MDB Capital Holdings - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

This conference call is being recorded. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment of what the future holds, they are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.

Throughout today's discussion, we will attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions, so you should also review our most recent Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the heading "Risk Factors." A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this morning, is available in the investor relations section of our company's website, MDB.com. Also, a replay of this call will be provided on MDB.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, CEO and founder of MDB. Chris will present an update on the first quarter ending March 31st, 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to MDB Capital Holdings Chief Executive Officer, Chris Marlett.

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Each one of our calls, I start with sort of a little bit of a different spin on our business strategy, how we create value, and really just to reinforce with all of our shareholders where we're at, the way we look at things, and basically how we currently view the future. Some of this is going to be a little bit of a repeat, but hopefully you'll get, for the new people, they'll get a better flavor for what we do. For the people that have watched a few other of these conference calls, the first five minutes may be a bit of a repeat. Just to remind everybody, what do we do? We curate public venture capital. It's pretty simple. We're looking for asymmetrical return potential with public market liquidity.

We've tried to really set ourselves apart from everybody else with this whole idea of public venture capital being a preferred alternative to traditional venture capital. We'll get into a little bit more of that later in the presentation. Again, what do we do? We transform these big ideas into valuable public companies. That's where we create all of our value. That's where we see what we're really good at is making big ideas financeable. A lot of things that we have taken public and had a lot of success with actually weren't seen as investable assets by most people. We actually created that transformation that we're very proud about. Again, you got to look through thousands of them. We've done this. We've built the team to basically look through thousands.

We've talked about this before, but we've really got a great team that's doing a great job of curating new big ideas. I would tell you that now is probably the best time in the history of us doing this for 20 some odd years or close to 30 years, actually, and that we're seeing better ideas at better valuations than we've ever seen. That has a lot to do with the current environment, which has obviously not been great for small companies trading in the public markets. I'll get to that in a bit. Again, what do we do? We have a platform to stand them up. PatentVest really helps us to guide these companies and position them properly.

We have this broker-dealer that is now a clearing firm that gives us a lot of flexibility to basically take these companies public when it is very, very hard for other underwriters and other people to do this, clearing through other traditional type clearing firms. We have got a growing community of investors that understand what we do. We think we have a very unique platform that really represents an unbelievable opportunity to extraordinary business opportunities that feel that the public markets is a great place for them to be. This is some updated data, which we rely on Carta for data on the venture market. I think this chart is going to sort of have a different flavor to it today than it usually has, in the sense that those venture companies that are still active, not gone public, there are literally thousands of those.

You can see just in 2018, there were 4,300 of them. I would say because of the boom in financing that happened post-COVID, there has to be, I don't know, 30,000-50,000 companies that have been funded by VCs that have not gone public. I mean, you can see here that of this class, only 15 have exited via IPO since 2018. Over the last seven years, only 15 of them made it public. That means that there are, I would say, at least tens of thousands of companies that have been funded that see no exit. Right now, what we're seeing in the venture market is really quite interesting because we're getting approached by lots of venture firms with opportunities to take things public because they're not positioned to be able to continue to fund these companies. New fund formation is way down, etc.

What's happening is nobody really wants to invest in and be locked up in a traditional venture fund. What I see as a huge opportunity is literally thousands and thousands of companies that could come public and probably should come public. If you take the top 5% of all of those ones that are still alive, there's a lot of great companies there, and we're getting to see a lot of them. I'm pretty excited about it because the valuation expectations are changing as the market's gotten worse. I think there's this mismatch that is going to enable them to accept the valuation and leave something on the table for public investors to participate in the future growth. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Of course, our track record helps.

We had a call with a VC last week, and we proposed to take their company public. I expected them to walk away. We offered them a valuation that was much lower than their most recent financing. I expected them to just tell us they're not interested. What they said was, "The fact that you're 17 for 17 of taking companies public gives us the certainty, and we're willing to accept this lower valuation as a result of the certainty of getting public. Hopefully, we'll get it back," meaning the value of that company will come back to the values they funded it at previously in the public markets.

