How's everyone doing?
Good.
How's the morning so far?
Excellent.
Good. Any, like, highlights? Anyone wanna, like, shout out favorite things so far?
RFQs for solid and dynamic new lidar.
Those are the best kind. Awesome. Well, we're really excited to move into the next part of the agenda. We're gonna have the town hall. Sumit and Anubhav are gonna come up in just a couple of minutes and make a couple quick remarks and then open the floor to questions. A couple of things just to keep in mind as we go through this. Lunch is gonna be coming in at 11:45 A.M. There's boxed lunches that are gonna be at the back. If you're hungry and you wanna grab something, you know, feel free to just pop up and grab some lunch, bring it back to your seat. As we get into the Q&A, we just wanna encourage people to be mindful of, you know, the size of the audience here.
We've got 50 people, many people who've come from a long way, we wanna ensure everybody gets an opportunity to ask their questions and have their voice heard. When you get the mic, please be thoughtful of other folks and be sure to kinda cede the floor when you've had an opportunity to ask your questions. We've got the guys for a considerable amount of time, so, you know, we should be able to loop back around and see people a couple of times if you have follow-up questions. Please just keep that in mind as we get into the Q&A. Jeff, any other remarks to make before we invite the guys up?
Yeah, I do have a couple remarks.
Yeah.
Hi, I'm Jeff Christensen. I work with the team on Investor Relations. Thank you for coming, and thank you for being a MicroVision shareholder. We've got several people that traveled a long distance to be here. Those of you, raise your hand if you came from outside of the state of Washington to be here.
Wow. A lot of, you know, a lot of interest. As Jeff Sanders said, there's, you know, people have a lot of questions. The thing I'd add to what he said about the Q&A portion is, you know, be mindful of the number of questions you ask. There is gonna be an opportunity to, you know, once everybody gets a chance to ask questions, we'll circle back, and you may be able to ask more questions at that time. Wanted to, couple things. You know, you've all heard her voice on the earnings conference call, and I wanted to let you make sure you saw Drew Markham. She's our, General Counsel. Thanks, Drew. Wanted to touch base on a couple things. On the Q&A session, when you have a question, raise your hand.
We are gonna bring a mic to you. We are gonna be recording the session. What we want you to do is start off with your name and then ask your question. Let them get a chance to respond to it, and then you can ask more. You can continue to ask follow-up questions at that time. The what I'd ask you to, you know, ask you to do is, if you can, address your question to either Sumit or Anubhav. That'll be helpful. Those are the main things I wanted to mention to you. We talked about lunch. We're not gonna take a definitive break. The lunch, as you said, is gonna be put in the back. You know, you're welcome to get up and go get it.
It will not be distractive. Also if anyone has not taken a ride so far, you're welcome to sign up and go for a ride. We're running that ride, you know, continue to run those rides. One last thing I wanna mention about the Q&A is that if you have a question, you don't feel comfortable asking it yourself, you can write it down and hand it to Jeff [Cadway] or myself or there's another team that's gonna come in and, you know, hand you the mic. Then we can ask the question for you. If you could put your name and the question on the piece of paper. Any questions about that? With that, I wanted to now turn it over to management. Thanks again for coming.
Great to see everyone. Thank you for joining. Wanted to just start off with just a few comments. I think first of all, I just wanna tell everybody that it really means a lot that you guys all came. MicroVision used to do this event back in 2018, pre-COVID. It was a smaller event we used to do further up the road. It kinda fell off because of COVID. You know, we intend to do this at least once a year just to get back into the cadence of it. Just so you know, we have a very large investor base. I think it's important for you guys to come and touch and feel and see the things that we're doing instead of just the videos and the other ways of communicating.
You know, certainly I know how hard, like, the entire team works on things. Personally, I was just telling the team outside that it means a lot that you guys care so much about it. Sometimes in the busyness of life, you know, we're all moving at different paces. Sometimes, you know, we don't get a chance to tell you how much we appreciate it. I can tell you that the attention, positive or negative, right, is appreciated because it's good that somebody's noticing all the hard work people are doing. Thank you. I think with that, I think we'll just jump in. I think this is like a typical town hall meeting. If anybody's been to a city council meeting, you know, they can turn into a show, but that's not the goal here.
The point is, you know, it is a conversation. Anubhav and I are both here. We're talking about the business we're building for you and all the investors. We certainly can talk about technology, but we certainly wanna also describe to you the business and, you know, the fundamentals that he's talked about. We wanna have a broad discussion, and just, you know, just think about it as a casual conversation, and just ask away. Okay? I'll turn it over. Who first?
Thank you. I'm Chuck Young, a local investor out of Duval. My question is regarding... I don't know what all you can share, but my question is regarding out of the RFQs that you've answered and responded to, would any of them, if awarded, pull the trigger on developing an ASIC?
For us, what's unique about our product is the one box solution, the words that everybody's doing, that's always in MicroVision, everything we've done for anybody. The analog and digital ASIC has been part of custom development we always do. Some of our competitors may have an analog ASIC from a company that makes analog ASIC. They say they have an ASIC, but they don't say if that's their custom ASIC. To get the lower cost and to get the real advantage of the technology, we develop our own. Actually, Chris Atkins, who's here, his team here, has been doing that in Redmond for several generations of ASIC. We intend to launch, as we said, the analog ASIC this year and the digital ASIC soon after that.
I mean, the work has already started on the digital ASIC, but we intend to focus on these RFQs to close it out, to make sure if there's some custom feature that somebody needs. Once the ASIC is done, it is hardwired. It's in the silicon. You wanna get the features in. Of course, we wanna make sure that we listen to all our customers, and if there's something that we can put inside there that gives them an advantage over somebody else, we'll do that. The intention is that, you know, very soon after that, the digital ASIC will start. Yeah.
Thank you.
The next question's over there. Yep.
Hey, Sumit.
Hi.
Adam Jones.
Hi.
You said something back there that's the first time I ever heard it, which is dynamic lidar is in every RFQ.
Mm-hmm.
You are inside the process. You said you showed that in 2019.
Mm-hmm.
If I have an OEM in 2019, and that solves my problems, I guess my question would have been, well, when can I have it? I guess what I'm Inside the process, we're outside the process. The market, in general, I don't think knows how to value the lidar sector in any way, shape, or form 'cause there's so much conflicting information.
Mm-hmm.
I guess lasering to the point, you know, you've obviously been building these bridges since 2019.
Mm-hmm.
People told you what they needed. I guess in one succinct form, what is that and how do we value it and how do we place it in context with everyone else in the sector?
If you think about, you know, this comes up often as in our competitors have a feature, a spec. Why don't you talk about the specs more? Because it's really difficult to describe to people that are not deeply into the technology. It gets too nuanced. As investors, let me just, I mean, just as people, think about it this way. Some of our competitors, when they would have a product, they would have a wide field of view. When you're very near that point, all the points are close by, so they're symmetrically distributed across that wedge, let's say. As you go further and further out, that same points just keep away from each other.
What happens is, if you build a wide field of view with static pixels like the flash-based lidar is, if you look at the flash-based lidar video back there, near the sensor, there's lots of lines, lots of points. The further away you go, there's bigger holes that appear in the point cloud. Okay? To combat that, what you really need is a dynamic lidar. What that is that in different fields of view, which is different distances away from the car, that the field of view changes. The resolution is maintained through the entire thing. Instead of thinking about the field of view as a, like a wedge, as a, you know, piece of a pie, now you think about it as like three different rose petals.
Effectively, you have taken the road, and you're not firing lasers off into buildings that are off the road. This way you take the field of view, you collapse it down, and you maintain the high resolution, the area of interest where you're driving. It's all about resolution. The more points you have on target, so if you have a small object in the middle of the road, you want more and more points there. If you have a wide field of view where you have these big holes in the point cloud, it'd be harder to detect things. The technique that our team had developed, this is very, very innovative. It allows you to use 905 nm laser, drive in sunlight, which you guys did.
Some people that I have, you know, I mean, distance is not a problem on a sunny day. You also have a very high resolution with a dynamic view that allows you to do small objects in the road far away. That's what dynamic view is. Every RFQ effectively is asking for multiple fields of view in a single box solution. If you have a sensor like the flash-based, you would need one of those for near, one of those for far, one of those for somewhere in the middle. Now you need three of those, and a one box solution would be massive. That technology is not the right tool for that problem.
Is that new to this RFQ cycle?
It is new to the last couple of years RFQ cycle, yeah.
Is that something we've been driving in terms of innovation?
I had never seen it till we showed it. I mean, I can't comment on, you know, how people think about it, but everything before that did not have it. Yeah.
Back to the RFQ. Ideally, you feel confident we're gonna get one accomplished, we're gonna complete an RFQ and have a win. What is the process post-win in an RFQ? Like, what happens next? You know, what do we look for? What milestones or achievements along the way, timelines, things investors can look at to ascertain value within the context of the RFQ once it's announced?
I think I'll give the answer for about what happens after the RFQ, and I'm gonna have Anubhav give the comment about, like, you know, milestones as in, like, business milestones and technical milestones. You know, we wanna make a distinction for that. Let's say you have an RFQ win, you are actually doing a custom development for them. When I say custom, it's not really ground-up custom. The inner guts, the MEMS, the optics, the lasers, the electronics, the ASIC, it's all the same. But they may have a different package, how it fits inside, different connector, some other, you know, key other requirements, what fields of view they want. That's all development that has to be done and has to be done with respect to the automotive process, which is slow 'cause, you know, it goes through the process of qualifying.
Target dates for those launches are gonna be 2026 in that time range. It's not because the technology takes that long to develop. Its qualification is a very methodical process that you have to be in. Post any kind of deal, you are part of the process now that you have to develop. They're developing a vehicle, you're developing a sensor, they have their milestones they have to hit because they have qualifications for their vehicle. Your sensor is part of a battery pack and tires and windshield and crash testing. I mean, they have a whole process of qualifying every vehicle. This is big time qualification right now, but it's not like it doesn't take a decade, you know. It is, you know, several years, absolutely going to C-sample.
Definitely want, you know, Anubhav to talk a little bit about how we think about. Go ahead.
Just back to the process. You mentioned you demonstrated dynamic view lidar in 2019. This is a process that's been several years in the making.
Mm-hmm.
Is our product a little more highly evolved than a lot of products out there? Have you had the benefit of-
Yeah.
... of OEM feedback early enough in the process that you were able to take to circumvent some of the design process work? Obviously, it still needs to be qualified, needs to be validated. Is there anything you feel you have to jump on?
Adam, if you look at the product we have, it's built not like a, you know, prototype in the back of a room, right? It is pretty solid. You know, it has got a lot of things that can get qualified. Certainly, I feel confident that our MEMS are gonna be well beyond the life of a car, right? That's many, many years' worth of work. When you're thinking about these customers, you're talking about these, you know, OEM customers, they're very conservative. It does not matter where you are, you're still gonna go through the churn. You still have to go through the milestones because you are new to them. The only way you go through that, you could have five customers you've done it for, but you gotta do it their way, right?
They take the liability to deliver a product, a full-blown car qualified to the consumer, so they have huge liability. Regardless of what you think about, right, the way to think about it gives us confidence that we're gonna get qualification done. That's how I look at it, right? I worry about a lot of things. I don't worry about that because, yeah, I mean, I'm an engineer, so when I look at the stuff that these guys have developed, it's pretty unbelievable the level of maturity that's there. Like, if I was a customer, I know that I'm gonna go through that process, but I'm like, "Wow, this is really good. These guys really know what they're doing." It just gives you confidence that if you pick them, they know how the work has to get done.
Right.
With the acquisition of Ibeo, they've actually gone through the qualification for their product that actually went all the way to the C-sample before the insolvency happened. I think they've, you know, both companies combined, both teams combined, when it comes to MAVIN, when it comes to MOVIA, certainly they know how to qualify that. That's the thing that investors should be confident about.
They're seeing maturity in the product even at this stage.
Absolutely.
In comparison to peers, which maybe you can or can't answer.
No, I can answer that. I mean, that's an opinion. I mean, that's just public data, right? We're an A-sample, but I would say that the components inside are significantly more mature than what a typical A-sample would be. I would say people that are showing B-sample and C-sample, some of the problems I hear at CES and other places just out in the public that they're having with other people's technology, I would say that is not a true B-sample even, right? Because their, you know, key components are getting changed out. In our case, the key component performance is being tweaked. New manufacturing partners are being qualified. Supply chains are being developed, right? The design is not changing. Design is the same.
I would say, yeah, we are more mature, but I just wanna be very, very clear with everybody that's here and, you know, who's gonna listen to this event that you still have to go through the process, right? There is no shortcuts in life when it comes to that industry, which is safety related, okay? Anubhav, you wanna talk a little bit about the business milestones?
Yeah. I think I'm gonna tie this question up with what is my confidence or our confidence in the runway of the company until the middle of next year. Why? Because what this design win wins will entail is if, especially if Sumit mentioned, if there's gonna be a custom feature that the OEMs will need in their product, we would be obviously going for an NRE that will be funding that development cycle. Obviously, that's what we expect to also help the company from a cash flow standpoint. The whole idea at the end of the day boils down to the milestones of this process has to be set from a business perspective.
At the end of the day, a cool technology is only good enough, but it's how you build a business around it. A business which is, you know, based on a foundation of what the revenue streams are gonna be and how do you go from point A to that point until when this car starts coming out of the production facility from the OEM. I think this is what's very important to understand that that's how we're thinking about the business and that's how we're gonna approach this design wins because at the end of the day, the whole idea is between design win and the day the cars start coming out of the production facility, how does a company achieve those steps.
Hi. Alex Yu. I actually wanna kinda go back to about three years ago when you became CEO. The expectation, obviously it's very different now than before.
Mm-hmm.
One of the things that we, when you first joined, was talking about strategic alternatives.
Mm-hmm.
Whether it be a licensing deal for certain verticals. We heard, you know, as investors, that's what we kinda banked on.
Mm-hmm.
That's why we supported MicroVision getting it over $1. That's the whole process. After about 1 year, that kind of just stopped.
Mm-hmm.
If we are truly best in class, you would think that there would be suitors. Whether it be from chip companies, automotive companies, whatever it may be. As investors, I've only been invested since 2018. We have people here from 1998. Yeah, it's a different company now. You were 19 or whatever it was.
It's 25.
25 at that time. We are tired investors.
Mm-hmm.
It's the same story.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, it's different, we hope.
It's not the same then?
It's not the same.
Okay.
Everyone's here because, you know, look, we think that there's huge potential here.
Mm-hmm.
Our stock's at $2.12 today.
Mm-hmm.
When and how soon can we change that?
Yeah.
-perspective?
So-
Instead of all we're hearing now is 100 million shares of dilution.
Your question has so much stuff mashed in, I'm gonna break it apart. Okay? All right. Let's start with strategic alternatives, okay? When I took over, the company was looking at no capital, delisting, looking at insolvency within seven months, okay? Company, when there's a strategic alternative, there is only one thing: sell it as a whole, sell it as a part. That was my job. Absolutely, right? The first time the proxy came up, the investors rejected it. I will tell you on the record for the first time, I'm not gonna name the company, but one trillion dollar company offered single- digit million dollar for the entire thing, and the thing that was thrown to me was, "Well, you guys are gonna be out of business. Your investors don't support you." Like, I'm getting worked up just telling you this right now.
That's what happened. Whatever you think is your experience, try to take a first-time CEO. You think my career, I wanted to do that? I put my life into it. That happens. Strategic alternatives, there should be no misunderstanding. We ran a process as best as possible, okay? I think, like, you know, I get it, right? Investors get tired. You know what? The reality is that companies that have more money, more power, they're opportunistic. Why would they pay what is fair if they can get it for less? That's what happened. That's exactly what happened, okay? I focused the company where I actually believed it was gonna be successful, and it did work out, didn't it? I mean, the stock did peak. Stock has gone down, so some of you must have extracted some out of those things, you know?
Management did not take any money out of it, certainly, right? effectively, the business direction we picked was the right one, Alex. Now, what has happened in 30 years? I mean, there's only things I can answer that I'm dealing with right now, that Anubhav is dealing with right now, that Drew, you know, is dealing with right now. clearly, what we're telling you is that, okay, the market is going through a cycle. Where the stock price is now versus where it was 18 months ago, that's like really not out of our it's out of our control, actually. It's not like we're the only ones that have gone down.
If anything else, you know, Anubhav always reminds us of the proportions that our competitors have gone down compared to us, and certainly we're in a better position because we manage our cash better, we communicate much better. Yeah, you're saying that it's same as before, but it not really is. By your own vision, it's a different company completely. The last three has been different. The journey for that did not start just with me. The journey was starting. Our board was involved. They were trying to find a solution. What we realized was you have this amazing technology, but you do a deal with Microsoft or Sony or Pioneer or the military, the markets are not big enough. You have this amazing technology that can solve so many problems, but yet none of those markets were big enough for the amount of OpEx that is.
We have actually focused ourselves to creating a good business, a business that's sustainable at a right level, and get to market as fast as possible and get revenues, right. As the things that we're saying are gonna happen is how the company's gonna be successful, and that's plain and simple. The cycles of that, I mean, I'm that transparent. I mean, you guys have heard me talk about it, and it's always the same fluid answer. You're in it for a while now because that's exactly what the people, your target market, is gonna do. At least you know for a fact is there's multiple customers, target customers, that are looking for it. They're talking publicly that they're gonna do something. You have multiple companies you're competing against.
