eXoZymes Aktie

Everything in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, will be forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings to better understand eXoZymes as a business, our risk factors and as an investment opportunity.

Welcome to the quarterly investor call. We've been looking forward to presenting for you and speaking with you all. We are four speakers today. I will open. Tyler will cover the product and platform progress. Damien will cover NCT from a partner selection and the commercialization road map perspective. Fouad will come and show the finances, and then I'll end where I can talk about the fundraising we did in Q2 and the strategic perspectives of how we are running eXoZymes.

I know we today have a good mix of long-term investors and brand new investor candidates. So let me show you how we pitch eXoZymes in 30 seconds. It goes like this. eXoZymes makes highly valuable natural products that until now have been inaccessible. Most of them are molecules someone have found in nature, but only in tiny amounts. Enough for people to realize a huge market potential, but no practical way of building a commercial product of business. eXoZymes enables these new and valuable nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals with the next generation of biomanufacturing.

I will start the update by expressing my super excitement about the news we released yesterday. Our R&D team and our product development teams have been super overperforming and it's setting us up for success with NCT. But Tyler, I'll let you go through that and what it means in practice. Over to you.

Hello. I'm Tyler Korman, CSO and Co-Founder of eXoZymes. I'd like to pick up on our recent work with NCT, namely the productivity work and what it took to get there. Back in March, we announced our first pilot scale campaign for NCT run with Cayman Chemical. Our process went from one liter to 100 liters with Cayman operating it independently working from the package we handed them. They produced over 500 grams of high-purity NCT at 99.6% purity with 99% of the feedstock converted to product.

That campaign answered the first question any manufacturer asks. Does this chemistry work outside our lab in someone else's hands at scale? It does. But working and being worth doing are two different things. Process can be perfectly reliable and still be too slow or too expensive to build a business on. So, months since March, we focused on productivity.

There are three numbers on this slide I'd like to highlight. First, we now get about 67% more NCT out of every liter of reaction volume than we did in the pilot run. Same-size tank, substantially more product. Second, the reaction finishes about 5x faster. That's about 80% less time in the tank. That one number matters more than it might sound because time in the tank is exactly what a contract manufacturer charges you for. Third, and this is the number we point you to, combining the first two gains with other improvements that we've made, the process is roughly 10x more productive than the pilot run.

There's a fourth item on this slide that isn't a number, and I'd argue is just as important. We've moved the process on to commercially relevant unit operations. These are the equipment and handling steps that commercial plant actually uses rather than the ones that happen to be convenient in the development lab. 10x the productivity is productivity a partner can actually receive. So the pilot campaign in March demonstrated the process could work. This productivity work here is what we believe makes it economically attractive.

We believe greater productivity and a simplified process strengthen the pathway toward technology transfer though the timing and outcome of any transfer will depend on factors described in our SEC filings. I'll now hand it over to Damien, who will take the third piece. How we're approaching partner selection.

Commercialization activities this year has been advancing the next stage of NCT scale up through the selection of a manufacturing partner and site. Importantly, this work builds on two major milestones that we've already achieved. Earlier this year, we successfully completed pilot scale production with an independent manufacturing partner, demonstrating the scalability of our NCT process. More recently, we announced a significant process optimization breakthrough that further improved the economics and commercial readiness of NCT. With those milestones in place, our focus advanced to selecting the manufacturing partner who will help us execute the next stage of commercialization.

Our partner evaluation extended well beyond just cost and equipment. With decades of industrial biotechnology scale-up experience, our team has learned that successful technology transfer depends more on the quality of collaboration than they do on quality of the assets. Strong communication channels and a shared commitment to problem solving are frequently the difference between a smooth scale-up and difficult one.

By qualifying multiple manufacturing options, we have reinforced one of the core strengths of the eXoZymes platform. We do not need to build and operate our own manufacturing facilities in order to commercialize products. Instead, we can leverage an established global manufacturing ecosystem and focus our capital on product innovation. The short list also creates strategic optionality. In addition to selecting a primary manufacturing partner, we are establishing qualified backup options that can support future supply continuity and risk management as demand for NCT grows.

We expect to finalize a partner selection by the end of the third quarter and we look forward to advancing the next phase of NCT commercialization while continuing to build the manufacturing ecosystem that will support future products across the eXoZymes platform.

