Unusual Machines Aktie

Greetings, and welcome to Unusual Machines Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to Christine Petraglia, Investor Relations for Unusual Machines. Christine, over to you.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. With us today are Unusual Machines CEO, Allan Evans; and CFO, Brian Hoff.

During this call, management will make forward-looking statements regarding our expectations for product demand, revenue growth, manufacturing expansion, gross margins and anticipated regulatory developments. Actual results may differ materially due to factors, including government program funding and timing, customer concentration, inventory risks, manufacturing challenges, supply chain disruptions, tariff impacts and other risks described in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law. For a complete discussion of risk factors, please refer to our SEC filings and the shareholder letter accompanying this call.

In addition to reporting financial results in accordance with GAAP, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. We believe these measures provide useful supplemental information to investors regarding our operating performance. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in the shareholder letter earnings press release, which are also available on our website and filed with the SEC.

As a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Unusual Machines website at www.unusualmachines.com.

Now let me hand over the call to our CEO, Allan Evans. Please go ahead, Allan.

Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. During this call, I will discuss our second quarter 2026 performance. In the second quarter, we generated more than $16.7 million in operating revenue. This is a 687% year-over-year growth from the second quarter in 2025, and it's more than double the revenue we generated last quarter, the first quarter of 2026. We generated a GAAP loss of approximately $7.8 million for the quarter, which represents a net loss of $0.16 per share and that's a reduction in loss when compared to the $0.32 per share from the second quarter of 2025.

The key takeaway from this quarter for me is that we are continuing to dramatically increase revenue while getting closer to consistent profitability. The Q2 results begin to reflect the underlying financial structure Unusual Machines is working to achieve. There is rapid continued growth, doubling to almost $17 million in revenue with the growth driven entirely from our Enterprise segment. At the same time, we've managed to reduce our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA from a loss of $1.6 million last quarter to a loss of only $400,000 this quarter. Our margins have remained consistent and healthy with the slightly lower than target depression that we see from rapid growth, and we finished the quarter with a 34.7% gross margin. This is in that backdrop of scaling as our head count went from 141 employees to 240 employees as of July 1.

A healthy balance sheet remains a priority for us, and we took the opportunity to raise another $60 million at $30 a share, and we did this with block ATM transactions. Right now, we have about $367.5 million in total working capital and no debt. It's very important to remember that we don't burn cash. So this money remains in the war chest and enables us to both manage inventory and make investments that accelerate our customers and the entire drone marketplace.

The success of this quarter and of the company just would not be possible without the hard work everyone on the entire Unusual Machines team puts in. Everybody works hard and brings incredible energy to all of the challenges we face. I am confident we can handle continued growth because I am confident in everyone I have the pleasure of working with. So I want to say thank you to everyone working at Unusual Machines.

I'll hand this call off to our CFO, Brian Hoff, to cover our financial results in detail. And then once he finishes, I'm going to go into more detail on both this quarter and our plans going forward. With that, I'm handing the call off to our CFO, Brian Hoff.

Thank you, Allan, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call. As Allan just mentioned, we've had another strong quarter with $16.7 million recognized in revenue for the quarter, which, as we said, is 687% increase from the prior year and 107% increase from the prior quarter. That puts us at revenue year-to-date at $24.8 million. And we continue to see this significant shift toward Enterprise revenue, about approximately 95% of our second quarter revenue was generated from Enterprise customers, which is across a diverse base of customers and products.

Gross margin was 34.7% for the quarter, which is an increase from last quarter and slightly below our 2025 margins. We expect to continue to see these margin fluctuations as we can scale our manufacturing and work to capture the market demand. We anticipate additional margin fluctuation for the remainder of 2026, primarily related to our growth initiatives. However, we expect them to kind of continue to recover.

Our operating expenses also increased during the quarter to $13.6 million for Q2 of '26. This increase reflects deliberate investments and strategic decisions to support our continued growth and scale of our business, things that are including of building out our G&A infrastructure, head count, systems, process. Including is also $5.7 million in noncash stock compensation expense and about $1.8 million in nonrecurring expenses. We continue to expect additional operating expenses as we continue to hire additional staff, add additional manufacturing space and have additional public company-related expenses. Please reference the tables at the end of the shareholder letter for the additional detail, which reflects our adjusted EBITDA. As Allan said, we've brought this down from about $1.6 million in Q1 to about $400,000 in Q2, so showing very positive trends.

In other income and expense, we had additional positive results from our investments. These investments are designed for strategic purposes, and they create goodwill in the U.S. drone industry and develop supplier partnerships and customer relationships. Our strategy is continuing to work. The results show a $2.3 million realized gain from investments during the quarter, which is a nice add-on to our overall cash without adding additional dilution. We also had interest income of about $1.8 million during the quarter. Our balance sheet also remains very strong and reflects our focus on positioning for anticipated growth. Our cash balance ended the quarter at $229 million, which included the $60 million from our ATM block funding in May at $30 a share. The balance sheet is also further supported by our short-term investments of over $86 million and inventory, which includes raw materials and finished goods and deposits paid of about $42.4 million. And we're going to see this continue to increase in Q3 and Q4 as we make significant purchases to meet demand and do our part in managing supply chain issues as much as possible. Our total working capital was over $367 million, which puts us in a great position to capitalize on demand moving forward.

I'd also like to reiterate what Allan just said. None of this is possible without the fantastic team working extremely hard to make things move. It's an exciting time to be at Unusual Machines and looking forward to the rest of the year. Thank you to our shareholders and partners for continuing to support our mission throughout it all. Back to Allan.

Thanks, Brian. At a high level, it's been an impressive quarter. We keep scaling both sales and company size. We maintain a strong cash position. We've added product categories through activities like the Upgrade Energy acquisition, and we've been able to achieve these results while reducing our operating losses. We believe we remain well positioned to be a supply chain leader for components for small drones as the domestic industry expands.

I'm about to go into a lot more detail on the second quarter and also discuss our outlook going forward. I'd like to remind everyone that my comments coming forward from here definitely contain forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ from those anticipated.

Quarter 2, the second quarter is worth talking about in more detail. The second quarter is the moment where I've gone from hoping we could be a major supplier in the emerging drone industry to believing that we will be. Two major threads emerged in the second quarter that are not going to show up in the financial statements, but are really core to Unusual Machines' ability to effectively grow forward and be a larger company. The first was the supply chain issue. During the quarter, we outgrew one of our electronics vendors, and we had to work through challenging supply chain challenges as we replaced different components and where we got parts is we still fulfill products for our customers.

Our sales and operations team did an incredible job of navigating this and putting in the extra hours and working with customers. And I cannot be more proud of those teams and how they handled what was this really challenging situation to deliver for our customers and keep our business on track.

The second challenge was that we had a quality issue with one of our motor SKUs. There was this intermittent issue that required deep coordination with our product team, our motor production team and our customers to go in and find the root cause of the intermittent challenge. They then had to go through and create remedies to our production processes as well as new ways to do quality testing to eliminate the issue from everything we're doing going forward.

These 2 challenges are both pretty normal types of issues for a company like ours at scale. They should be expected. But this is really the first time that we faced either one of these types of challenges at this scale. At the same time, they both showed up simultaneously, either one of these operating issues could have easily been used to justify a flat quarter, could have easily derailed what we were doing or slowed it down. Our team members could have treated this as routine.

They could have not put in the 10- to 12-hour days and worked the long hours required to be sure our customers were in the best place they could be. I've been watching everyone, and I mean everyone involved work through these challenges and still deliver the kind of growth we've seen and the margins that we've seen has me fully believing that we have the team and the mindset to be successful as we continue to grow. I absolutely believe in the team we have and what we are continuing to build.

That's probably enough on the second quarter, but I think it's important for everyone to understand that as it doesn't show up. So now let's talk about the future. First and foremost, demand remains strong. The current U.S. marketplace remains very supply constrained, and we still see demand outstripping supply both this year and deep into 2027. We are continuing to build the company and procure raw material to grow into this demand as fast as we possibly can, and we don't see any signs of softness now or in the near future.

The primary driver of this demand growth continues to be the Department of War. The Drone Dominance Gauntlet Program remains on track as Phase 2 is currently in the final selection process and more than 60,000 drones are expected to be ordered in the second half of 2026, mostly in the fourth quarter. The NDAA continues to move forward through legislation with big increases in spending for autonomous systems. And in addition to that, there are drone programs and counter drone orders for the same parts. Counter drone is really becoming another emergent addressable market segment that's creating immediate and near-term demand. There have also been orders that have been propagated through the sort of Department of War procurement process. And I just want to give some examples.

There was a $90 million counter UAS order for Powerus. There was $500 million in counter UAS from AeroVironment, $500 million in counter UAS orders from Perennial Autonomy, a $500 million IDIQ for FPV drones from Neros, which is an extension of the PBAS program and very recently, an $820 million loan from the OSC to PDW. These and other orders are really just starting to propagate through the supply chain, and we expect that they're going to create additional demand here in late Q3 and Q4 and then into 2027.

So one thing we did learn in the second quarter is that we do not yet have the infrastructure to support hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in annual revenue. The massive amount of money flowing into the drone marketplace is coming faster and is larger than we anticipated. And so we are in the middle of transforming Unusual Machines. And we now very strongly believe that we only have until the end of the third quarter to complete this transformation because of this demand wave. Our high-speed motor production line is just in the process of being installed, the components from Florida, and it's going to take some time to bring that online.

Our HR team is very busy in California, even this week, actively working on helping upgrade energy hire people, scale their team and process and prepare for integration into the Unusual Machines greater umbrella, even though we're not going to see any revenue from that acquisition in this quarter until we close. Our supply chain team is working closely with them to drive battery vendors and work on bringing in the cells and the material, and that is a long-term endeavor in terms of transitioning and qualifying new electronics providers. And these are all to address some of the challenges we had in the second quarter and are a ton of work that we're setting up for the long-term future. These activities, all of this work will not show up in the top line for the third quarter, but this is the work that positions us to continue our dramatic growth during the fourth quarter and into 2027 as this massive demand wave starts to fully manifest.

To summarize, the second quarter of 2026 showed strong results despite operating challenges. We doubled revenue to almost $17 million and reduced our adjusted EBITDA loss to $400,000. We continued our staircase financing strategy, and we're now focused on building a strong foundation with the industry through the end of '26 and into 2027. Unusual Machines remains at the forefront of the domestic components market, and the market is growing in a way never anticipated with additional demand from counter drone pushing things even faster. Our business is well capitalized and healthy, and we're continuing to grow as fast as we possibly can, and I am now confident and believe that our team is positioned to meet this demand. I want to say thank you again to our entire staff and to all of our shareholders who are part of this with us.

And with that, I would like to open up the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Austin Bohlig of Needham & Company.

Congrats on the great results. First, Allan, I just wanted to kind of dive a little bit more into kind of the revenue outlook for the rest of the year. I think prior, you guys were talking about trying to grow internally 50% quarter-over-quarter, understanding this is at a much larger base. Is the plan to still try and grow sequentially throughout the year?

Austin, I appreciate your question. We don't historically give guidance. I think I'm going to give you what our internal targets are and why here. And this is a unique situation. In the second quarter, we ran in front of our inventory a little bit. So we have some shortages as we go through the changeover to different electronics vendors. And we also, honestly, our motor factory right now is a construction zone, and we're prioritized plugging in our high-speed line. So our internal targets, which are not the same as guidance, these are sort of where we really work toward, and we've done a good job of this historically.

Internally, because of all the efforts we're putting in, we're targeting $12 million to $14 million in the third quarter, and then that positions us to go after our internal target of $25 million for the fourth quarter. So those are our internal targets, and we're really spending this quarter rushing to build out everything to start to meet what will be drone dominance and the counter drone demand coming in the fourth quarter. And so we're applying a lot of work not toward building and selling, but to positioning to start to explode into quarter 4 and the time after that.

Okay. Perfect. And then I guess, on kind of the counter UAS market because I think that's just as hot as the FPV drone dominance market. How many customers are you guys working with in that space?

I am not sure of the number right now. It is definitely more than one already. And some of the same customers that are FPV customers buy the same parts for counter drone. So I would have to dive into that specifically. But it is definitely a major driver for us. And the first customer that we announced that we were doing it with where we're the furthest along was Powerus. And they were the first ones to start to see large contracts. So now that we're seeing other companies get counter drone contracts, we'll have better granularity on that probably in another month or 2 as they finalize their supply chains.

Okay. And then just was curious on the pricing environment. I think historically, you guys have just tried to, for your customers, maintain pricing, but I've just heard just due to the really imbalance of supply and demand, definitely is an environment that favors you. Just curious of how you guys have been thinking about pricing of components this year and next.

