Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day one of the Sidoti Conference. I am Aashi Shah. I am an analyst here at Sidoti. With me today I have Unusual Machines. It trades under the ticker UMAC on NYSE. I am happy to welcome Brian Hoff, who is the CFO of the company. We have about 30 minutes today, including the Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. With that, Brian, I will let you take over.
Thank you. Appreciate the introduction, and thank you everybody for taking the time to join us today. Before I get started, just want to talk, lawyers always make us say, this presentation is going to contain forward-looking statements. You can read the full disclosure on our website at www.unusualmachines.com. We will go in today a little bit about Unusual Machines, what we do, how we have been growing over the last couple of years, the legislation that is behind it, and really the kind of balance sheet and strong cash position that we are in that is going to help continue to enable this growth. When we kind of simplify this, Unusual Machines, we are a drone component manufacturer based in the United States.
Here at the bottom, you can kind of see a picture of some of our components that we manufacture in the United States , primarily driven out of our Orlando facilities. We did just acquire Upgrade Energy. That is still subject to closing here probably in the next 30-ish days. They are based out in the L.A. area. These components, for the longest time, have been really manufactured, and really the expertise of it really has been done in China for the last 20, 30 years. There has been some legislation, which we will go into here shortly, but really that legislation has really created this demand vacuum here in the United States to onshore this piece. We have got flight controllers, electronic speed controllers, drone motors, FPV headsets, which is first-person view.
Really the primary piece that we want to do is we want to build these components at a large scale in terms of volume and really kind of maintain that price competition that we would see in China. Really this is really the legislation from these components have really been driven by the conflict that has happened with Ukraine, Iran. There has been just a large supply chain need to bring this back to the United States. That has really driven the demand for us and other manufacturers here to bring this back to the United States. These components go on these kind of small, kind of what we call Group 1 attritable drones. These are what we call FPV or first-person view. They will be anywhere from 5, 7, 10-in drones, depending on what the needs and payload capacity is going to be.
These are lower cost, kind of acceptable to lose, as we kind of say, just because you're going to want to see these in larger quantities that aren't really going to be overly cost-prohibitive. This is a great slide to kind of just picture where to put our pieces into the drone. This really kind of also talks about how the market is really developing here. With some of the regulations that have come out, there's this Drone Dominance that has been kind of mandated from the Department of War to really onshore the manufacturing of drones, but also the drone components. Starting this year and over the next three to five years, there's a need to create 1 million of these small drones and the components that go into it.
Originally there was legislation that was saying, okay, you can't use this out of covered countries. Now it's really saying it has to be done in the United States. That's kind of a rolling phase as to what we're seeing. With this market opportunity, we're seeing a massive increase in customers just constantly coming to us. What we'll do is we may supply one product, or we may make full programs for our customers. The Drone Dominance program is just one program. There's several from the defense side that is really driving kind of the influx of the need for this large capacity. As we kind of continue to build these out for our customers, we've kind of started building out the full powertrain as to what we're doing here.
Really when our customers are kind of competing for this, what they're going to do is they're going to say, okay, for Drone Dominance part one, they're going to have, let's call it 20-40 customers are competing for one contract, right? That's going to get whittled down to 5-10 customers. We're not necessarily going to be competing against those customers. We're B2B2G. We're going to go and sell into our customers that are going to win those contracts. We're not reliant on winning one specific government contract. We're more after we can go supply whoever wins. We're not going to be reliant and customer dependent on those types of programs. We'll see from our parts, we'll be anywhere from $600-$1,000 per drone.
If we're talking 250, there's going to be 90,000 drones this year, there's going to be 250,000 next year. Then it's going to even continue on into 2028 for just that Drone Dominance program. We're seeing a large market of continued growth in what drone components and what they're going to be doing for just the defense section. Going to give you a little bit of history as to what Unusual Machines started as. We really were this small, hobbyist kind of consumers that wanted to just go fly on their own, make cool YouTube videos. That kind of started as a really good, strong community that we've got still a strong following in relation to. This defense bubble that has kind of created this large opportunity in these kind of small drones.
