolio, this more sharpened focus, that we're really well-positioned to be the leader in this space. Again, taking analytical instruments out from the lab, but into these field and mobile contexts. We think it's an incredible opportunity. We're working aggressively to seize it. Thank you.
That's great. Maybe, Kevin, on obviously a transformation for 908 Devices, can you maybe talk to us in terms of the overall handheld opportunity? Obviously, you've been working at it for several years now, a solid adoption. There's international demand growing. Maybe just what are the levers, as you talked about? You touched on some of them in terms of fentanyl being one, threat detection, Ukraine that you talked about, the order that came from there. Maybe just overall, looking at that $2.5 billion sort of TAM that you look at, maybe walk us through some of the key drivers that you, again, with a sharpened focus on threat detection and toxin detections in the market.
Yeah, absolutely happy to give you some more application insights and things. Again, we're really focused on these health and safety applications that are more critical, where you need a response that's a robust response, quicker and faster. The TAM, as you said, it's about $2.5 billion. We've been unlocking more of that TAM as our portfolio has expanded to allow us to serve more of that TAM. Again, we went from one handheld device that did trace analysis of hundreds of analytes, very important for fentanyl. When we say fentanyl, it also means xylazine, nitazenes, the illicit drug market that's expanding. It was amazing to me to see the Secretary of Treasury Secretary on Friday talking about he used the words fentanyl on his CNBC talk, I believe it was. He used the words precursors.
Precursors is not just the end product, but it's also the constituents that are going in. We've assembled a portfolio that can not only do the trace amounts of the fentanyl components, but now with RedWave, three additional products that can look at tens of thousands of analytes, 5,000 gases that are all relevant for understanding toxics around one in there on a surface, in air, aerosols, in a solid liquid puddle form. Really assembled that to address that $2.5 billion of TAM. You're right, right now there is a considerable amount of interest in the fentanyl, but also security concerns, the border crisis that's related to it. Again, or carcinogens, which is a leading cause of death, unfortunately, for the firefighter community. Things like California wildfires are causing more and more of these to be unleashed across our community.
Really been focusing on a set there to provide more actionable insights with those products.
That's helpful. Just looking at the macro, there's quite a bit of noise. On one hand, you could see that this product has potential to be used potentially increasingly more in the fentanyl crisis. At the same time, you need those orders from the states or the federal agencies. Maybe with the continuing resolution potentially expiring this week and maybe some noise around the budget and overall, what are you hearing from Washington so far? What's the feedback from the field?
Yeah, so you're right. There's a lot happening there with the new administration and getting through the budget process. I think, again, it's important to note that in our evolution from the time of the IPO to now with this broader portfolio, we've really worked to address the predictability, the diversification of that revenue. Some is very much connected to what you're seeing and happening in Washington, DC, maybe a third of our handheld product sales. Another third is coupled to what's happening in all of our communities. The last third is coupled to what you see in the international space.
Related to the federal and military portion thereof there, I think where you need to watch is what we believe is priorities for the administration, our customers, Customs and Border Protection, our customer, the DEA, our customer, Homeland Security, and our customer, the Department of Defense. We believe those organizations, while there is still uncertainty in working through a budget process and working through the continuing resolution, we believe that they're part of that administration priority. When we talk to our customers, they're feeling that same, that they are part of the solution and part of the priority there. The U.S. administration further caused a ripple internationally. We've certainly seen a step up. We've talked about some topical news items already.
Another one that happened on Friday was in the EU, Brussels, there was an emergency meeting around spending more of their GDP on defense and security. The German Chancellor talking about going beyond their debt limits to prepare and spend more on defense and security. As I mentioned, we did announce this morning the Ukraine Ministry of Health buying $1.7 million of our product for protection, air monitoring, understanding what's in the air from a chemical weapons or a fentanyl or other toxic compound that we can detect with this broad technology. Yeah, I think there's a bit of multiple drivers here. Net net, the new administration is positive from where we see it today in Washington.