Any of those other projects that you may have invested for, how many people actually were successful in that and how much market was developed for that? I mean, you know, I mean, Microsoft's right up the street. We did the work for them. I mean, this is record, so nothing new there. How big did that get? I mean, it's an amazing company, really smart people, great software things. Imagine what it takes to actually create the market. Now, for the first time in the history of the company, we're not trying to create a market. We're already in a market that's been created, and it's got multiple players in it. I think it's a completely different company. The MicroVision name is still the same. The logo color may have changed. There's no hidden secret in there, by the way.
I know you guys keep thinking there's nothing. It's red lasers or IR lasers, so it's red color. That's it. That's about it. There's no, though there's no controversy there. The point was why did we change the color? It is a different company, right? It's the same thing, but all the investments you guys have done. You know, it is a labor of love for us, but it's also labor of love for yourself. It enabled engineers like, you know, some engineers have been here for 17 years. They've been working on this tech. They have actually poured more than all of us that have put money into the company. I can assure you that. I would see. That's real love, right? They finally feel more excited because they know there's a market for their stuff.
You know, before it was just sort of like this amazing thing that nobody could have gonna understand how amazing it would be because nobody would give us the opportunity to make a product. It is a different company, right? I get I'm patient enough to understand that. I get that people just want the results, right? Because that's, you know, again, you're investors. You wanna trade up, and you wanna see what, you know, other opportunity you can create for yourself. We are being very honest about this is the cadence of the company. This is the industry we're in. There's huge revenues in the future. There's competition. We are best in class in the lidar. I've never said we're best in class in anything else.
I believe that we are best in class in the AR, but it's hard for me to claim that when there's nobody there. I'm the only one, so of course, by nature of it is there. I pick my words very carefully. In the lidar, I'm absolutely confident there's not a single thing somebody will do that will surprise us. We're way ahead of everybody there, right? The benefit we have, we built a good business. We built something where the innards of it. For many years of project, we don't have to do a redesign. We can still meet their requirements for many cycles. I mean, the biggest risk in any business is if you have to develop a new product. We've de-risked that. You know, it's a different company, right? I think, like, you know, we're different.
We're different focus. We are. I think I was a lot more transparent about what we believe, good or bad, what the future's gonna be like. I think, you know, I just want people to judge us for who we are. I think we're authentic as a company. You know, in our filings, we're pretty authentic, and in our communication, we're pretty authentic. You just have to evaluate if you believe what management's saying or doing or not, and you'll make your bet, right? I've said this before. Some people wake up in the morning, they choose to be long, and some people wake up in the morning, they choose to be short.
That's a personal choice, but all I can do, all any of us can do is that we can represent the company for what's really happening, and you have to value the company for that. Okay?
Thank you.
Mike Wolken.
Hey, Mike.
Bear with me as I read this. With 2023 being the year of RFQs and design wins, it's critical that we name names at that time that they're announced. We recognize that the OEMs are largely in control of that, as you've communicated, and I can only speak for myself, but any investment that the company would need to make to assure that will happen would be resources well spent.
Mm-hmm.
Validation is critical at this point to investors and potential investors who are looking for that validation. What are your thoughts on that?
I think, again, going back to Alex's question, the history of the company is there's a certain experience you guys have had where the company would not mention partnerships, different ways, but again, we were in a different position way back when with those OEMs that we were dealing with. They were much more controlling. In this case, now where we are, we have something that they want as well, and as is demonstrated, those OEMs are very open to working with companies and, you know, talking about the partnership because for them to get access to our technology, that's gonna be there. I believe that's something that, you know, the investor should just be patient about, not be concerned about because of course, we wanna provide the validation.
You know, if we're gonna be a partner for a decade for somebody or more than a decade for somebody, it's important they know who we work with. I think, you know, as far as whatever is required legally for us to disclose publicly, I think Drew's here. I mean, you know, first thing that happened when she joined was she and I worked together to make sure the April 2017, you know, announcement was happening. It was not because somebody, you know, or I'm not gonna name who it was, did the breakdown. It had nothing to do with that. It was already in the works 'cause Drew and I started working on it right away. Again, you know, she's an attorney. She understood how to do that. Again, the company is changing, right?
I think like, you know, these are very talented individuals. They could, you know, very successful anywhere else. We're lucky to have them. Yeah, you know, I think I'm absolutely certain that, we're gonna find every opportunity to make sure the shareholders understand who our partners are.
Excellent.
I acknowledge what you're saying is, and I agree with that sentiment. You know, if you got the best product, best technology, we can demonstrate to them they have the best business that's gonna be around for a long time to support their needs. Important. If they have some other thoughts in mind about, you know, if they need, if somebody else is about to undercut us to try to take the project away or something, you know, we will use whatever tools are given to us to make sure that we're successful. Absolutely. We tend to be, you know, make something innovative. Let me just tell you something as an engineer. To make something innovative, you have to be very aggressive. You don't just sit around and flow through it.
You have to be very aggressive and work very hard. Our team has done great to create that technology, right? We intend to be very aggressive on business as well to make sure we get the right deals for us.
Good.
Yeah.
There may be resources, including shares-
Yeah.
That may have to be provided to be able to name a name.
You've noticed us, right? You know, we don't do flashy $5 million CES events. Like, we think of money, it's a resource, it's limited, right? We have gotten the best deal for shareholders in everything we've done.
You have.
Right? Including, if you think about the Ibeo team is significantly more valuable than you can imagine, right? We just happened to be in insolvency, and it was a lot of hard work over a very long period of time to get that done, right? I mean, they feel like family now, but it was a labor of love. We tend to do that with everything, Mike. What I'm saying is I absolutely acknowledge that's what we intend to do, be aggressive. Whatever is necessary to win, we're gonna win.
Excellent.
Yeah.
One other question. You've announced that ZF will be your Tier 1 manufacturing partner for MAVIN. At that time, you said you anticipated a deepening relationship with ZF moving forward. Can you expand on how the company is deepening that relationship?
Let me correct a few things. I think Jeff advised me of this one, and you guys got it wrong.
All right.
ZF, it's a German company. ZF was a partner for Ibeo. They are the manufacturing partner for the lidar you see back there. There's a whole production line that produces that. ZF, we still work with them for that lidar. For MAVIN, it depends on the OEM. We are open to anything possible. The statement you said that we're gonna partner with them, we can partner with them, we can partner with anybody. It all depends on what the OEM wants, what their strategy is. If they make cars in the area that ZF does not have a factory, that would, you know, be cumbersome for us. For us, as management and shareholders, all you have to think about, forget about those names. I know you guys were flipping around who's got who got shares this. Nobody got any shares. We would have said things.
ZF is a Tier 1 partner that Ibeo worked with. They're great. That's a beautiful factory. We're gonna work and listen to the OEMs again of what they want and what strategy they want us to deliver to them. Delivering technology is one thing, delivering partnerships is another things, we're gonna deliver what they want.
Haven't you committed to ZF on the manufacturing of MAVIN?
No. If we did, we would tell you.
All right.
We haven't. You always talk about like, you know what? Like, if you were ZF, I will say, "Yep, absolutely. Let's work on it. Let's think about it." There's nothing signed. If there was something signed, we would disclose it. If something was signed, like a supply agreement was signed, well, why would I sign that if I don't know that the OEM says, "Well, you know, I wanna go to this country, and they don't have a footprint there, and I don't want you to spend money shipping it from point A to point B. Can you find somebody over there?" MicroVision will actually put the resources in place to put where the OEM needs it. Our customers are the OEM.
We may ship our lidar to a Tier 1 that ships to the OEM for the go-to-market strategy, but the OEMs are our customer. We go directly to them with our technology.
Very good.
All right.
Mike, if I may just add one more thing to it, because I think, because we were talking, flipping back and forth between history and now, right? This is the first time, as Sumit said, we're in an industry which is already there, and this time we're not beholden to one. This time there are many players. There are many, Tier 1s, and every OEM has a favorite. That's why the whole point was why would you wanna be married to one? I think the whole point is, this time the company has a product which has applications, which has customers in geographies, not just here, but even in European Union, right?
That's why it makes all the more sense to not have just one egg in one basket, but have eggs spread out, because that's what diversifies our strategy as a company.
Think about it like you are invested in a company that has the technology that's gonna enable things for many, many years to come. Others that wanna manufacture, that's all they're bringing, manufacturing, supply chain value, right? It is our job on your behalf to get the best deal possible, so the name is incidental, right? Anybody that can do the deal that makes the company whole and significantly stronger footing, that's what we should all demand. Okay? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Just go ahead.
Sorry. Oh, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.
My name is Lucas. Quick question. With the fka consortium info that came out this morning, as far as that process goes, can you guys add any comments as far as what value or insights that whole journey gave you guys? What should we expect?
I think, did you do a demo drive yet?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I think you see it running. I think this is what OEMs see running. There's data sheets and RFQs, and there's all this other, you know, concepts and other work that we do to describe to them. If you think about the consortium, it's important to be part of those consortiums because OEMs, it's not about one technology. They want a unified way, how they wanna evaluate a group of technologies, right? The value there is you hear of how those standards were set for the future, right? It does not change your path of what you have to do, because the OEMs also give you specs saying, "Hey, all of you guys, if you wanna be in my technology roadmap, you have to be able to achieve this." That's something we do directly with them.
It informs us of how things will be evaluated. Like, you know, for example, I think somebody said that they saw 270 m in the lidar today. Bright sunny day out, right? You know, you yourself saw today that when people make claims that, "Oh, I can't see more than 160 m," or whatever the numbers were, I forget. You saw with your own eyes what it's running. What the consortium does is people that mince the specs, like we don't, like, you know, pretty plain what you see. If there was anybody out there that's mincing their specs to say something, but their product, you know, does not conform the right way, they're coming up with a unified way to test everybody's technologies. That's the way to think about it, right?
As far as, you know, why would I personally not be that involved in that one, you know, just be monitoring it. I'd rather work with the engineers because get the technology right. We know what we have to build. The hard work is the building of it, not just knowing how it'll be evaluated. What you saw running meets and exceeds of how even a human would perform. Therefore, yeah, it's important to know how that will all work out, but it's not the driving force. Okay.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Hi, Sumit. Jeff Grabo. Just this question centers around the supply chain, getting clarity around that design. You know, when you think about planning volumes, sourcing componentry, manufacturer, assembly test, and ultimately the delivery, what does that look like now for MicroVision? As volumes ramp up, does that fundamentally change to more of an insource model or outsource model? Just any color around that?
I think in A-sample, Jeff, because it was COVID, I think in the public records, we bought all the components that we were gonna need to make all the A-samples because it was unclear back in 2020 what was gonna happen to the Chinese supply chain, if you recall. Right after we got, you know, we raised a little bit more capital, we started buying components for the A-sample, right? That's typical of A-sample 'cause you wanna control your own destiny. You're, you know, figuring out how to make parts. As you go towards B- and C-sample, you're gonna have a manufacturing partner. You're gonna have supply chain internally to, you know, all these key commodities. You wanna know what the price is out there.
You don't want to rely upon somebody else giving you a, you know, piece price variance on top of what it really costs because they're just a manufacturer. Ultimately, the supply chain is, you know, it's gonna be outsourced. The entire product design, the process map, and the control plan is ours. That is also IP, by the way. It's not just the patent we filed. That is part of intellectual property. We give those designs to somebody to manufacture to our requirements. Then as volumes come in, of course, you know, part of the value added they have is they source all those components. You wanna create a, you know, a company that is, you know, you need capital in the company, but for things that you do. I'm not the manufacturer at the end of the day, right? I develop the designs.
I get the acceptance done. I'm involved in getting the qualification done. Yeah, somebody else turns the crank for that, and they sell through us, and that's how we, of course, monetize ourselves.
Right? Think about a more contract manufacturing model. This is also true of our competitor in Israel, right? Recently, I was watching something on LinkedIn, actually. There was a video from Magna, and they talked about all the technology they had, but then say, "Oh, but we only manufacture this lidar." They could not even say the name of that, right? It's not their design. They're a manufacturer, they actually admit it, right? In this case, Tier 1s are manufacturing partners. Yeah, managing supply chain is why you go to them, right? You have to identify the supply chain, so you do need talent to say, "What do I need, and can this person actually make my product long term?" We do that evaluation. We will have supplier development engineers that go out there, do the qualification. We own yield.
When we think about a line that gets qualified, we wanna make sure roll first pass yield is at a certain level. That's how we know profitability. We leave the factory with that process plan and control plan and every process map and equipment, and then they have to maintain that yield, and they give us a certain price on that yield, right? That's what they manage. It's a, it's a more predictable model. We're not gonna reinvent this thing.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you. Solomon Khan. This question's for you, Anubhav. I know when you onboarded a CFO, one of your main goals was to get more analyst coverage. How is that process going? Is it on the critical path to discussions with institutional investors, or is the company kind of doing that in parallel?
Yep. That's a great question. Yeah. I think one of the first things that when I came on board was the objective to get us in front of the investors, right? Obviously we have a huge retail following, but I think I wanted to get this story out there to be known to banks, investment banks, institutional investors, hedge funds, mutual funds. The reason why is because we are the only public company which is not a SPAC, and that is a huge advantage. Why? Obviously we have over two decades of SEC filings. We do not have any overhang of the stock, overhang of the SPAC that the other competitors have. What happened with even Ibeo, there were some analysts or institutional investors who were watching or following Ibeo.
Ultimately, we have started to get way more traction at this point with institutional investors. Guess what? I think, I'm pretty sure one of you will have this question, so I'm even anticipating it, because I think at the end of the day, what is the company doing also in terms of, you know, reducing the short interest? Look, at the end of the day, what a company, we as a management team is doing is building a business brick by brick as a traditional public company. How do you do that? Build credibility. Do everything what you say, execute on that, and demonstrate that you have done this already.
I think that's sort of why, you know, when we recently announced our Q1, you know, preliminary revenue guidance, the whole idea is to sort of build up the anticipation. Hopefully we will be able to beat all our expectations as a company. I think that's what establishes credibility in analysts. Now, one thing, as you can imagine, what has happened is a lot of these analysts started covering a bunch of our peers as part of the IPO. Guess what? They got burned. Why? Because they had stock price targets which were multiples of $10, because that's what the typical IPO price of a SPAC is. They got burned. Why? Because again, these SPACs were based on lofty projections, never met them, and now these SPACs are down 95% from their original IPO value.
What this does is, the analysts need to be a lot more conservative, and the analysts are now looking for companies like us who will not be giving out projections that they cannot meet. I think as a management, what you will hear from us is we wanna do things which we can deliver and execute, and that's how you build up trust inch by inch, brick by brick in this whole investment community. At the end of the day, what we believe is. This was one of the reasons why I actually chose MicroVision as well, because the DNA, right? You can make a quick flip, you know. Of course, you know, we have all seen what happened in 2021 and 2022. You know, the era of free money or free market, right?
Obviously, as things settle down, because I think, as industry becomes more cognizant and more geared towards businesses that are generating revenue and profits in the near term, rather than focusing on something which will be of value, will be prioritized, will be given or ascribed more value than the others. We have seen that happen. Again, you've seen Argo, you have seen examples of a lot more companies which were focused on fully autonomous driving, sort of, you know, market realizing that, hey, the monetizable opportunity is now in L2 and L3. I think the whole point is that's what we are building, and that's what we are trying to create in the investor community and the analyst community as well.
If you demonstrate these earning estimates and beat them, that's how you build credibility, and that's what we plan to do in the next 12 to 18 months as well as we deliver on our targets that we have announced this year.
Okay. Thank you.
Jim Sperber, longtime investor in MicroVision. I've rode the ups and downs and passed up a big profit when I got to $25, but I had more future thoughts of keep owning this company. My question is how. I haven't done the ride yet, but how did it come that you teamed up and put it in a Jeep, or was there help from that corporation to marry your system into it, or did you just do all that on your own?
I think, the Jeep is incidental. There's nothing hidden in there. I think, you know, we wanted a demo vehicle that was developed by a team, you know, our team worked very hard to identify a partner that had the platform we needed, you know, what they were gonna do development on. The team in Germany, of course, have Mercedes and Tiguans and others, right? There's nothing it's about, you know, our team looked at the companies that were available that we could work with to get that platform built out. That's it.
You installed it without the help of Jeep, or was there?
No, I think they just buy the Jeep, and the company we work with modifies the Jeep to what we need. It's, and then they of course, they deliver that to us. You know, it's like they probably just go to a dealership and buy a Jeep. Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
You were saying, OEMs are looking at 2026 model cars. How early would they have to get their hands on it to get it in that car? When would that deal be made?
That's the RFQs right now.
Okay.
2026 qualifications, they now start, you know, ramping up in 2027. Yeah, decision right now, so you can get a qualified car and that is not easy, like I know three years is a long time as investors. If you think about it, I can tell you how many earnings calls are gonna happen, how many Ks we're gonna file. Can you imagine like for them, that's like an unbelievable pace. The team, the Ibeo team that's here, you know, they've gone through it, they can tell you there is not a, you know, not an easy day. It is a very hard pace to get the qualifications done.
Right. That was my point. I'm an engineer, I don't know how early they need to have that sensor when that deal needs to be inked in order to get a 2026 model.
