And to add what Michael was saying, our cash balance continues to grow. Not only does it continue to grow from operations, but it's growing from operations while we're buying stock back. So we have an active stock repurchase plan, and we've been able to buy back a lot of stock. And obviously, we wouldn't do that if we didn't think our stock was undervalued. I mean, so we're actively buying stock back and still generating excess cash for us through the operation. So that's all we have for today. Does anybody have any questions? So our competition for each division is different. But, you know, so like Stripe that we talked about earlier, is our main competitor on payment facilitation. And we do really well against them, and it's because they don't have a focus on customer service.
They have some great technology, and we have great technology as well. But when you're, you know, processing payments for a company, the people want to be able to talk to somebody on the phone, and it's as simple as that, and that's why we beat them. They also don't share revenue, so they don't work with software companies and give them back money for payments, and we do. So that's a good example. And, you know, card issuing, we have competitors like Marqeta that kind of do different things than us, different verticals, but very similar to us. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Yeah, so we're going to continue to grow next year. We haven't set guidance for next year, but we have let everybody know that we have enough deals already sold that our revenue top line number should exceed $100 million next year.
It's likely us. In fact, I think we have a huge account here that a software company called TenantM agic that works with a lot of buildings here in New York. Yeah, that might be us, and I might have your bank account. So, yeah. Anybody else? All right. Thank you so much. Our stock symbol is just like our name, USIO, and we're traded on Nasdaq. Thank you.
Thank you, Usio, and everybody that joined us today. We will have Ocean Power in here next, if you want to stick around.
Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today at this year's MicroCap Rodeo. My name is Charlie Rushing. I work for Catalyst Corporate Advisory. We are a capital markets advisory firm, but today is not about me, it is about you guys. So next up, we have Ocean Power Technologies, with CEO Philipp Stratmann and CFO Bob Powers joining us. We're really looking forward to hearing about the company's turnaround, and I'm excited to hear about it. So without further ado, Philipp?
Thanks, man. Thank you. Morning, everybody. Yeah, as Charlie said, Philipp Stratmann, I'm the CEO and President of Ocean Power Technologies, ticker symbol OPTT. And I look forward to walking you through some of the major changes we have made in the company over the last three-plus years, the pathway to growth that we've set up, and the, you know, cessation of the dissident shareholder activities that we had for the past sixteen-plus months. So what do we do at OPT? We essentially provide ocean intelligence solutions. Think about this, you know, persistent and resident monitoring of data sets, customers being that defense or security, or be that on the commercial side, need to collect to do their job. It could be all sorts of things being, you know, underwater surveys for pipelines. It could be infrastructure surveys for telco cables. It could be security around ports.
It can be border monitoring, virtual border fences, and a whole bunch of other areas. And we do all of that by utilizing, you know, in-house owned and maintained, and developed dual-use technology, which allows us to play the commercial side and the defense side. And we've put our guidance towards profitability by the end of calendar 2025. You'll see a couple of references to calendar versus fiscal years in our presentation. We have a wonky fiscal year, which goes from the first of May to the end of April. So some of the quarters are a little bit out of whack at times. So OPT, quickly, everything we do, and I'll go into a little bit more detail, is based around two primary underlying solutions.
If any of you had known OPT 3+ years ago, it was probably all about some form of version of the buoy that you see up here, and that was going to be built, sold, and never really quite materialized. So we took the company and pivoted into a solution provider in that industry, and more focused on how that industry works. The entire management team is new. Most of us come from either the defense and/or military, and/or oil and gas, and/or some form of maritime space, so we have a really intricate understanding of how our customer base wants to utilize these things. The way we positioned it to our customers is, they don't have to understand how the underlying technology works. We can provide them with the technology and with the operators in order to do what needs to be done.