That is kind of the section that we are in, and we are really taking advantage of this growth vector right now. We are wanting to maintain a lot of our price sensitivity and just kind of making sure our prices are staying competitive as we start thinking about what the future state of this section is going to look like. When we start thinking about drone delivery, when we start talking about other competition like DJI, which is the primary what we call the Best Buy drone, there is a large vacuum that is getting created. There is a large demand bubble or kind of hole that is needing to be filled post this defense section, right? That is going to be used in the enterprise and kind of consumer next stage as to what this is going to be.
With that FCC regulation that came out in December of 2025, all of that needs to now be supplied within the United States. We are thinking about not only today, but we are thinking about what is it going to be in the next two to five years as well, as we continue to need to supply these components for commercial uses, delivery, DoorDash type scenarios, and be the primary source vendor for these customers as well. This is a fantastic slide. It really just shows kind of where have we come from, the rapid growth. We will see it in another kind of visual when we kind of look here at our revenue, but we have grown tremendously. We are making strong continued investments into this. If we flash back a year ago in June of 2025, we were 19 people, primarily retail.
We were selling again to those kind of. We were starting to enable a large portion of what we knew was coming from this kind of the NDAA, the FCC regulations. We saw them coming, and so we started making calculated pieces to onshore the manufacturing here. Again, 19 people started making investments. We started putting in orders for our motor equipment. That which is, and I will kind of get into some of those aspects here in a second, but really that $2 million mainly retail. We started increasing our team size to kind of enable that, so we had turned on our motor manufacturing plant around August is kind of when we started to first get in those. The equipment started to put our first designs in place. We acquired Rotor Lab, which is an Australian-based motor company.
We did not acquire them for customers or any of that, but more their know-how, their engineering. They have been through this, they have built it, and then you add in our scale and size as to what this is going to look like, and really gets us a head start as to what this next year was going to be. Then we continued to double around November of 2025. That is when we first turned on our motor manufacturing plant. We are kind of on our semi-automated line right now. We produce about 30,000 motors in relation to this a month. Soon we will have our highly automated line, which will increase it to about 100,000 a month. Really, we started with a single shift of motor manufacturing. We had all of our equipment turned on, and we started to see that inflection point.
When we talk also about inventory, the supply chain to get these pieces, especially if we are trying to get components outside of China, those things could take two to nine months, depending on which kind of raw material component we are talking about. We had to start making those investments in Q2 of 2025, just so we could start being in a position at the end of the year and into where we are today.
We are continuing to make team increases. In Q1, we have gone from one to three shifts in our motor manufacturing. We turned on our headset production. We are making cameras. There is just a large increase as to. It has all been facilitated by that defense bubble that has really been created. We will see that continue to turn on, and our customers are just continually coming to us and saying, hey, we need more.
Our main objective is let us make sure we have the material on hand for what this is going to be. Over the course of the year, we have also made large good capital raises. We have raised about $450 million over the last year to enable us to make sure that we can ride this kind of growth curve. If we think about from a purchasing perspective as well, if I start purchasing stuff today and it is going to take, let us call it on average six to eight months to get the full material in stock, we build it, I sell it is going to take probably 9-12 months before we start seeing some of that stuff turn back into cash. There is a long cycle of what this cash is going to look like.
As we talked about our balance sheet being in a strong position, we are in a great spot to be able to kind of withhold that kind of curve to being able to continue to capture as much of the market demand as possible, especially from the defense side. As we start talking about kind of some of those further initiatives on the commercial side as we want to take aspect as to that. Q2, we just released earnings. We had a fantastic quarter. We have just hit $16.7 million in revenue. We are kind of continuing to maintain our margins. We have really turned on our full headset production there. Our team members are at 240. We are growing to probably over 260 today. vision is to get to 500.
