All right, we're back from Cantor Fitzgerald's Technology Conference. I'm Colin Canfield, Cantor Fitzgerald's government technology and space analyst. Today we have the pleasure of hosting Jonathan Baliff, CFO of Redwire. Take it away.
My mic just came off, so hold on a second.
Thanks, Colin. .Jonathan Baliff, I'm Chief Financial Officer, Board Member at Redwire Space. I'm just going to, you know, generally we don't, we're not slide heavy. We've got about 30 minutes or so. I did want to, we just released earnings yesterday. We gave some level of disclosure and some new disclosure concerning our acquisition. Currently we are in the midst of a transformative acquisition. This slide, or really the introduction to our investor presentation, demonstrates the power of an acquisition of one of the largest Group 2 UAS systems developers and constructors in the world called Edge Autonomy. This is meant to show why would you combine a satellite manufacturing business with a drone manufacturing business? The answer is simple. Our clients and our fastest growing part of Redwire is national security, represented by the warfighter here.
The warfighter currently does not have seamless communication between command and control, his kinetic operations represented by the tanks and the armored vehicles, his eyes, which are the UASs and the tactical eyes, and then the ability to then seamlessly communicate over line of sight, which is critical given most of the battlefields we participate in in the future will have multiple different types of terrain. That is the satellites. Redwire makes all of the things that you see on this page. We technically do not make the helicopters. That is fine. I used to be part of that a long time ago.
The bottom line is the UASs and the satellites are part of what we call a joint all-domain command and control system, which is where all of the defense departments, but particularly the Europeans, want to get to this seamless ability between the satellites and the UASs to both communicate with each other and eventually for Redwire to be able to manage their data and analyze their data, because that's really where we're going here as part of the maturity of both the space market and obviously the UAS market. I would just give, you can look online. We have a ton of information. We're a very transparent company. We're one of the few that gives annual guidance, even though our, you know, our industries are less mature than commercial aviation. This is the power of it, not from a client standpoint, but from literally what are we making.
That line, think of that line as below the line is Europe, above the line is the U.S.. It's important because of what you've been reading about export manufacturing, export controls, tariffs. We make the Hammerhead and Phantom satellites in Europe. Hammerhead and Phantom have, especially Hammerhead, have a decades-long experience in maneuverable satellites in LEO. Phantom is a Very Low Earth Orbit, around 150 km up. Now we'll be adding the Edge Autonomy Group 2 UAS system, which is called Penguin, which is one of the major players in Ukraine. Above the line are our U.S. orbital drones. That's what our satellites are. They're orbital drones. They can maneuver quite highly in high-threat environments. We have Mako in GEO, Thresher in LEO, SabreSat in VLEO.
Obviously our newest, when we complete the transaction, the VX-3, which we call the Stalker, but is actually going to another moniker called Havoc. These are all tactical drones. They're meant to be at the battalion platoon level, but now they will be speaking to and seamlessly delivered as part of a strategic. Finally, from a financial standpoint, we just reported our 2024 numbers, $304 million, which is almost 25% growth over 2023. That includes actually an EAC adjustment that was not insignificant. Obviously our EBITDA ended up being flat because of that EAC adjustment. Important to note for the EAC adjustments that we took in the fourth quarter, they did not really have a cash impact because we reported very positive operating cash flow and free cash flow for the quarter. Our burn rates are quite low.
Just so you know, when we go to 2025, we are expecting to be free cash flow positive, but we're also looking at a growth rate between 535 and 605. We gave revenue guidance about a month and a half ago, but we're reiterating that now. It's really a combined forecast. We'll be coming out with our pro forma numbers here in the coming weeks. Obviously our combined 2025 number for EBITDA is 70-105. Again, the company will be conservatively capitalized. We will really be one of the few defense tech space companies that has a level of free cash flow to generate growth. The other thing I talked about and Colin will ask a few questions about is we did give some disclosure about the growth rate of the combined company on an organic basis.
