Valens Semiconductor Ltd. (VLN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Valens Semiconductor's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michal Ben Ari, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to Valens Semiconductor's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. With me today are Yoram Salinger, Chief Executive Officer; and Karine Pinto-Flomenboim, our new Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we issued a press release that is available on the Investor Relations section of our website under investors.valens.com. As a reminder, today's earnings call may include forward-looking statements and projections, which do not guarantee future events or performance. These statements are subject to the safe harbor language in today's press release. Please refer to our annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on February 25, 2026, for a discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. We do not undertake any duty to revise or update such statements to reflect new information, subsequent events or changes in strategy. We will be discussing certain non-GAAP measures on this call, which we believe are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business, and you can find reconciliations of these metrics within our earnings release. With that, I will now turn the call over to Yoram.

Thank you, Mike. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us, and welcome to our new CFO, Karine Pinto-Flomenboim, who brings with her extensive financial and operational leadership experience from both public and private technology companies. We are very happy to have you here with us. Since joining Valens, I spent a lot of my time with our teams, our customers and our partners. And what has struck me most is the depth of technology we've built and how directly that translates into customer adoption from audio-video products shipping today to automotive design wins that are advancing towards production. We provide high-performance chipsets that are in demand across industries because they offer OEMs a foundation upon which they can build the innovations of the future. Our technological leadership, combined with our growing commercial momentum, give me confidence in our ability to capitalize on many opportunities that lay ahead. I'll speak more about how this impacts our full year revenue towards the end of my remarks. I'm happy to share that this quarter, we exceeded the top end of our revenue guidance at $18.1 million. GAAP gross margin for the second quarter came in at 61.5%, well within our guidance, and adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $4.2 million, lower than anticipated compared to our guidance. During the remainder of my remarks, I'd like to highlight the key developments across our business, and I'll start with Audio-Video. Audio-Video continues to be the core foundation of our business. Our activities here continue to expand steadily and the momentum we saw this quarter reflects continued customer adoption and commercial traction across our chipset portfolio. The revenue growth this quarter came primarily from 2 chipsets, our legacy VS100 family and our cutting-edge VS3000. We are encouraged that the market continues to find value in our VS100, the first generation of HDBaseT chipsets. For customers looking for next-generation AV platforms, we are happy to see that they are increasingly choosing our VS3000, the only solution for uncompressed HDMI 2 extension over widely deployed category cables. In addition, we saw continued momentum building from our VS6320 chip, which extends USB 3.2. We expect integration of those chipsets to grow as more OEMs adopt higher-resolution video and more advanced USB protocols into their designs. In Q2, we saw additional products hit the market based on our most cutting edge chips, including from leading AV manufacturers, Crestron and Extron. Adoption by 2 top-tier AV manufacturers like these is exactly the kind of commercial traction that turns technology leadership into recurring revenue and give us confidence in continued growth from these products as we move further into 2026. Beyond these newer products, our broader Audio-Video portfolio also continued to perform well. During the quarter, we announced that Barco selected our HDBaseT chipset to power its new ClickShare USB-C Extension over CAT kit. Barco is one of the most recognized names in collaboration technology and the ClickShare product is known for its wireless connectivity. The company's decision is a clear signal of market demand for higher performance wired connectivity and of Valens's position as a leader in this space. We see wins like this as further validation that our technology continues to add value as collaboration systems evolve. At this point, I'd like to mention an important initiative we undertook aimed at converting our technology into new revenue opportunities. When I took the helm at Valens, we quickly established an internal task force focused on identifying new opportunities that could be pursued with minimal incremental R&D investment beyond the chip we are currently selling and with accelerated time to market. The team exceeded my expectations. One of the best examples came from our VS6320 with software enhancement, we created a new offering that addressed a clear market need. Rather than simply selling the chip, Valens developed a joint reference design for USB3 and 4K video by combining the VS6320 with a companion chip and introduced it to leading ODMs customers. We also work with those customers to design firmware tailored to their specific needs. The company has already seen millions of dollars in bookings across multiple customers, several of which have already progressed to sampling, completed qualification and are now beginning volume production. This is an elegant production-ready solution for extending both USB3 and 4K video. It also provides a clear bridge to the next step of our road map. We're currently developing a new single-chip solution that will integrate these capabilities into one package. Instead of pairing the VS6320 with companion chip from other vendors, OEMs will be able to achieve the same functionality with a single device, simplifying system design, reducing component count, lowering cost and streamlining integration. The strong market interest in our USB3 and 4K reference design reinforces our conviction that the chip's integrated feature set will address a real and growing customer need. Before I move to our Automotive business, I'd like to mention our presence at the InfoComm trade show, one of the marquee events in the pro AV industry, which took place in Las Vegas in June. Both the VS3000 and the VS6320 generated strong interest from OEMs, ODMs and ecosystem partners. Throughout the show, we held a large number of strategic meetings that resulted in new business opportunities, expanded engagements and a robust pipeline of follow-up activities. Overall, the event further strengthened our confidence in our Audio-Video strategy and growing demand for our technology and our ability to translate that demand into future design wins and revenue growth. Let's turn now to the automotive industry. I'd like to start this section with the exciting news that we are welcoming Dean Martin as the new Head of Automotive business unit, effective on September 1. I had the pleasure of working with Dean for more than a decade at Redmond later acquired by Harman and saw firsthand his exceptional ability to turn innovative technologies into significant commercial success. Dean has a track record of securing major design wins, leading global automakers and building the customer relationships needed to support the long-term growth. And at that note, I'd like to thank Adar Segal, who is stepping down from his position for his significant contribution to Valens over the recent years. Now turning to our performance in Automotive during Q2. As you know, this industry represents one of the most important long-term growth opportunities for Valens. As vehicles add more cameras, radars and other sensors to support ADAS and autonomous driving, the industry needs a new class of high-performance, reliable, standardized connectivity. We believe Valens is well positioned to become a leading provider of that connectivity for the years to come. At the center of this opportunity is our VA7000 chipset, which offers high-performance connectivity for cameras and radars using ADAS and autonomous driving. The VA7000 is the first chipset on the market to comply with the MIPI A-PHY standard. We now have 4 design wins for our A-PHY chipsets, and one of our primary focus is on executing those programs successfully. I'm pleased to say that all 4 projects are progressing according to plan, and our teams are working closely with customers to support their development towards production. As a reminder, Automotive programs follow long development and production cycles, often several years from design wins to volume production, but we expect to see revenues from these projects ramping up during 2027. While initial revenue represents an important milestone, the larger opportunities will develop as these programs advance into volume production over time. We continue to participate in several evaluation processes at various stages with multiple OEMs, providing additional opportunities to expand our design wins portfolio. To conclude, we delivered a strong execution during the past quarter. Building on the continued strength of the professional AV foundation, we also made meaningful progress across our Automotive programs while our technology leadership continues to translate into growing commercial momentum, positioning us well for future growth. As a result of our strong first half performance and the visibility we now have into the remainder of the year, we are raising our full year revenue guidance to between $78 million and $81 million, up from our previous guidance range of $75 million to $77 million. This would mark 13% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of our guidance. Our updated guidance reflects the strength of our current customer programs, improving revenue visibility and confidence in our ability to execute during the second half of 2026. And on that note, I'll turn the call over to Karine to discuss our financial performance in more detail.