I think that our track record not only benefits us from being able to tell investors that we're good at getting these things public and judging what we can get public, but it's now, I think, reaching beyond that to either founders or VCs that say, "Wow, MDB really does have a model that works." What I'm excited about is the pent-up demand for IPOs, I think, is not only getting strong, but I think it's bigger than it's ever been. What's happening is the backlog, or I would call it what's kept it from really being unleashed, in my mind, is sort of the changing market dynamics. The changing market dynamics are really that investors don't want to buy, I would say, green bananas anymore.

They want to buy stuff that's closer to commercial realization, where they're not worried about big dilution downstream from future financing. They want to see that these companies don't need to raise a lot of capital, so they need to be capital-light, and they need to look like there's going to be a business where there could be some profitability. That's having a big impact on what we're curating as well. This backlog of opportunities, in my mind, is getting rationalized. I think for the first time, we're seeing more of a match where we can take some of these companies public that will actually be well-valued in the public markets like we've never seen before. I would tell you that when I started in the business, we wouldn't look at anything that we didn't think was going to be profitable pretty soon.

We took companies public way before I started MDB, and they all had to have some sort of profit profile in the not-too-distant future. I think we're going back to those times. I think there's a whole nother presentation we could do about that, sort of the changing market dynamics, interest rates, etc., that I think is going to change this sort of 45-year downtrend in interest rates that's caused the growth of private equity and traditional venture. I think we're going to see these companies come public. If you look at the company and the reason why I think this is going to happen is that the companies that are public that are profitable are trading at very big valuations.

I think that for me, this means that I believe that the small IPO market's going to be very robust, which is going to basically see a reversal of the downtrends that we've seen for now decades. I already kind of covered this, but the valuation mismatch is really, in my mind, the biggest impact on microcap IPOs. We see that, again, leveling up right now. Our pipeline is pretty thick with companies that want to go public that we think will do well in the public markets. We're excited about it. It does mean there's a bit of a product mix, if you will, change. We have other companies that we're looking at taking public that are actually profitable, which is really a new thing to us.

Again, it's not something that we've even looked at since I was just a baby in the business, just starting out in my 20s. I think it's kind of a very unique, interesting time. We're pivoting not completely away from big, huge, deep tech ideas, but we're pivoting to make sure that everything we bring public is going to resonate in the changing marketplace. Really, what do we do? It's really about curating deals, the right companies that could really make a difference at the right valuation. Valuation is critical. If we can't find them, and that's been a big problem in the last couple of years is that expectations were so high. Now we see that, we see that dynamic changing.

I'm very excited that we're going to find really extraordinary businesses at the right values that'll represent great return opportunities for investors. We've got LOIs with three companies. One is actually a biotech that we've exposed to a number of people in our community already. Very exciting. Again, biotech has been the worst space to be in recently, but this is a team that we've worked with before with the formation of Provention that we sold to Sanofi for $2.9 billion. We took it from the back of an envelope to $2.9 billion. The team, which we love, has come back to us to do another IPO. What's exciting about this one, it's a relatively small amount of capital to a really, really big inflection point, which is, could we give somebody a pill that would get the pancreas to produce insulin again?

We think that it's got a good shot. We think that if that happens, it's a monumental inflection point, much like the other drug that got us bought for $2.9 billion. Pretty exciting. Even though it's biotech, we're very excited about it. We're pricing it right. It's going to be at about a $20 million pre-money valuation. We've got a company that was going to more than likely take money from private equity. It's a beverage company that is very profitable, growing at a very fast rate. They could see that an IPO made actually a lot more sense than private equity. Private equity, I think, is going through a real transition. I think private equity is going to be very difficult for a lot of companies that have not had good experience of private equity.