Okay, that's helpful. Then on the international side, one third of your revenue is from international markets, given that this is still a relatively new product. That's very interesting. I mean, maybe tell us sort of the international market opportunities that you can access, European opportunities, other countries potentially. How significant of a, I guess, pricing-wise, how should we think about the MX908 installs if they were to grow internationally?
Yeah, from an international perspective, I think we're just getting going. There's a lot of opportunity there. We do use a distribution channel, really, to light the fire and create breadth and opportunity, whether it's in Europe or the Middle East, to a little bit in APAC, but pretty international, European, Middle East. With that distribution channel, discounts can be 25% to 30%, depending on the partner status. It can impact margins. I do think that as we continue to see the opportunities here about the funding start to tap into that, we've invested quite a bit over the last two years. I think even with our nascent penetration, we're continuing to see opportunities pop up and continued opportunities moving forward to grow internationally. We'll start to see that here in 2025.
I think Ukraine was a great way to kick that off here in 2025.
Yeah. Ukraine's a great example of what we think of as maybe a pilot program, where a pilot program then has the opportunity to convert into an enterprise program. Ukraine specifically was in the 20s of units. You can imagine, as these show success, you can imagine how big of a problem they're dealing with there. We would look to see if we can get that into an enterprise rollout potential. Could that be hundreds? Perhaps, right? That's just one example of maybe where the international opportunity can go. As you said, it's about 30% today. We're pleased, but we think we can do much more there. Maybe as the business grows, you'd expect it to balance out more.
As Joe mentioned, we have a smaller footprint, and it is an area that's been performing. We think we can do more there.
Okay. On the AVCAD side, I mean, when do you expect AVCAD full rate production award decision to come out? How should we think about the phasing and duration of that $10 million?
Yeah, maybe I can start with just a quick recap. One of our three growth drivers is absolutely the U.S. Department of Defense program called AVCAD. It's essentially an air monitor that's a variant of our mass spec technology. It's really meant to sit and be able to measure toxic concerns, just by warfare agents, other chemicals, pharmaceutical agents, and things like that, by being in a standalone fashion that it can be parked around a base, kind of used in a ring structure or deployed. We've been working with Smiths Detection for some time now, about a decade. We've further provided about 100 component sets over the last 18 months for Smiths Detection to build up the first low rate sets of systems. Now we're on the precipice of getting a full rate award for that program.
We're very excited about that. Probably mid-year, but more likely by the end of the fiscal year, we should have visibility into that. Obviously, the government's going through a lot of change right now. Again, we believe this is a priority program for them and is addressing a set of concerns. On the flow of the dollars, do you want to talk through that?
Yeah. From a dollar perspective, as Kevin mentioned, we've initially partnered as we were placing the predecessor JCAD program in the low rate initial production, generated about $1.6 million of revenue last year. I think it was $3.5 million back in 2023.
We are not minimal impact here in 2025, but see it as one of the key growth drivers that Kevin mentioned in the slide presentation around our opportunity that could be up to $10 million a year over multiple years, five to seven years. Looking forward to hearing about the timing, the pacing, the quantities, and ultimately the dollars that flow through. Excited to be in the program and hopefully taking that final step.
You had talked about next generation MX908 as well. I think gross margin is supposed to be much better there, 2026 launch. Maybe what are some of the enhancements of the product that you're looking for? And just given the market itself and the end markets, can you maybe just give us a sense of where is that going to be positioned more broadly? Does it expand the market base?
Yeah, no, it's great. We're very excited for that development of the next generation of our MX908 handheld mass spec. And our current mass spec is the only commercially handheld mass spec out there. It's definitely created a whole new product class with 2,800 devices now installed. In fact, if you look back since its launch, which was now 2018, it grew at a 21% CAGR over that time period. It's definitely a great product for us. There are urgent needs that are out there that we talk about here. Our customers will upgrade for the latest of capability. We're looking with that product to make it smaller, about 50% smaller in size and weight. Importantly, we're working and taking customer feedback to make it even simpler, right?
