Weebit Nano Limited (WBT.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is David, David Perlmutter, and I have the privilege of being the Chair of Weebit Nano. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2025 Annual General Meeting of Weebit Nano Limited. It is now 3:00 p.m. Australian Eastern Time, the time appointed for the meeting, and as we have a quorum, I declare the meeting open. A notice of meeting was distributed on 24 October, 2025, which sets out the business and resolutions to be considered at this meeting, and I will take the notice of meeting as read. Today, I'm joined by my fellow directors, CEO, Coby Hanoch; Deputy Chair, Anne Templeman-Jones; and Naomi Simson; and also present today, CFO, Alla Felder; our Company Secretary, Naomi Lawrie; Michael Fay, our Auditor from Nexia Perth; and Michael Hutchison from our share registry, Computershare Investor Services, who will also act as our Returning Officer. In order for the events of today's meeting to be as follows: First, I will address some procedural matters for the meeting. I will then provide a brief address, followed by an address from Anne Templeman-Jones, our Deputy Chair; Coby Hanoch, the CEO, will then provide an update on the business. our full-year '25 results and full-year '26 focus. Alla Felder, CFO, will present the financial information. There will be an opportunity for questions on the presentation and general shareholder questions at this stage. We will then complete the formal business of the meeting. I will now address some of the -- some reason, things are moving.

We don't control the slides.

We don't control. No, no, I'm not there yet. I need to go back. It's the wrong slide.

The next slide.

