MDB Capital Holdings, LLC (MDBH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates and other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we will attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. So you should also review our most recent Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this morning, is available in the Investor Relations section of our company's website, mdb.com. Also, a replay of this call will be provided on mdb.com. Your host today is: Chris Marlett, CEO and Founder of MDB. Chris will present an update on the first quarter ending March 31, 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to MDB Capital Holdings' Chief Executive, Chris Marlett.

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Well, each one of our calls, I start with sort of a little bit of a different spin on our business strategy, how we create value and really just to reinforce with all of our shareholders where we're at, the way we look at things and basically how we currently view the future. So some of this is going to be a little bit of a repeat, but hopefully, you'll get -- for the new people, they'll get a better flavor for what we do for the people that have watched a few other -- of these conference calls, the first 5 minutes may be a bit of a repeat. So just to remind everybody, what do we do? We curate public venture capital. It's pretty simple. We're looking for asymmetrical return potential with public market liquidity. We're -- we've tried to really set ourselves apart from everybody else with this whole idea of public venture capital being a preferred alternative to traditional venture capital, and we'll get into a little bit more of that later in the presentation. Again, what do we do? We transform these Big Ideas into valuable public companies. That's where we create all of our value. That's where we see what we're really good at is making Big Ideas financeable. A lot of things that we have taken public and had a lot of success with actually weren't seen as investable assets by most people. So we actually created that transformation that we're very proud about. Again, you got to look through thousands of them. We've done this. We built the team to basically look through thousands. We've talked about this before, but we've really got a great team that's doing a great job of curating new Big Ideas. And I would tell you that now is probably the best time in the history of us doing this for 20-some-odd years or close to 30 years actually, in that we're seeing better ideas at better valuations we've ever seen. That has a lot to do with the current environment, which is obviously not -- has not been great for small companies trading in the public markets. I'll get to that in a bit. Again, what do we do? We have a platform to stand them up. PatentVest really helps us to guide these companies and position them properly. We have this broker-dealer that is now a clearing firm that gives us a lot of flexibility to basically take these companies public when it's very, very hard for other underwriters and other people to do this clearing through other traditional type clearing firms. And we've got a growing community of investors that understand what we do. We think we have a very unique platform that really represents an unbelievable opportunity to extraordinary business opportunities that feel that the public markets is a great place for them to be. This is some updated data, which we rely on Carta for data on the venture market. And I think this chart is going to sort of have a different flavor to it today than it usually has in the sense that those venture companies that have -- that are still active, not gone public, there are literally thousands of those. And you can see just in 2018, there was 4,300 of them. I would say because of the boom in financing that happened post-COVID, there has to be, I don't know, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 companies that have been funded by VCs that have not gone public. I mean you can see here that of this class, only 15 have exited by IPO since 2018. So over the last 7 years, only 15 of them made it public. That means that there are, I would say, at least tens of thousands of companies that have been funded that's seen no exit. And right now, what we're seeing in the venture market is really quite interesting because we're getting approached by lots of venture firms with opportunities to take things public because they're not positioned to be able to continue to fund these companies. They're not -- new fund formation is way down, et cetera. So what's happening is nobody really wants to invest in, be locked up in a traditional venture fund. So what I see is a huge opportunity is literally thousands and thousands of companies that could come public and probably should come public. If you take the top 5% of all of those ones that are still alive, there's a lot of great companies there, and we're getting to see a lot of them. And I'm pretty excited about it, because the valuation expectations are changing as the market has gotten worse. And I think there's this mismatch that is going to enable them to accept the valuation and leave something on the table for public investors to participate in the future growth. So I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. And of course, our track record helps. We had a call with a VC or -- last week, and we proposed to take their company public. And they were quite frankly -- I expected them to walk away. We offered them a valuation that was lower than -- much lower than their most recent financing. And I expect them to just tell us they're not interested. And what they said was the fact that you're 17 for 17 of taking companies public gives us the certainty and we're willing to accept this lower valuation as a result of the certainty of getting public. And hopefully, we'll get it back, meaning their -- the value of that company will come back to the values they funded it at previously in the public markets. So I think that our track record not only benefits us from being able to tell investors that we're good at getting these things public and judging what we can get public, but it's now, I think, reaching beyond that to either Founders or VCs that say, wow, MDB really does have a model that works. And so -- what I'm excited about is the pent-up demand for IPOs, I think, is not only getting strong, but I think it's bigger than it's ever been. And what's happening