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

MDB Capital Holdings' Second Quarter 2025 Update Conference Call. We appreciate you joining us this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin with our formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. [Operator Instructions] And as a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, and they are subject to risks 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 beware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of any 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. You should also review our most current Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon, is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, mdb.com. Also, a replay of this call will be provided on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett. Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. And he's joined by George Brandon, MDB Capital President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead the update on our second quarter ending June 30, 2025. So at this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett.

All right. Thank you, Tony. Well, thank you all for joining today. And I wanted to welcome George to the call. George is going to be talking to what we're doing on community development and other areas. And so I'll kick it off with the financial perspective. So as you all know, our revenue is largely from financings, and we didn't complete any financings this quarter. So we had some revenue from PatentVest as we are starting to scale those operations. And our goal is really to offset operating expenses with financings and then the equity in the finance companies and our Big Idea companies is really the upside for shareholders. And so we incubate -- as we incubate more of these -- the current revenue from launching more developed companies, really offsets any sort of the cash operations of the company. And there's always this balance of how much equity are we looking to generate versus fee income. And it's a balance and we're trying to be cautious. We're also trying to balance making sure we have enough companies so that our community can effectively build a public venture portfolio. For the first 6 months of 2025, we had cash utilization of $3.4 million. And we expect to be closing some financings in the second half of 2025 to reduce or eliminate that cash usage. So let's talk about where we're headed, not so much where we've been, because it's been a challenging last sort of year for all of us as shareholders. And I think that what's happening and what we're feeling is very different from what's being reflected in the stock price right now. So all I can tell you is that public venture is -- the momentum is really building, and we're super confident of what we've built. And we really do have the most sort of unique and capable platform to curate and deliver these market-leading companies that really have this sort of 10 to 100 bagger potential. And we've been doing it for 28 years. We recently published a report that talks about the 17 companies we've kind of conceptualized and taken public. And I think it gives a really good overview, which we've been really presenting to a whole new group of investors that have never seen public venture before, and we're really getting a great response. And what we're really finding is that they see this as an unbelievable asset class to position their investments in going forward. But we also recognize the key bottlenecks that we really have kind of realized what's happening over the last year. And quite frankly, the investor hesitation towards deep tech life science investments right now has been quite obvious. What's happened is that this has been the absolute worst segment of the market. And we understand that that's where we've basically made -- created billions of dollars of wealth for investors and for founders and for people who have worked at MDB over the years. And that's just not been the place to be. The other thing we've recognized is as we start to scale the number of companies we bring out, we need to scale up our investor community to really support these high-quality opportunities we're creating. And I can tell you that our team has done a phenomenal job on all fronts. And we're -- our analyst team as far as curating and standing up new opportunities, we're going to talk to you about in a second, and then really expanding our investor community, George and his team has been doing a phenomenal job. And so we'll get into that. So to really realize the promise of what we build as a platform, we really need to bring investors what they want to invest in now. And I think that the opportunities in profitable, growing early-stage companies that still have an asymmetric return potential and public market liquidity is really what we're hearing people want. And thankfully, we're very well positioned to add value to these opportunities beyond life sciences. And in addition, obviously, we need to expand our distribution, as I touched on. And we're reaching out to these new investors and partners, and you'll hear more about that from George as we get into it. But that's going incredibly well. And what we've realized is we provide a really attractive alternative for allocating capital versus sort of traditional venture or angel investing. So the product mix, what we've learned is, again, early-stage life science companies lacking revenue momentum or profitability are really struggling. These companies that we've done are taking longer to develop, as many times the case, but in different markets, the markets were a lot more forgiving. We funded these companies at what we believe super attractive valuations. But obviously, the market has to value that. And right now, it's just not -- that's just not been the case. And so investors want to really balance quicker returns with their venture bets. And I think that that's why we're starting to expand the universe of companies we're looking at. The other thing we realized is that profitable, growing companies with revenue momentum are super highly valued in the current market. And that's really good news because I think that that's going to have a profound impact on how companies look to raise capital or to see their companies highly valued. That's not happening in the private venture world today or in private equity. And so we think more and more of these kind of exciting growth companies are going to go public. And so we see a big opportunity on the horizon, and our team has done a great job of sort of curating more and more of those companies. So as we expand our product mix to include these profitable companies with revenue momentum, we think that we're going to get a lot better reception from all the various investor groups that we're talking to. And I think that today, we announced our first profitable company that we're going to be taking public. It was filed with the SEC, which we'll talk to a little bit here in a bit. But we're still continuing to focus on companies that can become new leaders and create new categories. We're not just doing companies that are profitable. These are still companies that still have that 10 to 100 bagger potential that are blazing new trails and creating new businesses. So it really, we believe, will enable us to get more deals done by expanding the investor interest beyond life sciences. So to that end, today, we filed a prospectus for what I think is going to be potentially the next Monster Beverage type opportunity in the beverage space. And what this -- what Buda Juice has done is created this new category called UltraFresh. Today grocery stores don't have fresh juice because they have to juice inside the stores, there's a shelf life issue. And these guys have figured out how to do centralized juicing and they're getting big traction with big chains. It's super exciting, they're growing rapidly, and we expect great things from them. