eXoZymes - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Transcript

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Everything in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, will be forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings to better understand eXoZymes as a business, our risk factors, and as an investment opportunity. With that, welcome to our very first earnings call of many. That is the plan here. My name is Lasse Görlitz. I am the VP of Communications. I am the one that is running PR and investor relations at eXoZymes. I would like to thank you all for being part of our call today. With that, I would like to hand it over to our CEO, Michael Heltzen.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Thank you, Lasse, and welcome, everybody. We have an agenda in front of us here where we'll be covering a number of topics. We have a lot to cover, so let's just dive right into our vision. Our vision of the future basically builds on the fact that chemicals are the fundamental building blocks to our modern life. It means that they're the basic building blocks of medicine, of fuels, of plastic, of food, of colors, and everything we consider the good life in the modern consumer world. Today, there's only a couple of ways where humankind can get hold of these essential chemicals. We have developed a new and better way. That's it for a minute here. We'll give it a second. It represents a huge business opportunity to get this right. Let me map that out for you.

The first way humankind can get hold of chemicals is basically harvesting them from nature, and that's by the traditional cut-down and extract method. It leads to problems like depletion of the source. It's also often too slow, too costly, or too wasteful to do. The other way of doing chemicals today is petrochemicals. Basically, since the discovery of oil and the advancement of petrochemistry, the world has become addicted to using this petrochemistry to produce chemicals for most of the products we use on a daily basis. Petrochemistry, though, has the problem of being toxic and environmentally damaging. That means long-term, it's unsustainable. Nature, on the one side, still has more diverse and advanced types of chemicals that it can produce. On the other side, petrochemical, cheap, fast, very controllable.

As a best-of-both-worlds solution, we at eXoZymes have developed a new and unique technology that we call eXoZymes that allows us to basically replicate and optimize on nature's biological way of producing chemicals. It allows for a very nice opportunity to create a lot of value, and that's for us and our shareholders. Let's connect to the next slide here. First of all, let me explain what we mean with the word eXoZymes. eXoZymes, with the capital X and Z, is when we talk about it as our company name. You see that up in the left-hand corner with red. When we spell it exozymes, no capital letters, it's the scientific concept. It's the technology that is used for this next generation of biomanufacturing. As we've developed it, we get to name it. Let's dive into the details of it. The next slide here. What are exozymes?

Exo means outside, and as enzymes normally live inside of cells to produce chemicals for the cell, then the in part means inside of, and enzymes basically means the chemical step reactions that they make to make chemicals. eXoZymes is therefore our way of saying cell-free, multi-step, enzyme pathway chemical production. Much simpler, just calling it eXoZymes. Making eXoZymes is possible because we master advanced enzyme optimization using AI and bioengineering, and we basically are able to fast forward the enzyme evolution that naturally happens in nature, but typically over thousands or millions of years. We can direct that evolution via the computational AI designs and our unique capability in producing a lot of enzyme and eXoZymes training data. How do these eXoZymes work? We take feedstock, for example, sugar as an input.

The first part of the eXoZymes, they basically break that sugar molecule down to the exact chemical building blocks that we need. The next eXoZymes in the pathway comes and puts them together exactly into the chemical that we want it to be. Due to our technical co-founders, Tyler and Paul and Jim, and our great team, we have been building on this for basically a decade, if you go all the way back to when it was an academic project. With that expertise of enzyme and exozyme optimization, leveraging AI design algorithms, and that we can generate a lot of high-quality enzyme data and specific trade secrets, we are able to do this that nobody else can do. Our technology, just to kind of point out the advancements here, is built with inspiration from four recent Nobel Prizes in chemistry.

It is pretty advanced chemistry, biology, and AI technologies that are merging into a perfect mix here. If we go to the next slide. Yes, thank you. The dream of synthetic biology is not much different than ours, and billions of dollars have been invested into the traditional cell-based SynBio methods where you genetically optimize cells to make chemicals as a chemical factory for you. It turns out that it often does not work at commercial scale. You can argue it is therefore not really real, at least from a business point of view. Those problems and why that does not work, I will point that out a little bit later in the presentation. We are basically pointing out that our method gets around all of those problems and is allowing us to deliver commercial value in an effective way, both from a production and cost perspective.

