Alamar Biosciences, Inc. (ALMR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Alamar Biosciences Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results webcast call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Carrie Mendivil, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please proceed.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review Alamar Biosciences' Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results. Joining me on the call are Yuling Luo, our Chief Executive Officer; and Justin McAnear, Chief Financial Officer. Our President, Todd White, will join for Q&A. Earlier this afternoon, we issued a press release detailing our second quarter financial results, and we posted in the accompanying presentation in the Investors section of our website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements we make during this call will include forward-looking statements as defined under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Additionally, we are not under any obligation to provide further updates on our business trends or our performance during the quarter. To better understand the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. We refer you to the periodic reports that Alamar Biosciences filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed on May 8, 2026. I will now turn the call over to Yuling Luo, Alamar's CEO.

Thank you, Kerry, and thank you all for joining us this afternoon for our first earnings call as a public company. Before I begin, I want to thank our investors for their trust and support following our successful initial public offering. On behalf of the entire Alamar team, we remain committed to delivering meaningful impact while creating long-term shareholder value. I will start our call with a brief overview of Alamar and our platform, then work through our Q2 business highlights and close with our strategy to unlock the opportunity ahead. I will then turn it over to Justin to cover our financials and the revenue outlook for the remainder of the year. Starting on Slide 3. Eight years ago, we founded Alamar with a singular mission to power precision proteomics for the earliest possible detection of disease. That mission remains our North Star. The proteomics market represents a massive largely untapped opportunity. We believe the reason it has remained untapped is not because of lack of demand but because of lack of sensitive and sophisticated tools. That is the technology gap Alamar was built to close. And today, I believe we are delivering on it. Turning to Slide 4. What sets Alamar apart is simple. We are the only platform to combine all 5 elements essential for policiting proteomics, ultra high sensitivity, high specificity, flexible multiplexing, broad time of range and seamless automation. Existing technologies have historically demanded the trade-off a sacrifice in sensitivity, in multiplexing capability or in workflow simplicity. Our platform was specifically designed to eliminate those trade-offs. Since launching our Precision proteomics platform in January 2024, adoption has been phenomenal. Starting with our top line results on Slide 5. Q2 was a strong quarter that reflects the momentum of our business. Total revenue grew 82% year-over-year driven by exceptional consumable performance. Consumable revenue accounted for 53% of our total revenue and was up 147% compared to Q2 2025. For the first time, we also achieved a 60% gross margin. Turning to Slide 6. We're focused on 3 key drivers to sustain and expand adoption of our platform in the near term: First, growing our instrument installed base to reach new institutions and geographies; second, developing novel content to extend our leadership in our beachhead neurology and information research markets and enter adjacent disease areas with significant unmet need; and third, collaborating with leading institutions to develop new applications, support third-party studies and grow our publication base to drive awareness and adoption of our platform. Turning to Slide 7. While making meaningful progress across each of these areas, we continue to expand our installed base, launching 3 new RUO products that extend the reach and the utility of our platform, deepening our strategic partnership, surpassed 165 cumulative publications and preprints and delivered our strongest scientific presence ever at Alzheimer's Association International Conference. I go through each of these achievements in a bit more