Yeah. I think as you said, right, you know, you know, our focus is on 2023 RFQ design wins. I think the answer is in there.
Okay.
Any other questions? I see a hand in the back.
By the way, lunch has arrived, so if anybody is hungry, grab it and come back. It's not disruptive at all.
There's a hand in the back there.
Yeah.
Right there?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Hi, Jonathan Erin. You had answered a question earlier pertaining to RFQs, I'm gonna paraphrase here. You mentioned that there are a lot of things that keep you up at night, this wasn't one of them. I'll ask you, what does keep you up at night?
I think, again, like as Alex mentioned, right, there's a 30-year history of the company, but there's also all of us that have been in this space for a long time. We've been in technology. You know, I'll probably sleep, I'll probably never sleep at this job as much as I want. It's because there's always something to grow at. Right now, even if you think you have something locked in, you know, for me personally, done is done. I think my team knows I use that, and I annoy them a lot when I keep telling them, like, "You will know when it's done because there's nothing more left to do." Right? As you think about, you know, building a business out, there's a bunch of things to do.
You know, we've done a great job building the technology, but building the business out, there's again, brick by brick establishing it, right? Those things are not trivial either. I think like as engineers, sometimes we get excited about technology, but we forget companies that are successful, they had both muscles. They had the technology muscle, and they had the business muscle as well. What keeps me up at night is get the adoption done, get the, you know. Three years is a long time. No hiccups can ever happen. Think about the April 2017 customer. How many times did we have some delay that, you know, was caused by whatever happened? It was not that big in the consequential, but you know what? That is a problem. You're in an industry where none of those things can happen.
You wanna get launched on time. Again, once you've had one, you don't just sit around like, you know, our competition, they've had one or two, and they haven't really done much with it. Our intention would be to stay aggressive on the business side and increase the velocity of adoption, right? If you created something that's the right price, that's the right thing, has perception, how do you actually go get more customer faster than anybody ever has? Those are the kind of things. Build a business that will essentially accelerate after that. You know, some of you here may say, "You know what? It's time to spike the football after you're done with one." That is not a successful business, actually. You know, because you already know what happens with companies that do that.
There are other companies that went public through a de-SPAC. We're gonna have to really build a business to say, "How do you accelerate?" Because what you wanna do is you wanna be 80%-90% market share of the entire segment. That's what Mobileye did, right? They accelerated everything. It's a great business. They're focused on it. Maniacally focused on building a very strong business globally and to accelerate adoption, not just the one or two or three or four, whatever the first few happen. You wanna say there's 60 OEMs out there. How do I get into every program as fast as possible?
Then my long-term cost to customer acquisition goes down because when I enter an RFQ, I'm like, really don't have to put so much effort in because it costs a lot of money to do an RFQ. You know, there's a lot of talent you have to put behind it and accelerate that. Those are the kind of things. Building a business is, you know, still something that we have to focus on and, you know, add as a muscle as a company.
Okay. I think we're gonna go to the back next, and we'll come to you.
Hi. My name is Ashwin. I spoke to Anubhav earlier over here, and he did a great job of explaining to me how the company decided to pursue the auto industry as the place of maximum revenue and ROI for the dollar that you spent. I fully understand that logic, and I see its reflection in the stock market as well. In the next two, three years, you're entering this matured phase where you'll have a seven figure dollar income coming in. At that point, you now hopefully don't have to make the choice of having to spend just the singular dollar but have an ability to choose where you reinvest that money coming in.
For the long-term investor, are you thinking of reinvesting it back into the lidar space, or do you have any thoughts on de-risking out of the auto industry or sorry, out of the lidar space and maybe into a direct-to-consumer or an AR vertical? Basically, I'm asking for thoughts on where you're reinvesting.
That's a good question. That's a very fair question. I think I kinda almost started answering it with this one. What all of us as investors want is to actually take whatever money comes back in, invest it back into the business, and get faster. Like, companies that are very successful, what do they do? They enter a market. There's lots of people. They get their foot in, and then they accelerate past everybody else, okay? Then they own 60%, 80% of the market share of that segment. Then you really get to scale, and you get to dictate. You have to maniacally focus till you get to that point. You set your prices, you set the features, you have your partnerships.
Once you get to those points, and you have, you know, free cash flow coming from that business, then you can think about what you're suggesting, is like, "Hey, should we go back to AR?" Maybe, like, you know, you guys can give me a hard time. I know a lot about AR, I have a feeling for it. I'm just saying that at some point when it comes in, maybe that's the right time that happens 'cause we have actually won this market, and now you have a reputation. It would be premature to start going into, you know, the next shiny thing.
If there was a big market, you know, I would be the first one standing in front of you guys saying, "Hey, we have to raise more capital, and we have to put a team together and focus on that market." All the public market data tells you AR is not that big right now. It will be someday. You know, companies like Apple and Samsung are talking about it. What if it takes a decade? How do you fund the company then, right? We have something, and when the money comes in, you're better off perfecting what you have, accelerate your path of a-acceptance within the industry you're in, and just dominate the segment. If you, if you build the best-in-class technology and you build a really strong business, you should win, right? .
Ashwin, if I can just add to that, because I think at the end of the day, auto is the biggest price that the company has. I think what differentiates us is bridging the gap between now and then, and that's why non-auto applications or the industrial applications, you know, I think you all saw how the sensor is used for agricultural purposes. That's what we're going after. The validation software that you saw as a demonstration, that's what gives us the high contribution margin revenue, which falls to the bottom line as profits. Something that we got strategically from the Ibeo acquisition. In my mind, this is actually a very good strategy to de-risk and bridge the gap between now and then, while we are focused on the automotive.
I think that's what the stock market and the markets in general are expecting, right? To go after something what he described as AR, which is down the road, of course, you know, when the company has enough capital and enough resources, we will deploy anything to fire on all cylinders to pursue growth. How do you get valuations high? You build a business which is high-tech, high growth with cash flows. That's what Mobileye demonstrated, and I think this is sort of a line has been drawn in the sand. History repeats itself, right? At the end of the day, this was an example set by a company which was developing something which was not popular or commercially available at that time, and they scaled the business and look what happened in 2015, 2016.
I think that's sort of what sets a benchmark for any company which is aspiring to build a model, to build a business which is gonna be highly valuable. That's sort of why we're focused on our resources. What we believe is gonna generate revenue and potential, that's what we are focused on today.
Thank you.
Yes.
Gonna come back to the front here. Do you still have that follow-up? Okay. Sorry, we're coming here next.
Alex Yu again. Actually have some a few short questions. Regarding Ibeo, there was an announcement regarding scale of one order. Some question related to that was it's been. That's an old generation. MicroVision is now getting money for that. How about like scale of two and three? Do we get any royalties on that? Second question-
Well, let, Can we do it one at a time?
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry.
I think I'll have enough answer, but we haven't talked about this on earnings call yet. As you remember, this event is about, you know, nothing public, anything new yet.
Right.
I think in the next earnings call, perhaps we'll talk about that.
Okay. Regarding the Ibeo acquisition, I know when you acquire private companies, sometimes they'll actually file an 8-K with some historical financial information for Ibeo. Are we gonna be filing that anytime soon?
Absolutely, we will.
Yep.
When do you think that'll be?
That'll be anytime soon.
Okay. third one.
That was a good answer.
Yeah. The Sharp contract, I know that was extended. Can you talk more about that? Was that for HUD? I know that Sharp is somewhere in the... you know, the thing about Sharp is, you know, they do a lot of things, but one thing they just made a investment in a laser beam scanning company, startup, and I think it was a $20 million investment with other people. I think, look, every one of us invested in MicroVision, or most of us anyway, because of the AR business, and we know that it's not anytime soon. We wanna make sure that we are still going to be dominant decades into the future, and what we're seeing with the Sharp investment is that, oh, maybe we're not going to be dominating.
How much was the investment that Sharp made?
I don't know how much it was, but the investment round was about $20 million.
What was our OpEx in the past? You can't even run the company for one year based on what they made investment is my point, right? I'm not trying to be cheeky, right? I think let's talk about the Sharp investment. It was really for the, you know, when we did the interactive display, the non-interactive, just the projection display for voice control, it was for that engine, for that design, right? Using our analog ASICs and the digital ASICs. The new digital ASIC was developed for that. You know, that was the past. That was the big one. We carved out some other parts of interactive display there. They could have gone into AR, but they did not. They were not able to find any customers.
There's Sharp with a big business development team globally because it was many years of development required, right? I think that it was not just bread in hand. Yeah, we have the technology in hand, but to develop that was gonna take a long time. If somebody's making some, you know, incremental investment, different places, you know, look, just go back and look at what is it that they make actually, right? Why would they make that investment? They make beautiful displays. Big ones, right? They have a small business that does lasers. Red lasers, they brought on blue and green lasers, of course, right? They're trying to compete with the micro-LED space, and they're Certainly, you can do a much, much more beautiful AR display with a scanning system. We know this, right?
We know a lot about it, right? Can I predict for you that long-term, 10 years from now, we'll be best in class for that? No. You know, I can't predict that right now because nobody knows what the customer wants. The benefit, like, you know, some of you picked up, was in 2019, very early, we started understanding what the lidar partners are gonna require now. This is like market intelligence you talk about. You can't buy this stuff. You really have to get engaged. Nobody knows, and I'm not kidding, nobody knows what AR people will adopt 10 years from now. Like, a multi-billion-dollar company does not even know that right now. The market is all waiting.
All these display companies, these micro display companies are all waiting actually, because those big companies have to figure out, how am I gonna market and monetize these, you know, devices with the consumer right now? It's not just software, it's about hardware, what people are gonna wear, you know, what the use cases are gonna be. That's what it is, right? I mean, that's the big part of it. Once that gap fills out, we'll be where we are right now, where an OEM, when you go talk to them, they know what they wanna build. They know how they're gonna market it. They know what the price point has to be. They know what the features has to be. No display company has that right now. In that sense, I don't think we're falling behind.
I mean, that's a honest and fair answer. It's like, I'm not like, you know, slicing it thin for you guys in any way possible. I'm just saying that's the reality of it.
Right. Thank you for that. Just one more. Regarding the HUD market and for automotive, MicroVision was looking into that in 2005, 2006, whatever it may be, and kind of fell off the Earth. Now we're seeing a lot more vehicles coming with an HUD system. Is that gonna come back? What are the advantages to LBS compared to the other technologies that are out there? Is it something that has potential or not?
I don't believe it's gonna come back. The reason for that is thin-film transistor displays got super cheap, and they solved the high temperature problem fast enough. What they also figured out was people don't want color displays, you know. What they want is they want the speed and arrows. They don't want Google Maps up there. You know, if you need Google Map, you come talk to us, right? What people wanted, just like left arrow and a speed. They wanted something very simple 'cause it was too distracting for them. It comes down to like, you know, human machine interaction.
You know, people, those customers realized, "Hey, this is all that's needed." For that display, a thin-film, you know, LCD display that is just industrialized for high temperature is probably all they need. I don't know if you've ever driven a car with that. I recently rented one with it, and it's I'm not saying this to be like... It's cute, but if it was not there, I would not miss it, right? Whereas if you think about safety, once you buy a car, you buy a car with airbags, seven airbags. You bought it for safety. It's about the ADAS market, right? It is a necessity. The HUD market, right? I mean, what the penetration would have been is unclear.
What is clear to us, you know, if you've been an investor for a long time, just or, you know, lots of folks here for 20+ years, just go back and look at the OpEx that the company always had to sustain just to be relevant, right? I mean, this is like, you know, operating losses you're talking about. Just look at it. Now to create our technology, it is not something as like, you know, some five or six engineers can keep it alive. There's a group of critical mass needed to just keep it alive, right? You have to find a market that is congruent to what it's gonna take, you know, how much OpEx is gonna be needed to just address it, right?
I don't believe that at this point, the HUD market has taken off that much in automobiles for that reason, because not every car has it. There's no regulation for it. You know, like in the expensive cars, they have it sometimes, and there's other technologies that are nowhere near as sophisticated and, you know, vivid as what MicroVision could provide, but people deem it as good enough for now.
Thank you.
Awesome. Yeah, we're gonna go to this gentleman with the sunglasses. Before you ask your question, we just need to adjust Sumit's mic. One second.
Is that all with that? Can't hear you.
Guess I can start with you, Anubhav.
Yep.
You talked about-
I'm sorry, your name first.
I'm sorry. My name's John Nelson. You talked about that gap to fill in between where we are now and the place where I believe we can be hugely successful with MAVIN in a few years are wrong. There's a gap. You know, there's people who are betting very strongly against this company that are partially dictating the share price, which to Sumit's point, there's very little, if anything, you guys can do about. On the other hand, you're the only guys that can do anything about it in terms of the company building that you talked about and that filling the gap. I was wondering if you could add any color in terms of that gap space, what exactly you can do to build that value quickly.
I'll give the emotional answer, and then he's gonna give the practical answer. Okay. There is so much energy, so much passion that people have in life. You have to choose where to deploy it, right? Anything that has happened with those companies, when CEOs go on CNBC and talk up a lot of... Right? If you actually look at their stock, it did not make a difference because, you know, unless you sustain that pace and that's all you do, right? you're not working on the business. The critique that came of that one CEO I think you're referring to was exactly that. If he just worked on his company, found better customers, increases margins, things would be much better long term. Right? I mean, I'm giving that answer because I'm just telling you, like, this is it.
You know, this is what I work on. This is how I think about it, is work on the tough problem. The tough problem is not to get on and, like, yell and scream and flail my arms about how unfair life is. How do you beat them? Beat them something they cannot do. They can't do what management can do. We can come up with objectives. We can build a business. Long term, they're gonna lose, right? That's it.
Let me give you know, how we are, sort of, you know, killing the shorts, if that's the word. I think a lot of the short activity is driven by algorithms, right? These are algo tradings that are constantly trading, you know, feeding on the data that, you know, yeah, the company was this EPS. You know, it's just a fictitious circle that, you know, people create, and that's what they are doing. How to beat that? I think the way to beat that is it's a consistent and sustained process of beating your estimates. That's what all traditional public companies have been built on. That's what the history they had. I think, we started that financially is in 2022. We had said that this would be a cash burn.
We actually came in much lower than that. Not a lot of people picked up on that. Why? Because, you know, this is why in all my meetings with the institutional investors who have been in some of the other companies, they're like, "Hey, all other companies are actually over-burning cash, not even meeting revenue and estimates." I think here's this, you know, new company. Well, not new company, but a company which actually says what it delivers. Or delivers what it says. I think that's what we wanna set a precedent on. Because if we do that consistently, this is what will kill the algos. Yes, every time, you know, I wanna be known as the biggest sandbagger, right? Because that's how you kill the shorts.
That's how all public companies, great public companies are built on, consistently executing what you said and delivering on your promises. That's how you build credibility. That's why I keep going back. That's how you know, yes, it requires patience, but that's how you build a business brick by brick and not wait for these spikes in stock prices. That's why, yes, as much as I get fazed by some of these stock price movements, but I understand that, yes, this needs time and patience because that's how you win. Every day, work at it, you know, consistently and build it brick by brick.
Appreciate your answer. One quick follow-up question for Sumit. I'm just a retired longtime real-time software engineer working with safety-critical systems. Thinking about your shift to work from FPGA to ASIC.
Mm-hmm.
Are there ways, and lines of delineation where you could develop ASICs, that might satisfy the requirements for multiple OEMs, within a single ASIC? In other words, having the flexibility and features that could be turned on and off, that would allow, that investment to be reaped more than once.
This is a really good question. Of all the questions, this is probably means a lot to all of you guys. Let me just tell you why. The team has created-- When we say the word best in class, that is just a bubble gummy word because you can't describe all the things Chris and all the teams have created already. Once we get this digital ASIC, the features that are inside there are beyond what we have in RFQs today. For a long period of time, these ASICs will survive because there'll be features that we will roll them out as customers are open to it, but they'll be in the silicon. This is important because ASIC programs are expensive, as you know. Once you get this done, you wanna milk this for a long period of time. We'll do another ASIC.
We'll definitely do other ASICs, we'll think about another feature that we can monetize more. This first one has to last many, many, many years. Therefore, if you think about your overall burn rate long term, you can think about it. Once you start winning, you got more than anybody needs. You can, you know, cost to customer acquisition goes down because, relatively speaking, because it still costs whatever it costs to take a project on, but you don't have to invent new things every time. You don't have to develop a new ASIC and a new every time. The MEMS, the ASIC, most of them survive for multiple generations. You're hearing about our competitors that are redesigning their product because they missed something. You've not actually heard us say that or do that actually.
It's because these guys have already done an incredible job of designing things above and beyond. You know, we don't talk about resolution and dynamic lidar as much. Why? It's our secret sauce. There's quite a lot that we have in there that we don't wanna talk about. We collected this information from OEMs. This is kinda IP, and these guys have developed features. When it needs to be public, we'll make it public. We, you know, I think Ty gets upset with me because I don't talk too much about it. Why? It is not in our best interest, but it is in the ASIC. That's a really good question. Yeah.
Can we go to the back next?
David Narvar. This is more like a wishful, long-term investor. I heard Mobileye twice tonight. I mean today. I listened to their CEO. He has a great vision for the future.
Yeah.
I was just wondering, like I was wishing that MicroVision could complement with Mobileye in future.
Yeah.