We operate primarily out of an assembly facility in our main office that we have down in Monroe Township, in New Jersey. It's a 50,000 sq ft facility, right off the Turnpike, 20 minutes south of Newark Airport. Mainly because it's really close to the Port of New York, it's really close to the Port of Baltimore, and it's really close to the airport. We can go and ship things in and out very effectively. We also have a 10,000 sq ft facility in Richmond, California, which is just on the northern end of San Francisco Bay. That's where we have our autonomy development team, and that's because it's really easy to hire in really good robotics engineers in the San Francisco Bay area. So ticker symbol is OPTT, and we're just under 50 employees nowadays. So we've also. You know, I've got a slide on this.
Really, we focused the team to focus on execution and value delivery for the customers. And the leadership team came in brand new. I was appointed CEO three and a half years ago, and over the course of the last three years, brought in Matt Burdyny as Chief Commercial Officer. He spent just under 15 years at Teledyne Marine, working on the technology side for the industry. I brought in Bob Powers as CFO. He's got a great background in public accounting and within private equity companies, so a real focus on cash flow and keeping ourselves focused on what we need to be focused on. And we're U.S. citizens. We work 30% veterans across the company, and that has enabled us to really build up our DoD book of business.
Many of us, including myself, have backgrounds at some point in our lives, working in the defense industry or serving in the military directly. So why now? We put this in here because we found out over the course of the last three and a half years, many people at some point interacted with OPT in a prior life. What is important to look at is that since 2021, we've integrated autonomous systems into what was previously a buoy power station company. That, we then took into a whole bunch of next-gen systems, you know, which enabled us to go and combine the buoys and the vehicles, and materially simplify how these things operate out there. We then started focusing on growth, and you'll see the chart that we've got.
Since we've come in, we've done almost a fourfold increase in revenues from where we took over management of the company. And in the next calendar year, so these are calendar years... we're guiding towards profitability, and we're doing that on the basis of having reduced operational expenditures and having focused on top line growth that we're bringing forward. So what are the products and services that we bring to our customers? On the left is the revamped next-generation PowerBuoy systems. Essentially what it is, it combines wave power generation all in-house. There's no externally moving parts, plus solar panels and small wind turbines in a buoy shape that has up to 150 kWh of battery storage in it. It's non-grid connected, so it doesn't require permits for expensive cables to be strung from the shore out to where they operate.
They are designed to power payloads over long periods of time in remote regions of the oceans, whether that is listening for whales that are coming across a construction site, or listening for submarines, or trying to power whatever you need to power on the seabed, or watching for small boats crossing into U.S. waters where they're not meant to be. Adding the solar panels onto this has enabled us to materially broaden our geographic reach, and you would have seen recently announcements of us announcing a partnership with a company in Kuwait on Monday. We just this morning announced that we're shipping one of our vehicles from Bahrain to Dubai to be present during ADIPEC, which is the big oil and gas conference for the Middle East. The vehicles that I just mentioned are on the right-hand side. This is what we integrated in 2021 through the acquisition.
We standardized those on three sizes, and they're really the pickup truck of autonomous boats. You need to think about this the way you would have thought about aerial drones ten years ago. This is where ocean movement is going. It's all going autonomous, and it's going renewably powered, primarily because that allows you to operate for much longer periods of time, and it removes even more operators out of there, which makes it even cheaper for our customers to go and operate out and do what they need to do. And then we've integrated this under our artificial intelligence capable platform, which is we call Meros, which enables us to do learning and correlation of data sets that come from the buoys together with the vehicles, and then continuously reinforce and improve the data sets that we collect and the intelligence that our customers are looking for.
Further example of what we've done, you know, if you look at the top here, we've set up the Meros system and the buoys so they can work with each other. And that is part, you know. But obviously, because we're on the ocean, we can't rely on cloud infrastructure. So a lot of the work that we did over the past three years has been at developing an at-the-edge computing capability that enables you to really focus on what you're looking for. So the customer wants to go and find out that, "Hey, I don't want any commercial fishermen entering my area where I'm doing construction, but I'm allowing, you know, tankers to go through at a certain speed."