Yes. I think we could absolutely increase our pricing to drive margin, but we view our company and always will is competing in the global marketplace. And so our customers very often have had overseas suppliers, and they're being forced to switch. And we really think it's important for us to be -- understand their cost sensitivities as well and be a place where they can switch and not break their downstream costs or make products that are too expensive for the American people. So we try to combine the -- looking at it to have a 40% gross margin, so we have a healthy business, but also being price competitive to imported motors from Taiwan or Japan or China, so that we don't break their downstream model. So we're not looking to use this moment to create margin expansion at the expense of our customer. We think if we serve them really well, then we'll have a multiyear relationship with all of them and be able to provide them with the parts they need at a competitive price so they can compete in the marketplace.

Our next question is coming from Josh Sullivan of Jones Trading.

Congrats on the big ramp here in the quarter. Just wanted to get some additional thoughts on working capital position now and where it might need to be next year as this ramp really comes through. And then where are the supply chain stress points currently for yourselves?

Yes. So if you look, this is a great example. As Brian had mentioned, we have about $42.7 million in inventory, raw material, finished goods, prepaid inventory, and that's on a $16 million quarter. Multiply that by 4, you at $60 million. We, I think, have historically said we always expect about 1x working capital to forward-looking revenue. So I think that is in that ballpark. It matches sort of our baseline models.

As we go into next year, I think we're going to be seeing still a year of forward-looking revenue in there, and we've always said that we aspire to do about $250 million of revenue, if possible, in 2027 if we're successful in don't run any hiccups. So we think we're going to need to land around there across the next year. I do think as we scale into that, there are options that are not equity financing, right? There's loans, et cetera, that could be possible. And then hopefully, that answers the first question. And do you mind repeating the second question, so we have an on record.

Yes. The second one is just curious where your stress points are in the supply chain at this point.

So the stress points are everywhere. If you look electronics vendors across the board, and this is especially true because you just saw yesterday, China make drone export restrictions harder. It's a very dynamic environment where the sort of isolation is creating regulatory changes. So if there's even -- you could say like on an F7 flight controller, the only place where they make the OSE chip is out of China. So working around that, and that is more expensive if you use a microcontroller and program it and then you have to go find it.

We've had to place orders for Sony sensors already for cameras that won't even be delivered until December because there's a shortage of camera sensors that are outside of China. If you look for magnets, we have to order 9 months out for magnets from Japan as we scale our production line and do design where magnets from other areas can be shorter. There's probably 20 different very challenging items to source where our supply chain team is on top of it and does an incredible job. And those are just some I know off the top of my head. And it gets harder as the rules are changing on short notice.

Maybe just one last one, just a follow-up on the counter drone market. What do you think the magnitude of the counter drone market is going to be versus the legacy FEV market?

So I think the counter drone market is probably going to be larger. And I think it's going to be larger because I think counter drones will be used more. I think there's a lot more global defense activity and I think a lot easier U.S. export for defense activity. I'll give you an example right now. In Iran and the Middle East, the Gulf states all would want counter drones in addition to things like Patriot missiles. And I think it's a lot easier to say, hey, here are counter drones where then we're not facilitating or engaging in a conflict. I think if you look, there was a great effort done by the government during FIFA to a full drone task force. And I think you're going to see the same thing with the Olympics, et cetera. So I think if you think the counter drone and the small incredible drone markets of the same size. I think you're going to see more routine rollover and deployment in the counter drone market. And so I think that's going to be a more consistent demand driver long term.

Our next question is coming from Craig Irwin of ROTH Capital.

So Allan, it's rare for a growth company to have a double in revenue and for margins to hang in there. Usually, there's fairly substantial margin compression when companies are scaling. And you've delivered the opposite despite some of the challenges that you had in the quarter. Can you maybe give us a little bit more detail on your planning for scaling as far as how you allocate resources for employees, hiring, infrastructure necessary? How are you actually delivering on margins that are healthy and expanding modestly while scaling at such a rapid rate?

I think that's a great question, and thank you for the observation. Everybody in the company cares about building a sustainable business. I think where you see a lot of companies reduce margin for growth, they have to create demand. And as we've always talked about, there's a market vacuum here. And so our cost to create demand aren't the same as other emerging environments. And so we have the benefit then of being able to understand and build with discipline to maintain and grow those margins. Our goal and our belief is that we're going to be able to be operating cash flow positive in the new year.

Now again, as I mentioned, for the third quarter, we're putting in a ton of work. So right now, we were at about 70,000 square feet of total space. And we've added 15,000 square feet in Orlando for batteries, another 4,000 square feet in Orlando for operating staff like overhead staff, G&A. The 18,000 square feet for upgrade energy will close, and we're actually looking for another 100,000 to 200,000 square feet over the next 9 months because at our current rate, we've sort of filled up the space that we had faster than we expected. It's all being operational and it's all generating margin.

The other thing that is true is everybody on our team puts in the work. And so I think when you look at gross margin expansion, a lot of our gross margin costs come from labor and people are really efficient and work really hard. And I think we have an incredible workforce that has helped us achieve that. So those are the 2 pieces that I think have led us do that is not having to spend wildly on demand generation and then a really effective workforce with a senior leadership that has an attitude toward constantly building a business with profitability.

I think one other thing to note, and this will create a changeover in 2027. Most of our loss is driven by equity comp. Myself and the senior executives are no longer taking restricted stock. We move to options. And so I think where you may see some more gap stuff in the third and fourth quarters by 2027, a lot of that gap loss will be ameliorated as we all believe in the future and are structured for growth.

So another major item that wasn't specific to UMAC this last quarter, but specific to the industry was Performance Drone Works getting their conditional loan commitment. That's $820 million, that's a big amount of money for the Department of War to commit to the build-out of this infrastructure, this industry that you are clearly a leader in. You were obviously mentioned -- your company was mentioned in several of those press reports that talked about potential government investments. So I don't want to ask specifically about your status there, but I'd love to ask about how you could potentially use money if you did have a couple of hundred million dollars come in. What would this mean now that you've proven that you can use your capital wisely?

Great question. I'd like to say congratulations to the PDW team. I've known Ryan and James and Matt over there since the early DRL days, and they're great stewards of what they're doing. I think they're a great company in the industry. What we would do, what we could contribute, is very shortly, we're going to have a complete, let's call it, motor production unit, a full supply chain, a mid-tier introductory line with the ability to do things all the way through a high-volume line where we could do, let's call it, 100,000 motors a month.

With hundreds of millions of dollars, we could take that production unit and parallelize it. We could rubber stamp it out and adjust it to match. So if there was a desire to do 1 million motors a month to support the drone and counter drone industry, we could take that base unit, which was confirmed and validated along with the full supply chain and the variants that we have there. And at this point, we could stamp out 10 of them. And I think in that way, with our leadership position in motor production and our quality improving through strong partnership and feedback with our customers and the hard work of our team, I think that's where you would see us go and what you could see us do with sort of a mandate that it would be desirable.

Well, congrats on the progress.

Thank you, Craig.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from Amit Dayal of H.C. Wainwright.

Just to begin with, did I just hear the targeted revenue for 2027 is roughly $250 million?

That is not guidance. We've said all the way along that is the available TAM from the Drone Dominance Program. And so we are aggressively trying to grow our company to fill as much of that demand as we can.

Understood. Just so in that context, what revenue capacity will your manufacturing infrastructure support going into 2027?

I would say, as of today, with the 70,000 square feet, we're probably getting close to the limit. So that's probably $20 million. We'll know better when we put in the high-speed automated line, but we're actively looking for another couple of hundred thousand square feet to scale out. So we're trying to build the infrastructure. And that's really what quarter 3 is about is that foundation. We're trying to build the infrastructure to meet the market potential of $250 million in 2027. And we're going to have to take a moment and really build out the base to be ready to do that.

Understood. And just any update on the announcement in May or the news in May about potential U.S. government investment in UMAC. Has that discussion moved forward? Any update on that would be helpful.

Yes. As I've said all the way along, we are in discussions with the OSC, and that's all I can say.

Our next question is coming from Barry Sine of Litchfield Hills Research.

A couple of questions, if you don't mind. First, Allan, you've been incredibly busy on the M&A front. But if you look back at the stack now, number one, if you look at the components required to manufacture a drone, you've pretty well filled that out, especially with batteries recently, maybe frames or antennas. Anything else there? And anything else you might go beyond just drone components you thought about services in the past but pulled back. What are you thinking on M&A?

Right now, we're really focused on closing Upgrade Energy. And then when we look at M&A, integration is a lot of work. We don't take that lightly. And I think until we have scaled to service what is the powertrain that we're working on, and we feel more comfortable that we're there that we're really focused on driving this organic growth that we saw in the last quarter. And I think our team has demonstrated we can really start to drive rapid organic growth. So we're always looking at adjacencies or new product categories. I think with where we sit in terms of capitalization and support from the shareholders, we're in a position that if something makes sense, we could go after it. But at the same time, our core focus right now is getting batteries in-house and really scaling what we have because there's a lot of demand for it.

Okay. So it sounds like you're in pretty good shape for now. Shifting gears, talking about gross margin. There's a lot of work in progress. You're ramping up the facilities now, but you're going to do a step change increase in square footage next year. You've got to get batteries closed and up and running in [ a mirror ] plant in Orlando. If we look out once that's done, I don't know if there's a steady state ever for Unusual Machines. What do the gross margins look like longer term on this business? Are we at 50% gross margin? What should investors think about that you can do once you're really at scale?

Yes. I think what we've said is why we're scaling. We figure around 30 -- low 30% gross margin is our target. I think we've demonstrated we can hit that. I think that's what you're going to look at as long as we're scaling. We're doing everything we can structurally to keep 40% gross margin as we start to flatten out as our target, which we think is fair to both us and our customers. I think once we get there and we don't see the growth that we're seeing, if we settle into 10% year-over-year growth for some really mature state, we'll have to look around and decide then do we need to expand into other industries to drive continued growth? Or do we need to look at margin improvements.

And I would say, very recently, the FCC just put out another ban, which creates potential TAM expansion and that they banned all light show drones immediately. But more importantly, they banned humanoid robots and even robot vacuums from being imported to China. So if we see a components ban in those categories, which would follow the same pattern as the drone marketplace, there are millions of robot vacuums that were sold in the U.S. last year. And right now, all of them are made in China. So there could be -- we would have the choice to pursue margin expansion or continued TAM and revenue expansion at that point. And I think when we get there, investors should be excited that we have decisions we get to make.

And just lastly, just a detailed question. What percent of revenue was Rotor Riot this quarter?

The retail channel, not the brand was only about 6% of revenue.

Our next question is coming from Matthew Galinko of Maxim Group.

Allan, you framed the market as supply constrained through 2027. So is that a function of line of sight that you have today? Or do you expect suppliers to catch up with demand in 2028?

Just line of sight. I think there's no suppliers that are close and the continued regulatory environment is restricting supply further. And so I think we'll continue to pay attention in Q2 2027, I think we'll have better line of sight looking forward. But right now, that's just as far out as we can see.

Our next question is coming from Josh Sullivan of Jones Trading.

I just wanted to get your thoughts on the evolution of the commercial drone delivery market at this point. I know you're already a lot in your plate scaling in the drone dominance alone. But given the longer-term battery swap opportunity, just wanted to check in on your thoughts on any developments.

Yes. I think most importantly, you saw DoorDash just got their 135. They'll begin testing. I think they're going to have very interesting results, and that will be -- my belief is food delivery is going to be the first thing that unlocks with 108. And so I think what we see from them publicly in terms of how customers are reacting to their early testing with the 135, I think, is going to tell us a lot about what to expect from that market.

I do think that you're looking at drone delivery being constrained in terms of developing new products by the FAA finishing the regulation for Part 108, in particular, the sort of detect and avoid requirement because if it requires an antenna and a radio, et cetera, then any companies building drones for that next FAA cycle won't be able to launch them until after they can qualify them. So right now, my guess as to the scaling of component demand for delivery is going to be probably late 2027 with deployment. My guess is in 2028. And I think food delivery is really the first use case that's going to scale. And so I think it will be really interesting to see what information DoorDash shares over the next year to give us really good indicators of what that market is going to look like.

We appear to have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I will now hand back over to Allan for any closing comments.

Yes. Again, this quarter is the one where I've gone from hoping to believing because of the team and the energy that everyone has put in and our ability to rise to the occasion. I think we're extremely well positioned going forward. And I want to say thank you to everyone for their time. I appreciate everybody that's a shareholder, and I look forward to working with everyone to continue to build the drone industry. So thank you. I hope you have a great morning.

Thank you very much, Allan, and thank you, everybody. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to Unusual Machines First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to Christine Petraglia, Investor Relations for Unusual Machines.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. With us today are Unusual Machines' CEO, Allan Evans; and CFO, Brian Hoff. During this call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements about our expectations concerning the demand for our products, our ability to manage this demand, the growth of our operations, our business and our revenues, the growth of the NDAA compliant drone market, our anticipated gross margins and future costs, our plans to scale manufacturing capacity, including the timing and success of new production lines for motors, batteries, cameras and headsets, our battery manufacturer acquisition, our ability to achieve cash flow positive operations in the future and expected 2027 FAA rulemaking.