If you have any comment on that, would be appreciated. I really see the synergy between these two companies. They are a great company with a great vision in future, what MicroVision could offer them if these two company come together.
I think, I'm not gonna comment on like, you know. Like, I think your question is pretty broad, so let me just narrow it down a little bit, if you don't mind. I think about our company. If you think about the bigger problem to solve, ultimately today, the OEMs, when they buy lidar systems, they are doing fusion. They're taking somebody's camera module, they're taking somebody's radar, they're taking somebody's lidar, and they're gonna create this service. Today, we're in the space of lidar. Our next step, as I said to a, you know, a few folks back there, is sensor fusion, where we're gonna take radar, which are commoditized, take the data, and fuse that. Long term, we're again easing the burden for the OEM, which is our true customer at the end of the day, right?
Would there be an opportunity for them to think about the camera module-based systems they're, you know, acquiring versus the fused version they acquire from us or the lidar they acquire from us to streamline that further? Absolutely. Do they enable partnerships like that? Absolutely, right? I don't think it's, you know, beyond the realm of possibility that once, you know, you have adoption, you go off, and you work with partners. This is actually a very important point from a business model standpoint. Because if you think about our competitors, they talk a lot as if they're gonna, you know, reinvent the world, and they don't need to work with anybody, and they're gonna deliver autonomous driving. We've never said autonomous driving. I've never said it. I've always corrected people. We're gonna do ADAS, and now you notice all our competitors are adjusting their tone to ADAS.
It's because they can't forget the OEM in the middle. They don't wanna give control to anybody. They wanna be the ones to say, "I'll pick this lidar, this radar, and this camera module, and then I'll decide how that gets integrated." That's their value added. Yeah, we're open to working with anybody. We have great technology. They're just starting their lidar path, FMCW. Their CTO's talked about it. I think MicroVision's way ahead, and I'm not trying to be arrogant about it. I'm just being as humble as possible I can be that we are way ahead of what I've seen from anybody so far. They may have the brand name, and we don't have that yet, but that's what we're trying to build brick by brick.
Hi, Brian Atchison. I like your humility there. That's good. I wanted to say, first of all, I think your team that you built, is excellent, and I think you have zeroed in on the weaknesses of MicroVision in the past with IP protection and contracts, particularly with finance. I know your passion with lidar since you got here. That said, a couple of quick questions. Do you see any inflection point at December of this year?
Do I see an inflection point? I think you know what our public comments are on what we expect in 2023. I think we're just focused on that. I think I've said the words epic, and I really meant that. I mean, it took me a long time to write that, of like, what, you know, how do I describe what the future looks like in context of what the company has been through over even 30 years, not just my tenure. I think the things that, you know, I know I've said about brick by brick, you know, like, think about we have business goals, we have technical goals, we have, you know, other achievements that we're talking about. If all those things happen, which is what we're focused on, it would be epic.
I think, you know, 2023 has been pretty well laid out, and, you know, we're gonna hold ourselves responsible with that.
I just meant with the closing of 2023.
I know what you mean.
Okay, good. Thank you.
I know what you mean.
I'll leave it at that.
I think, guys, listen. I'm not being cheeky here.
Okay.
I think, we still have to be careful how we talk publicly, right?
Right.
The money we raised from you, we need to develop technology and partnerships, not get sued by some short seller that wants to, like, do some mischief, right? I think you know what we're focused on. I think you can see that we are very committed to it. What you're seeing and experiencing is real. That's what you can count on, that, you know, we're committed to what we have said.
Okay, last question. Are there any Easter eggs today that we should be aware of?
Did we get the ham and cheese? There's nothing.
Okay, you're paying attention. Thank you.
I'm just joking.
Thank you very much.
I don't think this gentleman's had a chance to ask a question yet. Yeah.
This gentleman. Yeah.
My name's Matt Pence. Speaking about working with partners, I've noticed a few times now on the Jeep, I've seen Continental radars. Is there any meaning to that?
No, it's incidental. For us, you know, when we were thinking about sensor fusion, what you need is a radar that has a certain kind of output. We need raw data our engineers needed, you know, to develop. I think it's a development kit that had what they needed. You know, NXP could have one. TI could have one. It could have been any radar. Whenever they give a development kit, and it gives them the data stream that they need, I would not read anything into that.
Great.
The thing to think about is we don't want it to be any specific radar. We wanna create something in the future for sensor fusion because all those companies provide radars for the automotive industry. About 147 million radars were sold last year, right? You wanna create something that is more universal. The brand names you see there are incidental. The only thing that matters there is our lidar, including the vehicle it's on is also incidental, as I mentioned. Yeah.
Thank you.
Hey, Steven Jeff again. Regarding the vote-
Tapas K oley.
Oh, all right. Go ahead, Jeff. Please go ahead, Jeff.
Just a quick question. Yeah. Regarding the vote, the $100 million figure, why $100 million? Go ahead. You wanna cover it?
Yeah. I think, look, from our standpoint, we believe these are the tools that this company needs to take this company to the next level and also compete with our peers. You know, I think what you can see is from the past when we had asked for $60 million until, even till this date, we have only used, I think, $24 million-$25 million. One thing that I think what we have demonstrated, and I think it's resonating really well with investors, not just retail, but even institutional investors, how disciplined the company has been. Even with this acquisition of 250 more people, our cash burn still remains one of the lowest in the industry.
I think that's what tells you that why the management has been very disciplined about using the resources that the company has been given. Coming back to your question, why $100 million? When I was doing a benchmarking of our peers, what is the firepower or, you know, the dry powder the company has in order to pursue deals, in order to pursue, you know, accelerate revenue growth and customer adoption, I feel this was the number which will put us right in line with what our peers have left on the tank in terms of going forward. Keep in mind-
The whole idea of building this business is you wanna show to the customer that you have this capacity that you can go and expand into and tap into these resources to build a business. That's how we got to this number, because it's almost the same as, in hindsight, you know, three years ago, could we have asked for only 25 million shares, right? That gave us the buffer or the runway, right? This is the same logic as this, shared capital is essentially the toolkit that the company needs at this point to take us to the next level. Hopefully that puts things in perspective as to why we wanna be on a very strong footing when we go against our peers.
Again, keep in mind, our peers are well-capitalized because of the whole IPO hype. Since we did not go through that, we just wanna have the right tools to go against them.
Also, if you think about it, you know, we're not using it, you know, the $24 million that we've expended so far to just keep the lights on anymore. That's where the business has changed. You know, now what we're doing is we're using to fuel growth. If you think about partnership, enabling partnerships and going forward, how do the share price goes up? How do you beat the shorts? You generate growth at the least amount of OpEx, building a good business. If you think about it in those terms, you know, everything, you know, should just be resonating with folks that we're, you know. A lot of thought went into it. You know, if you wanna be in the middle of everything, you wanna look at your competition, you wanna look at the market. Yeah, our focus is on growth.
Thank you.
Here in the second row.
This is Tapas Koley from Atlanta, Georgia. I am an investor since 1998. I went to Munich and met you. I don't know.
Yeah, I remember.
I have a question, sir. You know, one thing that most of the OEMs are embracing lidar. That's a great thing. The elephant in the room is Elon Musk. He still doesn't believe in lidar. He's going for camera and the radar. My question is that, is anything that lidar organization doing with the safety or regulatory that makes sure that lidar is a regulatory safety tool?
Yeah.
How about that drive-by-wire with doing a test car and make sure that's what the gap Tesla has, it's not there with lidar?
Two questions. Let me answer it first, right? That individual is a genius, right? He's a very, very successful industrialist, has accomplished a lot in life, right? That's all right. Nobody on this planet can break physics. Do you understand that? Nobody. Does not matter how smart you are. Physics is physics. Okay. Anybody with a software background will tell you what data is needed to actually keep people safe. Ultimately, physics and market will decide what's right and what's wrong. You know, the only L3 qualified car is Mercedes with a Valeo sensor that the SCALA team was developed by Ibeo long term ago. That's the only lidar that's ever shipped, and that's the only car that's actually delivered L3 feature where the OEM takes responsibility for the, for the, any kinda crash that would happen with that.
That's the only car delivered. I mean, that is so big, you can't even imagine when they actually have announced that, okay? Well ahead of regulation. That's all that actually matters. That's the first part of the, you know, your question, right? Second part is, if I can do the same demo with a car that costs $40,000, why would I spend $100,000, right? Let's not get hung up on those things. That's not how marketing works, right? Build a great product. We're going after OEMs that have big RFQs. You know? I mean, there's companies out there that have 10 million vehicles that they make annually, right? A company makes that 500,000 vehicles, we need to go after the OEMs that have the biggest gravity in this industry. That's how you win, right?
Our focus is gonna be, if the OEM we're going to that has more volume and we have to use their car for a demo, that's what we're gonna do, right? That's where you wanna invest your money, right? It's not like that's more... I mean, I apologize, I'm not saying anything to you. That's vanity, right? If you wanna be humble, if you wanna be successful, focus on what's important, right, and put the vanity aside. You're not gonna convince people by buying their car and putting inside. You're gonna convince people by showing how your technology is actually gonna solve their problem faster and cheaper than anything else. That's it.
Thank you. I look for Mercedes as the OEM.
They're all gonna be there. I mean, these are, you know, when we bought Ibeo, there's all these cars that we have. Again, that was another thing. Is there an Easter egg there? No. Those are cars that Ibeo already had. We put it on the one that was available. That's it. There's nothing magic about this stuff. You know, there's a bunch of car in the fleet now in the two countries. We have two Jeeps, and we have a bunch of other cars. We, I think there's several cars, like 12 cars, that Ibeo had. There are different cars in the fleet. You'll see all different cars. It means nothing. It just means the fleet has been invested in, and those are the assets that transfer over, and we're not buying new vehicles.
We're not spending money on that stuff. We're spending it on engineers. That's what's needed to grow the company. Okay. Yeah.
Ty Bordner, longtime investor. I was awesome. It's good to see you.
Hi.
Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it, and I think the whole MicroVision team, because everything's going great today. There's always a lot of work behind the scenes when things go smoothly. As an investor, you know, I think we all probably to some degree look at, you know, the product and, you know, especially in an emerging market, right? What, you know, what's gonna happen? There could be new technologies that come along, et cetera. I think there's been some mudslinging that's gone on more and more recently, right? I think the competition has had a few things that they sort of try to highlight with MicroVision's MAVIN specifically. I'll just rattle off a few of them and if you could address them.
One is the FOV range is too small, 20 degrees. They say the OEMs require, I don't know what the number is, 100 degrees or something, but they say it won't work.
Hold on. Let's go step by step because let's not mash it up.
Okay. Yeah.
Okay. That's 20 degrees at far field.
Right.
100 degrees in near field.
Right.
A company that has no dynamic view lidar can make that. They don't know what they're talking about. Right? Do I get on a press release and talk about that? Why would I give credibility to somebody that is fighting their way to get to where we are already? I have gone on the record to say every RFQ requires dynamic view lidar , not a single one that is out there that has that. You deduce whatever you wanna. There's no Easter egg in that one. You deduce whatever you wanna deduce from that comment, right? Anybody that says that, 20 degrees at 200 m out, that's like a 6-lane highway, 8-lane highway, right? You don't wanna fire lasers off like, you know, 500 m on the either side of it, right?
The dynamic view lidar is something that we do that, you know, they're still working on, and it's gonna take them years to get there, and we have real patents on it.
Okay.
You know, that one is Like I just rolled my eyes on that one is because that's just a way to confuse them. Getting on stock, Stocktwits or sometime, you know, some of the other sub-Reddits, right? People have this tendency of trying to confuse, you know, the matter, right? The matter is pretty simple. I mean, that's why I wanted to do the drive for you guys that the OEMs get. You could be technical, you could be non-technical, humans have a reaction when they get in the car. They're like, "Oh, I get it." Like some of you that get inside, you know, you may have said, "Oh, I get it now." You don't know exactly what you saw. I can tell you what you saw, you kinda get it, right?
Your intuition tells you, like, I see what they're, I can see exactly like I would see with my eyes, and it's actually better and further out, right? That's why I don't really comment on that is because it's sorta like we're above that. Not in an arrogant way. Above as in, like, I know that they're working towards this, and that's not where they are.
Okay.
That's a fact, because you guys have been to their booths at CES, you've seen their demos. You know, if to show a very high resolution, like, you know, 14 million points per second that we have, if somebody is actually collecting video in super resolution at 10 Hz and only shows you near field in Paris and then speeds up the video to 30 Hz to say I have a 30 Hz system. They don't say they have 30 Hz system, they say the video is 30 Hz. What do I do? Like, do I spend all my time to like every press release to talk about how this person doing that? Like, we don't have to do that.
Right.
They have to catch up to us, so let them waste their time.
Okay. Just a follow-up to that 20-degree FOV. You said it earlier, right? That the concentration of points at that range is more important...
Yeah.
Than the spread out points at, you know, 100
No, no, it's more than that. It is that lasers heat up. The reliability of the entire lidar industry is gonna be dependent upon how you manage lasers. We have significant amount of experience managing lasers. This is a really big thing. It's not just the MEMS, it's not just the other digital part, it's how to manage the laser. The laser module is where our analog IC goes. It's a very, very important piece. Okay? Why would you fire off lasers half a kilometer off the road? You don't wanna do that. You wanna concentrate it on the road where you're driving. We have that feature. The Dynamic View lidar is more important, more valuable than you can imagine. Yeah.
I just have a follow-up on that. The one thing that I don't fully understand, and maybe it's not all solved yet, I don't know, but when the car's driving down the road and the lidar is pointing 200 m, 250 m, and there's a curve in the road, doesn't the lidar need to look down the curve?
No. When you think about the 20-degree field of view, it's beyond. You can go online, and you can look at how highways are built. A 3-lane highway that supports a certain velocities can only have a certain curve. All right? The 20-degree field of view was not just made up. It actually incorporates enough margins, so you can see around the bend, but it's 200 ft or 50 m out. You have so many seconds to achieve that. Therefore, as you're gonna be turning, you have more than enough margin to see what's around the curve.
Okay.
Okay? You're not making these sharp turns, right, on highways. Think about highways, right? They make turns, but whenever they have sharp turns, they slow down the velocity because it's based on speed. Highways are designed based on a certain maximum speed they can support.
Okay.
When you go to Germany, when I drive in Germany, you go on the Autobahn, the sections that are like, you know, unlimited, they're just like a straight shot. If you have good alignment, you don't even have to use it. Anytime there's curves coming, they slow you down.
Okay.
This is not just us. university all over the world, every highway is built this way.
Another argument, again, these aren't my arguments, these are, these are competitors' arguments.
Don't make their arguments for them.
Well, no, I would give you an opportunity to respond to these, right?
Sure, sure.
That the MAVIN doesn't deal with black or low reflectivity very well, right?
Okay. That's a statement that somebody's making, but, you know, there's no basis for that. Any OEM that's gonna evaluate this, you know, they have their targets, 10% reflectance, you know, 5% reflectance, tires, the shapes, right? It's gonna go through that qualification. That's why the fka question is important. You know, instead of all this hyperbole that other people create about technology, somebody's gonna standardize how things are gonna get measured. We're gonna have the same exact thing. You know, our system team is gonna work on that, our optics team is gonna work on that, and, you know, they're gonna provide what's needed, but that statement has no basis in physics.
Okay.
People can have opinions, but physics is still physics.
The last one in this sort of area is, and this is a weird one I think, that, you know, you have the dynamic view lidar, and you've explained how important that is. You have the short, the medium, the long term. They aren't running at 30 Hz. They're only 10 Hz each.
That is true.
Oh, okay.
That is true. 30 Hz is the system. If I was to put all 30 Hz in a single field of view, in near field it'd be like what, Chris? 24 million points or some crazy number like that, right? It just knocks you out. Mid and far, but that's the speed of light and how many pulses we can have in flight. Okay? When RFQs happen that have only two fields of view, then we'll have 15 Hz and 15 Hz, but the overall system is 30 Hz, right? When you think about other people's system, they're not at 30 Hz. When they have this dynamic view, they could be slower than 10 Hz in each one of those, where we're gonna be significantly much higher density.
Another way to think about it is, once let's say you have data collection happening and somebody's, let's say, driving over there and that cluster is identified, then you're tracking them frame to frame.
Right.
Right? Therefore, you can scan, come back, scan, come back, and you have to know where they're gonna be and predicting, and you have to just scan and get back to that point faster. When you have a 30 Hz system, you're able to cycle through that faster. Yeah. Yeah, again, it's people that are slightly informed, but they really haven't really thought about the problem. They don't ask a really important question, so I appreciate you asking the question, but it is something that you don't have... Like, you sat in the car. If you have taken the ride, can you tell the difference? That's a dynamic view lidar that you saw there. Did you see any gaps? It was continuous, wasn't it? Right? When the car was shifting, the car shift on and the view was happening at the same time. Really, there's no holes, right?
This is just, this is just hyperbole.
Okay.
You know.
One more. MicroVision's point cloud is blurry.
I don't think so. I mean, I don't drink, by the way, guys, so I see everything sharp. Maybe you see blurry, but I don't see anything blurry in there. I think, like, think about you're processing the point cloud really fast. The important thing is you can put a bunch of filtering in to reduce the, you know, make it look at any certain way. That's a human way to think about it because your eyes is what. A computer doesn't look at it that way. It needs data as fast as possible. It will most likely take a little bit more noise because if they can get the data faster, they wanna control the car. Again, can we make it, like, perfectly beautiful like that?
