Symbotic A Aktie

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Symbotic's Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Charlie Anderson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello. Welcome to Symbotic's Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results Webcast. I'm Charlie Anderson, Symbotic's Vice President of Investor Relations.

Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at ir.symbotic.com.

On today's call, we are joined by Rick Cohen, Symbotic's Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Izzy Martins, Symbotic's Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our third quarter of fiscal year 2026 results and our outlook, followed by Q&A.

With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to begin. Rick?

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results and business updates. We delivered strong third quarter results, highlighted by continued revenue growth and expanding margins, leading to continued GAAP profitability and adjusted EBITDA that more than doubled year-over-year.

Thanks to another strong quarter, we remain well on track to achieve the objectives we laid out at the start of the year. As a reminder, our first objective was to leverage our growing product portfolio and capabilities to broaden our opportunities with customers. We are clearly seeing this play out as our BreakPack product to handle individual items or each's has now begun deployment at half of Walmart's regional distribution centers.

In addition, we recently began installation of our first SymMicro system for e-commerce fulfillment at the back of a Walmart store, a significant step forward towards unlocking this exciting new category of our business. We are also continuing to drive additional value for our customers that have existing operational systems by providing higher levels of performance through software to further optimize their supply chains. A recent example is using our software to more intelligently layer pallets and dynamically optimize freight delivery, specifically for seasonal events like back-to-school. By doing so, we believe our customers can realize shorter delivery times and faster restocking during these critical periods.

We believe customers are increasingly recognizing the impact our systems can have. And as a result, we are seeing additional opportunities to broaden the scope of our work with both existing and prospective customers. For example, in the third quarter, we signed an agreement with Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits for a second site after the success of their first facility. Southern Glazer's is a leading total beverage distributor serving 47 U.S. markets in Canada.

As we drive additional value to customers, it is allowing us to realize the second objective we laid out at the beginning of the year, which was to enhance our margins and profitability. Our forecast for the year implies full year adjusted EBITDA that is more than double that of last fiscal year. This continues to be a key focus area for us, and we see clear levers to continue enhancing our profitability driven by value creation for our customers and further operational efficiencies.

The final objective we laid out was to continue to invest in our innovation engine to expand our capabilities and support future growth. The analogy I often use here is that our automation system is like an operating system, and we add apps to enhance its functionality for customers. For us, this is playing out both organically and inorganically. Organically, we are making several functionality upgrades to our SymBots to enhance the performance of our system. For example, we deployed over 1,000 larger bots into our operational system this calendar year to handle a wider variety of SKUs.

With this new bot, we've also built new modularized software development tools to give us enhanced flexibility to create different bots for different tasks and payloads with our SymMicro bot being a perfect example. We're also in the process of rolling out LiDAR, enhanced camera systems, Nyobolt advanced batteries and other updates, all with the aim of driving enhanced efficiency and performance for our systems.

Inorganically, we've made 2 tuck-in technology acquisitions that expand our capabilities. Fox Robotics for dock automation and most recently, ARMS Innovations for warehouse operations optimization. With ARMS, we have an opportunity to expand the reach of our software beyond our automation system to the entire warehouse operation, optimizing the movement of both equipment and people.

In summary, we are focused on meeting our objectives and in turn, creating ravingly happy customers and expanding shareholder value. We also continue to have a solid balance sheet and backlog. As always, I want to thank our team for all their hard work, along with our customers and our investors for their continued support.

I'll now turn it over to Izzy, who will discuss our financial results and outlook. Izzy?

Thanks, Rick. Fiscal third quarter revenue reached $721 million, near the high end of our forecasted range and was up 22% year-over-year and up 7% quarter-over-quarter. We also improved GAAP profitability with $55 million in net income. Adjusted EBITDA of $95 million was above our forecasted range due to expanding margins and operational efficiencies.

Our revenue growth was driven by the continued expansion in the number of systems in deployment and the growth of operational systems that generate recurring revenue. We started 11 new system deployments in the third quarter, including the new Southern Glazer's site highlighted by Rick, bringing us to a total of 77 systems in deployment at the end of the quarter. This expansion in the number of deployments drove systems revenue growth of 20% year-over-year and 6% sequentially to $671 million. We also had 4 systems go operational during the quarter, bringing us to a total of 56 operational systems. As our base of operational systems continues to expand, software revenue grew 57% year-over-year to $13 million and operations services revenue of $37 million grew 49% year-over-year, both in the fiscal third quarter.

Turning to margins in the fiscal third quarter. Gross margin expanded both sequentially and year-over-year due to strong project execution, cost discipline, benefits from scale and revenue mix. Operating expenses on a GAAP basis were $128 million in the fiscal third quarter. Combined adjusted R&D and SG&A expenses totaled $85 million, with SG&A down sequentially due to operational efficiencies.

Net income for the fiscal third quarter was $55 million, an improvement from a net loss of $21 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025. This included an unrealized noncash gain on the fair value of our strategic investments of $19 million in the quarter, which was primarily driven by an increase in the value of our investment in Nyobolt, our next-generation battery supplier. GAAP net income improved both year-over-year and sequentially, reflecting this impact as well as expanding margins and operating leverage.

As Rick highlighted, adjusted EBITDA of $95 million was more than double the $45 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025. Our backlog of $22.5 billion remains strong. The slight decrease from last quarter primarily reflects revenue recognized in the quarter, offset by final pricing adjustments on projects started in the quarter and the addition of the new Southern Glazer's site. We finished the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $1.7 billion, down from $2 billion last quarter due primarily to timing of cash receipts related to project starts, along with the timing of cash usage related to project activity.

Now turning to the outlook. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue between $760 million and $780 million and adjusted EBITDA between $100 million and $105 million.

With that, we now welcome your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

Our first question comes from the line of Andy Kaplowitz of Citigroup.

So Rick, I know you said that you've now installed a SymMicro prototype into a Walmart store. So maybe you can give more color into where you are in that development process. I think you've said previously, you could see conversion on the $5 billion in Walmart backlog before this -- the end of the calendar year. Is that still the right time frame? And then as SymMicro has evolved, how have you thought about the ultimate opportunity even beyond the initial $5 billion? I think, for instance, you've been working on solving perishables with the smaller system. So maybe just an update would be helpful.

I think you've covered the whole waterfront there. SymMicro, we are installing, it will take I don't know, about 6 months into our first Walmart -- the new version of our system into the first Walmart store. We're running 19 of the old versions, but we've been working with Walmart to develop this. And so that will be come to life about 6 months from now. That should trigger expanded. We expect that will work very well. We have a second site that will follow shortly after that. And then that should trigger a bunch more sites once Walmart actually sees the system working.

Your second question on perishables. We have a lot of interest in perishables. It seems like something clipped in the rest of the world. And so I think the realization that with the new structure that you can save so much money on the construction cost of these perishable buildings, and they're so expensive to start with. We've had a lot of interest. So we would expect within the next 6 months, I guess, I would say, to begin building our first prototypes and testing stuff.

Very helpful. And then, Izzy, maybe just revenue is beginning to accelerate now in Q4 as per your guidance. Given the new storage structure, it seems like it's allowing you to accelerate deployments. Ultimately, do we continue to see continued acceleration in FY '27 in revenue, at least how do we think about that if you don't want to give specific guidance?

Yes. I think, as Rick said, you covered it in your question. Obviously, as we unveiled the next-generation storage structure, we were expecting that inflection point. I think we're just starting that out. I think the sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter, including our guide is, call it, steady. I think though the real inflection point of the next-generation storage structure will really happen in the second half of next year as we proceed with the installation of that.

Our next call comes from the line of Matt Summerville of D.A. Davidson.

A couple of questions. Can you maybe provide an update on where you are with customer acquisition for Exol and maybe update where you're at with site launches? And then I'm also curious as to what initial inbound interest is with respect to that ARMS acquisition you referenced earlier.

So on Exol, our Atlanta site has gone live. We are receiving product there. Customer was asked not to be named yet, but that site is now live and receiving product. And then our Lathrop site, which the customer is C&S, that Symbotic system is now complete. And so that site will go live within the next 60 or 90 days, and that will be a nice revenue-producing site because right now, we have the system in there, but we're not getting any revenue as the cases go through Symbotic.

So we're feeling good about these sites are coming online. It's been a journey to get these sites filled up, but the reality is we have to get the buildings built and show people. So -- and we have a lot of incoming. We have 5 buildings. And so the fact that we have 5 buildings, we're able to talk to bigger customers as well as smallest customers. But it's a process. But the answer to your first question is we are live in Atlanta and receiving product. And in Lathrop, California, we will start filling out about 100% of what we plan there within the next 60 to 90 days.

Give him the insights on ARMS.

And then on ARMS. ARMS we're doing the integration of ARMS software with the operating system from Symbotic. We have a site -- our first site that we're doing the integration will be the testing, and then we'll be able to show people how that will work. And we think that will be a very nice revenue -- software revenue business for us because we think it creates great value in improving the efficiencies of the maintenance whole system and process.

As a follow-up...

Yes, go ahead.

Go ahead.

No, that will actually be one of the best examples of integrating AI with a software system because that system will actually be able to tell an operator what's wrong, where the inventory is, which operator should go fix it. So that's going to be a very sweet little business for us.

Appreciate that color. Curious if Southern Glazer's is using that next-gen storage structure and maybe remind us what the site opportunity may ultimately look like with that customer.

So with Southern Glazer's specifically?

Yes.

Southern Glazer's is not -- their second site is not using the newest structure in part because the way that the liquor industry works, the cases are more standardized. And so I think the third and fourth sites probably will, but the second site was already started in design. And these are heavy -- these are liquor heavy bottles and the case sizes are pretty standard. So it's not -- the new structure is beneficial to them, but in more varied block sizes, it's even more beneficial. But the real answer is they would have used it, but we already started with the old structure when we designed it, and it's just too far down the road.

And then for the potential there, as Rick mentioned in his prepared remarks, we're starting the second one. And as you know, they serve in 47 U.S. markets, including in Canada.

Our next call comes from the line of Joe Giordano of TD Cowen.

Just a couple of clarifications. The Atlanta site for Exol, is that like a one customer site. I know you mentioned the customer doesn't want to be named. Is that customer planning on taking the whole...

No, that's a multi-customer site. We're just receiving the first customer, and we haven't determined how much space they're going to need, but they're building up pretty quickly. That will be a multisite.

And then on the micro fulfillment, I'm just curious as you said you're going to deliver -- you're building it out 6 months and then you'll do a second. What's the mechanism in the contract? I thought the contract was kind of once they accept it, it automatically triggers the $5 billion and the 400-store order. What is required to have that hit?

The way we've done things with Walmart in partnership is we build a prototype, we build them so that they work, but we also know that where you can tell from the prototype. We're building it into a store. I'm not sure I'm supposed to announce the store, but it will become obvious pretty soon. But we'll build it into the store and then we'll -- we overbuild it to make sure that it works. And then we redesign it to make sure that we've got the cost out, in this case, make it smaller, make it more efficient. Walmart may add items, they may delete items. And so -- and when we do the second version, that's usually what triggers, okay, we want 400 of these.

Got it. Okay.

The most important thing with these sites is there's the coordination of the hardware, but most of the time, what's happened with these micro fulfillment sites is that the software hasn't been flexible enough and the software and the automation haven't been coordinated enough. So we're going to overbuild this, but we probably won't build 400 of the version we're building now. But I think the one after this, we will.

Great. Izzy, just how should we think about the pacing of system adds maybe for next quarter and into the near future?

Yes. So as you noticed, right, we had a great 3 quarters in a row. I had originally mentioned a couple of quarters ago, maybe the fourth would be a little light. But actually, now as I'm seeing the trajectory, I think the fourth quarter will be in line with the third, maybe just a little short of the third. So great, great expectations where we've been in the last 3 quarters and where we're going to land for the year.

Our next question comes from the line of Ken Newman of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Maybe for my first question, Izzy, maybe you can help us to think about -- I'll ask the new storage system or the revenue question on systems a little bit differently. As you think about the new storage system now being fully implemented, how should we think about the cadence of segment gross margins on that improvement, just given that you do expect that to maybe ramp, it sounds like maybe later in the back half of next year. But just trying to think about the opportunity for gross margin improvement there and the cadence of that in coming quarters.

Okay. So let me unpack your question a little bit. First with -- just let me repeat what Rick was saying on the micro fulfillment. So we're starting now the first prototype. We expect to get into, after that, or maybe in the middle of that, getting the second prototype. I really am not expecting just yet the micro fulfillment, call it, the store order that is mentioned in the contract probably until early 2028.

So then when you think about margins, right, our whole journey of improving margins, right? This contract is more profitable from that perspective. So you just have to think of it as we continue the mix, right? The first step, as I've been talking about is probably closer to the second half of next year. We get the inflection point of really having the installation of the next-gen system, which will improve margins. Then you also then end up adding in the back of stores and that being also a big part of the mix, which gets us to in this journey, how our margins continue to improve.

The one thing I will say about margins, we had a great quarter from a margin perspective. As I said last quarter, I was expecting stable margins. The quarter was really, really strong. I think the fourth quarter will behave very similar to our exit trend in the second (sic) [ third. ] So I hope that helps, [ Ken. ]

Third.

Third.

Yes. That's very helpful. I appreciate that. Maybe for the follow-on here, Rick, it was interesting to see a couple of bolt-on deals this quarter. You did a bolt-on last quarter as well. As you look at the forward innovation pipeline, is there any color you can give on just other types of deals that you're looking to maybe help you drive faster deployments? And I would also be curious just if there's anything you can kind of talk about on what you're spending on AI development in terms of token spend versus the hardware spend on R&D?

Yes. So -- we are looking at more bolt-ons. It's an interesting time. As you guys know, there's so much money chasing AI that a lot of the traditional automation companies are running into funding problems or -- and so we become a very good place for people to approach us as investors or acquirers. So we're -- that's why we've built up our balance sheet. We guessed right about that. We are right about that. I think we'll see continued opportunities there to acquire hardware.

In the case of ARMS, it was a software. So -- and some companies we're looking at are a combination of interesting technology, both hardware and software in vision. The question you asked about AI is, so the way I would describe it is, I think we were doing AI 5 years ago before anybody called it AI. So we've been doing self-driving cars. We've been doing vision, we've been doing LiDAR. We generate, I think it's 1 trillion bits of data every day at every site. Maybe it's 100 billion. It's an incredible amount of data at every site.

And so we're looking for -- to economically store it in the cloud. And then we are writing our own AI agent. So yes, we're using some AI to audit code. And that's helpful. But mostly, what we will do is we will develop our own AI agents that will actually be able to predict and tell us what's going to go wrong with our systems before they go wrong and then actually communicate to the robots, drive them out of the system, tell the maintenance people what's wrong with them and fix them. So that's not something that we're going to pay a lot of money for outside. That's something that we've been building here for a long time.

And that's why I think most people consider us one of the leading companies in the world with physical AI. And I think there's a lot of misnomers about that, but we're actually doing it, and we've been doing it for a long time before we used to call it machine learning. They used to call it a whole bunch of other things. But now we're actually learning how to use AI, not just to generate reports, but actually to communicate directly with our robots and in some cases, fix them, in some cases, tell them what to do, in some cases, tell them where to go to the exit ramp and get fixed.

If you just -- if I could just clarify that last point, Rick. When I -- when you talk about scaling that infrastructure on the AI software side, does that require an incremental or scale up in tokens needed to operate that system? Or is that really just on the inference that you get to scale?

Yes. So that's a great question. We're using some tokens, but there's a lot of open source AI. There's a lot of AI that -- and we're also looking at different forms of AI. There's some AI that we can actually not have to go to the cloud. We can actually imbue that technology right into our bots because with the new NVIDIA chips, we have 4x as much storage, and we'll have more storage on our bots that we didn't have 2 years ago.