The results expected by some or all of these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that affect our ability to achieve these results, including the risks that enough of our customers receive orders under the Drone Dominance program or other government programs and in turn, place component orders with us as well as potential funding reductions, program delays or changes in procurement priorities.

Our dependence on a limited number of enterprise customers and the risk of customer concentration, the risks that our inventory buildup will become obsolete or that we cannot sell such inventory at reasonable margins.

Our ability to manage our rapid growth, including integrating new employees and maintaining quality control, risks relating to manufacturing bugs, delays or failure to achieve anticipated production efficiencies, the availability of satisfactory labor pool to meet our planned growth, potential supply chain disruptions or component shortages. The impact also from tariffs, including inflation and increased cost of goods sold, the risk that our automated production equipment may not be operational on the anticipated time line, unanticipated audit issues relating to Upgrade Energy, technical or political risks that may affect FAA rule making and the risk factors contained in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025.

Factors or events that could cause our actual results to differ may emerge from time to time, and it's not possible for us to predict all of them. Any forward-looking statement made by us herein speak only as of the date of which it is made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law. As a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Unusual Machines' website at www.unusualmachines.com.

Now let me hand the call over to CEO, Allan Evans. Please go ahead, Allan.

Thank you, Christine. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. I apologize if I'm a little bit hoarse. I've been at the trade show at AUVSI all week, and talking to a lot of people. Anyway, during this call, I will discuss our first quarter 2026 performance.

In quarter 1, we generated approximately $8.1 million in operating revenue. This is a 296% year-over-year growth from the first quarter of 2025 and a 65% increase from the revenue generated in the fourth quarter of 2025. In addition, we generated $10.3 million in net profit for the quarter.

What's really key here is even if you move -- remove from that $10.3 million in net profit, the unrealized gains, if we exclude them, we still ended up being profitable. And we've also really dramatically increased revenue for the first quarter. So the quarter 1 results just start to show the dramatic growth that we're at the early stages of. Every single business indicator that we're seeing is pointing to growth. We were able to jump from $4.9 million in revenue just a quarter ago to $8.1 million in revenue this quarter. And that's without the benefit of Christmas driving high consumer demand.

We've increased our headcount from 81 employees to 141 employees across the quarter, and we continue to grow the team as we move forward. We saw the expected drop in margins as we added all these new employees. And we still -- the team did a really good job and we managed to still hit a 32% gross margin, which is a little bit above where we expected to be.

All of these trends that we've seen in the first quarter are continuing through now, and we're still scaling as fast as we can to meet the needs of the marketplace. In the first quarter, we were able to really secure our war chest to be sure that we can manage the working capital and finance this growth, which normally requires some cash in front of seeing the revenue returns.

We raised $150 million of $17 a share in a confidentially marketed public offering. And we now have about $320 million in total working capital, which puts us in a very strong position. We very recently entered into an agreement to purchase Upgrade Energy, and that's a total of just over $50 million in deployment of cash and stock. That's there to accelerate our battery ambitions and bring a new product category to market faster. It's, I think, really important all of this to remember that we're not seeing this growth by burning cash. So this money remains in our war chest, remains in our bank accounts. It can be used to really foster and turn over the growth rather than just to fund operations. The first quarter was our eighth consecutive quarter with record revenues. Since going public, we've never had a quarter where revenue has gone backward, and we don't expect to have one anytime soon.

So this sort of constant success is just not possible without our entire team putting in a lot of really great work. So everyone is working hard, bringing just fantastic energy to all the different challenges we face as we go through this. And I'm confident that we can continue to handle this really fast rate of growth because I'm confident in the team and in each person doing the job that they're doing.

So I very much have the pleasure with and I do want to say thank you to everyone working at Unusual Machines for continuing to make this possible. I'll now hand this off to our CFO, Brian Hoff, to cover our financial results in detail, and once he finishes, I'll go into more detail on our going-forward plans. With that, I'm handing the call off to our CFO, Brian Hoff.

Thank you, Allan. And thank you, everyone, for joining the call this afternoon. I'm excited to share our Q1 results with you all. As we discussed during our year-end results, we had a lot of momentum entering the year. Our Q1 results reflect that momentum, and we continue to expect to continue that for the remainder of 2026.

With that, let's dig in. Revenue was $8.1 million for the first quarter, which Allan noted is approximately 296% growth from Q1 of last year and 65% quarter-over-quarter growth from Q4 2025. As we left 2025, we felt that momentum and demand coming online, and this quarter is just the start of the demand curve. Our Q1 revenue mix was approximately 90% enterprise and 10% retail with a healthy mix of customers and product and little significant concentration.

Gross margin for the quarter ended at 32.8% for the quarter, which is, again, as we said, is a slight decrease from the trend over the last few quarters. However, we anticipated this as we are continuing to scale as fast as possible, which included significantly increasing our manufacturing staff by adding a third shift to our motor line, a second shift to our assembly line. And our total headcount increased from 81 to 141 and we're coming close to crossing over that 200 employee threshold today.

This is another indicator of the continual demand increase we're seeing and trying to capture. So while we anticipate margins, we'll have some fluctuations throughout 2026. We are making decisions to grow operations and be in a position to deliver on the demand throughout the year and headed into 2027. We are continuing to see our yield rates on manufacturing lines improve as we become more efficient and trained in this process.

Jumping to operating expenses. These also increased during the quarter to $9.9 million for Q1 of 2026. These expenses are -- were specific decisions to continue to enable our growth. This includes building out our G&A infrastructure, including headcount, systems and process build-out. We may see some additional growth in the short term in these costs. However, we will gain some efficiencies as we continue to scale revenue and our operating expenses will grow at a slower rate.

In addition, this includes 2 additional facilities that commenced during the quarter, which is our headset facility and kind of in our corporate office. Included in the $9.9 million figure also includes cash -- noncash related expenses of approximately $4 million and other nonrecurring expenses of about $1.7 million. I'd reference the tables in the back of our shareholder letter for the additional detail around that.

In other income and expense, we had very positive results from our investments. These investments, which are designed for a strategic purpose, creating goodwill in the U.S. drone industry and also create supplier partnerships and customer relationships. Our strategy is working, and we have received orders from these -- some of these investments as well. The results include a $7.3 million realized gain from investments, which is a nice add-on to our overall cash balance without any additional dilution.

We also had additional unrealized gains of approximately $9.5 million and interest income of about $0.8 million. Our balance sheet is strong and shows our continual view of being able to grow into the demand. We have a significant cash balance of approximately $223 million after our public offering in March, which netted about $139 million after expenses.

Our short-term investments are continuing to prove strong from a financial perspective and strategic partner in the industry with a balance of over $60 million. Our inventory, including raw materials, finished goods and deposits paid are approximately $27.4 million, and are going to see this to continue to increase in Q2 and Q3 as we make significant purchase to meet the demand and do our part in managing supply chain issues as best as possible. Our total working capital is approximately $320 million, which puts us in a great position to capitalize on the demand moving forward.

I'd also like to reiterate what Allan said. None of this is possible without a fantastic team working extremely hard to make things move, and very quickly. It is an exciting time to be at Unusual Machines and looking forward to the year ahead. Also, thank you to our shareholders and partners and continuing to support our mission throughout the call. I'll send it back to you, Allan.

Thanks, Brian. So what can I say about the year so far. A lot has changed in the 7 weeks since we discussed last year's results on a previous earnings call. We keep scaling both sales and company sizes. We raised $150 million at $17 a share and then subsequently placed $75 million in raw material orders and signed a definitive agreement to buy Upgrade Energy to really jump start our entire battery position.

We continue to be extremely well positioned as a supply chain leader for components for small drones in the U.S. We have the capital to execute and have been growing while maintaining profitability. I'm going to go into more detail now, but I want everyone on the call to note that my following comments are forward-looking and in no way guaranteed.

From our perspective, demand remains on track. The current marketplace remains severely supply constrained, and we still see demand outstripping supply this year and deep into 2027. We're continuing to build the company and procure raw material to grow into this demand as fast as we possibly can, and we don't anticipate slowing down anytime in 2026.

The primary driver of this growth, it continues to be the Department of War. For example, the Drone Dominance Gauntlet program is one purchasing group, and that remained on track. They announced the timing for Phase 2 as well as reiterate the commitment to buying 60,000 more drones in the second half of 2026.

They even were smart enough to put it before the end of the government fiscal year, so that everything will be done and isn't subject to delays that could be caused by continuing resolution. When you look then out a little further in future demand, the proposed budget for the Department of War, it has a 50% increase. They're talking about $1.5 trillion, but I think even more interesting is the dramatic increase in the proposed budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, DAWG, moving it to a little over $50 billion, which is really the drone-focused government procurement budget.

The Department of War as an end customer has really strong sourcing requirements with the preference for U.S. supply chain and is really the initial force behind driving this relentless demand cycle. In addition to these drone programs, you're seeing counter drone programs that are really starting to materialize and that's becoming an emerging addressable market segment. I think a very good example of what we're seeing there is real orders and partnerships with our first order coming PowerUS, who is one of the companies we invested in, and it's really pushing an even additional category to create this demand.

So given this overwhelming demand environment, we were trying to scale as fast as we possibly can to provide our customers with the parts they need to sell into the Defense Department or the Department of War.

To facilitate this in April, we placed over $75 million worth of raw materials in order to build out motors and other products. We scaled from 81 employees at the end of 2025 to about 200 employees today, we're definitely adding team members, and we're continuing to add shifts and facilities to deliver the -- just the raw material or the subsystems that our customers need.

In addition, and I think very interestingly, we recently announced the merger agreement with Upgrade Energy for the total purchase price of $52 million. The purchase is almost a 50-50 blend of stock and cash with half of the purchase price upfront and the rest being earned out. So Upgrade Energy did just over $6 million worth of revenue. This is unaudited. So as we go through the audit, it may change, in 2025, and that was in their old facility in El Sibringo, California. They very recently moved into a new 18,000 square foot facility, much larger in Torrance, California. And you guys think we're really going to see that ramp quite quickly. I'm personally very excited to work with Matt Barnard, the owner of Upgrade Energy and CEOs, as he joins the team, and really the entire team they built a really strong brand in the battery business.

They have some patented protected technology that works in production at scale. And then our ability to work right away with them and to do it at scale is going to let us drive, I think, very quick growth in the battery category. And own now the entire powertrain from the battery to the motor controllers through to the motors to build that full lift platform.

Now what I think people might not yet realize is that the purchase and the choice to go do batteries, it's not necessarily a right now choice. It is a strategic choice for what we see as the emerging markets that come next even more than it is just another SKU in our offerings. So we expect the FAA to enable the legislative framework that people are calling Part 108, it should really open up new activities like drone delivery in mid- to late 2027. So defense or attributable drones or one-way drones, whatever you want to call them. They typically only have 1 to 2 batteries per drone. On the other hand, delivery drones because they'll go up and down and up and down and up and down and they'll need to change batteries every time as the batteries recharge are expected to have about 10 batteries per drone.

So this purchase and our subsequently planned build-out in Florida for batteries is going to let us get ahead of the supply chain and this problem to really be in a place to do what is a very large battery-to-drone ratio, TAM for what we see as the FAA enabled market segment that we expect to materialize in 12 to 18 months.

So not only is it revenue right now with a team we like and people with the same attitude, but it also positions us, I think, to capture a large chunk of the value in the emerging market that the FAA is going to open up.

Just a quick summary. First quarter of 2026 is everything working well, kind of working the way we planned it. We're rapidly scaling. Our revenues grew above $8 million. We were able to report a profit, so we're not losing money in doing this. And while our operations are not yet independently profitable, we had about $1.5 million to $1.6 million loss just from operations in terms of cash if you subtract out the equity comp.

Our business as a whole is profitable. We're able to raise more money, quickly put that money to work into our supply chain and really drive what we see as a transformative acquisition with the Upgrade Energy merger.

Unusual Machines remains at the forefront of the domestic components market, and the market is continuing to really see this extreme growth. We're well capitalized. We're extremely healthy. We have the infrastructure to continue to scale. And we're just going to continue to grow as fast as we possibly can. And I am just completely overwhelmingly confident that our team can meet the demand that exists right now.

So I want to say thank you again to our entire staff and all of our shareholders and all of our customers.

With that, I'd like to open up the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Craig Irwin of ROTH Capital.

