Exyn Technologies, Inc. (EXYN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. This is Paul Kuz with RedChip Companies. I want to thank everyone for joining today's event with Exyn Technologies, which trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol EXYN. With us today, we have Brandon Torres Declet, CEO; Ben Williams, COO; and Brandon Duick, CTO. We will begin with a brief presentation in a moment, and then we'll open up the webinar for questions. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'm going to run through the safe harbor statement. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements pertain to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical facts should also be considered forward-looking and, of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. With that, I will now turn the webinar over to Brandon. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining RedChip's Exyn Technologies Investor Presentation. My name is Brandon Torres Declet, I'm the CEO of Exyn Technologies. I began my drone career back in 2001, shortly after 9/11 working at the Pentagon for the Air Force. Early days of the Predator program in General Atomics. I founded my first drone company, Measure, back in 2013, grew that to the largest drone service provider in North America, ended up selling that to AgEagle Aerial Systems, a ticker on that is UAVS, became the CEO there, did several acquisitions, one of Sensefly drone manufacturer out of Switzerland and a sensor company called MicaSense out of Seattle, Washington. I'm also a co-founder of Unusual Machines, the ticker on that is UMAC I've been with Exyn Technologies for approximately 2.5 years. And what you're going to here today and why I joined the company is an incredible moat, incredible technological advantage in autonomous navigation, autonomous mapping. Joining me today, I've got Ben Williams, our COO; and Brandon Duick, our CTO. Ben will kick it off here with the deck, and then we'll turn it over to Q&A. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Brandon, and I appreciate everyone being here. So as mentioned, my name is Ben. I'm the Chief Operating Officer and over here at Exyn Technologies. Broadly, my charter is productization, execution and go-to-market. Previous to this, I've been a multi-time founder, most recently a company called [ Reliom ] that we raised [ Venture 4 ] and sold AT&T. Prior to that has been a -- helped build out a deep tech commercialization group within Lockheed Martin and former naval Officer as well. So we'll move forward here with a little bit about the company -- so you can think of us as sitting at the intersection of high accuracy rapid mapping and autonomous navigation and specifically what we would call a self-contained autonomy. GPS denied, comms denied, no prior map or model and no external computer fiducials required for the autonomous navigation. A big piece of where we've been able to provide value so far is around physical industries that have a gap in digital and digitization of their industries. You can see a bunch of great examples here on the left-hand side of the slide of very successful physical industries that still have people out gathering information with handheld tools, using their eyeballs or out driving trucks around. So as you might imagine, this is labor intensive. It's still dirty, dangerous. There's a lot of opportunities for autonomous systems to take over some of this work. Our biggest -- one of our earliest categories was in the underground mining world. You can see here a great example of an underground mine that had been out of operations for a while. And the owners were looking to reopen operations at the mine. But because it hadn't been entered in a long time, it was not deemed to say if they didn't know what the state of the mine was and they needed this information in order to reopen. So what we were able to do for them is on the upper right-hand side of this diagram you see the operator launch pad. This is where the drone was launched to do an exploration here because you don't know the full state of the mine or the layout. We were able to just give it a high-level mission objective of explore and map. The system took about a 10-minute flight and came back with a full survey grade model of the entire mine space. So if you're doing the math there, that's about a 10-minute flight, 30 minutes to set up 30 minutes breakdown, in less than half a day, you're getting what would otherwise have taken you days or weeks to enter on foot. So a pretty big opportunity for improved speed, safety and accuracy. When it comes to autonomous systems, there's a lot of mentioning of the word autonomy, not always a lot of definition of what it means and how it impacts actual outcomes. So I want to make 2 specific distinctions here, the difference between automation versus autonomy. And then within the context of autonomy, what level of autonomy do we operate at. So within an automatic system, not autonomous, but in the -- in the automated world, you can think of this as human defined, human-managed machine executed. This means that humans have to do the preplanning. They define the possible paths, they define outcomes, and they have to control the environment to try and make sure there's no changes. Any issue with this, any change in the environment modifications to the pathway. That means that a human hand has to intervene again before the machines can take over. On the autonomous side, these systems are able to be resilient to those types of changes in the environment. An autonomous system can work based off of the high-level