This is what makes it effective, scalable, and profitable in the end. Let's go to the next slide. We basically use highlights, lowlights, and headlights in our organization to communicate to each other how things are going. I'll give you an overview here. On the next slide here, there's basically a number of the really great things that happened for us looking back in 2024. Amongst other things, we became one of the leaders in combining AI design algorithms with enzyme data. Quite a big achievement. Obviously, we want to move fast on the advantages that AI brings to our specific business vertical of the world. Another thing I want to point out is when we build a new company, it's never easy.

To be completely frank, I remember and will never forget standing at our front door to the office looking at the wildfires coming closer and closer. That January morning, that was stressful. It was stressful for everybody on the team and definitely not a part of our plans. When that is set, it is a perfect pressure test of us as a team. That day and those days, I went from being 100% sure that we are the right team to take on this bold undertaking to become 1,000% sure that with this team, we can do anything we set our hearts and minds to.

I saw hero-level actions, teamwork worthy of elite soldiers, just taking care of each other, making sure we had safety, but also making sure that all our work was not just safe, but also progressing despite we had to fight things like toxic air, toxic water, no power. There were a lot of things going on in those days and weeks. We kept the train on track, and we managed to, despite a little delay, get back on track, and it leaves me with a deep sense of being proud of our team. Okay, let's go on to the next slide. When we report in our 10-K, we look back on the year, and it's kind of old news that I joined as CEO in the past year.

That means I've already had a chance to meet many of you investors and shareholders through the IPO process and other events. For some investors, this might be our first introduction. Allow me a really short introduction of myself. I have 20 years' worth of experience and successes in taking leadership roles in early stage and growth stage startups, always focusing on the breakthrough sciences and technologies and turning that into business, specifically in this cross-field of computational power and molecular biology. After my last exit in 2023, I was attracted to eXoZymes basically because it's a perfect fit with my passion of combining these new technologies with molecular biology and making new generations of products that can make a big impact.

I strongly believe that eXoZymes is the next generation of biomanufacturing, and biomanufacturing is something that we really, truly need to make sure that the future is going to stay bright. Okay, I therefore believe that this is a great business opportunity, and I look forward to make sure we live up to the full potential. This next slide points out that we are doing things a little bit differently because we find it faster and better, especially better from a use of capital perspective. We are super focused on finding this fast-forward opportunity in going from value inflection point to value inflection point. We've done it before, and we have it systematically down. We do it via leadership principles.

We do it via specific optimized organizational structures and having a super, super focus on not just doing science for the sake of science, but doing science and technology for the sake of building competitive advantages that have commercial impact opportunities so we can get to market, so we can get to revenue, so we can get to asset creation as fast as possible. I want to underline that it's very much about our team. It's about our world-class talent. On that front, I have some good news to share here in a moment, kind of giving it away in the text here. We are natively implementing AI and machine learning as a part of our company because I've been lucky to have that as a part of all the companies since the first startup I was a part of back in Denmark where I'm born and raised.

The first startup was a bioinformatics company, literally writing algorithms on how DNA, RNA, and proteins behave, and we used machine learning already back then. Another thing that makes us stand out is that we are insisting on communicating and giving people access to ourselves in a manner of transparency and making sure that people understand what we are up to. If we go to the next slide, there is here a number of videos that we have already recorded and already released that give you insight to everything from the founder journey of our technical founders to that is how the company came about to a lot of other topics. Follow us via basically our webpage where you can sign up to have our notification system ping you every time there is a new video, there is new news, and also basically follow us on LinkedIn.

If we go to the next slide, we have changed language. I've already explained eXoZymes from the perspective of what it is and why we didn't want to have the long, long, long definition, but it's actually a little bit more complex than that, and I'll just spend a minute on it. When I started in the company and I started going out to different networks of mine and started talking about cell-free biomanufacturing, a lot of people were saying like, "Hold on, cell-free, I know cell-free because cell-free DNA that's used for cancer diagnostics, right?