So Allan, at AUVSI, it was really obvious talking to many of your customers, many of the other drone producers there, there's no shortage on demand. There is an intense demand in the market, and people want credible supply and your customers are lining up to be as credible as possible. to the end agencies, particularly the military, but also you highlighted delivery as a market, and they are also talking about that. So the biggest constraining factor right now is from what many of them represent capacity.

You've gone from 81 employees to over 200 today. You added a third shift to motors. You had a second shift to assembly. Can you maybe unpack for us how much of your time is going into capacity planning, the $75 million prepurchase on raw materials is obviously a big commitment to that capacity or that execution capacity. But actual employees, infrastructure, seats and workstations new products. You've got camera products and battery products and all sorts of new things coming in. How important is managing this to you right now?

I appreciate the question. And I think when you look at a hardware company, and the inventory flow, managing capacity and being sure that you get utilization, but also don't create backlog in this growth period is my most important job. So capacity really breaks down into 3 different things that we need for it. The longest lead time thing is the raw material. It's also the most expensive. So when we place raw material orders like we just did, you're looking at first deliveries are at least 4 months out, you're probably not material complete, which is when you have all the material to make a thing for maybe 6 months and then you can start to convert that raw material into finished subassemblies.

And what we're seeing is because we're becoming a more and more globally significant buyer from these non-Chinese supply chains is that while we do get a little bit of scaling function, we also get, oh, goodness, we have to go help our suppliers scale to meet our demand. So they also have to scale up. So when you see what we're doing for capacity management, step one, get material in the door so we can transform it.

Step 2 is get facilities. So if you look, we're regularly adding a new building here, a new -- adding on to a building there. And we're going through that, and we're very active in that process and what is our Orlando campus. Because once you get the building in place, then you have a place to put the equipment and the people, and so we see that process typically shows up 3 or 4 months in front of being able to start to produce things. So raw material, let's call it 6 months facilities and the capital equipment maybe 3 to 4 months and then the people really come in a month or 2 beforehand and drive it.

And so you're watching us stage this for material facilities people. And every time we've guessed and done something we thought was ambitious from a capacity perspective. We realized we weren't ambitious enough. So I think we continue to see that, and we have a really great person running HR and trace and train a great HR team, helping drive hiring and really great workforce management folks. And Jay, our VP of Supply Chain is doing a really good job with our buyers, managing the incoming material. And so luckily, I don't have to do the job by myself. But I think when you look at strategically in our business that capacity management and more importantly, the inventory flow management and sort of that transformation is singularly the strategic focus of where we as a leadership team, need to pay attention.

That makes complete sense. So my second question is around the gross margins. So when we were talking in the fourth quarter, you were obviously careful and cautious around gross margins. You're bringing your motor manufacturing up and the other significant aggressive hiring to meet demand, you were cautious but optimistic. This quarter, your execution was strong. It was better than what we were looking for. And that's with some substantial headcount additions. Your margins, is it fair for us to see similar margin execution over the next couple of quarters, given that you have a couple of quarters here under your belt, where you're obviously managing the efficiency and the productivity of new employees. I can imagine that people will become more productive, given months and years of experience. But the gross margin trajectory, I think, is somewhat important, less important than revenue. but somewhat important to the future profitability where many of us are looking several years out.

Yes. No, I -- so -- the team did a really good job of training and getting people on board. And I think being more efficient and sort of aspiring to be really good as a production engine. So I think margins for the first quarter exceeded our internal expectations. I think where we're at, given where we performed it's below the margins we'd like to see when it's a little more stable, but I think in this low 30% range, it seems like it's what we're doing. The team has done a really good job on onboarding. So if we can even hold here and we can hold our material margins where we sort of like them, so that we know that we have the room to hit our gross margin targets in the long run, I would feel really good about it.

There may be some movement around it up and down a little bit because it's not as important to us as being sure our customers get really high-quality products that meet their demand. So if we got in a batch of stuff that didn't meet our quality standards, and we had a scrap rate or something that had a little bit of a negative impact on margins, we'd be okay with that to prioritize customer success, but this feels to me, at least right now, sort of a really good spot.

And where I think we will strive to maintain as we continue through this growth cycle. So I think if I was looking at it -- we did it through it, I think, is one of the harder transformations, which is crossing that 100 employee line. And we now have a lot of processes and training and things that are being built out that I think allow us to carry this success forward.

Okay. And last question, if I may. So many people know my approach is kind of to get around a little bit. So when I met with the people from -- with FAA, I was using them. I was getting around saying, "Guys, what's taking you so long? Mana Air in Ireland has already done 1 million deliveries. This is America where the technology leaders you're holding us back. What's going on?" They were obviously pretty defensive and they didn't really, really get the joke. But when we had the conversation, the more extended conversation, they help me understand that there's outside influences that they would like to get their job done. They really want to get part 108 moving from waivers to permits as far as the drone pilots and give people a clear line of sight, but there's issues with the FCC and others trying to put their finger in the pie.

What do you think key issues are that you could outline for us for part 108 over the course of the next year? I know you also had conversations with key people this week. Is there any update that you think or any framing that you think would be useful here for investors to understand?

Sure. First, I think the FAA is doing a great job and has a very hard problem because manned aviation is extremely safe. And so they got the airspace with all of us flying on the carriers, and they have to maintain that and also got to be sure drones don't fall out of the sky. So they have this challenging problem to create a technology infrastructure that sort of still maintains this thing that they've done an amazing job with. So I have a lot of appreciation for the difficulty of that problem.

I think there are a couple of things that need to be really finalized for Part 108. The big one is what is called detect and avoid. So when you allow drones to fly with one pilot controlling 20 drones or whatever and the skies start to have more things in them, what are the rules around how a drone, even without an operator, needs to see another drone, needs to see an airplane. And then what are the rules around how they dodge in the sky, so that the onboard AIs prevent collisions. So I think that's really one of the things where -- is it radio frequency? Is it cameras? Is it -- and there's some -- how good does it have to be? How is it tested? How do you qualify your drone so that it can fly, because I don't think we should just let an unqualified drone fly across Manhattan, right? That's a high risk.

So there's a juggle a framework for innovation with sort of the regulatory and testing requirements necessary to be sure that, that those innovations are deployed in a way that's safe. And I think they're really thinking about it, they're really smart. They have to collaborate with the FCC because of what if it's spectrum, just like self-driving cars, there's discussions around it, too.

So they're on track. And I actually think they're doing a pretty good job, and I think they're dealing with the right problems. So that's my take on it is everything looks like, it's come together in a very effective way. And I think we'll see it in the year because we're down to the -- really that as the problem detect and avoid and a lot of the rest of it has been sort of addressed and agreed upon as a framework.

Great. Congrats on a really strong quarter there.

Our next question is coming from Josh Sullivan of JonesTrading.

Al, did you say revenue should grow sequentially each quarter this year? And any reason that thought process wouldn't carry then into '27 as now that you have the strategic inventory and order flow at hand?

I mean we've never gone backward. I don't see any reason why we would, right? Like the market's growing, I -- the way that I see demand, I think if we don't see consistent growth, I mean, this -- from quarter-to-quarter, this last quarter, I mean, this is full speed growth. It doesn't mean you won't see hiccups or things that might change the growth rate. But really, I think it's a pretty big tumble on our end if we don't manage to achieve that.

And then with the Upgrade Energy acquisition and the positioning you're talking about around a drone powertrain platform, as the commercial drone delivery market materializes next year, or thereabouts. What do you think that battery-to-drone ratio looks like? And then what kind of business models could we see building around.

So this is very much my personal opinion that I'll share with you, but I think the first delivery applications I really think are going to show up are food delivery. I think it's going to be DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub. And if you look, that matches very much the same performance stuff as the Drone Dominance program, right? So 5 pounds, 10 kilometers, it sounds like a hamburger to me. And I see a lot of appeal to that because it's something that people want urgently. You can deliver by drone in a lot of cases, less expensively than by a vehicle. And I think people are picking up because you don't have to tip the robot, and I think we do have some social tipping fatigue.

Assuming that's true, you're probably looking at 10 batteries per drone for active running, give or take, depending on the design. I mean, we could argue over it all day, but that's a good approximation. And if that's true, batteries only have about 500 cycles. So you're probably looking at 10 batteries per drone per year as the attachment rate. And so it actually becomes more of an ARR function on the hardware in that delivery cycle rather than a onetime sale. And so I think that will lead to some interesting business models and some interesting ability to say, okay, here's our recurring power base.

But also importantly, I think that the batteries and the motors and the whole powertrain are going to be part of the certification process, because if you have a power failure, you're going to need to understand how to detect it and have it land safely.

So in order to get certified to fly over people, there's going to be a lot more requirements than there are for combat drones that are designed to go crash and don't have the same sensitivities for mitigating accidents. So I think we're going to see a lot of the energy and the scale being put in the drone, the Gauntlet program, particularly for the larger vehicles are going to lead to some really great airframes and some cost structures, I think $5,000 a drone that are going to be able to deliver hamburgers or pick whatever food is.

But for me, it's always burritos. But anyway, we are going to be able to do those deliveries. And then I think you're going to see a battery ecosystem where the powertrain is going to have to be certified. So we're setting up to position -- if you walk through our factory, for instance, we don't do it right now. We do date codes on tracking our motors, but we have the ability to actually do full electrical characterization and individual serialization of every single motor, if that's what the FAA requires or track the amount of time the motor runs for swap out. Same with batteries, same with energy levels, sort of all these things that you'd see in maybe a type certification process for a different kind of aircraft.

And our next question is coming from Austin Bohlig of Needham & Company.

Congrats on the great results. Allan, I was just curious with this battery acquisition. Could you talk about how this changes whether from like a revenue or kind of margin upside opportunity when it comes to the total content you guys are selling into Drone Dominance per drone?

So for Drone Dominance, we were distributing their batteries. So I don't think it really changes the total, like our partnership there has made us feel really good about this acquisition. But it does mean that we'll get margin expansion. And I think on the batteries now, you'll see us move to that 40% gross margin somewhere in there because, again, we're not -- we try to target that to be a fair and equitable supplier and not break downstream economics for everybody.

So for Drone Dominance, I think we'll see that element of expansion. But I also think they were in a similar place where we are where there's this overwhelming demand. And so now we're able to go work with that. And with some of the battery cell suppliers and start to drive more battery volume, because we have the credit terms and the cash balance to break or do a lot more of the forward-looking inventory purchases there as well to enable really fast battery capacity growth where it would have been more constrained have we not decided to try to put these 2 companies together.

Okay. And then how should we think about as you guys ramp throughout the end of the year? What operating expenditures should look like? And I think you highlighted in the press release that the breakeven point might now be a little bit higher. Just maybe trying to frame up how we should be thinking about that?

Yes. I think it's really going to come down to how much and how much faster we scale. So I think the breakeven point moved higher because we have more space, more people doing more stuff than we originally expected. But I think with where we look at the end of quarter 1, we're starting to get to maybe a more normalized blend across our employee base of employee types. And so I think you can look at operating expenses has probably been a headcount ratio to total expense that we saw in quarter 1, if I'm estimating.

And then what I think you're going to see is the revenue generated per employee start to scale to push us past burning money. So maybe that's not the best answer on the planet for you, Austin. So I'm sorry if it's not. But I think we're moving to where our cost per person is pretty -- is starting to stabilize. I think by the end of quarter 2, quarter 3, it will really stabilize and that we'll then see our ability to generate revenue per employee start to really expand as efficiencies increase.

Well, we appear to have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. And I will now hand back over to Allan for any closing remarks.

No, again, everybody for listening. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate all the support. I think without the investor community, without our customers, without people who are interested in believing us we're not in a position to help onshore production and create these jobs and really be part of the transformation of the American Drone Ecosystem. So I do want to say thank you. If people have questions or are interested, always reach out. We try to be as transparent as possible and appreciate your continued interest and support.

This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful rest of the day. We thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to Unusual Machines Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] And please note, this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to your host, Christine Petraglia, Investor Relations for unusual machines. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. With this -- today our Unusual Machines CEO, Allan Evans; and CFO, Brian Hoff. During this call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements that our expectations containing the growth of our operations our business and our revenues, the growth of the NDAA compliant 1 market, our anticipated gross margins, our plans to scale manufacturing capacity, including the timing and success of new production lines for motors batteries, cameras and headsets, our ability to achieve cash flow positive operations in the future, our workforce expansion plans and future acquisitions we may make. The results expected by some or all of these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that affect our ability to achieve these results include the risks that enough of our customers received orders under the grown Domino's program or other government programs and in turn, place component orders with us as well as potential funding reductions, program delays or changes in procurement priorities.