detail. Turning to Slide 8. We've built a clear leadership position in neurodegenerative research. In middle March, we launched our new Neuro 220 panel and have seen incredible adoption. In early July, we launched the first commercial multiplex blood-based immunoassay for eMTBR-tau, which is emerging as one of the most important biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease research. Our eMTBR-tau provides a non-inventive blood-based measurement of tau tangle burden with [indiscernible] sensitivity, multiplexed alongside other neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation biomarkers from a single low-volume sample. We have validated this across multiple cohorts, and we have already seen data in submitted for publication from multiple customer labs. We showcased this data at our workshop at AAIC, and the reception was outstanding. It sets the stage for what was our strongest AIC presence today. Turning to Slide 9. We came away from AIC with a strong sense that the field is approaching an inflection point, and Alamar is at the center of it. We counted more than 140 posters and presentations featuring NULISA technology, a fourfold increase year-over-year. Three things from the conference reinforced our conviction in where the market is heading: First, blood-based biomarkers are going mainstream. Second, tau is emerging as a central drug target with Biogen advancing their tau lowering drug into Phase III and others following, the timing of our eMTBR-tau launch could not be better positioned. Third, there is a growing appreciation for the complexity of the neurodegenerative disease. Researchers are increasingly focused on heterogeneity and core pathology, including alpha-synuclein, frontotemporal dementia and vascular disease, driving demand for the kind of deeply multiplex multitarget panels that only our platform can deliver. Turning to Slide 10. Our leadership position in neurodegenerative disease research is translating into increasing use of our platform in large cohort studies. Today, we announced the expansion of our strategic partnership with the Alzheimer's disease data initiative and Gates Ventures, adding profiling of an additional 86,000 plasma samples using our new NULISAseq Neuro 220 panel. Disputes on our June 2025 announcement of a multicenter initiative that provide over 55,000 samples. Included within this expanded agreement is a national scale initiative co-led by researchers at 3 leading universities, to provide approximately 21,000 plasma samples from 10,000 Alzheimer's disease research center participants across the United States. Expected to complete in 2027, the combined data set will encompass more than 140,000 samples profile across multiple geographies and cohort made available to the global research community through the global neurodegeneration [indiscernible] consortium. We believe this partnership will generate one of the most unique resources available today for understanding neurodegenerative disease. Turning to Slide 11. Beyond neurology, we are also expanding content for our other initial market inflammation. 2 weeks ago, we launched our NULISAseq Immune 340 panel, our broadest multiplus immune profiling panel. It expands on NULISAseq inflammation panel 250, our first immune panel. The biology driving this expansion is chronic low-grade inflammation, which is implicated across cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic disease, neurologic disease, autoimmune disease and aging. Until now, much of the biology has been out of reach because many [indiscernible] mediators circulating other concentrations below the detection floor of conventional immunoassay. The Immune 340 panel addresses that directly with abnormal sensitivity and simultaneous measurement of approximately 340 immune-related proteins from a single blood sample and captures the regulatory signals, feedback loops and low abundance mediators that other platforms routinely miss. We believe this panel opens a large and under-penetrated market opportunity, and we are replicating immunology the same playbook that has driven our success in neurodegenerative disease. Turning to Slide 12. We also expanded the capability of our platform with the launch of NULISAseq Dried Blood Spot extraction kits, making home collected fingerstick samples compatible with our ultra-high sensitivity multiplex [indiscernible] platform. Historically, there has been a significant technical challenge to recover protein signals from small