mission objective and redecide how to accomplish that overall objective in the context of changing environmental conditions. Within the context of autonomy, we operate at what's called Level 4B. Some of the key hallmarks you can see on the slide, but an operator is not flying the system. This means that you're giving -- the human is giving the machine a high-level mission objective, the system self defines all the sub-objectives: waypoints, safe navigation corridor, speeds, et cetera. Reasons about the obstacles and things in the environment. A great example is when you are in a constrained space, often, a drone will kick up quite a dust that's been sitting there. For a raw sensor stream, cloud of dust actually shows up as basically a feature a wall or a nonnavigable object, even though it is technically navigable. So with a filtration or classification system, you're able to determine that, that is a navigable object of dust while still detecting solid objects within the middle of the dust, which makes for a much more resilient system, a higher degree of dependability in operations and much safer navigation. So in the context of our core technologies, we have most of our IP in the software side. That's all contained in what we call Exyn AI, which is our overall software suite. But because we play in the real world, you always have to hit hardware somewhere. So what we've done to manage this is what you see on the left-hand side, the Exyn Nexys. This is a modular autonomy payload. It provides mapping and navigation capabilities to drones, ground robots, et cetera. You can see a bunch of the examples here. These are all commercial off-the-shelf systems that with -- when paired with the Exyn Nexys gain the ability to navigate autonomously in GPS-denied categories and provide the mapping needed to make these systems even more useful. So I mentioned we started off in the underground mining space. The second biggest market for us has been the geospatial data world. These are a bunch of example industries that are part of that broader geospatial diaspora. Each of these are large opportunities on their own. They're early stage for these markets, but they're growing very rapidly. We expect geospatial to actually take over as our largest revenue driver by the end of this year. In terms of how we think about platform growth here, we've gone from a very verticalized, very targeted use cases to increasingly more flexible and modular tools. The Exyn Nexys has been an outgrowth of this, making the system both physically and software-wise modular. This has meant an outgrowth in terms of how we work with external partners as well. It's enabled us to enter our third category, which is the OEM market. And what we mean by OEMs in this case is anyone who is building product on top of our capabilities. So the 2 ways we work here is either by licensing the software as a whole or in modules as part of our SDK or by working with folks to integrate the Nexys through an API structure where they gain access to real-time information and control for the system integrated with Nexys. And the fourth category here is in Government & Defense. You can imagine that GPS denied, comms denied capability is really, really critical for contested airspace. The fact that we can operate day 1 without dependence on GPS and comms means we don't have to develop specialized technologies to operate in those spaces. Add into that, we can operate in darkness, dust, smoke, et cetera, makes us very resilient to a lot of these difficult areas. The defense use cases revolve mostly around the data collection, autonomous navigation. You can think of these as extensions and corollaries to some of the commercial work that we've already proven out. So ISR emissions, tactical mapping, real-time 3D digital twins, improving maintenance availabilities and logistics in a whole bunch of different categories, all of which are being funded heavily by the Department of Defense and Department of War. So in terms of -- part of the reason why we've been really successful in these categories is because this is a fielded capability. This is not a lab exercise or something that is a recent spinout. There's something that's been operating autonomously in some of the harshest environments in the world for over 6 years. Our external users are doing well over 1,000 autonomous flights every single month. And trust me, they put it through its paces, we find lots of new edge cases, develop the resiliencies for it and it helps us keep at the cutting edge of this technology and making it resilient to the real world because we have already hit product market fit in our first few markets, the next stage for us is less of a core technology development play and more of a growth capital plan. We're working a lot on extending our reach through partnerships and channels also working to extend our collaborations with OEMs to extend the -- into different markets so we wouldn't have access to it less. You can see here a lot of really great customers across mining, construction and geospatial worlds. And probably the big takeaway here is that these are folks that are not whimsical buyers. It takes time for them to gain trust and to validate the systems work. But once they are able to, then they put in a critical path and their long-term value buyers. And so we've been working with a lot of these folks for years. We've proven ourselves, we're part of their core workflows. And that means that we have continuing long-term relationships and improving lifetime value for these customers. Brandon Declet, do you want to cover the financials there?