Our dependence on a limited number of enterprise customers and the risk of customer concentration, the risks that our inventory buildup will become obsolete or that we cannot sell such inventory at reasonable margins. Our ability to manage our rapid growth, including integrating new employees and maintaining quality control, risks leading to manufacturing, bugs, delays or failure to achieve anticipated production efficiencies the availability of satisfactory labor pool to meet our planned growth potential, supply chain disruptions or component shortages. The impact from tariffs, including inflation and increased cost of goods sold, the risk that our automated production equipment may not be operational on the anticipated time line, any risk that our auditors may require us to meet changes to our financial statements and the risk factors contained in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 6, 2025, prospectus supplement filed with the SEC on September 2, 2025, and July 15, 2025, and May 6, 2025 and in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, which we anticipate filing in the coming days.

Factors or events that could cause our actual results to differ may emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all of them. Any forward-looking statements made by us herein speaks only as of the date on which it is made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as -- required by law. And as a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Unusual Machines website at www.unusualmachines.com.

Now let me hand the call over to our CEO, Allan Evans. Please go ahead, Allan.

Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us this Monday. During this call, I will discuss our 2025 annual performance and also emphasize results specific to the fourth quarter. In the year 2025, we generated approximately $11.2 million in revenue, this is 101% year-over-year growth from 2024. Over the course of the year, we raised $157.8 million through equity financing and closed out the year with $103.3 million as part of our $157.4 million in total working capital. This is a massive, massive balance sheet increase from the $3.7 million we had in cash at the start of 2025.

The 2025 results taken in aggregate, don't clearly portray the dramatic changes that occurred throughout the year. The year was a turning point for our business as we underwent a transformation from an online retail store to become a drone components producer and enterprise sales business. This can clearly be seen in the quarterly percentage of our revenue that was attributed to our Enterprise segment. It was 31% in quarter 1, 48% in quarter 2, 57% in quarter 3 and 81% in quarter 4.

Hardware companies like ours, but rapidly scale operations and often see revenues, we often see these revenues follow operation scaling by a quarter or so. Our growth shift started in the third quarter when we went from 19 employees to 38 employees across the quarter. At the same time, we also began to expand our footprint from the 6,900 square feet to the 62,500 square feet that we had at the end of 2025. The fourth quarter results the financial results are representative of the start of this growth process because the growth process started in the third quarter, and I would like to cover them in more detail.

The fourth quarter was our seventh consecutive quarter with record revenues, and it is not even close. We generated approximately $4.9 million in the fourth quarter which represents quarterly sequential growth of 133%. While growing, we were also able to sustain gross margins of approximately 36% and which did exceed our internal expectations for the quarter. We continue to scale operations in the quarter, growing from 38 employees to 81 employees at the end of 2025 and when we started production of our motors in some scale at our motor factory in November.

We expect this operational growth from quarter 4 to be evident in the 10-Q we filed at the end of the first quarter of 2026. Even now, we are continuing to scale as quickly as we can to meet demand and are already over 140 total employees. Our IPO was only 2 years ago and we went public with the plan to transform into a leader for onshoring the production of drone components. In a relatively short period of time, we have managed to undergo that transformation, and we are absolutely in the early phases of rapid growth. This success would not be possible without the work our entire team puts in. As we continue to grow, we now have a few older and many, many newer employees. Everyone is working hard and bringing just incredible energy and ideas to all of the challenges we face.

I am confident that we can handle the growth because I am confident in everyone I work with. So I want to say thank you to everyone working at unusual machines. I will now hand this off to our CFO, Brian Hoff, to cover our financial results in detail and once he finishes, I will go into much more detail on what this looks like going forward. With that, I am handing the call to our CFO, Brian Hoff.

Thank you, Allan. Thank you to everyone for joining our call this morning. I know you've heard it from Allan but it's the absolute truth. 2025 was a transformational year for Unusual Machines. We started the year with the goal of bringing drone component manufacturing to the United States. And by the end of the year, not only have we accomplished this, but we did this with such dramatic pace and scale that's required for the industry. And this is starting to show in our financial results as we will discuss.

But a quick note. As we mentioned in our shareholder letter issued this morning, the numbers in our presentation are unaudited and subject to change. We expect our audits to be completed in the next few days. Revenue was $4.9 million for the fourth quarter, which is approximately 133% growth quarter-over-quarter. And fiscal year-end 2025 revenue was $11.2 million, which was 101% year-over-year increase. This is the start of us realizing that operational scale and transformation that's driven by the shift from the entire enterprise -- from retail to enterprise customers, as Allan highlighted. And again, it's based on our enterprise mix starting around 30% in Q1 to over 80% in Q4 and really driven by our manufacturing coming online. And again, just to start.

Gross margin has increased from 24% in the first quarter to 36% in the fourth quarter and 35% for the full fiscal year 2025. Our margins continually improve as our mix has also shifted from retail to enterprise. That being said, we do expect to see some margin fluctuation and decline in the future quarters based on certain product mixes as we continue to scale up manufacturing, invest in growth, add team members and making our processes more efficient. Once our automated motor line is installed in the second half of this year, we expect to see operating efficiencies and the ability to increase our delivery of drug components to customers.

Our operating expenses increased from $18.5 million for 2024 to $29 million for 2025, all of which are choices to enable us for this growth. And more importantly, put even more growth in the future and this increase is in line with our expectation. Yes. The largest increase in there is noncash stock compensation expense, which was $15.6 million during 2025. We also increased our head count from 15 to -- at the beginning of the year to 81 by the end of the year, expanded our systems, increase our Investor Relations outreach. And again, many other investments for enabling us for the future. We added additional facilities, which includes our motor factory fulfillment center headset factory.

And I'd also just like to reference you guys to our GAAP Q4 net loss to our net non-GAAP operating loss in Table 2 of our shareholder letter to provide more detail. In regards to other income and expense, we had an interest income of $0.8 million in combined realized and unrealized gains from -- sorry, for the year was $1.8 million and combined realized and unrealized gains for short-term investments of approximately $4.1 million during 2025.

Shifting to our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is strong and is a reflection of our continued investment in growth and the momentum that we have heading into 2026, our primary 3 items that we look at is cash, inventory and our investment portfolio. We ended the year with $103 million in cash and that included 3 different capital raises that netted approximately $157 million in cash. Our inventory, including prepaid inventory, is over $15 million at the end of the year, and we are continuing to make purchases to be in a position to help provide needs in the drone supply chain. As part of our strategic plan to develop strong and strategic partnerships within the industry, we made strategic investments in drone companies that expect will drive additional liquidity. These 3 assets, combined with no debt, is setting us up for additional success, growth and scale for 2026.

As Allan said, thank you to the entire UMAC team. Everybody is working very hard, strong growth as we could do without them. We look forward to making this a great place to work. Also thank you to all of our shareholders and partners. Allan?

Thanks, Brian. 2026 is going to be your rapid growth for the U.S. drone ecosystem. We believe we are extremely well positioned as one of the supply chain leaders for components for small drones. As Brian said, we have the capital to execute and the responsibility to demonstrate to our customers and shareholders that we can manage rapid growth. I'm about to go into more detail. But I want everyone to know that my following statements are forward looking and -- extra material now, we see the constant increase in demand over the next 24 months as consuming any excess that we have and making it reasonably safe from a business perspective to be so aggressive that we could even overbuild in the short term.

This supply and demand imbalance and it's dramatic is created by 2 factors. First, legislative and regulatory actions have removed foreign competition from the market and domestic capacity is nascent. Second, the recent success of drones in the international complex like Ukraine has resulted in the driving demand for drones and a domestic supply chain capable of supporting the expected burst drone demand required in a potential war time scenario. The legislation is walled off the garden and the department of ores providing the influx of capital to quickly mature domestic solutions.

There are several legislative actions that all layer in to enable domestic producers to succeed in the U.S. market while making it more difficult for competitors that are overseas to sell into the market. This has been true for the drone companies themselves for a few years with legislation like the American Securities Drone Act, but this has recently extended to components providers with legislation in 2025. There were some smaller examples of government actions that highlight how quickly this market all has directed -- was the SCC ban on new licenses for all foreign-made drones and drone parts that went into effect in late December of 2025.

The impact of this legislation on our business cannot be overstated. The U.S. drone market for small drones is about $10 billion in revenue annually. That represents about somewhere between a $3 billion and $5 billion total addressable market for parts if the drone market stays flat. And it will all have to be made in the United States going forward or get a waiver from the FCC. This FCC action was unexpected, and it creates a huge marketplace vacuum in both the consumer and enterprise segments to go along with the demand we're seeing from the military segment of the industry. To repeat, we believe the FCC actions have created at least a $3 billion nondefense components marketplace that will require domestic solutions within the next 3 to 5 years and massively expand the total addressable market we can go after.

The second government push that is driving demand still on that demand side is the injection from the Department of War. The DOW has recently initiated several programs to buy different types of small drones, including short-range reconnaissance, which is SR purpose-built attritable system, PBAS, and most recently and most publicly the drone dominance program. The drone dominance program is a very public example of how the Department of Bard is trying to drive scaling of the drone companies and the supply chain. They have communicated the entire procurement process publicly on their website. They plan on buying 90,000 low-cost drones in 2026 and 250,000 drones in 2027. This program alone represents about $90 million component opportunity for us this year in 2026 and roughly a $250 million component opportunity in 2027. While the environment is set and demand is there, it really doesn't matter unless we unusual machines are able to see and sell into that demand.

As of right now, we have about $12 million in outstanding purchase orders that we are working to fulfill. About $9 million of those purchase orders are for programs that are not drone dominance. The first set of 11 winners for drone dominance were just announced on Friday, so I expect our sales team is probably reaching out, and we would see additional orders from them, hopefully soon. For the record, more than half of the announced winners of drone dominance are already customers of ours in some form or fashion. This early demand for our parts from the marketplace gives us a high level of confidence that we can capture a significant percentage of the total demand and total demand growth as long as we deliver quality parts on time for our customers.

Given this overwhelming environment of demand, we have started to scale as fast as possible to provide as many products as we can. In very late December, you see some of that on our balance sheet. And in early January, we placed over $15 million worth of raw materials so that we could receive elements from our supply chain to build motors and other products. We have scaled from 81 employees at the end of 2025 to over 140 employees today. We have started a second and third shift at our motor factory, and we're currently producing about 15,000 motors a month, while that number is regularly increasing as we generate efficiencies. We've also started a second shift at our flexible production facility where we kit and do other things to help our customers more effectively manufacture their drones.

In addition to scaling our current products, we are working on introducing new products to capture more of the total component market. Some people might call that wallet share. In January, we produced our first U.S.-made Fat Shark headsets, and we are very quickly scaling to be able to manufacture 100 headsets per shift per day, and we expect to hit that run rate sometime in April. We are working on setting up battery pack production, which we expect to be online in the second half of 2026 as well as install a very high-volume automated motor production line in the second half of 2026 and that should get us to well over 100,000 motors a month.

Finally, we anticipate manufacturing cameras in the United States by the end of 2026. Our explicit goal is to scale production so that we could meet the entire demand for every part that we sell from every company that would get orders in the second phase of drone dominance, and we expect that to occur in September of 2026, and we want to be ready.

That second tranche requires drone companies to use domestic supply chains or at least NDAA compliant supply chains and represents a major opportunity for our parts to get designed into their products. This is not mandatory for delivery of drones in this first phase, but it is for the second. We want to be available to all those great companies to be a supplier and deliver on time even if every single one of them requires parts from us. We have enough money to do all of this. We finished 2025 with about $157 million in net working capital and over $100 million in cash. Our growth is not resource constrained and we are doing a very good job of actively generating revenue as we scale.

Our financial position is strong enough that we can consider potential acquisitions if the right opportunity presents itself without having to compromise our growth plans. We do view acquisitions as a meaningful way to go faster, and we would use the template that we used when we acquired Rotor lab. We see the acquisition plus the build-out in conjunction accelerated our motor production by 6 to 12 months and has allowed us to scale faster.

To summarize, 2025 tells the tale of our transformation. The fourth quarter demonstrates tangible outcomes from scaling we started in the third quarter. We are well capitalized continuing to grow, and we believe that there is overwhelming demand from components that we make for the next 2 years. Unusual Machines is at the forefront of the domestic components market, and the market is undergrowing rapid growth. Our business is capitalized and extremely healthy. We are continuing to grow as fast as we possibly can and I believe we will capture a significant portion of this rapidly expanding market.

I am so confident that our team can meet this demand. I want to say thank you again to our entire staff and all of our shareholders and our great customers. And with that, I would like to open up the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Austin Bohlig with Needham & Company.

Congrats on the solid quarter. First question was just around kind of like the backlog number. So I think you guys said it's around $12 million. Is that the right way to think about total backlog?

Yes. So -- my whole team is cringing. Thank you for the question because I don't like the word backlog. It implies we're not delivering on time. But that is the outstanding volume that we're working toward delivering to, and we're still hitting delivery schedules. So $12 million is where we have purchase orders for right now. And then we have forecast further out from customers.