volume dry blood spots without losing the lower-balanced biology researchers care about. Our dried blood spot extraction kits delivers the high target deductibility across our neurology and inflammation panels using many micro-sampling platforms. We believe remote at-home sample collection will be the key requirement to power future population scale screening and health monitoring tests. Turning to Slide 13. In Q2, we added more than 40 new publications and preprints bring our cumulative total to 165, spanning neurodegenerative disease, oncology, cardiovascular, metabolical and autoimmune conditions. The breadth and depth of these rapidly growing publications really highlight the impact of our platform. A particular compelling example comes from Dr. Carlos Cruchaga lab at Washington University, highlighted on Slide 14. Published in the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, the study used our platform to deliver an AI-based classifier capable of diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases and characterizing co pathology from a blood sample. What makes this study particularly striking is that a carefully selected panel of just 15 proteins delivers a strong diagnostic and co-pathological classification compared to hundreds of markers on the legacy platform. It reinforces the thesis central to our value proposition, measuring the right proteins with sufficient sensitivity and precision can outperform larger, less targeted assets. A scalable non-invasive [indiscernible] categorize core pathology has the potential to make clinical trials more productive and precision medicine more achievable. Turning to Slide 15. As I mentioned at the start of the call, the opportunity ahead of us is massive. We serve the research market today, which is substantial on its own and estimated to reach $9 billion over the next decade. But proteomics is broadly applicable across disease areas, and we believe our platform has the potential to expand beyond research into clinical diagnostics and enable early detection and health monitoring at population scale. The real value lies in the combination of our multiplex capability and the sensitivity required for clinical use. We plan to partner with companies that brings disease domain expertise, established clinical development infrastructure, regulatory experience, reimbursement pathways and commercial channels. Think of our platform as the iPhone, we provide the hardware and the operating system, and we enable third parties to build their applications. In our case, those applications are differentiated diagnostic tests that our partners will develop and where applicable, seek regulatory marketing authorization. To realize this opportunity, we are developing a clinical instrument, ARGO HT/DX and are executing a phased diagnostic enablement strategy as outlined on Slide 16. The first step is obtaining FDA marketing authorization to establish that our platform meets the regulatory bar for clinical use. We believe this will drive adoption for use in late phase clinical trials and open the door for partners to develop laboratory directed tests and IVD tests on our platform. We also believe that pursuing FDA marketing authorization may drive increased use in IO space across discovery, translation and clinical trial because we offer something most research tools cannot, a clear path to clinical translation. Once we obtain FDA marketing authorization, the second step is developing high-value differentiated test offerings. With authorization in hand, we plan to partner with IVD and LDT companies to support the development of test with stand-alone or as part of mounting solutions that are meaningfully differentiated from what exists today. Before I hand the call over to Justin to discuss our financial results, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of our Board member, Ian Redcliff. Ian bought Alamar the same quality that defines his entire career, intellectual rigor, genuine care for the people around him, and unwavering belief in the power of scientific innovation to reach patients and change lives. His commitment to Alamar and to the broader scientific community was a hallmark of his leadership, and we're better for having had him in our corner. We are at an extraordinary moment for proteomics and I believe Alamar is uniquely positioned to lead it. I'm deeply proud of what this team has built and energized by what lies ahead. With that, I will turn the call over to Justin.