Yes. The next slide should show the procedural matters. I will now address some procedural matters for this meeting. In addition to our in-person meeting in Melbourne, we are also conducting the meeting with a virtual component. The hybrid format allows shareholders and proxies whoever they may be to attend virtually. All shareholders and proxies can ask questions and vote today. For those of you online, should you experience any technical difficulties, a recording of our AGM will be available on our website following the meeting. If we experience any technical issues during the meeting, a short recess will be required. Should this occur, we will communicate accordingly. Voting today will be conducted by the way of poll on all items of business. Instructions on how to vote through the Computershare platform are now displayed on the screen. In order to provide everyone with the opportunity to vote and in case anyone cannot stay for the whole meeting, the poll is now open, and you could vote on all resolutions. I will give you a warning before I move to close voting. For those voting holders physically in the room today, you would have received a voting card upon registration. Please complete the reverse of the voting card. Should you require assistance to do this, we have Computershare staff available to assist you. At the conclusion of the meeting or if you choose to leave the meeting sooner, please place your completed voting cards in one of the ballot boxes that are located in the exit door. I think we need the next slide now. Shareholders will have the opportunity to ask general questions after the CEO's presentation, as well as after each resolution is presented. For those attending the meeting in-person, please raise your hand when prompted and you will be called upon at the appropriate time. For those attending virtually, please see the steps as outlined on the screen. Please be reminded that any shareholder validly appointed proxies and corporate representatives are entitled to ask questions at today's meeting. It is my duty as Chair to ensure the shareholders here as a group have the reasonable opportunity to discuss the management of the company and the items of business before the meeting. The following procedures have been adopted for this meeting. Questions and comments should be concise. Questions and comments must be confined to the particular item being discussed and to matters relevant to shareholders as a whole, and shareholders are limited to one question at a time. I would like to make a short statement as a Chair. 2025 marks a decade since Weebit Nano was established. It is relatively short time by industry standards, and we have developed and commercialized early-stage research-level technology into the advanced production-ready technology to replace embedded flash in next-generation applications. Over the past year, Weebit continued to gain commercial traction. We licensed and taped-out our embedded ReRAM at Tier 1 Integrated Device Manufacturer, onsemi, achieved our 2025 target of 3 customers integrating our technology in next-generation applications and qualified our technology to automotive AEC-Q100 standards. This progress delivered a four-fold annual increase in revenues in full-year '25. The team remains on track to complete qualifications at DB HiTek before the end of the 2025 calendar year and discussions with more than 20 foundries, IDMs and product companies are ongoing. Demand for faster, low power and better performing non-volatile memory or NVM, is being fueled by AI, automotive and advanced consumer electronics. ReRAM is emerging as the NVM of choice of such applications, offering a faster, cost-effective and some secure memory solutions than embedded flash. Globally, Weebit is the only independent provider of qualified ReRAM and 1 of just 3 companies with qualified ReRAM technology in the market to date. Our world-class team is focused solely on ReRAM and the goal of our ongoing investment in the technology improvement is for Weebit to become the leader in this market. Across the semiconductor industry, we have been seeing significant investments in the U.S.A., Europe and other countries to bolster sovereign manufacturing capabilities. This includes investment in new U.S. manufacturing facilities and capabilities from TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Texas Instruments as well as $1 billion commitment from the U.K. government for domestic capabilities. Our enduring partnership with technical partner, CEA-Leti, has been instrumental to our technical progress and ReRAM leadership. I'd like to thank CEA-Leti as well as commercial partners, DB HiTek, onsemi and SkyWater for their collaboration and support. We look forward for continued cooperation in full-year '26 and beyond. To support our transition to a more mature business, we welcomed highly regarded Anne Templeman-Jones as our Independent Non-Executive Director and Deputy Chair. Anne has strengthened our governance practices, ensuring we have the right infrastructure and process in place. This included the release of our inaugural ESG report, which highlights the environmental advantages of our embedded ReRAM over flash and other non-volatile memory technologies. Weebit would not be where it is today without the dedication and hard work of our leadership and Board. I thank my fellow Directors and the entire Weebit team for their commitment to our commercial and technical targets over the past year. Before [indiscernible], I just would like to thank our loyal and engaged shareholders to our continued support. Our exceptionally strong start for full year '26 reinforces our belief that our best years are ahead of us. Full-year '26 will see us secure additional licensing and design agreements, improving availability of our embedded ReRAM, growing revenues and importantly, delivering value to shareholders. The Board acknowledges the shareholders' vote on the remuneration-related matters, noting we are taking it seriously and will address the appropriate information that our shareholders have indicated they require in subsequent reporting. This will be in the form of greater clarity of KMP/executive remuneration, clearly outline performance indicators for the long-term incentives and address the distinction between financial and calendar year reporting outcomes for key management personnel and executives. Restricted share units were issued to the Deputy Chair, which is consistent with the existing remuneration policy on sign-up of Directors and common of technology companies in the market in which Weebit operates. Can I have the next slide? Before that, my other shares don't show up. But anyway, can you get me the next one? Okay. I'll stop there. Okay. I'll say a few words because I'm getting these questions along visiting over here. I had some slides, but I'll skip those. We are visiting Australia for 10 years. I'm talking about semiconductors throughout my career for 45 years. For the general public, semiconductors have been something which is not fully understood even to date. But many people did not even understand the importance of the semiconductor industry in general to the economy and everything that we did to date. So just a few numbers to -- about 37% of the world's GDP is dependent on semiconductors and I believe it's going to grow significantly. In an interview, I was having about 15, 17 years ago with a Saudi Arabian reporter, he asked me about the importance of semiconductors and I told him, semiconductor for the digital world is like oil to the industrial world. And now, I would have said if I answered today for the digital and artificial intelligence world because without semiconductors, none of this would happen. The amount of money invested in moving forward and improving on this technology is huge. The newest fab of TSMC, the Taiwanese larger semiconductor manufacturer, is in the range of $47 billion. There is nothing on mother earth or any factory is getting even close to such cost. The R&D that semiconductor companies are putting in place to promote and push is way north of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a huge, huge investment. And it's not surprising that the largest company, the highest value company is a semiconductor company, not surprising. That would be unthinkable even 20, 25 years ago when most of the big companies have been either banks or oil companies. So, this is a significant change. And we are very happy to be part of this industry, and we are very happy to have our shareholders participate with us in being able to bring a small but still important part of this technology. So, I thank you very much for this one. As I don't have the slides and I introduced some of my fellow Directors, we have other 3 Directors, which are not present over here: Ashley Krongold, he's a local Melbourne person; Atiq Raza who was the President of one of the largest semiconductor companies, AMD and is an entrepreneur on his own. He's chairing a NASDAQ-traded company and Yoav Nissan‑Cohen, Dr. Yoav Nissan‑Cohen, who is one of the original inventors and did his PhD on non-volatile memory. He is and was a General Manager of a foundry. So, we have a very strong management team -- directors. We have a very strong leadership team under Coby. And in this business, the level of complexity, the amount of training and experience you need to gather to be able to do the thing that we do is huge, kind of in contrast for people that in order to become a world-class neurosurgeon, it's probably going to be 20-plus years until someone is getting to an extremely high level of proficiency. You would not have your kids being operated by someone with 5 years of experience. So if you look at our team and the level of experience across the board because in this industry like in neurosurgery, being able to avoid the mistake is even more critical than fixing the mistake afterwards. And we believe that we have the team and the fact that many of the other companies that have been trying to do resistive memory very much are not inexistent or quite disappearing in this world is a manifestation that it's not just the technology, it's the ability of the team to be able to run the things. So by saying that, I'd like to invite Anne over here to introduce herself and talk about this. Anne?