is the backlog or the -- I would call it, what's kept it from really being unleashed in my mind is sort of the changing market dynamics. And the changing market dynamics are really that investors don't want to buy, I would say, green bananas anymore. They want to buy stuff that's closer to commercial realization where they're not worried about big dilution downstream from future financing. So they want to see that these companies don't need to raise a lot of capital, so they need to be capital light, and they need to look like there's going to be a business where there could be some profitability. That's having a big impact on what we're curating as well. So this backlog of opportunities in my mind is getting rationalized. And I think for the first time, we're seeing more of a match where we can take some of these companies public that will actually be well valued in the public markets like we've never seen before. I would tell you that when I started in the business, we wouldn't look at anything that we didn't think was going to be profitable pretty soon. And we took companies public way before I started MDB, and they all had to have some sort of profit profile in the not-too-distant future. I think we're going back to thosex. I think there's a whole another presentation we could do about that -- sort of the changing market dynamics, interest rates, et cetera, that I think is going to change the sort of 45-year downtrend in interest rates that's caused the growth of private equity and traditional venture; and I think we're going to see these companies come public. And if you look at the company -- and the reason why I think this is going to happen is that the companies that are public that are profitable are trading at very big valuations. So I think that for me, this means that I believe that the small IPO market is going to be very robust and which is going to basically see a reversal of the downtrends that we've seen for now decades, so. I just -- I already kind of covered this, but the valuation mismatch is really, in my mind, the biggest impact on microcap IPOs. And we see that, again, leveling up right now. And our pipeline is pretty thick with companies that want to go public that we think will do well in the public markets. So we're excited about it. It does mean there's a bit of a product mix, if you will, change. We have other companies that we're looking at taking public that are actually profitable, which is really a new thing to us. Again, it's not something that we've even looked at since I was just a baby in the business, just starting out of my 20s. And so, I think it's kind of a very unique interesting time. And we're pivoting not completely away from big, huge deep tech ideas, but we're pivoting to make sure that everything we bring public is going to resonate in the changing marketplace. And really, what do we do? It's really about curating deals, the right companies that could really make a difference at the right valuation. Valuation is critical. If we can't find them, and that's been a big problem in the last couple of years is that expectations were so high. But now we see that dynamic changing. So I'm very excited that we're going to find really extraordinary businesses at the right values that will leave -- that will represent great return opportunities for investors. So we've got LOIs with 3 companies. One is actually a biotech that we've exposed to a number of people in our community already. Very exciting. Again, biotech has been the worst space to be in recently. But this is a team that we've worked with before with the formation of Provention that we sold to Sanofi for $2.9 billion. So we took it from the back of an envelope to $2.9 billion. And the team, which we love has come back to us to do another IPO. And what's exciting about this one, it's a relatively small amount of capital to a really, really big inflection point, which is could we give somebody a pill that would get the pancreas to produce insulin again. We think that it's got a good shot. We think that if that happens, it's a monumental inflection point, much like the other drug that got us bought for $2.9 billion. So pretty exciting, even though it's biotech, we're very excited about it. It's also -- we're pricing it right. It's going to be at about a $20 million pre-money valuation. We've got a company that was going to more than likely take money from private equity. And it's a beverage company that is very profitable, growing at a very fast rate. And they could see that an IPO made actually a lot more sense than private equity. Private equity, I think, is going through a real transition. I think private equity is going to be very difficult for a lot of companies that have not had good experience in private equity. In fact, -- the founders of this company have had experience with private equity before and really felt that IPO was a better alternative. I think this company will trade for a really nice valuation in the public market: one, because it's growing; two, because it's profitable; and it's something that everybody can identify with. And I think that these kind of companies have not been coming public over the last 5 to 10 years. So I'm pretty excited about that one. We have another health care software company has revenue growing, really big upside potential. And we're looking forward to exposing that one to you as well, great management team. And again, these are companies that don't need much capital to get to very big inflection points. So what we've seen is our mission after going public, which is really scaling up what we did before. Everything has gone great operationally. The backdrop for what we do has been the worst environment that we've been in, in the history of our firm. So the good news and the bad news. The good news is that all the things we thought we were going to be able to do, we've been able to do. So we've trained our analyst team. We've got unbelievable analytical capability. I can tell you right now that I would put up our analyst team against anybody in the business. The clearing firm is working great. Our operational team did an awesome job of getting that up and running. That's not an easy thing to do. It's also become a really major asset for us and a lot of other people are looking at us because of our capability to do clearing, and we have a lot of opportunities potentially to add some additional really interesting products to our mix because of our clearing