So I don't think tokens, I don't think AI expense is going to be a major issue for us, and we're very focused on doing as much as we can internally ourselves. So we don't -- one of the things that we've learned is that about 80% of the AI that maybe we looked at using last year was a lot of formatting. It was not actually using the data that we needed. So one of the things we're focused on is because we generate so much data, because we've always mined our own data, we're actually looking at what's the most efficient way to use our data that's cost effective.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney of Goldman Sachs.

I think better margins was one of the key highlights from the quarter. I believe revenue was $11 million above the midpoint of your guidance, but EBITDA came in $12 million better. So can you share more on what led to the degree of margin improvement in 3Q and the upside relative to your expectation?

Sure. I'll take that. So just to unpack the margins, right? If you think about it just in the amount of revenue we had in the systems, those margins came in quite solid. Quarter-over-quarter, they actually came a little bit better than I was expecting originally. But those really come down to the project execution and the mix of business we had in the quarter. I think the other thing that came in nicely this quarter was the fact that op services, right, it continues to deliver profitability. Maybe it was a little bit better than I expected. But at the end of the day, I expect next quarter to be in line with this year -- with this quarter's revenue.

And then last but not least, as you hit about on EBITDA margin, the operating leverage was really good because when you look at the non-GAAP OpEx year-over-year, it was only up 3%. So a combination of all those things, be it systems, operation services and really the scale that we're getting in our OpEx really allowed us to deliver a more profitable quarter.

Very helpful. My other question was on cash flow. Izzy, you talked about timing as the reason that the free cash flow was a headwind in the quarter. Help us understand how to think about free cash flow for the upcoming quarter, should some of those timing issues persist or maybe the better EBITDA will drive improved cash flow?

Yes. I would certainly look at the free cash flow for the quarter just as a timing item and not even timing that I have to wait for the whole fourth quarter. Those are really payments that just came in a week later. So I would say if I had a week more in the quarter, you wouldn't see no blip in that. I think the better way to think about it is, to your question on fourth quarter, I would expect a positive free cash flow. And I think just in general, given our business, it's better to measure us over a longer period of time and that the free cash flow will be on an annual basis will be positive.

Our next question comes from the line of Quinn Fredrickson of Baird.

Now that you've owned Fox Robotics for a little bit, curious if there's any updates to their product that you've made or are contemplating that improves the integration with your system. And I think you've also mentioned some of their largest customers are not Symbotic customers. So any updates on discussions with any of their customers and whether they could be potential customers?

Yes. We've been very encouraged. All of the Fox customers are actually delighted that we bought the company. We're in talks with all of them. We've hired some new folks there. We've hired some new salespeople there. We're sitting down and doing a complete review with 2 of the larger customers and just talking about what they would like for next versions, what they would like for next steps. And so I think that's going to be a very nice business. We've been very encouraged. We've had no headwinds.

We're actually -- I think the customers we're talking to are saying, we're really excited to own this company. And in some cases, they might want a Symbotic system. And in some cases, they're actually really interested in the combination of Fox, the ARMS software, some of the other software we're looking at and actually helping them with a dock management system. So -- it just -- we just started. It's a very small company, but I think it's got a very big potential. And we've been excited about the reception that we've got from all of the Fox customers.

And for my follow-up, Izzy, you've been on a nice sequential EBITDA margin progression for the better part of 2 years. You did mention the fourth quarter guide kind of implies flattish EBITDA margin sequentially despite higher revenue. Could you just unpack maybe why margins wouldn't continue to improve with operating leverage?

I think right now, I just want to make sure that we see it coming. So right now, based on our latest forecast, we do expect OpEx to just increase slightly, and that would be more on the SG&A side. So maybe it comes in better, but right now, my expectation is that the OpEx would be just a slight uptick. I think the other part, as I mentioned earlier, the gross margins where we landed on a non-GAAP basis of 25% this quarter. Right now, I'm going back to what I said I was expecting stabilization at the end of the second quarter. So if they come in closer to in line with the second quarter, those are the 2 main reasons why you would see that EBITDA margin would be flat.

Our next question comes from the line of Guy Hardwick of Barclays.

Just whether you could update us on the remaining performance obligations. I think the 10-Q says $22.5 billion and 15% realized over the next 12 months. It doesn't look like the changes were as significant this quarter than the previous quarter. Just whether there's anything unusual or just -- or is it just regular kind of contract plus ups as you begin deployments, particularly? I think there's another -- I think you said 11 starts.

That's correct. So the $22.5 billion and the banding of within the next 12 months of 15%, that's exactly what we put out there. I think it just has once again to do with the mix of deployments. So just before I even get into the deployments, right, the $22.5 billion coming off at $22.7 billion had a healthy amount of revenue in the quarter, you decrease it. As you know, we have pricing adjustments when we redo the backlog plus the fact that we added Southern Glazer's. But it really then comes down when you're tracking it, it just really comes down to the 11 deployments we are putting in, in the quarter, just what those pricing adjustments were.

So it could be lumpy at any given time. I think the more promising thing is that despite the revenue that we're generating every single quarter, our backlog still remains very, very stable. And as we said before, that backlog still doesn't include the contract for the 400 back of store systems.

And it looks like revenue deployments have been falling now for at least 4 quarters. Is that kind of a mix effect? What is the kind of -- it seems a little odd that system sizes in the Walmart business is actually going up, right?

Agreed. But it also just has to deal with at what point in the cycle we are in the installation phase, right? Because the revenue is going to come in as we get closer to month 13 forward. So there is a little bit of lumpiness, but I think it's better instead of just focusing on one given quarter, if you look at the multiple of the quarters and where we are and what the expectation is going forward, given that the fit banding is at 15% for the next 12 months.

So does that mean that you'd expect revenue per deployment to start going up again? Or will it continue to sort of trend down?

I think in the coming -- we don't guide to backlog. I think the expectation for the next quarter, given the guide we gave, that's really where our expectation. But of course, we're always looking to not only have stable backlog, but to increase our backlog.

Well, revenue is going up. We expect revenue to go up.

Yes. And we do expect revenue to go up, of course. That's where the 15% comes in.

Our next question comes from the line of Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer & Company.

Now with the ARMS platform purchased, can you talk a little bit about the opportunity to start introducing new offerings with semi-automation or robots that are more interactive with humans and existing assets that might be a little bit lower barrier to entry for some of the customers that you might want to grow with?

I'm not sure I understand your question.

I'm just looking for a sense of opportunities that you guys could bring to market that would be a little bit lower price for customers, a little bit lower barrier to entry to get them started as they move towards fully automated systems.

Yes. So I think the ARMS software is something that we could sell to a customer. The company actually doesn't make anything except software. So we could sell that to customers and introduce our software. The other thing is that the Fox robots, these are $100,000 machines. And so I think that is -- the way I look at it is, we will become -- that our hardware will continue to grow. Our sales are going to continue to grow, but we will become much more of a software-centric company that's selling machines that basically perform for what we want our software to do.

So for instance, some of the Fox customers as a company, it's no secret, it's DHL, one of the largest 3PLs in the world. They really like the Fox robots. They want us to help them manage the dock. They may never buy a Symbotic system. But if you sell -- I don't know, you sell 20,000 of these $100,000 machines, that's a pretty good sale. So I'm not saying we sell that to DHL, but it's a huge market out there, and it's a much easier point of entry.

Your question is appropriate because the last 2 weeks, we've had 2 major potential customers, retailers who are interested in automation, great companies, well-known names. And they're really looking at how they can enter into the automation space without a lot of experience. And so we can sell them a very small system. We can sell them a small system and a dock system. So that's one of our focuses is to get some of these very large customers in with an entry-level product. So it could be a single one-in and a one-out sell. That could be in the tens of millions, low tens of millions number. And so yes, that's what we're looking at.

And not to mention that the back of store system will be...

The back of the store system is another opportunity.

Perfect. And then there's certainly been a lot of investment around perception technology. And notably, one of the LiDAR vendors is now selling LiDAR with color capability and functional safety. I'm just curious about how much leverage you might get from those sorts of perception solutions into simplifying bot design and optimizing performance and how we should think about the adoption cycle in some of those newer perception technologies going forward?

Yes. So a lot of -- so there's a number of people, some of us, that are doing LiDAR, slow-moving bots to interact with people, I won't mention names of companies, but you know who they are. What we're doing is bots with LiDAR that are fast moving and weigh a lot. The change in technology and the reason we will expect to have LiDAR on all our bots within the next, I don't know, 2 years on the outside is that these LiDAR used to cost 4 years ago, they were $5,000, now they're under $500.

And so they become very affordable for our bots and then it really enables our software. So where other people are using LiDAR for basic like a Kiva bot or something that moves slow, follows the line, meant to be used with humans. What we're really doing is putting LiDAR on bots. It's like a self-driving vehicle that want to go fast. And so we're really trying to have bots that are now combined with ARMS and AI, really getting much closer to within our structure, a lifestyle facility that really we don't -- we may go long periods of time before humans actually have to go in and interact with a bot. That kind of technology does not exist out there for warehouse automation. And that's our goal.

Our next question comes from the line of Derek Soderberg with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Wondering, Rick, if you can expand on the ARMS acquisition a bit. You talked about a little bit in the prepared remarks and during the Q&A. I was wondering how you'll monetize that. Is that going to be a subscription or bundled through kind of the systems price? And is this more for Exol? Or is the plan to deploy this at your large existing customers as well?

No. We will deploy this with -- as an option for all of the Symbotic customers, including Exol. So it will be a software add-on.

Got it. And Rick, could you just talk about where this acquisition kind of started? Was this something customers were asking about? And then just high level, I was curious if you think eventually a large retailer might, in a sense, cede control of the distribution facilities to Symbotic or Exol as you sort of really fully automate the supply chain here, if maybe it makes more sense for you guys to take on the facilities and they would just pay you per case or any of those types of conversations happening?

Yes. So Exol is definitely getting those inquiries, and we've been funneling them through Exol. We also have a number of sites, a number of customers where we sold them a system and then Symbotic runs the system at a cost per case. So -- and ARMS just means that, if we were to do that with this kind of maintenance that we would charge the customer and our operating costs would be lower. And so we would be the beneficiary, both of the software and the more efficiencies.

What ARMS does is it creates a database combined with the operating system, which is inherent in every Symbotic system, but it says to somebody that -- so these -- everybody, all the maintenance people in the front of the structure or working there have a handheld device. And it would say, lift 606 in here and geolocated in this particular part of the building. And remember, some of these buildings are 1 million square feet. This lift has a failed valve, I need you to go there. Here's a picture of what it should take to fix it. I've already checked before you go. This is what AI does.

I already checked these 2 parts are in inventory. So don't go to the lift and then go to the inventory room, go to the inventory room, get these 2 parts, go to the lift. The whole thing should take you 40 minutes. That -- we've been struggling with how do we make these maintenance systems more efficient. And we could sell this kind of system along with some of the Symbotic software to a lot of people in the world. This is the ultimate warehouse management maintenance system.

Our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm of Craig-Hallum.

I wanted to go back to the OpEx and maybe honing a little bit more on R&D. I mean, in light of a lot of these kind of newer opportunities you have perishables and micro fulfillment, it was maybe a little bit odd to see R&D come down quite as much. It doesn't sound like that might go up or, I think as you said, maybe more stable. So I guess, is that just -- are we really pairing things back? Or is that more kind of a reallocation of expenses? Just wanted to get a little bit more color there.

Yes. Greg, so let me step back. First and foremost, R&D expense quarter-over-quarter was flat. All the things that Rick mentioned are the things that we're going to get started on. So hence, when I said earlier, I expect overall OpEx to go up, my expectation is that between R&D and SG&A, we do expect a little bit of an uptick. But as always, we want to maintain the ultimate flexibility in being able to increase our R&D. And that's where I make that comment of -- that's when the EBITDA margin staying flat quarter-over-quarter is really to give us that flexibility there. So I wouldn't say R&D has come down. It has stayed flat. We've gotten, call it, to a rhythm on the things we're investigating, but I expect a little bit of an uptick, not only in the fourth quarter, but in the quarters to come.

Okay. That makes sense. And I guess maybe just shifting topics entirely just in light of the other news, Steve is joining the Board of Directors. I'm just curious, maybe you can give us some thoughts on, given his background, kind of what he brings to the table and how he might sort of help you scale to the next level.

Yes. So I met Steve through one of my other Board members, they were on a Board together, spent a bunch of time with Steve. We're -- Steve is -- with his background, I think will be very, very helpful in helping us look at strategically M&A. We plan to be acquisitive. We've built the balance sheet to be acquisitive. And so that's what we're working on. And so Steve is a perfect Board member for that. And his background when he was at Bain was in the tech sector.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Latimore of Northland Capital Markets.

Two questions. I guess on the ARMS acquisition, how might you price that like the warehouse, how much might you charge for that or whatever metrics you use there? And then also in the third quarter, how much revenue came from just development revenue around micro fulfillment?

Okay.

I'll take the ARMS. I mean the ARMS will be a classic value pricing. If we can save somebody $1 million in warehouse maintenance, we're going to charge them a portion of that.

Yes. On the micro fulfillment side, the amount of revenue recorded in the quarter is in the high single-digit range, which is really kind of the average that I would expect going out.

Our next question comes from the line of Joe Giordano of TD Cowen.

Just quick, Rick, on Exol. I'm just curious what the final design looks like for this customer? What did you -- what did they decide to do in terms of trucks and who's responsible for that and how things are getting to and from the site. I think that was kind of up in the air potentially as a lot of different ways you can go. I'm just curious, we know how the inside of the building works, but how is the whole operation being kind of -- what's the flow sheet?

Yes. So you saw we made an announcement. We partnered with Manhattan on the software piece because so many people that we've talked to are already familiar with the Manhattan integration layer. We're also doing our own integration layer. But the inside of the building is pretty straightforward. It will do -- we'll move pallets, we'll move cases, we'll do each picking. And we are both hired some of our own transportation people and also engaged with some potential transportation brokerage or transportation companies that actually can bring customers into us. So we will manage freight when the customers want us to manage the freight. We will have that capability, both in and out of the building, but probably more so out of the building.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Charlie Anderson for closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks, everybody, as always, for joining our call tonight. We really appreciate your interest in Symbotic, and want everybody to have a good evening. Thanks so much.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Symbotic Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Charlie Anderson, Vice President of Symbotic Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello, and welcome to Symbotic Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results Webcast. I'm Charlie Anderson, Symbotic's Vice President, Investor Relations.

Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at ir.symbotic.com.

On today's call, we're joined by Rick Cohen, Symbotic's Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Izzy Martins, Symbotic's Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our second quarter of fiscal year 2026 results and our outlook, followed by Q&A.

With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to begin. Rick?

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results. In the second quarter, we continued to demonstrate strong execution against our objectives. We posted higher revenue growth and forecast with expanding margins, both on a sequential and year-over-year basis. Once again, this led to continued GAAP profitability and a strengthening balance sheet as we exited the second quarter with over $2 billion in cash and cash equivalents and no debt.

Our momentum with customers continues to build. During the second quarter, we began our first system deployment with Associated Wholesale Grocers, or AWG, the nation's largest cooperative food wholesaler to independently owned supermarkets. We're excited about the potential at AWG, which operates over 9 million square feet of warehouse space and distributes to over 3,500 retail locations. To build upon this momentum, our teams met with many existing and prospective customers last month at the MODEX Trade Show in Atlanta. A clear theme emerged with our existing customers and that they would like us to do more for them as our system performance and product portfolio have improved since we originally established these relationships.