Thank you, Dadi. Good afternoon, everyone. To those of you in the room, to our shareholders who are online and also to absent friends, my name is Anne Templeman-Jones, and I joined the Board as an Independent Non-Executive Director at the commencement of 2025 and was more recently appointed as the Deputy Chair and Chair of the Governance Committee. I'm a professional Non-Executive Director. And over the past decade, I have served on a diverse range of Boards, including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Worley Limited, the Trifork AG Group in Switzerland and Denmark and New South Wales Treasury Corporation. My executive career prior to Board service spanned international audit roles with Pricewaterhouse and OCBC Singapore, followed by senior leadership positions in corporate and institutional banking at OCBC, Westpac and ANZ, working across complex finance, risk management and governance environments. In addition to my global financial services background, I've held executive governance and advisory roles across a broad range of industries, including engineering services in the global energy sector, chemicals, consumer goods, automotive manufacturing -- sorry, technology and software services. This diversity enables me to bring a wide global perspective to the Board and a strong understanding of how different industries approach transformation, resilience and operational risk. Professionally, I bring extensive experience in strategy, audit, risk, technology transformation, complex supply chains and financing. Increasingly, my Board work is focused on cybersecurity oversight, technology resistance and safe and responsible adoption of AI. These capabilities are essential to building organizational resilience and ensuring continuity at a time when digital, operational and regulatory risks continue to evolve. Deep experience in highly regulated sectors and many of the governance principles, risk disciplines and compliance frameworks from these industries translate directly to the tech sector where safety, transparency and rigorous oversight are fundamental. As the recently appointed Chair of the Governance Committee, I look forward to contributing to the Board's strategic direction and ensuring we maintain disciplined oversight across financial controls, operational risk, technology, AI and cyber governance. I believe strongly in the importance of authenticity and candor in leadership, being clear, open and constructive so that management and the Board can work together effectively, make informed decisions and foster a culture of trust and accountability. Weebit Nano is on the cusp of significant growth with a large and growing market opportunity. Its essential memory technology is suitable for almost every industry and application, and will touch many of our lives as consumers. As Deputy Chair, my priority is increasing Weebit's engagement with Australian investors, regulators and the local deep tech industry. With very few sector peers on the ASX, market education is crucial to ensure our technology, growth opportunity and progressive milestones are well understood by the investment community. My appointment also enables Dadi to focus on supporting Coby and his leadership team on strategy. In parallel, we're continuing to enhance operational and corporate frameworks as we prepare the business for its next phase of growth. I'm excited to contribute to Weebit's growth and development and to work closely with the Board and management to deliver strong, sustainable outcomes for our shareholders. And I sincerely thank those shareholders who have already supported my appointment to the Board of Weebit Nano. And to those who will cast their votes today, having heard from me personally, I seek your support for my election to the Board. I will now hand over to Coby for today's CEO speech.

Thank you, Anne. So yes, this is the first slide. So, I'm going to hand it right back to you.

No, I've done my part.

You finished your part already?

I finished already.