Thanks, Yuling. This is our first earnings call as a public company following the completion of our IPO in April. It is a meaningful milestone and I am proud of the team's execution on both the financial and operational fronts. With that, I will now walk through our second quarter 2026 financial results in more detail. Unless otherwise noted, all growth rates reflect year-over-year comparisons. We plan to update the installed base and average instrument pull-through metrics on an annual basis and we'll be sharing those on our year-end 2026 earnings call. Starting on Slide 17. Total revenue for the second quarter was $29.4 million, up 82% compared to $16.2 million in the second quarter of 2025. These results reflect rapid and broad-based adoption of our ARGO HT platform across our customer segments and geographies. Consumables continued to be the standout performer and accounted for more than half of the total revenue in the second quarter. Consumables revenue was $15.5 million, up 147% year-over-year driven by strong demand for our multiplex panel kits as our installed base is scaled. Instrument revenue in the second quarter was $7.8 million, up 35% driven by continued growth in new instrument placements. We are pleased with the pace of placements. And as Yuling noted, the installed base now supports a strong and growing recurring consumables revenue stream. Service and other revenue was $6.2 million in the quarter, up 49%. This line is composed of our Technology Access Program, or TAP, services and maintenance contracts. Today, the majority of our service revenue was TAP revenue. Revenue from maintenance contracts is a smaller fraction as a large portion of our installed base is still covered by the 1-year warranty. As a reminder, TAP serves 3 key objectives: driving new customer acquisition, supporting custom assay development and beta testing new products prior to launch. It is worth noting that TAP is not intended to be a long-term service business. Our goal is for new customers to ultimately purchase their own instrument or transfer their work to a CRO, and we actively manage our TAP program with that conversion in mind. The increase in Q2 was driven primarily by larger custom assay development projects. As our platform continues to gain adoption and our publication base grows, we expect TAP services to grow at a slower rate than other areas of the business. Looking at the geographic breakdown for the second quarter on Slide 18. The Americas represented 69% of revenue. EMEA represented 22% and APAC represented 9%. We are actively building out our international presence, and we see meaningful runway in both EMEA and APAC as we deepen our distribution partnerships and direct commercial efforts in those regions. From a customer mix perspective, 52% of second quarter revenue came from academic and research institutions, 42% from biopharmaceutical companies and the remaining 6% from distributors. The continued strength in biopharma is particularly encouraging as these customers tend to run larger, more sustained cohort studies that drive meaningful consumables pull-through over time. Gross profit for the second quarter was $17.7 million compared to $8.6 million in the prior year period. Gross margin was 60% in the second quarter of 2026, up from 53% in the second quarter of 2025. Gross margins were at an all-time high. The improvement was primarily driven by 2 factors. First, manufacturing efficiencies as consumable production has scaled significantly; and second, a favorable shift in product mix with a greater proportion of revenue coming from consumables, which carry higher gross margins than instruments. Total operating expenses in the second quarter were $31.2 million compared to $16.5 million in the prior year period. These increases primarily reflect deliberate investments in the people, infrastructure and R&D capabilities. Research and development expenses were $13.8 million in the quarter, up 55% from $8.9 million a year earlier. The increase reflects higher lab supply costs to support our expanding consumable panel menu and an increase in personnel costs. Selling, general and administrative expenses were $17.4 million in the quarter, up 129% from $7.6 million in the prior year period. This was primarily driven by an increase in personnel costs as well as higher professional services costs for legal and accounting services. Loss from operations was $13.5 million in the second quarter compared to $7.9 million in the second quarter of 2025. This includes $3.3 million of stock-based compensation for the second quarter of 2026 as compared to $0.7 million for the second quarter of 2025. Net loss was $13.2 million in the second quarter compared to $7 million in Q2 2025. We ended the second quarter in a strong financial position. As of June 30, 2026, we had $256.3 million in cash, cash equivalents, short-term investments and restricted cash. Also, this month, we refinanced our existing debt facility with SVB First Citizens Bank into a new, more flexible revolving credit facility at improved terms and more favorable pricing. This facility includes $60 million available at closing along with an additional $40 million uncommitted accordion for a total of $100 million. We're pleased to continue to deepen our relationship with SVB for Citizens Bank who has been a valuable partner in supporting our growth since well before our IPO. The strength of our balance sheet reflects our April IPO, which generated net proceeds of $197.8 million. We are well capitalized to execute our plan, and we intend to deploy this capital strategically to scale our organization and capabilities in support of future growth by expanding our commercial sales and support function, increasing manufacturing capacity and enhancing our research and development organization to expand product content. Turning to our outlook for the rest of the year. we expect revenue for full year 2026 to be in the range of $116 million to $120 million, reflecting expected annual growth of 59% at the midpoint of the range. For the third quarter, we expect our revenue to be a modest sequential increase from Q2. On the expense side, we expect to continue investing in head count across the commercial and R&D functions along with the ongoing cost of operating as a public company. And as we grow, we remain focused on maintaining a disciplined path towards profitability. With that, I will turn the call back to Yuling.

