Brain+ A/S (BRAINP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to this investor presentation and Q&A with Brain+. With us today, we have the CEO and the U.K. commercial team. First, there will be a presentation and afterwards a Q&A with the management team. There have already been pre-submitted questions on Stokk.io and the Q&A is still open so that you can submit questions live as well. I will now hand over the mic to Brain+ to start the presentation. Your lines are now open.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this shorter half an hour update on the commercial pipeline of the U.K. and all the great efforts that the team is doing over there, which for us right now is the really exciting journey that we have begun on with the launch of Ayla your CST Assistant in the U.K. and now getting really strong traction in this market with great dialogues and great confirmation of what we initially thought were some very interesting segments. So here with me today is Devika, our Chief Commercial Officer; and Fiona our SVP Partnerships to share with you about the current pipeline, the activities going on over there in terms of sales, marketing and commercialization and then we take Q&A afterwards. So Devi and Fiona, over to you guys.

Great. Thank you so much, Kim. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. So Fiona and I thought it would be really impertinent to basically provide an update as to the sales pipeline that we've been building over the last couple of months, it's crazy to think that we've actually been in the organization for such a short period of time, but we've done so many incredible things to help us to get the foot in the door into the U.K. market. So we'll take you through briefly around the pipeline value that we've created, including like the number of opportunities and where we're seeing the biggest target opportunity in terms of both contract size and market opportunity, towards addressable market opportunity. Just to kind of iterate that the work that we've been doing in terms of the U.K. launch, we came into the U.K. with a very unknown brand. No one really knew about Brain+. We've had 0 marketing budget allocated and what we've achieved and managed to achieve in such a short period of time is a testament to not only the market opportunity, but the kind of great team that we have backing us and the great solution that we're solving for a big problem that's needed. So over the next year, we are totally confident that we will be able to hit targets and hopefully supercede targets, considering what we've managed to achieve in the last sort of 16 weeks. So I will start and my colleague, Fiona will no doubt hopefully jump in at any point because we work together really well like that. And if I missed out anything Fiona, just cut in any point that you want to. So we've done some amazing work. We've been creating incredibly powerful marketing strategies around leveraging sort of webinars and trying to leverage ourselves as experts in the CST space, but also trying to bring some brand awareness to Brain+ and awareness to cognitive simulation therapy being a leading and actually, at the moment, only real validated nonpharmacological intervention for dementia. So you may have noticed that we've hosted a few webinars with some really amazing experts as panelists, which have been brilliant to showcase not only people that are really engaged from an expert level and key opinion needed level in the business, but we also really believe in the mission that we're delivering against. So the webinars have been absolutely brilliant in terms of showcasing us and creating a brand presence. Fiona has attended a dementia strategy day launch in Devon, which has been crucial and critical to us being at the forefront of where the commissioners and clinical leads are essentially developing and devising dementia strategies and where we can then come in as Brain+ to really think about how we can support those dementia strategies to better target and support patients with dementia across the region. We've also done some incredible outbound lead gen activities that Fiona can maybe touch on more because she's been doing some incredible LinkedIn outreach and had some great conversion rates of around 30% to 40% on outbound lead gen. And then on top of that, we've been working to refine and validate and really create a compelling value proposition for Brain+. As we mentioned before, we had initially been targeting, obviously, the NHS pipeline, the health systems, where there is a real value add and a real opportunity for us to build Brain+ and our CST offering into it. We all understand and it's really interesting and important that as a commercial team and an organization, we don't just deploy services and rely on revenues from public market sector. There's multiple reasons why we don't. One of them being the fact that they are often longer sales cycles. But secondly, obviously, there are lots of market forces and factors that can impact those sales cycles and impact revenue targets. So although the NHS and health systems are a #1 priority, we believe it pertinent to create another revenue line and opportunity that was a shorter sales cycle that could drive some brilliant revenue numbers and that we weren't relying on public sector. And that would be the private sector, which was namely around care homes and retirement villages. So we've been doing a lot of research into the market and understanding where we can position Ayla or CST into the care home sector and the retirement village sector. We've had some incredible conversations, and we've kind of identified some really, really hot incredible opportunities to sell and have some revenue coming in from January 2025. So I'll now talk slightly about the pipeline. However, I'll just briefly pause and I'll allow Fiona to come in, in case I have missed out anything and if she wants to add anything in to what I've just said.