Our goal is to take our core system architecture and layer on capabilities that allow customers to automate their supply chain fully end-to-end. The analogy I often use that it's like an operating system and we add apps. Examples of this include our expansion into e-commerce and dock management. Having this total solution is also driving strong interest from prospective customers. These customers span new geographies and new verticals such as consumer packaged goods, food service and apparel in addition to our existing verticals such as grocery, general merchandise, beverage and healthcare. Within several of these verticals, a capability that is drawing strong interest is our systems' ability to sequence goods for route optimization.

On the technology front, we continue to make progress on our SyMicro product for e-commerce order fulfillment and remained on track to install our first prototypes this calendar year. We also continue to invest in technologies meant to generate greater performance from our system, notably next-generation battery technology with Nyobolt to enhance the operability and efficiency of our bot fleet. We are also now deploying a larger version of our SymBot to handle a larger variety of SKUs or retrieve multiple cases at once.

We believe our continued investment in new bot technologies and enhancements will be a key enabler to handle a larger amount of goods across multiple new verticals and use cases. In summary, we are focused on execution and delivering brightly happy customers, sustainable growth and expanded profitability. As always, I want to thank our team for all their hard work, along with our customers and our investors for their continued support.

I'll now turn it over to Izzy, who will discuss our financial results and outlook. Izzy?

Thanks, Rick. Fiscal second quarter revenue reached $676 million, which was above the high end of our forecasted range. We again achieved GAAP profitability with $9 million in net income. Our adjusted EBITDA of $78 million was also above the top end of our forecasted range due to higher revenue and strong gross margin performance. Our revenue growth was driven by the continued expansion in the number of systems in deployment and the growth of operational systems that generate recurring revenue.

We started 14 new system deployments in the second quarter, bringing us to a total of 70 systems in deployment at the end of the quarter. This expansion in the number of deployments drove systems revenue growth of 24% year-over-year and 8% sequentially to $634 million. We had one system go operational during the quarter, which is the Atlanta area site for XSLT. Notably, this project's install start to acceptance was accomplished in under 10 months, ahead of our historical performance for installation time lines.

As our base of operational systems continues to expand, software revenue grew 93% year-over-year to $13 million in the fiscal second quarter, including approximately a $1 million from a non-recurring adjustment. Excluding this adjustment, software growth remained above 75% year-over-year. Operations services revenue of $29 million was slightly down year-over-year due to a tough comparable in training revenue, but up slightly sequentially due to the increase in operational systems.

Turning to margins in the fiscal second quarter. Gross margin expanded both sequentially and year-over-year due to strong project execution, cost discipline and scale benefits. Operating expenses on a GAAP basis were $144 million in the fiscal second quarter and adjusted operating expenses totaled $88 million, both up sequentially in support of our growth initiatives. Net income for the fiscal second quarter was $9 million, an improvement from a net loss of $10 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, thanks to expanding margins and operating leverage.

Adjusted EBITDA of $78 million was more than double the $35 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2025. Our backlog of $22.7 billion continues to remain strong. The increase from $22.3 billion last quarter primarily reflects final pricing adjustments on projects started in the quarter and the addition of one system for AWG, offset by revenue recognized in the quarter. We finished the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $2 billion, up from $1.8 billion in the fiscal first quarter, driven by $218 million of free cash flow.

Now turning to the outlook for the third quarter of fiscal 2026. We expect revenue between $700 million and $720 million and adjusted EBITDA between $80 million and $85 million.

With that, we now welcome your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Andy Kaplowitz of Citigroup.

Obviously, is up a bit sequentially, and you did mention the first deployment with AWG. Would you say this new store structure that you have is starting to pay dividends with these kinds of new customers? Maybe what's the potential that you see with AWG?

Andy, I heard that a little bit broken up. I think what your question was, first of all, thank you for your question, is what do we see coming forward from the AWG. I think like every customer at the start is always with one system, and so the potential there is really to build one system successfully will take us a couple of years for that and then do one system at a time.

The importance there is unlike a larger customer that adds to our backlog, this backlog will come at one system at a time. Like we said, it's a monumental first step and also having another new customer earlier in our fiscal year, whereas the last new customer that we announced was at the tail end of fiscal year '25. Hopefully, that answered your question.

Yes. No, it's good. Like maybe I just -- it's great to hear about the new XSLT site coming live. Of course, I have to ask, I know you've been talking about customers visiting the site. Now that it's live, would you expect to see sort of more movement there in terms of getting these customers on board?

Yes. Andy, we do expect to get more movement. We've had a lot of interest at MODEX where basically everybody goes and XSLT was there. We're starting to give tours now in the Atlanta site. We would expect pretty quickly to announce our first customers there.

Our next question comes from the line of Joe Giordiano.

The remaining performance obligation in the Q, it suggests upside over the forward 12 months versus Street revenue assumptions. I know you don't like to guide or give color more than 1 quarter forward, but just curious how you -- is there any update to the thought process of the ramp in the rest of the fiscal year? I think the midpoint of your guidance is like 5% sequential 2Q to 3Q. I think consensus is something like 9% from 3Q to 4Q. Just curious if there's any changes into the cadence that you see as the year goes.

Joe, thanks for the question. I think, as you know, we guide 1 quarter at a time. You're spot on, on what we're guiding for the third quarter. I'm not going to get ahead and talk too much about the fourth, but here's what you can expect, right? I'll say that the fourth quarter should be on a sequential and a year-over-year show that growth.

The other thing that I would point out, as you mentioned, the RPO in our 10-Q, you will see that disclosure of what we expect over the next 12 months. You kind of can back into what that fourth quarter is. As I said in the past, there would be maybe a little bit less of a sequential growth quarter-over-quarter. We did over exceed just slightly in the second quarter. I would stick to the guidance in the third and then give us a little bit of time, but you can back into where the RPO is in the next 12 months. We expect a strong fourth quarter with both sequential growth a little bit higher and year-over-year growth as well.

Then just as a follow-up, I noticed there's a fairly big jump in CapEx in the capitalized software in the quarter. It's up like double versus last year. Just if you can talk to that and the outlook there. Rick, you've talked about memory a bunch and input costs in the past. I know it has not been like an issue, but I mean, they continue to like skyrocket. Just curious if there's any updates there.

Joe, I'll take the first half on the CapEx, and then I'll leave it for Rick to answer on the memory side of things. On the CapEx front, maybe what I should have made a little bit clearer in the last quarter where we only had a $2 million spend. What I mentioned the last quarter was that there was a little bit of a delay in payment, but really that we would catch up in the second quarter. The best way to think of it is that we are going to spend on average $20 million to $25 million a quarter. We just had that delay in the first.

I think also what's more important is what are we spending it on? When we announced the next-gen structure, we also mentioned and we started in the fourth quarter that we would be investing in our suppliers for them to increase their capacity. That's where the bulk of the CapEx spend is.

I think your next question was about potentially whether you're referring to sort of memory shortages or things of that nature. In short, I would say we don't have any impact on memory, any memory shortages. We don't consume a ton of memory on the bot. If we have any confirmation of memory, that would be more on the back-end IT infrastructure that stores the data, and that's really an immaterial amount. Not sure if that's what you were asking about.

Our next question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlase of Deutsche Bank.

Maybe just starting with system completions step down to 1 this quarter. I think it was 3 last quarter. Is the expectation that the number of system completions picks up as we move into the back half? I know this isn't a metric that you necessarily guide to, but just with the step down in completions that's happening this year relative to last, it would be good to get some color around that.

Nicole, thank you for the question. You're right. It's not a metric we guide to, but let me give you a little bit of insight. When you see this quarter or really this year, we're really experiencing the impact from the low number of system starts about 2 years ago, right? Really, when you go back to '24, kind of in line, maybe just a tad under, but I think what's important is that we continue to execute well on the items within our control, which is really the installation period.

I think really the way to think about it is that, yes, we expect completes or call it, system completes to grow sequentially from here with probably Q4 being the highest for the year, but I wouldn't expect them to be significantly higher. There just may be a little bit of movement between the second and third quarter. I can say today that there's always a little bit of timing in the quarter. We're still early on into the next quarter, and we've already achieved a couple of those system completes.

I think you highlighted in the prepared remarks that you achieved less than 10 months of deployment time on the system, which is impressive. Was there anything special about that system that allowed you to do that? Could this potentially be like a new norm moving forward?

I will let Rick answer if there's anything specific on the Atlanta installation time line. I don't believe so. I think that for the new norm. I think we've been talking about it quite a bit, what we're in control, which is post month 12 to, say, month 24. We continue to see improvements, which is really what's also driving some of the efficiencies that you already see.

I think what we've also asked for is give us a little bit more time as the mix of the next-gen storage systems really becomes larger for us to truly have a good sense of what is driving that. Today, everything we're seeing, including the one in Atlanta that we continue to shrink what I'll call the installation time period, which is the second tranche of, call it, month 13 to 24. In this particular one, you're going only month 13 to 22. So we've set the new standard, and the key is to stay there, if not be it.

Rick, anything further on the Atlanta site and installation?

No. I mean the Atlanta site was an easier site because it was a greenfield. Some of the sites have been a little more complicated early on because we've been going into existing facilities. There's 2 things that I'll say is that was partly what was responsible with Atlanta, but we've also another -- we have 2 sites now where we're installing the new structure, and that will be faster.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Summerville of D.A. Davidson.

I was wondering if you could give any sort of update on kind of where you're at with development on frozen/perishable as well as if there's an update on the APD and how you're feeling about hitting kind of the benchmarks you need to hit to trigger that additional backlog? Then I have a follow-up.

In the APD, we have -- we're working to get our first 2 prototypes up and running in the next 6 months. If you were to visit us in the ITC, you could see a pretty small prototype that is actually working now. We're very excited. The hardware is pretty much done. We've got some software updates we're doing, but we feel very good about the APDs, and there's a lot of interest -- we into MODEX, a lot of interest in that particular product.

The second part of your question. We've now -- as part of the APD expansion, when we took over Walmart Robotics, there were 19 sites that we had to upgrade, and we've done that. We actually now have a bot working in a freezer. We have another test series of boards that we're testing that are also working in a freezer with no showstoppers. Perishables is actually simpler, not a lot of changes. We've made some substantial upgrades in wiring harnesses and stuff like that coming from some of the car guys that we brought in to handle moisture. I would say we would expect to begin thinking about a frozen and perishable prototype sometime certainly within the next year.

Then as a follow-up, can you maybe update us on your progress with respect to international expansion, particularly with respect to Europe and what the new buffering structure, how that ultimately could accelerate some of that opportunity for you?

Yes. We have our first site in Mexico. We're installing Rack, and so that's our, I guess, our first international site with Walmart. We had an early on site with Giant Tiger in Canada, but we're also looking at other applications in Canada. I guess you call that international. We just came back from Europe, met with a bunch of retailers there just a couple of weeks ago. We're getting a lot more notoriety because Europe is very, very interested in brownfields. Most of the automation that's been built in Europe over the last 5 years is mostly greenfield. It's 70 to 90-foot to 100 -- actually 110-foot high buildings, very strict permitting processes.

Europe is still a ways off, a lot of interest, but a lot of turmoil in Europe right now with Ukraine and the Middle East, but very good reception, and we'll continue to work on developing our first sites in Europe.

Our next question comes from the line of Ken Newman of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I maybe for the first question, just wanted to go back on the initiations. I know you don't really guide to it, but I'm just trying to make sure that we think about -- I think last quarter, you had mentioned maybe one of your larger customers with the advent of the new store structure, maybe transferring some of those deployments into 2-in-1s. So is it just safe to assume that the number of initiations probably steps down a significant amount starting in the third quarter? Or just any help on how to think about that numerically relative to ASPs?

Okay. As you know, we had the 14 starts in the quarter coming off of 10 starts in the first quarter. Just as for the 14, it's a mix, right? It's a mix of those next phases. Yes, there are some larger systems, but there's still also BreakPack, plus the one system for AWG. I think how I would think about it is no different than what I mentioned in the last call. I think the middle will be pretty meaty as to the number of starts, and they will trail off in the fourth quarter. Being consistent to what we said last quarter.

Then maybe, Rick, can you tell us a little bit more about the investment you made in Nyobolt? As you think about the R&D pipeline for future product releases, where do you see the opportunities for maybe some incremental investments? Where do you think you can kind of build organically versus having to go out and maybe do some modest acquisitions?

Yes. Nyobolt was -- we found Nyobolt very early on, and we invested in them very early on. I think, I don't know, maybe right after their seed round. Nyobolt has a unique chemistry where -- I don't know, we're one of the larger owners of the company right now. We believe that the battery technology is very applicable. Our bots use ultracapacitors. Nyobolt is more of an ultracapacitor battery. The energy that we can get out of a single charge is 5x as long as what we get from a charge today on a regular bot. What does that mean? It means our bots are going to be able to do longer trips, much more reliable and not be affected by brownouts and other things that are affecting sites today.

Nyobolt, we're very excited about that investment, and we're using that technology in all our new bots. As an example, for investments, we have our regular SymBot, but we also have a mini bot. We'll have an APD bot, and we'll have a stretch bot. One of the things that makes us I think, special is that we can use the same software in 4 or 5 different bots. We're going to continue to invest in new robots and the 9-volt battery allows us much more flexibility for either longer trips or bigger bots because it just provides more power in the same space.

In terms of other acquisitions, so we just acquired Fox and Fox is going to be a very interesting acquisition. They're using the same LiDAR that we're using on our bots, so we actually can buy these LiDAR considerably cheaper than they can. We have a lot more experience. Today, our bots are traveling 1 million miles a day. We may have the largest autonomous fleet traveling today in the world. I'm not sure. But we're traveling a lot of autonomous miles. The bots are all being retrofitted with LiDAR. They're all being retrofitted with a 9-volt battery. I think we're distancing ourselves between whatever the competition is and where the future goes.

Then there's 2 other acquisitions that we're looking at as part of our trip to Europe. I can't really announce those, but there's -- what's happening is in our space is that as we become a clear winner and a sustainable business, there's a lot of start-ups that are approaching us now about can you help us expand, maybe take an ownership stake or maybe just buy us. A lot of incomings, and we're very excited about that technology.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney of Goldman Sachs.

I was hoping the company could give an update on BreakPack. I think, Izzy, you said one of the system starts this quarter was BreakPack. Can you share more on how that product has been doing in the field and your outlook for additional deployments of BreakPack from here?

Yes, I'll take that one. We did the original BreakPack system in Brooksville, some of you have seen it. There's now right next to that is the new upgraded BreakPack. These are newly designed bots. These bots have -- will have Nyobolt batteries. They will have LiDAR. They're much faster. They can do twice as much work in the same amount of time as the old bots. Walmart has given us orders for 40 of these in every site.

There's a lot of interest in terms of BreakPack is an application that allows us to do smaller versions of these systems. For instance, convenience stores, where they're doing itches. Also the BreakPack is an interim step between a big system and an e-commerce system. BreakPack is very exciting. We're on track. It's going well, no showstoppers. Software is in place, allows us to actually sequence, which is interesting for route drivers, sequence itches and packages, and so for gig drivers who are doing multiple deliveries, BreakPack is a very interesting application.

My other question was on XSLT and now that you've got Atlanta complete, I was hoping to better understand the ramp from here. Maybe you could help with how many of the 14 system starts in the quarter were associated with XSLT and the trajectory going forward?

I'll take the front half of that. I would say in the 14, there are any XSLT. As we said in the past, XSLT is in the, call it, the build mode still. We are very strategic in the 5 locations they picked throughout the country. Now we have the first one completed, and we're in the process of doing the other 4. No different than the last time and the current amount added to deployments does not include an XSLT.