Cell-free protein synthesis is used for antibody development. I was like, "Hold on, actually the word cell-free is being used for so many things that our little niche of cell-free biomanufacturing is kind of being confused or forgotten about." Especially because we as a company happen to use what is called cell-free protein synthesis as well as a tool, we really got not just the external world confused, but also ourselves sometimes. We sat down and basically agreed on we needed to invent a new language, a new way of understanding what we're doing and communicating it. Hence, eXoZymes and the need for this new language. In April, there will be a lot of media attention on how we are offering up eXoZymes as a scientific concept for other people to use as well.

This is not a word we want to sit on and trademark and keep to ourselves. Of course, we have taken and want to continue being the market leader of it, hence why we have taken the name as well. Keep an eye out for us. What is the difference? Synthetic biology shared the vision like ours, but making living cells the chemical factories turns out to be a really tall order. Cells do not want to do something they do not benefit from. If you go to the next slide, that is basically reason number one for why we have the world have a challenge with convincing cells by genetic reengineering to be chemical factories. If you put genetic code into a cell, basically forcing it to make chemicals for you, the cell will turn it off again because it does not want to.

If you then invest a lot of time in genetic engineering to make it not turn it off and not have all these safety mechanisms that are there to protect the cell, you end up with a sick or maybe even a dying cell as the chemicals are often toxic. The chemicals you make the cell make are often toxic to the cell itself. The cell, your chemical factory, will therefore fight you as if its life depends on it because it literally does. The third reason that we are listing here, and there are actually many, many more reasons, but let's just stop with three.

If you finally get your cell to do what you want it to do from a chemical factory point of view, then you end up with this business problem that when you have your chemical inside of this cell slurry, the cell is doing a thousand million other things, actually. How do you get your chemical compound out of that cell slurry? The isolation cost often ends up being higher than the value of the chemical itself, and no matter what you do, you do not have a business case. Okay, if we go to the next slide, we did not want to be lumped in with cell-based SynBio for the same reason, hence our new way of talking about cell-free exozymes and biomanufacturing, and also why we took the new name. Next slide. Let's zoom in on our way of, yes, a very, very large, bold, long-term vision.

If we try to do everything, we get nothing done. Therefore, having a focus strategy for the next couple of years is very important to us. What market opportunities should we focus on? That's basically where we came to the next conclusion, that is that it's going to be nutraceuticals that have the potential of being pharmaceuticals. Some extraordinary business opportunities we'll talk about in a minute. Basically explaining nutraceuticals here, the reason why we picked those as an area of focus is that it's high value relative to relatively low volumes when we do nutraceuticals. They are therefore much faster for us to get commercially set up and brought to market and gain value from. There's another reason why nutraceuticals is a good fit, and it's basically because what our platform is optimized to do fits really well with that already.

We get a lot of inspiration from natural products where something is working out in nature, and we borrow those pathways and that genetic code to then optimize as a starting point. The other opportunity with nutraceuticals, just a second here, let's go back, is that nutraceuticals is a very hot topic right now. The conversation about wanting to use natural products and nutraceuticals instead of petrochemical-based drugs is a very large conversation that is only accelerating right now. To explain the second part, the with a pharmaceutical potential basically means we get an extra shot on goal per project because the nutraceutical business case in and of itself will carry the reason for why going into it.

With a number of these nutraceuticals, with a more pure version and derivatives of the natural product version, we can actually get ourselves into some really interesting drug candidate positions. There is both a base business case that is healthy, and then there is a very large business opportunity on the pharmaceutical side. Those have a longer time period and take a partnership often to get into to go through the clinical trials and so forth. Okay, next slide. The part of our focus that is called extraordinary business opportunities is, of course, because we as an innovative company that has something as unique as we do have to keep our ears open for if something really, really good from an opportunistic point of view comes our way.