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's been a great sort of experience in working with the CEO, who I've known. And they were very much looking forward towards going into -- or being -- partnering with private equity. And they had some experience with private equity in the past and I think they really saw that the public markets are a better place for them to really grow their company, raise additional capital to meet the expansion that they see coming in the very near future. So look forward to talking to you more about that company as we take the company out and complete the IPO. So again, we really believe that the public market is the place to be, and we see a dramatic shift occurring away from private equity and traditional venture. And we're hearing that more and more from the RIAs and family offices and other investors that we talk to. What's happened over the last 20 years is we've seen up to 35% of these portfolios of these family offices allocated to private equity and public venture -- excuse me, traditional venture. And we see that as being they're all coming to the same conclusion at the same time that that's not the place to be. And so they're all looking -- they all see the benefits of having liquid securities that are priced at transparent pricing as opposed to the opacity that exists in private markets. And I also think that the entrepreneurs that run the companies are recognizing the drawbacks of private equity and traditional venture. And we're helping them to understand that they can go public and actually do it in an efficient way and not believe all the things that have been said to them, which is it's super-expensive to be public and companies die when they get in the public markets, et cetera. The companies that are growing and profitable are doing incredibly well in the public markets right now. And what's really encouraging is not many underwriters have the process or platform to take these early-stage companies public like we do. So we think we represent a really unique opportunity for these companies to go public. And we're having great conversations with these people and I think that they're -- and companies, and they're finding that this is a very exciting alternative for them. We also -- we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and we really started to think about what are we going to do in life sciences and how are we -- where are we going to focus our efforts and where is really the big upside? We've had -- oncology got very, very overinvested and there were too many companies, and became very, very difficult in oncology. And so we really have started to think about where is the future in life sciences. And we really believe that metabolic health is really the biggest opportunity of our time. Metabolic health is such a gargantuan opportunity that is now just being scratched on the surface with what we're seeing with GLP-1 drugs. And I can't overemphasize enough that if you look at the drugs for both diabetes and for obesity, we're looking -- and other therapies, we're looking at probably $200 billion to $300 billion, which dwarfs all of the other pharmaceutical markets. And so we see this as one of the greatest opportunities. Obviously, there's a lot of other people investing in things like crypto and AI and other things. We think that AI is going to have -- is going to be a big driver in health care. But we really believe that what's going to happen to metabolic health is perhaps the biggest opportunity we've ever seen. And our team has done a great job of curating what we believe could be really some of the greatest opportunities in metabolic health. And we're really focusing on this area which we call the metabolic switch for these 100 bagger potentials. These are all kind of companies that we think can represent multibillion-dollar valuations, and we're bringing them to our community at very modest valuations. So we've been out introducing Paulex Bio, which was built by a team that we worked with at prevention that we had a great result with, that got a drug approved for type 1 diabetes and was purchased by Sanofi for $2.9 billion. They came back to us with something that we find very exciting that could be the first small-molecule drug to really regenerate beta cells, which are the pancreatic cells that generate insulin. So this could be a first-of-its-kind drug that would be a massive win. All these things -- all these companies have, in our mind, very near-term potential. These aren't long-term propositions that take a long term to figure out if they're valuable. So with a modest amount of money, we believe that Paulex can generate, hopefully, positive data that could generate a significant readout and significant value. As some of you may know, eXoZymes, which we launched and took public, has launched a new subsidiary called NCTx. And NCTx is an unbelievable potential value driver in that they have figured out how to biomanufacture NCT. And that has not been done. And we see that NCT is one of the most promising platforms, both as a nutraceutical and pharmaceutical, to mobilize pathogenic organ fat, both the liver and the pancreas. And it works via a completely new approach using mitochondria to effectively mobilize fat, as opposed to basically prevent people from eating like the GLP-1 drugs do. And then lastly, GT Metabolic is a company that has what we think is an unbelievable metabolic switch through magnets, that basically does incision-less, very fast laparoscopic procedure to do what they call a duodenal bypass. You swallow a magnet, you -- it basically enables what we call the anastomosis. And they have super-impressive patient data that basically, in early patient studies, switches off diabetes and also causes sustained weight loss. We're super excited about all 3 of these and we think all of these have multibillion dollar potential. And I really want to thank the analyst team for all the hard work they've done to not only discover these, but put them together. And we'll be presenting all of these at our September 4 event. Now talking a bit more about expanding our community, and I'm going to let George maybe talk to this a little bit. Or do you want me to talk to it, George, or do you want to go ahead?

