And CFO Sean Wirtjes of Rapid Micro Biosystems, ticker RPID. During the presentation, please feel welcome to submit questions using the Zoom Q&A interface at the bottom of your screen. After the presentation, we will open to your questions. With that, Rob, I will turn it over to you.
Thanks, Alex. Again, good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Again, I am Rob Spignesi, President and CEO, and I am joined by Sean Wirtjes, our Chief Financial Officer. What we will do today is I will start with a brief overview of our business to give you a high-level sense of our business and what we are doing. We will get a little more into depth into our customers and our products and our technology. As Alex mentioned, we will have some time for some Q&A. With that, we will dive right in. In 2025, think of us as a $34-ish million business growing at about 20%. It is important to note, and this will become apparent as we work through our discussion today, our business model has a strong component of recurring revenue.
Greater than 50% of our revenue is recurring in the form of consumables, and we will walk through how that works, as well as services. In 2025, around $34 million in revenue and growing about 20%. Globally, we have a large number, relatively speaking, of systems placed and growing. About 200 systems placed around the world. We will go through our customer footprint and also installation network, and we will show you where they are. It is important to note, though, while 200 is a significant number, we are just barely getting penetrated. If you converted the market for Growth Directs, all the test volume into Growth Directs, it is about 8,000-10,000 systems globally. We are just getting started in penetrating this market. Around 169, 170 systems validated. This is an important metric.
Validation, it is a point in time in which our customers, typically a pharmaceutical manufacturer, puts a system in what is called routine testing, and it becomes the actual system of record for that pharmaceutical company, and we start generating the high rate of recurring revenue, largely in the form of consumables and recurring services. We operate globally across 20 companies. Fantastic customer base, and again, we will show you who they are in a few slides. From a high level, we are very proud to count 75% of the global top 20 pharma companies as customers. The vast majority, in pretty much all those cases, we are just getting started penetrating their global networks. It is important to note that we address all manufacturing modalities in pharmaceutical manufacturing, but we are especially strong in the higher-value advanced modalities of biologics, cell and gene therapy, et cetera.
As you can see here, we have 86% of the FDA-approved commercial CAR T manufacturers are using the Growth Direct to release their valuable therapies. Looking forward, we believe we are very well-positioned to continue to grow and expand our margins. To touch on strong business fundamentals, 200 systems placed and growing with a very strong, durable recurring revenue model. We continue to expand with existing customers across their enterprise and have many new customers in our pipeline as well, some of which have multiple system opportunities. Touched on the recurring revenue model, very powerful model where we place our Growth Direct System and pull through a high rate or a high yield of increasingly profitable consumable and service revenue. Gross margin is a very important story for us. Our margins are inflecting, and we will walk you through that. We will continue to inflect our margins higher.
We have a very exciting relationship with Merck MilliporeSigma with regard to global distribution and the ability to supply Rapid Micro and drive and accelerate our gross margins further and the opportunity to collaborate on innovation and new product development. We are very well-positioned to capitalize on the global trends across pharmaceutical manufacturing. One of those is reshoring of manufacturing into North America. We are well-positioned to help automate those sites, and it is our belief the vast majority of those sites will be heavily automated. More broadly, the advent and the penetration of AI and automation globally, we are very well-positioned to take advantage of those trends around the world. Importantly, we have a disciplined approach to capital allocation and growth and profitability, driving a declining cash usage year-on-year and driving the cash flow positivity by year-end 2028.
With that, we continue to actively evaluate opportunities to strengthen our balance sheet, and with that, maximize shareholder value. That is a bit of an overview. We can double-click now into the business itself. Think of us as solving a problem, as I touched on, in global pharmaceutical manufacturing in the fundamental quality control infrastructure. We are targeting in an area called microbial quality control. This is a process that all pharmaceutical companies have to do. It is regulated by the FDA and all the equivalents globally. It is a high-volume testing process that is fundamental. Its fundamental job effectively is to ensure the finished pharmaceutical product is safe for a patient and it is not contaminated by bacteria or mold or fungi or other organisms. The problem with the legacy method is it has not evolved since it was created about 100 years ago by Louis Pasteur.