Edge Autonomy, which has been the more profitable of the two companies because they're more mature than we are, has generated between 20-30% revenue growth and has actually significantly hit its operating leverage so that it has EBITDA margins, you know, well above 30%. We are still getting to that place, but on a combined basis, we should enjoy EBITDA margins well above 15%. Again, free cash flow positive. That is our combined forecast. Again, we'll revise guidance when we close the transaction, which is, as we reiterated yesterday, second quarter. That is us. That is Redwire. There is a lot in between what I just spoke about, but Colin will ask the questions and I'll be able to answer them. I do want to kind of stay on this page because it kind of shows what we're doing.
Sounds great. Thanks, Jonathan. I think first off, we'll focus on strategy and company growth. If you could kind of talk about what the key levers that you think enable Redwire growth that also enable Edge Autonomy growth and how you view those factors relative to peers. Maybe we can talk a little bit about kind of how bringing those two sets of capabilities together enables you to grow in a system of systems environment.
Right. Let's go big to small, give three specific numbers. First of all, our TAM for the next five years, what we will be able to compete on in space is over $100 billion if you include all the six product areas that we have in space, which is in the documents you can see online. When you look at that and our ability to grow 15%-25% and that our pipeline has doubled, what we've been on over the next five years is $7.1 billion, that pipeline, you know, for us is now absolutely expanded by the UAS TAMs. Now we have not given what the UAS TAMs are, but they're measured in billions. Over the next five years.
The UAS TAM that Edge Autonomy enjoys is a much larger TAM, you know, on an, because it's really, they have really two or three product lines. For us, that's a real positive. The second positive is probably the most positive, right, which is it brings up their P -win rate on their pipeline and it brings up our P- win rate. Because again, the national security has been our fastest growing sector. We had less than $50 million of revenue three years ago and now we've more than doubled that. In fact, a lot of our commercial revenue, which we've tripled in the last three, almost tripled in the last three years, comes from that national security. That's by far our fastest growing. The fastest growing of the fastest growing is Europe.
We have already talked about our largest European client, Thales, has been really a big part of our growth rates on just a Redwire standalone. They at Edge Autonomy also see a much higher level of P- win in Europe when you then combine it with space. It is number one, the TAMs get bigger. Number two, the P- wins get bigger. Here is the third one. We can rationalize this expansion by keeping our CapEx quite low. We did disclose CapEx for both companies is less than 2.5%. We think we can even be more capital efficient because their facilities have extra capacity. Ours do too. To be able to expand even beyond the 20% as Europe builds up its defense posture is something that we can do with a very low capital base. Those are the three drivers, you know, with the acquisition.
Obviously, the P- win rate number two is really important for us. It is not included in the forecast I gave you. We are very clear. The forecast of $535 million-$605 million for 2025, and I would even include the 20% growth rate, does not include a lot of P- win synergies. We have kept that fairly conservative. We also kept it very conservative for Ukraine. They had greater, they had a pretty high percentage of their revenue coming from Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. In 2024, we publicly disclosed, put an 8-K out that their revenue streams were less than 30% coming from Ukraine. Not to say they cannot benefit from a Ukrainian piece that will have a demilitarized zone that the Stalkers and the Penguins will, in essence, be able to monitor. We just did not put a lot of it in the forecast.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Maybe just striking the long-term balance, you know, how do you view yourself as a competitor relative to other system of system architectures providers? Maybe talking a little bit to kind of how you think about defense prime supply chains versus new defense tech players.
We are going to be what we try to tell people. Redwire is you do get without, and trust me, I do not want to oversell this given that we still are not profitable at net income, but we definitely combine the heritage combat proven with innovation. What that means is that we are big enough for our defense and commercial and civil clients to have reliability. We are well capitalized. We will be one of the few that has free cash flow growth. We are not waiting for some big revenue train to hit us. We are the more measured, but most importantly, we have great innovative technologies. Our Roll-Out Solar Arrays, the Stalker itself, what you see here, it looks like a very simple aircraft, but actually super sophisticated power system that uses hybrid fuel technology. It is a very quiet technology.