Our next question comes from the line of Jim Ricchiuti of Needham & Company.

I apologize if this was asked already, but you had a nice step-up in gross margins. Izzy, I'm wondering, is there anything you'd say about looking out into the -- I know you don't guide past the quarter, but how might we be thinking about gross margins over the year?

I mean I think here's where I'd start, right? Starting with the -- what we guided to in the second -- in the third quarter. That's really what I would say a stabilization where we saw some really, really nice growth. I mean, I think first, we should just stop to think about where we were a year ago and where we're at now, definitely no small feat.

I think as you think of it going further, as I've mentioned, it's really about stabilizing where we're at for at least the next quarter. Then it's really about not a couple of quarters later, about what we've always said is when we really have the mix of system installations being majority next-gen storage structure, that's where we really should be unlocking a path towards longer-term systems margin. As we said in the past, we expect those to be at 30-plus. Recap, great improvement from where we were a year ago. I would say in the next quarter, a bit of stabilization and give us a little bit of time to get through that journey of having a mix of more next-gen storage systems being installed.

Rick, I think you alluded to stretch bots. I'm wondering what can you say about the deployment of these? How do you see that ramping? Maybe walk us through locations at different customers that you could envision for this?

Most of the products that we initially designed our systems for was a product that was about 8 cubic feet, 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet. As we got those machines running really, really well, and we understood how to do the software for the turns, we got requests for items that were about 50% bigger. That took us about 2 years to actually develop that. Now we have hundreds of those running around right in the same sites as the smaller bots.

The customers are really excited because we've now kind of cracked the code that we could design a bot to handle pretty much anything, but the difference between we designed our bots to handle about 94%, 95% of the products. The stretch bot handles another 2% or 3%, which becomes very important to the customer. This is just a journey that we're on, but we can handle products that we could not handle 2 years ago and we couldn't sell against 2 years ago.

There's some very technical details when you make a bot a little bit longer. It's the difference between driving a little mini and a suburban. Then the next thing, of course, is driving a pickup truck or a 53-footer, and so the handling on those is where the software imagine comes about and then mixing those together, and we've cracked that code. That's where we are right now.

You've had success penetrating a few different sectors. Would you be willing to share with us your expectations of when you might be in some other areas? You highlighted apparel. I think we in the past about opportunities even in the broader manufacturing sector with automotive. I'm just curious how you're thinking about some of these other areas of opportunity.

Yes. We've done so much development in the last couple of years. Medline, for instance, is actually a version of kitting. What Medline liked about us is that they want these 10 products or these let's say, 5 eaches to go to the ophthalmology operating room or the surgical room or the oncology area. That's a combination between a big system and a BreakPack system, but then that could also be an each picking APD system. That is also applicable to auto parts. We talk to auto parts suppliers, some of the retailers. A couple of years ago, our systems were too big and too expensive, but now we're back talking to them again with a smaller, lower cost system that actually is very catered not to them, but it actually works very well for them because what we've done is develop system that's applicable across a lot of areas.

We've also had a number of discussions with actually auto manufacturers because they also have kitting and parts. We're just on the journey. We're pretty busy because we're growing pretty fast. We have a lot more salespeople out there talking to a lot more people about future projects. I think we're very comfortable that we can adapt to most anything that these folks will throw at us.

Our next question comes from the line of Guy Hardwick of Barclays.

I just a question on the backlog. It looks like the change in the backlog in the quarter was quite considerable. It probably implies the pricing adjustment was quite a big step up? Or are you willing to kind of reveal how much of the change was the pricing adjustment versus the AWG win?

It's Izzy. I think I understand. Basically, here's how we think about it, no different than you've seen it in the past, right? Quarter-over-quarter, the backlog does have an increase. As you mentioned, right, the first thing that happens to the backlog is it's taken down by the amount of revenue that we generated in the quarter. As you also mentioned, we also have to do the final pricing of the system signed -- the systems that we signed in the quarter plus the AWG.

As we've said in the past, the backlog has been quite conservative. Actually, coincidentally, if you look at our backlog at the end of this quarter, it's equal to the same amount that we had last year at the same time. It's a little bit of the fact that our systems are configurable, the fact that we do get to align pricing to the current market conditions. As we go through all that math, this quarter, we end up with really, call it, $1 billion of incremental backlog when you take out the amount of revenue that we've recorded in the actual quarter. I hope that helps.

Just as a follow-up, it looks like no matter how I look at it, whether it's 1-year trailing basis or 2-year trailing basis that system revenue per deployment is coming down sort of double-digit percent. I know you have a lot of new system starts and there's, I think, BreakPack would be in there as well, but should I just assume that going forward, the past averages of revenue per system don't really apply anymore that I kind of should step down my assumptions for revenue per system going forward?

Yes. I would say you're spot on, on the numbers. The number does tend to vary though by quarter. Depending on what you said, the mix of systems in the installation versus the design, etc., including the mix, be it a large system versus a small system, a break pack, it's going to vary every quarter. Right now, what we see or where we find ourselves is that we have a very high percentage of recently signed systems, and those signed systems haven't entered the installation phase. The installation phase is really where it's going to be driving more of that revenue. I do see that decline. What I'm saying is it's going to vary quarter-by-quarter. I think it's also as you see where our growth trajectory is that we don't see a concern in the fact that you see that averaging coming down.

Our next question comes from the line of Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer & Co.

I'm curious about the evolution of the capabilities that you guys are thinking about as well as some of the increased integration with the supply chain. We're starting to see autonomous trucks hit the road in a little bit higher volume. I'm curious about some of the scheduling capabilities that you're thinking about and partnerships there as well as the potential to move into heavier objects or even into delivery into hospitals with robots that are integrating into a built environment already. Given the capabilities that you guys have and visibility and opportunities, just curious with the cash balance and the selective acquisitions you've made in the past, how you'd be approaching that or whether from an acquisition or partnership perspective?

Yes. Good question. We spend a lot of time talking about this internally and externally. We want to connect the whole supply chain. We want to be able to coming from a manufacturer going on a truck, communicate to our system and a warehouse know what's going to show up in the yard, be able to schedule that into a door, have our robots, a Fox robot, unload that truck, put it away and then likewise, schedule through our system, integrated with somebody else's system probably, could be a Walmart system, could be a Manhattan system, could be our system.

We're very focused on leveraging the end-to-end supply chain and having -- whether it's AI, some of this will be, but just knowing where everything is in the system and setting up our robots and our software to be able to handle it is really what we're focused on. We will be acquisitive. That's all I can tell you. I can't tell you who, when or where, but we're in a good space. There are a lot of people with a lot of names with a lot of high valuations that are talking about physical AI.

We're the ones that are actually have the information and actually moving the products. We're going to go both upstream and downstream and may look at even more software acquisitions as part of how we connect our systems.

Excellent. The second question is really around data management. We're seeing an escalation in kind of data transfer and management of management expenses. I'm just curious about how you guys are thinking about that if it's even registering at this point for you from a cost perspective and something you need to manage on a go-forward basis?

How we manage -- the question is how do we manage the data management?

We're just seeing data transfer becoming a more meaningful expense across the physical AI supply chain and thinking about localized decisions versus coming back to centralized compute to train things.

Yes, absolutely. We've been -- I'm like maniacally focused on this for 3 years. You just have to be in our IT center here and hear me every day. We're very focused on the data that we need. The cloud per unit is going down, but in total, it's more expensive. It's not something that's going to become a major problem for us to disrupt it because we can control the data.

There's some question about how long you store the data, how you process the data, what we do with the data, but we've been processing massive amounts of data for at least the last 5 years. We do spend a lot of time. We're out looking at all of the software packages, how to connect it. I think we're well ahead of everybody else because we've been doing this for so long, and we've been managing so much data on the physical AI side about what -- how we teach the bots to handle data locally as opposed to sending it up to the cloud and what we need to send up to the cloud. The answer to your question is we're actually very focused on managing this variation.

Our next question comes from the line of Derek Soderberg of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Quick one on the AWG project. I'm curious if the deployment represents a standardized retrofit of the existing platform? Or will it require significant custom engineering for that customer?

No, there's no custom engineering. I mean, from day 1, grocery is something that we -- is kind of our bread and butter. Nothing special about this.

Then as my follow-up, my understanding is that you have a few customers that just have a single pilot line, which they've had for a handful of years now. What's the update on those retailers? When might we see a larger agreement from that list of customers still sort of in that pilot stage?

Yes. I would give you the example of, as you see in the amount of logos, some still are at one system. We expect at least 1 or 2 to be increasing that, but it's not really information that we disclosed as to where we are with it. As you said, there are customers who would say one system at a time, but I would continue to expect them to sign one system at a time. I think that for purposes of backlog with those logos or those customers, that's how I would think about it, but yet the potential is greater. I think there's opportunities for systems 2 and 3 in a couple of those, but it's -- sometimes we want to be discrete about our customers' business as well.

Our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm of Craig-Hallum.

Izzy, I'm curious, the operating leverage has been really impressive. Like if I look at the incremental margins, they've stepped up quite a bit the last 2 quarters relative to what we've been accustomed to. Any reason why that shouldn't be an appropriate level going forward, especially as you see the sort of the further boost on the next-gen storage structures at least on the gross margin line?

I don't want to get ahead of myself too much, but I am seeing what you're seeing, right? You see not only the sequential improvement in gross margins, but even a better improvement, call it, on the EBITDA margin. Where I said stable on gross margins, I see a little bit of an uptick on the EBITDA margins. I think it's really how we continue to exercise that discipline around the OpEx with one caveat. You've heard about all the things that Rick was talking about. So we do want to maintain that ultimate flexibility on the R&D line.

If we see something that we should be investing in, given our cash balance and the ability to allocate cash, we would be doing it. Outside of that, it's I see what you see, whereas we continue to expand that bottom line and very proud to be profitable and plan on being profitable going forward.

Is there an incremental margin that you're managing the business to either in the near to medium term or longer term or not necessarily?

I would say not necessarily, right? It's not as easy as you would suggest. I think what we manage to is the things that we talked about is really the efficiencies on the execution side and the cost discipline. That's what we're managing to, and you see those results come through in the P&L, but not per se. I think the bigger message is we do continue to drive for that longer-term margin being in the 30-plus.

Our next question comes from the line of Robert Jameson of Vertical Research Partners.

Just actually one really. Rick, you've made some very interesting acquisitions. You mentioned Fox Robotics that was completed last quarter, quite a compelling acquisition when you think about how that helps further automate different processes, moving the pallets from the loading base, the info system and on the other end, loading the mixed case pallets for final delivery. Of course, the opportunity to sell those products to others as well.

When you look ahead, what are some of the other parts that you might look to invest in to further automate other parts of either the Symbotic system itself, BreakPack or the micro fulfillment system? Should we expect like ecosystem partnerships on the MSC side like adding cobot arms to -- or picking solutions that take another human out of the loop on the back end of those systems. I mean I'm just trying to understand what types of technologies are interesting to you at this point that would help you accelerate some of those efforts as you move kind of towards a so-called dark warehouse with the Symbotic solution.

Yes. You mentioned a bunch of things. I mean obviously, robotic arms are interesting to us. There's a couple of companies out there that are doing it. It's not -- it's -- so we're looking at it. There are a number of companies that are doing truck unloading. I mean we know everybody because everybody is talking to us and everybody is interested in partnering with us.

I think , we're very focused on micro fulfillment because we think that's a huge opportunity. That would lead us to eventually look at robotic arms. We're also very focused on the -- how to say it, connecting all of the supply chain. There are very large import DCs that are just basic storage DCs. That was not interesting to us before, but it becomes more interesting as our customers want us to connect all of these DCs.

Fox is probably the most important one because we basically build pallets and somebody has to take them to the truck, and so they sit on the dock. Managing the dock management is very important to us. That actually allows us to get customers -- introductory customers at a very low introductory price and then upsell them to, well, you could do this with the rest of our system or this part. Everybody needs pallet jacks. Having the best automated pallet jacks is something we're focused on. We will continue to look at opportunities and opportunities continue to present themselves to us. I don't think we have a specific road map right now. We really want to get the dock management working well. We want to understand the perishable world. Those are the things that we're really focused on right now.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Charlie Anderson for closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks, everybody, for joining our call tonight. We really appreciate your interest in Symbotic and we look forward to seeing some of you in the coming weeks on the road. Goodbye.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Symbotic First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Charlie Anderson, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Hello. Welcome to Symbotic's First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results Webcast. I'm Charlie Anderson, Symbotic's Vice President of Investor Relations.

Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance maybe considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at ir.symbotic.com.

On today's call, we're joined by Rick Cohen, Symbotic's Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Izzy Martins, Symbotic's Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our first quarter of fiscal year 2026 results and our outlook followed by Q&A. With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to begin. Rick?

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results. We're off to a great start this year as our operational execution, product innovation and financial discipline are translating into improved results. Notably, in the first quarter, we grew revenue by 29% and significantly expanded margins year-over-year, paving the way for our transition to GAAP profitability.

On our last call, I highlighted that one of our key objectives this fiscal year was to unlock higher margins by providing additional value for our customers. As you can see from our results, we are on a solid trajectory. We also have increased line of sight that our product innovation, notably with our next-generation storage solution will yield tangible economic benefits for our customers while benefiting our margins on an ongoing basis.

Another objective is to broaden our opportunities with customers, particularly in e-commerce. On this front, we are seeing strong execution on the program launched a year ago with Walmart for their accelerated online pickup and delivery centers at stores. First, we made a technical and operational improvements to the first-generation automation systems we inherited at 19 Walmart stores. This helped drive record holiday volumes and improved performance metrics from those systems. This is important because we can take those improvements and incorporate them into our enhanced second-generation design, which we're being paid to develop.

Second, we delivered record financial results from that paid development program during the quarter as we advance toward installation of the initial prototypes. We see our offerings as the future of e-commerce as retailers are increasingly seeking to take advantage of their store footprints, and localized presence to offer customers unparalleled availability and order fulfillment speed through automation.

We are also meeting our key objective to invest in our innovation engine to expand our capabilities. On that note, we recently closed the acquisition of Fox Robotics, a leader in autonomous forklift solutions. This acquisition further enhances our strategy of utilizing our software to orchestrate robots to move goods through the supply chain from the dock door at the warehouse to the individual customer order from the store. We are also investing in internal R&D efforts intended to drive higher levels of performance across our operational systems. Here, we are also making great progress.

Specifically, for our SymBots that move goods in customer distribution centers, we have seen an over 25% increase in both the number of miles driven and the number of transactions per bot daily versus 1 year ago. We have also seen meaningful per site volume increases from our floor-loaded inbound cells that ingest unpalletized cases compared to a year ago.

The fact that our platform improves over time speaks to our leadership in the emerging category of what some call physical AI. We are doing this on a massive scale. To put it in perspective, Symbotic operational systems processed over 2 billion cases for customers in calendar year 2025, inbound and outbound. And our SymBots logged nearly 200 million miles alone in calendar year 2025. As best we can tell, this may be the most travel, fully autonomous vehicle fleet in the world.

In summary, we're meeting our objectives, which, in turn, are delivering braggingly happy customers, sustainable growth and expanded profitability. As always, I want to thank our team for all their hard work, along with our customers and our investors for their continued support. I'll now turn it over to Izzy, who will discuss our financial results and outlook. Izzy?

Thanks, Rick. Fiscal first quarter revenue reached $630 million, meeting the top end of our forecasted range. We achieved GAAP profitability with $13 million in net income, while our adjusted EBITDA of $67 million was well above the top end of our forecasted range due to stronger margins and continued cost discipline. As a result, we delivered a double-digit EBITDA margin for the first time.