You'll see demos that we're gonna do that by sometime, right? That's again demo. I can assure you that when you think about our customers, sometimes they may care about latency, we can go faster, right? It's not. Again, there's no limitation in the technology. There's no limitation in the physics. It is the amount of time we wanna spend. What we have is gives a massive amount of data point cloud, low resolution, very, very fast. I mean, it's a massive pipe of data coming out. That's actually important for somebody to write their perception software. Okay.
Okay, good. another question, changing gears here a little bit. How have the OEMs reacted to the Ibeo acquisition?
Very positively. I think, you know, we've been showing MicroVision, showcasing them to a long time. They love the technology, it's like anything else. You feel more comfortable because the Ibeo team has a lot of experience developing lidar. I mean, they're the only ones that have actually developed one and launched one. Nobody else has done that actually, right? The combination of the two teams, it was clear that they're very, very innovative. We're very innovative. The two companies combined. As I mentioned in the last earnings call, the RFQ, RFI cycle has completely changed because now we get RFQ, RFI cycles for both flash-based and MEMS. It's the only lidar company that can provide all their lidar needs. It's a one-stop shop for the, you know, for the first time. No other company has multiple technology nodes.
We also have perception that we can offer as a part of it. Other companies do different things, but mature perception is what Ibeo had created. No, my Ibeo team is incredibly productive, work very, very hard. You know, I love these guys. They're really, really good. And all the investors should be very, very excited about the Ibeo team in Hamburg. You guys really should be. They're great. They really are great. These things have been created, but it's the first time for an OEM, all those things are in one place with a silicon strategy and a business strategy that kinda makes sense to them, that this company will be around for 10 years because we're building it in a more conservative way, which is what they like. These are very old, very conservative companies.
They like high tech, but they don't want the risk of coming up and down. We have to build a stability around the things that we talk to them. I think, you know, I would say since we've announced the agreement, right, it has accelerated things. You know, even just last week of, you know, something very, very big came across, which was, you know, pretty much clear to us that it was because of, you know, the Ibeo MicroVision combination. Our balance sheet, their technology, MAVIN, perception, everything all in one. It's, yeah, it's been very, very good. Yeah.
Okay. Gonna go to the second row here next.
Yeah. Yes.
John McLean. I wanna thank you guys for this investor day. It's been great so far. I just have a question, partially answered, but I go back to Anubhav's comment on how the shorts and their behavior is based on a algorithm. I wanted to maybe dig on that just a little bit, especially, you know, as we're all looking at the lidar sector, not just MicroVision, but, you know, a lot of the companies have just been beaten down pretty heavily with super high, you know, short volumes. I guess, I think of it maybe as a game of chess and kinda wondering if...
By the way, I also wanna make one more comment, which is I'm super glad that you guys don't worry about that much and just focus on the execution 'cause you can't really do anything about it. I'm interested to know if you have people that look or try to understand the ultimate strategy of these hedge funds. You know, are they trying to sort of narrow the field by running some competitors out of business because they want consolidation? Are they looking at companies that have low cash, so they're trying to, you know, get their share price so low that when they do, you know, have 100 million shares that come on board, they won't get very much money for them?
Mm-hmm.
I'm wondering if MicroVision and not yourselves has, you know, the investment banks or the support that tries to think about what these hedge funds are trying to do, so you can think about how MicroVision can have the strategy to bridge that gap that we're talking about between now, which is the RFQ year, and 2026 when that revenue starts coming in. You know, is there thoughts about that or do you have somebody else who is trying to get into the minds of these hedge funds?
Yeah. Yeah. Pass the hand. It's Anubhav.
Yeah. This is my wheelhouse. You're right. What has happened is the SPACs opened up this window, this huge window for these shorts to actually prey upon companies. They actually walked right into the trap. Promising lofty projections, they knew that they were gonna miss it. I think that's what you're saying. You're right. We have seen lidar companies falling off the map. I think you know who I'm talking about. I think this will happen even in the next six to 12 months. Why? Because there are companies like that are valued 50% of their cash. That tells you that's a very telltale sign because that tells you these shorts are betting that these companies really don't have any future, and that's why they are valuing them below the market value of their cash.
I think what this will entail is two things. Like, how do you sort of, you know. Again, I think I've said this as well. When you are rational and you behave in a traditional public way, a public company way, that's the only way to counter this, right? That's the only way you counter shorts because they know we're gonna deliver what we have promised and not the other way around. Obviously, that's how you kill the shorts. I think what you'll see in the next six to 12 months, a bunch of these companies will go off the map because of the same reason, because the shorts know that, hey, there's a problem here.
The second way to address it is, yes, since the price is still a couple of years out, I keep saying that's how you bridge the gap. The way you bridge the gap is bringing in revenues from the non-auto sector and the high contribution margin validation software because that's what is ultimately differentiating us from the rest of the peers because this is what they don't have. I think as Sumit described, we have become this one-stop lidar shop by offering MAVIN, MOVIA, and MOSAIK, which is a three-legged stool in my mind, which actually de-risks the business. Hence that's the way to answer these shorts. You know, there is no magical wand that I can wave and, you know, kill all the shorts tomorrow. I keep saying that that's how you do it.
Every quarter we come out with something and beat it. That's how you say, "Okay, these guys are gonna do." That's how the algorithms will be. That's how you fool the algorithms, right? That's how you break the algos. I think that's sort of how I feel the industry will transform, the lidar industry in particular of, you know, the wheat shall be separated from the chaff.
Yeah. Adam, you had a question?
Yeah. Just to follow up on what Sumit was saying.
Can you speak in the mic just so for the recording, please?
Yeah. We're kinda in this mode where anyone can say anything and it's very confusing. At some point in the near term you're gonna have some RFQ wins, we would assume. Epic wins, your word. How are you positioning the company for growth at that point? Because we'll be in a different space, we'll be in a different place at that point. We'll have a win. That win will come with a story, a story from some OEMs who've seen something in your technology that they didn't see elsewhere. A lot of those things you're keeping close to the vest, which is a very difficult position to be in.
At some point as these wins come in, you're gonna be in a very different position. Hopefully, one to talk about what OEMs have seen, to crow a little bit about your competitive advantage and, you know, take the authorization and move it into areas that spur growth. I'm just kinda wondering what your perspective is on at what pivot point in the near term do we start to focus on growth and what does that mean and how does that change your approach in what you say and what you do?
I'll tell you exactly how I'm gonna behave and I'm gonna have the company behave at that point. This has to be clear to all of us actually. Nothing really changes. What you have to do is you have to accelerate from that. You do not sit back and, you know, pop open the champagne and say, "Hey, look what we got." You don't crow about it. Get on with the work, which is what? There's 60 OEMs out there. How much penetration can you get? How fast?
When you have that, you know, when you have that validation behind you need to accelerate because other people have to realize, but why did this some, you know, if let's say it was somebody big and powerful or somebody that's really respected as an OEM, you know, different tiers of OEM as well, how much penetration you get from that news? Sitting around, you know, we didn't have to go through a de-SPAC. A lot of those guys had to do those kind of deals to just go through the de-SPACing process, right? Since then not a whole lot has happened, right? They're still working on their product, their technology. There's a lot of marketing, but there's nothing of substance. Yeah, their stuff goes up, stuff comes down.
If you are a long-term investor you would ride it out because the big price comes in when you own 80% of the market and you did not spend billions and billions and billions of dollars that they may have to raise to get to that point. You know what I mean? That's the difference, right? Yeah, if that day comes in you're not gonna see the company like, you know, just, you know, go back and start spending $10 million, $20 million on marketing in CES. That's a waste. I think, you know, you saw like we're so humble about how much we spent at CES and in Munich.
We're gonna just accelerate and focus our resources and our passion towards the next win because you need to get to a certain critical mass of those people, those OEM deals, and grow the engineering team beyond what we have right now to meet their needs and now you know you're gonna be around for a long period of time. You brought stability to this business and to those OEMs. That's what's gonna happen.
Great.
Yeah, we're not gonna spend too much on marketing. No, no. We're gonna spend money on marketing. I'm joking, but the point is I don't want people, like somebody had actually sent me an email on LinkedIn a while back saying, "Why don't you spend like $10 million, $15 million on marketing? Would that accelerate?" I'm like, "$10 million, $15 million?" I mean, I think some of you guys would like have a guillotine out there. You'd probably kill me if I did that.
Well, it was, it was less a marketing question than it was about, you know, you're having to sit on a lot of things that you feel are, you don't wanna give away to your competitors, you know. Once you're in the market, once you have some RFQ wins, those things are.
No, you talk about that. Of course, you talk about like if there's a certain configuration that won it. Like let's say there's a certain configuration of dynamic view lidar won it. Yeah, you talk about that, right? The other things that are in there that could be done that nobody has, we will not talk about because, you know, if there's a win specifically then there'll be a data sheet. Like there's a data sheet for the product there because that went to C-sample. It's a static view, static number of pixels, easy to write data sheet. We can do a lot of things with dynamic views. I would like to write a ton of different data sheets, I'm telling everybody else what my technology can do, which is what they wanna know.
If you think about, you know, why am I so excited about the validation software? I don't know if Anubhav and I have talked about this, why we're so excited. Yes, it brings margin. Yes, it brings revenue to the company. Very, very important. You try to break the algo that way. Great. The real thing is we know about what future perception needs those OEMs have. We will know well in advance of anybody else of what to build and what not to build, right? Think about that market intelligence. That by itself is worth the deal, right?
Right.
Like, you will never be surprised. Like, if you think about it, if you can be at a company that will not be surprised by the OEM, that is a slow-moving industry, what they're gonna want, what their demands will be in the future, and you know that years in advance of your competition, that is unbelievable, right? That's a great value.
Well, that's one of the most valuable things I think I've come away with this morning.
Yeah.
-is really understanding that in a way I hadn't understood it before. Thank you guys.
Yeah. 2019, we got that from MAVIN.
Yeah.
With the new acquisition, with the, you know, the perception development, the validation software development, we're gonna just know what we have to do years in advance. We're not gonna be talking about a redesign, because if you keep evaluating everything, it looks like, man, we are way ahead of there. We can focus our resources to other things to grow the business. You know what I mean?
I do.
That's an advantage that we have that nobody else has. I don't have to do a 360 degree lidar or something like that to get investors excited. I'm saying like, "Wait a minute, I got something that what I've invested, we're gonna keep winning, and let me show you how we're gonna win.
Yeah, that's important. To me, that's been a disconnect for me. I don't think investors have seen that really clearly, because there's only so much you can say. You don't wanna give it away, I get that part. I think I understand where you're coming from now a little better in a way I hadn't before, but.
If I could just add, it's always easier to scale up, right? See, that's the advantage of being, you know, having one of the lowest cash burn in the industry. We don't have to scale down because, again, people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year in OpEx. We're way below that. I think your question is when these wins happen, because, you know, when it rains, it pours. I think your question was, if I understood correctly, how can you scale the business at that time? I think if you look at this, Ibeo acquisition was a perfect example. We went from $100 million to $350 million for paying, you know, a value which was way more than what we got from the Ibeo engineers and the talent pool.
I think that's one of the ways as well, like, you know, when, you know, there would be times, you know, when you have multiple wins, that's how you scale the business. Again, you're already one of the lowest in the industry. I think what the OEMs need is your ability, and I think this goes back to the question of why $100 million, why not $200 million, why not a different number? This is what, you know, it's the elasticity that the company are evaluating. How quickly, how fast can you go from where you are today? I think that's why we are positioning the company so that it can move up and down as and when needed.
Do they see your fabulous approach as a benefit as opposed to someone taking capital to go build a factory or a multiple factory scenario? I mean.
Yeah. I think, like, you know, I've been in several meetings where, you know, they definitely complement that the strategy kinda makes sense, because, you know, why would you actually build your own fab? We're willing to work with a traditional Tier 1 or a CM. You know, we're not saying things that, you know, incongruent things to them. Like, the overall thing we're proposing has lower risk because it's a model that they know, right? Like, silicon companies do a really good job processing wafers. My guys do a really good job at actually developing the technology, right? They work with the fab. We're gonna work with manufacturing partners. We're gonna work with automation companies. Guess what? Those are not, you know, those are things we show people how to make the device, but somebody else can manufacture it.
In that sense, we definitely get a lot of compliment, you know, not a lot, but, like, we definitely get acknowledged as in, like, "Hey, that's really good. That really makes sense." It shows the credibility that, you know, we're thinking in line with the way they would wanna see the business for a decade. Just don't forget that. We'll have this win. There'll be a moment all of you guys will celebrate. You know, we'll celebrate a little bit, but it's not over. Then comes the hard work of being a sustainable company.
Now, if you think about some of the, you know, everybody talks about, "Hey, you know, why doesn't somebody acquire vertical?" If you build a strong business that looks like it's gonna be for a long time, that's the value of the company, then you are valuable significantly more than what your revenues would be. You'll have huge multiples, right? You can talk about valuation like you did in the spotlight last year. You can think about it, right? That's what you have to build out.
Which makes the most sense to me. I haven't looked at strategic alternatives for a while, knowing, understanding what you're trying to accomplish, so.
Yep.
It looks like you're on the verge of it, so.
Yep. No, I think I mentioned this in my last thought article on this as well, because sinking in capital to become a Tier 1 is an extremely difficult task. It will require hundreds of millions of dollars, and it will require qualification from OEMs, which they have been doing forever. I think that's sort of why we wanted to make sure that when companies are marketing, they are, we understand as an, you know, as an investor audience, what is the exact difference between being a Tier 1 or partnering with a Tier 1 or having a manufacturing partner.
Because this triangular relationship is extremely critical because I think at the end of the day, developing or building a facility from scratch will require huge amounts of capital and huge amounts of experience and talent to get to the level of automotive-grade qualifications by the OEMs. I think that's what Sumit's mentioning, the acknowledgement of that strategy makes sense because that will sort of make the management not focus on the product, but rather get into the production and the manufacturing business, which has a completely different dynamic than the business that we have. Sorry, I'm keep going back to Mobileye. I think this is sort of what they demonstrated. Again, it's a comp that has been established in the industry. They have shown that that's how this model works.
I think that sort of is a very good example of how businesses are built when they are really built thoughtfully.
Well, 'cause there's a cost benefit to using stuff that you can attain very easily, like cameras Mobileye uses or the lasers or all the simple things you use. If you had to build a factory, you wouldn't be at $500 a unit. You'd probably be at $1,000 a unit.
Your dilution would be significantly higher.
Yes.
If you went public through a de-SPAC, you raised a bunch of capital, but it's already been promised for things, and then how do you tell an OEM that wants a conservative company that's gonna deliver what they say, and you're not able to raise capital on these crazy things? You know, being very meticulous about how much you spend, what we spend on, show the discipline of a typical company. Right? Is actually very important to this equation.
Yeah, I think you can see that happening now within other companies in the sector, and you're starting to see evaluations happen based on the actual cost of building the unit, which is a first. That hasn't really happened until the past couple of months, so.
Yeah. Anybody saying that it's gonna be $1,000 OEM is willing to pay, I can tell you, I mean, without a shadow in a second, that is absolutely not true. You know, they're trying to achieve $1,000. Absolutely not true. And I think one of the analysts, I think I read a report, I think it's somewhere. I forget where it was. And they were saying that even this analyst was saying for that company like, "That is not gonna happen." This is an industry that every dollar they spend, they know what the multiple is by the time they deliver to a customer. That is not gonna happen. It's been well-established what this lidar target has to be. Absolutely. Yeah. And the one box solution is very, very important. Yeah.
Get it. Thank you.
Did everybody get lunch? I know some of you haven't moved. If we can take a five minute pause. We'll stay here, just please get some lunch. You know, just, wanna make sure you guys have enough energy. We have still an hour and a half to go. We're not, we're not running off anywhere.
We don't want people fainting.
Yeah.
Hey, you guys need to.
Okay. Yes, Pat.
Hey. Just my perception of what you've done over the last few years has been highly credible, right? I think you've predicted some things in the industry that you talked about a year or two before, and then they happened, right? I'd like to ask you about your thoughts around this concept that you're doing, which is that one box, but the perception in the ASIC, in the thing. I don't think I've read any other competitors that are going down that path.
Mm-hmm.
I guess I'll ask you, do you think that they will have to copy that?
I think, first of all, I'd like to say, like, I'm very fortunate that I have a really great team. A lot of the things that I share with you is because they've created it. In that sense, I'm like more of a spokesman. I drive the product a little bit, but, you know, I wanna just acknowledge the team that works incredibly hard to get us here. Now, when you talk about perception, this is what I believe. All right? Ultimately, a lot of OEMs believe right now that if they own all the software, that's their IP, and that's how they, you know, that's how they can beat Tesla that makes less cars and has a higher valuation. Right? I mean, Tesla makes less cars and valued more than VW. Think that for a second.
You know, that's a uniqueness of only in America. All right. They wanna own the software. Let's take a step back and say, how would you solve this problem if that was not a issue? Like, what product makes the most sense? Okay? Typically, if you need a lot of machine learning algorithms, you need more computing.
I'm just making sure I get that.