So, I deserve to be more efficient. Okay. Let's see -- I don't know where I'm going to put this, so that it doesn't mess up everything. Hopefully, this will work. Okay. So, I'm going to -- this thing works, good. So, I'm skipping Dadi's slide that he already talked about, basically or talk to, and I'll go straight to my part. So thanks, everyone, for coming. Always good to see you guys. I guess I'm going to be skipping quite a few of the slides because you guys know them already by heart, probably. You can present them even better than me. So, you know the company. This year is our 10th anniversary. You saw the books here. Those who are in the room got our books that we published for this 10-year anniversary. And yes, these first slides, you know that ReRAM, non-volatile memory is really critical in the semiconductor space. Basically, any device -- practically any electronic device needs non-volatile memory across all applications, and it's a strategic element for them. And I already went through these slides about the history of non-volatile memory and how over the past 20 years, people have been looking for a replacement for flash. It's been really intensive. It's down to basically MRAM and ReRAM. And as you know, MRAM has its issues. The M stands for magnetic. And there have already been issues in the field with devices that have MRAM. They were near magnetic fields and sometimes the memory is corrupt. So today, ReRAM is really growing, taking a bigger and bigger share of the market. And as you know, Weebit is the only independent supplier of ReRAM in the market, which means that we're really swapped with work. And you know the advantages of ReRAM. So, I'll go straight to where we are today. And this slide, which is from, I think, one of the leading analysts in the memory domain from Yole. We like to quote them because they really know what they're talking about, unlike a lot of people who are not real experts. And I think it reflects what I've been talking about for a long time. The world is really moving to non-volatile memory, so try not to trip over the wires here. You can see here in 2024, basically now, it's a very small market, USD 122 million. ReRAM is 1 of 3 technologies. I will mention the one thing that Yole is very biased about is their friend. We sit right next to STMicro. STMicro is actually the only company that is developing PCM. So, they always have a lot of PCM on their slides, I think, a little bit out of proportion from what it is in the market. But in any case, you can see here the market today is roughly divided between PCM, MRAM and ReRAM. But the more interesting part is this transition. In just 6 years, the expectation is that the market will grow from USD 1.42 billion to USD 3.26 billion. That's very significant growth. The market is really moving now to emerging non-volatile memory. And the most important part as far as I'm concerned is really to see that ReRAM is growing from 1/4 to 1/2 or over 1/2 already of this market. And that really -- I was showing the other slides in the past and telling you how the market is transitioning from MRAM to ReRAM. I think now you can see it here in the analyst report very well. And this basically represents a 45x growth in 6 years, 45x growth. Just imagine what we're talking about. It's huge, and we're really, really feeling it. Last year, I was talking about how the market will start embracing the technology, how I was referring, and I have a slide here about the crossing the chasm, and I told you guys, I'm expecting to see the tornado hitting us in '26, '27. We're starting to feel the wind. It's really now happening. There's a lot of activity. The team has really swamped because of this effect. No big surprise. If you look at the markets that are adopting the technology, the first market that is really ramping up is the analog. If you remember, DB HiTek, we're working with their BCD process. onsemi, a leading analog company and again, BCD. So, Weebit is really working with this analog market. And this is -- a lot of this initial growth is also what we're starting to do, what you're seeing with Weebit going on. Of course, we already have today in the MCU ASIC and other domains, we have a lot of work going on, a lot of activity with the different fabs and product companies. So, what have we been doing? Again, you know most of these things, achieving AEC-Q100 that was a major milestone. That was really a very, very important milestone because we show just how robust our technology is. It's really -- once you show that working 150 degrees Celsius for 10 years, that shows you that this thing is really working and can withstand a lot. We've been demonstrating actually even 175 to customers and the technology is really in a good shape. The result, we've been ramping up revenue, still small numbers, but you can see that growth of revenue. In September, we already taped-out with onsemi. So in just 9 months, we managed -- this shows you how committed they are. They're very committed. They have a big team working with us. We have so many conference calls on a weekly basis. And the result is that we managed to achieve the tape-out already in September. We're waiting now for wafers to come back from the fab. And then the first quarter of this fiscal year, we already announced a nice cash income. So it's not revenue, it's cash, but more than $7 million, you can see. Again, what's important is to look at the trend, the numbers. The specific numbers are less critical, but with $90 million in the bank with less last fiscal year, the expenses were $25 million. So, you can see we have money to really move forward to progress. Cash is coming in. Obviously, expenses will go up as we have more and more customers and activity. We need to grow the team natural. But as the expenses go up, the cash coming in is also growing and we feel very comfortable now with our cash position. And we also recently announced, there are already 3 products that are being designed with our ReRAM embed, which is, again, another very important milestone. These companies believe in our technology enough to move forward. And eventually, when they'll get to mass production, we'll start seeing the royalties coming in, which is, of course, another key step forward. So onsemi, I've already talked about them a lot and about the automotive side, so I'm skipping these slides. AI, you already heard me talk about this a lot. I'll just quickly go over this because I think this is still relevant. And for those who might have not heard it before. But AI, everyone knows, it's booming now. It's really growing so fast and the applications are just endless. And every week, we already hear about more and more activity. AI consists of 2 key parts. There's the learning, you teach it to do something. And then there's the inference where you use that knowledge to perform things. Actually, in both parts, nonvolatile memory and ReRAM has an important role to play. Today, the initial focus of the industry is more on the inference. All of these edge devices that need to sense things and react and so on. The industry has realized very quickly that having these edge devices send everything to the data center to be analyzed, it just doesn't make any sense. It requires a lot of power, a lot of communication bandwidth. It takes time. Many things you need to react much faster. We don't want to rely on communication. So, AI at the edge, inference at the edge has become a very, very hot topic. We're getting calls from companies, big name companies even in this domain who are talking to us about it. I mentioned earlier and kind of quickly going over the slide, the challenge is that most of these AI chips are designed below 28 nanometers. They're [ 20 ] low. You don't have flash in that space. People today have a 2-chip solution. They put all of the AI weights on flash in a separate chip. When they turn on the system, they need to copy everything from that chip into an SRAM in the AI chip and then they can start working. Obviously, it's a 2-chip solution, so it costs more. Loading everything takes time and power, et cetera. And you have a major security issue because it's so easy to eavesdrop on that communication. So, what is being done today and literally, we are engaged with companies who want to just put ReRAM in the chip instead of having a second chip, so just 1-chip solution. You turn the system on and it works immediately. It's an instant-on solution. You don't have the security risk. ReRAM bits are smaller than SRAM, so you actually can put more data on the same piece -- more weight on the same piece of silicon and have higher accuracy, a lot of advantages. The next step is moving to in-memory compute, and this is something that is already being worked on intensively by research institutes, by companies. We are engaged in this already for quite some time where you actually do the computation inside the memory. I know it sounds a little bit strange, but you can actually -- because what you do in AI is mostly matrix multiplication, and I won't go into the details, but you can actually configure the memory itself to do it. And it saves a lot of time, a lot of power instead of having -- the most critical part of electronic systems today is the communication between the processor and the memory, okay? That's where a lot of power, a lot of time, a lot of everything is spent. When you put the computation in the memory, it's orders of magnitude faster, lower power consumption, et cetera. And we're very happy to be a player in this domain, and we intend to be a key company in this domain. And the last point, which I think those who have been with us for many years know, we've been talking about neuromorphic computing since when I joined 8 years ago. This is the holy grail kind of thing. This is where the computer or the memory actually mimics the human brain. And this is still basically in research. It's not in the industry anymore, but we are working with these research institutes. They are using our ReRAM as the basis for research in many of these institutes. And this is going to be a very exciting future. It's years away, but still something that is very exciting for us. So in 2025, a year ago, we were talking about our targets for the year. I'm glad to say that getting 3 product companies or 3 products to embed our technology, that's a target that we achieved. On the qualification side with DB HiTek, we had some challenges, but we're on track now and we're still expecting to get the qualification. The testing is going on as we speak now to get it done. And on the fab side, we said we'll have 3 fabs. We have onsemi. We have another one that is -- we're working on and we will definitely -- we expect it to be before the end of the year. And the third one, actually, there's much more than a third. There's a third and a fourth and a fifth that we're working with, seems to be slipping to 2026, but I think still the progress here has been very significant. And with all of these fabs, there has been a lot of progress over the year despite the fact that they're all very cautious, et cetera, et cetera, as you know. So where are we heading? Well, the famous crossing the chasm diagram that I talked about last year. We're basically now in what's called the [ bowling lane ]. So, we are now getting those first customers that are taking that "perceived risk" and moving forward with us with SkyWater, DB HiTek, onsemi. You can see how every time we also made a step to a much more significant company. And the impact here is they're helping us drop the following pins. We also have the product companies now that are helping us. And we are expecting to have, as I said, another agreement before the end of the year. We have others in the pipeline. These additional agreements will bring us to the point where we reach that critical mass, what Dadi always talks about the tipping point, where there will be enough customers, enough companies using the technology that suddenly what we call today FOMO hits and people will start realizing, all my competitors are using it, everyone around me is using it. And suddenly, everyone will be jumping on us. And that's what the book refers to as the tornado. And as I said, we're starting to sense those wins coming. We're already -- the number of requests, the level of engagement of the different fabs is like nothing we've seen before. We've been talking to them for so long, slowly moving forward, but now there's a much higher sense of engagement, much higher sense of, okay, we really know we need this type of thing. So, we are expecting to achieve these additional agreements and move forward. In terms of the markets, I think you've already seen this slide also in terms of -- in different formats. But Weebit is really engaged today in each and every one of these with companies. Power management, we've talked about a lot. onsemi is one of the key players in that market, automotive and without raise, we've done it because companies there need a solution. The A&D and the health care and IoT, IoT is very strong, and I talked about edge AI. So, each one of these markets needs ReRAM. They know they need it. We are working with them, and we'll start seeing -- we haven't really talked about the specifics of the products that are using ReRAM. We mentioned one of them is a security device. I hope we'll be able to talk more about the specifics of these projects and have more projects, but really a very, very active discussion with these customers. I think the business model, you guys already know very well. So, I'll skip it, maybe I'll just mention. Obviously, what you're seeing now when we report revenues and cash and everything, it's really the work mostly with the foundries of license and NRE. There is already from the product companies, obviously, but it's mostly license and NRE from both sides. Our goal is to get with these products to the point of mass production and royalties is obviously the big goal that we want to get to. And in order to do that, I mentioned in the last AGM, for me, 2025, more than anything was the year of preparation, the year of preparation for this tornado that's coming. And we've been very focused on really setting that infrastructure, getting ready. You don't want the tornado come and just take all the buildings and cars and everything and everything just flies up in the air and it becomes a total mess. You want to be prepared and controlled. So, that's what we've been doing. In terms of management, really organizing how we manage everything, our databases and the procedures, automation of -- as much as we can, so that we don't need to do everything by hand. No more Excels that people start controlling and are error prone and stuff like that. When you start having multiple customers, when you have 10 fabs in parallel, you cannot control with an Excel and a Word. So, bringing in the tools that help you control it, that helps you make sure that everything is synchronized and less potential for errors and so on, defining those procedures and methodologies, how do you work setting up the databases, having things that now, okay, when we have a wafer fab, just take that template and just copy it and everyone knows exactly where everything is. If an engineer moves from one project to another, they immediately know where to find things, where the [ PK ] is, what the naming convention is, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's been a lot of work going on, on this side. Obviously, we need to grow the sales team and we've been slowly but surely adding people to the sales activity. There's more and more engagement. We need the people there. We set up the customer success team managed by Lilach, again, having a person who managed a fab herself. She grew up in the fab from the lowest level when she got out of university, climb through the ranks, became a fab manager. She knows everything about fabs. When she sits and talks to customers, they see that we know what we're talking about. She understands their issues. And this is a critical element in managing all of these engagements successfully. Of course, supporting all of these projects in parallel. And just recently, we actually set up a U.S. subsidiary in order to help us with all of the activity there. There is so much activity now that it's justified. So there is now a Weebit Nano Inc. in the U.S. and that's yet another step in growing and building this whole system. So -- and now I'm very happy. We actually have a reason for the CFO to come and join the AGM. We have Alla. We're very fortunate to have Alla who has so much experience beyond being a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers in the past and being -- well, a professor not in the university teaching classes, she sits on the boards of several public companies traded in NASDAQ in Israel. And so really vast experience. We're so lucky to have Alla. I'm really happy to have you here and to have you present financials for the first time at an AGM.