Importantly, first quarter revenue surpassed fourth quarter levels, driven by the continued expansion of systems and deployment, the transition of systems from deployment to operational status and ongoing progress in our paid development of a micro fulfillment solution for e-commerce.

We also delivered another strong quarter for new deployments with 10 systems added. This included several Phase 1 deployments for our largest customer that will do twice the work of our historical Phase 1 deployments and possibility unlocked by the density of our next-gen storage solution. The quarter also included a new deployment in the Northeast for GreenBox, which, as a reminder, is now branded as Exol.

Strong start activity, disciplined project execution and continued progress with our paid development program drove systems revenue growth of 27% year-over-year to $590 million.

We now have 57 systems in deployment as three deployments transitioned to operational status during the quarter. Installation time lines have continued to improve relative to historical averages, reflecting ongoing process improvements across our supply chain and implementation teams. As our base of operational systems continues to expand, software revenue grew 97% year-over-year to $10.9 million in the fiscal first quarter. And operations services revenues grew 68% year-over-year to $28.8 million.

Now turning to margins in the fiscal first quarter. Gross margin expanded both sequentially and year-over-year, underscoring the accelerating strength of our operating model and the leverage we are beginning to realize at scale.

Systems gross margin continued its trend of significantly -- significant year-over-year improvement, driven by structural operational enhancements, disciplined cost management and the addition of our paid development program.

Software maintenance and support delivered further year-over-year gross margin expansion, benefiting from scale. We expect this trend to strengthen as our installed base of operational systems grow.

In operation services, we generated an improved gross profit with continued process optimization. Operating expenses on a GAAP basis were $127 million, in the fiscal first quarter. Adjusted operating expenses totaled $80 million, down sequentially as we maintained strong cost discipline and increasingly aligned our R&D investment with revenue-generating activity.

Notably, a portion of R&D headcount shifted to supporting paid development, where that work is reflected in revenue, with the associated costs recorded in cost of revenue. This evolution underscores how our core R&D capabilities are increasingly being monetized as the business scales.

Before I discuss profitability, I want to highlight that our results this quarter reflect an accounting change in how we recognize stock-based compensation expenses. We have moved from a graded vesting approach to a straight-line pro rata method, under which expense is recognized evenly over the service period, consistent with how the awards vest. This change follows the completion of the accelerated vesting associated with our becoming a publicly traded company, which required higher expense recognition in earlier periods.

With the final grants from the transition to a public company now fully vested, the more common straight-line method more accurately matches the ongoing timing and financial impact of our stock-based awards.

As a result, we recast retrospective periods in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. And those updates are reflected in the earnings tables in our press release.

We have also posted a supplemental presentation on our Investor Relations website with the recast quarterly results to assist with model updates. As you will see from the recast results, GAAP results improved modestly due to lower stock-based compensation expense, but there is no change to any prior period adjusted EBITDA results.

Our net income for the first quarter was $13 million, a significant improvement from a net loss of $17 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, reflecting the continued strengthening of our financial performance.

Adjusted EBITDA of $67 million was above the high end of our forecast and increased significantly from $18 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025. These results demonstrate the operating leverage available to us and reinforce our confidence in our ability to continue expanding our EBITDA margins and delivering sustained GAAP profitability.

Our backlog of $22.3 billion continue to remain strong. The modest change from $22.5 billion last quarter primarily reflects revenue recognized during the quarter, largely offset by final pricing adjustments on projects started in the quarter.

We finished the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $1.8 billion, up from $1.2 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter, driven by the timing of cash receipts tied to project milestones, the signing of new projects and $424 million in net proceeds generated from our successful follow-on offering completed in December.

Now turning to the outlook. For the second quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue between $650 million and $670 million and adjusted EBITDA between $70 million and $75 million, reflecting continued strong top line growth and margin expansion.

Looking ahead, we expect our third quarter sequential growth to be similar to what we anticipate in the second quarter with more pronounced growth in the fourth quarter. With that, we now welcome your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlase from Deutsche Bank.

Could we just start -- I think, a few times, Izzy, in the script and Rick kind of commented on this too. You talked about how the paid development impact to revenue and maybe EBITDA was a bit stronger than you expected and a factor in the 1Q beat. Can you just maybe elaborate on the impact a bit and how that kind of moves throughout the rest of the year if the impact grows?

Nicole, thank you for the question. Here's how I would explain it. If you recall in the last quarter, we talked about that representing about high single digits of our total revenue. It's not all that significant of a change, but we've now reached, call it, double digits.

The way I would think about it going forward, we want to maintain our flexibility in how we deploy our resources. So albeit, yes, it reached double digits in the first quarter. It's probably not going to be at that level in the second based on what we're already seeing and how we're deploying. So it will be lumpy, but I did want to call out that it was higher than the fourth quarter.

Okay. Got it. And then you also mentioned in your prepared remarks that you guys have continued to improve deployment time. Can we just get an update on what that time line looks like today?

Sure. I would say, as you take, call it, from -- when we announced the deployment to the end, we're still staying within that 2-year period.

I think what's important to note is we're focusing on how we shrink the time from installation to, call it, acceptance to moving it to operational. We have seen improvements in that, in that most recently in our averages. We're now probably on that side of it, going to 10 months. And that's what we want to continually improve. But overall, I would still say 2 years from the day we announced a deployment is a good proxy as we continue to improve on that end.

And our next question comes from the line of Joe Giordano from TD Cowen.

On the R&D spend, I hear that some of it was moved into COGS, like based on where these people are -- what they're working on. But is the level here? Like is this like the run rate that we should be thinking of? And how much should we think of like implications on systems gross margins as that cost is flowing in there?

Okay. Joe, thank you for the question. Here's how I would think about it. You did see, call it, a decline in the first quarter in total R&D compared to the fourth quarter. And as I mentioned, because we had a little bit more going into that paid development.

To answer your question, it's no different than how I just answered the paid development. It's not going to be a straight line. It will be a bit lumpy. So the expectation would be if there's -- how we're allocating our resources in the second quarter, if there'll be less on the top, we're keeping the same resources that we'll be focusing on other priorities. So what I can tell you is in the second quarter, I would expect a higher number in R&D, in our OpEx expense versus what you're seeing. So I wouldn't take the first quarter exit trend and model that completely out and more look at it as our annual spend in R&D should stay about relatively the same.

The same as like what it was prior, like the same assumptions that you had prior?

Exactly.

Okay. And then on the 10 starts in the quarter, how should we think of the makeup of those like traditional systems like you would have for your large customer versus brake packs versus micro fulfillment stuff. So how should we think about the -- as we think of like almost the size per start?

Okay. So I'll start backwards. There are no micro fulfillment in the 10 deployments that we mentioned. We don't give specifics as to what that represents. As I said, one is for Exol. And the remainder, it's a mix between different types. You can't treat every deployment the same. So it's a bit of a mix.

But I think the highlight, though, is as we transition to the next-gen structure, you'll know that the -- now you could fit more because of the density of that next-gen structure. So the -- call it, the size, you kind of get a two for one, and there's a little bit of that in the 10 deployments that we have in the quarter, similar to what we had last quarter, but I'm not going to give specifics between the types of deployments.

And our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs.

Congratulations on the good results. I was hoping to start with the shipment trajectory. On the last earnings call, Izzy, you talked about a more muted first half based on your expectation for the deployment timing with the new storage structure and then an acceleration in 2H. You actually started 10 systems in the first quarter, which was more than I was expecting. And you talked about 3Q being similar growth to 2Q and then a pick up in 4Q. So it seems like maybe there's been some movements in how you're seeing the year shape up. I was hoping you could help us better understand what's driving that.

Mark, I remember when we talked about this, so this is really what's going on. It's really not any different. So when we talked about being a less pronounced, call it, sequential improvement in the first half of fiscal year 2026, that was on the heels of a big improvement, call it, sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter last year.

So if you look at where we're standing right now, we ended up at a little bit over $618 million in revenue in the fourth quarter, and we're at $630 million. So not that same sequential improvement that you saw in the tail end last year. So that's coming to fruition. And if you take into account what we guided to or what our outlook is in the second quarter, we end up pretty much in the same place, maybe a little bit better. And now what I would say is the second and third quarter are a little bit more aligned than what we originally saw. But it still falls within what we were talking about a couple of quarters ago and last quarter.

Got it. And my other question was on the announcement of the Fox acquisition. Maybe if you could please help us understand what the implications are from that acquisition for revenue margins in the near term and then what it might mean for your business in the longer term as you can bring that capability to your customer set?

Yes. I can't really say what the revenue implications are right now. I think we'll develop that over time. What we liked about Fox is that a number -- they have '25 different customers. A number of those customers are not Symbotic customers today. So it gives us an opportunity to enter a new customer base.

And what we liked about Fox is that they're essentially using a fork truck on the dock to do the same thing we do with our transfer deck in our structure. As a matter of fact, what we do in the transfer deck and the structure is we might have 100 bots in a 400 by 24 foot wide, so a 10,000 square foot area. And the dock may only have like 20 or 34 trucks. They're bigger, they're heavier, but the software that we're using and the evolution of what we're doing, where they have vision and they have LiDAR and they can avoid collision. This is -- we think this is a market where we could sell people dock automation separate from even warehouse automation.

So we think this is a very big market. A lot of people are looking at this market. We have some very big customers who have been experimenting with Fox. So I can't say exactly how it's going to go. It's very early stage. But we like the customer base, and we like the potential.

And our next question comes from the line of Piyush Avasthy from Citi.

One on fulfillment system. Like I think you guys have mentioned the $5 billion opportunity with Walmart, but the total addressable market is more like $300 billion plus.

Rick, you kind of mentioned working on the second generation. Maybe talk about the time line on when you can market this offering to incremental customers outside Walmart? And if you could refresh us on the time line for the $5 billion opportunity with Walmart, that would be appreciated.

Yes. So we have a couple of prototypes that will be the next generation, this is what we've learned from the initial 19 installs that we bought. And Walmart asked us to improve that install. So we have 2 installs that will happen in the next year. Not exactly sure how -- exactly what month, but it will be within the next 12 months. maybe sooner.

And then that addressable market, it's a little hard for us to figure out because there's -- everybody that we've talked to with a traditional system has asked us about, we call it SymMicro is the way we call these systems. But it's not just -- these systems are not just food systems, they're not just back of store. They could actually be e-commerce for, let's say, somebody like a Medline, which is doing very specific small deliveries to, let's say, a surgical room. So I think this is -- I don't know, Izzy, or the financial people put a number to it. It's a very, very big market, and it's a worldwide market.

And these systems are smaller, so people are more interested in -- and they're cheaper. So people are more interested in saying, "Yes, I could experiment with one of those" versus going into a warehouse and saying, I'm 100% committed on a $50 million or $70 million system.

So not sure I'm exactly answering your question, but this is -- we are -- every customer we talk to about a warehouse now talks to us about SymMicro.

I was going to say on the backlog, the way to think about it is exactly how Rick mentioned that within this calendar year, maybe sooner, we'll get past those prototypes, then that backlog would be triggered after that. And also, just as a reminder, that backlog only represents 400 stores. So as we continue to do more, obviously, as you can tell, as you asked your question, the backlog is really small compared to the addressable market.

Got it. Helpful. And can you also update us on the interest trends for GreenBox? I think you guys have a site coming live. So if you can update on any time line for this site and other sites? And how close are you to convert potential customers? Like any incremental color would be helpful.

Yes. I mean, my answer is we're close. We have a couple of customers that we're actually beginning to talk contracts with. But the site is still not ready to go live. So it will be in the next 9 months, 9 to 10 months before we're really ready to start shipping customers. Maybe sooner, but that's what we would expect. It's going to take time to get contracts done, customers signed. And -- but a lot of interest now because people can now go visit the sites. We're starting to give tours. And so it's real to people now versus just a concept.

And our next question comes from the line of Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer.

As you move into multiple form factors here with the bots and start working through different generations of these bots, can you talk a little bit about the potential for designing modular components and things that are common across these form factors to help optimize some of the cost structure?

Yes. So that's exactly what we're planning on doing. So today, we have the original SymBot. But we also have a new bot, which we haven't really talked about, we call it a stretch bot. So the SymBot can handle a 24-inch bot, a stretch bot handles a 36-inch bot. And that's that -- so it's kind of like a minivan and then a suburban. So bigger capacities and different customer bases.

And then we also have our BreakPack system, which we're -- we have a second-generation prototype in Brooksville, that site, and then we're starting to roll those out to many more sites. That is a second generation, what we call a mini bot.

And then we have a third generation, which will become the dock handling -- I mean, a fork truck for us is just another bot. And so what we're using is it's really years and years of developing, figuring out the technology. But these bots now have -- we'll continue to upgrade the chips, so they have more processing power. But the bots now have eight cameras and the bots will also have LiDAR on them, which is the newest thing we're installing. And so that allows us to use bots for our structure, but we'll be able to use bots for any part of the warehouse. So we're expanding the warehouse capability. And that same software can control lots of different machines. So it's what we've always said, we want to create a software platform. And then we want to have -- for me, they're just different apps. The bots are just different pieces of technology.

That's super helpful. And then thinking about the opportunity set for you guys downstream in the logistics space, given your entrance and kind of engagement in outside the warehouse for the distribution center and some of the shipping lines. Could you talk about how quickly you might be able to potentially serve customers just on that space, if that's of interest? Or does everyone want to work with you from the warehouse all the way through the final delivery?

Yes. So we're pretty busy right now with the customers we have, but we're developing technology to both to be able to unload containers and some people are now asking us, can we load containers in different ways. And one of the things that we're doing is that we're finding that there's a series of customers that order a full trailer to a store.

There's another series of customers, example, the wine and spirits guys, which actually have route -- which have very small deliveries, but they're routing. They're very important for the routing of the trailers. And so -- and for instance, foodservice might be interested in the same thing where their orders are smaller. So the ability that we have to sequence and sort and stack products, we don't think anybody else has the capability to do that in the whole world that we can do. And so what we're spending a lot of time with customers is looking at different verticals. For instance, a lot of people think we're doing food. But actually, we're doing food. We're doing general merchandise. We'll be doing route drivers. We'll be doing hospitals.

So the technology will be -- we will continue to invent machines. We will continue to look for acquisitions, and we will continue to refine the software to be able to solve the customer problems. So we look at ourselves really as a solution provider. And many of the automation people look at themselves as hardware suppliers.

So we sell the software. We integrate the software. We make the machine. And then we're working with customers now where we actually have to invent new machines. But we've gotten very good at that lately, and we'll continue to look at acquisitions. And we'll continue to refine the software and that brings the whole process together.

And our next question comes from the line of Ken Newman from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Congrats on the great quarter. First, Izzy, thanks for the color that you gave on the sequential revenue growth expectations for third quarter and fourth quarter. I think if I heard you right, you mentioned a more pronounced sequential growth in 4Q from 3Q. First, I was just curious, is that truly just the timing of the deployments that were from new initiations from a year ago? Or is there anything else to that, that we should kind of be aware of in terms of that stronger sequential growth?

It really relates to, if you recall, in the third quarter of last year, we unveiled the next-gen structure, right? So if you think about how our percentage of completion revenue comes in, that really -- and as we said then, people were kind of -- the customers were waiting for that. So given that, that started as part of the deployments in the fourth quarter, that's why what I see right now is that I would expect more revenue in the fourth quarter this year. So that's the reason for my comments and the driver of it.

Okay. That's helpful. And then for the follow-up, Rick, I think we talked a little last quarter about chip availability. And I think the takeaway there was that you don't really have that much exposure to the higher inflation memory impacts. But when I listen to all these new exciting developments that you've got on the new generation of bots that you're developing, it sounds like those are going to be requiring updated chipsets. So maybe just talk a little bit about your ability to source those updated chips. And if you think there's a way to price for those chips in a price/cost positive way.

