Aeva Technologies - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 2024 delivered sequential and year-over-year revenue growth, improved non-GAAP loss metrics, and consistent execution on Daimler Truck milestones; however, gross margins remained negative and overall GAAP losses were sizable.
• Aeva announced a development award with a global top-10 passenger OEM and secured a letter of intent toward a large-scale production program decision in 2025; Atlas Ultra SOP is targeted for 2027, positioning the passenger vehicle opportunity as a key stock catalyst.
• 2025 revenue guidance of $15–$18M implies ~70–100% YoY growth, with non-GAAP OpEx targeted at $95–$105M (−10% to −20% YoY), and revenue expected to be back-end loaded—another potential narrative driver as execution milestones arrive through the year.
• Liquidity remained solid with $112.0M in cash and marketable securities plus an undrawn $125.0M facility at 12/31/24; management noted the facility is available at their discretion, supporting multi-year runway to production.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Commercial momentum broadened: development award with a global top-10 passenger OEM (with LOI toward large scale production in 2025) and continued progress toward Daimler Truck SOP (2026) and market entry (2027).
• Industrial traction accelerated: expanded collaboration with SICK for precision sensing, and progress with The Indoor Lab for security deployments; management targets ~10x increase in industrial sensor shipments in 2025.
• Financial trajectory improved at the margin: revenue grew to $2.7M (Q4) from $1.6M a year ago and $2.3M in Q3; non-GAAP EPS improved YoY to $(0.49) from $(0.59) and sequentially from $(0.55).

Selected management quote: “We believe 2025 is the year where Aeva will…deliver a year of record revenues with significant growth, while reducing our spend.”

What Went Wrong

• Profitability remains challenged: Q4 gross margin stayed negative (gross loss of $0.829M on $2.696M revenue), and GAAP operating loss was $(34.2)M.
• Cash burn in 2024 was significant: operating cash use $(106.9)M (gross cash use $112M including capex), underscoring the need for execution on revenue scaling and cost actions in 2025.
• Q4 “Other income (expense)” remained a headwind (Q4: $(3.266)M), reflecting financial/mark-to-market dynamics; full-year GAAP net loss was $(152.3)M.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day. My name is Jess, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to Aeva Technologies' fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. During the opening remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the opening remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and simultaneously webcast. I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Fung, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Andrew, please go ahead.

Andrew Fung (Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development)

Thank you, and welcome everyone to Aeva's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. Joining on the call today are Soroush Salehian, Aeva's Co-founder and CEO, and Saurabh Sinha, Aeva's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our fourth quarter and full year 2024 press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our investor relations website at investors.aeva.com. Please note that on this call, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative of our views as of any subsequent date. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations.

For further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-Q and Form 10-K. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Aeva's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company's website under the investor relations link. With that, let me turn the call over to Soroush.

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. Q4 and the start of 2025 have been an incredible period of momentum in our business, and I am excited to update our investors and stakeholders. I think it's appropriate, though, to step back and frame how we got here. When we laid out our vision for Aeva and building a market-leading perception and sensing company nearly eight years ago, we knew it was not going to be easy, and the path we were taking with FMCW would ultimately build a platform for the future, but it would take time. Importantly, we built a strong team, understood the challenging engineering problems to overcome, algorithms and software necessary to build, the hardware, semiconductors, and silicon photonics to be developed, and iterations required to bring multiple generations of a powerful product to market.

If successful, we would have the building blocks required to enable both breakthrough long-range perception and micron-level precision for broad applications and perception. Richer data sets, faster processing, everything aligned in scalable architecture and protected by a massive wall of significant IP. We knew that this product vision was the only way to unlock the potential promise of autonomy and the other next-generation capabilities for our customers across automotive, industrial robotics, and other applications. Our team was constantly faced with challenges to overcome along the way and needed an intense drive to deliver on our ambitious goals. I am proud of how we have pulled together time and again to deliver our first commercial product, Aeries II, in 2022, followed by our first integrated ASIC product, Atlas, beginning of last year. These were breakthrough milestones in the LiDAR space as the promise of FMCW LiDAR was finally being delivered.