We are continuing to build out the team, build out and make sure we are making the right inventory purchases at the right time. We are making smart strategic investments into other drone and drone-adjacent companies to really enable the marketplace as well. The demand is kind of continuing to do it. Great things as to the growth trajectory. We have increased our facility footprint. We are continuing to increase our facility footprint, continuing to add new spaces, hopefully complete the Upgrade Energy acquisition to bring in batteries into Q4, build out a secondary battery manufacturing plant in Orlando. A lot of great things ahead. Kind of expanding, and I know I have touched on this a little bit, but really this kind of helps understand and put to place as to why that growth kind of has been enacted.
It started with the National Defense Authorization Act, which was originally approved in 2025 and was renewed as well, but really this kind of started it where there is a national security risk in relation to drones and how this is going to be. So, it started with just covered countries. So you could not purchase things from China, Russia, and those other types of countries. It really started kind of where we saw the need for this. Given our long history, just even in the drone space from kind of the hobbyist world, we have known, and we have got a great team that has already been in part of understanding the supply chain. They know that there has been constraints.
They see where the primary of 90% of these products were made in China, and how do we bring that back with these regulations that we see and kind of being involved in kind of how they are developed of what is going to happen. So take that as kind of the foundation where we put our investments to say, okay, let us start bringing motors, right? That was kind of our primary piece that said, okay, let us bring this here to the United States. Let us do it ourselves. Then in December of 2025, the FCC came out and expanded that, which kind of was a big piece, and we kind of initially thought, yes, we knew that was kind of coming to say that the drone, the full program, the full drone manufacturing was going to be there.
They included it to also say critical components could not be produced in any foreign country, not just the covered countries, but any foreign country. So now it is going to be a rolling impact here as to all those components that we just saw have to be made in the United States. So we have taken all those critical pieces, and really just tried to say, hey, there is no new technology that we need to do. We just need to then replicate what China has been doing for 20+ years, and let us recreate that same thing. Let us be cost-competitive with it as best as we possibly can so that way we are enabling the U.S. market really figuring out the supply chain here. Then just the demand has been done through this. Again, the Drone Dominance program is the primary one, right?
There will be 30,000 drones that were already done as a part of part one of the first phase here, and that was earlier this year. That was down selected to 11 vendors. More than half of those are Unusual Machines customers. We are currently in phase II of part two of this phase I in this year, an additional 60,000, and that is kind of continuing to. There was already kind of a reduction of those vendors competing for this section of it. Again, a lot of those customers that are still in the running for part two are Unusual Machines customers, and we are here to go and supply those with NDAA-compliant parts. So why Unusual Machines, right? We talked about the regulatory pieces. We started as this is what we were going to go after, right?
So kind of our roots, like we said back in 2024 when we were coming out as an IPO, as a micro-cap company, we said we see around 2026, and Allan, our CEO, kind of said, I think right around 2026, and you're just like, I don't know how he got the timing so well, but he did, and we were right place, right time. We made the investments early enough. Probably could have done even earlier if we really wanted to think about it. But right now our piece to this is grow as quickly as possible, take as much demand as we absolutely can, and continue to capture that market. To be a reliable customer on time, good quality. That's really the core as to what we're trying to go do right now and be a Tier 1 supplier for this. Strong working capital.
We had over almost $230 million of cash on hand as of June 30th. We've got about 80+ million sitting in investments. Some are very liquid as we invest in other drone and drone-adjacent companies. We've got a strong inventory balance to continue to try and meet demand. Now, there's always aspects to the inventory. It's like even though we have the large balance, if we could go and fulfill and add more on hand of some certain components, we could have done even more. But again, we're in a strong position. Then you add in the team, kind of the expertise in this industry, the know-how. FPV is such an interesting and unique place to start. That is probably one of the areas that beat drones up even the most.