Well, I mean, one, it's something I work with every day. And I think what Chris is alluding to, and it's very obvious, is that what we're seeing in venture and private equity is there is a confluence of moving to liquidity. Venture right now is constipated. We just put out a paper that Will Rosellini and Javier of PatentVest put out yesterday about the AI and the rise of deep tech and really the decline of the SaaS model software. And AI is doing a number on a number of different areas. It's really positive to what we're trying to do and where we're going. And so I think family offices, RIAs, they're figuring it out. They figured it out a couple of years ago. And they're not willing to really look for the -- what was a 7 to 10-year hold going to 10 to 11 to 12. And so public venture has become -- we're kind of the new, new thing that's been around 28 years. And so we're coming up with a number of different models to help not only these angel groups, but really RIAs and family office to be able to invest and play along with our model over and above just being a shareholder in MDB and being able to participate in everything we do. That said, Chris, why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about, I mean, the very fact that you got invited to a family office conference? I don't want to give all the details on that because I don't have them all. Is that something you can -- and I'll come back and talk about this, the Keiretsu announcement we just announced.

Sure. No. It's interesting, George, and team, has really been out talking to a number of RIAs. And really we're just figuring out, how do people look at what we've done, our track record, et cetera. And it's great. When your stocks are down, you don't feel so good, right? And we haven't felt so good about MDB stock being down and our stocks being down. But when we really look at, critically, at ourselves, and we looked at it and we said, we're in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, our job is to be in the right place at the right time. And so -- but as we talk about what we do and the logic behind it, we've been getting unbelievable reception. And we have, I think, $150 billion RIA that's invited me to talk about public venture in a couple of weeks. And as we talk to them, their -- all of their clients have been allocated towards traditional venture and private equity, which has been just as bad as being in biotech in the public markets the last couple of years. And so they see public venture as the future. And so it's pretty exciting. And I think that we're going to be out talking to a lot more of these folks. And we're getting just unbelievable reception, which is -- feels good when your stock is down. So George -- I'll turn it over to George to talk about our new partnership, which I'm super excited about.

Yes. We've been working on this for a while, and we just made the announcement earlier today around noon Eastern. So if you haven't seen the press release, it's certainly available, you can find it. It will be on our website, but also on really any PR site, financial site. You can get more details. Keiretsu is really one of the largest. They're unusual. And we're talking about Keiretsu Mid-Atlantic. MST is Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Texas. Keiretsu is probably one of the largest angel groups in the world. They're unusual in the fact that if you take a look at the dollars they put into early-stage investments, it dwarfs really all the others by a factor of about 6 or 7x. And so the gentleman who runs Keiretsu is a former Safeguard Scientific employee. Safeguard Scientific, if you don't know Safeguard, we really stand on the shoulders of the founders of Safeguard, which was really one of the first public venture publicly traded models. And Howard Lubert is the Keiretsu director. When I found out he actually came out of Safeguard, found the first big deal for Safeguard, which was Novel, and they put in somewhere between $19 million, $20 million and pulled out $1.5 billion, he gets public venture. Really the first angel director, and I've talked to a lot of them, that really understands how public venture can work. So we -- they're very excited about this partnership. They've formed a new group called IPO Angels. We're going to look at somewhere between 2 to 4 deals a year. They're going to help build a syndicate of angel groups in the nation, North America, and includes Canada, and we're talking to some Canadian groups as well. There are 15,000 active angels, less than there were 5 years ago. But out of those 15,000, I think there's 200 groups that are associated and affiliated with the Angel Capital Association, ACA, which is the overall association. And really to try to go out and hit each one of those up is -- would be a big effort. Done some of that, e-mailed some of that. Sat on a podcast with a group that we've been working with, Tech Coast Angels out of Orange County, and it's been a great relationship. We'll continue that relationship. But to have someone who understands public venture in Keiretsu MST, and Howard, that really is going to put his efforts in building out a syndicate of launching the companies that really Chris is talking about expanding to, companies that are near profitability or profitable that we can take into the public markets, those angels are holding those investments that they make for -- I think the average is 12 years. And no one's got 12 years anymore. We're all getting older. And when you can take a look at where we're going from A round to IPO within 12, 18 months, they don't -- they think that's miraculous. And so we're going to work with them very closely. Now we've got one group that helps build that quilt of angel groups. I think this is a great group. There's a confluence going on where they're moving later. And then we're talking to a couple of groups on the micro-cap public space that is looking for not only companies that can be in the micro-cap space and do well, but that they could take advantage of QSBS 1202. And if you're not familiar with QSBS 1202, you need to write it down. You need to look at it, you need to tell your accountant about it. Because everything we do usually is QSBS 1202. And the Big Beautiful Bill just changed the rules and the benefit of this type of investors. They've moved the target from you got to have a minimum of $50 million -- or a maximum of $50 million of assets, not market cap, assets, they moved it to $75 million to qualify. That is really going to qualify pretty much everything that we ever look at. And they've changed from what was a 5-year hold for 10 -- the greater of 10x your money or $10 million, to a 3, 4 and 5-year opportunity for tax benefits. This is a major situation that really plays into our hands and certainly will cause family offices and wealth managers to take it very serious. So that's about all I got. I mean that's -- we are going to continue to expand the community. It's really important. When you're doing one deal every 18 to 24 months, it was pretty easy to take the community we've had and put those deals up. When you're going to go to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deals a year, we've got to expand our community multiples. And we've got some things in place, obviously. Today's announcement is one of those opportunities. I'll kick it back to you, Chris.