In fact, the founders of this company have had experience with private equity before and really felt that IPO was a better alternative. I think this company will trade for a really nice valuation in the public market, one, because it's growing, two, because it's profitable, and it's something that everybody can identify with. I think that these kind of companies have not been coming public over the last five to 10 years. I'm pretty excited about that one. We have another healthcare software company. Has revenue growing, really big upside potential. We're looking forward to exposing that one to you as well. Great management team. Again, these are companies that don't need much capital to get to very big inflection points. What we've seen is our mission after going public, which is really scaling up what we did before. Everything has gone great operationally.

The backdrop for what we do has been the worst environment that we've been in in the history of our firm. The good news and the bad news. The good news is that all the things we thought we were going to be able to do, we've been able to do. We've trained our analyst team. We've got unbelievable analytical capability. I can tell you right now that I would put up our analyst team against anybody in the business. The clearing firm's working great. Our operational team did an awesome job of getting that up and running. That's not an easy thing to do. It's also become a really major asset for us. A lot of other people are looking at us because of our capability to do clearing.

We have a lot of opportunities potentially to add some additional really interesting products to our mix because of our clearing platform. We are in discussions with a lot of people that see the value of aligning with us because of our clearing platform. We are broadening our relationships with new investor groups. One of the things that we had done is we really spent a lot of time with a relatively small group of people because we did not have that many companies. So why go broaden your investor group? Now we are really broadening that, which I will talk about here in a second. Our community service team is doing great. You have probably heard from some of them. Our back office platform in Managua is really doing great. Our leaders here in the U.S. have done a great job training. Everyone is licensed, doing a great job.

It's really a lot of fun to see what this public offering has enabled from building the platform. In last quarter, we closed the HeartBeam deal. HeartBeam was the only financing we did. Like I said, we've got three new LOIs in the hopper and look forward to presenting those here shortly. Our shareholder base moved up modestly. We onboarded a number of new accounts that wanted to invest in the HeartBeam offering. What I thought was really great about what happened was it was a lot of smaller investors. We had really a lot of small investors as opposed to big lead investors, which many times we've had in our deals historically. I think that that really is exciting for us. I wouldn't say that we're getting close to crowdfunding, but it's sort of like curated public venture, but with a broader group of people.

What we've been doing is talking to angel groups and RIAs. That's kind of exciting for us because we've gotten really great reception from these people, even in a really difficult marketplace. As I mentioned, we're looking at leveraging our platform and broadening our IPO offerings. That's in the works. I think you're going to see evidence of that here shortly. The other thing we did was recognize that our executive comp plan for our four top executives, which was really heavily based on RSUs, which means we get stock even if the shareholders aren't winning, that we had to change that. We realigned our compensation and converted them to options. We gave up, I don't know, $21 million worth of stock, so I think was the number. Don't hold me to that number, but it was a large number.

We assumed that we were going to be hugely successful coming out of the chute, and we were wrong. The market did not cooperate, and things did not cooperate. We recognize that we can't be winning if the shareholders aren't winning. We are realigning comp across the board to make sure it's perfectly aligned with the shareholders. This is sort of what we call our enterprise value calculation, which is, if you look at that, we're now presenting every quarter. To simplify, we take net current assets, which is largely cash. Then we take our big idea investments to give you sort of what our balance sheet looks like. Then we take our stock price, shares outstanding to give you a market value, and then sort of calculate the enterprise value.

Turns out that at year-end, we were trading at a large discount to our enterprise value. As of the end of the quarter, it's gone down a bit. That was largely due to the volatility in HeartBeam and eXoZymes. eXoZymes is, I think it was at $10 then. It's up to, what, $15? If you did the calculation today, the enterprise value discount to market would be a little bit bigger because I think it says in there it was $10. I think it's $15 today or something. Anyways, that's an easy way to look at it. I think that anybody that wants to create a model or something, we can help you to create the model, but that's where it stands today. If you look at net current assets, dropped by about $2.3 million.

We actually utilized less than $2 million in cash for the quarter. I think that with our backlog of financings and whatever, again, what we're trying to do is be relatively cash flow neutral when you take the cash from financings and other revenue from PatentVest, etc. We're not there. Obviously, we're pivoting on the type of companies that we're going to fund. Hopefully, that'll increase our activity and get us closer to that. Obviously, what you can see is the big valuation differences are going to be in our big idea investments. Talk a little bit about the transformation, which is we were in the business of selling deals we've curated.