We do focus, but we are open-minded, and we have had the luck that the DOE, the Department of Energy, saw our technologies and realized that after having spent billions of dollars on sustainable aviation fuel programs that are cell-based, but also learning the hard way that if you make high energy density chemistry, it's often toxic to cells and therefore it won't work at scale. They came to us and were very intrigued about the point of us being cell-free and working with enzymes heavily optimized to be able to do things that normal enzymes can't do, a.k.a. the eXoZymes. We have therefore gotten some really nice grants where we get to keep basically all the ownership and all the business opportunity, but they pay for it. That's an extraordinary business case that we are not going to let get away.

Okay, nutraceuticals with pharmaceuticals potential, first and foremost, we have the extraordinary business cases, but we also have, when time allows for it, down the road in a number of years from now, we will branch out into other industries because we get the core up and running first. If we go to the next slide, it's time for us to talk a little bit about financials.

Fouad Nawaz (VP of Finance)

Good afternoon, everyone. Our financial results for the year 2024 are detailed in the press release that was issued. I'll take a moment to review the results. As of the end of 2024, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $9.72 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support ongoing operations and key initiatives into 2026. Our total operating expenses for the year were $5.9 million. This represents an increase of $4.1 million compared to the full year of 2023.

The increase in 2024 was primarily driven by R&D investments, personnel expansion both in the leadership and in the R&D team, and infrastructure development. The net loss for the year was $5.9 million. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus still remains on prudent financial management, ensuring capital is efficiently allocated while making targeted investments to drive long-term growth. That concludes my presentation of the financial results. I will pass the call back. Thank you.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Thank you very much to Fouad and take a note. Lasse, maybe put the financial slide on again. Take a note on that, of course, all our SEC filings can be found on our webpage. Go in under the investor section and under filings, and you will be able to pull all of those detailed numbers and insights. Next slide. What's ahead?

We, the company, we are at our core, a platform of platforms company. To understand what that means, it's basically that we have a fundamentally technology and science breakthrough that is so fundamental that it can be used for everything. If we try to focus on everything, we get nothing done. We are therefore very aware that we have to have extra focus and extra speed to get to market because otherwise we can drown in the opportunity. What we fundamentally make are competitive advantages. That is this famous story about bringing a gun to a knife fight to specific markets and specific applications. We can do that for a number of different markets, but as we are now getting to the commercialization phase of building our company, we need to pick what chemicals, a.k.a. what products that go first.

As we have a limited bandwidth still here the first couple of years, we need to be smart about what we pick. We have had to make some choices. If we go to the next slide, we have basically been growing our sales pipeline with a lot of people interested in potentially partnering with us and building these eXoZymes biosolutions. We continue this important work and ripening up these conversations and sales cycles. The leading partnership cases, they're making progress on a monthly and quarterly basis. The reality is that we have to accept that we move much, much faster than our large potential partner companies. Sales and decision-making processes take both months and years in some of the big companies.

As we have already identified great new chemical business opportunities that are ready to go, and frankly, some of them are too good to share at this initial point, it's time for us to take some decisions. If we go to the next slide, we are talking about the business model specifically applied here. The first couple of years is going to be spin-outs and joint ventures. We are an asset-light business model that has been basically established to optimize our platform and the assets we can make with it and do that over and over again by sharing the already paid-for IP and R&D that have led us to this position. That allows us to have some really healthy return on the invested capital because we are not trying to many times double a very, very large amount, but a much smaller amount than most other young companies.

The way we will build the initial value is via these spin-outs and joint ventures. It's basically because they can be self-financed because the business cases are going to be so clear, otherwise we won't enter into it, that it enables basically these market vertical applications where we bring the technology and the competitive advantage in that market vertical for the company either to be built or together with a joint venture partner, co-built in a way where it doesn't bring a lot of financial burden onto us because they're self-financiable. In the second quarter that we have just started a day ago, we are going to launch our first spin-out. That is very exciting. For fairness reasons and because everybody needs to have fair access to that information, we will have a whole basically investor call and presentation about that specific natural product nutraceutical market and business opportunity.