Sure thing. I think we touched on RIAs and their eagerness to talk to us and trying to figure out how to fit what we do into their platforms. Obviously, some of these guys that are managing multibillions were not putting that much to work. But I think that what they see is that this is something that you don't have to allocate 35% of someone's net worth. You can allocate a very small percentage and make a meaningful investment for their clients. And they're really in the business of curating the best stuff. They can't be left out of stuff that's working. And so they're really curators of investments and managers of investments in general. And we're really what we believe is the best curators of these -- the leaders of tomorrow, these potential 100 baggers that we've focused on for our entire existence, if you will. So the other thing that we're looking at quite closely and we're -- there's been a lot of discussion with our group is sort of these new age distribution platforms. And what's happened is regulation, we made a bet when we first went public that we needed to be a clearing firm because regulation was going, that they were going to shut down micro-cap. Well, obviously, things changed dramatically. Now we're talking about tokenization of equities and we're -- regulation, as a result of the election, regulation has gone exactly the other way. Reg A.+, which I never thought was going to survive, because I just didn't see that advertising offerings online and on TV and things like that were going to work long term, exactly the opposite has happened. And what's happened is Reg A.+ is happening. We're seeing very large offerings happen using Reg. A+. And what we now realize is that Reg A+ is, quite frankly, it's a reality. And there's no reason why we can't utilize Reg. A+ and other distributions like -- platforms like that going forward. And then there's also things like Robinhood and all these other companies, they're starting to participate in IPOs that other underwriters are doing. And so we historically have never worked with any of those kind of folks before. We've never looked at it as a real opportunity. But now we're actually talking to these people. And again, we're having a great reception in the sense that they look at what we do as being sort of master creators -- or curators of these opportunities that they see the logic of partnering with us. So we're hoping to see that we can also partner with what I call these new age distribution platforms, and we're making a lot of progress on that as well. So the last major theme that I want to communicate before we get to summation is basically we've -- as we've been scaling up PatentVest and getting that operational as a law firm, our revenues are starting to scale, we're getting a lot more momentum from companies. Now that we sort of figure out exactly how to position the firm, we're starting to add clients at a much more rapid rate. And what's become very clear to us is that the practice of IP law is going to change dramatically. And the emergence of AI is not just impacting IP law, but I think it will have potentially more impact on IP law than any other space in law. And luckily, we did become this Arizona business law firm, which enables us to have nonlawyer ownership, but also enables us to partner with not only companies, but lawyers and also partner in litigation as well as IP development like no other law firm can. Traditional law can't do that. Also, traditional law is very much wrestling with what do they do with AI. And the old law firm models of the billable hour is not what companies really want to hear anymore. The companies want to hear about value creation. They don't want to hear about how many hours you worked for them. So we think there's a massive transformation happening in law, but specifically IP law. And so we've made the decision that as that sort of new big idea of this law firm is developed, it's ready to be spun out as its own independent public company. We really believe that this is a transformational shift. And so we are now making preparation to spin that off as its own company and take it public sometime in 2026. And while we'll still be very connected to PatentVest, we'll obviously -- the processes that we developed to really develop sort of IP and technology leadership for these companies, we're still going to be employing within MDB, but we really believe that PatentVest is going to be a very valuable entity in its own right and we want to spin that off to shareholders and develop that as its own independent business separate and aside from what we're doing in public venture. So we're super excited about it. We're putting together the plans, the team, et cetera to also monetize that as an investment for the shareholders, which currently is certainly not being recognized in the value of the shares of MDB currently. So all of this, we really -- we've now -- I'm sure you've heard about our Investor Summit that's happening next week at Old Parkland in Dallas. We have, I think -- what is the number of seats we have for the...