If you are smart enough, and you've created algorithms, some of those algorithms that can actually go inside an ASIC running on, you know, smaller level of compute, like our engineers have, and deliver the same level of KPIs or really high golden standard level of KPIs, it'll be a cheaper product. We'll provide the safety, and we qualify it, and it's in silicon. You don't have to worry about the software. Ultimately, it does not matter how much they resist us. We have the key ingredients of that final product will be very valid. True one box solution will happen. Right now, you know, somebody may say to me, "Oh, you know, just give us the point cloud. We have a massive team that we've had for 10 years. We do not intend to use your perception." Okay.
The next thing they say, "Bring your perception engineers. We'd love to talk to them." They know the Ibeo team, they're really intelligent. They're really incredibly talented. They created something of value. Purity of thought, they did a really great job, right? Ultimately, that product has value. It may not be in this first digital ASIC it happens, but it will happen, and they will demand it. There'll be no choice, right? If you build a business over several years, you're gonna have many bites at the apple for, they want this right now, fine, you can have that. Eventually, the real value will come when you put the one-- true one box solution perception inside. Either in MAVIN or in MOVIA, it will happen. You will see it that that product adoption will be incredibly fast.
I mean, it sort of portends that you would think that the competition would need to ultimately go down that road. Not that it's that easy to do, not that you can flip a switch and make it happen.
The mistake, I mean, who am I to talk about somebody else's mistake? I can say that from a strategy standpoint, you know, if I just go by what public comments people make, they're not acting like good engineers or good people that know how to develop technology. You know, you have to speak the truth about really what is gonna happen in the future. Like, you know, yeah, I'll take the credit for the fact that years ago, I said to you guys, "We're not gonna do autonomous driving. We're gonna do ADAS." Because, yeah, when you think about it, that was the bigger market. I clearly even state that right now that a lot of those guys, it starts with the top people understanding what strategy has to be deployed. You can't be arrogant.
You know, you have to think about business as what it is and think about your customers first. They're telling you what they're willing to accept. You're not gonna get them to accept a autonomous driving software stack and completely change the way they do the business. That's not gonna happen. Argo is a great example. Great company, very smart engineers. Where did it go? The fault was not in the engineers. Absolutely not. It was the strategy was wrong. Right? It comes down to strategy. Therefore, yeah, we spend a lot of time, you know, making sure our strategy is correct and in line with what the future will be. I do not lose a single night of sleep thinking that my competitors eventually are gonna start saying the same thing we're saying right now. That's the vindication.
If we have a design win, if we get something done right, guess what? Everybody will change their tune and start, this is gonna be the victory path. What we did not do is when they were getting their small victories early on, right, we did not start making the product based on what they were doing just to gin up a story, get some money, and get that done. That would not have been good stewards of the technology, right? I mean, you guys have been in this stock for a long time. A lot of these engineers have worked on these companies for much longer. It's kinda important for me to think about, like, if you build something, how is it gonna be sustainable for a long time, and you really get the value of what was invented.
Follow-up question. The MOSAIK software, you know, you've articulated well and you did a press release for Jaguar and Land Rover, you know, a couple of weeks ago. It seemed like there was a intimated at, what I perceived, intimated that maybe the reference sensor that might go with that software could be MOVIA or MAVIN. Is that sort of what-
That is true.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, like, you know, if you think about those hardware sales, they're incremental, right? You're gonna sell just so many validation ground truth vehicles. Certainly we're gonna have a vehicle at someday, which is gonna have MAVIN. You know, if it's such an awesome thing, you wanna build a full stack, and you wanna be able to offer them. Right now, like Andy said, like, you know, people have, like, reactions. They wanna say, "Well, you know what? That's great. But you know what? I'm gonna use my own sensor. Just give me the software." Great. Why would we do that? Well, we wanna know what their perception needs are, so you know what? We can make our products better, right? We're okay with that. If you think about the MOSAIK business, right?
We are gonna support it as an independent business. We're gonna innovate. Like, if they say, like, "Hey, this other lidar, make sure you support that." We're gonna do that. Absolutely. Absolutely, right? We're gonna let the OEMs decide what they need, but what we can get out of it is just, you know, real market intelligence of, are we still on track? You know, can I say the word best in class now, and it holds true for many, many years to come? I mean, that's, you know, that's it, right? If you can predict the future, you look like an oracle, but nobody's an oracle. It is because you have inside information.
Every business that does that, they have some hook someplace, so they can figure out what the market will do in the future, and they get to say some stuff, and if it comes true, you feel like these guys must know what they're doing. I'm actually telling you guys how we get the information. I'm telling you where the hook is. We met them in 2019. We started finding things out for MAVIN. MAVIN is in good shape. MOSAIK will make sure MAVIN is in good shape for a long time, and MOVIA is in good shape for a long time. I mean, I'm glad that we're at this company working together. Yeah.
Thank you. Alex Yu again. There were some, for the proxy, there were some board member changes. Seval is now up for re-election, and Jeffrey Herbst, he's the newer person. There are some discussions about, you know, Jeff's previous history with NVIDIA. Maybe, is there something there? Who knows? I don't know if you can comment on that.
I can comment on that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Why is Seval leaving, if we're not focusing on NED anymore or the AR, not for now? You know, we have Spitzer who's obviously very well-respected, but it's not something that we are focusing on. Seval is from the Continental and also the driving type of background. What's the board makeup, strategy behind that?
Yeah. The board makeup is up to the Chairman of the Board and what's happening on the board. You know, that's, you know, it's an independent board that is representing where we are going. I would not read too much into it. I think Jeff, we met. I think, you know, just like we have great employees in the company, we're fortunate enough to have great independent board members that are willing to take their time and spend it on our board and make us better, give us insight, and give us guidance to make the company better. I think Brian Turner has been on the board for a long time. He's gone through a lot of things that you guys experience. He's put his own money in the company. We have to respect that.
I think, like, it's not, you know, good to, like, you know, it's, this is not like any kinda reality show, you know, which is like, you know, how people go in and out. I think the board decides what the makeup is, and I think I feel very fortunate. I learn a lot from them. You know, they give us a lot of insight and guidance towards a broader thing. We're very happy to have the board we have. I would not read anything into it. You know, people come and people go. They have personal reasons. I think as far as the company is concerned, I think it's just, you know, this is a board, seven-person board, independent board, and I think we have a very good board.
You know, we really have an independent board compared to our competition. Just go look at it, right? It's just a really great makeup. I mean, there's professionals everywhere, but we have, for this industry, done a really, really good job to prepare for what comes ahead.
Okay. Just to kinda follow up with that, we have a new VP of Software that is in the website now. Before that, I believe Jari was the VP of Software, and then he kind of disappeared, and we didn't hear anything.
He resigned. He resigned from the company. Yeah.
Okay.
Again, I met Martin last year, September. We just connected. I like him a lot. I can promise all of you guys, you know, CEOs come and CEOs go, people like, you know, some of the VPs we have right now, you can see them. You know, you guys should be very proud of them. The teams that they built are really, really good. Martin's great. I know Jari really well. I love Jari. You know, he's been at the company for a long time, and the company changed. I don't think there's anything to comment. It's a personal choice that people make.
Okay. Can you comment more on the difference between class... I know you talked about it before, but, you know, if you go onto some of the competitor subreddits, there's always a knock on MicroVision saying, you know, we're not Class 1 certified. We're Class 1 compliance, and, you know, that's a knock on us. w-what's-
Why do you think it's a knock on us?
Because it's not. Certified is better than compliance.
Certification happens when you're shipping the product. We're at A-sample right now. You develop everything to say you're compliant. You have to develop a product with an OEM and get it certified at the end. When your cell phone, your iPhone is in early development, they don't get it certified. They make sure it's gonna be compliant, the design is gonna be compliant long term. They go through the development process, when they're ready to launch it, they go get the certification. The certification comes at the end. I think, like, you know, whoever's talking, they don't know what they're talking about.
Right. No, that makes perfect sense. I, I'm not a software engineer. Obviously, you know, Ibeo's acquisition sounds great. The fact that it's automotive certified, et cetera. Now, from a non-software expert, you know, one thing about kind of acquiring or using a very old, not old, but, you know, experienced software is that it could be bloated versus something that you kind of build more recently from the ground up. Kinda like the difference between like Internet Explorer versus Microsoft Edge. Now is there some kind of a-- That's a concern that I have, but I'm not an expert on that. Maybe you can comment on that.
These guys use the latest computers. They're not using 286 from the 1980s. The software we're talking about is cutting edge. I mean, like, you know anybody that develops software, and I'm not a software guy, by the way, Alex. Like, this is not a knock on you. With me also, I'm learning a lot. I think the tools we're using are, you know, phenomenal. Don't think about software in that sense that it is some, like, executable file that just goes out. It's something that's maintained. It's something that we keep investing to, like, make better, okay? I think I've said that it's beyond what people have right now. Nobody's actually even showed the KPIs they have. That is not a concern that anybody should have. Just like MAVIN has more than what anybody's asking for.
It's cutting edge, right? It's long in the tooth for some people because, you know, it's the same thing, but what's in there is, like, so contemporary, it's gonna be many years before it's, like, really long in the tooth. The software is not that way, right? It's something that has to keep to be developed, keep investing into it, adapt it for MAVIN, perfect it for something like putting inside a silicon chip. There's a bunch of investment that still goes on the software, and all the tools these guys use are, you know, totally contemporary.
Okay. It's my last one. There's been some discussion regarding silicon and silicon carbide. Is there any benefit to using silicon carbide, and do we use it on the MAVIN at all?
No.
Okay.
We make our MEMS. MEMS are silicon wafer. I didn't bring one today. I forgot that, but, you know, wanted to show you the wafer. We have wafers that are done by wafer fabs. Our chips are made by analog chips with analog fabs and digital there. Silicon carbide, I think that's more about battery, power converters, right? You know, we use the most, the best automotive nodes that are available right now. I think, like, when the ASIC team actually goes out there and finds that, they benchmark nodes and technologies that are gonna be around for a long time and, you know, that's how we piggyback onto it.
Just a question around the RFQs that you've had so far. Have you noticed any kind of trends in terms of the vehicles being more in the medium range, high range? Just in terms of if you were to win it, I mean, are these high volume end products or are they, you know, more in the top end, lower volume?
I think the OEMs that we're talking about that are out there right now, you know, we know what their fleet size is and you know, and they're more conservative as in, like, when they tell you a number, they're unlike, you know, some other companies we worked in the past. They don't give you this big number, and it's like one-tenth of that, right? What's the biggest complaint about the 2017 contract? A number was given. You know, we worked out a deal, and not even a tenth of that has shipped right now, right? These guys are, you know, they are really serious business people, right? They give you volume. You know the size of their fleet. You know that it's gonna be rolling out into vehicles definitely beyond their premium vehicles.
If you think about these OEMs, when they talk about it publicly, they're talking about their EV strategy. As I've said always, when EV starts rolling out, ADAS is gonna be the big hook of like, you know, why is this car more valuable? There's less parts. There's no transmission. There's no engine. You know, how do you sell it? You can't sell it because you have more horsepower, right? Pretty much all the EV vehicles have, like, significantly higher performance. They're, you know, they're great to drive.
Yep.
Okay? How are you gonna sell it? They're gonna have, you know, some ADAS features that are gonna be significant level of safety beyond what has ever been there. The volumes when you talk about that these EV, I'm sorry, these OEMs are discussing, it certainly is gonna be deployed into wider fleet. That's why I'm excited about what 2023 represents for the RFQs that we have.
Thank you.
Yes, Jeff.
Oh. The notion of novel marketing campaigns as time goes on around automotive safety, that resonates heavily with me, and I often dream of the day where they say, "MicroVision inside," much like Intel Inside.
Yeah.
You know, that would be really cool. That would be a really cool thing. Do you guys have any conversations around, I mean, or hear any talk around OEMs and, you know, how they plan to market ADAS as a key feature and?
Uh-
You know, anything like that?
I mean, I can't comment on anybody's marketing strategy, especially like, you know, we're not aware of anything they've shared with us. I think like, you know, I'm just giving you my general view of the space. I think there's a reason why we call it safe mobility at the speed of light. There's a very specific reason for that. Technology for people is scary because they don't understand how it works. Like Ty is always worried about specs and this and this, right? He can't put one and one together, like how is OEM evaluating? I can't tell him, so he could feel frustrated. If you think about it, when you guys actually buy technology, you say Intel Inside. You don't know the gigahertz or the processor is, how much RAM it has.
You buy an experience, right? Technology has to melt away, and it has to be the product that you say, "Okay, I believe this is safe." Right? When you think about branding for this, I believe it's not gonna be some big splash, something like that. It's gonna be, it's safety. This is something that you wanna count on. If you wanna look back when they started marketing airbags, that's the way. There was no big marketing campaign. It was just about safety, a five star safety rating this technology path there. It's gonna be that subtle, most likely. You know, again, I mean, I love technology. Our engineers love technology. We're comfortable with what we see. It's because we are intimate with it. But, you know, my mother who's, you know, in her late 70s, she doesn't wanna hear that.
She wants to hear, "Is this stuff safe? Like, it's got a five-star rating, and whose name is behind that car?" Right? You know, that's how it's gonna be evaluated. Yeah, it's not gonna be that, you know, moment you're looking for that, "Hey, we're going to the Super Bowl." That moment is not coming, but it's gonna be more subtle, but it'll be more meaningful because, you know, again, the revenues that comes into the business we build is what we have to evaluate as a success point. Yeah.
Not a tech spec question. Commercial question.
You got it. Yeah.
You know, you guys, the company laid out the strategy about a year and a half ago, right? Three pillars. The OEM, you know, win OEM deals, you know, work with a Tier 1 as directed by the OEM, and work with silicon companies. I haven't really heard a lot about the silicon companies, and, you know, competition talks about their relationships with the silicon companies and how great it is, and it'll sell, you know, be able to sell more stuff. Any. Are you talking to silicon companies?
I've been thinking about it this way that we've stated a pillar, so whenever we say something, we do it, but it'll happen at the right time, right? 'Cause, you know, you can flail your arms and you say something, and that's what a lot of people do nowadays, right? It's social media, they wanna get attention, get a spike in the share price, and then when it dumps all the way down, they don't defend it, right? If you do it the right way, it's gonna sustain you for a longer period of time. If you think about the partners that I'm talking about that are in the silicon, they are the ones that make the domain controller and the ECU. They have very complicated businesses, and they have much more powerful businesses.
You know, being able to think about how you connect with them long term, like how are you gonna actually enable them, right? You wanna get a more meaningful relationship done. That takes time. Okay? First thing is focus on the RFPs, win it. There'll be time for some real opportunities. Okay.
Chuck Young. Anubhav, this is for you. The 100 million shares, I know you guys have stated you don't have any near-term plans to be tapping into that or using it. What would you say would be the first use likelihood scenario for tapping into those?
I think of this as, you know. Again, let me give that answer in technical and non-technical terms, right? Obviously, the technical answer would be general corporate purposes, but that's a bunch of words. What it means. We are looking to accelerate revenue and acquire customers faster. I think all I can say is this capital gives us the ability to pursue both these options, and that's what we're looking to do. I think this year, if we hit our revenue targets, $10 million-$15 million is gonna be a huge leap of jump from what happened in-
$12 million to $15 million. Yeah. Before it got. $12 million to $15 million. Yes.
It obviously is a huge jump from last year, right? I think of this as an enabler to accelerate that, to turbocharge this growth. I think that's what would be the first use of this capital whenever we wanna do it.
Can you expand on what you mean by gain customers faster using this?
Expand in the sense that, look, at the end of the day, we're looking to accelerate this revenue. Either you sell more products or you find more customers to sell that product into, right? You acquire sales channels or you build sales channel and, you know, it's, you know, what's build versus grow, right? I think the question in front of us is: How can we demonstrate between now and then the trajectory? Because we have a impressive trajectory. Can we further accelerate that trajectory and further instill even more confidence in the in the institutional investors, you know, who are looking at the holistic lidar space?
I think, as Adam pointed out earlier, I think because of what has, what I call as a wreckage on the highway because of the SPACs, a lot of the people have lost their confidence in the lidar market. If you demonstrate that, I think it's very easy to attract those investors back because they will see the trajectory. In my mind, the game has already been set, you know, what could the valuation of any successful company could be. Again, it's gonna be a very easy decision for these institutional investors to come in and partner with a company that is executing on its strategy to accelerate the growth.
But more think about it's not capital as in like it's gunpowder. Last time we got $60 million, we've only used, what? $24 approximately million, right? You wanna have the right gunpowder ready when the market starts, right? You wanna be opportunistic. The goal, as I've mentioned, is you wanna own the segment. You don't wanna just have a small piece of it. You know, just get one win and say, "You know what? Miller time," right? It's more like, no, you wanna own all of it, as much of it as possible, right? You wanna accelerate that. You wanna have enough gunpowder, you know, for that, and people have to believe you're gonna be around in a more sustainable manner to do that.
I think that's what Anubhav wants to highlight is when he says, like, brick by brick building business, I think as you guys reflect on this day, that's actually really powerful words. You have to build a real business, right? Part of real business is you wanna have capacity available. You know, opportunistic, like, you know, if we do not have the balance sheet strength and, you know, and some of the other things we had to do from there till now, you know, Ibeo would not be part of that. Think about what value that represents for each and every one of you. Long-term that, you know, I hope, you know, after today, you can feel like in long term, this is gonna really be like one of the best deals that we did to turn the ship around. It's not just making MAVIN.