Once it gets up to five, I say this as a former aviator, once you get up to 500 feet, you can't hear this thing. Very, very difficult to detect audibly, which is really important for national security. Finally, it is super simple. It's called Edge Autonomy for a reason. They're very easy to operate. And so are our satellites. Our satellites are very easy to operate comparatively. You know, for us, we combine the best of both worlds. We're well capitalized, but we're very innovative. We bring the new space, the new defense tech, you know, with an ability to work with the primes and then directly with the governments. I would say for the primes from a supply chain, a lot of the rebalancing of the supply chain from outside the country, especially in Asia, too, is mostly complete or completing.
We were a part of it. Redwire was founded four years ago to redomesticate the supply chain for very sophisticated space products. For us, the primes have already really gotten that. Our own supply chain is very domesticated. By the way, it's very domesticated depending on where we're located. We have operations in Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, obviously Latvia, Ukraine. We build where we sell. We do not have a lot of tariff issues comparatively, but most importantly in the United States, which is still the bulk of our revenue, we're seeing a very secure supply chain for what we do.
Got it. Got it. Maybe as you think about kind of your spacecraft components, what Edge Autonomy portfolio brings, if you can just talk about kind of where are you most constructive within that portfolio.
Sure. Just, you know, we have six product lines in space, right? We have our avionics and sensors, our power systems, RF antennas, structures and mechanics. We have our payloads and our platforms, which you just saw on a previous page, and then microgravity. I know I just said that really, really fast. You got to remember one thing, that in the components piece, you did not hear me say optics. You did not hear me say optical anything, right? In space right now, we do not have a huge optic program. They do. They have actual optical gimbals that actually that technology can be applied into space also. It is really exciting for us to start getting an optical capability, which is still very important in space.
For us, that's an important synergy from the standpoint of us being able to sell to the MODs our space equipment and then being able to sell, you know, into other MODs that already take space, they can get to defense. Just, you know, overseas or really in Europe, you sell your space equipment and your UAS systems to the same people. In the U.S., I mean, you got to kiss a lot of frogs. I mean, even UASs within the Department of Defense, you're going to the Marines, you're going to the Air Force, you're going to the Army. And even within the Marines, you're going to the Special Forces versus the infantry. In Europe, actually, it's a very simple sales cycle. You're going to the same people.
Obviously, you've seen what's, we're very excited that Europe is going to, you know, re-energize its defense industries. We are viewed in Europe as a European business because we are. We're European in Europe.
Yeah. We'll see what kind of takes the, we'll say efficiency efforts take out of European combatant commands versus U.S. combatant commands. Maybe bridging from strategy to earnings, if you could just talk a little bit about kind of what the guidance contemplates in terms of U.S., EU, and then specifically Ukraine exposure. I think you'd suggest that Edge Autonomy, you know, 30% Ukraine, obviously you judge that.
Less than 30%.
Less than 30%.
In the forecast, it's even less than that. Again, let us complete the acquisition and then we'll give you a bit more data. We have not broken out in 2025 what the, like the, let's use the midpoint, the 570, what percentage, as much as Colin has been very instrumental in us thinking about how we want to talk to our investors, until we close the transaction, we haven't shown what percentage of the 570 at midpoint is space versus terrestrial. The bottom line is, is what I'd say is what we've been telling investors, just look at our historical, we did give some pretty good historical numbers for both companies and just kind of follow that trend, right? I will say from a profitability standpoint, until our business gets more mature, a lot of the profitability is going to be driven by Edge Autonomy.