Thanks, Justin. Before we open to questions, I want to acknowledge the Alamar team. The work required to build this business completed IPO and deliver a quarter like this simultaneously is extraordinary. I'm deeply grateful for everyone on the team who made it possible. Looking forward to the rest of 2026, we have 3 major goals: First, growing our installed base by at least 100 instruments for full year 2026, strengthening the foundation for recurring consumable revenue; second, maintaining per instrument pull-through above $400,000, which we believe is the clearest signal our customers are running our platform at real scale; and third, advancing into additional large cohort studies, particularly in translational and biopharma settings where demand for high sensitivity multiplex protein data is most acute. Into 2027, the milestone gets more significant. We plan to continue to grow our installed base of instruments and launching the multiplex panel targeting a new disease area, submit the ARGO HT/DX for FDA marketing authorization and establish partnerships to drive our clinical and diagnostic enablement strategy. Our conviction in this opportunity has never been stronger. We're well capitalized we have a clear road map, and we have a team that has demonstrated it can execute. With that, we'll now open the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question from the line of Casey Woodring with JPMorgan.

Congrats on the quarter. Maybe to start, I wanted to ask just on demand trends between academic and pharma customers in the quarter. I know pharma has been driving growth for you guys of late. So just curious if that was the case again, if you could frame up the growth by that customer segment? And then would also be curious to hear if you saw any underlying improvement in the academic markets. And then just as a follow-up, on the instruments you placed in 2Q, more broadly speaking, I was just curious if you could give us a sense of growth was driven by more placements into existing accounts or with new customers.

Yes. Thank you, Casey, for the questions. In Q2, we have seen strong growth from both academics as well as biopharma segment. And we have seen exceptional adoption by our neuro. I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing incredibly strong growth in the academic market. Going forward, we continue to expect significant growth on both academic as well as resource market.

And Casey, to answer the second part of your question on instrument placements. You asked if we're mostly going to new customers or existing customers. So if we look at this year to date, the majority of instrument placements are going to -- are going to new customers.

Maybe just to add that, I think it was exciting to see the existing customers continue to adopt additional instrument. To me, this is a good indication of existing customers have found a lot of value and the utility of our platform and they like to expand and some expansion are beyond one side to additional site, which is quite exciting to see.

Our next question is from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.

Congrats on the first quarter. Maybe just the first one on the quarter itself on the TAP strength and maybe kind of unpacking a little bit consumables and instruments. So TAP drove like really strong growth, some upside. Could you just unpack was there any onetime nature in that at all? Do you expect kind of TAP to continue? And then I know, Justin, you talked about modest growth sequentially. Just wondering, is that typical? Or is that being conservative? Just anything on that front as well? And then I have a follow-up.

Thanks for the questions. So we are very pleased with our consumable pull-through and grow almost 150% over last year at the same time. We're also quite excited to see the TAP increase, which is certainly significantly above what we have anticipated. And one of the major reasons for this is the customer asset development. We are happy to see that customer asset development indicates the customer wants to move from discovery leveraging our platform; two, translation and future clinical application. So we do believe that over the longer term, those increase in customer revenues will translate into future consumables or instrument adoptions.

And Dan, to add to that about the TAP program, like we said, it's got 3 objectives: drive new customers, support the custom assay development and then beta testing of new products ahead of launch. We do have a really strong top pipeline. And as Yuling said, we believe it's a good leading indicator of future demand. To your question around onetime, I suppose you could say if we're ideally, all of TAP would be onetime because then we would be transitioning to new products. We did see a higher volume for TAP in this past quarter than we had been expecting. I do expect that the trend will continue in the near term into Q3, but not at the level that we saw in -- not at the level that we saw in Q2. And then you had another question around just a step up overall from Q2 to Q3 when we talk about a modest step up. And so when we use the term modest, to me, that means like low single-digit sequential growth from Q2 to Q3.

One moment for our next question please. It comes from Puneet Souda with Leerink.

First one is on pull through. I wanted to understand the 400,000 pull-through number that you have and you expect to continue to exceed that. You exceeded that number last year or 2. So just trying to understand sort of -- how are you thinking about that number longer term, the cadence of that? As I look at this quarter, was there a step-down in the pull-through from Q1 to Q2? And is that just a function of more installs, which is an indicator of future consumables growth in our mind. But just also the last part of the question is, could you maybe talk about the ceiling that you can reach given the output of this platform on the pull-through side? And I have a follow-up.

Thank you, Puneet. Certainly, we're seeing a great demand for consumables. As I mentioned, the consumable have grown close to 150% over last year. We think this is still early days. When you acquire new customers, it takes time for the new customer to ramp up. And that's exactly what you explained about the pull-throughs. We remain very confident that we'll continue to keep the pool to about $400,000 this year, which I remind you that this is industry leading.

And I'll just add that new instrument placements will put some pressure on pull-through in the near term, just given the number of instruments that are being placed each quarter relative to the size of our installed base. And so we expect that there would be fluctuations quarter-to-quarter on the quarterly pull-through, which is why, at this time, we're providing that metric on an annual basis. And you had a second part around the pull-through ceiling. If you were to use the assumption that you would do 3 plates in a 24-hour period, 5 days a week, you could get to a ceiling of $5 million, $6 million per instrument on theoretical pull-through.

That's super helpful. Yes, please, Yuling.