Yes. Very briefly, we've grown, obviously, year-over-year. From 2023 to 2024, it was about 20% growth, smaller growth from '24 to '25. However, that doesn't account for our larger bookings number that we had in 2025 as we begin this transition towards a more recurring revenue business. And we talked obviously earlier about Exyn AI and the work that we're doing with the Department of War. We continue to shrink our losses year-over-year. We expect this year as well to close that gap. Overall, we've got significant bookings for 2026, and we think there's an extensive opportunity and upside in the defense applications arena in 2026 and beyond.

So from a top level thing, there's a couple of key areas that we'll try and leave you here with. There's a technology moat, both in terms of the core autonomous navigation and mapping technologies, but also in the infrastructure and the tuning that makes these work really, really effectively out in the real world. This means that we've got a multiyear lead even on newer technologies that are just coming to market. We've been out there in the trenches with folks understanding their use cases, their needs and keeping a pace with the new developments in the field. We're mission-critical for lots of different folks across a bunch of different industries. This means we understand what resiliency looks like for those systems and how to make sure that they are succeeding as we succeed. It's proven at scale. As I mentioned, well over 1,000 autonomous missions performed every month by our external users, and they are pushing the bounds of what we can do. It's a dual product business. What that means to us is we have both hardware and purely software that enable us to understand the full scope of how these systems are useful now in the real world. It's a huge opportunity. Obviously, we sit at the intersection of autonomy, digital twins, LiDAR and robotics. Each of these are interesting even by themselves. So you can imagine that sitting at the intersection here is a huge opportunity for us. And in terms of the leadership team, you've met Brandon Declet and myself, Brandon Duick on the call here as well. The rest of the team up and down the up and down the chart is really world class. And we're happy to answer any questions you might have.

Great. Thank you, gentlemen. And so we are going to now open up the call for questions. [Operator Instructions] We do have a couple that already came in. Our first question, what will this mean in integrating with LiDAR like Ouster and their new focus on color?

Yes, that's a great question. A big piece of what we do already involves data-rich captures with multiple sensors. So this is actually just a great new addition for us. We were already integrated with Ouster LiDARs. And this is just another capability that helps enrich the speed and sort of depth of data that's collected with these systems. So it's part of our road map existing, and it's a great opportunity for us.

Next question...

Paul, 1 second. Brandon? Brandon, do you want to add anything to that vis-a-vis Ouster and the integration there. Do you want me...

Thank you. Yes. So we're actively looking at the integration there to have it as another variant of our Nexys product line. The data looks processing in terms of both accuracy and the RGB colors, which is really the headline on that sensor. We expect to have test results soon and some marketing to file.

Thank you, Brandon. Our next question, how scalable is your business and what do you need to scale?

So I would say that we are already very scalable as is. We're deployed to over 30 countries. We've got channel partners that span much of the world. We're in the process of expanding those partnerships worldwide and both in more verticals and more horizontals. So our systems are very flexible already. So I think we're in the process of ramping up those teams with the capital from there's an IPO. And we're doing more of the work to make sure those extend across new categories.

And our next question, have you considered a partnership with Boston Dynamics to monopolize the Robotics segment or of the Department of War.

So we have active work with Boston Dynamics. We integrate onto their Spot quadruped already. We've used it for a bunch of different examples where we do periodic scanning and information collection and that sort of thing. We have a lot of opportunities across not just Boston Dynamics, but a lot of other leading robotics platforms as well. So you can think of us really as powering the breadth of robotics industry, providing autonomous navigation and data collection across a lot of different platforms.

Thank you. And our next question, could you share your current commercial metrics, specifically annual recurring or recurring software revenue, hardware versus software mix, gross margins, customer retention backlog and how do you compare with where you expected the business to be 2 or 3 years ago?