One of our major areas of focus this year has been advancing the commercialization road map for NCT. Importantly, the work we're discussing today builds on a series of milestones we've already announced, including pilot scale production, productivity breakthrough and the screening process for production partner options. These achievements move NCT beyond technical feasibility and toward commercial readiness. Our focus has now expanded from proving we can make NCT to building the ecosystem required to successfully launch it into market.

Our commercialization strategy is centered on assembling an integrated ecosystem that can efficiently bring NCT to market. That ecosystem begins with the supply chain. Over the past year, we've tested and verified multiple suppliers for key production inputs, creating sourcing flexibility and reducing future supply risk. The next layer is manufacturing. As previously reported in this meeting today, we've advanced through a comprehensive manufacturing partner selection process and are establishing a scalable asset-light production model that leverages world-class external manufacturing capabilities rather than requiring us to build our own facilities.

We're also assembling the regulatory and clinical foundation needed for launch. Activities including GRAS preparation and supporting human studies are creating the framework necessary to support commercialization. But the most important relationship we're building is our commercial and marketing partnership. This partner will play a central role in translating NCT from a novel ingredient into a successful market product by providing branding, channel development, commercialization expertise and market reach. The opportunity is not simply to launch NCT but to establish meaningful market adoption and product revenue.

We're making solid progress screening and evaluating prospective launch partners and are encouraged by the quality of discussions underway. We look forward to sharing details regarding that relationship towards the end of Q4. Our expectation is that this partnership will provide the capabilities, infrastructure and market experience necessary to support an NCT product launch by mid-2027.

Ultimately, this ecosystem is about more than one product. It demonstrates how the eXoZymes platform can repeatedly create new molecular opportunities and efficiently assemble the partnerships required to transform those opportunities into sustainable, high-value businesses. Thank you.

I want to spend 2 minutes on a question investors ask us often. What comes after our current programs? Everything we do starts with the same asset, our cell-free AI-enhanced biomanufacturing platform. What the platform produces, we call biosolutions, which we use to make molecules that are traditionally difficult, expensive or impractical to make at commercial scale by conventional methods. NCT is our first bio solution. It is the program most of you know best and the clearest demonstration of what the platform is designed to do.

Cannabinoids are our second. In June, the NIH awarded us a $2 million Phase IIb SBIR to support development of rare and novel cannabinoid analogs. Beyond the Phase IIb NIH grant, federal support has broadened this year. In July, the Department of Energy selected us for its Genesis Mission, where we are working with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on AI-enabled digital twins for enzyme driven biomanufacturing. And in the NSF-funded CFIRE program, we have advanced our milestones over the past year.

Together, this is non-dilutive capital totaling approximately $20 million to date. We believe it reflects the versatility of our platform, I would note, however, that these awards reflect the scientific merit of research proposals and are not an endorsement of eXoZymes or any product by the government, which brings me to the next slide.

We have built what we call the New Ideas Engine, a repeatable stage-gated process for identifying the next biosolution. Our scientists submit candidate molecules year-round and each is scored against four criteria shown in the box on the left. We evaluate technical feasibility: Can we make it? Market and commercial appeal: Can we identify a real market? We consider economic and operational factors: Do the unit economics and the scale-up path look like they could work? And we ask if there is a strategic differentiation, does it build on or leverage our platform and an intellectual property we already have?

A candidate only advances when it clears all four. That discipline is deliberate. It keeps us from spending capital on interesting science with no path to a product. Candidates that advance follow the graduation path on the right side of the slide, proof of concept in our incubator, biosolution development in our accelerator and then commercialization. Today, five molecules are in rapid proof-of-concept evaluation.

We are intentionally not naming them, and we are not making any claim about whether an individual candidate will succeed. What we can tell you is that successful candidates would open opportunities across nutraceuticals, including supplements and cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. The takeaway is straightforward. eXoZymes is not a single molecule company. NCT and cannabinoids are the first two biosolutions out of this engine and the engine keeps running.

As we look ahead over the next 12 months, we believe eXoZymes has one of the most catalyst-rich periods in the company's history. We've already started that momentum with the productivity breakthrough we recently announced, which significantly improved the economics of NCT production and with the successful award of our $2 million SBIR grant supporting our cannabinoid program. These achievements reinforce both the value of NCT and the broader capability of the eXoZymes platform.