We have 140, and we're right there.

Are we going to record the conference? I guess I should...

We're going to record parts of it. It's not going to be streamed live. And there'll be an opportunity to go back and listen to presentations from recording.

So we're going to have all of our existing companies are going to be there as well as these new opportunities. And we're going to talk about what we're doing in metabolic health. We're going to have a special presentation for Buda Juice to kick off the roadshow. And we're also going to have our new friends from the Keiretsu and IPO Angels be there. And I think it should be a great event. So for the shareholders, if you haven't already registered, you should go ahead and register, and I think we'll look forward to seeing you next week. And I think it'll be a great event. And any other words about the event, George?

Well, we also have Matt Burris. If you're not familiar with Matt Burris. It's the Venture Studio Forum. What's happening is these venture studios, which you may not be aware of or familiar with, I know we weren't, he is one of the leads in that. He is creating a Venture Studio kind of Morningstar report. We are back -- our track record puts us up at the top of any deep tech venture studios. And a venture studio really is a firm that finds an idea, puts the board together, puts the management together, puts the financing together and help these companies get commercialized and to an exit or to a liquidity event. We've been a venture studio all along, we just didn't know what a venture studio was. So once we found out we were one of the top venture studios in the world, we thought, "Yes, we're a venture studio. Love venture studios. We'll always be a venture studio." So he'll be there and presenting. He'd be a great -- if you're going to be there, you want to meet Matt Burris, as well as Howard of Keiretsu. They'll have some visibility of where we're going in both of those areas.

All right. So to sum up, we are -- really the team has done a great job of really figuring out how we want to move forward, expand our -- the potential and really leverage our platform that we've built now. And so our team has done a great job of expanding our product mix to really understand and meet sort of investor demand. We really -- George, and his team, has done a great job of really positioning ourselves well with not only these angel networks, but RIAs. And as we curate these -- the best early-stage companies that have really market-leading potential, I think we're going to have great success going forward based upon what -- the optics, the way things are looking right now from all the companies that we are working with currently. And then lastly, really leveraging our unique asset in PatentVest. And as it becomes an independent public company, I think it's going to create a lot of value for the MDB shareholders. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to -- back to Tony for questions.

Okay. Well, thanks, Chris. [Operator Instructions] And Chris, give me one sec, let me queue them up. And here we go. So our first question, are there vulture opportunities in your core life science market?

Vulture is, as I say, an ugly word. Maybe not ugly, but it's -- I think, listen, what happens in tough markets is the opportunities get better, right? When there's hot money around like there was when interest rates went to 0, there was too much money around, so you didn't really have great opportunities. And that's why after COVID and all the stocks ran up, we kind of took our foot off the gas pedal in life science. We got back in too early. We thought it had dropped enough. And I think we were a bit early. And some of the companies we backed are, again, it was just -- the companies are doing phenomenal from a technical perspective, but it's not reflected in the market price. So being too early is the same as being wrong. We love the technology, that they're doing a great job. But if the stock goes down, you're wrong, right? Well, now what we're seeing is valuations are super reasonable. So yes, if you want to look at it from a vulture perspective, I think there's some great opportunities. If you look at what we're doing with Paulex, we're basically doing this funding at a $20 million pre-money valuation. That's super cheap. If we get a readout -- if you take that pill and you produce a bit more insulin, you're talking about elephant country. That could be a multibillion-dollar valuation. Again, there's no promises here, but you at least have that asymmetric upside. That asymmetric upside did not exist 3 or 4 years ago and before. And so that asymmetric upside is really available today where it wasn't available back then. Same thing with NCT and what we're going to be doing with GT Metabolic. These valuations based on where they're at are super reasonable. And so yes, I mean in a sense, there are. I don't think that -- the most important thing that you have to look at investing in life science is, is it going to work? That's the most important thing. If it works, then it covers up a lot of things. But before, there were some things, even if they worked, you wouldn't make money. And so that's changing. And so yes, I think there's a huge opportunity, and we're -- we have our finger on the pulse and I think we're going to continue to curate some of the best ones possible in that sector.

Tony, let me pose the next question because actually you could be part of the answer for this question. A really good question regarding IR/PR, whether it's MDBH or eXoZymes or our portfolio companies. What's the plan? I mean we're seeing these -- our companies, we're seeing very little volume. What's the plan in order to -- as we execute on the model, what's your thoughts, Chris? You've got a lot of experience in small cap, micro cap, low-volume companies. What's your thoughts on that for the Street to learn about them, to get behind them to support them and so we can see volume and liquidity go up in these names?