Let me take that. So our gross margins are typically around 48%. And we do have a significant backlog from a 7-figure backlog from last year that we've been working through here in the first half of 2026. What was the second part of that question, Paul?

Will we start off with the annual recurring and recurring software revenue and hardware versus software mix?

Yes. So since I came on board about 2.5 years ago, the company primarily was nonrecurring kind of hardware business in our Nexys and Nexys Pro product lines. That has been transitioning over the past year towards more a reoccurring revenue model where we're licensing out that autonomy tech stack, the 2 companies don't want to leverage it for their own platforms. So we expect that mix on the recurring side to continue to grow here in the next 18 to 24 months.

Great. And our next question, can you speak more to defense applications? Where are you seeing traction? And with who, if possible? And is it sub, underground or battle plan resource mapping from the sky.

Sure. So we've got some active contracts already, both within the broader Army and Air Force diaspora. Most of it is in the high accuracy mapping world, as I mentioned before. There's a lot of opportunities here for contested environments, autonomous navigation. You can think of transit as well as data collection in a lot of different categories there.

And our next question, how did you acquire this technology?

So the company has originally spin out from the University of Pennsylvania. It was inspired by some of the research conducted within the grass laboratory by Dr. [ Vita Kumar]. Over time, we've continued to push the boundaries of this tech. So we are not licensing any more technology these days. It's all self-developed internally. So this is not as a basis of acquisition, but it's as a basis of development internally.

Thank you. And our next question, what are your revenue growth like projections? And what does your cash burn rate look like at this moment?

So let me take that. So we -- the proceeds from the IPO should provide us enough cash for the next 18 to 24 months. In terms of specific burn rates, we're obviously investing critical areas of our business, including sales and marketing and product development and our strong pivot we're making towards defense applications.

And our next question, Exyn talks about Level 4 autonomy is a real differentiator. Someone outside the robotics world, can you put that into plain terms of what that level of autonomy actually lets your customers do that competitors can't?

Sure. So a great example here would be a typical scenario where you're utilizing a drone or a ground robot to conduct inspections or something like that, you would require a highly trained pilot or operator to be conducting that inspection, basically be fully dedicated to operating that system, in which case you are often not much better off than if the person was just walking around and collecting information. And so in this case, by removing the need for continuous even oversight or operation means that, that person can initiate the mission across 1, 2 or even dozens or hundreds of systems and then continue to do other work. And so it greatly extends the reach for operators and the ability to digitize the physical and built environment.

Thank you. And our next question, it looks like the customer base is expanding beyond mining into construction and geospatial with names like BMW and Trimble now in the mix what's driving that shift? And how does the Trimble relationship specifically change your go-to-market strategy?

So we've been working with Trimble for some time now. We work hand-in-hand with integrating into their software ecosystem in Trimble Business Center, in Trimble Connect, et cetera. We often partner with their channel network as well, where we actually fit in really well with their overall sort of sales mix. And so there's quite a few partnerships going across, predominantly geospatial but some other categories as well. And more broadly, our expansion into the geospatial world has been driven both by capability development on our end as well as a groundswell adoption of digital scan technologies and the process of digitizing a lot of workflows in the geospatial world more broadly.

And our next question, do you use AI to analyze data?

Well, yes, is the obvious answer. AI, meaning a lot of different things to different people. Our physical AI stack is in sort of 3 separate categories: the navigation and mapping is through a deterministic stack that is built around repeatable, dependable and auditable systems. We use nondeterministic tools for filtration or classification. And then there's also in the post-processing steps for data where we could do cleanup and that sort of thing. Those are mostly algorithmic, but there's opportunities to expand on that also with LLM based or machine learning-based tools. I don't know, Brandon Duick, if you have anything else you can add to that.

I think that's pretty good for a [indiscernible].

Thank you, gentlemen. And then I have another question here. Does it integrate with all C2 systems? Any specific use with Anduril's Lattice or Palantir.