platform. And we're in discussions with a lot of people that see the value of aligning with us because of our clearing platform. And we're broadening our relationships with new investor groups. One of the things that we had done is we really spent a lot of time with a relatively small group of people because we didn't have that many companies. So why go broaden your investor group. But now we're really broadening that, which I'll talk about here in a second. And our community service team is doing great. You've probably heard from some of them. And our back-office platform in Managua is really doing great. Our leaders here in the U.S. have done a great job training. They've -- everyone's licensed, doing a great job. It's really a lot of fun to see what this public offering has enabled from building the platform. In the last quarter, we closed the HeartBeam deal. HeartBeam was the only financing we did. Like I said, we've got 3 new LOIs in the hopper and look forward to presenting those here shortly. Our shareholder base moved up modestly. We onboarded a number of new accounts that wanted to invest in the HeartBeam offering. What I thought was really great about what happened was it was a lot of smaller investors. So we had really a lot of small investors as opposed to big lead investors, which many times we've had in our deals historically. I think that, that really is exciting for us. And I wouldn't say that we're getting close to crowd funding, but it's sort of like curated public venture but with a broader group of people. And so what we've been doing is talking to angel groups and RIAs, and that's kind of exciting for us because we've gotten really great reception from these people even in a really difficult marketplace. And so as I mentioned, we're looking at leveraging our platform and broadening our IPO offerings. That's in the works, and I think you're going to see that evidence of that here shortly. The other thing we did was recognize that our executive comp plan for our 4 top executives, which was really heavily based on RSUs, which means we get stock even if the shareholders aren't winning that we had to change that, and we realigned our compensation and convert them to options. We gave up, I don't know, $21 million worth of stock, so -- I think was the number. Don't hold me to that number, but it was a large number. And we just -- we assumed that we were going to be hugely successful coming out of the chute, and we were wrong. The market did not cooperate and things did not cooperate. So we recognize that we can't be winning if the shareholders aren't winning. And so we're realigning comp across the board to make sure it's perfectly aligned with the shareholders. So this is sort of the -- what we call our enterprise value calculation, which is if you look at that we're now presenting every quarter. To simplify it, we take net current assets, which is largely cash. And then we take our Big Idea investments and to give you sort of what our balance sheet looks like. And then we take our stock price, shares outstanding to give you a market value and then sort of calculate the enterprise value. It turns out that at year-end, we were trading at a large discount to our enterprise value. As of the end of the quarter, it's gone down a bit, and that was largely due to the volatility in HeartBeam and eXoZymes. eXoZymes is -- I think it was at $10 then, it's up to, what, $15. So if you did the calculation today, the enterprise value discount to market would be a little bit bigger because I think it says in there it was $10. I think it's $15 a day or something. So anyways, that's an easy way to look at it. And I think that anybody that wants to create a model or something, we can help you to create the model, but that's where it stands today. If you look at net current assets dropped by about $2.3 million. So we utilized -- we actually utilized less than $2 million in cash for the quarter. I think that with our backlog of financings and whatever, again, what we're trying to do is be relatively cash flow neutral when you take the cash from financings and other revenue from PatentVest, et cetera. And so, we're not there. Obviously, we're pivoting on the type of companies that we're going to fund. And hopefully, that will increase our activity and get us closer to that. But obviously, what you can see is the big valuation differences are going to be in our Big Idea investments. So talked a little bit about the transformation, which is we are in the business of selling deals we've curated. So if we only had one deal every 18 months, we had a relatively small group of investors, 400 to 500 that we were looking to invest with us and what have you. But as we scale this up to where we think we can do 4 or 5 companies a year, we're working with investors and advisors that can allocate to this public venture asset class. So it's pretty important to sell people on the public venture asset class or more importantly, a curated public venture asset class, which is what we do. So we started talking with these various folks, and they gave us a lot of suggestions about how to sell this as an asset class. And it got pretty exciting in the last month or so as we started to have more discussions with them, which I'll talk about in a second. So one of them said, "Well, why don't you go back and actually tell us how to invest in public venture?" And we said, "Well, jeez, how do you do that?" And so we got our analyst team together, and we started saying, okay, why don't we go back to all 17 of the companies that we launched after we started MDB, and go back and really look at each one and look at depending on how you invest it, what would your return profile be? So not only demonstrate, okay, MDB's companies always gave you sort of the opportunity to make money, but also what was the best strategy to invest in them. And the results were pretty interesting. And so what we did is we said, okay, why don't we break it into 3 kind of models. One was sort of a buy and hold -- kind of hold long term. One was more balanced; and more was sort of more Active Management. And the results were interesting, but it was kind of like I didn't know how they were going to turn out. I had a sense of it because we obviously invest in these companies ourselves, plus you know which of your investors kind of do better than others, but the results were sort of interesting. So if you took sort of a buy and hold, which is really not too