Yes. Well, listen, I think the first thing you have to do right as any public company is you have to have your narrative correct, right? In other words, you have to recognize the environment that's changed. It's a different environment than what it was before. And so a lot of times these companies have to come up with different strategies to basically say, "Hey, listen, we're going to get through to the other side. We're going to get through to either commercialization or we're going to get through to a major inflection point technically." And these companies are doing that. And I think you're going to see them position themselves for success. In some cases, they may be cutting their budget down to deal with this current market environment. In some cases, they're going to look to partner maybe a bit earlier than they normally would. They're going to adjust their business models and their narrative to reflect the environment. That's job number one. Number two is they've got to focus on things that are near term, right? They've got to focus on inflection points that are super near term and make it super-clear to investors. And I think strategically, all of our companies are doing that and they're -- I think they're doing a super good job. And I think over the next 90, 120 days, you're going to see evidence of that. As far as getting it on the radar screen, that is -- as you reposition it, you open it to a different audience of investors as well. And so I think it's starting to happen. I mean I think you can see volume really is a function of money coming into the asset class. Low volume a lot of times is a good sign. It means that you might -- you're near the bottom, right? And then they say price begets volume. And so I think that as we've seen a couple of these small biotechs that have good news go up dramatically, one that we were tracking and we almost did a financing for went up like 11x in the last month because -- on good news. So I think that some of these things are primed and then the volume goes parabolic. So some of these things are trading no volume, trading at very low prices, and then, all of a sudden, something happens, and next thing you know, you've got a ton of volume. So that's the way I see it. I think that's what's going to end up happening. IR is, in my mind, has been overrated. It's "Let's have a good narrative, get in front of the people that you should -- that care about it." I would tell you over the last 2 or 3 years, the major problem has been people don't care about it. And that's in venture -- traditional venture and public venture in the life science sector.

So let me go then to Tony because you're on the market and community side. Some of the efforts and what we're doing is to get the story out. We've tried a lot of different things and we're going to continue to try a lot of things, whether it's influencers on a particular name. But can you speak to that a little bit, Tony, what we've been doing?

Yes, I sure can. I think a couple of things are really important for us, recognizing, as Chris just said, that media love success stories, right? And as the companies that we're financing have their own success stories and are creating newsworthiness in the marketplace, it certainly helps MDB. But for us, being able to have speaking opportunities, like the one Chris is about to do in Boston in a couple of weeks; George, you've been out on the circuit speaking with angel groups; and Matt Hayden being out there with RIAs and big family office groups and things, getting in very highly targeted, selected audiences where we get the opportunity to tell the MDB story at a greater length than a 15-second blurb, blast on social media or whatever, I think, is a really quality over quantity in that sense, is really important to getting our story out there. Podcasts, that the 2 of you have been on recently, is another great example of an opportunity in a setting where we know we have interested investors and interested financial writers and financial media. Listening is another great place that we continue to mine, and we're finding success in that. And then always, we're working to find and create our own content. And right now, George, you mentioned at the top of the broadcast, PatentVest has been terrific about creating reports in really helping to give investors education and information that demonstrates the breadth and depth of what MDB does and what PatentVest does, that really separates us in our diligence in our curation, and we fully intend to continue to do more of that and distribute it. So I would say those things are really the bedrock of what we're doing. Obviously, the block and tackling among press releases, social media posting and things, of course, we're going to do that. But it's really the quality and the depth to our story that sets MDB apart.

So just the last part here, Chris, and we didn't really talk about it, but I got a question, and we get questions on it all the time, about what does the holding company own? What's the kind of the plan to harvest, whether there's -- assuming there's gains there? And what's your plan on a distribution? I think it's always got to be reviewed and kind of what you're thinking and how we're going to proceed going forward as these companies -- some of these companies go to where we think they could go.

I think that, listen, what we said when we went public and we've said consistently is, is that I can tell you, as the large shareholder, I'd love to get a distribution. So from my perspective, eXoZymes is our biggest position and I think that we'd like to distribute that out. We just made an announcement right now that we're going to spin out PatentVest in some form or fashion and take it public. So our -- my sense is that 2026 is the right year for that. I think that the trading volume in eXoZymes has been so low that I think distributing it out right now before there's really a big sort of event to happen with eXoZymes is probably -- I think the best time to do it is when there's good news on eXoZymes and...

Can you off the cuff just kind of give the holdings of the various holdings at the holding company right now?

Well, we have roughly 4 million shares of eXoZymes. So at current market, that's close to $10, so, what, $40 million. And then we have -- I don't have the exact number of shares, but a couple of million shares, I think, of...

Yes, it's north of 2.