Got it. Got you. And then congrats on the high exposure to drone dominant tranche 1. Could you maybe just like walk through with like the 6 to 5 customers like how much content per drone you guys are working with? Like are they buying the whole portfolio of content? Is it primarily motors? Would just love to get a sense of kind of how you're exposed for this first tranche.

Yes. So very few customers across all of the entrants have placed full drone dominance orders yet. So that's being discussed this week now that they found out that they won. So for our blend could be anywhere from 1 part for a customer all the way through a large chunk of them. But even actively over the weekend, we were getting some of these customers asking about other parts of the offer. So I don't know what the mix is. I trust Stacy and our -- the whole revenue side of the house, we'll do whatever we can to serve as much of their needs as possible.

And then just kind of last question, a sense of kind of like how we should be thinking about the ramp throughout the year. So would we be like modeling sequential revenue growth throughout 2026.

I -- we're still scaling as quickly as we can. What I would say is there could be hiccups supply chains could be tough for instance, there's currently a challenge getting barometers. And as demand for drone dominance, I think, sucks up a lot of parts. We have to get further in front of it. But I would expect sequential growth over the course of the year with maybe some supply chain acquisition challenges if demand continues to outstrip supply. So the goal is sequential growth. Our procurement team is in front of it, but you got to be material complete to make a part. And if you're waiting on 1 component, there could be a delay that could cause revenues to slide 1 way or another. Okay.

Our next question is coming from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group.

Congrats on the strong year. Can you touch on the investment needed for the automated motor production line? And do you expect it to be kind of tuned and yielding at its expectation this year? Or is that kind of a 2027 event?

So the CapEx has already been made that is already accounted for in our books. It's really -- we're targeting having it in-house right now, July, it's a little bit uncertain. But then at the same time, the cost that you'll see is the material component. So if you're going to run 100,000 motors a month, you've got to procure the material for that 6 months ahead of time. So you'll see inventories match the requirement for that probably 2 to 3 months out, and then it will turn on slowly. We really expect to see it running a reasonable scale by quarter 4 with -- for faster if we get it done in quarter 3, that would be great. And you'll see the cost -- the added cost for it will be us scaling inventory. But since we're already moving toward 20,000 to 30,000 meters a month, you'll just see that carried as inventories and prepaid inventories probably at the end of Q2.

Got it. Okay. And then you mentioned outperforming your internal expectations for gross margin in the quarter. Can you maybe give us some thoughts on how that trends as you make these additional investments and expand into -- I think you mentioned battery pack production sometime this year. So where does gross margin trend?

Sure. And I'll explain why just so everybody can be aware on how gross margins work. So you scale operations, all right, you don't really start to see revenue until a quarter delayed. You don't really see the gross margin impact to even a quarter after that. In a lot of ways, gross margin because the people doing the work are in gross margin, but it doesn't show up in the financials until the product is shipped. So for instance, as we had people and we're building motors in November, we shipped many fewer motors that we made in November versus that we would in January. And so when you start new processes and new people, they're not as efficient as they become with training and expertise and new processes. So I would expect whenever we turn something on, like the motor factory, the biggest impact to gross margins would be a quarter delayed, so you'd expect those in quarter 1 and then recovery from that as efficiencies and processes and scale come in?

So we thought we'd see more from really the rapid scaling more of a dip, but the employees that came on we're more productive and crushed and learned and our team did a good job of keeping the dip lower, but I would still expect our worse gross margins as we go through this to be somewhere in the quarter 1, quarter 2 time frame as we've just brought on so many new people and created so many new processes that the natural impact to COGS will be in those quarters.

Very helpful. Final question for me. Maybe if you could touch on what the competitive environment and components looks like today. You've kind of been going at this for a few quarters now, and I'm curious if anybody is kind of following a similar playbook or starting to catch up in components.

There's several other small companies that are private that are out there doing different types of parts. In addition, some of our customers choose to do their own parts. So I would say for electronics, PCVs, there's a really great supply chain in the U.S. I'd say for everything else, there's nobody that is doing higher volumes than us. And again, because we think that this is a supply-constrained market. It's just us growing as fast as we can without worrying about competitors because there's this much larger demand where we just collectively can't fulfill at all. So right now, this is -- everybody can go as fast as they can to secure market share question. And so we think there are a lot of other companies out there trying to do and enter some of these segments in the U.S. I do think that if you looked at who some of our competitors were last year, you'd look and say, like luminaire on the retail side for good FPD. A lot of them set up NDAA compliant but foreign supply chains in terms of -- and the FCC ruling was a really big surprise for that. So we've been very aggressive about onshore in production and still are. And I think a lot of the categories right now we're the largest producer.

Our next question is coming from [ Jonathan Seidman ] with Stifel.

Brian great color on how supply constrained the market is. I appreciate that. Just with your capacity being so valuable in this environment, can you just talk a little bit about how you allocate that your resources to customers? How do you choose winners in this dynamic marketplace.

Jonathan, I appreciate it. The first thing I would say is the other side of this question is a lot of people ask why we don't increase our prices. So I'd like to start to say that we're trying to build relationships and a pricing model that's stain, and we're not in this unique market. We try really hard not to pick winners. We try to work with as many people as possible. And that's where I'll use my statements about drone dominance as an example. We are building capacity to build components for every single winner of Phase 2. Will we be -- be able to supply every single winner? Will they all want to buy our parts? Probably not, but I hope they do. But in that way, we'll talk to and work with the 30 potential companies when drone dominance is only down select to 10, and then we'll have a capacity to stop ply 10, and we won't be forced to make companies that may not have won that program take components.

So we think by building to match the end customer demand, we're in a better position to shift material streams from us to the customers based on how effectively they compete. And that's really what we're trying to do is meet the entire U.S. components demand so that none of our customers so that we don't have a dependency and they don't have a dependency on any specific individual program.

Our next question is coming from Barry Sine with Litchfield Hills Research.

I want to ask about the B2B sales pipeline coming up for 2026 and a couple of parts to the question, with a lot of numbers. So how many B2B customers have you shipped to over the last year? How many are in that $12 million backlog? And then looking ahead, what does the process look like? I know Stacy was promoted to Chief Revenue Officer. What does her team look like? I assume with the drone dominance announcement, it's all hands on deck right now to get those orders. But if you can give us a little visibility that would help us looking out over the next year?

Yes. So I think the number of customers we've sold to depends on how far down the line you want to slice it. we've sold hundreds of enterprise customers at small scale for R&D and some of that even through our retail channel. At large scale, I it's constantly shifting with some of these programs, but we don't have single customer concentration. We still don't. I'm not positive where the exact 1 is exactly today. And really where we see Stacy's team continuing to drive this -- and what we see is really important is not new customer outreach, but more importantly, being sure all the customers we have are satisfied. I believe in the last year, our sales team has done a really good job of driving awareness to everybody and getting small numbers of parts and being designed in for most of the drone companies that people are aware of or that we think have any ability to scale and even some that are smaller? And now it's really relationship management and starting to look more past what they need today to what they need tomorrow.

So we don't care to service 200 customers, we think the market is going to consolidate some and maybe be down to 50 customers. And we want to be sure that those 50 customers have a great experience working with us and what they need.

And maybe a little visibility on what does Stacy's team look like? How many folks are underneath here now? How many in sales, how many customer service, what does that team look like?

There's 5 or 6 people right now doing the combination of sales and customer service, really more relationship management. And then we're actively looking for more account managers. Nice thing is it doesn't need to be a huge team because we don't have to go door to door or anything, and they're doing a great job.

And if I could shift gears. I know it's no longer the focus, but on the retail part of the business, are you still looking to grow that business? How important is it? I know you've added a new person in charge of that, and I'm actually seeing rotary TV commercials now. What's the strategy for the retail business?

The strategy is to use it as a sales funnel and provide parts out there. So the goal is to keep it healthy. We don't expect significant growth there. We expect it to move in the marketplace. But it acts as an amazing sales funnel. So a lot of our customers will go and buy motors off of there for R&D, et cetera, knowing that they can buy them at scale when they go to production. And so from that perspective, we think it's a really important part of our sales process. It minimizes the need for people to go ship stuff all the time. And from that perspective, our hope is to see it continue where at that with some growth and some energy, but right now, it's not the priority of our business.

Our next question is coming from Josh Sullivan with Jones Trading.

With the start of operation epic, Allan, what have been your observations just relating to unusual machines and future warfare and how you're positioned? I get mostly larger systems at this point. But if you look at lessons line so far, curious what your observations are.

Yes. So I'll start and say, hey, war stocks right? And -- what we're seeing is through conflict, people have developed new technologies. And in this case, I think Ukraine is still the largest driver of would has caused people to look at the drone component supplies. I would say when you look at Epicuria, when you look at everything else, when you look at drone dominance, whether it's on the positive or negative side, I think the current Department of or realizes not just that drones are going to matter, but counter drone is going to matter. -- and that we have to understand both sides of it. And so I think they'll procure a whole bunch of drones to test counter grown systems to understand what they may use from our department or may understand what adversaries may use against us. And I think you're just seeing the solidification of this next generation or next paradigm of how complex you're going to be operated with robots and particularly aerial robots.

And then I guess just a question on the funding side or your customer funding side. What are customers seeing on contract adjudications as the environment picked up is funding getting out to them?

I don't track too many of them too hard. I mean most of them or a lot of them are large enough that they make money and they pay their bills on time. So I haven't had people say, hey, look, we can't pay you for components because we're waiting on pet, which we'd be fine with. So in that case, I assume that they're getting paid. But we don't dive too deep into it past that.

Got it. SP1 And then in the letter for 25, painted a picture of 2 halves for '25. How would you might characterize '26, particularly as you scale here to capture this big demand environment?

So I'm going to use an analogy because I like it, and this is a little bit more me, but '25 was fuel in the rocket. And then you saw in early -- like in mid-25, we lit the fuse. And like any rocket taken off, it starts really slow. It just starts to lift off the pad. And I think '26 is going to look like the next part of the launch.

As we have no further questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to hand the call back over to Mr. Evans for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate your time this morning. Please reach out if you have additional questions. And again, I'd like to say thank you to the entire team for making all this possible. I hope you guys have a great morning.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.

Greetings. Welcome to Unusual Machines Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to Christine Petraglia, Investor Relations for Unusual Machines.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. With us today are Unusual Machines' CEO, Allan Evans, and CFO, Brian Hoff.

During this call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements that address Unusual Machines' expectations regarding the impact from tariffs, our ability to add more employees to our ranks, our factory expansions, our ability to increase our margins and revenues, our ability to achieve aggressive growth, our expectation that the marketplace will change in quarter 4 of 2025 and 2026, our plan of keeping our cash burn low, our ability to scale our motor and headset manufacturing capabilities, our ability to scale supply chains to meet our customers' needs, receipt of orders from the U.S. Department of War, our ability to continue to grow revenue, the timing of our 2026 inventory and other expenses, revenues, expected GAAP profits, and positive cash flow from operations and our expectation that the U.S. drone market will continue to explode.

Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in Unusual Machines' most recently filed 10-Q, Form 10-K and prospectus supplement. Except as required by law, Unusual Machines disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call.

As a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Unusual Machines' website at www.unusualmachines.com.

Now, let me hand the call over to our CEO, Allan Evans. Please go ahead, Allan. Allan?

Oh, I'm sorry, I was muted. Thanks, Christine. Sorry, everyone.

Before we get into the meat of the call, I want to address the format change to this audio-only format. We moved to this channel for our earnings calls because of direct integrations with a lot of investor portals like Bloomberg Terminals. This should give all of our investors, especially the ones unable to make the call, faster and easier access to information. As our company keeps evolving, we really do appreciate feedback, and we would love to hear any thoughts that you have, both good or bad, on the new format. So please e-mail us at [email protected] if you have anything to say.

Now, today is a good day. We were profitable in the third quarter. Let me repeat that. We were not just cash flow positive. We actually had our first profitable quarter as a company. The good news doesn't stop there. It was the sixth quarter in a row we achieved record revenues. It was our best gross margin quarter of all time. It is the first quarter where more than 50% of our revenue was from enterprise sales, and we already have enterprise purchase orders totaling more than $16 million from a diverse set of customers going forward.

We closed the Rotor Lab acquisition. Our motor factory in Orlando has turned on, and we're currently producing American-made motors. We executed our staircase financing strategy and currently have more than $130 million in the bank. Our strategic investments have improved partnerships and yielded financial returns. Finally, our team has grown from 19 people at the start of the quarter to over 60 people today, and we're continuing to scale to meet demand.

18 months ago, we set out with an idea to transform this company from a retail channel into a leader in the onshore production of drone components. The results of this quarter finally show initial -- just initial results from the seeds we planted and all the hard work we have done. So, it is not just a good quarter, but rather it's the first signs of a successful transformation and the beginning of rapid growth for Unusual Machines.