Our business can be profitable. We've had free cash flow LTMs. We've had positive, actually we've had positive net income quarters. We've taken an EAC adjustment. We're not happy about it. The truth is that we are, I think we're more on top of our businesses. That doesn't mean we wouldn't take EAC adjustments in the future. Again, if you want to understand what an EAC adjustment is, go online and you can see our discussion about it. A lot of space companies have been taking these big adjustments. The good news about ours is it wasn't really, it didn't impact fourth quarter cash because fourth quarter cash was quite good.
Got it. Got it. Maybe post earnings, if you can just talk through kind of what you view as the most important questions that investors have been pointing to and maybe a little bit more on the buy side versus sell side slants.
Yeah. I mean, I think the buy side, you know, was spent a little bit of time on '24, but if I had 10 minutes with a buy side analyst yesterday or a buy side investor, I spent two minutes on '24 and eight minutes on '25, right? The company has fundamentally changed with the announcement of this acquisition. Let's just talk about the two minutes. Of the two minutes, it's like, Jonathan, you know, you've had some EACs and you took a big one. Are we done? Right? What we've said is, you know, we believe that we've gotten on top of most of the programs. It was really less than 10% of our programs caused most of the EAC. They were focused on that.
They were, in the two minutes I discussed about 2024, very happy to see that our cash position in the fourth quarter was pretty good. For the most part for the year, we hit our cash position, which was a use of cash, but much, much lower than in past years, right? On the eight minutes of the 10 that we talked about 2025, super focused on when is the deal going to close and are we on track? I said we are very much on track for this transaction closing. We have more confidence now in certain approvals that are going to be happening. We feel pretty confident about that. They would ask, does the stock price, you know, change anything?
Like because the stock price has moved up 54% on announcement and then back down below, let's call it 20% lower on announcement. We said, look, we have plenty of access to capital to be able to finance this deal. It's mostly a share exchange anyway of the $925 million in proceeds to the seller. $775 million of it is being given in stock. You know, for us, we have the financial wherewithal. On top of it, the last thing we talked about for 2025 is we did release that our warrants. We did talk about capital structure. We had public warrants outstanding. By the beginning of next month, we will not. The warrants will be, many of them, if not most of them, have already been exercised. Those that have not been exercised will redeem for one penny. Or one penny a warrant.
Those warrants are gone, which helps both from a capital structure standpoint and provides us more cash to close this transaction and do organic growth. That is what the buy side has been focused on. They did care about the EACs in 2024. Happy to see that we had cash flow in the fourth quarter, but actually very focused on 2025. They are asking the same questions you just asked, which is what is the breakout? What are the growth rates? That is why we gave a combined growth rate that we feel comfortable with of 20% into the future without synergies.
If we think about a little bit about kind of going back to the EAC dynamic and making sure we run that to ground, if you can just talk through kind of the dynamics that are going on there. You mentioned less than 10% of programs. Then kind of your view on how we recover that from price or.
Yeah, you recover that from your clients, right? I mean, because EACs are basically dealing with fixed price contracts that you're either having a planning issue, either you're going to go a bit longer in the process to satisfy the client's product needs or your costs go up. For us, it has a tendency to be more timing. Usually we are doing a bit more test. Look, in many ways, there's a silver lining to EACs in that we are doing more EACs to do generally more tests, which makes sure that our products actually work in orbit, which is hard, right? Space is hard. That's not an excuse. It just shows that other companies that have been doing space for decades took huge EAC adjustments in 2024. I won't name them, but you can look them up. They took huge EAC adjustments.
I mean, we're talking about, you know, 20-40% of total yearly revenue. We took about 5% of yearly revenue, which is not historically, historically it's been lower than that. The bottom line is it also did not have a big cash impact. I think we are going to have EAC adjustments in the future, positive, i.e., favorable and unfavorable. We are not saying it is not going to happen. We just think for the projects that we have right now, many of which we inherited, many of which came out of Europe, we feel like we have gotten on top of it.
Got it. Got it. Last thing on earnings, if you can talk about kind of what the key focus points that investors are missing and kind of what are the key confusion points on Redwire, on Edge Autonomy?