Over the remainder of 2026, our primary focus is execution. We expect to finalize our NCT production partner, complete the NCT technology transfer package and continue advancing the regulatory, clinical and manufacturing foundation required for commercialization. Another key milestone will be announcement of our NCT market launch partner. This relationship is particularly important because it represents the bridge between technical success and commercial success, providing the market access needed to bring NCT to customers and generate revenue.

At the same time, investors should expect to see proof points emerging from what we call our New Ideas Engine. These programs demonstrate how the eXoZymes platform can repeatedly generate differentiated product opportunities and new business creation.

Taken together, these milestones position us for our targeted NCT market launch in the first half of 2027. More importantly, they represent the continued transformation of eXoZymes from a technology development company into a commercialization company capable of creating both products and platforms with significant shareholder value.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Fouad Nawaz. I'm the VP of Finance at eXoZymes. Our financial results for the second quarter of 2026 are detailed in our 10-Q filing. I will provide a summary of the financial results, but I encourage you to read the report for additional details. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus remains on prudent financial management, making targeted investments to drive our development objectives and achieve commercialization.

As of the end of June of 2026, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $5.65 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support our ongoing operations and key initiatives into the end of 2026. We completed two financing events in June of 2026, which generated net proceeds of $5.86 million. This was done through the sale and issuance of 732,260 common stock and 366,130 warrants.

Our total operating expenses for the 6 months of 2026 were $5.34 million, which represents an increase of $1 million compared to the prior year 2025. On a quarterly basis, our operating expenses were $2.95 million for the second quarter of 2026, which represents an increase of $405,000 compared to the same period in 2025. The increase in operating expenses continue to represent our investment in R&D with additions in personnel and a focus on further developing our internal infrastructure.

The net loss for the end of June of 2026 was $5.25 million with a net loss for the quarter being $2.88 million. We have and continued to be disciplined in our spending approach and continue to ensure that capital is allocated efficiently to maximize shareholder value. Additionally, we continue to explore non-dilutive funding opportunities, strategic partnerships and potential government grants to further strengthen our financial position. That concludes my presentation for the financials. And with that, I will pass the call back. Thank you.

Thank you, Fouad. Let me take you all through our capital position. And I'll start with some details about the raise we did in June. We ran two offerings of our Form S-3 shelf. On June 9, we closed an underwritten public offering, and with the overallotment that the underwriter exercised on June 17, that offering issued 660,000 shares and 330,000 warrants approximately for gross proceeds of approximately $6 million.

On June 30, we closed a registered direct offering for a further 71,000 shares and the equivalent warrants for gross proceeds of $640,000. That is in total the gross proceeds of $6.59 million. The unit price of the offering was $18. Because each unit was two shares plus one warrant, that works out to a per share price at $8.99 and $0.02 per warrant. As a result of these fundraising efforts, we -- the company now have approximately 9.3 million shares outstanding.

And I'm getting a lot of questions about our float and how we get the daily trading volume up. There's a couple of ways we want to do that. We can and will engage in activities to bring new retail investors to look at eXoZymes as an investment opportunity. And as a segment, they are known to be much more active in trading. We also have an uptick in the number of family offices reaching out to us, wishing to invest, and we'll direct some of those to buy in the open market instead of waiting for a funding round.

Turning to the balance sheet. We closed the quarter with $5.65 million in cash or cash equivalents. That's up from $3 million at year-end, we used only $3.6 million of cash in the operations across the first half year. This is due to the amazing help with our non-dilutive funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy aka our grants. We believe we have sufficient working capital for the near future and we're actively pursuing additional grants, deal payments and licensing opportunities and financing options.

And now over to the strategy part. Let's take on the last topic before the Q&A session. This is about the strategic perspective of eXoZymes. Why are we building NCT and other product assets instead of just selling development deals?

Our original strategy focused on closing high volumes of partnership deals. We wanted to sign as many partners as possible across many different verticals. Have them each basically fund the development work, and we would collect royalties on the back end. It was a reasonable thesis, but it had a problem built in that held us back for a while at the core of the problem is: How do you get the first partner to sign when nobody want to go first on a brand new science and technology platform?

The partners' arguments and reasons were straightforward. Despite many companies being super interested in our technology, none of the established companies wanted to be the first to build on a genuinely new science and technology platform like our cell-free biomanufacturing platform, especially in the risk-averse market environment we have been facing in the last couple of years.