If we only had one deal every 18 months, we had a relatively small group of investors, four to 500, that were looking to invest with us and what have you. As we scale this up to where we think we can do four or five companies a year, we're working with investors and advisors that can allocate to this public venture asset class. It's pretty important to sell people on the public venture asset class or, more importantly, a curated public venture asset class, which is what we do. We started talking with these various folks, and they gave us a lot of suggestions about how to sell this as an asset class. It got pretty exciting in the last month or so as we started to have more discussions with them, which I'll talk about in a second.

One of them said, "Why don't you go back and actually tell us how to invest in public venture?" We said, "Geez, how do you do that?" We got our analyst team together, and we started saying, "Okay, why don't we go back to all 17 of the companies that we launched after we started MDB and go back and really look at each one and look at, depending on how you invested, what would your return profile be?" Not only demonstrate, okay, MDB's companies always gave you sort of the opportunity to make money, but also what was the best strategy to invest in them. The results were pretty interesting. What we did is we said, "Okay, why don't we break it into three kind of models?" One was sort of a buy and hold, kind of hold long-term.

One was more balanced, and more was sort of more active management. The results were interesting, but it was kind of like I didn't know how they were going to turn out. I had a sense of it because we obviously invest in these companies ourselves, plus you know which of your investors kind of do better than others. The results were sort of interesting. If you took sort of a buy and hold, which is really not too practical, but you could have, and just kind of held it forever, you would have had a great return, but your IRR would be actually lower because of the timeframe. Because we've been in business for 27 years, the return would be much lower if you just took that approach.

If you took a balanced strategy, which again, this publication will be out, and you can read all the details of what a balanced strategy is, you would have had an IRR of 49%. If you had active management, you would have had an IRR of 44%. Basically, with active management, you took a little bit more off the table earlier, etc. I encourage you all to read the report, which we'll be putting on our website. If it's not on the website already, it'll be on the website in the next few days. This data and this report, now that we've presented to RIAs and angel groups, they sort of are understanding the difference between public venture and private venture.

The real difference is that because of the liquidity, a lot of these companies, not the ones that went and were sold, not the preventions or the mitigations that were sold to big pharma for huge numbers, but a lot of the companies that did well for a few years, you had the opportunity to take money off the table, you generally do not have that opportunity in private venture. That is a huge difference from a return perspective and why I think our story is really resonating with a larger group of people. The keys really for us are scaling. We need to really bring forth three or four new investment opportunities, not just ones that we like, but that really will do well in the public markets. That is why we are having to pivot because we do see things changing.

We do see that this may not be a market like we've seen before. We've gotten a lot of our really sophisticated investors are calling up and saying, "Hey, you guys need to pivot your product mix, and we're listening." I'm super confident we can bring three or four of those opportunities every year. Maybe more, but I think we can commit to three or four of those opportunities every year. I think that should be fairly easy. The ability for us to really scale and take advantage of our clearing platform to broaden out this community of investors is really going to be important. We're working really hard to do that. That's probably our number one initiative because I think that our deal flow is certainly sufficient to find really, really good stuff.

I think the good news is I don't see that we need to bring on a lot of people unless we really, for whatever reason, scale the number of investors materially. Our level of expenses right now can handle thousands of more investors without having to scale our organization. We have a lot of scalability currently from our current people platform. Now it's just getting more companies through the pipeline. Talking about our existing companies, eXoZymes is really focused on getting really valuable products that are really meaningful. I think NCT, which they recently announced, is really a big one. As you dig into it and you learn more about it, I think you're going to find out that NCT is a big opportunity for eXoZymes. I think there's other big opportunities right behind that.