It is very much a slow, manual Petri dish incubation type of system. It is creating costs and risks for the industry, and in some cases, can hold up delivery to patients timely. We developed a technology that fully automates and replaces and accelerates that fundamental process and really brings it into the 21st century. This slide shows thematically and more from a strategic level, the problem we are going after. I think we all can agree that technology and advancements have dramatically impacted how we discover drugs and how we screen and perform R&D upstream in the process. Then, of course, downstream, how we manufacture pharmaceuticals and various therapies through the advanced modalities and advanced manufacturing techniques. But fundamentally, the underlying quality control infrastructure has not changed, as I touched on. It is still very manual, slow, and error-prone.
You have this incongruent tension between the balance of the value chain and the fundamental QC process, which is critical to releasing, in many cases, life-saving therapies to patients that are of high quality. The center of this picture, the black and white elements, is this is what we're going after. I'll be quick here. For those of you who have never been inside a microbial quality control lab in a pharmaceutical company, this is what one looks like. Imagine this scaled up times 10 people, in some cases 100 or more, depending on the size of the company, and the number of therapies being in scale, the therapies being manufactured. In any event, what you'll see is a lot of people, papers, pencils, pens, Petri dishes, incubators. The way the process works quickly is these technicians will take these Petri dishes.
There's various forms and flavors, but it's basically a media-type Petri dish, and perform testing, air testing, water testing, personnel, manufacturing, everything gets tested, comes back to a large room that's an incubator. You can imagine the shelving all around it. All these Petri dishes are stacked up. Then, the analyst will come back a week or two later and manually count each and every Petri dish by hand. This could be hundreds per day at a site, or it could be thousands of tests per day per site. So very high volume. As you can probably tell, it's a very manual, error-prone approach, usually paper-based. This is the fundamental underpinnings of most quality control operations around the world today for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Again, this is more at the deck plate level. This is the problem that we are addressing.
We're addressing that through the Growth Direct platform. The platform itself consists of the Growth Direct System. As you can see here on the left, it's the only fully automated high throughput system available, and this full automation is extremely important, where it's a walkaway system. I'll walk through the workflow in a minute. The system as well as the proprietary consumables, which is part of the platform. We designed the system and our consumables to automate the vast majority of daily routine use testing. So don't think of the Growth Direct as a niche or exotic test that you do once a month or once a quarter.
This is designed to be an everyday workhorse that's automating the vast majority of the daily routine standard tests every day in a-- My customers have multiple systems lined up, all working through very, very high volume. We also have a full data and software complement, and this interconnects the Growth Direct to the customer's information management systems to seamlessly and securely activate a paperless environment to transfer data to and from the various systems and the Growth Direct and global validation and support services. This is very important for Big Pharma, where you can seamlessly install, validate, and move the system into GMP, as they call it, manufacturing seamlessly, which we do seamlessly and effectively. The system itself delivers a very strong value proposition. The right side of this slide shows you why customers adopt in the first place. The first of which is data integrity.
Again, this is the fundamental element of can we trust these samples. The regulators are enforcing increased data integrity guidelines, and our system allows to be fully compatible with the guidelines. Operational efficiency is an important part of the hard dollar ROI for our customers. Think of this as the system is fully automated, walk away. It is also rapid. Think of a system that is replacing a legacy slow two-week process with a leaned-out workflow that basically entails taking a sample, putting it on the machine in bulk format, and then walking away, and that is the last time a human being will ever typically see that sample. We are able to deliver an answer in half the time or less, in some cases, a day or two versus a week or two. Customers can find problems faster. They can move to the next processing step faster.
They can ship to market faster. They can turn inventory faster. This just creates a significant manufacturing and quality control environment. Then accuracy and insight. There is certainly an error rate associated with the legacy method, and ours is a computer AI-driven, algorithm-driven system that eliminates human error. This is the platform, and again, the fundamental reason why customers adopt us from a value proposition standpoint. Next slide is coming up, I think. There it is. This slide, I will just go through this quickly. Again, this just reinforces my comment around we automate. Think of the Growth Direct as a high capacity, fully automated, high throughput, walkaway system that automates. It is the workhorse of the lab. It is an absolute workhorse. It is designed to, again, automate all the tests that these labs do day in, day out.
Those are typically environmental monitoring testing, high volume testing of the environment, the air, the surfaces, the personnel. Water testing. As you may imagine, a lot of products, water is a large factor of input. Making sure the water is not contaminated is critical. Bioburden testing is testing the actual product itself as it moves through the various processing steps. Then sterility testing, this is a critical end-of-line test to ensure the final vial or the delivered syringe to a patient is, in fact, sterile. These are the main tests, and we automate all of them. This shows basically what we have been chatting about here, the from and to workflow on the top side of the slide. It is the legacy method. I will not go through all this.