I just think to add to -- well, there's a few things. I think some of you in the last couple of sessions, I've been involved with have expressed an interest and knowledge and awareness of the U.K. market with regards to the NHS and that's just kind of reassessing the points that Devika have made. But within the last 16 weeks, it is important to understand that we have had in the U.K. a new budget, which is obviously directly influenced health care budget and spending. And as I said, in the last session, the commitments that the government have made to the NHS are probably some of the more positive commitments that we've seen and that has results in a more positive sentiment from the NHS that we may not have seen prior to the budget. And that's the first thing. However, we are facing significant -- a significant crisis in our acute hospital sector with a significant flu pandemic. And that is -- that does bear the risk of potentially directing people's attentions elsewhere. But we're doing everything we can to link dementia and the cost of dementia directly to some of those system impacts. And so actually, this is a really important part of that story and can't be seen separately or discretely. The Scotland released their budget last week, which made some really clear commitments to dementia, which is really positive and through already established links the Scottish government. We are working hard to kind of reassert again, dementia treatment, but also the role of cognitive simulation therapy and supporting those dementia aims and objectives. What was really interesting about the Devon dementia strategy launched last week was the way in which they were positioning the strategy, thinking about preventing well, diagnosing well, supporting well, living well. We are able to provide an offer that tackles each of those components. And there were explicit references to cognitive simulation therapy within that strategy document. So that has led to a very targeted outbound to say, we want to work with you as system leaders, but we also want to work with community organizations that are delivering CST and exploring ways in which we can accelerate your work. So it's not a zero-sum game. We're not coming in and saying, "You have to choose us or no one." What we're saying is we can amplify and expand your existing provision, which from a sales perspective is a much easier message to be providing than if we were going in as a full service replacement that would make it much harder and much more of a replacement. So -- and that has also resulted in a direct link to a professor who has made an extended limitation to Brain+ to attend an international dementia conference in April, which will support some of our international activities to again diversify the market, which Devi will touch upon in terms of New Zealand. But it will also allow us to explore his direct connections to the Prime Minister's office around dementia and rural communities, which aligns very well to our product strategy moving into next year, particularly around how virtual CST can help address dementia challenges faced by those living in rural and coastal areas and those facing health inequalities as a result. And through that exposure through that ongoing marketing communications outbound activities, we are able to really strengthen and amplify the role of Brain+ where we didn't have that brand presence prior to joining, which is, I think, all really positive. The dovetail approach of going grassroots and top-down will serve us well. You will know the vast majority of you live in similar systems where it's public funded. You will know that there are sales cycles attached to that. But that is why we're kind of coming at it from a very sort of targeted approach with regards to what we said last time and say, for example, one of our top targets for NHS trusts in a place called Greater Manchester, which is in the Northwest. And we are in conversation with the dementia program lead and the dementia project manager and that has also looked at pile of opportunities. So whilst we're opportunistic with areas like Devon, and we're also retaining that focus on those priority trust as we have highlighted a couple of times now. I think that's it from me, from an NHS lens, but I think budgets on our side, stakeholders around our side, commitments to CSTs on our side, is just letting this play through in that context of some of the political movements that we have going on in the U.K. at the moment, but not that insurmountable to sales and closing contracts.