So the first slide highlights our very impressive revenue growth from $153,000 in the first half of '24 to $3.7 million in the second half of '25. This represents a 24x over approximately 18 months period and a total of $5.4 million recognized as revenue over 2 years period. And since we recognize revenue based on the percentage of progress of licensing agreement with our existing customers, this increase or growth in revenues represents both expansion of our customers' engagement as well as our steady progress in the licensing project. We deliver according to our progress, we can recognize the revenue. Now looking ahead as additional design and licensing agreements should come into effect, we anticipate the continuous momentum of growth in revenue, yet as our business model, which is IP licensing as well is based on a small number of large deals. We do expect our quarterly results to fluctuate over the coming few quarters until we start to recognize revenues from royalties and then ramp up as well. The second financial highlight we wanted to present to you is the record-breaking quarter we just announced in September, a $7.3 million received from customers. This amount represents mainly milestone-based payments from our existing customers. And as milestone-based payments are not recurring, they are, again, based on each project plan. We might see different results in the coming quarters, not necessarily as high. And another point worth mentioning in the recent quarter, we've received [ $4.1 million ] from the French tax authorities for our 2024 R&D costs in [ Weebit ] France. We finished September with a very strong cash balance of $91.6 million, reinforcing our financial stability and our ability to continue and support our R&D activity and to expand our commercial activity. The last financial slide we chose to share with you is the ESG report. Now the reason we decided to share this is not just for the importance of the ESG, but only to -- but also to demonstrate the significance and the high efforts we put into improving and upscaling our governance and our resilience. So we have progressed and formalized our commitment towards reducing risks toward managing impact and toward generating sustainable performance through ESG managing and report way ahead of regulations requirements. We have conducted a materiality assessment, ESG materiality assessment and recognized 6 key factors we found critical for our long-term success. And among these factors are workforce and leadership diversity as shown in this table and also in the company itself, we are about 30% women in a very technology company, responsible supply chain, IP protection and cybersecurity, transparency and disclosures. And this is to demonstrate the high [indiscernible] governance issues.