I gave a bit of a rundown of it, but a very manual 15-plus step process over the course of a week or two. Very insecure, paper-pencil driven, a process that gets you an answer that, in some cases, has some questionable data integrity. To our approach, when our system goes in, where it is basically a two-step process, full walkaway with very robust data integrity and accelerated results you can trust to make a decision against. Our vision of the new value chain in pharmaceutical manufacturing, again, replacing that legacy centerpiece, that legacy quality control challenge with a fit-for-purpose 21st-century capable, fully automated system that is on par with its peer technologies and capabilities, and research and development and downstream and manufacturing. I think this slide is coming. One second here while we change the slides. Okay.
It is also important to note about our business, there are a number of, we believe, long-lasting market forces and strong tailwind driving our business forward. The first of which, we have a large and growing market. We size that at about $5 billion in recurring revenue, recurring opportunity and consumables and services, and about a $5 billion global system offers to adopt automation, especially around data integrity, which we do not believe is a short-term pressure. We believe that this will be long-lasting, especially as therapies get more valuable and are more directed towards, in some cases, life-saving applications. The fundamental change of the industry is also a very important driver to us. As I touched on, the current method was developed about 100 years ago.
The new methods that are being developed for manufacturing and cell and gene therapy and some biologics manufacturing require that they are short shelf life, require fast turnaround time, are very high value. They are typically time critical going to a critical patient environment, so the speed is really important, which we do very well. Also, the amount of testing is typically increased with these advanced therapies. What you have is the combination of criticality around accuracy, the criticality around speed, and a sheer volume, a high volume testing environment is a very good fit for our technology, and this is why we are so strong in a lot of the advanced modalities of biologics and cell and gene therapy.
I touched on another driving trend in U.S. in particular, but more broadly, globally, the expansion of the manufacturing capacity, not only in the principal manufacturers, but also in the CDMOs. We are positioned extremely well, as I touched on, for the North American reshoring processes and build-outs of the North American pharmaceutical manufacturing. A bit about our growth strategy and how we have been successful. At a high level, it is a land and expand strategy. Our commercial strategy has, from the onset, targeted the large pharmaceutical companies. They bring brand and sophistication and scale. Our approach was to land inside an initial site, establish a Growth Direct as the standard within that site, and expand within that site to other applications and to other sites, and then expand ultimately globally. This is what we have done and what we are doing.
We typically sell one to two or three, four systems to an initial customer. They get validated, and then we expand within that site, within that region, within that application, and then we move to different applications. If we start environmental monitoring, we can expand to water and bioburden or vice versa, and this is how we have built out our global network. We are in most large geographies now, but geographic expansion has also been part of our expansion, and we will continue to expand geographically as well. That is the core of our, I would say, organic sales and commercial strategy. That being said, we do envision launching new products. Some of those we have already announced to continue to expand our ability to capture more share of wallet within customers and drive our revenue and margin profile. There are also adjacent market opportunities.
Think personal care products, think cosmetics, and potentially in food and beverage. We are, as a company, focused on pharmaceutical now. But via our partnership with Merck MilliporeSigma, these adjacent markets create a very exciting growth opportunity. This slide, in some ways can tend to present itself. It is who our customers are and where they are around the world. I won't go through all of this, but you can see on the left-hand side of the slide who our customers are, the majority of the large name brand pharmaceutical companies. But I would also highlight that we have many of the large CDMOs as well. We're broadly here penetrated into the cell and gene therapy ecosystem, nuclear medicine, small molecules, personal care.
This highlights the fact that we are agnostic to the manufacturing type, and we are an attractive technology to a broad array of customers, not only in size and scope and scale, but also in their type of manufacturing to include small molecule as well as all the advanced therapies. Geographically, think of us as balanced between North America and Europe largely. A bit smaller, but exciting and growing footprint in Asia. Each one of these, by the way, each one of those green dots is a customer site. In many of those, we have multiple systems. I touched on our partnership with Merck MilliporeSigma. This is a very exciting partnership we're extremely happy with. It's got three primary elements oriented around our three top-line goals of accelerating Growth Direct System placements, expanding gross margins, and driving innovation.