I think the key, you know, to be frank, when you announce something, I'm not saying your stock should always go up after an announcement of a very accretive deal. I will say that when the market was a bit more normal to probably more understanding of high growth momentum stocks, they understood this immediately. Like this picture, people understood, and we did not even present this picture. They understood that a defense tech company is going to have to be in the fastest swim lanes in defense, whether it be European, U.S., Asia, it does not matter. China is a threat. We obviously have the issues in Europe. We have, you know, the wars that we have seen in the last, let's call it three years, Ukraine, Israel, other hotspots have all needed an integration of unmanned, uncrewed vehicles, whether they be below the water, terrestrial, airborne.
They all need satellite configurations to be effective. Not only that, they need those configurations to be hardened and to be maneuverable. That is really, so they really got the strategic very quickly, much quicker in many ways than we thought. On the financial side, they pretty much understood it because if you can give people a sense of historical UAS companies, of which AVAV is a very good comp, you could see that us trading at 40 or 50 times EBITDA, buying a company at 12 times where their biggest peer trades at 30 times, it kind of made sense. People could see the accretion, you know, very quickly. From our standpoint, they really did not miss much. Alex, did they miss anything? It is director of my IR. I do not think so. We really felt like they understood it.
Now, what they're seeing now is a stock that doubled and then went back. What's going on? Let's face it, a lot of it's macro. We have not pulled back at all on our view that this is a high growth, more profitable, more free cash flow driven company. That being said, you know, the market's going to be whatever it is and we can complete this transaction. The only other thing is that people have asked is they're not missing it, but they haven't asked that much is what's the next M&A deal? And the answer is, you know, we have lots of companies that want to be part of the Redwire story for both mostly strategic reasons.
If you're in these fast swim lanes, the people who do this, which are mostly engineers, they want to see their equipment financed and in orbit, financed and working for the warfighter and to be part of a bigger company where you can make a difference. There are a lot of companies that want to join our cause. That being said, sometimes their valuation expectations aren't exactly where our valuation expectations are, but that's why we don't do M&A every day. This is really a company that can do M&A, take accelerate growth, but it's not only about M&A. The company is, as we tell people, it's a very cool company even as a space company. So anyway.
That's great. I think just front running that question a little bit, if you can maybe talk about kind of what are the key capabilities that Redwire looks to add and how should you think about kind of those desires and rationale around time to market versus developing it organically?
Let's get to a, let's get to a few slides then. Might as well. We have time. All right. This is a big one. You know, I didn't even mention pharmaceutical built in space, right? This is probably one of the largest value creators that we have. Now it's venture optionality. You know, we have five pillars of our growth. I'll go back and talk about it. One of our biggest pillars of growth is we have put $70 million over the past 10 years into 10 plus years into building out an ability for pharmaceutical companies in microgravity to build out what is in essence large molecule proteins to help deliver their drugs. You say, why do you have to do it in space?
You have to do it in space because crystals that help deliver large molecule drugs really can't, they're happenstance on the, they don't get built naturally in Earth. You need a microgravity environment to do it. We built the ability. We built this little lunchbox that can do these crystals in space. We had one flight with Eli Lilly last year and now we've had over 24, 27 now. We have had 27 with various pharmaceutical companies, including Bristol Myers. What this allows us to do, we get paid to do this, right? We make margin on this. We make EBITDA on this. We make cash flow on this. What we don't do is take a piece of the royalties on the overall drug as it becomes more successful. By the way, many of the drugs that we've taken up are already operational.
They're not through the stage two or stage three. They're operational. They're just not effective enough. They need protein crystals for delivery or for side effects. We are partnering with these companies to do that. In the future, and I'm talking about near future, we will set up economic structures by which we get a royalty payment. This is one of the growth areas that is a major pillar, but this could be measured in billions of dollars, not just tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It's also a bit uncorrelated to defense budgets, to other things. We're the only ones who have a proven ability to do this. There's a number of companies. How do we deliver this value to you? Do we wait till the drug comes online? No, there are ways for us to monetize this in the 2020s, right?