Yes. So we'll probably upgrade to -- at some point to the next generation of NVIDIA chip or something like that. But these are not the big $25,000 chips. These chips are plenty available. I mean we're still at -- our bots are still at a fairly -- let's say, the medium end of technology. These are not super expensive chips. We think they're readily available. We're not fighting for -- with Google and Chat GPT for those chips. So we don't expect that kind of problem, and we're just -- and we'll be able to upgrade when we're ready to upgrade.

Right now, we can handle what we're doing with the chips that we have, but we actually think the new chips will be -- the new chips that we're looking at will be more powerful and either the same price or less expensive.

So our -- within -- with what you're looking at and the battle going on with the big guys in AI, that's not the space that we're playing in. What we can do is much more moderate control on the bots. And then eventually, the bots will get smarter, but it's not -- we're not building huge data centers here.

And our next question comes from the line of Jim Ricchiuti from Needham & Company.

I apologize. You may have talked about this, I joined a few minutes late. I was wondering if there's any update being given on how the Mexico site is progressing and how you might characterize the pipeline for securing additional locations there?

Yes. So Mexico is progressing well. The time line, I think, is within the next year, next 12 months, maybe sooner. The building is built. We're getting ready to install -- where I spent a week down there a month ago. I think there's a lot of opportunities. It's a big country. We're also looking at other places in Central and South America. So our customer in Mexico is very happy with us. They like what we're doing. They can justify it based on more efficient deliveries to some of the big stores, but also some of the small stores and inventory. So we think we have a -- we -- without getting very specific, we'll do a number of sites in Mexico, far more than we thought initially.

And a follow-up question. Just with respect to Fox Robotics, if I heard you correctly, I think you said they have 25 customers, and I thought you said a number are not Symbotic customers. So does that mean that they're selling to a couple of your customers? And is one of them your large customer? And I assume these are pilots. Is that a fair way to think about this?

Yes. Mostly what they're doing is pilots. They are selling to our large customer. We -- every time I go in a warehouse, I look at their robots and I look at how we could help them do better. But they also have -- I mean, the interesting thing with Fox is our large customer has thousands of fork trucks. But there are lots of other customers, the CPG manufacturers, their facilities where they actually don't do as much manual selection, but they still move pallets from the warehouse to the trucks. They unload goods to their warehouses.

So what I'm excited about is, is that we're looking for more opportunities to interact with customers and acquisitions is a nice way to do it, to introduce them as we talk to their supply chain people, and we make these robots more successful, they build credibility and trust in Symbotic as a solution provider.

So yes, some of their biggest customers are not Symbotic customers now. We hope they will be in the future.

And our next question comes from the line of Guy Hardwick from Barclays.

I'm just wondering, Rick, if you look at the core offering of Symbotic, how progress is being made in offerings so chilled or frozen offering, which some of your competitors can do? And then I had a follow-up question.

Yes. We are working with several customers right now on designs for perishables. We don't -- I can't tell you we have a contract yet, but the new structure has allowed us to offer to -- if a customer was building a greenfield, and it was 500,000 square feet at $500 a foot, and we're going to spend $250 million for a building. And we can do that in 60% space. So instead of 500,000 square feet, it's 300,000 square feet, and they can save $100 million on construction before they even put the system in. That's what we're talking to people about.

And so there's -- obviously, people are concerned and tentative because of how sensitive these structures are. But our arguments are much more compelling, and we will be spending a bunch of money on R&D to build prototypes internally. And so we would expect fairly soon. I can't tell you whether it's a year or could be longer, but we would expect fairly soon to announce some perishable sites.

But we're -- this has gone from theoretical to the new structure and the density especially in perishables because the construction costs are so expensive, has been a real opportunity for us.

And just a follow-up for Izzy. I'm just wondering how much of the development revenue is still available to be recognized over the next few quarters or next year?

There's still quite a bit left. I'm not going to give you specific numbers, but I think the way to think about it is focus on what Rick's answer was, which was within this calendar year, we expect to have the prototypes. So obviously, after the prototypes, we wouldn't have any more development going on, and we'd be installing.

And our next question...

Yes. One of the things I should have added is that the SymMicro systems, they will have perishables. They will have a perishable aisle and they will have a frozen aisle. So we're already comfortable that the bots can handle it. There's other technology we need to develop, but we're -- this is not a what if anymore. This is like this is happening.

And our next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore from Northland Capital Markets.

On the operational services gross margin, it's pretty healthy relative to the fourth quarter. Should we think about the gross margin here as remaining positive going forward?

Yes. So as we discussed it last time, we said it was a bit of an anomaly of what we saw in the fourth quarter. And given, call it, what we should be expecting is that it should be continuing to improve. I think that improvement occurred a little bit more, call it, sooner than what we expected. But I think where we're at right now is a good exit trend for what you should see in the coming quarters.

Great. Sounds good. And then on the kind of sequential growth forecast for the year, does that kind of imply that new starts should improve every quarter as well?

We don't guide to the amount of new starts. I think as you think about, we had 10 in the fourth. We have 10 in the first. I think we see that in the coming quarters as it being healthy, but there's a potential for it to drop off at the tail end of the year.

So I would say I wouldn't take that as a trend. But at least something that we could count on in the, call it, this quarter and next quarter.

And our next question comes from the line of Derek Soderberg from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Rick, in the prepared remarks, you mentioned broadening within e-commerce. You're now working on in-store automation for buy online, pick up in store. Do any of your customers want to leverage your technology for the direct-to-consumer distribution centers? And is that even an area that you guys would want to play in?

Yes. The answer is yes.

Got it. That's interesting. And then as my follow-up, Rick, with the forklift automation, it seems like the case handling aspect of your distribution centers are pretty much fully automated. On the BreakPack side, what's sort of left to automate there? What's potentially possible to automate over the next coming quarters? And maybe if you could just talk about how that technology has sort of evolved to the point where you're now rolling out that pilot to multiple facilities.

Yes. So we started out with a prototype mini bot we call it. And now it's our fully designed our own SymBot. The new bots have LIDAR on them. They can handle more units per trip. They're faster. They're safer. So that allows us to do break pack, which is basically cutting open up a case and putting something on a mini bot and then we put it into a tote. That process has applications. So the logical thing where you might see that is in a Walmart Supercenter, there's -- every supercenter has a huge drugstore in it. So those kind of smaller applications within a store within a store, basically, they carry 30,000 items, let's say, in a drugstore, but they only have one facing, not a whole case.

So those applications actually -- there's a lot of applications. There's convenience stores have applications. There's the auto part stores have applications where they have a lot of items, but they only want one or two of each one of those. So that would be direct to store, but we can also see that kind of application where people want to use our technology to sort.

And so somebody like a Medline is really interested in could we deliver 20 different items, not cases, 20 different items in a tote to a surgical delivery room. And Nobody else in the world can do that. Nobody else can say, "Well, if you want a case, we'll deliver a case, if you want an each, we'll deliver in each in a systematic way". There are other people that deal with eaches, but nobody can do it with the level of sophistication or the speed with which we can do it. So those are, what I would call, again, software apps combined with hardware. So that's a particular problem that we're solving, just happens to be a lot of customers have that problem.

And then the third thing, as we -- and so what happens in our system, for those of you who have been to a site is you know that the bots mostly run on rails and then on the transfer deck, they're kind of free floating. In the BreakPack, they're much more free floating. And so that takes a lot of software to stop them from crashing into each other at high speed with LiDAR. That same technology is what got us excited about using fork trucks on a dock, which is the most congested and dangerous part of a warehouse and being able to do that. And so what it allows us to do is when we finish an order for a customer and an order could be a pallet, 20 pallets going on a truck or it could be one. We can now take a fork truck and sequence that onto the truck. And that is typically done by humans. And this is a very good way because we now control the whole system.

We know exactly when the pallet is going to be done. We know exactly where it goes on the truck. And so that actually makes a whole new part of the warehouse open to our automation. And that's what we're going to continue to march down that journey.

And our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm from Craig-Hallum.

I wanted to just go back to the systems gross margin for a second and just make sure I understand it right. So there was sort of a real allocation of costs from R&D to cost of goods sold that impacted the systems gross margin. Can you quantify exactly how much that was? And I guess, kind of where I'm going with this or what I'm getting at was systems gross margin step down sequentially. So without this sort of reallocation, if you want to call it that, would systems gross margin been up sequentially from Q4?

Yes. Great question, Greg. Thank you. Here's how I would think about it is, like I said, the relative proportion of how much was paid development didn't grow significantly. Like I said last time, it was high single digits. Now it hit double digits.

I think what -- how to think about it is and how we measure success by the team, as you may know, we have pass-through expenses and those pass-throughs come in on the top line and the bottom line. They were just a little tad bit higher than what they were in the fourth quarter. And so how I measure or how we measure, call it, systems gross margin quarter-over-quarter, we actually did have a slight sequential improvement.

But overall, what I would focus on is, at times, those things will be lumpy, and I would focus on the bottom line gross margin where you see that significant improvement from the fourth quarter.

Got it. Understood. Okay. And then I just wanted to follow up on the Fox acquisition. I thought that was pretty interesting as well. And Rick, you talked a little bit about sort of different kind of applications or use cases. But how do you think about the portfolio expanding longer term? I mean I'm not trying to get you to give up any sort of secret information. But in terms of other types of technologies and applications, you talked about trailer unload, but what else might be an attractive fit or a bolt-on for Symbotic?

Yes. So we're actually -- we're -- I mean, we've got this big war chest, and we did it very purposely. We're looking at a common -- and we're actually doing a lot of work with some people that specialize in this field. It's like how should we think about M&A? Some M&A could be a way of acquiring customers and getting much more interaction with the customers.

In the Fox acquisition, we can sell guided fork trucks to a lot more people than we can sell a Symbotic system to. I mean, we could sell two guided for trucks to Joe's Pizza warehouse. But there's people like DHL and other people that are very interested in the space that are -- that they're running tests on a lot of the big CPG companies. So what we're trying to -- so we're looking at those kind of acquisitions, and we looked at Fox and say, this is a very, very large potential customer base. Smaller sales per transaction, but beginning to show customers how they can think about reorienting their warehouse.

So you've got -- we don't do a lot with pallet storage. We're kind of an unpallet storage company, but there are still pallet storage companies. There are automated guided fork trucks. Fox is pretty much dock fork trucks, but there are other types of fork trucks. So I think we'll look at that. We'll look at import DCs and look at what they need there. We'll look at different types of technology.

So one of the things that we're probably spending more money on R&D than any other automation company. I'm pretty sure by a lot last year, and we'll spend even more this year. And so we're looking at beginning the process of how we can invent stuff to think about different parts of the warehouse.

So there's -- we don't do a lot with clothing right now. We're interested in clothing. We're interested in fashion. We're interested in automation, auto parts. And so with that, the way I look at the business is we understand -- if we can understand the customer's problem, I don't want to go to the customer and say, "Here's what I got, that's what I got". You need to make your problem fit into my solution. We may only have 75% of the customers' problem solved. And then we would say, either we can invent it or we can buy it.

So we're very much interested in lots of different start-ups. A lot of those guys are struggling right now. The VC guys are cutting back on some of the start-ups, so good opportunity for us. But we also could look at a fairly sizable acquisition. And so the money is not burning a hole in our pocket, but we're certainly on the prowl looking for various acquisitions.

And our next question comes from the line of Keith Housum from Northcoast Research.

So Rick, over the past year, you guys have expanded your sales force. You guys added Medline last quarter. Can you perhaps give us an update on some of the, I guess, efforts that you have in terms of focusing on places outside of the U.S. and perhaps success you guys are having and confidence in your ability to add customers to your backlog?

Yes. So we're spending a lot of time in Europe now. We've got three or four people in Europe. They have very interesting problems because real estate is so scarce and so expensive there. And so it's very expensive for them to either put up a greenfield. So we're looking at Europe. We're talking to all the usual suspects in Europe. We're new there.

And -- but we're now able to -- and we're able to sell in Europe because we have European suppliers. We have some German suppliers. We have some Italian suppliers. We have some English suppliers. So Europe is something that we're very much focused on and probably spent, I don't know, 100x more hours there in the last 6 months than we did in the prior 5 years.

So that's of interest. I go to Europe 3 or 4 times a year now, maybe more. One, to see suppliers and two, to actually meet with customers, potential customers. So we're still new in Europe and the Europeans, there's a lot of German companies that make stuff, but I think people are now beginning to understand how different our technology is. There's packaging issues in Europe that are different in the U.S. So we're working on experimenting with those. But I think Europe and Canada, Central and South America, Mexico, those are all markets for us now.

And our final question for today comes from the line of Robert Mason from Baird.

Izzy, would you be able to provide a little color on free cash flow, how that may play out this year, particularly if you -- as you cross the line into GAAP profitability and maybe grow from here, what kind of implications that has on cash flow if any from a tax standpoint?

I think if you -- the way I would think about free cash flow, if you see the amount we reported in this quarter, that is how you would think we should be landing. If you take where we landed in the fourth quarter and the third quarter of last year and you average those out, those just had some timing differences. So I think where we landed in the first quarter, that's a good starting point. And obviously, as EBITDA improves, I think my guidance wasn't significantly higher than where we are this month, or this quarter. That's how I would think about it rolling out. And as quarters progress, I'll give you more insights as we move along.

Okay. Just as a follow-up. Rick, I think in your monologue, you made note of, again, improvements in floor loading, maybe for one of your customers. Just could you elaborate on that and whether that is automation technology that you've developed? I didn't recall necessarily having seen that in your facilities, but if that's new or if that's something you're partnering on or -- what the implications were?

So we're having a number of discussions with people that -- like if you're a liquor distributor, you have -- you might deliver to Costco, and you might deliver full pallets, but if you're going to restaurants and bars, you basically have to sequence those orders to help the drivers speed up.

That technology is something that we're working to develop, and we can pre-sequence not just -- we can pre-sequence a whole trailer. And so today, we -- if a trailer has 2,600 cases, we might -- and there was 125 cases on a pallet, we might put 22 pallets on a truck. But we could actually sequence every one of those 2,600 cases. That to a lot of people who are delivering small orders is really interesting. And that kind of sequencing is essentially what we will do for -- and we're working with people explaining how that type of sequencing is something you can actually do for e-commerce, if you're going to do customer delivery or customer pickup. It may be 20 eaches, but it's sequencing totes instead of cases, but if you're a restaurant supplier or a liquor distributor, or any other kind of supplier that's doing routes, including beverage suppliers, the ability to sequence that stuff is something that doesn't really exist today.

Thank you. This does conclude the question-and-answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Charlie Anderson for any further remarks.

Yes. Thanks, everybody, for joining our call tonight. We really appreciate your interest in Symbotic and look forward to seeing some of you on the road in the coming weeks at the investor conference that we will attend. Thanks, and good night.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Symbotic Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Charlie Anderson. Please go ahead.

Hello. Welcome to Symbotic Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results Webcast. I'm Charlie Anderson, Symbotic's Vice President of Investor Relations.

Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at ir.symbotic.com.

On today's call, we're joined by Rick Cohen, Symbotic Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Izzy Martins, Symbotic Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 results and our outlook, followed by Q&A.

With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to begin. Rick?

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results. We made strong progress in fiscal year 2025 and finished the year with good momentum. For the full year, we increased revenue by 26% year-over-year, while delivering significant margin expansion and free cash flow generation. The cash on our balance sheet now exceeds $1.2 billion. During the fiscal year, we also expanded and upgraded our product portfolio. We added micro fulfillment as a new category to address e-commerce and upgraded our storage structure to a proprietary next-generation design that offers leading density and rapid installation.