This would not be possible without the work our entire team puts in. As we continue to grow, both old and new employees are working hard and bringing incredible energy to the challenges we face. The culture and quality of our workforce make me just very excited for what we can collectively achieve going forward. And the way that we have maintained our culture as we have grown has been very confident our workforce can handle the imminent wave of demand we're starting to face.

We have been aggressively growing as the marketplace changes, and I am sure that is what most of you really want to hear about. I'll hand this call off to our CFO, Brian Hoff, to cover our financial results in detail. And once he's finished, we'll talk about the future.

With that, I'm handing the call over to our CFO, Brian Hoff.

Thank you, Allan. As Allan just noted, we're seeing the initial signs of our transformation from growing from our seasonal retail operation into an organization with significant focus on enterprise sales with expanding margins.

We ended Q3 with over $2.1 million in revenue for the 3 months ended September 30, 2025, which is a 39% growth from the prior year. Year-to-date revenue is at $6.3 million, which is a 55% increase year-over-year. We see the shift from retail to enterprise first through our margin expansion from 28% year-to-date in 2024 to 34% year-to-date in '25. And second, we continue to maintain top line revenue quarter-over-quarter, which typically we saw larger fluctuations from seasonality that typically comes with our retail operations.

Now, looking into Q4, we are bringing those strong enterprise orders that we will start fulfilling in Q4, along with our strongest retail quarter with the holidays coming. We did see an increase in our operating expenses quarter-over-quarter, which is intentional given our investment in our motor and headset production and at scaling our operations. We fully expect to see an increase [ Audio Gap ] fully turn on our motor production facility, hired the additional staff, and continue to build for the future.

Our G&A expenses increased in Q3 as well, which includes noncash stock compensation expense of $2.1 million and nonrecurring expenses of $1.2 million related to Investor Relations and other professional fees. I'd reference Table 2 in our shareholder letter that we issued today for additional breakdown of our non-GAAP operating results.

We had interest income for our cash balance of $0.7 million for the quarter and recorded unrealized gains as GAAP requires us to record at fair value based on current market values from our short-term investments of $5.8 million, which brings us to net income of $1.6 million for the quarter.

Now, shifting to our balance sheet. This is a reflection of our continued investment in growth and the momentum that has been building here. We ended the quarter with $64.3 million in cash, which included a $48.5 million raise in July at $9.70 a share. And subsequently, we raised an additional $72 million in gross proceeds at $15.46 per share off our ATM, giving us over $130 million in cash today.

In addition, as of September 30, we have approximately $16.8 million in short-term investments. We've grown our inventory and prepaid inventory balances to over $10 million in preparation of our enterprise orders, the start of our motor and headset production and the holiday push.

We've grown our PP&E by $1.7 million during the quarter to purchase for our motor equipment and related items. We closed the acquisition of Rotor Lab at the beginning of September and currently working on our GAAP purchase price allocation related to that. Overall, balance sheet is very strong positioned to take full advantage of the growth that Allan is going to talk to you about.

I'd like to thank our entire team, old and new, for their continued -- for their hard work and willingness to get things done. We look forward to a strong finish in 2025 and rolling that into 2026.

I'll send it back to Allan. Thank you all.

Thanks, Brian. It should be obvious by now that, we're excited for Unusual Machines. We are extremely well positioned in the current domestic and global political landscape, and we generally continue to have favorable market conditions for the American drone subsegment outside maybe some of the very short-term hiccups given the government shutdown. We also have the capital to execute. I'm about to go into more detail, but I want everyone to note that my following comments are forward-looking and are in no way guaranteed.

Let's start with an update on internal production. Development of our motor production has matched our expected timeline so far. Phase 1 of motor production is now fully operational. We've just started scaling production and expect to have thousands of motors shipped by the end of the month. As this grows, we're beginning to source material for our highly-automated production equipment that we expect to bring online through the second quarter of next year.

Headset production is just starting to move forward. We're finalizing space and have already ordered the materials to produce 5,000 headsets domestically. Our internal expectation is that we'll start shipping headsets from our U.S. assembly facility in January of 2026.

We have $130 million in cash. We have enough money to build out motor and headset production as well as scale supply chains to meet our customers' needs. As a general rule of thumb, we want to have at least 12 months of forward-looking revenue in cash to meet our working capital needs.

So, our growth is not resource constrained, and we'll be able to right-size our company regardless of how fast or big this marketplace requires us to be. This also provides us with enough extra capital that we can consider potential acquisitions if the right opportunity presents itself without having to under-resource our current plans.

This moment of scaling with uncertainty is one reason why hardware is hard. As a component manufacturing supplier, we ask our customers to give us both forecasts and then purchase orders. It's typical for customers to give us forecasts that extend 12 to 18 months out, but purchase orders are generally only placed for material that they need delivered in the next 6 months.

Our growth ultimately requires purchase orders. We're excited. We have $16 million in purchase orders, and we expect delivery on those purchase orders to occur through the second quarter of 2026. We also have forecasts past that, that have us confident in our continued scaling past that run rate way into the second half of next year. For us to meet these demands, we have to place orders and provide forecasts to our vendors.

Our supply chains outside of China are about 6 to 8 months long, and that's the lead time on several critical components, not just one. So, this is causing us to and will continue to cause us to have to place large orders and put significant amounts of cash in deposits and other payment for material. This material management is critical to our company and is going to likely result in significant cash outlays over the next few quarters, and then we expect revenue and GAAP profits to catch up in the second half of 2026 as we reach a new larger revenue equilibrium.

This uncertainty has been further complicated by the shutdown of the U.S. government. Our primary enterprise business model is B2B2G, and the shutdown has prevented our customers from getting any additional orders. This, in turn, prevents them from placing orders with us. We see this as a competitive advantage, that's right, an advantage for our company relative to our competitors for 2 reasons.

First, we expect the Department of War and other government agencies to still want the drones and drone parts as soon as possible regardless of how long the shutdown lasts. This allows us to continue to build because we have the capital and then we'll be in a position where we are in stock when those customers place orders. Any of our undercapitalized competitors, they have to wait for the actual orders to come to their customers and then to them to even start their supply chains. So, this allows us to get further ahead every day the shutdown continues.

Second, the shutdown in the government has stopped the SEC from processing S-1s for new IPOs. Most companies' numbers go stale in February. So, there's likely to be a massive backlog and a challenge in the IPO market until at least May of 2026. There are very likely several wonderful midsized companies that will have trouble with access to capital due to the combination of the shutdown preventing orders and the IPO market being inaccessible.

This could create an opportunity for us to potentially make a larger acquisition at a reasonable value and further accelerate our business. Regardless of the shutdown, and when it ends, we believe the government demand is going to be very strong through 2026, and we are scaling as quickly as we can to capture as much of the emerging market as we are able to.

To summarize, our third quarter was a standout performance in my book. We are well capitalized, growing the team and the facilities, and have started to see government orders materialize for our customers and ultimately for us. Even though we had a profitable quarter, our goal is to sustain positive cash flow, and we expect to need $30 million in annual revenues to get there. I believe this will happen in the latter half of 2026.

Unusual Machines is at the corner where we think the market is maturing right now. Our business is capitalized and extremely healthy, and now we are aggressively pursuing growth. The U.S. drone market is about to explode, and we expect to fearlessly seize the opportunity.

I want to say thank you again to our entire staff, and all of our shareholders.

And with that, I want to open up the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group.

Not sure, if you're muted, Matt.

Matthew, your line is live.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, sir.

All right. Congrats on the strong quarter. Allan, you touched on expecting to reach a new revenue equilibrium sometime in '26. But to your point, in the growth cycle we're in for drones and domestic components, do you expect that '27 will be -- and I realize you're not guiding at this point to '27, but do you expect we'll still be in a growth cycle in '27? And to the extent that we might be, is the working capital investment cycle going to continue past 2026?

Yes. So, I think everybody is going to try to scale as fast as humanly possible in '26, and we're still -- the drone industry, particularly for defense is going to fall short of the objectives of -- not fall short, but the government programs have increasing numbers of drones they want from now through about 2030.

And so, I do expect working capital to continue to probably be sort of outlaid in front of revenues in that growing pattern. But I think towards the latter half of '26, we'll have a better idea of what that growth looks like, because I think the next year is sort of the 0 to 1 or the 5,000 to 100,000-plus drones. And then after that, it's $100,000 to $200,000. So, it's less of a dramatic step function. But I -- right now, all indicators suggest grow as fast as we all possibly can because of market demand until 2028.

Got it. And maybe just one quick follow-up for me. Just given all the additions and ramp-up in production that we're talking about that's happening in pretty quick succession. I'm wondering if you could give us a kind of reset view on your operating expense run rate, excluding stock comp, starting in the fourth quarter or first quarter of '26 that you have line of sight to?

Yes. So, if you look in quarter 3, we put this in our shareholder letter. Our cash burn, which we try to pay attention to, is still $900,000, and that's without any of the added income from the investments or anything. We still really stare at that pretty hard. And I'm personally proud that we've kept it under $1 million every quarter for operating.

Now, we might grow a little bit past that, and that will just come down to some of the GAAP elements that just when our customers receive material. But our goal is going to be to keep it down. And in quarter 4, quarter 1, it will be a little bit variable just based on when we're -- when our customers are able to accept product from when they can get it to the government. So, a little tough to project it just because the shutdown will affect the day-to-day stuff. But we try to keep it under $1 million every quarter. That's been our goal since we started.

Your next question is from Austin Bohlig with Needham.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

All right. Allan and team, congrats on the nice quarter and especially the margin expansion. Super exciting. I guess my first question, guys, is I just want to dive into kind of what your guys' current capacity is at as maybe we enter 2026. Like, is there a way you guys could frame up like the revenue that you guys could capture, whether it's through like your internal capacity plus the contract manufacturing if we get a perfect strong scenario next year with this demand?

Yes. I mean, this is a little speculative on my end because we keep scaling as we see demand, of course. Right now, we said we have $16 million in purchase orders, and we expect holidays is big for us. So, I would say between here and the end of Q2, everything we said suggests we plan without even being optimistic on delivering $20 million worth of stuff.

I think if we got $100 million, $150 million worth of orders, we'd figure out how to get it done. And more than that, we'll have to start to add space and equipment, and there's longer lead times on that on the CapEx. But I think you could see somewhere in the $100 million to $150 million range as being the capacity that we're scaling to and what we already have machines in for and CapEx in for and partnerships for.

We'd have to get the orders if it was SkyFoundry or PBAS or any of these very large programs. If we had indicators before the end of the year, we could bring in CapEx and exceed that. But we need those indicators here before the end of the year. And of course, if we had them, we'd share them with everybody. So --

Okay. No. Perfect, perfect. And then I just kind of had a question just on the consumer business. It was down kind of a little bit lower than what expected. Anything specific to kind of call out for that near-term weakness?

Yes, a couple of things. The summer tariff weird uncertainty, I think, caused a little consumer hesitation in the marketplace. We weren't focusing on it with the same thing. So, we had some shipments early in this quarter that -- because we had a little bit of out-of-stock stuff. So, we would have been, I think, on par for where we would have expected to be had we not run into a little bit of a stock thing with GAAP rules. And I think you'll see it rebound this holiday. So, you get a little shifting across that time barrier, but my expectation is we'll see us back to normal with consumer in quarter 4 here.

Got you. Got you. And then my last question is just kind of around this $30 million annual run rate for you guys to reach breakeven. On a quarterly basis, is it fair then to assume that it's around like $7 million, $8 million? Or how should I think about like the quarterly revenues you need to be breakeven?

Yes. Yes, I would say, I'd figure $8 million a quarter with the margins that we've been able to move to, and we're there.

Your next question for today is from Josh Sullivan with Jones Trading.

Congratulations on the quarter as well as the strategy coming together here. Just actually a follow-up on that last question, on that $8 million. What do -- can we get there on the enterprise mix where it is? Or is that assuming the enterprise mix is materially higher?

Oh, I think it's going to be on the enterprise mix. So enterprise is going to grow much faster than retail. And as long as it continues to even show up the way we're there, I feel pretty good about it. Hopefully, that answers the question. If it doesn't, ask it again, and I'll try to dig in better about it.

And then just you talked a bit about the competitive advantage you guys have regardless of how long the shutdown lasts, which is great. But curious, is this just something you see from your vantage point? Or do customers see this? Is it helping build your reputation, awards or even M&A opportunities that might be out there? I mean you talked a bit about the S-1 dynamic. Is this competitive advantage? Does it need to play out? Or is it now when people are coming to you?

A combination thereof. So we can finance some inventory. So for our customers that want to be aggressive, we're willing to take a chance with them. And that builds -- that gives them an advantage right now and us as a parts vendor, but it also builds relationships. And when you're a supplier, relationships for 10 years long is you don't lose spots very often.