Of HeartBeam, plus warrants. And we have -- and then we have PatentVest as we own 100% of it, and that will be spun out. And then we have some small other warrant positions that are not meaningful. But I think those are the major positions. And so if you add up that, it's a substantial number. And the idea is to not keep that buried. I mean right now, our enterprise value at current market is like $35 million, so it's below -- significantly below our -- the value of eXoZymes and our cash and other securities. And so we don't -- I think going forward, we're not going to really need much capital to operate as we do more financings. That offsets our operating cost. So really it's distribute out as much equity as we possibly can. And so hopefully, in 2026, I think that's kind of the year that makes sense. I think do it into a stronger environment from micro-cap and when these companies have a sound footing, then it makes all the sense of the world to distribute it. We've always -- I always tell people, we started MDB with, when we started in 1997, we started with like a few hundred thousand dollars and an idea. And I always tell people, the rest is profit. We created multibillion-dollar companies with no capital. And so what we did do is scale up our operations to do more than one company every 18 months. And scaling up took -- increased our operating expenses. But we should be able to offset those operating expenses with fee income and what have you. And so I think that -- and also becoming a clearing firm increased our OpEx a bit as well. So a combination of scale, the clearing firm and scaling up PatentVest, it increased our OpEx from roughly $5 million a year to $10 million a year. But the great news is that intellectual capital created, like I said, multibillion-dollar companies. And I don't think we're getting stupider; I think we're getting smarter. But I can tell you, I felt pretty stupid the last couple of years being involved in deep tech and biotech. And so certainly being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like I said, or being too early is the same as being wrong. So we got to pivot to being right, and that's what we're hoping to do right now.

So Chris, to follow up on your comments about PatentVest, the question here says, are you planning to take it public in the same way you have done all the others? Will MDBH remain a controlling or large shareholder in PatentVest?

Again, we're -- our goal would be to -- again, is, yes, take it public. I think that, from my perspective, again, I'd like to get it into the hands of the shareholders as fast as possible. There's no real reason for MDB to control it going forward. If we spin it out, I'll still have a -- the existing shareholders and I will still have a pretty good interest in it. And so the goal would be to get as much of it into the shareholders' hands as possible. But the exact plans as far as exactly how we're going to take it public, whether it's through an IPO or through maybe just a distribution to shareholders, that hasn't been fully baked yet. But we'll be announcing those plans as we develop it later this year.

And here's a pipeline question that came in. Are there other companies like Buda Juice, being a nontraditional big idea type company, currently in the MDB pipeline?

Yes. So what's kind of fun is I've been feeling down, I've been feeling pretty -- as our stocks are down, I'm like not feeling so smart. But we've had a lot of calls from people. And the way Buda came in, it was a relationship and someone just asking me for advice, and that's how it turned into an IPO. Had one of our community members call me recently and he's got a really exciting company. I can't tell you the sector or what they do. But I'm super excited about it. It's got significant revenue momentum, and really exciting space. And he said to me, "Chris, listen, I think taking this company public makes all the sense in the world. And there's nobody else I would take it to except MDB to take it public." And that made me feel really good that 28 years of working, doing what we're doing, that people recognize that -- our reputation and the value we can bring. But also GT Metabolic that's going to be at the conference, what an unbelievable story and opportunity. And someone like me that's battled metabolic disease my whole life, like roughly 50% of the country now, is it's a wicked, wicked, wicked -- it is a disease. Yes, you eat too much, right, and you're overweight, but it's way more complicated than that. And GT Metabolic, again, Thierry Thaure, who's the CEO of GT Metabolic, he had been on the board of Pulse Biosciences that we took public. And he said, Chris, he goes, public venture, he goes, man, he goes -- he's talking to VCs, he's talking to other people and what have you, strategics, and he said, "I think going public is the best thing for us." And again, a relationship and an experience with our form of public venture is why he came to us. And so it makes me feel real good that our reputation and our experience and relationships, that we're seeing a lot of really cool things. So stay tuned. Whether it's GT or others, I think we're going to end up having a deep pipeline. But more importantly, and I think -- I'm super excited because I believe -- I've been hearing for the last 20 years, why would I go public? Why would I go public? Why would I go public? It's for the first time in a long time that these companies are walking in going, jeez, everybody is saying we should go public. And so it's really -- it's all changed, right? And it's really -- what I see is kind of the death of traditional venture, at least in the small company space. You're still seeing billion-dollar deals happen in the big -- the big funds doing huge AI deals and things like that. But for these smaller opportunities where they don't need $100 million or $200 million, those companies are struggling. The VCs are coming to us. Ironically, the VCs are coming to us also bringing us deals. So the whole game has changed from my perspective. And I think that we went from 8,000 public companies at the end of the Internet boom to 4,000 public companies today. It's been the worst thing you could ever imagine for going public. But I think that -- I'm a big believer that shift is occurring. I sense it. I'm not -- I'm only right half the tone, so hopefully this half, I'm right. And so I think that going public is going to be the thing to do. And so we're crazily so well positioned for that wave that I think is going to come.