It is a market we are very excited about. Other players have sunk three-digit million dollars into that market to build synbio solutions for it. We already have something that can compete against those biosolutions with our way of doing it. At the same time, this nutraceutical that we are looking at has a very, very potent pharmaceutical drug opportunity that can be pursued as well for a disease that has no treatment today and has a lot of patients waiting for a solution for treatment. We will be presenting this in Q2, where we'll give you a full overview of the business case and why we picked it as our first commercial go-to-market business case. Later this year, we are also aiming at launching a joint venture.

That is another business case with a big potential, but we'll wait with that and even putting more data behind that until we have done the first business launch. Make sure to sign up for our news notifications on our webpage so you always can stay up to date. Of course, these significant things we will be announcing via the SEC as well. Next slide. This is the best news of the day, of the week, of the month. Yesterday, Damien and I, on behalf of our company, signed an agreement that makes Damien our new Chief Commercial Officer.

When we are about to build all of these new businesses and we are going into the negotiation phase with a number of our potential partners, it is important to have world-class talent join us that has experience doing exactly these kinds of biomanufacturing projects and can basically help us become successful. Here's a little message from Damien that has been with us as a consultant for a while now. He'll be hitting the ground running. He's actually already at the office pulling forward while I'm sitting here at home presenting to you guys. Let's play the video from Damien.

Damien Perriman (Chief Commercial Officer)

Good day. What a fun way to turn up. Chief Commercial Officer at eXoZymes, a company that I've been looking at for a little while, really impressing the socks off me as a company and a place that's moving so quickly with new discoveries, new developments.

I have been wayfinding green chemistry for the last 25 years. During that time, I've had the privilege to commercialize several biotechnologies for personal care, for plastics, textiles, fragrances, performance fuels, and fine chemicals. Along the journey, I've been constantly inspired by our ability to use the tools of biology to make stuff. However, I have to acknowledge the challenges of doing so economically. I think if we're honest about our industry, we would say the scorecard has been one of lots of learning and lots of progress, but limited commercial success at industrial scale. I see eXoZymes as the logical successor to SynBio. I base that reflecting back on the journey I know I've been involved in.

At the beginning of my career, we started looking at using fermentation, microbial pathways to make naturally occurring molecules at industrial scale, believing the world would embrace them and find new applications for them. That adoption rate for the new materials, the new drop-ins, was very, very slow. We then found ways of unlocking pathways inside these microbes to make the exact same chemicals, drop-ins. The development journeys and the scale-up journeys of those were expensive and challenging. Along came a bunch of DNA tools trying to accelerate the speed and pace of innovation. Whilst it might have brought down the cost of reagents, it did not really change the pace of innovation. It did not improve the targets we were able to go after and did little to change the process economics, which are necessary for performance at the end of the day.

When we marched a lot of our technologies to scale, one of the things we felt hampered by was the large scale of investment necessary to build globally relevant capital projects. With eXoZymes, it isn't just about driving the pace of R&D experimentation. It isn't just about improving the quality of the enzymes that you can select and develop. It's also about operating free of the constraints of the microbe, being able to operate at really high concentrations, being able to build smaller plants that are still commercially and globally relevant. That bringing down of the CapEx profile brings down your project investment risk. It brings in investors that were previously shied away from these first-of-a-kind projects. The more projects we deploy at commercial scale, because this risk is lower, the more successes we'll see, the more payback we'll see, the more growth in the industry we'll see.

That's what we want. Impact comes from commercial deployment. This company, in its world of AI-driven learning, has been able to move very, very quickly through the development of pathways, the development of tools. I think that sets themselves up to be a strong partner for companies who are looking at products that perhaps haven't been served well. As I think about the evolution of this SynBio space over the 25 years I know I've been kicking around, this really feels like an exciting new chapter for us to be moving into. It's an exciting group, but it's an important mission, right? Continuing this journey towards making sustainable products reliably that don't overtax the environment behind us, that delivers consumers with things that can excite them, and really important that can actually deliver back to our shareholders a return on investment.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

That is super exciting for us to have a capacity like Damien join our team. Despite Damien also pointing out that SynBio have had a hard time, I want to point out that Damien have actually belonged to the team, the teams that have had the relative success and the few success stories in SynBio. Having Damien join us and helping us to commercialize multiple projects and negotiate even more partnerships is exciting to a degree. I could talk about it for the next hour. I will spare you for that and just show you the results over the coming quarters. I know from Lasse, because he's chatting me right now, that we are getting some questions. I just want to end up on that we truly believe that the future is bright.