How do you make it just even one step easier to your point, so we can have the replacement opportunity? The more you can simplify it, the more you have the opportunity to expand the user set and really kind of expand those that can take it on and not have maybe as much of a training burden because it's something that's just even more innate. It's definitely an area of simplification even inside the device. We're working to reduce the number of boards and cables so that directly affects your bill of materials and your labor costs. We have gone through these upgrades in our past history as a management team, 908 and beyond. We know you can drive upgrades for the new variant if you can unlock such new capability.
I also get excited because we're looking at it and a nice roadmap of ways to increase our recurring revenue, our pull-through. About a third of our total revenues for our handhelds is related to recurring elements. Using something like the next generation MX as an example, we're looking to put and attach more connected services to it. Cell phone connectivity, we have an application called Team Leader that's employed now on our FTIR products that we're looking to continue to build out. That's an ability to do fleet management of a large enterprise account. Post Office is a great example on our FTIR product where there's a couple of hundred of those FTIRs, and they're able to see where they are in location, see what they're measuring, detecting, being able to kind of build that ecosystem around it.
Those are definitely areas with the next generation MX and all our products we're going to be looking to expand as well.
Got it. Let's talk a little bit about RedWave. Maybe just talk to us, how is the addition of the FTIR products changing the conversation you're having with potential customers? In essence, I mean, do you get this as an expanded portfolio gets you to a broader customer base?
That's right. It's really opened the door where our sales team was out there selling one product, the MX908, a great product, but now have more tools in the toolbox with the three FTIRs. It's enabled us to leverage our customer base and the 2,800 install base where we've seen instances where MX users are now coming on board and buying the Explorer, right? Nine, 10, 12 at a time, which is exciting. We've also seen opportunities where we've gone to pitch a total solution. They've adopted, and we've had purchase orders where they buy the MX and the Explorer or other FTIR products at the same time. Really kind of leveraging the multiple tools to go after the needs out there in the market so there's more tools when they go to respond to incidents has really proven quite beneficial.
We fully integrated the sales team by the end of the year and are really excited to see what they do collectively here in 2025, not only with the direct sales, but also lighting a fire within the channel. There is a really strong channel on the RedWave side that we are looking to leverage and we see that acquisition that happened less than a year ago really help us to catapult the growth profile and the opportunities.
When you do the early pilots, I think in 2024, you had 18 pilots, 34 enterprise accounts. That was a step up from 2023. Sort of any thoughts on now with the focused portfolio, sort of how are you looking at 2025 in terms of those accounts?
Yeah, I mean, we really do love this penetrate and radiate strategy. You first get these on the large opportunities. You start in more of a pilot way where it might be 10, 20, 50 units that's adopted. I mentioned Ukraine in that same context in the 2020s, the first adopted. We work with that customer to drive success and move people across to the full capacity, which we then consider as an enterprise account. A great metric as of year-end of 2024, our number of units that we'd put in that pilot program went up seven-fold. It went up from about 100 that were in these various pilots to now over 700, greatly driven by the FTIR addition to it. What that's a prelude to is that we're really working to get opportunities for the FTIR in these larger U.S.
federal and military accounts. Some international, but a lot of that progress last year was getting the FTIR positioned into and starting to take footholds in things that we hope to become enterprise accounts for over time.
Got it. One could argue with the desktop boxes that you had. You were levered to pharma, but still the pharma, QA/QC, or raw material opportunities is not, I mean, you still have some of those capabilities. How much of a focus would that be? Maybe talk about specific applications where you can still use some of the products that you have.
Yeah, absolutely. We have two great, very broad platforms, mass spectrometry and spectroscopy, optical spectroscopy. Those, as you know, are gold standard lab techniques that the major life sciences firms all have a franchise in. Our variant is to take that to the field and be mobile. There is a plethora of life science applications in a broad context. I'd argue everything we're doing with small molecules today in fentanyl is part of that greater health and safety need and application. We're not blocked there. We have as much opportunity in front of us that we can handle in terms of things like cleaning validation, things like incoming material inspection, reaction monitoring, which we do serve today through some OEM partnerships. These are all areas that's about 5% of our revenue today, but definitely areas that we'll be looking to invest as we go.