So thanks, Alla. And yes, I guess the ESG, many people have been asking me, you don't really have to report ESG. Why have you guys been reporting ESG? Well, as you can see, the company is really preparing itself for growth. We believe we are on the verge of significant growth. And as part of it, you can see with the Board that we have now and with Naomi and Anne joining and becoming the Chair and part of it is also that we already decided to step forward and do the ESG report as get used to doing these things that are normally required from bigger companies expecting that we are heading in this direction. So when we look forward, I think Weebit is really in a very, very strong position. We have a strong differentiation in the market. We talk a lot about the company itself being the only independent supplier of ReRAM in a market that really is understanding they need ReRAM, the ReRAM space is growing. The company itself is in a strong position. Alla was talking about our cash position. So on the company side, I think we're in a very good position. I can't ever stress enough how important the team is. It's -- people say, oh, yes, yes, for sure. No, it's really important. So many companies have been trying to develop ReRAM. And I believe the #1 reason why many of them failed is because they just did not have the right team. They did not have the people with the right expertise. Dadi was talking about a neural surgeon and so on. But this is a domain which requires really deep understanding, a lot of experience. And today, I guess the numbers have been corrected because I didn't realize we already have 17 PhDs in the company, chemistry, physics mainly that are driving things forward, constantly improving the technology. We are very focused on continuing to develop, continuing to improve, making that happen. The team that we have, and I'm not talking just about the VPs, I often present the management team. Each and every one of them is basically at a worldwide level in terms of being known worldwide and their experience and so on. But it's throughout the company, even at the lower levels, you'll see people with so much experience. So that's really a key element. Our partner Leti is obviously also a part of it and talked about the Board already many times, but the team itself is big, I'm sorry, very, very important in this. The technology, we have been developing the technology, and it is a very robust technology as you can see with all of the qualifications that we're doing. We feel very, very good about the technology now and about what it's achieving and addressing the different markets. Obviously, our solutions and our engagement with the market and the customers and so on. So we have a very strong sales team. Again, the people in the sales team are very experienced. We insist on having people, the technical support for the customers, people who have actually been there, who have done designs, who have worked in fabs, who know what the customers are doing. And I personally believe that this level of investment in ReRAM is something that is unique to Weebit, even huge companies like TSMC that have ReRAM, it's not their main focus. Yes, they are working on it. Yes, they have a good solution. Over time, as we progress, we are being pushed by our customers. Quite a few of these fabs that I tell you we're engaged with, some of the reasons for things taking so long is they come to us and they say, hey, we have customers who want to have whatever area, speed, power, they have different criteria at levels which we look at and we say, this is crazy. You guys are insane. How can anyone do that with ReRAM? And then I pushed the team and we spent some time, we analyze it and we find ways to make it happen. And the technology is constantly improving. And I'm sure that we will get to the point. I feel very strongly that we are capable of having the best ReRAM in the market. People know that I've said many times, TSMC, UMC, even fabs who already have ReRAM, for me, they are potential customers. And I believe that we will get to the point where the product companies will go to them and say, hey, we want to manufacture in your fab, but Weebit's ReRAM is much better. It addresses our needs better. We want to use Weebit's ReRAM and not your ReRAM. And I know that they will come. I mean I'm very confident that we will get there and that we can not only address the market that doesn't have ReRAM, but even the people who do have it, we will show that we have better ReRAM. And that's, again, the people more than anything and the whole setup. So what are our plans for the next year? Well, we definitely plan to continue growing the revenue. We're setting a target of -- for the fiscal year of '26 to already get to above $10 million. This is not a forecast. It's our goal for the team. We're not giving an official guidance and so on, but it is what we want to achieve. We are already -- I'm sorry, expecting some of these product companies that are now working to get to the point where they tape out another step towards them eventually getting to mass production. So this will be the first step, and we do want to see our first product company already reaching tape-out and moving forward. On the AI front, I already talked about it so much. We are working with so many companies in this domain. We want to start pushing it in there, and we want to have a first AI customer. So these are the key goals that we have for next year. And I think these goals are achievable. We're going to have a very, very fun year. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be a lot of fun. And I really believe that a year from today, we're going to be in a very different position. So I think this kind of finishes the presentation side. It's all the legalities and things. And I don't know if anyone has questions before we go into the technicalities and the voting and everything. Yes.