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Fi. So I'll talk briefly now around the emergence of our pipeline and what that means. And the deals I was mentioning in terms of retirement villages and care homes. So I'd mentioned retirement villages as of January 2025. The reason I mentioned that was because this is new opportunities that have come out in the last sort of few days, which will be pertinent to closing probably early in the new year rather than this side of the new year. And that's not to sway from the deals that we have live and the targets that we have live for end of this year. So in terms of opportunities, we have one deal size of around GBP 50,000. These are all annualized costs. So these are annual ARR figures. So this is with one of the U.K.'s leading retirement communities, where we're looking to sort of enhance our dementia care offering scale. So retirement communities for those in the audience who aren't aware of what these are. These are often luxury or not luxury locations where people will live, they can purchase flats and they end up in locations where they've got kind of 24/7 support around them, but they're often independent living. So they're not as advanced in terms of care needs within a care home setting. And they're also coined to be really nice places that people can live over a certain age where they can maintain their independence but also live really happily and healthily. So often, you'll find retirement communities and retirement villages, house, health and wellness facilities. They'll have dining options, they'll have bars, they'll have on-site care teams. So no matter who you are and where you are in your sort of life, these facilities are meant to help you live as independently and happily as you possibly can and they are beautiful. I've seen a few and they're absolutely stunning. So they are brilliant locations. And what makes them amazing for us is that -- and this is why Fiona and I have been so hot on thinking about a private sector market care homes, retirement villages outside the NHS. CST is obviously at the moment in our -- in its current format, and it's our current product that we have [indiscernible]. The best format for delivery is obviously a multimodal group therapy with between 5 and 8 people, 2 sessions per week over 7 weeks. Care Homes and retirement villages where people are under one roof. This makes this a prime situation and opportunity for us to deliver CST and embed CST into their health and wellness activities. The other reason why it's so pertinent is that retirement village is often people will come in at an earlier age, so over 55 and they will hopefully stay for the full tenure and the facilities will maintain that, that person can live as healthy and as happy as they possibly can. In terms of, obviously, when people will likely get dementia, we have researched and found that I think it's 20% of those that live in these facilities end up having dementia. And it's really, really important for these communities and businesses to maintain those individuals as residents because they want to keep them there for many reasons. It's often hard to fill spots and obviously, lifetime value of keeping somebody there is really important in terms of their cost evaluations. So the reason why this CST solution becomes so valuable and important is that it can help people who have early onset dementia, mild to moderate dementia to maintain their cognitive function and reduce their cognitive decline and therefore help them to live happier and more cognitively functioning for a longer period of time. So this is a really, really amazing activity or therapy that could be embedded into their health and wellness activities. So you'll notice there's about 3 deals that we've got really exciting ones. For December through to New Year that we're working on as we speak. So larger retirement villages circa GBP 200,000 for proposals for a year worth of delivery of CST and then smaller ones, we're looking at around GBP 7,500. They range and they scale depending on whether we want to be sort of an innovation partner and trial out the solution within a care home setting or a retirement village setting or whether we want to deploy actively CST. And we will price it up based on the number of residents they currently have, the number of groups they want to deliver. And we'll do it on a per-person basis because often within the care home setting and the retirement village setting, you can have a pass-through cost. So we can do proposals baked in around the retirement village or care home covering x amount and then potentially a pass-through cost to the residents at a discounted rate. So there's amazing ways that we can work and partner with these establishments. We just are seeing that huge attractiveness and there's a huge push and a need to deploy this to help these establishments obviously keep their residents as healthy as possible. I will briefly stop there, and I'll allow Fiona to either touch on anything I've missed out again or talk to the NHS pipeline.