Sort of pauses if I'm jumping around. I mean, if we look at the forensic sales force, do you think it's adequately staffed right now in order to reach all the regions that you want to have coverage on?
We have a little over 30 folks involved on the sales side. Of course, that covers applications, customer experience, training, and ultimately our salespeople inside and external. We also leverage a lot of channel partners in direct and direct. I think we're adequately staffed for the short-term opportunities that we're going after. One of the beauties of being focused is that if we see opportunities to go after new markets or double down in certain markets, we have the ability to do that. I think as we sit here today and what we put out there in the guide last week, I feel adequately staffed to deliver on the organic growth that we talked through.
Do you see any impact from you do not have a large academic position? If there was, it was maybe tied to the ZipChip. There are certain grants, federal grants. There are some institutions that are under pressure. How are you thinking about that risk overall?
Yeah, I mean, to us, the NIH and healthcare overhangs and some of these academics are not relevant to 908 now. We've really flipped that around through this divestiture and really enabled all the tailwinds on the other side, on the defense, border crisis, fentanyl and opioid side. I don't think we really see an impact going forward.
No, not on the academic side.
Got it. In terms of continuing to sort of expand the portfolio, maybe just help us understand what are some of the areas or sort of pipeline opportunities, so to speak? Or is the focus after this selling of the PAT assets, is the focus really going to be just driving commercial execution in the current product base?
I mean, we definitely believe there's a lot we can drive with commercial execution. We are, though, a very innovative company, as you know, and we're going to keep that culture very much. We talked already today about a couple of new product releases on the horizon with our AVCAD product through Smith's Detection and also with our next generation MX. We have a few other great products that we're working on there in that same vein of really best-in-class handheld detection products that we'll tell more in the future. I do get, as I briefly mentioned, very excited for that roadmap of all these connected services and all the kind of network approach to these sensors that we can do. If you look at our portfolio, you can see us doing more and more in air monitoring, right? You see us doing that.
I mentioned one of you in the winds today that was driven by that in Ukraine. We are definitely putting the gas on that. There is nothing stopping us from thinking and working towards these other broader life science applications that we touched on. Again, about 5% of our revenue is from those areas: industrial, QA/QC, pharma, reaction monitoring, and such. Those are through OEM. Now Repligen as well is an OEM partner to us. We will definitely be looking to have some exposure and increase that.
Got it. When you look at the customer concentration, do you have more concentration after the PAT assets? Just again, given the type of customers you have, they order a large number of these units in some of the cases. Maybe just can you talk about the customer concentration going forward?
I think we've diversified our concentration over time. If I think back, we used to talk only about Army for a few quarters, right? A lot of it was on the federal military opportunities, and we were concentrated around the IPO. I'd say over the more recent period, we've diversified. Kevin mentioned a third state and local, a third international, a third federal military. With that, it's really the individual customers and the opportunity. We are no longer focused in academia or biopharma, but I think there are opportunities where we haven't been prevented. Really, we divested within a specific application area around bioprocessing and PAT, and we still can play in other areas and diversify even further into more life sciences. A few OEM partners today, but I think there's opportunity as we think about organic opportunities for the years to come.
Is it the right way to think about it as profitable growth, or there's always a balance in terms of what you need to invest into the business versus have profitability?
Yes. There's always a balance, right? You don't want to go too far one way or the other. I think this was a bold step in really focusing more on profitability. We're excited to get the six times multiple ultimately as it became a reality. I think having that balance sheet strong and then focused on revenue growth with an eye towards adjusted EBITDA positive in Q4, cash flow positivity in 2026, it's great to be talking about those things and with a focused business and where we can take it from there and continue to fund our own operations. As opportunity creates it, maybe strategically look at other opportunities. We'll focus organically first here in the near term.
Got it. All right. That's all the time we have. Thanks, guys.
Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.