MAVIN would have been great, but this really took us to another level, right? You wanna be opportunistic, right?
Right. Well, keep saying 80% of the market. I like those words.
No. I think, like, you know, anybody that's in this space, if that's not what they're dreaming, then they're just completely missing the spot. They're a professional CEO. You know, I'm not the founder of this company, but sometimes, like, the amount of energy that all of us spend, every employee in the company spends, you would say is like 350 founders in the company. People work way harder than we pay them. I assure you on that one, right? Yeah, I know everybody worries about OpEx, right? People are really invested in it and they're really excited about it. Yeah.
That's great.
If it's not gonna win at all, why do it?
I have another question regarding RFQs.
Yeah.
I'm not a technical guy, but it's my understanding that creating the digital ASIC is a very capital-intensive project. Takes a lot of money, takes a lot of work. You've already stated you expect to get at least 1 design win this year. Is one design win enough to start that investment in a digital ASIC, or do you wanna wait and get two or three more?
No, no. It, it's required to get the first. The work is gonna start, right? Yeah, I mean, you're spending the money because, you know, you expect that, you know, it's around the corner. Once it's done, the other ones that you're thinking about as you think about longer term, you have something, you have a product that's going through qualification, and that's valuable. You wanna make sure what's in there, you know, supports multiple customers, so you can grow customers without having to do every year a new digital ASIC. Because of that, a lot of people that did not know all the features to put inside the product, perhaps they are putting their sensor model in an ECU outside, and they don't talk about the digital ASIC. Riddle me that, right?
I think, like, you know, nobody asked them that, right? They can't talk about a digital ASIC strategy because they have none. They don't want to do it, because they don't know all the features. You know, this is again, market intelligence from our part that allows us to actually commit to a very expensive digital ASIC program that I believe very strongly multiple customers will be happy, and we will meet all their needs and never have to spin another one for a certain category of product. There'll be, when we put the perception inside, there'll be another category of product. Four different OEMs. There's 60 OEMs globally. The race is pretty far from over.
Great. Thank you very much. Thanks again for having this. It's the first time I've been able to get in front of you guys, and I'm loving it. I live in Duval.
Okay. That's great.
Let's go over here to gentleman. I don't think he's had a chance to speak yet.
George Brunner. I wanna talk about our patent portfolio for a minute. We have a pretty substantial patent portfolio. Being best in class, we also are attracting potential infringement. That's my guess. Do we have any ongoing investigations or infringement potential right now that from either United States or other countries?
We don't. If we did, we would announce it publicly because we'd be required to, right? I think I mean, Drew can talk about that, but I think the public comments would reflect that. I think we're in good shape.
Okay. On another aspect, being best in class, I mean, reading about various lidars, I just wanna make certain that our lidar, I mean, is impervious to adverse weather conditions like fog, dust, snow, rain, sleet. How does it characterize black ice on a road?
It's impervious to things that are limited by physics. You know, ray-based systems always have a hard time looking through fog. Any laser there, right? We're picking 905 for a very specific reason. Radars can look through fog, but they have really crappy fields of view and resolution, right? Every technology based on physics is gonna have a limitation, right? Our strategy, if you think about sensor fusion, why? When you combine radar and lidar, we've expanded the spectrum within which the solution performs, right? This is like, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum, right? If you think about it as a spectrum, yeah, we're at 905, and we're gonna do a phenomenal amount of work, heavy lifting there. The software will combine radar and the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that you're talking about, expand it.
That sensor fusion is very valuable long term, right? Again, it's congruent to what would happen with an OEM. They're gonna start off slowly. Before everybody wants to turn over the control of their cars in fog and rain and everything, can they just be happy in sunlight, right? It's gonna be step by step by step, the lidar has to be put inside 'cause a 15-year product, you know, that you buy a car expected to be 15 years, and they're gonna send updates out there. The lidar has to have all the features now that for the next 15 years, they can still upgrade. This is the model that you can think about it. When you buy a car, it comes with, let's say, seven airbags. For the rest of the life of that car, you'll have seven airbags.
This is the first time they're gonna put sensors inside where new features of safety can be rolled out to you in that 15 years ownership of a car, right? They may find other ways to monetize it. I have no idea how they'll monetize that. This is very exciting actually, because, you know, again, your car is now a platform, right? It's an experience that you can always have.
Are there any OEMs that are actively looking at talking to you about the combination of those various, you know, radar and-
I think what I've said publicly is we're developing a sensor fusion demo, and then from there on out, it will be a jumping point for us to, you know, discuss. You can't talk about, you know. Everything is like, it can't be done in PowerPoint and, you know, just orating, you know, your idea. You have to show something working. I think the Ibeo team was incredibly productive. They developed something. We are bringing the focus to a product that's scalable, so we're not talking about autonomous driving. We're gonna start with that demo. We're gonna look at, you know, communicating to the market and our partners what could be possible in the future. As we have success in that area, then we would scale that part of the business to start producing that product. Right now it's an R&D phase.
I think there's a question right there, and then we'll come to this gentleman in the front here.
Hi, Stefan. Are OEMs sharing at all, what the split will look like for EV versus gas cars for lidar adoption? Are you worried about the lithium supply from now going out to 2030?
I think in their public comments, they've never distinguished, you know, If the volumes you're talking about that they're talking in those time frames, there'll be ICE engines around for a long time. They're not disappearing. Their fleet will start transitioning to EV. Now, this is again, my belief, right? If you look at their public comments, they're not really talking about how EV is rolling out. They say things like, "Majority of my fleet is gonna be EV by 2027." Right? The word is majority. It's, you know, there's no qualifier for that. I mean, there's no number, right? We sell lidar and of course it works on all of them, and they have to figure out what models, what their fleets are gonna do.
You know, lithium supply, I think those are resources they would have to really worry about. I think, you know, what we care about is RFQs have specific volumes, ramps, things allowed. We know the size of their fleet. We know, you know, how much of their fleet has grown in the last 10 years, where the growth is. You can imagine they have lots of other things that they will announce that they have not made public yet. Can't certainly comment on that.
Thank you.
Right here.
Yes.
Yes. Jim Sperber again. I wanna know if you have any feel for how this will be deployed by the car manufacturers. I assume it will probably be an optional package in the cars. If that's so, how much does it affect my cost to buy a car with lidar?
The reason this $500 number is very, very important and the volumes that we're talking about. Somebody asked me questions about the volumes, right? Again, we talked about that. The volumes are big enough where it is probably a standard feature. These rounds of RFQs now are looking at this as a standard feature going forward. Unlike the previous deals that they've done, those were options, and not a whole lot of them sold because those products were not ready, right? They were like kinda big, and they didn't have the features that were required. You're finally talking about RFQs that are looking at a fleet, parts of their fleet, so they have to be a standard feature.
Therefore, price is very, very important because you have to have a certain price because let's say you have a car that costs X number of dollars and you wanna upgrade that car and you want the same exact car, you don't wanna pay 30% more for that previous car. You know really what kind of car you want. You know, I have a FJ Cruiser, right? I know what that costs. Somebody offered me more than what I paid for it 12 years ago. I mean, that's just crazy to me. Can you imagine if somebody says, "Oh, it's gonna cost you $70,000 to have an FJ Cruiser now." That's nuts. I'm not gonna buy that then. I'll buy what I can afford. Right? Price, you know, we don't talk enough about that.
The price of the device is actually very important. I think Anubhav have talked about it a lot. I think, you know, if you guys wanna, like, talk about Easter eggs and stuff, forget that. This is real stuff because those are real business models. That's very important. Those are models that we haven't just ginned up. We've really given it a lot of thought of what would be required to penetrate the market in those big numbers if you wanna own it. So.
Sumit.
Yes.
I think I've heard... Sorry, I'm standing over you.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, yeah. I think I've heard comments in the past around the solution actually being able to reduce the number of sensors that OEMs would have to put in a car and therefore, does that imply some sort of eventual cost savings?
Yeah.
Going down this path for them?
There's multiple levels of cost savings if you think about this product. When I say sensors, if you think about, you know, you can have multiple radar that have low fields of view and overlapping, that you can try to create that with more sensor fusion happening at a, you know, big old ECU or domain controller. If you have a dynamic view lidar that covers near, mid, far fields at very, very high resolution and it is a, something that you can certify, you can get it fully qualified, you don't need as many sensors those other sensors require. You may not need them, right? I mean, OEMs will decide that, of course. The other part is if you could actually put perception inside the domain controller side, that compute goes down. You don't need massive amount of AI compute anymore, right?
That's the premise for us. That's the... You know, they will call it a hypothesis. That is our thesis. We believe that's what's gonna happen, and that's what the team in Hamburg has created. It's very, very impressive what they've created, right? Long term, to be in more of the fleet, you have to keep reducing price. You can't. You know, there's a physical limit of how cheap you can make a sensor, right? Then you have to look at the overall system cost and say, "Hey, by the way, I have software that can further reduce the system cost for you." Your sensor price can stay where it is. You don't have. You're not in this, like, never-ending battle of, like, you know, go find a cheaper supplier someplace else. That's not possible because you're in a slow-moving industry.
You know, the level of difficulty when you say the things like $500, you know, to $600 sensor, it's much higher than you think because you can't just go out there and keep finding cheaper and cheaper sensor component suppliers. You have to have investments right now, R&D investments right now that long term are gonna reduce the overall system cost. That will be compelling to our customers, we believe.
Our next question is right here.
Yeah. Brian Atchison. Are you going to incorporate over air technology? I know I want you to commit to ASIC, that there may be from FPGAs, that there may be difficulty. Gonna be any variability that's built into this for-
No.
No. It is-
The sensor is overdesigned, has more features than they'll ever need. The hooks will be given to their computer, so their software will be over the air upgrade, so they can deliver a new feature to you. Why don't we talk about all the specifications, right? We don't wanna tell anybody, but also it is clearly got more features than they will ever need, right? You know, all the hooks will be left in, and their software will enable those features as they go. For us, it's a lidar sale. It's a box, one box solution we sell all in with a piece of ASIC that's qualified. Once that's qualified, they use the data stream, and they do what they wanna do with it. They create the customer experience, so they will do the OTA.
We are not gonna be in the middle of that, and we don't wanna be in the middle of that. You don't want a company that says they're gonna OTA their sensor. That tells you that their technology is, like, not up to snuff.
Thank you.
Yeah.
In the back.
I learned a lot about reflectivity today in our test drive. How will snow affect the car's ability to recognize the space around it in a snowstorm? Will the system shut down in a case like that?
I believe that in ADAS system at the car level, Mike, they're gonna shut down the ADAS system, right? Till they have sensor fusion that can penetrate the snow with another sensor that can actually fill in the gaps so their algorithms can continue running. Just remember, the driver experience will be controlled by the OEMs. They will decide, you know, what is the different environmental conditions within which the feature is allowed to work. We'll be streaming the point cloud, we'll collect all the point cloud with snow, with fog and everything, whatever the quality comes in. You know, there'll be radar that, you know, there'll be fusion for that. There'll be camera, there'll be fusion for that. They have to decide in what environmental conditions they wanna allow it.
For that, they're gonna do lots and lots of validation, lots of different sensors over a period of time. The work here is gonna continue. It's not like one and out. You have a sensor that feels like, okay, it's gonna do something for them long time. It's gonna be very stable. Then they have to see from their software standpoint, what are the sensors do they have to put to expand the features they deliver. That's gonna be the big race between all the OEMs, who can actually expand faster and provide safety, right? Again, the good news that I'm delivering to all of you guys is, like, we have a sensor that's way overdesigned for what their needs are, right? They will have the lidar working, and that's why such a high resolution.
You know, you don't drive through waterfalls, right? Yeah, if there's some places that water, you know, part of the point cloud dropped off, you do that, but you still have so many more points available to you that it is still a useful sensor.
I'd like to pivot, if it's okay.
Of course.
Anubhav, address this. I've got a group of about 37 investors. One of the questions I get now is that a 100 million share authorization is on the table. I'm all for it, I'm voting yes. I have to convince 37 other people why this authorization is important to the company. Could you give us your thoughts on that?
Look, I think this is really what I mentioned earlier, gives us the tools that we need as a company to get to the next level and build a business. I think it's very imperative, and as Sumit has described, that we have a very fantastic piece of technology, but can we build a business around it? That's the entire focus of this conversation and our strategy. I think a lot of the people talk about, you know, fancy cool tech. Again, going back, can you monetize that technology and build a sustainable business which is growing and also yielding cash flow? Ultimately, I want to be a traditional public company. We wanna be a traditional public company where we reduce the cost of capital, right? Which is going from the equity all the way down to fixed income to debt.
That's what the goal of any public company should be, which is emerging from this space, from an R&D to a product company to a business that can be built around this. This authorization is really essentially the tools that we need to get from here to the next level. Hope that sort of, you know, helps you identify, you know, why... I think the other thing that I would say is the financial discipline of the company, and again, by virtue of being a traditional public company and having decades, you know, again, if you think about it, we have been around for 50+ years, including Ibeo. That sets us apart from anybody else who's like, you know, less than five, 10 years ago, you know, they were formed.
I think that's sort of what essentially demonstrates that how disciplined the company has been in using the resources that were always given to this company and what we plan to do in the future as well.
This question, I'm sure you I'd like to at least hear an answer. Certainly the company, based on my knowledge of how the market works with public companies, that you'd have to raise more capital mid to the latter part of the year. You wouldn't wanna wait any longer than that. Do you anticipate being able to sell into the market at a much higher share price based on where we are in our development process?
Look, like I said, I don't think I can comment on when and what the share price is gonna be, right? I think at this point, let me tell you one of the few levers that we have in terms of, you know, the visibility through the next year, right? It's really the revenues that are gonna come in, especially the revenues from the software, which are actually, you know, what is called a commit to consume model. Where we get the revenue or the cash before, and then we bleed it down into the P&L as and when the customer uses the software. That itself, in my mind, is a very big driver to fuel the growth of the company and the OpEx of the company in the next six to 12 months.
On top of that, I also talked about the NRE programs with the OEMs as well. Whenever you are doing a customization, and I think as Sumit talked about, OEMs might wanna have different features enabled or disabled in their custom product. This is where we expect, you know, because that would mean we're gonna have to spend man-hours to do that. That itself is also gonna add to some of the cash coffers of the company to fuel the OpEx between now and the next 12 to 18 months. Like I said, raising capital, we have been very strategic about this in the past because I think that's what even when, you know, the entire industry, you know, especially fueled by the SPACs, the stocks were trading all-time high for everybody else.
I think you could have seen that how prudent the company has been and how strategic, you know, the company had been at that time. Then we sort of again demonstrated that for the Ibeo acquisition. We only sort of raised what we needed to fund the acquisition. I think it ultimately makes us very opportunistic as and when the opportunities present themselves, we're gonna make sure every dollar goes way further out than what has been spent or raised. I think that's sort of what I meant by crashing the algos, because that's how you demonstrate prudence and also beating what we have said in terms of setting the expectations that we are setting for the market.
That's why I mentioned I had a question about whether or not we're gonna be able to name names, and I thought it was a great answer. I think again, validation in terms of building confidence and trust in the market and beating the algos, I think that's a critical goal for the company to be able to name names.
I think benefit it has that you see that other partners that actually went public with their partnerships, right? OEMs want that, you know, 'cause for the first time, they have to deal with high-tech companies that have developed something that they need. Typically, they work with Tier 1 company, like a company, you know, a typical Tier 1 would not, as I said, somebody is not gonna, you know, invest half a billion dollars over 10 years to go develop a technology like this. You know, the conventional business, they just look at revenues for the next quarter. They have to deal with technology companies, and part of that technology company is that they have to be able to say that, "Hey, I have a partnership with this XYZ." Validation is part of, you know, some of these deals that we do.
We are some market?
Absolutely. Of course, this is, this is unique than what we had ever in the past. In the past, as I said early on, we were the small company that was amazing. Same set of stuff that we're using to make the products right now, these guys had already developed it. It was easier to mash that company down because what other choice did they have, right? The market was narrow. They control the market. They can say whatever, and they can do whatever they want. You're better off being in a market where there's multiple customers, multiple competitors, because everybody's competing now. This is a better place to be for us.
Great. That's great news.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think it's a question for Anubhav. You've talked for years about the value of the software, and I'm not talking about the MOSAIK software. I'm talking about, you know, the algorithms and things. Of course now, and certainly we're looking at putting that software really into the hardware and making that one solution. Just like to understand, like, 'cause you've said, like, okay, well, the hardware gets commoditized over time. The price, you know, the OEMs expect your price to keep coming down and down. If you have software in there, you can. Certainly it's higher margins in software generally, but you can maintain that price, right? Can you just? I'm not sure I fully grasp that aspect of how that works or how that is working in your model.
I think, in the model that we had described, I think, at the beginning of last year, the idea was since the hardware is gonna be manufactured in a partnership, obviously the hardware gross profit margins cannot be in excess of, you know, even 20%, 30% because obviously that's something which, you know, again, you could have commanded if you were a Tier 1. Like I said, it's so hard to become a Tier 1. That's, that's a, that's a place where the margins have to be much significantly lower because that's when it's a triangular relationship between the OEM, Tier 1, and MicroVision. The software will remain the biggest component internally for us because that's what If you think about it, the price is what I talked about the $500 ASP at every device.