What the system will do, you program it and set it, that it only sends an alert to the operator when it detects something that's smaller than, you know, say, 100 ft, for example, traveling at a speed faster than 15 knots. It has the intelligence on board through the various ways that we program the algorithm to figure out what is meant to be there versus not meant to be there. So you avoid overloading people with more data than they need. So it's really intelligence-focused as opposed to data-focused. And then down there, this is not CGI. This is a real-life picture of a project we did in Raritan Bay. So between, you know, just through the Verrazzano Straits in New York, where we remotely attached one of our 16 ft vehicles with an electric engine, attached it to one of our buoys, and started charging it up.
So as you progress out further, you can start seeing how you're gonna end up being in a position where you can have buoys detached out in the middle of the ocean, have autonomous vehicles operating, and when they need to, they can come along, recharge themselves, do data exfil, and then continue operating. That has helped us get into a whole bunch of markets and customers. You know, we broadly separate our markets into two bits. It's defense and security, and it's commercial. Some parts of commercial do include government's portion. That's like things like, you know, we would consider NOAA to be more on the government commercial side, as opposed to the specific kind of behaviors and processes as a company we need to have in place to work with the DoD, DHS or allied forces overseas.
So on the defense and security side, it is things like, you know, underwater monitoring, unexploded ordnance, mine countermeasures, counter underwater robot systems. If what you see in the public news hasn't told you anything, it is that the increase in autonomous warfare has gone up exponentially over the past two years, and we, as the United States, are still trying to take out drones that cost $20,000 with a $3 million cruise missile to try and keep shipping lanes free. So there is a massive demand pent up and built up to bring these systems out further out into that part of the industry.
But then equally, on the offshore energy side, with increasing pressure on oil prices and increasing OpEx pressure on operators, and increasing sustainability pressure from the renewable side of the fence, they also wanna use autonomous vehicles because there's obviously a direct offset in terms of carbon, because these things are much smaller, they're electrically powered, but there's the indirect offset. Every time you're putting out three drones that operate in a swarm, you're not putting out a large vessel that uses bunker fuel to do anything. So it's a direct cost saving that our customers see as a basis of working with us. That has led us to being able to achieve this.
So the management team that is now in place, and we said we did about a fourfold over the past, you know, three years, and we took what was a sub-$1 million business into just below $6 million in the last fiscal year. And we've continued driving, you know, $1 million-plus quarters year on year, quarter on quarter. What is not shown in this chart is, at the same time, over the last three quarters, we've also driven gross margin from what was negative into, you know, 50% plus ongoing, you know, on ongoing margins, which has helped us be more certain on that pathway to profitability that we've put out there. And interestingly enough, in that revenue stack, you know, it's a healthy mix between sales and leases and services.
I'd say the leases and services are what are driving the high margin operations. You can sell a system, and you sell it once, but if you're leasing it, these systems have useful lifetimes of, you know, in the vehicle side, between five and eight years, on the buoys, between 12 and 15 years. They pay for themselves after about two years of utilization, cash on cash, in terms of what we put in to build them, but they keep on operating. Yes, you can have some maintenance expenses, but you can start as we start increasing the deployed fleet and installed base, you'll see how that service revenue will increase even further. We've been able to do the revenue growth because we've been able to materially increase our pipeline and focus on positive cash flow.
What you see in that pie chart down there is the fact that we took that the company that we had. We reduced burn by, you know, 39% in the last quarter that we announced publicly. Over 50% of our company is now execution-focused. You know, there is no huge R&D overhead. There isn't a whole bunch of fancy things that we try and do. It is delivering for our customers day in, day out. If you add on top of that, the maintenance and sustaining engineering functions that we have, about 75% of the company is focused on generating money for our shareholders and helping out our customer base and increase that conversion rate from pipeline to backlog to revenues.
We've not been shy about publishing where we see our pipeline, and the reason we feel good about our pipeline is the fact that every quarter where we announce that, you know, backlog has increased and revenues are growing, our pipeline doesn't go down, because we keep on feeding more stuff into it. But it's also not all hypothetical. This isn't like a, "Well, we think this is a $10 billion market, and when you capture 5% of it," this is a, "Well, we know that we have, you know, about $30+ million at the moment under review with customers." These are customers who we are in discussions with, not just, we would like to talk to them at some point, but they're under NDA. They've received, you know, RFP responses in certain cases, and they are reviewing what we could help them do.