These products enabled our historic series production win at Daimler Truck, one of the largest commercial vehicle manufacturers globally. We did not stop there, however, as we have continued to push into a smaller form factor, launched a next-generation ASIC, and have increased the resolution of our market-leading Atlas Ultra product line targeting passenger vehicles. Our Atlas Ultra product has now enabled us to bring the power of our platform to the passenger vehicle market and enabled us to be awarded a joint development program from a global top 10 passenger OEM. This award opens up a new market for our products and signals the confidence large global OEMs have in our technology and future. The joint development program is focused on taking our market-leading Atlas Ultra product and fine-tuning it to fit within their specific vehicles and package it for use in their stack.

The engineering work and milestones for this program are well-defined, and the team is laser-focused on delivering where we have confidence in our success. The objectives of this program are clear and, on success, enable us to be included as the LiDAR future in the global OEM's model lineup globally and for geographies outside of China. We expect to complete this program later this year, where we expect this transition to a large-scale production award amongst the largest opportunities in the industry and delivering a next-generation technology to our customers' vehicle platform. In summary, 2024 was a year of strong commercial momentum at Aeva, and we expect to double down on this momentum in 2025. Let's now discuss in more detail our recent business developments.

We are excited to be selected by a global top 10 passenger OEM for a LiDAR development program for its next-generation global production vehicle platform, where we will jointly work on development, packaging, and integration of Aeva's Atlas Ultra 4D LiDAR for use across the OEM's global line of passenger vehicles. Over the course of last year, we have discussed our advancements with this OEM, including being now selected to the final stages of the RFQ. Now, this development program win represents a key milestone in our ongoing collaboration, and it is effectively the first development phase of the series production program and is focused on the joint B-sample development and packaging of our Atlas Ultra product for use across the OEM's broad lineup of vehicle models. This OEM has a long history of using time-of-flight 3D LiDAR.

However, through extensive evaluation and real-world testing of Aeva 4D LiDAR, including instant velocity, immediate interference, and other advantages over time-of-flight, the OEM has found that our technology is better able to address a number of key use cases needed for the OEM to successfully expand its operating design domain at higher speeds and scale to higher levels of automation across its vehicle lines and more markets. As such, they are moving to FMCW technology in order to future-proof their solution for the next-generation vehicles. Importantly, separate and in addition to this program, we have also secured a letter of intent from this passenger OEM toward the series production program award decision, and we expect that to transition to a large-scale global production program opportunity for Aeva later this year. This OEM is a leader in commercializing new technology at scale in the passenger vehicle space.

With annual vehicle volumes in the millions and the potential to be the primary feature across geographies outside of China, we believe the opportunity for the series production program upon conversion from this development phase is expected to be massive and likely one of the largest in the automotive industry, which could cement our position as a market-leading company globally. We're excited to be awarded this development program with this OEM and are planning for Atlas Ultra startup production starting in 2027. Beyond this top 10 OEM win, we are seeing increased momentum for our funnel with other global passenger and commercial vehicle OEMs that are advancing toward FMCW technology for their vehicle platforms.

Specifically, we are increasing our joint activities with other passenger OEMs, including another top 10 passenger OEM through the RFQ process, and two other commercial vehicle OEM opportunities with significant volume potential based on our Atlas and Atlas Ultra platforms, and with targeted SOPs between 2027 and 2029. More broadly, interest to leverage FMCW technology is rising across the industry as is decisions incorporating geographic considerations. We believe Aeva is in a strong position with our product and cost-competitive solution. Moving now to update for Daimler Truck on the production program. We are progressing well with Daimler Truck having delivered on all of Aeva's milestones for the program in 2024.

As an exclusive long-range and ultra-long-range LiDAR supplier for the OEM's autonomous truck production program, Aeva 4D LiDAR is the primary detection sensor, and we have been working closely with Daimler Truck and a subsidiary, Torc, to achieve their key milestones towards a safe and scalable commercialization of autonomous trucks. I'm happy to share that this relationship continues to deepen in 2025. We recently expanded our collaboration with Torc to include sharing of sensing data and a Freightliner vehicle platform. This will enable even closer collaboration between our teams as we work together on advancing the safety architecture for autonomous trucks and enabling Torc's Virtual Driver software to make safer and more intelligent decisions. In short, Aeva remains on track for its start of production in 2026 to support Daimler Truck's market entry by 2027. Turning now to the latest developments around Aeva's products.