Imagine as the production scales, you know, our effort because we don't have to spend any money to upgrade the software because as Sumit described, once you're in the chip, it's done. This price is per box. Where I was going with that is the reason why it translates into a higher margin business because over time, every dollar that comes in drops straight to the bottom. It's like almost recovering the cost of your investment that the company has made all the way, reaping it towards the end. Does that make sense? Ultimately the price is fixed, but you don't have to do anything because you've already done the work.
You buy a lidar. There's a hardware. There's one line item, and then they can use the point cloud by itself. That comes out of the lidar. That's the hardware-only cost. If you use the perception, that was also innovation. That was also investment. That's another line item. You know, there's different models, right? I'm not saying a specific model, but we have to find a way to monetize. You wanna build a business brick by brick, but this is a lever that we have that people are not thinking about. They wanna sell expensive software that goes into domain controller. As far as, you know, OEMs are concerned, they said, "Well, that's an executable file. Why would I pay you so much premium for that?
You know, I would have the liability. Once you put in the silicon, you still have other opportunities to build a more successful hardware and software business.
I think I heard two things, and I think I get it. Just to recap, see if it's right. On the one hand, you build a new lidar hardware device. There's costs, right?
Mm-hmm.
The manufacturing costs, you're gonna have to put it together. Somebody's gonna make it, and that's gonna be a real cost. You get some margin out of that.
Mm-hmm.
The software was developed, you know, X years ago, and there's no more cost for that software on that device anymore.
No, no, that's not true.
Okay.
You have to maintain software. Like, when you buy your Windows-
Sure
... machine, there's all of the Windows update, right?
Okay.
You have to maintain it. There's a bunch of work that's done, and you have to keep perfecting it, right? I mean, it's not like after that is done, all the people just quit and they're gone, and we just keep selling an executable file.
It allows you to command.
Yeah
... value for that because you have to maintain it.
Of course, there's value for that. You have to maintain it. You have to do it. You have to perfect it. You have to validate it. You have to create new features, right? You're always gonna be engaged in that thing. That is gonna be a software division. It's gonna be around for a long time. Absolutely.
Okay. The second part I heard was what you said. You, as you mentioned today many times, you put that software over design features are in the ASIC, and then you can just turn things on in the future when.
Not us.
... they need them.
Based on the license that the OEM bought.
Right.
They will do that.
I'm saying.
Let's say they bought license to three features, you know, they pay us for, okay, that's it. Somebody buys a license for eight features, they get that, right? Again, that's the variable part of the model, right? The point is, I want all the engineers that are working in the company to be, "Build anything you want. We'll find a way to monetize it, but build something that solves their problem long term." They can choose to do it themselves, but if it's already created to a high level of quality like the Ibeo team had done or the Hamburg team has done, we get to monetize it. Every OEM, to be honest, truth is, they may not wanna take it. They'll say, "No, no, our team will create that." Okay, here's the point cloud.
Somebody will say, "I'll just take three features." Okay, there you go. The point is create it, and then we find a way to monetize it.
I guess what I'm thinking though is that they could buy it with three features today, get a license, pay it, and two years down the road or three years down the road or five years down, they might say, "Oh, I wanna unlock these new features that are there.
Mm-hmm.
They would have to pay. I mean-
I would like to live in a world where what you said is, you know. Again, I don't wanna oversay anything, right? Of course, that's the idea for building this stuff out, right? What we're being honest about is to find a way to monetize. There's no validation I can give you that we've actually agreed to somebody to do that. The focus is, of course, that's why you wanna invest in the business that will have that variable, right? Something you already sold, perhaps you can sell a license onto that because another feature could get activated, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Back to the front here, and then.
Actually, he asked my question. It was exactly about monetizing other features you've already built into the ASIC at a later time for extra money.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
That's Alex.
Yeah, Alex Yu again. Look, I sometimes dream about MicroVision as a lot of other people do here.
Me too. Don't we all?
You know, one, you know, the thing that I, that kinda, that I keep thinking about, what is the checkmate move to get us the 80% share of the market? Obviously, you know, resolution, dynamic range, that's all fine. I feel like, or if you just, you know, just kinda comment on it, like the lidar interference, because you can blind other lidars and if there's lot of other lidar companies versus, and a lot of cars with lidars. The fact that MicroVision actually has a patent and has a solution to lidar blindness, I feel like that's a big feature or am I just kinda overstating it?
No, you're not. I think like, you know, the active scan locking feature, that's very important, right? I think you're asking the question, what's a checkmate move? You're still thinking about like, you know, technology is it. Technology is very important. We've already created everything that would be needed for a very long period of time. The checkmate move to get that 80%, you know, that, you know, just owning the segment, is actually building a good business, something that people can count on. Like I used an example with somebody back there that when you wanna renovate your house, you don't just pick the guy that can get the most exotic Italian marble for your kitchen. You want that, but a business that can actually finish the job. Do you understand that?
Mm-hmm.
You have to build a business. That's the checkmate move. Like I can talk about tech all day long, you know I like doing that, but that's half the story now. The people you're talking to right now, they have businesses that have been around for 100 years. They want other businesses to behave a manner that you're gonna be around, you know what you're doing. Build a business that they can actually get their brains around, that is not some hokey business model. A lot of people have asked me when I've gone to Germany, they don't understand how the de-SPAC works, and they just made a comment about it because they don't even know what that is, right? We're a traditional business. We're building out, you know, yeah, business may sound boring, but that being boring in this environment is actually the checkmate move.
Mobileye did not become what they are by, you know, just exotic features. They have a lot of exotic features. We're gonna have more exotic features, absolutely. learn how to monetize it and build a business that's sustainable. That's the checkmate move.
Right. I understand, you know, building a business is important, but that's in terms of barriers to entry. I feel like anyone who's kind of disciplined, has a good business mind can do that more or less. In terms of technology, that to me is more like the barrier. It's the, it's the, the moat around what you have. In terms of, you talked about it before in terms of the secret sauce. This is the secret sauce that MicroVision has, which was developed, you know, 20, whatever, 15, 20 years ago, or even more than that. Can you talk more about, like I wanna feel as an investor here, I wanna feel that Innoviz and Luminar and all these other guys are not comparable. That's how I would like to feel.
The secret sauce, without giving too much detail, can you just kinda talk more about that a little bit?
Yeah.
'Cause my question is so simple.
If you think about a marathoner that wins the London Marathon, they don't say, "I won this, so forever and ever and ever, I'm the greatest marathoner ever." They still have to get up and train the next day and win another one, and another one, another one, right? If you think about technology, it's no different. You have to keep innovating, right? The stuff that was created 15 years ago, some of it we use right now, but there's new things that the guys create all the time. You have to keep actually at it, and that's how you actually have to go develop technology, right? You want a answer perhaps that tell me one thing that, you know, forever and ever and ever I can like turn my brain off and never have to think about it. It is always a race.
You have to always create other things. Don't discount the fact how hard it is to build a good business. Companies have created technology for a long period of time, and they're gone because they never thought about building a good business. Yeah, you say more or less, I would say it's more than less. It is not that simple. You have to get people to trust you. That is not trivial. That's not trivial, actually. Yeah, you know, why are we so direct and honest, just not with you, but with the customers? Because they have to trust us that when we say we're gonna deliver something, it's not just that our tech will deliver, that we're gonna deliver a business that is gonna be around to support you. These are things that are not trivial, right?
I know like, listen, I'm an engineer, we could all geek out about it all the time, but at some point, we have to stop and say, "Okay, we are gonna do great things. The team's gonna do great things. They're gonna invent awesome things." If you don't build a business, think about Ibeo. You think the Ibeo guys, they were not surprised by the insolvency and they were like harshly affected by that? It's a personal thing. We almost went insolvent as a company, I know exactly how they feel, right? If they were the successful business, everything they've created could have been monetized, but that never happened, and they were looking at the abyss, right? If you think about it, where both the companies failed and the joint company has to succeed is a successful business, and that is not trivial.
No, trust me. Sit back, you know, put aside whatever your ego is and think about it. Getting somebody to trust you, it's not based on the specs that I can give you. I can talk about that all day. I can tell you what the next thing we have to build. But right now, for the company to be sustainable, you have to really build trust with everybody saying, "We're predictable. We're gonna be around. We're gonna give you the best technology at the best price, and we're not gonna disappoint." If you think about it, right? I mean, I'm going back down. I'm being so harsh about that is because it is that important actually.
I mean, like, the whole this whole event is, you know, so people understand that this is now really about, you know, not just a proxy question. They're really building a business is even more effort than technology because we've already done a lot of technology development. We are way ahead of everybody, and we'll be even further ahead as we keep investing. We're gonna falter if we just focus on that.
Right. Thank you.
Sorry.
Hi. John Nelson again. I've heard it said that, innovation is realizing that, you know, what your customers are gonna need before they realize it. My question is. You talk about your guys. You're an engineering guy, I get that. What do you do to foster within MicroVision an atmosphere where there's a sense of, recognition and reward around, people realizing these things and being able to integrate features into your design that are gonna ultimately be differentiators or, as one marketer put it, delighters?
I think, the DNA of the company will always be great engineers, you know, deciding what they can create and, you know, looking out there. That has not changed. I think, you know, we will mature as a business. We're gonna have, you know, more conventional business things to create. The DNA of the company, the combined company, is the same, which is actually engineering-led. You know, a lot of things that you have right now, nobody gave us a spec. These guys were working on this years in advance, well before any product was needed, right? That cannot change. You know, certainly, like, you know, it will not change as long as I'm CEO. That's important because that's what's fueled this company to get where it is.
The only way you think about winning a big section of a segment is to keep doing that. While in the background, you work extra hard, double time it, and build out the business as well so you're there, right? You get everybody. The, the investment in new R&D, the new things that are there, nothing has changed. We incentivize our team, our engineering team as well, you know, with, you know, as you know, with the shares and things that, you know, that they have to be part of the story. I think all of you guys should be, I mean, I hope you are, but you should be very happy about that because these guys are creating amazing things for you, and they should have an incentive to make it even better.
You know, align management's, you know, compensation, but also, you know, employee compensation to long-term shareholder value. We've done everything possible in the last three years, not just build technology, but also try to build the fundamentals that the employees see a reason that long term, their, you know, value creation has an effect that they could also enjoy. That's how we keep I mean, that's how you keep ahead of everybody, right? Just be the fastest gazelle on the savanna, right? You're not gonna be able to do it by, like, you know, forcing, you know, features all the time. These guys are gonna come up with stuff that nobody's even thought of. You just have to let them work out what they're doing. Yeah.
I think that's one of the reasons why we are able to attract talent from the Big Tech. You know, obviously, this market, as you can imagine, the people who work here are really passionate about, you know, creating something that is really valuable. You know, obviously, Big Tech can throw around money, but the testament that these people, you know, are really passionate and devoted to the cause, I think tells the story itself.
Thank you. Yeah, I think that there's no substitute for that within an organization. Thank you both.
We're engineering-driven. I think I would be lying if I said we're anything else. We're always gonna have great engineers. I mean, think about MicroVision. We've had lots of ups and downs. You know, if any of you guys have been around for 20 years, you know a lot of great people have left. You know, we miss them, but, you know, the company always found engineers that will take up and take it to a next level of height, right? Yeah.
May I ask a question?
Sure. Of course.
This is for Drew. I know you're not mic'd up. I'm sorry. Two things. Do you have strategies for protecting our IP? Secondly, I think, if you look historically at our company, do you have strategies for making our contracts more desirable going forward? Thank you.
The toughest question goes to Drew.
Absolutely, we have both of those things. We have... Is this working? You need me-
Yeah.
We have an in-house patent counsel. He has been with the company for about 17 years now, I believe. He knows this technology inside and out. He actually is an engineer, but for us, he's a patent lawyer. This company, as you can see from its history, has a very strong process for protecting its patent portfolio. We take that very seriously. Ibeo did as well. Combining our patent portfolios has been pretty straightforward. We feel very confident in the protection of our intellectual property. On the contract side, I can't speak for historical contracts at MicroVision. Yes, going forward, again, we have a strong internal legal team, and we make good use of outside counsel as and where needed.
Obviously, it's what I live and breathe every day, so we're very focused on it.
Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you.
Let's go back here.
Yeah. My name is Matt Pence. I had a question going back to talking about AR and VR. I initially invested in the company. I'm a gamer. It's kind of the technology that I know. Now that we understand that Microsoft is making HoloLens and it has MicroVision parts in it, is there a reason, like, at this investor day, like, we couldn't show off that technology, I don't know how to say this? The base that doesn't necessarily know a whole lot about, like, automotive, for example, versus video game technology and the future of that. Like, even just speaking to it, would make people more confident-
I think I can speak to it. I'll speak to it, right? There's a very specific reason you're not seeing that. It's consistent with, like, you know, we're authentic people, authentic company. Clearly said since I took over that that's not we're investing in at all, and it's not because I don't have a love for it's because it's not the right time to run a business around it. you know, I think, you know, there could be a personal reason why that, people think that, "Oh, you know, Sumit won't even say the word AR." I've worked longer in that. I have more passion for that than any of you can even imagine. I know more about that than you don't know. I will tell you what you don't know, okay?
It's not the fact that, like, you and I may be passionate about it and we're willing to take our glasses off and put it on, but what you always find, people will use it, but then they'll put it down after 30 days and not use it again, right? I just don't want it here because it dilutes what we're doing. We're spending your money with this, not on that. That's a hobby that I can have it at my home, somebody can have it, we can talk about it, you know, over a glass of water, but that, you know, that's about it. The business that we're running, that we're spending our money on is this, right? That's the reason why it's not here. There's no other secret thing.
You know, it's not a matter of that I don't have a passion for that vertical. I'm pretty sure that I can argue about how much more passionate I am about that than anybody else, okay? I cut my teeth on that one. I worked for Mark Spitzer on his company when we had no money, when, you know, everything was, like, dying, and I just kept working at it. I know more about that, and I'm passionate about that. It's not the right time. I just keep saying that. People are not accepting it. Alex will, you know, probably, like, give me a hard time about this, but you just have to accept it. It's just the market's not ready for that yet. That's a fact.
Thank you.
Great. I think we've got time for, one more question, and there's someone who hasn't had a chance to speak yet. We'll go there, and then I think we're gonna have to wrap.
We'll do two more. We'll do two more back there.
Two more? Okay. Good.
Thank you.
Yeah. Hi. Nogi [Ask]. This is for Anubhav. The guidance that you gave of, $12 million to $15 million, right? Is that correct?
I'm pretty sure it's $10 million to $15 million.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What percent of that would you say, if any, could be from additional acquisition versus organic revenue growth?
This $10 million-$15 million is really coming from, you know, when we announced this acquisition. This is coming from the product portfolio that we have. This is the product portfolio we got, the breadth of things that you see today.
Okay. Okay, perfect. Thanks.
Can I ask you real quick, on that $12 million-$15 million range, you mentioned NRE? Is that factored into that $12 million-$15 million? Is that possibly?
That's a great question. The reason why the revenue and that is a bit different because NRE. Sorry, I don't wanna get too technical, but there is a difference between what you can recognize as revenue versus what NRE is because technically on the books is what you can show as revenue because they are ASC 606 requirements or performance obligations. When those obligations are met, doesn't mean even if the company receives cash, the U.S. GAAP doesn't allow you to recognize that as revenue, right? That's why I think I wanted to be, you know, clear that, you know, there are different factors or drivers that drive what gets booked as revenue. I wanted to make sure that, you know, this is...
These are the different streams that the company has or different tools that we use, that we will use to put this revenue on the books.
Great. There's a last question. Okay.
Thank you. I'm Kate O'Neill. I wanted to more make a comment and just to say thank you for having us here today. Thanks for the test drive. It was tremendous to witness it and experience it. I think we are all realizing this technology is going to change our lives, especially as we age and grow.
Mike, she was looking at you when she said that. I don't know, maybe there's a easter egg about that.
That's really it. You've all asked great questions. I've learned so much today and really thank you.
Thank you so much. No, thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, guys. Thank you.
I just wanted to say thank you to Sumit and Anubhav for enduring, you know, three hours of intense, grueling questions. Thank you, guys. Thank you all for coming today. Do you wanna wrap it up, Anubhav?
Yeah. Again, I really thank all of you for coming here and really witnessing what we have created. I think this company has really transformed into something that, I think we all can be very proud of. The team of engineers, the spirit most importantly, and I think the passion, because I think the combination of all these elements are really the key to success. I'm just gonna repeat the same thing that I said, Rome wasn't built in a day. Obviously, as we build this business brick by brick, that's what is the foundation is based on.
This is a traditional public company, and we just wanna continue that DNA to show and create a business which is gonna be valued on fundamentals and the true foundation of the technology and what can be created around it. Thank you all for coming to this event and making this a big success.
Yep. I just wanna say that, you know, it means a lot to us. Like, these guys work very hard. All of us work very hard. The attention we get, you know, in these kind of events, I think I can tell you from the employee standpoint, they love it. We wanna thank you for that. I know a lot of you traveled really far away to come here, and that personally means a lot to me, so thank you for that. If you get a chance, congratulate Anubhav. Today is his birthday.
Oh.
The whole event, you know, was organized 'cause I was traveling, so I really wanna thank him and the entire team. You know, our team, you know, worked very hard to get this experience created for you. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.