The conversations were enthusiastic, engaged, but they constantly ended up in one of a few places. Either the partner was very interested, but had no space in the budget in this cycle or we were still seeing interest from people, but they asked us to come back when we had built and proven something at scale or when the partner stayed at the negotiation table because they were very interested, they negotiated from a position of strength and wanted to have steep discounts and low royalty rates as they would be going to be the first on the platform as we couldn't guarantee success because we didn't pick the molecules under that model and the arguments were fair. If they should pay both for the development and carry all the risk, they should capture most of the upside. If we had signed any of those deals we had on the table back then, we would have been leaving substantial value on the table, and were locked in to work on complex biosolutions in all kind of different spaces with no synergies and no knowledge we can bring on to the next product because they would be so different.

I take full responsibility for those strategic choices. Also, despite that, I know it has caused some shareholder pain because things have gone a little slower than we had hoped in regards to making deals. So we set aside the old strategy and found a very interesting new way of focusing. This result is a strategy where we enter into partnerships at a later stage in the development side on assets we have picked and basically made sure that they fit us in our unique technology. And that way, we can now faster and cheaper de-risk these projects ourselves. We no longer need to persuade anyone that the platform works because the proof precedes the conversation. We have working biosolutions, we want to partner on.

This is the role of NCT and the other first products. It demonstrates that we can make highly valuable molecules, no one else can manufacture at scale, then we can do it faster and at lower cost than anyone else. And when the risk is retired before the negotiations begins, we retain all the upside and value we previously were conceding.

We call our new synergy focus for nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential. It also sharpens what we pursue and how quickly we can determine whether a company is a potential partner for us. It saves a ton time on the business development side instead of just talking to everybody and exploring all potentials. We targeted high-value natural product molecules that can reach market quickly as nutraceuticals. That is, for example, a supplement or a skin care products.

And they have the feature of carrying credible pharmaceutical potential with only a few but important changes to how the molecule is made on our platform. Two shots on goal per asset: the faster and the more inexpensive one comes first and the slower comes second, but has a much larger upside potential. And because of these "nutraceutical with pharmaceutical potential" molecules often share biochemistry and enzymes, every program inherits a lot of work that has already been completed by prior projects and uses a lot of the same infrastructure, supply chain and sets of knowledge that we are building. Each product asset, therefore, gets developed faster and cheaper than the one before, which means that the over time, will be a accumulation of products and revenue without us having to do new investments every time.

Accelerating and underpinning all of this is a new capability we have been building the past 2 years that also ties into the strategic recalibration. By applying advanced AI to biomanufacturing, we are creating a lot of competitive advantage. Now apply artificial intelligence and machine learning at both ends of the development progress cycles.

On the front end, we use it to screen what the commercial potential is, how well of a fit there is between our technology platform and the molecules and all of these things that Tyler have already presented so well earlier today. On the back end, our cell-free laboratory generates a kind of clean and structured data that specialized AI models, especially the ones called protein language models and the similar zero-shot algorithms, are actively requiring to be trained on to become really good.

Which only a few organizations in the world can produce at all. We are one of them. And we are probably the ones that can do it the fastest and the cheapest. It is a true competitive advantage as it makes us faster and better at building our unique cell-free biosolutions, allowing us to unlock even more and better business cases.

The more we run the cell-free based AI-powered eXoZymes platform on our deliberately focused domain, the nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential, the stronger the platform becomes. Product development cycles shortened cost, both for the development and the unit economics level fall. And this is how our strategy brings us a competitive position that progressively becomes harder to challenge.

And thank you all for your time. We hope this helped to inform you better about eXoZymes. And let's now take the first questions. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to answering some of these questions that have come in. I will start by thanking all our investors for all the support you continuously give us, and I can then set the stage a little bit today by saying we have presented a lot about NCT and the nutraceutical side. And therefore, I can see in the questions that there is appetite for talking also about the pharma side of this. So let's take some of those questions. Maybe you start by giving me a question.

Sure. So one of the initial questions that came in: We understand that people are fascinated by what we've described in terms of a new form of chemistry. The question is, does our platform potentially give pharma or even other entities access to new chemical space that they couldn't get to before?

Yes. That's a super question and it feeds into the strategy conversation just before here, where -- why did we pick nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals? We wanted to have something where we could go fast to market and at the same time, something where we would have a high upside potential. It needs to have competitive advantages in both. I think we've fully described on the nutraceutical side, that perspective. From the pharmaceutical side, it is exactly the core of the question. It's a new generation of medicinal chemistry. We can with enzymes, literally bring these different things together that in normal chemistry are forced together. It's a very elegant way of controlling how things are either taken apart or put together. So it's a big fat, yes, that is exactly what the competitive advantage on the pharma side is. And just to remind people, sometimes we talk about it as BioClick, as a name for the tools we're using to -- basically using the enzymes to build small molecules.