I think just to add to the care house, I think what was really striking about the conversation that we had with this very senior stakeholder, who has a role at a national level in terms of influencing conversation is the values alignment between our 2 organizations. And this concept of that if you can compress the amount of time that people are in that very advanced stage, then there are such significant benefits to quality of life to that dementia and cognitive decline journey that actually it makes sense to invest in these types of interventions. And that's obviously a really important signal for us that they fundamentally understand what it is that we're trying to achieve, both in terms of cosimulation therapy as an intervention, but also as an organization in terms of trying to scale it. So I think that's really important. It has led to some very direct parallels with other countries, particularly those countries that are doing this very well, like the U.S., like the New Zealand and through both Dev and I's connections from other lives and other experiences, we have already started to initiate those conversations included with a large-scale provider in New Zealand. So again, thinking constantly how are we responding to what customers are telling us, how we're reselling to prospects to how to then be able to continue to build the pipeline and enable us to kind of fill that top of the funnel, if you like, to then be able to execute and close quickly. From an NHS perspective, we have obviously described the sort of strategy that we've been adopting over the last couple of months in relation to how we are positioning ourselves and how we position quite finite resource and efforts to those that we think have the highest potential in terms of conversion. And with this in mind, what it has meant is that we've been able to get conversations. So we're not doing a sort of spray -- what I call a spray and pray approach, which is just bombarding people on LinkedIn. It does not work for the NHS and it will not work either. They get bombarded with this sort of stuff all the time. So that's why we've had to really double down on being quite targeted. And to that end, we've been engaging with a number of stakeholders across the Northwest in the Southwest, as I said, and also within London. This has led to a number of opportunities where we've been exploring stakeholder engagement to promote ILS adoption and implement CST in a quality improvement. So what we don't want to do. We need to recognize that from an NHS perspective, we are still relatively unknown and therefore, we are really thinking about how do we frame our offerings. What we don't want to do is be seen as a clinical innovation because actually, this isn't a clinical innovation. This is an established intervention. So really, what we want to establish ourselves as a quality improvement program, and that will tap into key drivers that are influencing budget and spend going into next financial year, which begins in April. We are also looking at lead opportunities, so focusing on integrated care boards where they have the power to directly commission and tell provider organizations what to deliver. So we're exploring an opportunity in the Midlands as well as in the Southwest again with the Devon dementia strategy as the impetus to have that conversation. And thinking about creative ways in which we can explore those different components of a dementia strategy. So thinking again about living well, supporting well, preventing well, diagnosing well, our solution is not confined to supporting well, but rather can meet various different aspects of those different areas. So that means we're broadening out who we can talk to within an NHS ecosystem, and we're not limiting our pipeline by being very prescriptive, which has also meant that we can be a bit more creative in terms of how we explore those quality improvement projects. So there's 2 big opportunities that we're currently exploring with ICBs and that doesn't include Greater Manchester, as I described earlier. And then finally, we have submitted a proposal that's being actively discussed with a team that's really establishing Ayla as a service evaluation project as a way for this service to introduce CST, where they've tried and failed before we can provide a plug-and-play approach where they can just get started and very much framing it as a service evaluation to improve and optimize service delivery and the offer to patients where quite often they're diagnosed and then there's nothing. We're talking to clinical leads, consultant psychiatrists and also obviously navigating towards service managers. I would anticipate that at this stage of the year, everybody will be thinking I've got a bit of spend going into next financial year, we need to spend this. So I would imagine some of these will start converging relatively quickly, and we'll start getting into contracting conversations because the NHS is not allowed to take money over into new financial years they have to spend in year, which is good for us. So all of the work that we're doing at the moment is laying the foundations for those conversations that will then be enabled by things like G Cloud contracting to be able to enable rapid closes, which is obviously what we've been targeting from the start, but recognizing the kind of the position that we were in when we first started talking to you about our U.K. market entry strategy.