practical, but you could have and just kind of held it forever, you would have had a great return, but your IRR would be actually lower because of the time frame because we've been in business for 27 years, the return would be much lower if you just took that approach. And then if you took a balanced strategy, which, again, this publication will be out and you can read all the details of what a balanced strategy is. You would have had an IRR of 49%; and if you had Active Management, you would have had an IRR of 44%. So basically with Active Management, you took a little bit more off the table earlier and et cetera. So I encourage you all to read the report, which we'll be putting on our website. If it's not on the website already, it will be on the website in the next few days. But this data and this report now that we've presented to RIAs and angel groups, they sort of are understanding the difference between public venture and private venture. And the real difference is that because of the liquidity, a lot of these companies, not the ones that went and were sold, not the Proventions or the Medivations that were sold to big pharma for huge numbers, but a lot of the companies that did well for a few years, you had the opportunity to take money off the table, you generally don't have that opportunity in private venture. And that's a huge difference from a return perspective and why I think our story is really resonating with a larger group of people. So the keys really for us are scaling. And we need to really bring forward 3 or 4 new investment opportunities, not just ones that we like, but that really will do well in the public market. So that's why we're having to pivot because we do see things changing. And we do see that this may not be a market like we've seen before. We've gotten -- a lot of our really sophisticated investors are calling up and saying, "Hey, you guys need to pivot your product mix, and we're listening." And so -- but I'm super confident we can bring 3 or 4 of those opportunities every year. And maybe more, but I think we can commit to 3 or 4 of those opportunities every year. I think that should be fairly easy. The ability for our -- for us to really scale and take advantage of our clearing platform to broaden out this community of investors is really going to be important, and we're working really hard to do that. And that's our -- probably our #1 initiative because I think that our deal flow is certainly sufficient to find really, really good stuff. So I think the good news is I don't see that we need to bring on a lot of people unless we really, for whatever reason, scale the number of investors materially. We really -- our level of expenses right now can handle thousands of more investors without having to scale organization. So we have a lot of scalability currently from our current people platform. Now it's just getting more companies through the pipeline. Talking about our existing companies: EXoZymes is really focused on getting really valuable products that are really meaningful. And I think NCT, which they recently announced is really a big one. As you dig into it and you learn more about it, I think you're going to find out that NCT is a big opportunity for eXoZymes. And I think there's other big opportunities right behind that. HeartBeam, with any luck, we'll have good news from the FDA on the 12-Lead Synthesis Software. I think that's going to be a really big value-creating event in that now this card really can be in the hands of every consumer that is worried about their heart or other things. And we're getting unbelievable reception from not only cardiac patients and concierge docs and cardiologists that really see that there's going to be a huge market for this soon. ClearSign, company, they're continuing to scale revenues. And I think that they are continuing to build a business and the valuation has really been volatile, but we see them continue to make good progress. And Cue recently had some news where they brought in a partner, and they're now really making a move into autoimmune. And I would call the depression in Biotech. The company has got a good runway cash-wise. And I think that the platform has done everything that we always hoped it would do, which was having a really effectively a T-cell management platform to modulate the immune system to either effectively increase length of life if you have cancer or mitigate autoimmune disease. So we're still hopeful. Again, you couldn't ask for a worse biotech market in my career, but we're still hopeful that Cue -- that the value of Cue becomes realized in the not-too-distant future. So our key priorities coming forward are really just execute on these financings for our existing 3 Big Idea companies and really get new ones in the pipe, which I think we have a number of candidates that are close behind it; continue to expand our investor community; really focusing on folks that are capital allocators as opposed to deal buyers. And I think that, that's happening in our conversations with RIAs and family offices and angel groups. And we're -- what are we good at? We're good at curating great opportunities, that's pivoting a bit to companies that are a little bit closer to product revenue and value creation. And we're continuing to scale our capabilities across the board to help these companies. These companies are all struggling right now in the marketplace, but I think that's going to change. And I also think that there's a lot of emerging growth companies that could go public that we're going to be able to be a great platform for them to go public with. And I don't really see that we have any effective competition. There's really very few firms left that can take small companies public. So I'm super excited about what we've built. And we've got to respond and just find the right things for this market. And -- but we have a really experienced team that's been doing this for a long time. I'm tenacious. I can tell you that I'm going to always fight to find the best opportunities. That's what I'm good at. I'm spending more time than I've ever have really just diving in to make sure that happens. And I'm having a lot of fun in these challenging times because I really do believe we've got a special -- special place for companies to go public that are the most exciting companies in the world. So with that, Kevin, I'll turn it over to questions. I took exactly half an hour, so I'm glad I didn't go too long, so.