When we marry up our innovative bot technology that can handle goods of many sizes, this new highly dense storage structure and our proprietary software, we believe we can unlock more opportunities than ever before. This includes everything from smaller buildings to e-commerce facilities to perishable facilities where square footage is at a premium. We are seeing this play out with a growing sales pipeline as our solutions deliver space savings and installation efficiencies that result in higher value.

Customers are already taking advantage of this breakthrough in installation efficiency. Notably, our largest customers opted to utilize our next-gen storage to combine what previously took 2 separate deployments or phases into 1 single phase for new sites. That means a Phase 1 system deployment when we enter a distribution center for the first time, we'll be able to do twice as much work versus when we began deployments for this customer previously. And the overall time to install and achieve acceptance for the same amount of case output in this example will be cut by more than half, generating significant savings, reducing disruption and generating a larger and faster return on investment for customers.

Customers are also taking advantage of the modular build qualities of our next-gen storage with a handful of deployments that began in the fiscal fourth quarter connecting next-gen stores to prior gen storage at the same site. And GreenBox is moving forward with next-gen storage, signing up to utilize it at new sites near Dallas and Chicago both of which were signed in the fiscal fourth quarter. Notably, with these sites, GreenBox coverage will extend from California to the Midwest to the Southeast. We also finished the fiscal year by signing a new customer, Medline, the largest provider of medical surgical products and supply chain solutions serving all points of care.

This marks our first customer in the health care vertical where we believe the case for automation is very strong given the importance of accuracy, speed and cost. This is also 1 of the largest potential new verticals available to us. It is worth noting that there are over 500 health care distribution centers in the U.S. alone with a combined 76 million square feet of warehouse space according to the health industry Distributors Association. With our scale rapidly improving project execution and growing set of capabilities across the supply chain, we are in a better place than ever to bring our new customers covering multiple verticals, geographies and use cases. Our focus in this has never been greater.

In summary, we delivered on the commitment we made at the start of the year to achieve strong top line growth and a significant rise in operational systems thanks to improvements in our deployment process. This also enabled us to deliver strong margin expansion. Looking ahead, our key objectives for fiscal year 2026 are, number one, [indiscernible] growing product portfolio and capabilities to broaden our opportunities with customers, particularly in e-commerce with our micro fulfillment solution. Two, unlock higher margins by driving additional value for our customers, along with operational improvements; three, continue to invest in our innovation engine to expand our capabilities and support future growth.

I just want to end by thanking our team for their reference along with our customers and investors for their support.

I'll now turn it over to Izzy who will discuss our financial results and outlook. Izzy?

Thanks, Rick. Fiscal fourth quarter revenue grew 10% year-over-year to $618 million, exceeding our expectations. Year-over-year revenue growth in the quarter was driven by the expansion of the number of systems in operations, fueling higher recurring revenue, along with continued progress on our pad development program. Due to higher stock-based compensation, reflecting our commitment to attracting and retaining top talent and restructuring expenses primarily associated with acquisition integration activities. Our net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter was $19 million versus net income of $16 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024.

Adjusted EBITDA in the fiscal fourth quarter of $49 million was at the high end of our forecast due to revenue and gross margin upside and up from $42 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024. Our backlog of $22.5 billion remained in a strong position. The increase from $22.4 billion last quarter was due to final pricing on projects started and the addition of backlog associated with Medline, offsetting revenue recognized in the quarter. In our fiscal fourth quarter, we began 10 new system deployments, as Rick highlighted, this included 2 deployments for GreenBox and 1 for Medline.

We also had 6 systems go operational in the quarter, bringing our total to 48 operational systems or nearly double the level at the end of fiscal year 2024. Importantly, for the systems that went operational for our largest customer in the fiscal fourth quarter, we observed nearly 3 months of improvement in the time between start of installation and customer acceptance compared with our historical average with this same customer. This period of deployment is a portion that is most within our control, and it is also when we recognize the highest level of revenue and profit.

With the continued growth in operational systems, we saw our software revenue grew 57% year-over-year to $9.3 million in the fiscal fourth quarter, and operations services revenue grew 21% year-over-year to $26.9 million.

Turning to margins in the fiscal fourth quarter. System gross margin continued its trend of significant year-over-year improvement, driven by disciplined cost management, solid project execution and strong supply chain partnership as we roll out our next-gen structure and deliver increasing value to our customers. We expect to see additional expansion in systems gross margin. Software maintenance and support also saw substantial year-over-year gross margin gains, benefiting from continued scale and exceeding 70% for the full year.

In operation services, we posted a loss as we increased investment in additional resources to support certain sites and ensure their long-term success. Operating expenses on a GAAP basis in the fiscal fourth quarter were $149 million, adjusted operating expenses in the quarter were $87 million, up sequentially, primarily due to strategic R&D investments in supporting our expanding product portfolio and cloud-based software tools. These investments are in areas where we see the greatest potential to increase value and long-term impact.

We finished the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $1.2 billion, up from $778 million in the fiscal third quarter due to the timing of cash receipts tied to project milestones and the signing of new projects.

Now turning to the forecast. As I've settled into the CFO role, I want to share some context for how I think about guidance. We will continue to guide 1 quarter ahead with a focus on transparency and consistency. My approach will be to set a guidance range, reflecting where we expect to land based on our best view of the deployment schedules and a balanced assessment of both risks and opportunities. With that in mind, for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue between $610 million to $630 million, representing year-over-year growth between 25% and 29% and adjusted EBITDA between $49 million and $53 million.

I want to reiterate what we highlighted during last quarter's earnings call. That is the introduction of our proprietary next-gen storage structure, has resulted in a realignment of deployment schedules. While this has no impact on our $22.5 billion of backlog, it does have an impact on how our revenue is phased throughout the fiscal year, with the quarters in the first half of fiscal 2026 showing less pronounced sequential growth. We believe this new technology advancement, combined with the unique capability of our proprietary box and software is resonating with customers as they recognize our competitive differentiation and the significant value our solution creates.

It also unlocks new opportunities across the supply chain as well as the opportunity for more efficient deployment, which we expect will contribute to higher margins over time for Symbotic.

With that, we now welcome your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question today will be coming from the line of Nicole DeBlase of Deutsche Bank.

Maybe just starting with Medline. Is it possible for you to provide a bit more color on the relationship that they've committed to, and then it seems like health care could be a pretty big opportunity with respect to new customers? Anything on how aggressively the sales force is pursuing that right now.

So, you broke up a little bit, but the Medline relationship is something that we worked on for about a year, maybe a little bit longer. And it was a combination of understanding what they wanted to accomplish with the hospitals and critical care units that they deliver with. And then for them to understand how the ability of our system to handle lots and lots of items and also the incredible accuracy with which we ship product. And then thirdly, the ability we have to sequence products because oftentimes, to hospitals, you're delivering to a specific section to a specific floor. And so we work with them to give them a good understanding of the unique capabilities of our system.

And so that's why we won the award, and we're -- they have lots of warehouses, great customer. So we're very excited about that. In terms of future growth, we've added about 5 or 6 new salespeople in the past 6 months. And so we're much more in the aggressive marketing role than we were before. Probably a year ago, we were still wanting to make sure everything was working and testing out and as I tell the organization, you can't scale chaos. But over the last year, as we began to hit all our time lines for builds and price points for execution and the quality of the way we measure it in some of our internal measures has more than improved by almost 300%. So we're feeling very bullish about being able to handle a much broader base of customers and to deploy systems that will work on day one.

That's really helpful. And you kind of alluded to this, is when you were talking about like the cadence of 2026. But -- is the expectation that you guys start to really ramp next-gen systems still kind of around the middle of the year. I think that's what we shared on the last earnings call. And does that mean we're going to have kind of a stable revenue through the first half and then the next step-up kind of comes in the second half of '26?

Nicole, that's exactly the way we're thinking of it. As you know, we unveiled it last quarter. So we had some signings then. And this quarter signings are all about the next-gen system. So what that does is exactly what you said. You'll call it see a less pronounced increase in revenue in call it the fourth, the first and the second and then you'll see more of an increase towards the tail end. So Nicole, I would say you got that right. Thank you.

And our next question is coming from the line of Joe Giordano of TD Cowen.

On Medline, can you talk about like what's contemplated there? Like how many sites are we talking about? Like what types of technology is this encompassing? Is there a break pack in this? Is there room for the micro fulfillment strategy in there as well? Like what was like effectively added to the backlog from them right now?

Yes. So Joe, it's 1 site. It's a proof of concept is the way we look at it. Obviously, if we do a good job, they have a lot of warehouses. And initially, we contemplated a pretty straightforward moving case system. But we also -- as we think we can upsell or extend to sell to these customers, micro fulfillment, which could either be in receiving room in a hospital for them or a very specific selection for them in a warehouse and then breakpack is also an opportunity for us to sell. So basically, we could sell them 3 different products. But right now, we have -- we're starting out with the first original product.

And then do we need to like -- I just want to make sure I understand the comments about Walmart were like the 2 phases being incorporated into 1 now. Do we need to like change the way we describe these things? I guess I just want to make sure the -- we understand the definition. So if you say like 10 new systems are started, can some of those new systems effectively be like 2 that you would have said last time, we have to talk in dollar terms instead of number of sites now?

I'll turn that over to Izzy because I'll get in trouble.

I think the way you said it, you have it right in the sense of not every system is created equal. But going forward, the size of the system is going to be slightly larger. So that's how I would think about it.

They could be slightly larger or we also have the ability to do some smaller systems, in terms of smaller space and a warehouse. So it gives us a lot of flexibility. But what is he was saying is absolutely right, is that in the same amount of space, that we were going to install an operation in some of our bigger sites, they can actually take down more of the warehouse because we can do more work in the same space as we did before.

And our next question is coming from the line of Andrew Kaplowitz of Citigroup.

So Systems gross margin was, I think, a high watermark close to 22%, and that's despite all the changes you're making to your systems. And I think you had spoken more flattish gross margin for Q4. So is Q4 a function of ASR mix maybe being a little higher? Is it safe to say you're on a better glide path given improved operating leverage, better execution. Any more color on whether you think your system gross margin continues to sort of just kind of go up from here?

Yes. So let me tackle what you said in the beginning of your question is how I think about, call it, ASR in the quarter? It's really, call it, mid- to high digits in terms of a percentage of total revenue in the fourth quarter. And I kind of would expect that to be about the same as we progress. I think the bigger part of your question is how you think about, okay, how do you unpack the margins. And I would say we feel really, really bullish about our system margins, not only where they are but where we're headed.

So I think if you see the last several quarters, we have kind of a little bit of a lumpiness, but I think it's about the exit trend where we landed in the fourth. And I would say even though we don't buy to margins, I would expect that to be a slight uptick in the first. But I think it's more about when you think about how we're recognizing revenue in, call it, that 12- to 18-month period, given when we roll out the next-generation storage system that we expect those margins to really to be expanding in the coming quarters. That's really what's the key part.

And like I said, I would reiterate, if there's 1 thing I would walk away from today is the fact that we are very bullish about where our margins, not only where they are, but where they're going.

It's helpful. And then, Rick, backlog, as you know, has been somewhat flash for Symbotic, I know your burn rates are going up. But do you think you could grow Symbotic backlog in FY '26 and/or -- we know you're ramping on Green Box, ASR. Can you give us an update on whether FY '26 is a big year for Symbotic new customers, GreenBox, can you start booking backlog for ASR, like any thoughts around all that?

Yes. So -- you're trying to trap me a little bit. So we don't guide to backlog, but here's how I would say, right, given the guide we gave for the first quarter, I would expect our backlog in the first quarter to really be no different to where we are. You do have in the 10-K, call it what our banding is, but what's coming through in the next 12 months. So I would say too soon to tell of where backlog will be. It's not something that we talk to in coming quarters. But I think you have to take 2 takeaways.

As Rick said, we've built up our sales team because we obviously have more opportunities, and so we will continue to do that. I think it's also important to think about that backlog for us is strictly what you do from a GAAP perspective, not what we think could happen given that most customers will do 1 system at a time. And then last but not least, what I'll leave you with, maybe not in the next 12 months, but soon thereafter to some extent, is to think about that we still have more than $5 billion of backlog to unlock with the mini -- micro fulfillment systems. So I'm not troubled about backlog at all. I think that's more about our long-term strategy. But I would say that 2026 is a solid backlog.

Our next question will be coming from the line of Mark Delaney of Goldman Sachs.

First 1 was on GreenBox. And now that you have a CEO of GreenBox and also given the new store structure that you've had and some of the progress you spoke to around building out sites there. I was hoping you could speak a bit more on the progress at GreenBox in terms of finding new customers who use the GreenBox sites.

Yes. So our first site that will come live will be Atlanta. I mean some of these sites are still under construction. Some of it will be a year away, some maybe be a little longer. But Atlanta will come alive. We have a lot of interest in Atlanta, no customers to announce yet, but we expect hopefully, by -- in the next 90 days, next 180 days, we'll have some announcements as to who our first customers will be. We continue to get interest. And now that we actually have facilities, we are in discussions with customers about how much space they want and when, but nothing to announce yet.

Okay. Anything in particular, Rick, do you think new customers would want to see in order to get across the line?

No. I mean, I think what's happened is what we're seeing is on the real estate space, there was a downturn after COVID and then some of the big guys have gobbled up a bunch of space. So there's a shortage of space right now. So we're very well positioned and so we're talking to people about some would be different versions of GreenBox. Some might be just jet storage. Some might be very proactive warehouse handling services and then we're starting to talk to a few new customers about just being a whole active 3PL. So we're in a pretty good spot because we're ahead of the market. And so we're talking to different customers about different things right now.

That's helpful. And just 1 more for me, if I could please, on GreenBox. Your partner at SoftBank has said they're looking to raise capital more generally in order to fund some of the investments they'd like to do. So as you think about what that may or may not mean for GreenBox, any implications you can share in terms of how GreenBox is looking to have the funding and what that might mean for the pace of deployment at GreenBox?

Yes. So I mean our agreement with SoftBank is IronClad, they're there to provide the funding. So we don't have any worries about providing the funding there and we have a lot of cash to do our part of it as well. So funding will not be a problem with GreenBox.

And our next question is coming from the line of Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer.

As you get into these customer conversations in a bit more detail, can you talk a little bit about the potential for adjustments to bot design or even system design more broadly? And how we might think about the cadence of that evolution.

Yes. So that's a great question. What's happening is that the customers are coming in now, and I'll answer your question in 2 ways. So what's happening is that the market is appreciating the fact that we're not selling the same system that we were 10 years ago, and a lot of our competitors have not innovated, they're just scaling. So our bots, for instance, we introduced to 1 of our customers, what we call a stretch bot. So we can now handle the 36-inch case. We might even be able to handle 2, 18-inch cases. So the bots have more flexibility. We've introduced vision and LiDAR on some of our bots. So we have collision avoidance. So customers are coming in, and they've -- and even some of the ones that we talked to 5 years ago, who weren't ready to make a decision, they come in now and they say, my goodness, the pace of change, which you guys are doing things, so I think we're really differentiating us from the rest of the world.

One of the things that we have done a lot of is we've moved to cloud-based. We're investing in AI resources, the databases. So we can do sorting and slicing and pallet building and for instance, truck routing I think maybe better than anybody in the world at this point. So I should avoid [ superlatives ], but our customers say, nobody can do what you guys are doing. So it's not just building very aisle friendly pallets that's building super friendly aisle pallets, but we can actually route the whole truck because of the reliability of our bots, which has made huge progress in the last 2 years.