Our team really understands our product, and it accelerates us into what we know and how we're going to go do this. So we can't have our drones having issues, or the parts that are going to go supply to our customers. So we've got a strong expertise in what that's going to do, and how they're to ensure that our products are going to be high quality. If we take a look at where do we sit in the drone parts landscape, there's these premium kind of customers that sit where they'll make great products. But they're going to be less at scale. So right now, if we're talking about 90,000 drones this year, 250 the next year, and even more and beyond, the amount of product that needs to happen in relation to it is where this is at.
So we're sitting there trying to be the high volume and reasonable cost affordable for our customers. So, we've got competitors that can do it, their pricing's higher, their volume's lower, or we'll also have them where maybe their pricing is lower, but also they just don't do as much quantity. Then, especially as we talked about the U.S., and if we think about what. We get the question sometimes, hey, what about international? Right now, we can't even make enough product just for the U.S. demand. So right now, that's our primary focus. We're going to continue to focus there. Now, obviously, we'll always have conversations and talk with customers, especially if they've kind of got any international presence. We've got counter-drones and those types of things as well that are driving additional demand.
We are really focused on there, and we are trying to be that primary spot here for high volume, reasonable cost for our parts. Talked about this already, but this just kind of gives you an aspect as to the inflection and the shift in what we have seen over the last year. Again, doing this at scale, in Q2, we were close to being kind of on an adjusted basis, which does not really adjust for too much other than taking out some non-cash items and those kind of things. We were close to being almost on an adjusted EBITDA breakeven point in Q2. We do not burn a lot of cash. Our growth is tremendous. We are maintaining margins. It is going to hopefully continue the rest of this year.
Great job from the team to continue to expand, make sure we are in a good position to enable the continued growth of this industry, be a reliable source to our customers, all while trying to grow at rapid scale. It is not easy to do. There obviously comes with its pain points, trying to build out the rest of the infrastructure to support every aspect of this operations.
We are going to continue to see some of our, when I say costs, I am not talking necessarily a margin cost, but just our overall G&A. We will eventually hit that inflection point where we do get to be breakeven. It might still take us another 6 - 12 months to get there, because we are continuing to make investments. We have had to expand our HR team to make sure we are recruiting the right people. We got to get the right IT teams.
We are making sure our sales teams are enabled in the right fashion to go after and really talk and meet our customer demands and do it at the right process. We are getting to be a larger company, so it just is going to meet other public company requirements. There is going to be some other cost aspects that are going to be there.
We could get to the path of breakeven. As of right now, that is not our primary focus. It is a focus, but it is not our primary. Our primary is go capture as much of the revenue. We still have not seen the top of that inflection point yet for us to necessarily say, okay, now is that time to start slowing down. We are trying to hire, we are trying to get our manufacturing capabilities up as quick as possible, and really enable it for the future.
I will not spend too much time on this, but we are very clean company. There is no debt. We are all common right now. A little bit sitting in our EIP, but great position from a cap table perspective. Here is a large portion of the team. As we looked at it, there were a couple of us on this slide, not only a year ago, but now we are continuing to expand. We could not do it without the tremendous people behind that next layer down. They are enabling this growth. They are fantastic. They are bought into the mission. People are excited and energized. They want to be here and go solve these very difficult problems as we get into what the demand looks like for the future. Kudos to them. We could not do it without them, and we are continuing to build this team out.
Again, just to recap, started as a small kind of vision as to what this is going. We saw the demand happening, we took advantage of it. We saw the NDAA come in. We are accelerating the growth as much as possible. The legislation is really driving it. We have got a strong balance sheet to enable our growth, and financial aspects to this, and we are here to go capture the rest of it in 2026 and beyond. I will open it up. I know probably went a little longer than needed, but I wanted to save a couple minutes for questions as well.
Thank you so much for presenting, Brian. Really appreciate it. Again, I would like to remind the audience if you have any questions, you can submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Brian, can you tell us how you can improve the payload capabilities?