HeartBeam, with any luck, will have good news from the FDA on the 12-lead synthesis software. I think that's going to be a really big value-creating event in that now this card really can be in the hands of every consumer that is worried about their heart or other things. We're getting unbelievable reception from not only cardiac patients and concierge docs and cardiologists that really see that there's going to be a huge market for this soon. ClearSign Company, they're continuing to scale revenues. I think that they are continuing to build a business. The valuation has really been volatile. We see them continue to make good progress. Q recently had some news where they brought in a partner, and they're now really making a move into autoimmune. I would call it the depression in biotech. The company's got a good runway cash-wise.

I think that the platform has done everything that we always hoped it would do, which was having really effectively a T-cell management platform to modulate the immune system to either effectively increase length of life if you have cancer or mitigate autoimmune disease. We are still hopeful. You could not ask for a worse biotech market in my career, but we are still hopeful that the value of Q becomes realized in the not-too-distant future. Our key priorities coming forward are really just executing on these financings for our existing three big idea companies and really get new ones in the pipe, which I think we have a number of candidates that are close behind it. Continue to expand our investor community, really focusing on folks that are capital allocators as opposed to deal buyers.

I think that that's happening in our conversations with ROAs and family offices and angel groups. What are we good at? We're good at curating great opportunities. That's pivoting a bit to companies that are a little bit closer to product revenue and value creation. We're continuing to scale our capabilities across the board to help these companies. These companies are all struggling right now in the marketplace, but I think that's going to change. I also think that there's a lot of emerging growth companies that could go public that we're going to be able to be a great platform for them to go public with. I don't really see that we have any effective competition. There's really very few firms left that can take small companies public. I'm super excited about what we built.

We have got to respond and just find the right things for this market. We have a really experienced team that has been doing this for a long time. I am tenacious. I can tell you that I am going to always fight to find the best opportunities. That is what I am good at. I am spending more time than I ever have, really just diving in to make sure that happens. I am having a lot of fun in these challenging times because I really do believe we have a special place for companies to go public that are the most exciting companies in the world. With that, Kevin, I will turn it over to questions. I took exactly half an hour, so I am glad I did not go too long.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Great. Oh, perfect, Chris. Thanks. Can you put my video on, please? It just went off. If you have questions, use the chat on the bottom. We're actually starting to get a couple in. The first question actually came in, Chris. Can you just talk about the one company that you have that you're financing the $20 million for the potential cure for diabetes? The question was, what's the name of that? And that's Paulex Bio.

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Yes.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

The other question that we have right now is, how does management interpret the persistent discount of the MDBH stock price relative to the IPO price? Is it execution, macro conditions, or market misunderstanding, or other?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

It is always supply and demand. I have been doing this for a long time, so I have perhaps a little bit more perspective than the average investor. We had two inspirational companies that were critical to the formation of MDB. One was called Thermo Electron that was started in the 1960s. They spun out 68 new public companies out of Thermo Electron. They were really unbelievable and prolific birthers of new technology companies. There was another company called Safeguard Scientifics. I knew the founders of both these companies, and they were both kind of mentors of mine. I watched their stocks religiously. Thermo Electron was one I got when it was very, very early in the business. Then Safeguard Scientifics in the 1990s.

When the markets were not good for new technology companies or early-stage companies, it always traded at a discounted net asset value, almost 100%. No one believed that their platform was worth anything because the market was bad for those kind of equities. Ironically, when things were good and their stocks were moving, they always traded at a premium to net asset value. I am philosophical about it in the sense that I believe that the market really people will always overdo it. They'll just say, "Why buy it now? MDB's selling stuff that nobody wants right now." I can see how people would think that. That changes. Like I said, having seen these cycles and having seen it before, it doesn't trouble me too much.