But interestingly enough, there aren't many comps for us out there. Bob and I have this conversation, you know, with you and other people in this space constantly. The bulk of our competition is venture capital backed. That's leading to a discrepancy of between a 3x to 6x market valuation discrepancy. If you're looking at our nearest competitors, you know, they're 3x plus what we're valued at in the markets. That presents a massive upside potential, where we know that certainly the private markets have validated this drone and buoy approach that exists. It's just the public markets haven't paid much attention to it because there isn't a huge level of comps in that space. But what's driven part of that downward pressure on our market cap?
Part of it is the fact that, you know, we finally defeated the activist campaign from Paragon Technologies, which went on for about 16 months and caused huge amounts of pressure, and I'll show you on the next chart of what that did to our share price, but there is a huge amount of misleading negative releases that came out at least once or twice a week for a period of 16 months, that oftentimes had very little basis in facts, but they kept on going out. I know that in August, Paragon did announce that they have ceased any and all activist activities against OPT, and in that same press release, they also announced that they have a new CEO and Chairman, so we now see this put to bed.
We think this vindicates the effort we did to protect our shareholders' equity as we went through this. And we can now refocus with our customers on the pipeline and backlog and revenue generation now that this is finally behind us, and the distraction that this caused.
Sorry, did Paragon still maintain their equity stake, or did they also [inaudible]? Can you speak to that?
I think they stated they maintained some of the holding. They're not disclosing how much it is, because they don't have to, because I think they haven't triggered any SEC thresholds, that it's sufficiently material for them to actually file a release about it. They haven't filed a Form 13 in over nine months.
How much is it?
4.9%.
T hey were always up.
Yeah, but they did file the 4.9% as part of their campaign of wanting to take over the board in the company without paying a shareholder premium.
Yeah, fine.
Sure. Yeah. So what you can see here is, this is the share price over that 16 month period. You know, in the presentation, which you can download, it's a bit hard to see on the presentation, but we felt it was important to highlight how much downward pressure is correlated to events and press releases that they put out, and also the amount of shorts that were in our stock during that same period of time, that were feeding off that ongoing bad news flow that we saw. And that's obviously, that's definitely not helped the discrepancy, but it obviously presents an opportunity in terms of the valuation upside. So why is it that, you know, we are successful?
If you look at what our customers are seeing for them, if you put yourself in the shoes of our customer, you know, ignore management, ignore everything else, but what OPT offers them is a material decrease in costs for them. Now, you're not spending tens of thousands of dollars a day on a ship to go out to do a survey. You're spending a couple thousand dollars for a couple of drones to go out and do your survey. These drones can. They can work as swarms. We announced, actually, we put it out on social media on Friday, over the weekend, and we had a small flotilla of drones going for a U.S. Navy demonstration on the West Coast of the United States. But you can set them to work in a swarm.
You can set one as the leader, the others to follow, and they're automatically adjust their track as they follow. We work well with aerial payloads. We've integrated aerial drones onto ours. We've done underwater robots, we've deployed sonar systems. We can detect underwater vehicles and a whole range of things. Same goes for the buoys. We did a project, recently that we concluded for, Premier Oil. It goes back a few years ago, they've now got a different name in the North Sea, but they were decommissioning an oil well in the North Sea, and the regulator over there requires you to put a guard vessel over the wellhead until the wellhead is cut six feet below the midline.
You can do that, and you can spend a couple of tens of thousands of dollars a day for that and burn fuel and have five or six people at risk, or you can put a buoy out there, which we did for them. We had the buoy out there for six months, didn't require any maintenance. It met the regulatory requirements of telling people that they were entering an exclusion zone, didn't burn any carbon, and, you know, that's the kind of things that decreases or eliminates costs for them. That equally improves safety for them. Every time we improve their safety and make it easier for them through automation out in the field, be that, you know, defense and security or offshore energy, that decreases risk. Decreased risk means decreased costs for them again, because there's less of an exposure, and the insurances like it.