We unveiled Atlas Ultra at CES this past January. This is our newest and most powerful automotive-grade 4D LiDAR that is designed to meet OEM requirements for Level 3 and higher-speed applications. Compared to our Atlas product, Atlas Ultra offers three times the resolution and the capability for a wider field of view, all in 35% slimmer packaging, which opens up even more integration options with minimal impact to vehicle styling and aerodynamics. Like other Aeva LiDAR products, Atlas Ultra leverages our proprietary LiDAR-on-Chip architecture, which integrates all optical components, including transmitter, detector, and lenses, onto a silicon photonics module. This, along with no use of fiber or exotic materials, allows us for a highly automated manufacturing process and ability to mass-produce at affordable costs.

Atlas Ultra also utilizes our custom Aeva X1 SoC or system-on-chip processor, which enables seamless integration of data acquisition, point cloud processing, scanning, and application software into a single mixed-signal processing chip. Our X1 SoC also powers Aeva's advanced perception algorithms that leverage per-point velocity data for object detection and semantic segmentation. We are already working on integrating Atlas Ultra with key partners such as the global top 10 passenger OEM and plan for additional availability to automotive customers later this year. At CES, we also showcased the industry's first functional behind-windshield integration of an FMCW LiDAR in collaboration with an automotive partner. This enables a high LiDAR positioning for optimal long-range detection with seamless integration, minimizing impact to vehicle design and aerodynamics. The in-cabin integration is enabled by our FMCW LiDAR-on-Chip's small form factor, low power consumption, and passive cooling, which help maintain good road visibility and passenger comfort.

Our operational demonstration vehicle utilizes a co-developed custom formulated glass from Wideye by AGC that is compatible with Aeva's unique FMCW wavelength to maintain long-range detection and point cloud quality. Feedback from leading OEMs following real-world on-road demonstrations has been very positive and has already led to deeper engagements. Switching now to industrial developments, where we are growing rapidly with major applications of our products with industry leaders such as Nikon and SICK AG for the $10 billion+ market opportunity in industrial robotics and factory automation. This is possible now in 2025 because of the completion and our core technology components, including our CoreVision LiDAR-on-Chip module and X1 SoC for industrial applications. In particular, late last year, we partnered with SICK AG to incorporate Aeva's FMCW technology into its portfolio of high-precision contactless sensor solutions.

As mentioned, SICK AG is one of the top leaders in sensor solutions with revenues of nearly $3 billion annually. Specifically, though, in the multi-billion-dollar market of high-accuracy displacement sensors, SICK AG sells more than 250,000 sensors a year, which are used across a broad range of industrial robotics and factory automation applications. Aeva sensors bring a number of major performance, size, and cost advantages versus current solutions, such as more reliable micron-level precision across many operating conditions or the ability to measure both short and long standoff distances with the same small sensor. Because of Aeva's ability to directly measure velocity, we believe our technology will open up new capabilities that bring the possibility to expand the use of Aeva sensors across the industrial precision market. Having now substantially completed our validation with SICK AG, we're now moving to commercial deployments beginning in Q3 of this year.

Turning now to our key objectives, I would like to first provide a quick recap of our 2024 goals before sharing more about our 2025 objectives. We set challenging objectives for 2024, and I am proud to say that we have achieved essentially all of them. With regards to the goal for two additional production wins, we secured an industrial win with Indoor Lab and a global top 10 passenger OEM development program. Our other goals from maturing our production product to finalizing our supply chain and exceeding our financial metric targets with over 100% revenue growth were all successfully achieved. Looking to 2025, we expect the work accomplished last year will enable Aeva to build on our momentum this year. Our focus is on further driving the adoption and commercialization of FMCW technology while continuing to maintain strong financial discipline.

Specifically, we target winning two additional programs in 2025 beyond the top 10 passenger OEM. Second, we are on schedule to complete and release the C-sample of our Atlas product to key customers this year. This key milestone will keep us on track for our 2026 start of production with Daimler Truck. Third, we are working to expand substantially in industrial robotics and factory automation, where Aeva's unique FMCW technology has the potential to transform the industry. We are seeing significant interest from some of the global leaders in the space with potential for materially higher deployments to the tune of at least 1,000% for Aeva in 2025. Fourth, we plan to complete our automated and automotive qualified production line with capacity for 100,000+ units annually.

