Butterfly Network, Inc. ($BFLY)

Earnings Call Transcript · May 12, 2026

NYSE US Health Care Health Care Equipment and Supplies Company Conference Presentations 15 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Joseph DeVivo

Executives
#1

[Audio Gap] to Bank of America for giving us the opportunity to present. So my name is Joe DeVivo. I'm the CEO of Butterfly Network, and I look forward to either introducing you or giving you an update to the overall story. So we are a point-of-care ultrasound business. Point of care ultrasound is bringing ultrasound to where the patients are. So instead of a patient having to go into the hospital and have a radiology exam, doctors are educated to use a device, nurses. So wherever the patient is in the hospital or in the outside, in the home, doctors would carry these devices to be able to manage patents. And it's a whole new way of reducing the cost of care, democratizing ultrasound because about 2/3 of the world doesn't have access to medical imaging. They don't have that beautiful hospital where these just go in and get the overall image. And so we are bringing -- can I have the clicker, if you don't mind? So we are a semiconductor-based ultrasound device. So that semiconductor acts very much like a TV screen where we are able to program it to deliver all different types of sound dynamically. So about 20% of patients with serious conditions are first misdiagnosed. About 80% of diagnostic dilemmas can be solved with simple imaging and the initial assessments with imaging results in changed medical diagnosis if they're in the right upfront. That means like at your primary chair doctor, that means when you engage, instead of them taking your symptoms and then making the best decision with that data, giving them more data. It's like we were -- we are the stethoscope salespeople 40 years ago who said, "Hey, doc, it might be good if you to listen to the bowel sounds, listen to the fluid and the lumps, listen to the heart." Now we're giving them a device that's only several thousand dollars to be able to see inside the body when they see the patient. And it's having massive impacts around the world. And the way it works is supercomputers used to be huge. Now we all carry one in our pocket. Well, ultrasound machines are huge. Now doctors and nurses are going to be able to have a device in their pocket. And it's all made possible by the development of the semiconductor because whether you look at the heart, whether you look at the lungs, MSK, peripheral, vascular, you would typically need a different probe for each one of those applications. And what we have now is the ability to just identify what part of the body you would like to scan, choose that part of the body and then the settings of the chip change to be able to deliver the type of array and frequency necessary for that part of the body. What we are to classic ultrasound is what digital photography was to film. We are revolutionizing ultrasound through digital, the digital acquisition. Now, ultrasound will do back-end digital processing, but they don't capture the image in a digital form where they can change and dynamically change those settings. So it's a very, very powerful tool, and we're making a lot of progress, so much so that we're actually getting noticed in the world. We're getting noticed. And we are on The Pitt, we were on just recently on Survivor and then Virgin River. I never watched that show that's my wife show, but she got excited when this particular person had a lower rate quadrant pain and had to diagnose an appendectomy. But what we're making -- Butterfly is making its mark in health care. We have over 150,000 devices sold to date. There are doctors in all different types of walks of life that have them for all their different use cases. And now we're becoming a verb, "Did you Butterfly that patient?" It's really, really strong type of adoption. And now we're working with large institutions about institutionalizing this into the main component of health care. Now, also, as individual doctors walk around with individual ultrasound devices in order to make this work for hospitals, they have to be able to capture the scan. So we're one of the only companies in -- the only medical companies in the world to ever receive an Apple design award. We are architected in a cloud-based app-based modern architecture with a modern SaaS platform that integrates to all the systems in the hospital. So we can have -- we have hospitals now who have over 1,000 different devices and all those devices stream data into the stream data into the EMR, stream data into the DICOM, stream data into the revenue cycle management system because in point-of-care ultrasound, hospitals only capture about 35% of their scans. And so that's 65% leakage on revenue and also data compliance as they're they need to have that data to be compliant. So we've architected ourselves in a very modern way. When I was running other device companies, and I wanted to update my software on a device in a hospital, I have to send my rep in with a USB stick. Now I can push an update just like iPhone to all those devices around the world. We come up with a new concept, we push it. And so our architecture is actually one of our strategic advantages. And what it allows us is in ultrasound, the hardest part about ultrasound is that it's hard. If you've had an MRI, if anyone has had an MRI or CT, you go into the MRI lab and the tech puts you on the table and tells you not to hit your head on the way in. And then they go outside and initiate an automated protocol. Ultrasound is like an art. You have to actually search the anatomy, and then you have to understand what you found. It's a much harder modality to do. So it's kind of an enigma. You have this low-cost modality but it's harder to do. So how do you make it easier? AI. There's over 30 companies now in Butterfly Garden developing LLM models to be able to make it easier for caregivers to do an ultrasound scan and at a minimum, make it easier to acquire the image. So the 2 biggest challenges in ultrasound is image acquisition and image interpretation. If you make it easy for a nurse to go into a home and do a cardiac echo, which is the highest volume cardiac image taken, you can send that image to a cardiology clinic, they can make a decision, change their medications for that patient, keep them in the home, keep them in the nursing home, keep them where they're at and stop the revolving door in and out of the hospital because they're not getting the appropriate management of care. The amount of apps we have now and the amount of -- whether it's cardiac echo or pulmonary or MFM, we just received the first FDA approval of a blind-sweep of any company in the world just a month ago. And FDA was so proud of it they actually tweeted and posted