There is much improved decision-making. If you're trying to make a decision and you're going, "Hey, I've seen something out," or, "The satellite is telling me that, you know, 118 nautical miles out from Southern California, there's a couple of dots that we saw crossing the Mexican-U.S. border." By the time the satellite are back again, it's too late. By the time you've dispatched a Coast Guard cutter to figure out what's going on out there, it's too late. But if you have a row of buoys daisy-chained along the border with vehicles in between, not only do you know that there might be something there, you know that there is something there, you know what it is, you know where it's heading, and you can either further interrogate, intercept or interdict if that's what's required. Same goes for offshore energy.
If you are a wind farm developer and you have regulatory requirements around, "Hey, you have to stop construction when you see a right whale coming up and down the East Coast," well, at the moment, you're doing that because somebody may or may not have seen a fluke, and if they may or may not have seen a fluke, you stop construction. You put a buoy out there, three buoys out there that can triangulate the position and the sound of whales, you can continue operating and constructing up until the point so that pod of whales is actually within the exclusion zone that they're not meant to be in. That saves them tens of thousands every time, which becomes hundreds of thousands, which becomes millions of dollars for them. It is that benefit that we bring to customers, why it's successful.
And you know, overall, there is the benefit for them on sustainability efforts. You know, we're seeing huge amounts of interest from our customer base, the fact that these are self-regenerating, self-powering systems to a large extent. And the defense industry likes it because that means there's no heat signatures, there's lower noise signatures. You don't have the thermal footprint that a diesel engine would have. And every time you have something that is renewable and sustainable, you don't have to put a war fighter out with a jerrycan to try and fill up your system that is doing your intelligence and surveillance. And that's what's been helping us. Yes.
What is your monthly burn and how much in the bank?
So the question was, what our monthly burn is and how much we have in the bank. Monthly burn is about $750,000. Correct, Bob?
Correct.
Yeah, and at the last quarter end, we had $3.5 million cash in hand.
What is the range of your device? How many miles it gets per hour?
So the buoy it can see about 12 to 15 nautical miles radius, and that's based on the height that we've got. So you cover about 40 normal miles of diameter with one buoy. And as I said, because they can work with each other, that becomes a very huge footprint very quickly. The duration on the vehicles, the 22-footer, we've done one exercise with the U.S. Navy, where we did 75 hours autonomously in international waters. And that was out in the Middle East.
Could these be used for drug interdiction?
The question was whether they can be used for drug interdiction. It is certainly one of the use cases that we've had discussions around. If you can go and detect a small boat and then go and figure out and interdict it, whether that is a drug smuggler or a people smuggler or just somebody entering an exclusion zone, doesn't really matter what they do, but you can go in and, you know, do the necessary movement.
I just want to ask a couple financial questions. You made a few statements in there. You said you achieved 50% gross margin in 2024. Is that fiscal 2024?
Fiscal 2024, yeah.
Okay. So have you given any kind of guidance as to what you expect in fiscal 2025, which ends when? In March. Oh, you say May?
End of April.
End of April.
End of April next year.
Okay.
We would expect gross margin to continue on the trend it has been on and be around about maintained.
Okay. Also, you made a comment with, you're expected to be cash flow positive in 2025 . That's fiscal 2025 ?
No, that is the end of calendar 2025.
But you said you're gonna be profitable by the end of 2025, and I thought you said in there cash flow positive in 2025.
Same timing, but Q4 calendar twenty-five.
Okay, that's fine. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. So I saw the revenue chart. You only went out to, I think it was fiscal or-
Fiscal.
Yeah, yeah.
This, trust me, I feel the same way, so.
Okay, got it.
Question on data collection. Question against the time. You're gonna be collecting a lot of data. There's a chance... Is there a chance that you can monetize that as well?
So the question was about, with the data collection that we have, whether we can monetize that data. We collected all the data, and we are having several conversations at the moment around the data that we have and where else that could be monetized outside of our Meros platform, where we're using it to help with machine learning on either side. But there's obviously other values in it, because there are very few other opportunities or other data sets that you get, where you can get in-ocean data of what certain vessels at certain speeds and certain weather conditions look like. And that's of great value to some of the people that we're talking about in terms of autonomy and detection.