Thank you, Yoram. And before I dive into the financials, I'd like to say how excited I am to be joining Valens and to participate in my first earnings call as CFO. As this is my first week in the role, I'll be brief on qualitative observations today, but I look forward to engaging more deeply with all of you in the quarters ahead. Now let's dive into our second quarter 2026 results. We achieved quarterly revenue of $18.1 million, which exceeded our guidance of between $17.2 million to $17.6 million. This compares to revenue of $16.9 million in Q1 2026 and $17.1 million in Q2 2025. The Cross-Industry Business, or CIB, accounted for $13.1 million or approximately 70% of total revenue, while Automotive contributed $5 million or approximately 30% of total revenue this quarter. This compares with Q1 2026 revenue of $11 million from CIB and $5.9 million from Automotive, which represented approximately 65% and 35% of total revenue, respectively. It also compares to Q2 2025 revenue of $12.8 million from the CIB and $4.3 million from Automotive, representing 75% and 25% of total revenue, respectively. Q2 2026 gross profit was $11.1 million compared to $10.5 million in Q1 2026 and compared to $10.8 million in Q2 2025. Q2 2026 gross margin was 61.5% compared to our guidance of between 60% and 62%. This compares to a Q1 2026 gross margin of 62.2% and Q2 2025 of 63.5%. On a segment basis, Q2 2026 gross margin from the CIB was 69.2% and gross margin from Automotive was 41.5%. This compares to a Q1 2026 gross margin of 70.8% and 46.2%, respectively, and to Q2 2025 gross margin of 67.8% and 50.5%, respectively. The decrease in gross margin in Automotive compared to Q1 2026 was mainly due to additional testing facility expenses incurred to prioritize and support production requirements. Non-GAAP gross margin in Q2 2026 was 64.3%, which compares to 65.2% in Q1 2026 and 67.2% in Q2 2025. Operating expenses in Q2 2026 totaled $19.1 million compared to $19.4 million in Q1 2026 and $18.2 million in Q2 2025. Research and development expenses in Q2 2026 totaled $10.1 million compared to $10.3 million in Q1 2026 and $10.2 million in Q2 2025. SG&A expenses in Q2 2026 were $9 million compared to $9.4 million in Q1 2026 and $8.9 million in Q2 2025. GAAP net loss in Q2 2026 was $8.1 million compared to a net loss of $8.3 million in Q1 2026 and a net loss of $7.2 million in Q2 2025. Adjusted EBITDA in Q2 2026 was a loss of $4.2 million, better than the guidance range of a loss between $4.9 million and $4.4 million. This compares to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $5.5 million in Q1 2026 and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $4 million in Q2 2025. GAAP loss per share in Q2 2026 was $0.08, the same as in Q1 2026 and compared to a loss of $0.07 for Q2 2025. Non-GAAP loss per share in Q2 2026 was $0.04 compared to a loss of $0.05 in Q1 2026 and a loss of $0.04 in Q2 2025. The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP loss per share was mainly due to stock-based compensation as well as depreciation and amortization expenses. Now turning to the balance sheet. We ended Q2 2026 with cash, cash equivalents and short-term bank deposits totaling $83.4 million and with no debt. This compares to $86.1 million at the end of Q1 2026 and $92.6 million at the end of Q4 2025. Our working capital at the end of Q2 2026 was $88.9 million compared to $91.3 million at the end of Q1 2026 and $95.7 million at the end of Q4 2025. Our inventory as of June 30, 2026, was $12.5 million, an increase from $10.9 million on March 31, 2026, and $10.1 million on December 31, 2025. Now I would like to discuss our guidance for the third quarter of 2026. We expect Q3 2026 revenue to be in the range of $21.3 million to $21.7 million. We expect gross margin for Q3 2026 to be in the range of 60% to 62%, and we expect an adjusted EBITDA loss for Q3 2026 between $3.4 million and $2.8 million loss. As Yoram said earlier, we are proud to raise our full year guidance between $78 million to $81 million. It's certainly an encouraging start to my time at Valens, a reflection of the team's strong execution. I'll now turn the call back to Yoram for his closing remarks before opening the call for Q&A.