Coby, I was just wondering if you could give us some simple insight into the delays in qualification from DB HiTek. What have been the hiccups along the way there and how are they being addressed?

So any technology transfer project is a very big, very complex project. Some of the issues that we had are they use some different types of machinery in their manufacturing process, which needed more tweaks and adjustment to make it work. We had -- they -- in the middle of the project, they came to us and said, hey, we -- there's some additional functionality we want. We already had things designed and going and running. And they said, well, customers need some more. We want to have some more. We had to actually stop and do some more design work and get some more stuff working. So these are normal things that happen in these kinds of projects. It's -- we always want everything to just go smooth and straight to the finish line. But these are, I consider them normal things, and we are now moving forward. We are in a good position and the tests, the qualification now is running as we speak. Yes.

Coby, over the past 2 years, we have seen a weakening of diplomatic relations between Australia and Israel, primarily driven by the labor government here. Has that affected business in any way?

I'm glad to say that we haven't really felt that. So I guess the simple answer is no.

Coby, the time from tape-out, well, from signing a contract with the fab to tape-out and qualifications around, we're seeing around 18 months. What do you anticipate it will be for a customer, a product customer? And how do you speed that process up because there's millions of products out there that may want ReRAM?

Actually, I think AGM 2 years ago, I showed time lines of things. And if you go back to that presentation, we actually have the slide with it. Basically, a product company when they engage, the first thing they need to do is design their product and embed our product -- our module into their design. That's -- it really depends on the application. Some applications can do it in 6 or 9 months, some need 18 months or more. But basically, they need to go through the design phase. Once they finish it, they do their tape-out and then they need to wait for silicon. As you know, it takes several months to get silicon back from the fab. And they need to go through their testing and in many cases, they'd like to do their own qualification. So it's a process that can take 2 years or more, potentially even 3 years depending on the product. The only thing that we can really do -- well, there are maybe 2 things that can be done to accelerate. One is to just get them to start earlier, and that's what we've been really pushing. So many of these product companies want to wait until they see official and formal qualification before they engage and move forward. We've been pushing companies to, hey, you can see that it's working. We're going through the formalities of qualification. You can start the design now. By the time you get to tape-out, it will already qualified. You don't need to wait. So that's one thing that we've been doing. The other thing is focusing on IDMs who actually manufacture their own products. So obviously, when they engage with us to do the technology transfer, they know that they are going to manufacture their products and very often, they trust themselves so they can start working earlier. So these are the type of things that we're doing to get things moving faster. It does take time, but we have managed to get already 3 products. We have others that I really hope in the near future are going to be ramping up as well. So the pipeline is starting to move. Once they engage, it can take 2 years or so or whatever, but you know it's going to happen. And I think that's what -- the key about this business is when we sign with a fab, and we've already proven that we know how to get to qualification. So you know that we'll get to qualification. You know that their customers will have -- will be using our technology in very high probability, let's say it that way. And it takes time, but you have that prediction, and that's basically what we...

Thanks, Coby. The -- I saw on one of the final slides, the U.S. entity for customer engagement that you mentioned. Will this -- is this a separate company? Or this will remain under the auspice of Weebit Nano?

It's a daughter company of our Australian parent. So it's a fully owned subsidiary.

I was just wondering, in the competitive landscape, you're saying you're expecting Weebit's ReRAM to be superior to the other 2 competitors. What sort of characteristics make it more competitive than what's happening out there at the moment?

So first of all, they're not competitors. It's very important that everyone understands they're not competitors. They're not giving their ReRAM to other fabs because obviously, those are their competitors. And they have ReRAM just because it's an enabler for their product companies, product customers to manufacture. So in terms of what will make our ReRAM better, first of all, better is something that every application, every product company has a different definition for. Some companies are focused on power, some are focused on areas, some are focused on immunity to radiation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I believe that as time goes by, we will gain advantages in different parameters where different product companies will say, for us, this is a better solution. So we might not be better in all aspects, but it's enough to be better in the key aspects for a specific product company to have them push to do this. Okay. Yes, we have also people online. Yes.

Thanks, Coby. First one from Jason Falkner. Is one of the foundries expecting to be signed in late 2025 or during 2026 also an IDM? Or are the numerous foundries and numerous IDMs in discussion, different companies?

I guess we'll know very soon, hopefully. I cannot talk about it right now. Once it will be signed, we'll be announcing it.

Thank you. Next question from Robert Carman. Read the title approaching the tornado. What are the key indicators, milestones that will indicate that Weebit is entering the tornado?

Well, internally, we're feeling it already just by the amount of demand from customers and the level of engagement by customers. Externally, what you guys will see, and I think you're starting to see what Alla was presenting, when you look at our revenue and cash numbers, you're starting to see the direction. I think at a certain point, our announcements of the number of new customers and our announcements on cash and revenue, you'll start seeing it going up hopefully faster. Again, no predictions or commitments or anything. I always have to say this is what we believe we hope we will be achieving, this is our goal and what we're pushing for.