[Audio distortion]
So the question was. If I paraphrase the question, the question was, how much intelligence is within the autonomy stack to enable us to act on triggers that we receive whilst we're doing a mission? It is continually improving. So-
[Inaudible]
No, it depends on what it is. So, like, basic things, like basic obstacle avoidance, basic obstacle detection, that already exists. Like, if the system runs loose, it's not gonna crash into the Bay Bridge, 'cause it sees an obstacle, and it will go into an emergency stop. The work that we're doing on, you know, the autonomy is further advanced when you're doing a kind of leader- and follower mode. And we've demonstrated that. We did a six-week project up in Goodnews Bay off of western Alaska to do surveys, where there was one vehicle as the lead, one as the follower, and the follower automatically adjusted its course every time the leader determined that the way that the survey was being done needed to be adjusted.
We have a partnership with Red Cat Holdings, and that is to further integrate feedback from systems that are not just ours. So if an aerial drone spots a target, it is for that, w e're working at the moment, and some of the exercises we're doing right now is to have that aerial drone re-task the wayfinding system for the vehicle, to then, for the vehicle, go further to where the drone has seen something. So you end up in that integrated system of system autonomy picture, and that's where we're actively engaged in.
What about if one of these is being run down. How much is one of these worth?
So how much is one of these worth and what happens when it's run down? Well, the Navy uses a really nice term for this. They consider these to be attritable systems. Their view is like, "Well, if we were to lose one entirely, it's $300,000-$400,000. You know, it's not the great $300,000-$400,000. It's not the greatest thing we would like to happen, but you know what? It's cheaper than whatever else might happen if we're doing stuff." Buoys are slightly more, but all of them are cyber compliant, so if somebody was to fish it out, there's no data they can take from it, because they meet various cyber standards that we need to meet.
I guess that completes my question. Leasing and services, what percentage of that is your revenue now?
So the question was, what percentage is leasing and services of the revenue? I'd say leasing and services is just under 50% of the revenue stack. We're looking to increase that further as the installed base comes along. We also, two or three weeks ago, publicly announced that we've launched a service level offering, so that we can work with customers who are saying, "Hey, actually, I want a premium support." And that can go as far as having an entire asset of spares taken to a region where they're needed. So that materially increases that services type of the revenue. The reason we like the services and leasing part, while it is lower total revenues initially, it is great recurring forecastable revenue.
So, how do you take on the risk of if it's [audio distortion] like he says, gets run down or whatever? [Inaudible}
Well, that's taken care in the contracts, depending on how it's operated. So particularly in a lot of the U.S. government contracts, they're kind of contractor-owned, government-operated. And in those cases, it's. There's the sufficient coverage included in the terms that we have for them, that we would get a replacement if needed.
Has anyone tried to sabotage your equipment, potentially?
Not that I'm aware of that. I'm sure people might have tried, but so far we've not lost any systems to sabotage. But yeah, so as I said, you know, these are some of the events, particularly since the end of the last quarter, because, you know, we're coming up to one. But, you know, we just recently announced a partnership with Kuwait, focusing on that part of the Middle East. We just this morning announced that one of our vehicles was moving to Dubai to be exhibited at ADIPEC, so that will be in Abu Dhabi in early November. We recently announced some work down in sub-Saharan Africa, and we announced a couple of partnerships focusing on Latin America, specifically Brazil.
I mean, the offshore market in Brazil is still huge, and we look forward to continuing to service that. So with that, you know, as I said, you know, It's a brand new management team. It's a very different approach to market. We have expanded the business model. We've changed the strategy from where it was before. You know, we don't have any bank or long-term debt on the company, and, you know, we look forward to continuing executing the strategy we've set out. With that, thank you.
Thank you to Philipp and Bob from Ocean Power Technologies. We do have a little bit of a break in this room until after lunch. Tune back in here to this room at 1:00 P.M. for The Glimpse Group.
Thank you. Appreciate it.