In terms of we pick very, very, very, very high percentage of what we say we're going to pick, and we never make a mistake picking. So for hospital supply, that's absolutely critical. But for other people like we're starting to go live with our Southern Glazer site pretty soon in -- and it's liquor. And so it's both buyers and restaurants. And so the ability to route trucks is really critical for them, and they're telling us other people can't do it. So we continue to make improvements, both in software, our bots are getting much more technologically in both intelligent but also better vision tools, collision avoidance, better routing and we're also innovating on our pallet building and depalletizing to get product into the system.

So it's been -- I mean the reason I do what I do is I love the innovation and I love the fact that we have a team that can do innovation very quickly. And that's creating a big noticeable distinction between us and the rest of the market right now.

That's incredibly helpful on our side. And then just from the human capital and the competition for talent, we're hearing about a variety of different dynamics on that. Can you talk a little bit about your ability to attract folks and retain them as this market really heats up in terms of both physical AI as well as some of the software that you're talking about?

Yes. So the reason we went public is because we had to create a compensation system that would allow us to attract people that were used to being compensated in stock. And so we're not doing $1 billion packages out in Palo Alto, but we're doing pretty good in the Boston market in the East. We also have opened an office on the West Coast. We also opened an office in Vietnam because 1 Omnilabs, which was 1 of the health care -- small health care start-ups that we bought has a lot of Vietnamese people that founded that company, and so we've opened an office in Vietnam where there's huge talent.

So we're getting more than our fair share of talent and at a faster rate. And 1 of the things that's been interesting is as the EV space falls down some we are getting people from the EV world that are just disillusioned with some of the things that are happening there. And basically our bot the way we're approaching it is an electronic vehicle with LiDAR and collision avoidance. It's not passenger carrying. But we do some very complicated things. And so we're able to attract people because they like the problems that we're solving. And our comp is as good as anybody needs to be, we're not going to compete with chat GPT, but there's plenty of people that aren't going to work for them either.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Guy Hardwick of Barclays Capital.

It looks like the -- based on the change in the RPO that there was very strong bookings in the quarter, that $600 million, $700 million. Izzy could you just mix split that out between the Medline, new win and pricing?

So we just make it clear. Medline was something we signed in the tail end of the quarter. So Medline is not going to influence really our results in the fourth quarter. Really Medline is about no different than how we spoken to how we recognize our revenue over almost really a 2-year period. So I wouldn't put a lot of, call it, [indiscernible] numbers are how we achieved our fourth quarter numbers with the announcement of a new vertical. I think the fourth quarter is about the momentum that we've created for over a month on end on the installations and moving, call it, 6 more sites to operational.

That's really what drove it was the fact that, yes, we did sign 10 more than the repayments. But overall, the -- I would characterize the the success of the fourth quarter based on the momentum that we've been working on for months on it.

So Medline was not in the RPO $22.5 billion RPO at the end of the quarter?

Yes, it is in the RPO, but it's not -- it has no significance to the revenue generated SP-29 In the quarter.

Okay. So just -- my question was more -- was it material to that increase in the RPO because given you would it implies that your bookings are at $700 million given the revenue burn in the quarter plus the change in the backlog. So that's a very significant increase compared to, say, previous quarters. So the question is really the mix of that, how much of it was Medline versus increase in pricing?

Yes. I would say it's more about the increase in pricing or call it, how you can fit or what we did years ago and how inflation has moved. So that's really the main driver in the RPO change. But yes, Medline is in that.

And just in the 10-K, which you referenced, is it looks like the the 12% of the backlog will be delivered over the next 12 months. That's quite a big increase in the figure back 12 months ago in the 2024 10-K said 10%. It looks like you actually missed that 10%. You came in more like 9%, particularly if you include the ASR R&D revenue. So given what you said also about being a back-end loaded year, 12% of that backlog seems quite a big significant step up on the previous delivery, which you [indiscernible] kind of missed slightly. So what reason should we give us confidence that you can deliver 12% of the backlog in the next 12 months?

I think it's all about what we said in our prepared remarks, given that we're seeing, call it, improvements from that start of installation to the end line. And that's what gives us the, call it, the the momentum that we're talking about. Yes, we do have ASR that we built in during the year. So you're absolutely correct. But I think you really -- we're laser-focused on the exit trend and what the new structure delivers. As you know, it's -- not only is it more dense, but more importantly, from an installation perspective is that it has call it, somewhat -- the subassemblies that come in that have that process gets done at a much faster pace.

So a quick call out on the 10 to 12 I'm really comfortable with the 12% that we have in the years of AMD.

Our next question is coming from the line of Derek Soderberg of Cantor Fitzgerald.

On the recurring software fees, I'm wondering if you can share what new customers are signing up for in terms of an annual software fee on a percentage basis. Can you share that at all?

Unfortunately, that's not an area that we give any more color. I think it's just in general, how you map call it, what we move to operational and when we start triggering that software fee. But I would think if you take the -- a little bit of the exit trend, that's really what we would be expecting in the near term.

Okay. Got it. And then, Rick, you mentioned there's about 76 million square feet of distribution centers in the health care vertical. I'm wondering if you've done the math internally, how many modules does this equate to? Or what's for the dollar opportunity. Just wondering if you could help us size that health care vertical in the U.S.?

I haven't done that, but you can ask Izzy after this call is over.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Jim Ricchiuti Needham & Company.

I think late in the quarter, there was an announcement regarding Symbotic working with a, I guess, a small battery technology company, I think in the U.K., [indiscernible] I'm trying to understand the significance of this. And if you could talk to how we might think of potential deployments? Is this going to be on new projects? Is there a plan to move forward with retrofits as the maintenance schedules dictate.

Yes. So all our new batteries starting, I think, from February on, we'll have [indiscernible] batteries. So we, for the last 15 years have used ultracapacitors. And an ultracapacitor can take 1 million charges, but the charge only lasts about 8 minutes, deniable is actually a battery, but it charges the same way as an ultra cap and it can take a 40-minute charge. Now that may not seem that much to you at home but the American grid, especially with all the stuff that's happening with AI is pretty erratic, especially in hot weather places like Florida and Texas, which also had tornado.

So the ability to go 40 minutes is like a lifetime for us in terms of reliability of the bots. So when there's a power flicker, we want our bots to get back to a home station, which is on a charge plate. And in the past, sometimes 8 minutes wasn't enough. So this is just 1 more thing that as we show new customers, what we're doing with battery technology, most people are operating their bots with a third rail. It's kind of an electronic wires in the system. And so you have a -- when you have a flicker, the whole thing is down, but -- so the progress we've made on battery technology, and we've taken a stake in this company.

It's very, very exciting, and we can actually use these batteries for other parts of our system and sometimes actually to help our customers keep uninterruptible pyro supplies in their warehouses. So it's just 1 more thing of the [ Marche ] technology that we had a problem. The American grid is pretty bad, erratic. And so we're thinking, well, how do we solve this problem for these automation systems. So -- and so I think this is really going to help us in life sciences and a bunch of other areas. But just in general, our systems are way more reliable than they were even 2 years ago.

Follow-up question. Just as we think about your fiscal '26 goals, I'm wondering how does geographic expansion figure into that. Obviously, you've got a site in Mexico that you're working on. And I'm just wondering if there's an opportunity you think in fiscal '26 to perhaps get into Europe?

Yes. A matter of fact, half of our sales team is in Europe today. So we -- it's been interesting with Europe because so many of the great automation companies came from Europe because Europe had either smaller land spaces, more restrictive labor laws. But as we go to Europe, especially with our smaller, denser warehouses, people are really getting interested and we've been doing this long enough that the reliability issues are not a problem. So I'm very optimistic about Europe. We see lots of opportunities.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Ken Newman of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Izzy, I wanted to go back to your comment about the change in the phasing of the revenue. I know you said you expect less pronounced sequential revenue growth in the first half versus the back half, just looking historically, though, I think in the last 3 years, sales have typically been down sequentially, high single to low double digits, 4Q to 1Q and the midpoint of the guy is assuming something that's a little bit better than flat.

So I just want to make sure we're understanding that growth comment for accelerating growth in the back half versus what already seems like a bit of a stronger start versus typical seasonality?

That's fair. If you take the high end of the range we just gave for the first quarter, we would sort of break the trend that we've been typically seeing at least from what I saw over the last 2 years. So clearly, that's our main focus. But if you take, call it, the bottom end of the range I gave you, and that's really just about 1% less than where we landed in the fourth quarter. So it depends -- but if you take the midpoint, we're kind of flat to exactly what we achieved in the fourth quarter. But internally, as you can imagine, we're trying to get past this lumpiness and really be continuing on continual improvement.

And so although I guided right in between, guided us slightly under where we are in the fourth. So the guide was $610 million to $630 million. But if you take that midpoint, that's really where I know about this less pronounced sequential improvement. But the overall goal, to be clear, is not to have that lumpiness in the first quarter going forward.

Okay. No, that's very helpful color. I appreciate that. And then -- and secondly, for my follow-up, we are hearing some more comments from hardware-related manufacturers around higher DRAM pricing and memory shortages. Rick, can you maybe just remind us how memory-intensive are the Symbotic deployments? And just any comments on what you're seeing broadly from chip availability and pricing as it relates to your ability to kind of keep margins stable even though I'm sure you're able to pass through the pricing, is there a risk of just nominally margins kind of stepping down?

No, not for us. I mean our bots are -- I mean, basically, what our bots are doing is transmitting data back to us, which we then process in the cloud and with different various algorithms, which are mostly proprietary. So yes, we're buying more cloud storage, but not significantly like the super big guys are so -- and it's coming down in price. But we're not doing that directly on the bots. What we're doing is we will take the information that the bots transmit back that's a controllable expense, so it's going up.

And then reprogram the bots for different various edge case behaviors. So like a bottle, see something and say, I don't know what to do. And so it will transmit back to us. But the bots are being trained, but the bots are not truly independent AI machines. We kind of take that information back do the processing, run the algorithms and then send it back out in a software release. So chips are not really a problem for us as we get bigger and better -- I mean I think this time next year, we'll have over 20,000 bots. So we're a major factor for some of the medium and smaller-sized companies and even the video, there's a certain amount of -- the lower-priced chips are what we're using. We may upgrade some of those chips, but they're not the $25,000 chips that other people are [indiscernible] And we don't use that many of them.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Mike Latimore of Northland Capital Markets.

I guess I'll just build off that last answer. I guess if you're expecting 20,000 or so bots in a year, can you give us kind of a baseline of where we are now?

Yes. I mean we have about 15,000 lots right now. So we expect to keep growing and there'll be different kind of bots that we'll use. Those would be different versions. The back-of-store mini system will use a similar bot. So there'll be different versions of our bots as well.

Yes, that makes sense. And then I guess just on the new system starts in the quarter, I think you said there was 10. Were there any break packs in there? And then I think last quarter, you guided to sort of mid-single to upper single digits. And should we still think about that as kind of the run rate for a while?

There's a mix of -- in the 10 deployments we had in the fourth quarter. Yes, there were a couple of breakpacks. Sorry. And your next question was -- can you repeat your latter part of your question?

Sure, sure, sorry. Yes, last quarter, I think you guided -- I think you had guided the system starts being in the kind of mid- to high single-digit range and then you did 10% this quarter. So I guess, any new view on the system start number?

It's something we don't typically guide to is what our, call it, system starts are going to be or which ones are going to be moving into operational. I think the best way to think of it is, although I said historically, I want to get away from the lumpiness in the revenue. I do think though sometimes we do have more of a tailwind of those deployments in the fourth quarter. Now we have a healthy amount that we're -- we have throughout all the quarters of next year, but I think it's less about trying to manage what they are and more about, okay, the size and how much is to be coming through in the revenue. So more importantly is the guide of the $610 million to $630 million in the top.

Our next question will be coming from the line of Greg Palm of Craig-Hallum.

I want to go back to systems gross margin because that was certainly a highlight, and it sounds like you're pretty confident that, that can continue to improve. So any way to maybe, Izzy, if you can sort of break out or bucket out some of the positive impacts in the quarter and just sort of broadly what's happening from an improvement standpoint relative to maybe the last 12 or 18 months?

Yes. I mean I think we keep going back to the same thing, but I think we've actually seen it over multiple quarters. And really, the way I would think about it is we saw a little bit of, call it, a decline in our operation services, but yet overall, we had a terrific gross margin on the bottom line. So if you just -- if you go through all the math in our earnings release, and I know it's not the easiest thing to track to, you'll come back to that the systems is really where the powerful improvement is I think if you unpack the quarters, really what it comes down to, last year, at this time, we did have some cost creep.

And I think what -- if you walk through the halls here in Wilmington, what everybody reminds me of is that we didn't have that really disciplined cost management for the entire year and with no cost creep in how the supply chain team and sold the systems. That's really what's driving the overall systems gross margin. And not to mention what it will become as we deploy the more denser systems. So even before that, I think that's really what's the highlight, not only in the quarter and the highlight of what we feel bullish about what the systems margins will be going forward.

Okay. Yes, makes sense. And I guess, Rick, I'm fairly certain that Medline was a pretty large user of another competitor in the warehouse automation space. So I'm curious, like, does this have potential to be a competitive displacement, something that could be expanded from this initial site? Like I know they've already automated a big chunk of their [indiscernible] already. So I just want to hear what the actual opportunity with them could be over the years.

The answer is yes. We -- our technology does things that other people's technology doesn't do. We also can augment some of the other technologies that we've seen in some of their facilities. But we would do bigger projects. And I think we -- if they like what we're doing, and I don't want to mislead anybody. We don't have a contract for any more than 1. But if they like what we're doing, I think we have a huge opportunity with them.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Keith Housum of Northcoast Research.

Rick, I know it's kind of new news here, but the largest retailer in the U.S. is scaling back some of their investments with, I guess, a smaller competitive of yours. I guess any thoughts on what was perhaps driving that? And any -- does that dampen any of the enthusiasm that you see from your customers, about the use of this type of technology for the fulfillment centers going forward?

Yes. No. Actually, it's actually supercharged with the interest in our technology. So what's happening in the e-commerce space and in the supermarket space, in particular, is the congestion from all the people picking orders in the store, the DoorDash and that stuff, Instacart was a great convenience, but it's really very confusing and messing up the stores. And so what we're talking to people about is, how can you put 20,000 or 30,000 items in 10,000 square feet and deliver in a marketplace or a city that could be actually used the fresh produce from the store. So it's -- e-commerce is evolving in the way of -- the biggest guy in e-commerce delivers 1.2 packages or 1.2 items for delivery, but the retailers in the food space are delivering probably 15 or 20 package order.

And so it actually allows them to do a lot of things that you can't do when you're just delivering 1.2 eaches. The reason I can't speak fully. I mean, I have my own view, but I don't express it here, why that retailer made a change of mind with that technology. But I think what you're starting to see -- and where is that we can actually use the same box, but pick each and pick eaches or use -- bring a toe a bot can bring an item or a number of items to a pick station, very similar to what we do in our breakpack installs and actually do customer orders, which is -- initially, we -- this is what we've been trying to explain to people, 3 years ago, we did a breakpack where a bot would bring a top to a person, the person would pick it and then we that basically batch pick it.

The same more or less concept can be deployed in the back of a store, except you're picking a customer order. And so that -- the real problem that people are trying to solve with the e-commerce now is speed of delivery and much more local. So I think our commitment and our largest customer asked us to develop this for them. We're really excited. This is a very, very big market.

And that does conclude today's Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you, everybody, for joining our call tonight. We appreciate your interest in Symbotic and look forward to seeing some of you in the coming weeks at investor conferences that will attend. Goodbye.

Joining today's conference call. You may all disconnect.