Great. Thanks, Devi. Thanks, Fiona, so much. And I think for the audience, this also brings a bit of perspective into the 2 segments that we're pursuing. As you can see, some of the care home deals we're looking at already, are already quite large where we started with a smaller NHS deal size, but we also know that the NHS deal size over time as we move up to integrated care board level can increase through some very significant sizes, but it's a longer-term play. So that's why we have this balance between the private care home market and the public NHS market, both of which are potentially very attractive markets in the long term. So Anders, over to you and questions from the audience.

[Operator Instructions]. The question is divided into 4 parts, so I will take one part each so that you can answer everything. And the first part is, could you update us on time line for a new issuance of stock/funding need?

Yes. So there's -- we don't really have any news except what we have been saying most of this quarter and also for a long time now that we will need some new funding in the new year, and we've been working on multiple tracks for that. And we do plan to share as soon as we know something concrete that we can share, we want to share that with you. And of course, some of this stuff is something that we can share more publicly and some of it is not, right? So we'll share something as soon as we have news on the funding -- on the specifics of the next funding.

Yes. And the second part of the question is also funding related. Can there be any potential happenings like, for example, a large sale that would cancel this issuance/funding need?

So I would say in the short term, we will need some funding. A large sale can offset some of the funding need. And also something like grants can offset some of the midterm to long-term funding needs as we've been very successful with in the past. But in the short term, in the shorter term, you can say for the first half of next year, and we will need some funding.

And then the third part of the question, what is the funding for the running costs or more R&D with Brain+?

So the funding is for funding operations and for funding commercial scaling. So it's not for the R&D in particular. So really, what we are very focused on is just for the sales and commercial takeoff and all activities are very concretely on those activities and the product adjustments necessary to serve the U.K. market in the best possible ways. So any R&D funding that we're looking to do, which goes outside of that main focus is something we get funded with grants, and we have a numerous grant obligations out for funding those activities.

And then the final part of the question from this person. Brain+ stated at some time that a U.K. sale would be at end of November, which was adjusted to end of year. I guess, if any official data available on this or even an indication, could you please share?

Yes. So I'll take that one. So yes, so we are working around the turn at the end of the year for closure of sales and obviously, contract signing for deals that you can see in that pipeline. Like Fi said, it's good because there's often budget that's being -- that's kind of been left unallocated and needs to be spent because it can't go on to the next financial year. And so yes, we're working to closing deals. And obviously, we've created a really, really extremely strong and healthy pipeline for the end of the year going into the new year, which is brilliant to have because it means that we can really rapidly close conversations and contracts as soon as we hit post Christmas, when everyone comes back. We've got some amazing opportunities lined up, which is a really great place to start a new year, and it's what every sales team dreams of. So we're in a good position.

And then we have a final question here so far. Do Brain+ have a saving value on CST treatment per patient when comparing analog CST treatments to digital run CST treatments. And what would those savings be in percentages?

That's an interesting one. Fiona and I have been looking at this data. We've got some economic value in terms -- we've got some economic savings in terms of the current analog capabilities of CST. Fiona did we -- have we got anything captured for the digital first? And I know we've got the cost per patient to be delivering to go through CST via Ayla. I don't know saving points that we've adjusted.

No, I mean I think follow up with a written response to that question based on information that we have from original economic analysis that was undertaken as part of research that illustrates the cost possession. And we know what we're obviously pricing at, which not only is below that original economic evaluation, which was done some years ago, but also remains extremely competitive in the context of inflation, and we can share that information. But I just want to add as well. That is one of the reasons why we are looking to do this service evaluation with very much the ROI and economic evaluation in mind. It's not enough for us to lean on theoretical at this stage when it comes to the NHS, but particularly the climate that the NHS finds itself in, which is why we're trying to position ourselves as a quality improvement project first and foremost those services that aren't delivering CST, but should be because it's a nice recommendation, but also to provide that exact metric, but it needs to be within the NHS context. And it's obviously our sincere hope that by positioning ourselves as a service evaluation first and foremost, that we'll be able to get that data that then drives activities through. But as it stands today, we have an economic analysis that we can share that's rooted in the original research that was undertaken and that takes into account our current pricing. And it's good, just FYI.

Perfect. And that was actually all the questions that we got for today. So that finalizes the Q&A. And before we just end this webcast, let me hand over the word for you if you have any final remarks to end with.

Yes. I think, first of all, thanks, everyone, for coming and listening. I think today's presentation just makes it all the more clear that we are literally on the cusp of breaking through into a large market already having shown traction and repeat multiyear contract sales in our home market in Denmark. But even in the U.K. where the stars are much more aligned than they ever were in Denmark and with this pipeline having been created in just a couple of months by the team, the outlook is really, really exciting. And so it's literally a matter of time before we realize this. So we hope that you will join us for this journey, and we thank you for your time today.