We have -- we are not currently working with them on anything specific. But because we have a really standardized set of interfaces through an API on the SDK. It actually is really easy to work with a lot of frameworks, both from the command and control perspective as well as the data export perspective. We work with a lot of common standards for both the interfaces and the data formats.

Thank you. And another question. What milestones should investors expect over the next 24 months? Specifically, when do you expect to achieve positive operating cash flow? And what revenue level do you believe is required to sustain the business without additional equity financing.

So I'll take a crack at that. So some of the milestones I think investors should be looking for is the growth and the announcements we make around our work in defense applications, and that could be partnerships that we announced with OEMs. In terms of when we expect to be cash flow positive I think that is something that is heavily dependent on the investments that we are making today and obviously, on our execution. But we are very confident that this company can be both profitable and continue to grow here in the next 18 to 24 months.

And our next question, who is your biggest competition or concern?

Our -- from a competitive standpoint, we have a handful of competitors, primarily in the mining side of a company called [indiscernible]. On the geospatial side, we mostly compete with pan scanners or other capture tools, which is pretty favorable for us because it means that we're -- we usually win most of those. In the broader defense side, we don't have a ton of direct competition in our category. -- especially the autonomous data collection side, not a lot of people that are able to match our sort of core capabilities there.

And another question, you frame the addressable market of well over $70 billion across digital twins, LiDAR and defense robotics. Of all those markets, where do you see in capturing share fastest over the next couple of years?

I think you'll see in the very near term, Geospatial will be the most rapid largest growth category with the OEM and government defense side growing right behind that, probably at faster rates, but at smaller top line for the short term. But all 3 of those categories are massive markets that we expect to be driving a lot of growth for us over the next few years.

Thanks, Ben. The next question, beyond the Nexys hardware, you've built out a software, an SDK layer that supports OEM integrations. How important is that recurring software revenue piece to the long-term margin profile of the business?

It is a critical piece to how we grow margin and bottom line, profitability. We are working on initiatives across the board to improve margin, both from the hardware side as well as extending our software reach outside of purely OEM. But it's part of our strategy overall. As I mentioned in the beginning, we're a software company at the core we have been looking for more and more flexible ways to get our software out into the real world across a lot of different hardware mechanisms.

Thanks, Ben. And another question, what are you most worried about?

I think staffing is always a question. There's a lot of really critical skill sets, and we've done -- we've had a great run of hiring great people so far. But as we grow, we're going to continue to need to find some of the best folks and the market at large is looking for great people all the time. So we've got to compete, we got to win, and we got to bring them on board.

And then we have another 1 here. Looking at the opportunity overview slide regarding your Level 4 autonomy operating in disconnected environments. I'm highly interested in how your hardware agnostic software with API integration handles data integrity when generating digital twins for industrial utility lanes and urban perimeters, how seamlessly does the Nexys payload integrate into existing infrastructure development pipelines.

So this is a pretty core piece of what we do in the geospatial world. We use a lot of standardized output processes into things like Trimble Business Center or AutoCAD or lots of other different platforms as well. So especially if there are existing data pipelines, we plug into those really easily. And in most cases, we end up greatly improving the speed and accuracy of those processes as well.

Thank you. And then there is another. This question just as Anduril's cooperation perspective?

Yes. I think we have a lot of opportunity to collaborate across most of the companies that are playing in these spaces. There's so much growth and opportunity even in each category that most of the folks that we would run into, there is an opportunity for collaboration.

Excellent. And that looks like the last question has come in. Any final remarks that you would like to be the audience with?

Yes. Just a big thanks for everyone that joined the webinar today. You can find more information at exyn.com and our ticker symbol on NASDAQ EXYN. So look out for us.

Thank you, Brandon. And also for audience, you can also reach out to of course to us here at Redchip. If you do have questions as well, 1800redchip or e-mail us at exyn. redchip.com that's just the ticker symbol exynredchip.com. And there's additional information also at exyninfo.com where you can download the investor presentation, fact sheet and also sign up for new alerts as well. I want to thank everyone for attending today, and thank you to the Exyn team for the presentation.

Thank you.

Thanks.