This critical step will not only better position Aeva to meet the increasing near-term interest for our 4D LiDAR, but also our upcoming commercial deployments. Fifth, we aim to achieve these objectives with a strong focus on financial growth this year. As Saurabh will discuss later on, we believe we have the ability to achieve record revenues for the company this year with approximately 70%-100% year-over-year growth in 2025. At the same time, we expect to reduce our operating expenses this year by approximately 10%-20% year-over-year. In summary, Aeva is working on multiple significant commercial opportunities in 2025, and with our unique 4D LiDAR, the strong team, and liquidity position, we believe we are in a good position to execute on our objectives and capitalize on the growing momentum around FMCW. With that, let me turn the call over to Saurabh to discuss the financials.

Saurabh Sinha (CFO)

Thank you, Soroush, and good afternoon, everyone. I would now like to discuss Aeva's full year 2024 financial results. Revenue for the year 2024 was $9.1 million, representing growing sensor shipments to automotive and industrial customers, including for the Daimler Truck program. Full year non-GAAP operating loss was $123.2 million, consistent with our plan to keep it flat from the prior year. 2024 gross cash use was $112 million, which comprises operating cash use of $106.9 million and capital expenditures of $5.1 million. Aeva ended the year with total available liquidity of $237 million, which includes $112 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and $125 million in undrawn facility. This facility has conditions to draw that are fully met and can be drawn at management's sole discretion. We believe Aeva's total liquidity positions us to continue executing on our existing production programs as well as securing additional wins.

As more industries look to FMCW technology, Aeva is in a unique position to drive this adoption. We will continue to be strategic in how we invest and believe we can simultaneously scale manufacturing to support increasing deployments and pursue new business while also lowering total spend. Turning to our financial outlook for the full year 2025, we target growing our revenues to be in the range of $15 million-$18 million this year, which is an increase of approximately 70%-100% year-over-year in 2025 and continues on a similar strong 100%+ year-over-year revenue growth trajectory that we achieved in 2024. The higher revenue is expected to be driven by the ongoing scaling of product shipments to automotive and industrial customers. Revenues are expected to be back-end loaded in the year. As we mentioned earlier, we see opportunity to reduce our spend in this year 2025.

This is due to completion of certain major engineering activities and our overall maturing the commercialization of our products. As such, we are targeting non-GAAP operating expenses, which excludes stock-based compensation and other potential non-recurring charges, to be in the range of $95 million-$105 million, a reduction of approximately 10%-20% on a year-over-year basis. We are at a very exciting time in the company's journey as we begin to scale deployments and meet the growing interest for our 4D LiDAR technology. We believe our available liquidity enables us to execute on our plan. With that, let me turn the call back to Soroush for closing remarks.

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Thank you, Saurabh. 2024 was a transformational year at Aeva, beginning with our major production program award from Daimler Truck to multiple industrial wins and the start of the commercial deployments.

Aeva has taken a leadership position in driving the growing adoption of FMCW LiDAR across a broad range of applications. I would like to thank the Aeva team for their immense work that they continue to do in realizing these accomplishments. Looking forward, I am really excited about what lies ahead for our company in this year. We are uniquely positioned to execute, given the maturity of our 4D LiDAR technology and the company's financial position. With our first top 10 passenger OEM program and other auto and industrial opportunities, the number and depth of our engagements have never been stronger, and we believe that Aeva is on the path to emerge as a leader in our market. With that, we will now open the lineup for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 on your telephone keypad.

You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing Star 2. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Once again, that is Star 1 for any questions. We will go first to Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer & Company.

Colin Rusch (Managing Director and Analyst)

Thanks so much, guys, and congratulations on all the progress. With the industrial applications, clearly there are a myriad number of them, and they're fairly sizable. Can you talk a little bit about initial targets outside of metrology, if there are any, and what the cycle time is in terms of design wins and when we might start to see some revenue off of those wins? I guess since we're doing one question, the secondary piece would be if you can give us an update on manufacturing progress from here.

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah, Colin, hey, happy to answer that.

This is Soroush speaking. As you pointed out, we are actually beyond automotive, which was a big update today. We are really excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us for robotics especially and also the factory automation space. In that space, as we have talked about, across our products, as I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we have spent the past number of years laying the foundation for creating the products and a platform, the perception platform, including our key core technology pieces with our two silicon chips, right? The optical core vision as well as the X1 SoC. With that, we've been able to actually put this product together in a way that can be applied to automotive and industrial applications.