Let's pull that thread a little bit further because it does tie up with another question that we received. And I think we're going to go into translation now. You've talked about a capability, and let's direct this one to you, Tyler. Do you see this as hypothetically giving those pharma companies optionality to solve bottlenecks that existed before, whether it be on previous drug candidates, maybe improving existing drugs or even manufacturing new drugs designed by AI?

Yes. I think that's a really good point. And I think what we've developed is this ability to -- once you understand why things have failed or what things could be applicable in the natural product space or the drug space, this allows us to modify really quickly. So we can do things using a technical term, group transfers. This is what the BioClick is based off of. We can add different parts of different molecules to existing scaffolds. We're agnostic as to where a lot of those targets come from initially, but we know that we can modify or build very quickly, use a bunch of different types of building blocks, which is very amenable to this development of new molecules and chemistries.

I would add to that, that the times where we've sat with a medicinal chemist from a pharma company that have gotten the aha moment of what the platform can do, it's actually exactly that. It is when we get to the point of them typically saying like, "Well, I can do that already. But that would be so expensive that we will never go that route" or "That would be so polluting that we will never go that route" or "It would be so impure." So they kind of make the argument themselves and that's where they get the "aha" moment, like, so you can do this without what's keeping them from doing it. And that's where we have seen the light bulb go on a couple of times with medicinal chemists that are gone being skeptical to becoming very intrigued.

Yes. And it's really a different way of doing medicinal chemistry. It's not your traditional kind of synthetic approach where you have to try lots and lots of things. And then after you finally found some kind of chemistry that works, you have to patent it and apply it to scale. That's not what we're doing here. What we're doing is we're starting with enzymes and enzyme cascades. And we're leveraging that ability to engineer enzymes around specific substrates and then control what we're feeding it to now actually build up increased diversity in terms of the molecules that we can make. So it's really a different type of approach to medicinal chemistry. That's the type of team that we've built here. And so that's the expertise that we have. My background is in structural biology, and a number of other team members to understand how natural products are made and how we can leverage the tools that we've developed to now make products faster and better.

And I think this opens up for a question. We have seen a couple of times with people basically saying, "So do you have what it takes to basically do the journey from idea and all the way to a drug someday?" So I would say this question probably falls into that. Given that eXoZymes' expertise is towards building cell-free enzymatic pathways, what expertise does the company have in medicinal chemistry and rational design given that these are distinct specializations?

Yes. I think that's where a lot of our core lies in this enzyme engineering and this ability to understand both how enzymes are specific, but also how they're promiscuous. And so we can leverage this to now add in different inputs that maybe it's like an amino acid analog or something like that. That now gives you the ability to make a new molecule that has new composition of matter that we can file IP on and then leveraging our network of consultants and partners to basically figure out how to match a lot of those capabilities to indications of interest.

Maybe adding on to that, something I find super fascinating. There's so much money going into AI drug design right now. It's probably one of the hottest life science areas. A lot of these AI companies are able to sit down and predict how a small molecule will bind to a drug receptor and therefore, theoretically what the small molecule should look like in the optimal reality, but they can't make them. And that's why I think our platform is so intriguing that we can also do a lot of the predictions and we can work together with these other companies as partners. And then we can actually sit down and say, well, it's not enough to kind of have a theoretical key that could unlock this drug receptor. We can actually make that and we can start engineering and having control over the manufacturing process so that it turns out to be the best analog version. And frankly, that is what it takes to get the patent and get the business opportunity.

And even taking a step back and kind of building off of what was said in some of the presentations, this is where this ability to have a nutraceutical focus initially. It's some natural product, you find in nature it does something, right? If you've identified what receptor it can bind to and how it does that, well, now you not only have this natural molecule that can be used as a supplement potentially, but then you can modify it to now improve its properties in some way.

And getting even closer to a specific indication. So it might be generally good as a supplement, but for a specific disease indication, it needs to be optimized to hit that goal specifically. Damien time for you, you are having too easy of a time. Yesterday announced...

That doesn't have to change.