In this decade as a way to get the royalty payments and then sell it. Eventually this business also could be carved out and just be its own business or be bought by another company. It's really great to see this thing accelerate. When we built this two, three years ago, we thought we'd start getting commercial viability in the 2030s. We're getting commercial viability in 2024 and 2025. That's actually way ahead of what we thought. Anyway, that's an area that I think we want to talk about. Our growth strategies have really remained roughly the same. I didn't talk about them, so I'm stepping back a little bit given we have a little bit more time. We provide the picks and shovels. Those are those six product areas that I quickly went through.
We deliver multi-domain platforms, multi-domain platforms, including the new UAS systems when we get the merger done. We explore the moon, Mars, and beyond. That's microgravity research. Obviously, this advancing venture optionality is very much the form of business. We execute accretive M&A across those other four growth strategies. We're very proud that since going IPO, since IPOing in September of 2021, we've never issued equity as part of our organic strategy. We've been able to self-fund our organic growth, which again has been between 15% and 25% revenue. We've become much more profitable in the last three years. We've only issued equity associated with M&A. Even that, we haven't done that much. We're pretty proud of this and being able to do this. Now we got to keep delivering, but hopefully that answers your question.
No, that's great.
Look at the pharma. It's super interesting. We put out a lot of information about it. Hard to value, but there's a couple of companies out there that are going, they're doing their rounds at very high valuations. Colin will pick up on this and hopefully write a bit about it. Cantor's got a great bio practice, so.
That is the beauty of our platform is that we have a really, really strong healthcare team. When you sit next to people on benches with PhDs, it makes the conversation a little bit easier.
That's right. They can talk protein crystals.
That's right. That's right. Maybe just kind of following on that vein a little bit, given the kind of level of and the extent of the venture optionality within this portfolio, can you just talk about a little bit of kind of how those medical customers or healthcare customers or pharmaceuticals are structuring those contracts and kind of what duration you typically see on those contracts?
Right. Currently the contracts are structured under a NASA contract. In essence, we are in essence allowing them to use our PIL-BOX for a fixed fee for a period of time, and we make a bit of margin on it. It's less than 15% of the revenue of the total company. We had $304 million last year. It's not that much revenue. It's less than 15% of our total revenue. We do make money on it, and it's got pretty good margins. It's got actually much better margins than the overall company from a gross margin standpoint. That being said, if that drug goes back down to that protein crystal, because all we're making is a small amount of protein crystals that then can get replicated on Earth. The hard part is getting the protein crystal. You can actually replicate it on Earth.
The bottom line is they take that protein crystal and they apply it, and then they'll start, you know, moving it through their system. If anybody has heard of the drug Keytruda, Keytruda actually did this with a nonprofit in which they got Keytruda to be easily deliverable with new protein crystals that were developed in space. The point I'm making is now what we will structure is either a joint venture or a joint development agreement in which they don't really have to pay us all that much. Like we don't have to necessarily make that much money on the actual PIL-BOX, which is the piece of equipment. We can, instead of leasing it to them, we'll take a royalty payment on the drug as it becomes commercial. And there are lots of models with CDMOs, which are contract developer and manufacturer operations for pharmaceutical companies.
Fisher Scientific has one. There is a very well-known economic model to take that royalty payment, which could be, you know, a fraction of a percentage of the total amount. If the drug is going to cure cancer or some type of cancer, talking about billions of dollars in the future, we can then take our blank % and then monetize it.
Yeah, an incredibly, incredibly important thing to solve for.
The key is to getting many more drugs in space. And people always ask, well, do you have enough room in space? Right now we're doing this on the ISS, but Colin will, you know, if you look at his report, he did a great job talking about the new space stations that are going to be going up. The most prolific space station that will be going up in the next three years is going to be Starship because Starship will in essence be its own space station that we can put more PIL-BOXes on.