At its core, it's a global five-year distribution agreement with committed minimum Growth Direct purchases and placements. It's also important in our gross margin journey, which I'll touch on in a few slides. A lot of what Merck MilliporeSigma has in their portfolio we purchase from other vendors and into our manufacturing process, consumables in particular. This relationship will allow us to purchase at rates to accelerate our gross margin expansion journey. Innovation is really important as well. Merck Millipore is in a vast majority of pharma QC labs around the world, and customers use our products together. Part of this is how do we comport our products to work better together, but also how do we innovate new products in exciting workflows that will help our customers better run their operation.
As I touched on, we have been and plan to continue to grow at 20%+ revenue growth over time. That's driven by our land and expand strategy, selling into our new and existing large customers, medium customers as well. New products will be part of that. The Merck MilliporeSigma relationship is certainly part of that as well, reshoring, et cetera. The makeup of this is quite clear. It's also important to note that as we continue to drive revenue, we fully expect our recurring revenue model to stay very much in place, and you can see it here. It will continue to be really the underpinnings of our fundamental revenue umbrella will be that recurring, the very durable recurring revenue. Also touched on gross margin is an extremely important part of our story.
I won't go through history here, but you can see how we've driven gross margins over the past several years and expect to continue to do so in the next couple of years. Getting to the punchline, we expect to exit 2028 at 50%+ of gross margins. This year printing a 20% gross margin and exiting at better than 20%, exiting this year on the way to 50%. We're doing that through a variety of levers, material cost reduction, volume leverage. As we expand, there's meaningful volume leverage in our business. On the service side, operating at higher productivity and more efficiencies throughout our business. To wrap up, there are a number of reasons why we're very excited about the outlook of our business. A large and expanding market under pressure to change. Strong barriers to entry, first mover advantage.
We have a relationship with Merck MilliporeSigma. We have an existing customer base that's very sticky. It's clear that the Growth Direct is the right technology for this market, just given who's adopted, how they've adopted it, and how they've entrusted, in some cases, the crown jewels of their product portfolio to us. We can address in our strong in all modalities, but we're especially strong in the very high growth advanced modalities of biologics and cell and gene therapy manufacturing. Our business model, it's unassailably working. It's quite clear we place a system, and we pull through a high rate, a high yield of very durable, recurring revenue in the form of our consumables and recurring services. With that's what we have from an overview. Went through a lot pretty quickly. Also happy to open it for Q&A.
Great. Well, thank you so much for the presentation. We have a bunch of questions. Let's start with something that you mentioned earlier. You mentioned evaluating opportunities to strengthen the balance sheet. Could you and Sean elaborate a little bit more on that?
Sure. I'll take that, Alex. Thanks. We ended Q2 with about $20 million in cash on the balance sheet. As we talked about on the Q2 call, we have a couple of different potential sources for additional capital out there right now. We have $25 million of additional capacity under a debt facility we put into place last year. $10 million of that is potentially available in January, and we believe we're on track to unlock that at that point in time. We also did a financing in May that involved warrants that, if exercised, would bring in up to $22 million of additional equity capital. So those are out there. Having said that, as you mentioned and as Rob said, we are actively looking at opportunities to strengthen the balance sheet. We're doing that in part of our efforts to maximize shareholder value.
We're doing it with an eye toward disciplined capital allocation, and it's all things that we're doing in an effort to try to support and kind of harden our path to cash flow break even by the end of 2028.
Great context. Thank you. Rob, you also mentioned the ongoing collaboration with MilliporeSigma. Could you give us an update on that and how you think about their system placement contributing in the second half of the year?
Yeah. We actually just had a two-day leadership summit with the team this past week. Very exciting about where we are and where we're going with Merck MilliporeSigma. It's a very strong relationship and as I've mentioned previously publicly before, we do expect a meaningful contribution in the second half of this year.
Okay, great. We have time for one more question. Sean, I know gross margins are inflecting. You reported 15% in Q2, and you're guiding to about 20% for the full year. Could you talk about your confidence in hitting that guidance?
Yeah. The guide is 20% for Q3 as well. We have been executing very hard against that. I think we feel good about the trajectory on this quarter and beyond that, looking forward for the rest of the year and even out over the next few years, as Rob covered, into 2028. The levers that we are pulling to deliver against our objectives here with margins are things that we have a lot of experience with. They are things that we are devoting a lot of attention to and things that we feel confident we are going to be able to drive to as we look forward and head our way toward 50% exiting 2028.
Glad to hear. With that, we are at time. I would like to thank you both, Rob and Sean, for sharing the Rapid Micro Biosystems story with us, and also thank everybody listening for spending time with us today.
Thank you, all.
Thanks, Alex. Thanks, all.