Well, we'll see. Yesterday's announcement said that you would be getting increased yield. The question says, I think from memory, on a slide deck you had, it showed predicted high gross margins already. Does this improve on those? Or was it built in?

I mean the short answer to that question is our commercialization targets have been improved upon and exceeded. So when we sat down and we made our projections early on in the program, we said these are the productivity metrics we need to see in the development journey to justify taking this product commercial. We've gone past those metrics, right? So it's a part of the discipline of development is you build what we call a technoeconomic model. Yes, that looks at all of the inputs, both from the technology program, but also all of the external inputs like your raw material costs or the fees you would be charged by a contract manufacturer to produce and all of the other costs associated with taking that product into market.

Every time we learn a new piece of information, whether a gain on the science and the performance of the process or maybe it's a change in the pricing landscape of your raw materials, that feeds into that technoeconomic model, so you're constantly tracking where you are, right? The announcement we shared where we had increased productivity 10x was a very meaningful step change in our expectations now what the profitability would be on NCT in market. But also, there's still a lot of work to be done to take a product like NCT into the market.

So there's a lot of other bits and pieces we will learn. So seeing that sort of magnitude of improvement gives me, I think gives all of us a lot of confidence that this thing is going to turn up in the market that's going to be profitable and it's exciting. So it was a great result. I think collectively, you don't always see that kind of significant change during an optimization period. So, kudos not just to the hard work of Tyler's team, but it's sort of an endorsement of the technology as a whole, that it's able to sort of exert that level of control and that level of change over the process.

If I kind of put you on the spot a little bit more like thinking towards that product journey, right? It's not enough to just make it, right? You want to be able to have somebody that's going to use it at a certain point. So if you're putting this in the context of a nutraceutical or pharma company, right? What are the things that they want to see before signing a deal for a product? In vitro studies, commercial scaling? How are these activities tracking right now?

Yes. So we do see a range of answers to questions like that from the different partners that we engage with. I think we're blessed in that sort of the networks we have at the business level, say, between Michael and myself and some of our Board members we've been able to have really, really good conversations. And your team comes back from these technical conferences, having met R&D people in these companies as well. And the dialogue on what they're looking for is a rich sort of dialogue of expectations.

Typically, what we're hearing more frequently is that they want to see the particular analog or the particular compound we want to commercialize in pharma as having animal results against targeted indications. But I will say two things are kind of influencing that. One, this space of metabolic health, particularly as you think about obesity, these disease conditions are rich in deal making right now. So that kind of encourages Pharma to become a little more active in what's in that discovery pipeline. So we see the phone gets answered pretty easily.

The e-mails come back pretty quickly as we engage there. But also what we're seeing more and more of these days is the interest around mechanisms. Yes. And not just molecules, right? What are the mechanisms people want to invest in against targeted indications? And HNF4 alpha, which is the mechanism we target with NCT, that's one that's really understood. And so I think that's a great open space opportunity for partnering.

I find it so fascinating when you start reading back in time who has looked at this drug receptor, we have worked on it and basically come up somewhat empty-handed but understanding the mechanisms and the potential. So actually, can you say off the top of your head, how many publications have there been on that one target over time?

There's hundreds. I think from when it was discovered in the early '90s to now, there's been a lot of different academic and industrial groups studying the potential for this receptor, not just how it works, but how it could serve as a drug target. And so there is a wealth of knowledge out there, but currently, it's underserved in terms of things that are actually used to treat.

And let's sort of go back to what you were saying in the earlier part of this presentation about sort of one molecule, two shots. It's because of the receptor, because of that mechanism, we have two shots, right? And I think what we do in nutraceuticals for NCT also elevates the awareness of and the discussion around HNF4 alpha, right? Which then just creates more demand, but I think more interest in that as a mechanism to be addressed.

But wait, there's more, as they say in advertising. There's two shots on goal, but you just made me think of that in the -- on the pharma side, of NCT and the specific drug receptor. I'm personally hyper fascinated by how nature and evolution have decided to give that drug receptor. You can almost say, like two distinct roles, at least two different organs that it heavily influences. Maybe you can unpack that statement a little?

Yes. I mean it's been shown that this HNF4 alpha is predominantly in the liver. It helps affect things with metabolism and kind of management of metabolism, but it's not just found there. It's found also in the gut, right? It might be a slightly different isoform, but it's almost completely identical. It's about 90% the same as the one found in the liver. So they both bind most likely NCT, right? So or whatever their ligands, they bind them similarly. And so now you have two different locations in the body that can be -- that can affect different types of indications, gut health and kind of overall metabolism and management of fatty acid oxidation.