And so I think it's both a right now advantage in that we can help our customers gain the same advantage on their competitors, even if they aren't as well financed. And in doing that, we're creating very long-term relationships with preferred vendors.

Got it. And then the other dynamic is speed to market, and we talk about this big opportunity coming up here. Can you frame where you guys are relative to the competition and how you've been successful winning these awards?

Yes, we started earlier. I think we messaged really well, but my understanding, we're the only ones doing thousands of motors right now. We -- anything we do, when we go place orders into our component supply chain, it's at least -- it's for at least 10,000 units. So, when customers come to us and they want 15,000 of thing, we can deliver.

So, we really haven't seen any of our competitors do that for value components in the U.S. market. And that puts us way ahead because it gives us the long-term relationships with our suppliers. It means that if somebody needs 500 units for like an LRIP run or something, we have them right away because it doesn't affect our material flow. And then when they scale up, we're a trusted vendor. So, this was -- we're starting to see the results from work we put in more than a year ago when our first flight controller came out because we did 10,000 of those out of the gate. And it's really starting to create sort of an avalanche advantage where even if you go do a design with somebody else, how do you get to 10,000 real fast? Well, you call us.

Your next question for today is from Barry Sine with Litchfield Hills Research.

Lots of questions for you. So, I want to talk about the outlook for orders. You've talked about the confirmed purchase orders, but that's really a subset of what's out there and what you're likely to win. So, we've seen some of the announced customers that presumably there's a lot more wins that you've won on platforms. Can you talk about the part of the iceberg that's under the ocean that we don't see? What is out there that you've won or you've won a placement on a platform that we don't see, at least size-wise? I know you probably can't name the companies.

Yes. So, I think there are several different pieces to this. First, there's -- the government issues are customers often programs and long-term contracts. And there are some things being competed like PBAS, purpose-built attributable systems. And there's -- they haven't awarded the final awards for it yet, but we have parts on, I think, every finalist. So that's an example of where we have forecasting if they win, but haven't seen purchase orders yet necessarily.

So, when you look -- and also the purchase orders we get for anybody are really only for the things they want in the next 3 to 6 months, and we're setting up inventory for the forecast. So, I think there's still some uncertainty because the Department of War hasn't finalized contracts, and they're still trying to figure it out. But my expectation is that what we've put out there is well under 50% of what I expect to see in demand.

Where that falls exactly will depend on which ones of our customers win which contests, whether we're a smaller portion or a larger portion of the bill of materials. But I'm very confident in where we're at going forward, and that's why we continue to scale. We just -- we know that when the government comes back, those will be awarded, and they'll still want the initial drones for those programs at the same time.

And then if we look at your product catalog on the blue list, your hot seller seems to be motors. You seem to be selling a lot of motors. I guess, goggles, maybe second. Where do you see holes in your product line? For example, do you need to have a digital -- more digital solutions? And along those lines, I had a good conversation with a new hire, Al Ducharme at Rampage, and he's got a pretty strong background there. So, what might we see product-wise in components with his fingerprints on this?

Yes. So, product road map, we'll start to really flush that out in quarter 1. What I would say is, right now, we're trying to scale for the FPV segment because there's a ton of demand, and we're really -- we want to focus on that scaling. I would say, initially, where you'd see adjacencies into other drones even before there's a lot more technology necessary is in the powertrain. So, motors plus motor controllers plus batteries is kind of a sweet spot to go look at delivery drones or aerial photography drones or otherwise.

And then I think, once we have moved to scale, we'll know what customers were successful, and we'll work on technologies that they need. I do think there's some really good other companies that do some of the high-value stuff like Digital Lynx, there are several companies that do that, Mobilicom, Doodle Labs, et cetera. And so we're not trying to go compete with other people that are trying to build out the western drone ecosystem. We're trying to be complementary. And I think once we hit scale and we start to build the components for our customers that are doing tens of thousands, they'll tell us where to go, and we'll just listen and we'll get those parts done as quickly as they need them.

So my ears perked up when you said the word batteries because I don't think you have -- you make your own batteries today. So that sounds like it might be a potential area of acquisition.

Yes. I would say, when we look at powertrain, I think batteries is one of the things that we'd have to look at in the next year to see if we can be part of the solution there.

And then on the retail business, as you had a question before, kind of flattish sequential, although 3Q is never historically a big quarter, I don't believe. A couple of questions on that. First of all, some of that is actually enterprise where prospective customers are buying lots of units to try out before they place a large order. So, if you have any sense on that.

And secondly, the other person I had a good conversation with at Rampage was Nate Kennedy, and he seems to have some ideas on growing that business. And I think I'm happy to see that because you guys are so focused on enterprise, it's nice to see somebody focusing back on Rotor Riot, which is where -- what started the company.

Yes. So, we see our retail channel as a massive sales funnel, as you mentioned, and it's great. And we realized that as we're being overwhelmed as a small team with the very rapidly scaling demand for enterprise that we were making some compromises.

So, we definitely -- we brought in some senior personnel to help be sure that our retail channel is better than ever this holiday and past it. And that's where -- that's why I think the hiccup is just added to hiccup. And otherwise, we're really excited about our brands and what we're doing going forward on the retail side and see it as just -- first, our customers there are awesome.

So, I'd like to thank every Rotor Riot customer and Fat Shark customer that -- and everybody that went to Rampage. I mean they're just awesome. And we want to be sure to continue to service that customer base even better than we did before as we grow.

Okay. And Allan, my last question, you made 3 strategic investments during the quarter, Safe Pro, LightPath, Kopin. And we proved that you're a great portfolio manager with the nice gain there. But from a strategic standpoint, could you talk about each of those briefly? Why did you make that investment? What do you see in them? And when might we see the benefits of those new partnerships show up on your income statement?

Yes. So Safe Pro was the first one. It was a smaller one. It was done in collaboration with Ondas, and that was more -- that was done because they're finding land mines and that helps generate value, whether there's conflict or not. I think, it's a really great use case. And we just wanted to be sure that if they were using FPV drones, it worked fine. That was probably the most financial in air quotes of the investments in that it's a little further removed from our platforms. So, I don't know how much that will drive value for our company in deep strategic relationships just because we are not building too many cameras that will be special purpose for that, but we do want to be sure it works.

If you look at LightPath, they're doing non-germanium thermal cameras. Pretty much everybody -- every enterprise customer wants multispectral or thermal cameras. So, Sam's just crossed a way in Orlando, like literally 20 minutes away and has just so much business that, that investment can put us in a position to do thermal cameras. Camera is a little further down on our road map. So, we're not there yet, but I think that will start to materialize in collaborative stuff, assuming we execute and we set up our road map probably mid to late 2026 in product offerings would be the goal.

And then Kopin does panels, display panels, and we're building headsets. So I expect our headset assembly to be online here in January, but we're starting conversations to figure out how to include their panels. And again, that will probably be late 2026. New products take 18 months generally. So, I wouldn't expect anything faster than that.

Your next question for today is from John Roy with Water Tower Research.

Allan, I wanted to discuss a little bit about the domestic motor and headset production. Kind of 2 twin questions here. One is, how do you expect to really turn this, what seems to be a reshoring competitive advantage into a long-term competitive advantage with production of those? And the second thing would be, how do you expect margins might ramp as you really put some more into production costs, et cetera?

We always set out and said that nothing we did could be more than 20% greater in cost than what came out of China. And that's how we try to price. And we think in doing that and building really high-quality products and using things like automation to be able to be competitively priced that once we win slots in this sort of disintermediating moment that we'll keep those slots with those customers through customer service and being local, and also it's just expensive to change suppliers.

So, what I think we're going to see is a dip in margin, a little dip in margin as we really ramp as we figure out how to get these things working again. But what I'm really proud of the whole team, we've demonstrated we can get to 39%, 40% margin. We're on the way we are, and that's at lower revenue. So, I think you might see a dip as we scale, but then at even greater volumes, I'd expect us to be able to probably break through that 40% margin level and be really competitive. And that's where I think this quarter where it's not like blowout revenues, we've done a really good job of taking what we were doing and refining it and polishing it. And so we're not scaling problems. We're scaling solutions. And that has me feeling pretty confident that even though we'll run into the -- probably some yield stuff as we -- some other ripples in margin as we scale that we'll get back to it and probably exceed 40%.

Cool. One last question for me, maybe a little bit broader one. How do you see the competitive landscape evolving maybe a little longer term? We're hearing rumblings from some European companies that they expect to start doing U.S. manufacturing. Just curious as to how you might see the competitive landscape evolving.

Yes. My personal belief is that sort of in the deglobalization we're seeing right now as part of the macro trend, we're going to see regionalization. And so in the same way people ask, hey, are we trying to sell in Europe? Not aggressively, no, because I think Europe is going to buy from Europe.

And I think there's going to be so much demand with all the GDP budgets in Europe increasing that will be there. And then I think U.S. money is going to favor U.S. companies. I mean, it's taxpayer money when you want it to go to people that pay taxes, and are other Americans. So I think that is in a tie, I think the local option wins. So, I think we just need to play for the tie and we'll win in North America, and we're really focused on North America rather than those other geos for that reason. So that's an assumption we're making and how we're going forward.

Sounds good. Congrats on the quarter and talk to you soon.

I really appreciate it. We also have a couple of questions from an analyst that came in via e-mail, which I'll read and then answer.

The first one. Can you please discuss how you expect the timing of major drone awards to interact with U.S. government shutdown dynamics versus looser budget spending requirements for drone purchases? What does reclassifying drones as munitions mean for UMAC's growth versus regular waste spend? How is growth appearing between acquisition officers and base combatant commanders?

So, I think the major drone awards for the U.S. government shutdown, I really don't expect them if the shutdown goes on much longer to probably occur until early 2026. Where I do see a lot of the overly allocated stuff of the looser, the smaller buys occurring when the government gets back online because those are just easier. They require less oversight, less people for approval, someone's on vacation, et cetera.

Reclassifying drones as munitions helps our growth in that it allows much smaller groups to just buy drones and not have to track them. And so, it means our customers can sell $100,000 or $200,000 worth of drones to these sort of base level buyers rather than have to be all centralized and go through a really long process. So, that -- those looser spends, I expect to come online much faster when the government comes back and to drive sort of maybe fewer headlines, but a lot of the revenue in the category.

And then growth between acquisition officers and then base combatant commanders, that to me is pretty opaque. I would say we'd have to go talk to our specific customers. And it also feels like they're still figuring that out, like what is the ratio or who's in-charge of what. And so, I think in another 6 months, we'll have a good idea there.

The second question. Can you discuss the acceleration of customer interest post-AUSA? How does getting the 101st Airborne as a customer raise awareness, not just for UMAC, but also the importance of domestically-sourced drone components?

AUSA was a great event. We were able to go and see a bunch of our parts that were priced out on a wall with members of the armed services flying those drones, and we're really excited about it. One of the things I think it does is there's an initiative called SkyFoundry, where the Department of war, and I think the Army in particular, is considering spending several hundred million dollars -- $200 million or $300 million, starting to build drones inside the military to understand them better. And I think really AUSA drives a lot of awareness as us as a vendor for that.

And I really think it being so inherent even in our customers wanting to use American source components. I think it points out to everybody that this is an important thing from a redundant supply chain perspective. And so, it's been a real positive. And there's -- it's also helped to highlight that we don't have, like, just at-scale suppliers yet. And so there's a real need for that.

The next question. What engineering approaches, materials or form factors are you most excited about with respect to drone components? How do you expect those dynamics to feather into your growth algorithm?

I would say, right now, I am the most excited about doing the powertrain. I think we sit really well there and can be complementary. And so as I alluded to earlier on Barry's question, I think batteries is something we're going to have to look at, and that will come into our growth algorithm. There may be some opportunities to move to like cameras, like gimbaled cameras and the ISR stuff if our customers want it. I think that's a little further out.

But I do think putting this all together is going to put us in a place to continue to add new components and get a more diverse group of customers, but also a more diverse portfolio to, again, really prevent any concentration risk. And I think that's what's awesome about where we're already at, is we're getting this growth, and we don't have customer or product concentration. And so we're able to be really dynamic and not really put ourselves in a situation where it could all come tumbling down. And I think that's what I like the most about it.

And those are the questions from the e-mail. So, I think that's all the questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session, and I will now turn the call over to Allan for closing remarks.

Again, I would like to thank everybody for being on the call. Really appreciate it. We wouldn't be here without our customers, our shareholders, and people that support us. So, thank you.

I wouldn't be here without the team. We had 30 people start Monday. They're building motors this week. So, thank you for being part of the team to everybody with us since we started. Again, thank you guys all, to Brian for being here. Brian, do the best. And I just -- it's a great quarter. It's profitable. We're growing. Everything is set up for this to scale, and there's -- there are no roadblocks in our way. So, it's time to go. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.