There's a question here about are you looking locally in -- as we expand our focus, are we looking locally in the Dallas, DFW area, which is an incredible area and there's a lot of venture studios here and venture. And the answer is absolutely. And I think the fact that we have our own fully clearing broker-dealer, we're not only looking at venture studios locally and angel groups locally in the Dallas area, but internationally, that are coming to us that have a portfolio and they're going like, "We have mature companies. Could you help us take them public?" So I think the pipeline is not an issue. For me, I'm all community. I'm about building the network. So that's to me where the biggest issue is and the biggest opportunity for us to do. Once we build it, they're already here. They aren't even coming; they're here. And certainly, in the Dallas area, I think the fact that we're taking a local company that's very well known in Dallas public, when it could have gone private equity, Buda Juice, I think, is going to help kind of expand our following and interest in what we're doing in the DFW area. Any comments on that, Chris? Does that sum it up pretty well?

Well, listen, I think that Dallas has traditionally not been a hotbed for life science companies, but there's a lot of great companies in Dallas. And I think that there's been a huge transition in the Dallas community. There are some life science companies that have started to percolate in the DFW area, but there are so many other companies. And it's a dynamic field. I mean you've got -- what's happening in Dallas is crazy, from Goldman Sachs opening up and bringing in, what is it, 800 employees to Dallas. You've got so many people moving to Dallas. And you're also seeing hedge funds, private equity, all these guys are sort of congregating in Dallas. And so it's become a hotbed. And I think we're going to see a lot of activity. We've been very specific about what we do. So for the most part, Dallas has not been a biotech community, so quite frankly, there wasn't a lot of things to talk about with Dallas people. And so I think that going forward though, that's going to change. And I think that we're excited that we have a platform based here that I think can serve the market, but not just the Dallas market, but beyond.

Chris, we're at the end of our time here and I want to get this one question out. It's a question about, in the future, do you see you have to be an MDB shareholder in order to participate in offerings? Which would certainly be a great place to be for shareholders -- existing shareholders of MDB. How do you see that playing out?

Well, I think it's still the same thing, right? In other words, we've always -- we've told everybody that this is a community-based effort. And so being a shareholder in MDB is you're always going to have priority over outside people to participate in offerings. It hasn't been a huge -- when you're doing life science companies that are not the hottest part of the market, being an MDB shareholder hasn't been that critical. But for those of you that have known MDB and participated in MDB historically, there were times where I was in the very uncomfortable position of getting phone calls from people begging me to get into offerings, right?

I like those days better, by the way.

Hopefully it's coming around the corner again. And so part of the reason for going public was we anticipated that to be the case, right? And it hasn't turned out that way in the short run. But going forward, that was the whole idea. And so we're -- we have a long memory. We're not going to go back on what we said. So being a shareholder is going to be important to being -- for that.

Lastly, we're leaving -- that was lastly, but now really lastly, there's a number of PatentVest questions. I am assuming as we get further down the road, we're going to have a call just on the PatentVest and this AI law firm to answer what the model is, how that works, what we see the value drivers to be. Is that accurate?

Yes. I mean, the team -- we've all been working on the business strategy for it. And it's pretty well developed. And I think you'll -- I think we're going to be ready to present that to shareholders so they understand the value that PatentVest represents. And I think we've had a lot of discussions with patent lawyers that want to join. We've had a lot of discussions with strategic partners to come in and be part of the fold. So it's developing quickly. And so I expect that we'll be able to give some color on that here shortly to the shareholders.

Okay.

All right. Chris, any closing remarks?

No. Thank you guys for hanging in there. It's been -- it's not been a wonderful start to being a public company. Like I said, we've been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I think we're working really hard to be in the right place at the right time. And I think we're -- the team has done a phenomenal job. From our team at -- our analyst team and banking team that's putting together deals and teeing these things up, they're doing an awesome job, and I couldn't be more proud of the work they're doing. And I take total responsibility for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not their fault. And as far as community development is concerned, George and Tony and the whole team as far as what's going on there has done a phenomenal job. And we're really expanding beyond our historical MDB community and really getting out there and saying how do we really scale so that we can bring several investments to people a year, and the whole team at PatentVest that's really catalyzed and figured out how to create a real opportunity with that. So I couldn't be prouder of all the efforts of everybody, but it's time to go put some points on the scoreboard, we got to go win. So again, I appreciate all of you for sticking in there and -- over what's not been a great time.

Thank you, everybody. And this will conclude our call today. Thank you.