If and when we capture just 10% of the potential of what we are holding here, it will be an amazing business, and we will be making a lot of positive impact on the world and on the bank account of you, our investors. With that, I want to thank you for your time and let you know that I fully believe and trust in our vision that the future will be bright. We are going to fight for it, and we're going to deliver on it. Lasse, will you read out loud some of the questions we are getting in here?

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Yes, and thank you for posting some questions. I can see there were some early ones that have been answered throughout the presentation, and there are also some very, very good questions that I wish we could answer.

They will primarily come with this opportunity that Michael talked about when we will have another call designated to talk about our future spin-out. Yes. Michael, let's go with I've selected a few here. I'll ask the first one here. What keeps you up at night? What are the biggest risks that you see on the path to success?

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

What keeps me up at night? I did just read all the risk assessment factors that we report in the 10-K. That's definitely something that can keep me up at night. That is also the really, really wide everything under the sun that can go wrong.

What keeps me, if I were to kind of pick from a more operational and practical point of view, what keeps me up at night is making sure that we find this right balance between this humongous potential and staying focused on hitting the next value inflection point, the next value inflection point, so that we can keep growing the value, the assets, and the value creation of the company. Because that is obviously how companies like ours go from being not revenue-creating to getting to a point where we are revenue-creating, and that journey in between, we are worthy of investments.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Thank you. Let's go on to the next one. This is a fun one. Everyone is claiming that they're using AI these days. How can you prove that you're actually doing it?

I think that there's a little bit of a hyperbole asked in here if we're just saying it to say it or if it's actually real.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

That's fair. That's fair. I have been kidding around with that you can go to Starbucks and get AI in your coffee nowadays because there's no limitations on what people will be claiming using AI for. We, first of all, have, by myself, a lot of strategic and business understanding of what we can use machine learning and pattern recognition via algorithms for. That was why I insisted on introducing it as one of the things that our team got challenged to achieve. One of the bottlenecks in using AI to optimize on enzymes specifically is that there's limited training data available publicly. What do you train on?

It was actually a two-point answer that our team came back with and said, "Well, in that case, we need to generate much more training data for our AI algorithms to be effective on answering us what genetic changes could make a better enzyme and have that circular training loop." That is known, for example, from self-driving cars. It's not just when you drive perfectly that you're training an algorithm. It's actually also when you do something you're not supposed to do that you train with the negative feedback signal of not that you need to crash your car for your car to learn something, but all of the corrections are actually training equally much.

We sat down and built a data generation platform that was not just seeing what is pushing the enzyme evolution forward, but also what did we think would push it forward but did not do it, and then training from that. To answer the question specifically, if you really want to stress test us, then come visit our lab. There is enough secret sauce in what we do that people can come and see what it is that is going on. Of course, just measure us on the fast, fast progress we are doing in enzyme and exozyme evolutionary development. That typically would cost you millions of dollars and takes months and years to do, where we are doing it much, much faster and much, much cheaper. That is going to be my answer for today. We can maybe go into a session of AI optimization of enzymes another day.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

I think it's a good answer. And it's also, I mean, it's a topic that's frequently asked when we are out presenting and all of this. I think it's very good to double-click on this here. Thank you. Let's go on to the next question here. This attendee says, "I'm trying to understand the model here. What does a commercial deal look like from a structure and a royalty perspective?" That's a very good question.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Yeah. That leads back to, as we talked about in our IPO and other places, that with time, we see the business model expand from spin-outs and joint ventures over to the more pure-play licensing deals where partners can come and basically pay for the development of a biosolution for their specific chemical, for their specific market use. It makes this conversation a little bit complex.