Great. No. Perfect, Chris. Thanks. And you want to put my video on, please. It just went off. So if you have -- perfect, if you have questions, use the chat on the bottom. We're actually starting to get a couple in. The first question actually came in, Chris, can you just talk about the one company that you have that you're financing the $20 million for the potential cure for diabetes. The question was, what's the name of that? And that's [ Paulex Bio. ]

Yes.

The other questions that we have right now is how does management interpret the persistent discount of the MDBH stock price relative to the IPO price? Is it execution, macro conditions or market misunderstanding or other?

Well, it's always supply and demand. So it's -- so I've been doing this for a long time. So I have perhaps a little bit more perspective than the average investor. And so, we had 2 inspirational companies that were critical to the formation of MDB. One was called Thermo Electron that was started in the '60s, and they took 60 -- they spun out 68 new public companies out of Thermo Electron. They were sort of really unbelievable and prolific birthers of new technology companies. And there was another company called Safeguard Scientifics. I knew the founders of both these companies, and they were both kind of mentors of mine. So I watch their stocks religiously. Thermo Electron was when I got -- when it was very, very early in the business and then Safeguard Scientifics in the '90s. When the markets were not good for new technology companies or early-stage companies, it always traded at a discount in net asset value, almost 100%. No one believed that their platform was worth anything, because the market was bad for those kind of equities. Ironically, when things were good and their stocks were moving, they always traded at a premium to net asset value. And so I'm philosophical about it in the sense that I believe that the market really -- people will always overdo it; and they'll just say, why buy it now, MDB is selling stuff that nobody wants right now. And I could see how people would think that. And -- but that changes. And so I'm -- like I said, I'm -- having seen these cycles and having seen it before, it doesn't trouble me too much. And I also think that -- I think that the most important thing is that the companies that were birthing are doing well, that if the companies were birthing are doing well, then our stock is going to do well. And I think that, that's really what it is. And so much of it is geared towards eXoZymes right now, and we get very little credit for our platform. But again, when things are going well, that will change and go in the other direction. So...

Perfect. And as an LLC, you've structured your company to be able to distribute dividends without double taxation. Could you discuss what your future dividend policy might be? And how you would go forward with that down the road?