Just following on this vein, if you can maybe talk about kind of the healthcare hires that you've made and what impact that has had on your kind of strategic decision-making in that sphere.
I mean, so we have a whole slew of PhDs on staff. We do this in Indiana, right? So our microgravity, we're about to, we just broke ground and we're calling it, we might even call it this, the Larry Bird Microgravity Center in Indiana, just because he's a well-known Indiana. It has nothing to do with healthcare. The point I'm making is we're right near Purdue. We're right near Lilly. I mean, there's a huge pharmaceutical element to that area of the world. We in essence either kind of have some of the Eli Lilly and others kind of on loan to us as we put these together. We have Dr. Ken Savin. We have a number of medical and pharmaceutical PhDs already with us that created PIL-BOX. We haven't really had to hire too many new people.
Got it. Brilliant. Brilliant. If there's any questions from the crowd in the last 180 seconds here, if there's anyone that wants to ask one, Justin, please.
Good to see you, by the way. One of the OGs with us.
The microgravity optionality, the thing you laid out, when do you expect that actually is like a five-year plus type idea or?
No, no, no, no, no. It's a five-month plus idea, right? I mean, we've talked about being in discussions already with these royalty agreements and starting to put them together.
What else is there outside of medical delivery? Is there stuff like the chemicals or the industrial stuff? Things like that.
It's funny because we, part of the PIL-BOX, I mean, we know we don't disclose what's in all the PIL-BOXes, but we have said publicly these crystals can be used in a number of different areas. One that, you know, we didn't know about, but obviously it's a way of developing, is fungicides. We've actually created some of these crystals for, because, you know, lethal fungus or at least detrimental to your health funguses are very, it's actually a big deal both in the US and in the developing world. They've done some fungicides. There is some industrial applications. I would say the only thing from a venture optionality that we have of that type of TAM is that when we acquire Edge Autonomy, they actually, the power system on there is very lightweight. It actually is a hybrid fuel cell.
It's actually one of the few hybrid fuel cells that actually has commercialized. It's very light. It can be used for terrestrial applications. For example, you know, backup power for, you know, street lights and other things like that. We've never, they've never actually gone out and sold those in that format. That would be a very big venture optionality in a bit of a different format, right? But they have received inbounds to see if it could work because they're very inexpensive to make. That's another example of venture optionality in the business.
Thanks, Jonathan. Just for the benefit of the webcast, the question was whether or not venture optionality was five years versus five months. The second question was on chemicals and the flexibility there. I think in the last 100 or call it 90 seconds here, I have one more question and maybe talk a little bit about the flexibility of the PIL-BOX and your ability to drive interest from quantum folks and chip making folks.
Yeah, we haven't talked that much. By the way, I want to qualify just for the transcript that's going to go out dealing with the five months. You know, we don't want to give a specific date. I just want to give people a sense that this is not, we have publicly said that when we started working with this company that then we acquired, we always thought this was going to be much more five years from now. It is happening now. The negotiations, the discussions are happening now. We just don't want to give people too much optimism that it's going to happen in five months. I want to clarify. As far as the PIL-BOXes themselves, I'm trying to understand your question.
The concept is essentially that if you remove gravity as a contaminant in the quantum compute world, is Redwire able to service that sort of mission set?
Yeah. To be frank, I can't speak to it. We have, and it is public that in Europe, we are building and have built satellites for a quantum encryption company to put quantum encryption through satellites as part of, in essence, a communication tool for people who are trying to authenticate and reinforce cyber attacks, especially those that could come in from quantum. Anything associated with medical and other things like that. It's funny because I was talking to our CEO about it yesterday, about how quantum can be an accelerator of some of these compounds, but I don't think that it's been connected with our microgravity.
Got it. Got it. Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate you coming out.
Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.