Two very large markets. So it's actually two shots on goal just on the pharma side and then, obviously, nutraceuticals.

Michael, we've got another question here. I think the context for this is really rich because we just spent the first half an hour talking about the progress we've made to date. We've got a really rich set of prospective milestones in front of us. So what are the plans to increase the investor awareness and the reach that the company has so that we can actually get the story out about these milestones that we're walking through?

A little bit of hindsight first: we needed to figure out exactly who we were, how we would want to deliver on this journey and this value build that we're doing. So getting the whole nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential in place, getting it built up supported by our AI platform and doing all of these things have led us to now being able to start making these predictions into the future. These are things that are going to happen. And it's the similar kind of business we're going to do after that. So it's -- you can argue it's been an exclusive club of people that have been willing and capable of listening into the potential when it was as undefined as it has been up until a while ago. Now it's getting very defined.

It's getting tighter and tighter all the time. And at some point, when we have launched NCT as a nutraceutical it's going to be a very different conversation. So because we have all of that coming up, it's also time for us to start engaging in speaking to the broader world. So obviously, we will continue our investor calls like these and the other activities we have done, but there are tools and mechanisms where you can get in front of much bigger audiences. We now have that story that is ready for that prime time. And without giving too much away, I can say we have just engaged with a number of people and outlets that will basically help ensure that.

So yes, as I said in the presentation, we want more in a diverse set of investors. Retail is known for being smaller position, trading faster. There is definitely a lot of family offices that are literally reaching out and asking if there is an opportunity to buy blocks instead of just buying in the open market because afraid of pushing the price up too high with the amount of investment they would like to make. All of those things are coming together now. So I would say that's a definite yes, more awareness coming up. Those are the questions we have here in front of us. Would you give me the two ones over there, Yes, those.

These are the impromptu ones.

These are the ones that make sure that it's not too easy to be us. For future joint venture partnerships, does eXoZymes expect to receive initial upfront payments and milestone payments or is a partnership mainly based on shared equity in a subsidiary? I'll start by unpacking that a little bit, and then I am going to throw it over to you. It depends on the business case, it depends on the partner. It depends on what position we are in.

The packages we're bringing to the table, the assets we are bringing to the table. And I would say, and from a top-down perspective, we will be thinking of this exercise of picking the right partners and the right deal models as a portfolio approach, where we will have in the beginning, this stated need to really go deep and fast together with a partner on NCT. While at the same time, that might not be the case in 5 and 10 deals from now. Maybe at that point, we are more of like let's focus more on royalty streams and building biosolutions for partners where we won't take part in the actual building and owning that business opportunity. So it depends a little bit, but I'm curious to hear what you're thinking.

Yes, right. But I think about the start of a rugby game. You've got 15 people on the field and the opposition is about to kick off, right? You don't know where they're going to kick the ball, but you're ready for anything. And that's kind of how I think of this is like we could do any of these things. It's really going to depend on the engagement we have with a partner. But if you want a little bit of direction on this, it's earlier on in this journey for us, we understand the risk profile better than anybody. So the premium we get by hanging on to more of the equity going into these arrangements is going to be higher versus if we had sort of equal sharing of risk understanding between the two, then it becomes a little more transactional.

So we will style these types of structures to a way that sort of prioritizes speed to get them done because speed to market is where we maximize value, not getting an extra percent on an equity deal. We're focusing on capabilities are people being incentivized through the structure in the right way that mobilizes capabilities in the right sequence. And then we'll look for like can we get the biggest piece for us so that we've got the levers to make sure that our interests are being looked after. You can't put your interest first and foremost in these types of deals. Otherwise, you don't do a deal. So it's about finding that ground. You've got to survive the kickoff. Hope the ball comes to me because I'm ready to run it up, but you've got to be ready for anything.

And that kind of builds on to the next thing here, actually. So let's just give ourselves a frame of reference here. So on the one side, we could and will, in some cases, own everything as we do with NCT right now. And therefore, pace forward at the speed that we desire. Then we can find the right partners to joint-venture style join us in that pursuit. And that's where we're starting to get into the joint venture and spin-out territory. And then leaning over to the side of licensing, where we will build specific biosolutions in the future for, and I especially think that's going to be true in the pharma side for people that come in and know very particularly what it is they're looking for. So you can argue they bring a lot of the science and the medicinal chemistry to the table. So if that's your thing, then just to show a kind of -- that there's even another perspective. So that can be worked in here.