Sure. So our dividend policy is really about -- there's 2 major factors, which is, one is, if we were to distribute those shares, how does it impact the company that we're distributing. So if we were to distribute eXoZymes' stock to the shareholders today, how would that impact eXoZymes? And the company is still relatively lightly traded. And right now, if we were to distribute out those shares, until more people understand the company and are in tune with the company and its prospects, we'd like to get the company to get a little bit more legs before we do a distribution. Mind you, being the largest shareholder, I would love to have a distribution. So my interests are aligned with yours. I just don't want to hurt the companies by distributing shares. And so, I think that's part of it. The other part of it is we -- just what our cash levels are. At some point, we have to look at, do we invest more money in a new Big Idea? Or do we just fund it and take it public? Obviously, if we put money into a new Big Idea, we get a bigger equity stake. So at some point, we might look at selling some of the shares, again, only if the shares of these companies are doing well and pull a bit of that money into a new Big Idea to kind of keep the flywheel going, if you will. So -- but I would say the biggest factor is really just how is it going to impact the company that we're -- the subject company that we would distribute. So -- but my hope is, is that if eXoZymes catches like all of our companies eventually or all 17 of our companies at some point caught fire, right, where they traded millions of shares and it didn't matter what we did. They were broadly held and everybody wanted to be in them. That's a great time to distribute shares. It's just now is not the right time.

Got it. Also just, a question here kind of like on the mechanics. So when we take a venture public company public, how do we make our money? And how does the shareholder of MDB make their money?

Sure. Well, a lot of these companies were -- if we're doing a pre-IPO financing, we earn equity because we're also helping put that company together and prepare it for a public entry. And so we get, let's call it, carried equity in the company. So we earn a piece of equity, plus if we put any capital in, we also earn -- get equity for that as well. And then generally, when we take them public, we're going to be charging cash fees and in many cases, getting warrants. So it's really always a blend of cash and some equity. And in some cases, it's more equity if we're a Founder like we were in eXoZymes; in some other cases, it will be less equity where it may just come in the form of warrants; on the extreme case where it would just be cash and warrants. And so it's a bit of a blend. And -- but obviously, we're really in this for the equity upside because that's where the real returns are for shareholders.

Perfect. And then just to go back to that [ Paulex ] question, and we're going to have some equity right, Chris, in Paulex. Just to let everybody know, we do have a recording of that presentation. So if you have any questions on that, we're going to close it over the next couple of months. Indications are already coming in. We'll keep everybody updated on the PPM should be out sometime next week. So don't hesitate to give us a call if you'd like to see information on Paulex. Then another question, Chris, is, can you tell us more about PatentVest? And what you believe its potential is for how it will bring value to MDB?

Sure. Well, PatentVest brings value to MDB every day. It's a question of from an independent business perspective and revenue generation that we're basically really working to figure out what the right business model is for PatentVest. Currently, what PatentVest does is takes a company like a HeartBeam, helps transform -- really transform the business model and position it correctly. And that's where not only are we able to see things other people don't see, but also position it in a unique way. We're very deep involved in business development, very much in strategy development, business model development and IP development. And so to us, that's critical to value creation. And very few companies, especially small companies, have the resources to do that well. And so initially, we looked at PatentVest and our team there as critical to the go-forward path. Company like eXoZymes is a great example. There's thousands of chemicals you can make potentially with eXoZymes platforms. Which ones should you make, which ones can be protected, which ones can you reasonably make great margins on? Who are the players in those spaces? Who could potentially block you? Who could potentially license from you? Who could potentially purchase you? All of those things are, again, especially when you have a platform technology, these are not -- these companies are not staffed to be able to answer those questions. We're providing those critical answers for those companies and the go-forward strategy. So that's where PatentVest brings value, and it's a key part of how we earn value through MDB. But as an independent business, where we're charging for it, we're continuing to grow revenues. It's still as an independent entity, loses a bit of money. But I think realistically, it provides a really important value creation part of what we do. So I don't know how to look at it as an independent business because we really can't do without it for our own companies. So -- but my hope is that we can really grow revenues. And so we're looking at some new initiatives to really see how we can scale revenues in a meaningful way. And we've even looked at the idea of spinning it off as a new business. So it's got a very unique platform. It's a law firm, which is -- now is really getting exciting because a lot of the big accounting firms are now going to Arizona and following us to become law firms. And we've had a lot of people interested in either merging with us or talking to us about how do we leverage our law firm platform along with PatentVest to grow a substantial business. And so I think there could be a lot of interesting business opportunities that come with that as well. And so yet to be seen. But as of right now, it's not a huge factor in revenue generation, but I think it very well could be once we find that sort of rich vein to push it forward. I would also ask you to look at some of the PatentVest Pulse things have been published, and we're getting a lot of notice from big tech companies. We published on the Brain-Computer Interface. We published recently on the Humanoid Robotics space. And it's kind of exciting. You should look at some of those. It's getting a lot of notice on platforms like LinkedIn and social media and what have you, and we're getting a lot of inbound inquiries from a lot of these companies. So it's getting noticed. It's getting some momentum, and we're just learning how to really propel that business now.