Thanks, Coby. Next one from My Property & Finance. If ReRAM is 27% of the $142 million, which equals $38.34 million, who is earning this off ReRAM? I can only think of TSMC.

Well, TSMC is the -- currently the major player. They have it in mass production, and they are selling it to key customers also. So right now, TSMC is the key player. Weebit is entering and starting to grow and -- but we definitely plan to grow our part also in that market.

Next one from Van Kelly. Some people try to compare near-memory and in-memory approaches as if one will win. From Weebit's perspective, can you explain how ReRAM based in-memory compute complements digital neuromorphic approaches and whether Weebit aims to compare with neuromorphic chip companies or enable them?

So I will say, first of all, in all of these domains, you have several steps in the evolution of technology. And even in nonvolatile memory, while everyone is talking now about ReRAM and MRAM and how we're replacing flash, flash is still around and will be around for a long time. And guess what? Rotating disks are definitely out there, and there's a lot of them out in the data centers. And you know what, even magnetic tapes are still out there and being used. So -- and Danny can tell you about a lot of these technologies and how they evolve and you have a better and better version, but it doesn't mean that the old ones, they don't die so fast. The same thing with AI. We're going to see -- today, you have the 2-chip solution. I believe that most people will want to move from that to the near-memory compute because it is -- it has so many advantages and there really isn't a reason to stick with it, but it will be around. From near-memory compute to in-memory compute, that's a big step forward to move all the compute into the memory. There's so much work on it going on now already in the industry. I'm talking about research, but also in the industry. So I think that will start growing more. Will one replace the other or not? In Hebrew, we say prophecy was given to the fools. So I'm not going to try to be a prophet here. But I think overall, this whole domain is going to explode.

Next question from the same shareholder, Van Kelly. You described Weebit as being in the bowling alley phase, and you're the only independent provider of qualified ReRAM. From your discussions with other foundries and IDMs, what are the main focuses that still slow down adoption? Is it internal road maps, competing NVM options or just the desire to see DB HiTek and onsemi all the way through to shipping products first?

The last point is actually an important one because many of these companies -- again, you're talking -- that you mentioned the TSMC fab that costs now almost USD 50 billion to set up. So many fabs are not $50 billion, but they're definitely billions of dollars to set up. This is a big risk for a fab. Every second, every -- in this fab is very costly for them to decide to stop the line and start to allocate time for you to bring in your ReRAM. That's a big risk. That's a big investment. Beyond what they're paying us, you can see the cash, the revenue, whatever, but beyond that, they need to put a big team on this project. They need to allocate a significant amount of time on their manufacturing line. They need to allocate, of course, wafers and manufacture the wafers, the masks and everything. So it's a huge investment for them. It's a huge risk in their eyes when the technology, they've never seen it in mass production. So a lot of these guys are just hesitant. They can see the results that we have. They can see the prototypes that we have. We already have silicon. It's not -- for many of them, it's not enough. They say, it still is the proceed [ was this big ]. And they just -- they say, we'll see DB HiTek, we'll see onsemi, we'll see the progress. They're sitting there. Some of them are just going to their customers, getting demands from the customers. They're coming to us. We need to show them every time that we can achieve a little bit faster, a little bit smaller, a little bit whatever. So it's just -- it's the normal stuff in the industry. It's very normal. I want you to understand. It's not like there's any big issue here. This is what we expected. We didn't expect anything else. This is how the industry works. I sometimes talk to Dadi as he was for many years in the seat of our customers. And he told me, these things were -- are perceived risks. These are definitely things that the customers are concerned about. But we're breaking them. One by one, we're breaking them. We expect to sign another agreement, I guess, in the near future. And each one of these agreements, the bowling, each one of these agreements helps you tip another pin in the bowling alley and move forward, and it's happening.

Yes, I like the analogy. Next question from the same shareholder, Van Kelly. Do you expect licensing...

Questions other than this one or...

There are.

So go ahead to others, please.

To other shareholders.

Other questions, we...

A question from My Property & Finance. Do you know of any other independent companies working on ReRAM?

Not really. I mean there's...

We need to accelerate the rate. So...

We need to accelerate.

Also shortages.

That is not anything serious.

Next question looks like a comment to me from Stephen Mayne. Sure, there may be a few curly questions from the floor at last year's AGM in Sydney, but why have you moved the AGM to Melbourne this year? Now thank you for continuing with the excellent hybrid AGM format, but can we have less marketing and more focus on governance, voting and shareholder questions at next year's AGM, please?

So we actually go 1 year Melbourne and 1 day Sydney. And in terms of governance, well, we'll finish the questions and we'll move to the governance side.

Next question from Matthew Joule. Are the product customers planning to manufacture at a fab that is already licensed or ones that you are targeting?

Product customers normally want to know that they have a fab where they manufacture before they engage. Yes.

Okay. Next one from [ Nathan Venavus ]. Recently, a paper from China was published with ReRAM used for AI weights to -- that outperform the newest generation NVIDIA GPUs and use 50x less power. How will Weebit leverage this market to accelerate the company's growth and the adoption of their ReRAM?

So we're also obviously working on these things. What was done in China is a very theoretical thing still. Again, I don't have time to dive into details, but we're definitely involved in it.