Now that these are substantially complete, this is the year that we are really excited about, that we're starting to actually increase those sales and be able to actually commercially deploy those across the markets. Within the industrial sector, just to give you an idea, these applications, the industrial automation, robotics, and factory automation, we see an opportunity just for the sensing supplier, one similar to us, to be in the $10 billion+ market per year opportunity. Obviously, SICK is one of the leading players in this space. Nikon is another in the metrology space. We are working across with these players and others to start to deploy our first kind of industrial precision products. For this, the opportunity is quite massive. SICK by itself does about $3 billion of sales annually. That is in the multiple 10 million millions of sensors.

If you kind of peel the onion and look at what is actually actionable and marketable for our specific sensor set in the kind of high accuracy or precision displacement sensing, SICK itself does about 200,000 or 300,000 units per year, right? Right there is where we see a critical opportunity for Aeva. This market, because it is already in existence, is one that is ripe for disruption. It is one that is really exciting for us. We are part of SICK to actually transition their portfolio of sensors from other types of technologies such as factory light or others more and more towards FMCW-based sensors as it relates to high accuracy and displacement sensing. We see that as quite a large opportunity.

We have talked about it on this call as well, in which we're planning to actually increase our industrial segment sensor shipments by nearly about 10X or 1,000% this year. That is just to give you an idea of kind of the scale that we're going after. We think this is just the beginning. We think the run rate and opportunity for this, if we're able to execute in the next couple of years, could be quite massive, providing us an opportunity potentially in the $100 million+ type range per year of business. That is a very exciting thing for us. The reason that I think I would say we are seeing traction in this area, this is not the same as maybe others in the space when they talk about LiDAR for industrial. This is something that's quite different.

The unique advantage for Aeva there is really around accuracy, micron-level precision in a non-contact way at kind of long standoff distances. That is something that really time-of-flight or 3D LiDAR is not even in the business of doing. That is why we are excited about it. I hope that answers your question.

Colin Rusch (Managing Director and Analyst)

Thanks. Can you just address the manufacturing question for a second just in terms of your progress in manufacturability and preparation to ramp as you start to see some of these opportunities materialize?

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah, absolutely. As you pointed out, we have been focused heavily on increasing our manufacturing capacity. Obviously, it is important for us to be able to meet the growing demand of our products to hit these targets that I mentioned of the 1,000% for the industrial sensor.

One of our goals this year actually is to install and complete our manufacturing production line with a capacity of 100,000 units per year. If you may recall from last year, we set a goal to really secure our final assembly manufacturing as well as make a dedicated manufacturing line at Fabrinet for our core module. All those, as I mentioned on the call, are done now. We are now kicking into the next year to really start being able to have that manufacturing capacity that is at much higher scale and then be able to satisfy the demand that we are seeing from these various markets across auto and industrial.

Colin Rusch (Managing Director and Analyst)

Thanks so much, guys.

Operator (participant)

Once again, it was Star 1 if you had a question. We will go next to Suji Desilva with Roth Capital.

Suji Desilva (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Hi, Soroush. Hi, Saurabh. Congrats on all the progress here.

Taking into consideration your comments about OpEx, being able to bring it down, some of the product after maturing. I'm wondering if also that applies maybe to some of these large programs like the Daimler Truck program. Could you characterize the 2025 kind of effort left versus maybe 2024 perhaps with the heavy lift and there's less risk in what's left between now and program start 2026, 2027, or whether there are still some significant milestones and challenges remaining?

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah. Hey, Suji. This is Soroush. Happy to answer that. Obviously, as you mentioned, we have substantially completed a significant chunk of the efforts as it relates to our first launch of our product for Atlas. This is the year in which we're working on releasing a final seed sample, which is the, I would say, key milestone for us to be able to then commercially deploy this at scale.

There's no coincidence that we're actually, if you go back and look at it, pulling forward the installation of our manufacturing line capacity from 2026 to 2025, including to be able to get that to 100,000 units per year is because of the growing demand that we're seeing across automotive industrial. With Daimler Truck, we have delivered on every milestone, either on time or ahead of time last year. I think we have had a really successful partnership in production since when we announced this at the beginning of last year, and we continue to do so as we go forward. The majority of the development work is complete. A good chunk of the manufacturing line installation is done. We're now increasing that, making a full automated line for our final assembly and being able to hit these types of numbers that we're talking about.