Perfect. Next question is, can you share how much of MDB's value is due to its share of ownership of the companies you've taken public? I guess that's probably a better one if it was -- if you had been -- if we had been public when we did Cue, we did Provention and Pulse, it all became multibillion-dollar companies.

Yes. I think that, listen, it's -- we went public at the absolute worst time you could probably go public for what we do. I would say that had we had the strategy before we -- and we were public before we launched Pulse, Cue and Provention, we'd -- I don't know where we'd be, but we'd probably be close to $1 billion valuation or something. It would have been pretty substantial. But yes, so we have eXoZymes, and we have a smallish position in HeartBeam. But if either one of those things really take off, it's going to impact our stock price. And we've got -- but what I don't think people appreciate is our ability to find the new ones, to find the next Pulses and Proventions. And when you look at our whole pipeline, they're all -- they all have maybe even greater potential than our historical ones did because I think we're getting smarter about what we do and how we do it, so...

Yes. Perfect. And it looks like the last question here. No, there's 2 more actually. Do you ever consider acquisition of companies instead of IPOs?

Well, we've had some interesting offers presented to us where we could effectively acquire something and then take it public later or spin it out as an independent public company. But as far as acquisitions, I would say, as of right now, we're very focused on public venture. And if it was very accretive to what we do in public venture, we would certainly entertain it. But I really don't want to create a distraction by merging in some other business that isn't really connected to what we're doing in public venture.

Got it. And how many firms do you see out there that are doing what we are -- MDB Capital is doing currently at this point in time?

I don't see that really -- I don't view that there really is anybody that does what we do. There are companies that take small companies public. I think the number of those companies have gone down pretty dramatically. I think that they -- unfortunately, the industry has devolved. And like we saw a biotech deal that went out last week by a small underwriter that they did a $13 million offering, I think at $4, and it's trading like $1.83 or something. So it -- that happens because you don't have good investors or people that believe in what you're doing, right? And I think that we've had -- there's so many firms that focus on transactional investors as opposed to, I would call it, real investors. And I just think that, that stands out. Like I don't -- that's why I don't view that we have any effective competition. I also think that the curation capabilities that we have are second to none. So we do more work, and we provide more value. We can stand these companies up. I'm a firm believer of those 17 companies we've taken public. I'm not so sure that any of those companies would have been companies or even got public unless they met us. And I think that's a really key differentiator. Underwriters don't provide much value. And so I just believe that our value proposition is so strong that I just -- I don't view that we have any effective competition.

Yes. Perfect. Well, that's the end of the Q&A, Chris, if you have any closing comments?

No. All I can say is hang in there. I appreciate you all from having -- keeping the faith and it's -- this has been a really, really tough time. Believe me, I've -- I didn't think at this age and everything we've accomplished historically that I'd be as -- I wouldn't say sleepless nights, but at least preoccupied nights, if you will. But I've accepted it, and we're working our ass off to make sure we perform and we find those companies that are meaningful and that the market will appreciate. And the great thing about bad times is -- is it provides a lot of opportunity. And so we're opportunistic, and we're going to keep fighting to fight through a bad tape and get through to the other side. So I appreciate all your faith in us, And I believe -- and thanks for taking the time to listen today.

Right.