Thank you, Karine. I'm happy that we were able to raise our full year guidance. This reflects the progress we are making across our core businesses, both in the established Audio-Video unit and the high-growth potential Automotive offering. With our differentiated technology, strong balance sheet and focus on our core markets, we're well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities ahead and drive meaningful growth, not just in 2026, but beyond as well. With that, I'll now open the call to answer your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

Welcome, Karine. I wanted to start on the new reference design, Yoram, that you mentioned in the script. One, can you just give us a little bit more detail on what that solution involves with the VS6320 and what type of companion chip did you integrate into that solution? And then sort of a related question, as you look to bring that companion chip into an integrated solution with the 6320, how does that affect ASP and margin for that new solution?

So as you probably know, our part in the reference design is the 6320 and a software implementation that enables a companion chip running 4K video to coexist over a single cable in order to transmit video in parallel to USB. As we said in the script, this is getting a ton of traction from ODMs and it already generated bookings of millions of dollars. And basically, it doesn't affect the gross margin and the ASP because we are not the one selling the end product.

I guess when you mentioned you were getting to an integrated solution, would you bring that functionality into a chip designed by Valens? Or would it just be a solution where you buy the companion chip and pass it through as part of a solution, but it's not something that really affect -- you're not designing a new chip? Or are you going to design a new chip with that companion chip functionality integrated into the 6320?

So that's a very good question. The companion chip is going to be bought by the ODMs who is eventually going to design and build the system and sell it to the market. You're right about the intent of having a solution to be introduced later in coming years where we would integrate the 2 capabilities, 4K video alongside with the USB kind of 6320 into one chip, and that's kind of a road map plan for us. But for now, it's ODMs that we have built a reference implementation for them. They're buying the companion chip and they build the PCB in order to get it to the market.

Understood. Got it. And then, you already mentioned that all 4 of the VA7000 wins are progressing towards initial production in 2027. That's still potentially about a year away. Can you give us a sense what are the key milestones left on the time line to achieving start of production on those programs? Are there major milestones? Or do you feel like most of those milestones have now been met? Just trying to get a sense of what the challenge is or what the next big steps are for those 4 Auto designs.

So I'm proud to say that our piece in that very complex puzzle has been completed and delivered. So we have delivered chips to the Tier 1s who are building the ECUs in order to get into the manufacturers or the OEMs, the carmakers to build the car. So our part in that has been completed and done in a very effective manner. Obviously, launching cars is a complex task, and it takes a few other elements of the car industry to get together at the same time in order to -- for the OEM to launch the product. So our part in that is pretty much completed. And the reason we are saying we see that moving on track is because we are working with the Tier 1, and we know that they're advancing towards releasing their piece into the assembly line of the car manufacturers, and this is what gives us the confidence.