As that relates to our spend, it's obvious and goes without saying. This is the year that we are looking to set our record revenues for the company. As I mentioned, 70%-100% year-over-year. We're not just making this out of thin air. We have set those goals last year. We exceeded them. Now we are back here again or setting these goals this year and hope to do the same. At the same time, this year, we're looking to reduce our spend. Part of that is because of the fact that we are substantially complete with our product development. Some of the one-time or engineering-type costs, including silicon development, that can be costly, are now getting behind us. We're maturing as a product. We're maturing as a company. Really excited now to kick into high gear and start scaling our products.

On top of that, keep on some of our momentum with wins in automotive and others. Pretty exciting year for us to look ahead for.

Suji Desilva (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Yeah, and a great progress and a great setup for 2025. My other question is on the OEM program and the 2027 target for start of production. I just was curious, first of all, is that an L3 car program? Second of all, as you talked about a billion-dollar lifetime value, maybe 10 years straight line, is 2026 the beginning of that contribution part of it, or is 2027 really the first year you'd get some kind of one-tenth of that sort of run rate beginning? What's the more realistic expectation?

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah, sure. Happy to maybe touch on the top 10 win here with the passenger program that we talked about.

As I mentioned on the call a little bit, we've been working with this OEM for quite some time now, over the past year or two years. The past year has been quite intensive, really extensive collaboration together. Before I dive into that, maybe we have to zoom out for a second. You have to understand that this OEM has had significant experience with time-of-flight already, time-of-flight LiDAR. Throughout their experience and lessons learned, they're now realizing what they need and what may be missing. In short, they're looking now to move past time-of-flight towards FMCW technology.

Given both the lessons learned, the challenges, as well as the significant advantages they see that they can gain by going to FMCW, we think that's a win-win situation and, importantly, a crucial signal for the passenger OEM space of what we think is to come as a major shift for the OEMs as they start to transition to FMCW LiDAR technology. We hope and we believe Aeva is going to play a key role for that as a leader in FMCW. Now, together, we've done a lot of work since last year. They have evaluated our technology firsthand, done extensive real-world testing, on-road testing. We have talked about this over the past year or so, a few months.

We have passed a number of audits, maturity as a Direct Tier 1 supplier, and done a lot of technical analysis, gone through thousands of requirements together, and gone through the final stages of our FMCW that we were down selected for, as we mentioned last year. The culmination of all that is what? Is these two kind of agreements that we talked about. One is the award by this top 10 passenger OEM for the development agreement. This is intended for developing a solution that fine-tunes our Atlas Ultra product in a way that fits across their global production vehicle platform, which includes multiple lines of vehicles. The work is effectively the kind of first phase of the production program and really focused on joint B sample development for us to be able to get them to use it across their lineup of vehicles.

This OEM has obviously serious vested interest and skin in the game with Aeva, as well as with NRE contribution to help make sure that we are successful. In addition to that, the second piece is we have gone a step beyond that with this top passenger OEM and have been able to secure a letter of intent from the OEM for a large-scale production program award this year, which we believe is a very strong indication of the OEM's plan for next generation, as well as our collaboration together. Overall, we're feeling confident about that. I think the objectives and the milestones are clearly laid out, as I mentioned. We know what needs to happen. The team is laser-focused here right now and is understood what we need to do.

We have high confidence to be able to close it out together in the next number of months here. That is what I would say about kind of our activities and kind of how we got here. To answer your question about kind of timing and SOP, we have mentioned on this call and earlier today that our target for the Atlas Ultra SOP, which obviously ties into what we are talking about here, is 2027. We expect then from production ramp and market entry to follow that.

Operator (participant)

We will take our next question from Mason Wayne with Morgan Stanley.

Mason Wayne (Equity Research Associate)

Great. Thanks, guys. I just wanted to ask, given some of the additional wins and engagements, just how are you feeling about the level of cash right now? It looks like the cash burn last year was kind of similar to what is on the balance sheet today.

Spending will be a little bit lower this year, but just is there a cash number you feel comfortable operating the company at? You expect to be able to have to draw on that facility before we kind of start to get to scale over the next couple of years?

Saurabh Sinha (CFO)

Hey, Mason. This is Saurabh. Happy to answer that question. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our total liquidity available is $237 million. $112 million is on the books on the balance sheet, and the remaining $125 million is in the form of an undrawn facility where the conditions to draw have been fully met. It is at management's sole discretion to draw at any point in time. We feel pretty good about our liquidity. It's a multi-year runway to take us all the way to production.