on LinkedIn that this is the way AI should be approved with the appropriate safety, and efficacy data and it's all based upon the apps and how we come into our ecosystem. That will change health care. And just like the iPhone took over BlackBerry, we will take over all of the legacy handhelds when we have all of our applications easy and in a modern way. We also now are helping work with at-risk providers to be able to show them how to use this in their practice and how to use this in order to be closer to patients. And we are going to be creating a whole new home care business that allows us to manage the logistics in order to move that part of this forward. So that's another we have our devices, we have software, and now we're building a service business. That will be a very material contributor in 2027. Now there is a moment happening right now. And that moment is ultrasound is being seen as an amazing bridge into the human body by AI, and a lot of different use cases, and this is normalized from a growth rate standpoint. There's about 13,000 to 16,000 studies on normal ultrasound a year, but it's very flat. There's about 2,000 studies on point-of-care ultrasound a year, but it's very flat. But now new applications on how ultrasound can be used in the brain for neuromodulation, how it could be used for deep brain stimulation, where literally we are the only company in the world that has commercialized a digital ultrasound on a chip. And we may be the next bridge between that chip and AI in the human body. And there's a lot of use cases now. So what we've made a decision is to start a business by licensing our chip to third-party companies who are not competitive with Butterfly in its core space. And that's called our Embedded program because we have solved a foundational problem in overall technology and we're the only one who can put this chip and have this continuously evolving semiconductor-based ultrasound. And what it does for us is our TAM for point-of-care ultrasound is just about $30 billion. But now by partnering with other companies in some very big use cases, our TAM goes from about $30 billion up to about $35 billion because we can participate in all these different segments of the market. So we've launched a program called Butterfly Embedded. For those looking at the slides a lot like Intel Inside, as you see in the bottom right, and that's exactly what it is, is that we have an ultrasound processor that can help third parties accelerate their ultrasound aspirations by using our tech platform. From 1993 to 2005, NVIDIA was a video game company. They made processes for video games. What they did. They had a GPU, they had POCUS because they had to have this multidimensional activity and then they had to have someone else have this multidimensional activity interact, and they constantly evolve that. And it wasn't until 2005 when they launched something called CUDA. CUDA was their developer software, and that allowed third parties for the first time to go into the chip and change the settings for their particular applications. That's when the world started to change from them. And if you listen -- I listen to The Joe Rogan Podcast that had Jensen on for 3 hours. I listened to him speak to Stanford students, where he said, "We had no idea what our next chip would be used for. We just kept pushing the boundaries of technology." Well, we're taking that same mindset. We're a point-of-care ultrasound company primarily. But we now have opened our software up to third-party developers, and they are now finding all different types of new use cases for the technology, and that's turning into pretty potent revenue stream. So a company that was purely point-of-care ultrasound POCUS now has shots on goals for all these other markets, and we are actively talking to companies in each of these markets. So we are developing point-of-care ultrasound. We have a sales force, we have a marketing team, we have the cost of building that market but we can now participate in all these other markets without having to develop them but by partnering with someone who's there who needs our core technology. We have 600 patents in this space. That's cost us $300 million to make our first chip. We are now selling our third-generation ship. Our fourth generation is at TSMC, who is our partner, and we are developing our fifth generation ship. And here's our pipeline. We've never shown this before. but we have 4 companies that are working with us that have been publicly disclosed. We have another 5 companies that don't want to be unveiled yet, but these are real early players in their space and those are our partners. And then we have another 40 companies that we are actively talking to license our chip. So the ability to build our point-of-care ultrasound market and grow and see the dream of every doctor and every nurse having their own device is what our core mission is, but being able to now leverage the technology for all different parts of health care to accelerate the benefit of human care, and then also to have our existing shareholders benefit from all that innovation is why I think the next several years of Butterfly are going to be absolutely insane. When these applications start going public when these companies start bringing them out and also in point-of-care properly adopts and inflects, this is going to be one of the most exciting growth stories you guys are going to watch. You just remember, that you're here today because this is a real exciting time for us. The way our revenue as our company comes in, is both POCUS and Embedded. We are now breaking out the Embedded revenue and we sell hardware, services and software in the POCUS segment. And then on the Embedded side or the chip side, we have a licensing fee, we sell chips and we do a revenue share, depending upon different models that they want exclusivity, et cetera. And that within the most recent quarter, it was about -- or in this year, it's about 20%, 25% of our revenue now, and I think it's going to be a much bigger part. We're in the midst of a big turnaround. If anyone has seen Butterfly, we used to be a company with declining revenues, lower gross margins, burning a lot of cash. Over the last 3 years, we're now doubling our revenue. We're in the high 60s in gross margin. We have a strong balance sheet. We're using less and less cash. We'll get to breakeven on a current cash and we're going to be generating a tremendous amount of value. And just last quarter, we grew 25%, improved our gross margins by 600 basis points, reduced our loss and are really focusing on being very good shepherds of our cash. So with that, I just want to thank you for your attention and, again, for Bank of America for giving us this opportunity. So thank you very much.

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