I also think that the most important thing is that the companies that we're birthing are doing well. If the companies we're birthing are doing well, then our stock's going to do well. I think that that's really what it is. So much of it is geared towards eXoZymes right now. We get very little credit for our platform. Again, when things are going well, that'll change and go in the other direction.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Perfect. As an LLC, you've structured your company to be able to distribute dividends without double taxation. Could you discuss what your future dividend policy might be and how you would go forward with that down the road?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Sure. Our dividend policy is really about there are two major factors, which is one is if we were to distribute those shares, how does it impact the company that we're distributing? If we were to distribute eXoZymes stock to the shareholders today, how would that impact eXoZymes? The company is still relatively lightly traded. Right now, if we were to distribute out those shares, until more people understand the company and are in tune with the company and its prospects, we'd like to get the company to get a little bit more legs before we do a distribution. Mind you, being the largest shareholder, I would love to have a distribution. My interests are aligned with yours. I just do not want to hurt the companies by distributing shares. I think that's part of it.

The other part of it is just what our cash flows are. At some point, we have to look at, do we invest more money in a new big idea, or do we just fund it and take it public? Obviously, if we put money into a new big idea, we get a bigger equity stake. At some point, we might look at selling some of the shares, again, only if the shares of these companies are doing well, and put a little bit of that money into a new big idea to kind of keep the flywheel going, if you will. I would say the biggest factor is really just how is it going to impact the company that we're the subject company that we would distribute?

My hope is that if eXoZymes catches, all of our companies eventually, or all 17 of our companies at some point caught fire, right, where they traded millions of shares and it did not matter what we did. They were broadly held and everybody wanted to be in them. That is a great time to distribute shares. It is just now is not the right time.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Got it. Thanks. Also, just a question here, kind of like on the mechanics. When we take a venture public company public, how do we make our money? How does the shareholder of MDB make their money?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Sure. A lot of these companies, if we're doing a pre-IPO financing, we earn equity because we're also helping put that company together and prepare it for a public entry. We get, let's call it, carried equity in the company. We earn a piece of equity. Plus, if we put any capital in, we also get equity for that as well. Generally, when we take them public, we're going to be charging cash fees and, in many cases, getting warrants. It's really always a blend of cash and some equity. In some cases, it's more equity if we're a founder like we were in eXoZymes. In some other cases, it'll be less equity where it may just come in the form of warrants. On the extreme case, it would just be cash and warrants.

It's a bit of a blend. Obviously, we're really in this for the equity upside because that's where the real returns are for shareholders.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Yep. Perfect. Just to go back to that Paulex question, and we're going to have some equity, right, Chris, in Paulex. Just to let everybody know, we do have a recording of that presentation. If you have any questions on that, we're going to close it over the next couple of months. Indications are already coming in. We'll keep everybody updated on the PPM. Should be out sometime next week. Do not hesitate to give us a call if you'd like to see information on Paulex. Another question, Chris, is, can you tell us more about PatentVest and what you believe its potential is for how it will bring value to MDB?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Sure. PatentVest brings value to MDB every day. It's a question of, from an independent business perspective and revenue generation, that we're basically really working to figure out what the right business model is for PatentVest. Currently, what PatentVest does is takes a company like HeartBeam, helps really transform the business model and position it correctly. That's where not only are we able to see things other people don't see, but also position it in a unique way. We're very deep involved in business development, very much in strategy development, business model development, and IP development. To us, that's critical to value creation. Very few companies, especially small companies, have the resources to do that well. Initially, we looked at PatentVest and our team there as critical to the go-forward path. A company like eXoZymes, great example.

There's thousands of chemicals you can make potentially with eXoZymes platforms. Which ones should you make? Which ones can be protected? Which ones can you reasonably make great margins on? Who are the players in those spaces? Who could potentially block you? Who could potentially license from you? Who could potentially purchase you? All of those things are, again, especially when you have a platform technology, these companies are not staffed to be able to answer those questions. We're providing those critical answers for those companies and the go-forward strategy. That is where PatentVest brings value, and it's a key part of how we earn value through MDB. As an independent business where we're charging for it, we're continuing to grow revenues. It still, as an independent entity, loses a bit of money.

I think realistically, it provides a really important value creation part of what we do. I do not know how to look at it as an independent business because we really cannot do without it for our own companies. My hope is that we can really grow revenues. We are looking at some new initiatives to really see how we can scale revenues in a meaningful way. We have even looked at the idea of spinning it off as a new business. It has a very unique platform. It is a law firm, which now is really getting exciting because a lot of the big accounting firms are now going to Arizona and following us to become law firms.