As you see that, while we are increasing revenues, we are decreasing cost. As Soroush mentioned earlier in the call, there are certain heavy lifts on the R&D front, particularly the silicon development and maturity of the product. Those activities are coming down, as you would expect, as you reach maturity. We feel pretty good about it. We do not have any debt. At the same time, we look at the whole ecosystem of LiDAR companies and others. We feel we are in a very good position from the balance sheet strength and the liquidity to execute on our plan and win more customers.

Mason Wayne (Equity Research Associate)

Okay. Excellent. Thanks, and congrats on the progress.

Saurabh Sinha (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We will move next to Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum.

Hi, this is Tyler on for Richard. Thank you for taking my questions.

I was wondering, what is the general area that the top 10 OEM is located in for their headquarters, and in which geographies ex-China are they operating in? Is there any cadence to the different model ramps or any kind of way you could describe the size of this opportunity?

Soroush Salehian (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah. Yeah. Happy to do that, Tyler. I think, obviously, I have to be careful here. I think we just announced this, so we do not want to get ahead of ourselves too much. I can tell you this is obviously a top 10 OEM, a super, obviously, well-known brand with global presence. I do not think I can tell you the exact headquarters, but in general, I can tell you that they have significant business globally.

What we see with this OEM is, as I mentioned, they're making in the millions of vehicles per year, and they're importantly, really one of the top leaders in introducing new technology, right? We think that that combination, together with Aeva's ability to provide this really unique FMCW technology and along the way, really prove out its maturity and scalability, is going to be a major win-win situation, not just for the two companies, but we also see this as an opportunity for us to jointly bring this technology to the passenger real market, similarly to what we're doing with Daimler Truck on the commercial vehicle market. We are really excited about that. Daimler, obviously, is a leader in their respective commercial vehicle field, and we see that the opportunity here with this OEM also is to be in a leading position in the passenger vehicle field.

We are looking to work together and really build up that potential of the scale. As you alluded to the side, as I mentioned on the call, millions of vehicles sold. We see the opportunity, the production program, to be across multiple vehicle model lines. We see that for some of these key model lines, we expect it to be as a standard feature for LiDAR. If you run the math, this potential opportunity would be quite massive. As I mentioned on the call, it could be amongst the largest in the industry. We expect the size to be at least similar to what was the Daimler Truck program, which is a billion-plus dollar revenue opportunity. We are really excited by this, but again, we see this as a stepping stone and not at all as a destination.

We're just getting started here in Q1, so looking forward to providing more updates as we go along.

That's fair. Thank you for answering. I had one more. For the manufacturing, is this enough to get you going for the next couple of years, or does that need to be adjusted as we move forward into end of 2026 and beyond?

Yeah. As we mentioned earlier, our goal is to obviously install manufacturing capacity in the hundreds of thousands of units to really be able to satisfy the demand that we see in the market from our customers. Our target this year is just to start this year for our manufacturing capacity install. I can tell you that our line, as it's being installed, is already able to go north of 200,000 as we install them and able to expand that.

That is something we already have plans for as we go around installing this manufacturing capacity. Our ability to produce at significant volumes for each, this is just one line, is going to be crucial. One of the reasons we can do that is actually because if you look at our system, what we have been able to do with Atlas and then Atlas Ultra is reduce the components that go inside the LiDAR. Let's say if you compare it to and contrast it to, let's say, a typical LiDAR or a time-of-flight technology, you may have many tens or hundreds of components and modules, where what we see with FMCW, what we have done at Aeva, has been able to reduce that to a handful of key modules. That significantly reduces the complexity of the product. We have had very positive feedback from the OEMs.

It has contributed to some of the success that we've had so far. Some have even commented that this is kind of reduced to the max in terms of complexity at a system level. We see that opportunity to be able to really make this for us to make this fully automated is not going to be that much of a huge challenge for us. That is why, from the beginning of the design, we've been able to actually get the system-level complexity to a level where it's straightforward to be able to manufacture in an automated fashion. All of that, what I'm saying, is ability for us to increase our capacity at system level is already in our plans, and it's something that we know how to do.

Our focus is on scaling our manufacturing at the module and silicon level to match that up, which obviously is something that is also a known quantity that we know how to do. Hopefully that answers your question.

Operator (participant)

It appears we have no further questions at this time. This will conclude the Aeva Technologies fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.