Yeah. There is going to be a couple pieces. It is going to be the size of the drone, is really going to be there. Right now we are focused primarily on just that Group 1, right? So we are sticking into the 55 lbs and less, right? And so you are going to be talking about the size of the drone, which is really going to be depending on motor size. Obviously, there is going to be depending on how much from a battery perspective and how long and what the power of that is going to be.
So there is going to be some aspects that kind of go into it. There is obviously Group 2 and other types of drones that are going to be a little bit larger in size that you are going to get. Now, those costs go up in relation to it, but the payload is going to be dependent on what that is going to look like. And right now, I think from a Group 1 drone in these attritable pieces, every aspect is there is meeting kind of the needs from the defense side in relation to the payload.
Right. Do the new MOSAIC flight rules help your retail penetration or does that not change the equation at all?
Can you What was the question? Do which rules?
The M-O-S-A-I-C flight rules.
Stacy, I do not know do you know that I know you are on here as well. I do not know. Do you know which ones that are?
Sorry about that. I was on mute. It's yet to be determined if those new special airworthiness certifications are going to help. Not quite sure yet.
Okay. Thank you. There's another question from the audience. Given that PDW recently secured an $820 million conditional loan, if you were to receive an OSC loan, for what purpose would the funds be used and would you need a comparable amount or substantially less to stay ahead as the leading drone component manufacturer?
I think what some of our primary aspects, and we'll kind of keep this at a level that's We have visions to expand our drone motor is probably the biggest area that we would use that type of capital for. I don't think that it would be in that type of ballpark if we were to go in any type of fashion. We would want to make sure and we would kind of have I think the discussions we've had have primarily been around expanding. Like if we have one motor, we'll call it one motor line. That's going to be our partially automated and highly automated line. That'll get us, I don't know, 1 million, 1 .5 million, somewhere in there of drone motors a year. We want to be able to go to 8 million- 10 million and have flux capacity that goes in there.
We'd probably take it from one to call it six to eight lines, somewhere in there, right? We'd probably start going into this Group 1 and Group 2 motors sizes. So that's kind of been some of the discussion points if we were to think about it, but obviously we'd kind of I think there's a large quantity that we would need to continue to expand that footprint with any type of funding that we would go do.
Right. Are you planning to do an equity or convert offering before the year-end to take advantage of the current fast growth opportunities that you have?
As of right now, look, we've got a healthy balance sheet. I don't think there's anything that's saying that we need to go do anything. We have aspects in place if we need to. I think we would obviously look at what the opportunities might present us. As of right now, there's nothing that's like, hey, right now there's anything that's going to be like, yeah, let's go and pull the trigger on that. It's going to be dependent on whatever situation may arise into it, but there's not a need. We're very smart about how and when we raise our capital. If it arises, we'll go pull that, but as of right now, there's not like a overarching saying, h ey, we have to go do this.
Right. I'd just like to end by asking if you can sum up the value proposition for investors who might be looking across the drone sector. What would you say to them?
I think there's a large opportunity that we haven't seen the full aspect of this yet. We are very committed to aggressive growth, making sure that we capture as much as possible. I think there's still a lot of untapped pieces here, right, as we continue to see what the evolution of this is, especially from a defense side. So there's, I think you can even kind of expand it even beyond to just say what it even in from a robotics perspective is there going to be, right? So I think there's a lot of areas in where we re-industrialize and onshore manufacturing to the United States that Unusual Machines has its eyes on, right? So I think there's a lot of potential, and we're very willing and able and wanting to grow as fast as possible and be there at the end.
I think the value proposition is we have proven our point already in the first two years of being public to take us from a small microcap to over 1 billion in market cap, and I think there is continued energy to want to continue our growth story and seeing that, hey, we have started this, we have proven we can and are willing to go do it, and let us continue that ride.
Great. Thank you so much. With that, we are at time. I would like to thank you very much for sharing your story with us, and I would also like to thank everybody in the audience for listening and spending time with us today. Thank you.
Thank you all. Appreciate the time.