We have had a lot of people interested in either merging with us or talking to us about how we leverage our law firm platform along with PatentVest to grow a substantial business. I think there could be a lot of interesting business opportunities that come of that as well. It is yet to be seen. As of right now, it is not a huge factor in revenue generation, but I think it very well could be once we find that sort of rich vein to push it forward. I would also ask you to look at some of the PatentVest Pulse things that have been published. We are getting a lot of notice from big tech companies. We published on the brain-computer interface. We published recently on the humanoid robotics space. It is kind of exciting. You should look at some of those.

It's getting a lot of notice on platforms like LinkedIn and social media and what have you. We're getting a lot of inbound inquiries from a lot of these companies. It's getting noticed. It's getting some momentum. We're just learning how to really propel that business now.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Perfect. Thanks. Next question is, can you share how much of MDB's value is due to its share of ownership of the companies you've taken public? I guess that's probably a better one if it was if you had been if we had been public when we did Q, we did Provention, and Pulse, and all became multi-billion dollar companies.

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

Yeah. No, I think that, listen, we went public at the absolute worst time you could probably go public for what we do. I would say that had we had the strategy before we, and we were public before we launched Pulse, Q, and Provention, I do not know where we would be, but we would probably be close to a billion dollar valuation or something. It would have been pretty substantial. Yeah, we have eXoZymes. We have a smallish position in HeartBeam. If either one of those things really take off, it is going to impact our stock price. What I do not think people appreciate is our ability to find the new ones, to find the next Pulses and Proventions.

When you look at our whole pipeline, they all have maybe even greater potential than our historical ones did because I think we're getting smarter about what we do and how we do it.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Yeah. Perfect. It looks like the last question here—no, there's two more, actually. Do you ever consider acquisition of companies, acquisition of companies instead of IPOs?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

We've had some interesting offers presented to us where we could effectively acquire something and then take it public later or spin it out as an independent public company. As far as acquisitions, I would say, as of right now, we're very focused on public venture. If it was very accretive to what we do in public venture, we would certainly entertain it. I really don't want to create a distraction by merging in some other business that isn't really connected to what we're doing in public venture.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Got it. And how many firms do you see out there that are doing what we are, MDB Capital is doing currently at this point in time?

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

I don't see that, really, I don't view that there really is anybody that does what we do. There are companies that take small companies public. I think the number of those companies has gone down pretty dramatically. I think that, unfortunately, the industry has devolved. We saw a biotech deal that went out last week by a small underwriter that did a $13 million offering, I think, at $4, and it's trading like $1.83 or something. That happens because you don't have good investors or people that believe in what you're doing, right? I think that we've had so many firms that focus on transactional investors as opposed to, I would call it, real investors. I just think that stands out. That's why I don't view that we have any effective competition.

I also think that the curation capabilities that we have are second to none. We do more work, and we provide more value. We can stand these companies up. I'm a firm believer of those 17 companies we've taken public. I'm not so sure that any of those companies would have been companies or even got public unless they met us. I think that's a really key differentiator. Underwriters do not provide much value. I just believe that our value proposition is so strong that I do not view that we have any effective competition.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Yeah. Perfect. That is the end of the Q&A, Chris, if you have any closing comments.

Chris Marlett (CEO and Founder)

No. All I can say is hang in there. I appreciate you all for keeping the faith. This has been a really, really tough time. Believe me, I did not think at this age and everything we have accomplished historically that I would be as, I would not say sleepless nights, but at least preoccupied nights, if you will. I have accepted it, and we are working our ass off to make sure we perform and we find those companies that are meaningful and that the market will appreciate. The great thing about bad times is it provides a lot of opportunity. We are opportunistic, and we are going to keep fighting to fight through a bad tape and get through to the other side. I appreciate all your faith in us. Thanks for taking the time to listen today.

Kevin Cotter (Head of Capital Markets)

Great.