So there's a question here specifically. What is the strategic benefit of building cell-free solutions for santalene even though its market opportunity is smaller than your other programs? So that's a good example of like why did we do that? Well, we literally had a funding opportunity where the National Science Foundation came to us and had specifically a need for helping to educate the world and standardize some of the things that cell-free does, and they put us in a position of recognizing us as the leader in the space. And then at the same time, they wanted to have a concrete project to build on and implement that on. So we get santalene for free.

So are we willing to take on things that are maybe smaller, but if they're paid for by a partner that comes into this whole portfolio thinking. And it's even more complex than just what's the best thing. It's then held up against the resource allocation we have quarter by quarter. What are the different teams in our company building on already, how is it important from a time to market versus a lower cost but it's okay if it's slower kind of perspective.

So the portfolio of what we are building of assets and business opportunities can actually kind of de-risk each other to some degree.

I think I'm excited about the santalene project that we're doing under that CFIRE grant because let's unpack santalene in just a moment. The team is also coming up in parallel with a new tool for how we drive the cell-free reaction, how we drive that cell-free reaction. If you think about it, going from raw materials to target product in any system requires energy. And so what we get to unpack in this CFIRE grant with santalene is development of a tool set that could even make the energetics of moving our reactions for any type of target product more and more effective, which brings down cost, right?

And overall has that economic input-output. So I think that's exciting about that project. And then secondly, because santalene is coming out of that project, almost as it rides along, we get to be a little patient with it and see where it goes because it's a fragrance compound. And the thing about fragrance compounds is until someone smells it, you don't really understand the note and where it sits in the potential landscape for someone who's designing perfumes to know where they would fit it in. So it's one of these things where a little bit of patience, we get some samples out of that project. We can test the notes, we can see where it fits. We can understand its economic value. But really, what we're hitting is this really cool new tool for driving cell-free reactions.

Yes. I look at it in a similar way from leading the R&D effort, right? We spent a lot of time focusing as a company on production. How do we make this molecule and make it as much as we can for as fast as we can as cheap as possible. But we need to continue to invest in our production capabilities, right? What are those things that are going to come next? How can we enable this next generation of compounds to get into different classes? This is a perfect example of that. Not only is it a different class of molecule, right? But it's also a different tool that we can then use and apply to other systems as well.

I mean taking that edge of driving process faster. I mean, what you did with NCT in going from 20 hours down to 4 hours. I just can't understand how extraordinary that is, to have a reaction that goes that quickly to be able to turn those tanks over and use them again. I think as you summarized...

10 hours wasn't even slower.

Yes, yes. I mean, 20 wasn't. You're right. Absolutely, it wasn't slow compared to, say, microbial-based systems, which can be counted in the days until your process is complete. So this is extraordinary, but to think you could even drive that further is incredible.

So this gives me the opportunity to kind of ask myself a question that I've been asked a couple of times. Why did we pick the nutraceutical to pharmaceutical? Are we leaving opportunity on the table? And I will be honest to say, it is more nuanced than like the hardcore definition of a nutraceutical. We will be more than fine with also doing basically skin care molecules, fragrant molecules and other things. What is important for us is that it fits into that frame definition that we need to be able to use our platform to get to a state where we have a competitive advantage that other people can't get to, that there is a high degree of market opportunity. And we absolutely prefer when we can kind of build on top of each other. So santalene is a great example to show that, yes, of course, it should carry its own weight on its own merits, but at the same time, that the things that will unlock afterwards by having that extra technology component is also why it's so exciting to build a platform. I think that's going to be basically -- unless you guys have questions you want to ask yourself -- then I think we're going to call it.

It's good. We've had a steady parade of scientists walking past the window here, giving us thumbs-up and encouragement. So, everyone needs to get back to work.

That is true. And I want to end on, as I've done before, thanking our investors. Thank you for joining the journey. It is an exciting journey. There's still much more to be done and we are on it. I want to thank the team. It is mind-blowing the kind of thing we are building together here. I am super impressed with the team over how basically concise we are in our work. We get so much done so fast with a capital-light approach. That is just a joy to see. So I want to thank the team for that, and I look forward to having this conversation again in a quarter. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.