I'll keep it overall now, and then we will give more guidance on it, frankly, when we have more data to support how we're doing it. When it's a subsidiary fully owned, a.k.a. spin-out, then it's kind of easy. The model is we own it all, the problems, but also the upsides are owned by us. We will only do that as long as we can see our way to a value inflection point and an exit where we can basically generate value that can be lifted back up to us either via the ownership or via basically the exit opportunity. That's one model for the spin-outs. The spin-outs, in a number of cases, will have people coming and investing into the spin-out to finance that.

There are the joint ventures that is a little bit more of an in-between the two of spin-outs and licensing full out and not having any ownership specifically. A joint venture is depending on the market and the joint venture partner, often a partner that has a unique market access point or market insight or something to bring to the table where what we are bringing is the technical solution and the competitive advantage from the technical side, but they are bringing often the market side. Together, we can basically perform better than if we did it alone. Over in the licensing deals, it depends on our negotiation strength in the moment.

We have already now in these test cases, or it's not test cases, it's real cases, just the first cases where we have had conversations, it's very clear that what is worthwhile for us to even engage in right now is the ones where we bring a lot of competitive advantage. That translates into a healthy licensing and royalty stream. It's depending on what it's going to cost to build a payment upfront to cover that cost and maybe even an upfront payment to secure the exclusivity. It's a long-winded way of saying it really depends on a lot of things. We will have more guidance on this when we go further down. We want to have a couple of these things under our belt before we start giving examples.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Thank you. We'll move on to the next one.

Do you expect a need to raise additional capital in the future? If yes, when?

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Yeah, that's a little bit of a harder question. We will be taking our conversation about future capital needs after we have launched our first spin-out because depending on the number of things there that might impact our liquidity. Yes, on a bigger perspective, we will be raising more capital at a point in the future. I'm not putting a date on that right now, but we are, at the same time, I can say we are having a lot of interest from different funds and everything from individuals and other types of investors that are coming that is interested in buying a part of our company by doing an investment that is larger than what they can pick up in the open market.

That is the kind of people that would be relevant if we do a PIPE or a public offering or a similar thing down the road. We will, of course, when we take decisions on fundraising needs and timing and so on, again be sharing that information broadly and to everybody at the same time.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Thank you. Okay. I think this is going to be the closing question. I know that there are quite a few questions here, so I guess we're probably answering 20%. I'm sorry if you think that your question was important and we did not answer that. I think we're almost at time here. We'll take the last question, and then we'll wrap it up.

Are there any key opinion leaders in the industry who now understand your process and platform and are promoting you, or you could say maybe starting to adopt our terminology and all of this?

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Yes. Said with a smile, we actually are talking with a key opinion leader in a specific space about doing a joint venture. That is a good example of someone that has sat down, understood our technology, and had that aha moment, like, "God, if you can do this, then you can do that again and again and again and again in this nutraceutical with a pharmaceutical potential space." It happens to be one of the world's leading key opinion leaders in that specific space. I won't mention names right now and so on because that's actually the second case, the joint venture I was talking about.

We'll have much more about that, but a little later.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Yes. To your point, very early in this presentation today, there will be coming out news here in April about the scientific projects, scientific definitions of eXoZymes and all this. That will certainly also carry some oomph to it once we get there without disclosing any details.

Michael Heltzen (CEO)

Yeah, that's true. Look at the people that are co-publishing together with us and are going to be in the media. Those are definitely key opinion leaders as well. I think that's a wrap. I don't want to keep people here too long. Thank you so much for your time.

We will be back again on a quarterly basis if there's something we can do better because this is our first time, and we are doing it slightly different than other companies because we have our own style, we have our own communication methodology, but it does not mean we are not open to feedback and ways we can improve.

Lasse Görlitz (VP of Communications)

Exactly. Thank you, Michael, and thank you to everyone who participated. I think that this sums it up for us today. If you haven't signed up already, please do so. Everybody who's attending here, you will be getting a link to the video. If you're looking for a transcript of the call, that's also going to be available in around 24 hours or so. With that, thank you and have a great day. Thank you.