MDB Capital Holdings - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Transcript

Speaker 2

Update conference call. We appreciate you joining us this afternoon. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Before we begin with our formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. First, a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you have questions during the presentation, you can type them into the chat to be answered during the Q&A session. Questions can only be seen by the moderator. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, and they are subject to risks 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. Please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of any 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. You should also review our most current Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon, is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, MDB.com. Also, a replay of this call will be provided on MDB.com.

Your host today is Christopher Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He's joined by George Brandon, MDB Capital Holdings President and Head of Community Development. Christopher will lead the update on our second quarter ending June 30, 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Christopher Marlett.

Speaker 0

All right. Thank you, Tony. Thank you all for joining today. I wanted to welcome George to the call. George is going to be talking to what we're doing on community development and other areas. I'll kick it off with the financial perspective. As you all know, our revenue is largely from financings, and we didn't complete any financings this quarter. We had some revenue from PatentVest as we are starting to scale those operations. Our goal is really to offset operating expenses with financings, and then the equity in the financed companies and our big idea companies is really the upside for shareholders. As we incubate more of these, the current revenue from launching more developed companies really offsets any sort of the cash operations of the company. There's always this balance of how much equity are we looking to generate versus fee income.

It's a balance, and we're trying to be cautious. We're also trying to balance making sure we have enough companies so that our community can effectively build a public venture portfolio. For the first six months of 2025, we had cash utilization of $3.4 million. We expect to be closing some financings in the second half of 2025 to reduce or eliminate that cash usage. Let's talk about where we're headed, not so much where we've been, because it's been a challenging last year for all of us as shareholders. I think that what's happening and what we're feeling is very different from what's being reflected in the stock price right now. All I can tell you is that public venture, the momentum is really building, and we're super confident in what we built.

We really do have the most unique and capable platform to curate and deliver these market-leading companies that really have this sort of 10 to 100-bagger potential. We've been doing it for 28 years. We recently published a report that talks about the 17 companies we've kind of conceptualized and taken public. I think it gives a really good overview, which we've been really presenting to a whole new group of investors that have never seen public venture before. We're really getting a great response. What we're really finding is that they see this as an unbelievable asset class to position their investments in going forward. We also recognize the key bottlenecks that we really have kind of realized what's happening over the last year. Quite frankly, the investor hesitation towards deep tech life science investments right now has been quite obvious.

What's happened is that this has been the absolute worst segment of the market. We understand that that's where we've basically created billions of dollars of wealth for investors and for founders and for people who have worked at MDB Capital Holdings over the years. That's just not been the place to be. The other thing we've recognized is that as we start to scale the number of companies we bring out, we need to scale up our investor community to really support these high-quality opportunities we're creating. I can tell you that our team has done a phenomenal job on all fronts. Our analyst team, as far as curating and standing up new opportunities, which I'm going to talk to you about in a second, and then really expanding our investor community, George and his team have been doing a phenomenal job. We'll get into that.

To really realize the promise of what we build as a platform, we really need to bring investors what they want to invest in now. I think that the opportunities in profitable, growing early-stage companies that still have that asymmetric return potential and public market liquidity is really what we're hearing people want. Thankfully, we're very well positioned to add value to these opportunities beyond life sciences. In addition, obviously, we need to expand our distribution, as I touched on. We're reaching out to these new investors and partners, and you'll hear more about that from George as we get into it. That is going incredibly well. What we've realized is we provide a really attractive alternative for allocating capital versus sort of traditional venture or angel investing. The product mix, what we've learned is, again, early-stage life science companies lacking revenue, momentum, or profitability are really struggling.

These companies that we've done are taking longer to develop, as is many times the case. In different markets, the markets were a lot more forgiving. We funded these companies at what we believe are super attractive valuations. Obviously, the market has to value that. Right now, it's just not been the case. Investors want to really balance quicker returns with their venture bets. I think that's why we're starting to expand the universe of companies we're looking at. The other thing we realized is that profitable, growing companies with revenue momentum are super highly valued in the current market. That's really good news because I think that's going to have a profound impact on how companies look to raise capital or to see their companies highly valued. That's not happening in the private venture world today or in private equity.

We think more and more of these kind of exciting growth companies are going to go public. We see a big opportunity on the horizon. Our team has done a great job of curating more and more of those companies. As we expand our product mix to include these profitable companies with revenue momentum, we think that we're going to get a lot better reception from all the various investor groups that we're talking to. I think that today we announced our first profitable company that we're going to be taking public. It was filed with the SEC, which we'll talk to a little bit here in a bit. We're still continuing to focus on companies that can become new leaders and create new categories. We're not just doing companies that are profitable.

These are still companies that still have that 10 to 100 bagger potential that are blazing new trails and creating new businesses. We believe it will enable us to get more deals done by expanding the investor interest beyond life sciences. To that end, today we filed a prospectus for what I think is going to be potentially the next monster beverage type opportunity in the beverage space. What Buddha Juice has done is created this new category called ultra fresh. Today, grocery stores don't have fresh juice because they have to juice inside the stores. There's a shelf life issue. These guys have figured out how to do centralized juicing. They're getting big traction with big chains. It's super exciting. They're growing rapidly. We expect great things from them.

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's been a great sort of experience in working with the CEO who I've known. They were very much looking forward towards going into or being, you know, partnering with private equity. They had some experience with private equity in the past. I think they really saw that the public markets are a better place for them to really grow their company, raise additional capital to meet the expansion that they see coming in the very near future. I look forward to talking to you more about that company as we take the company out and complete the IPO. We really believe that the public market is the place to be. We see a dramatic shift occurring away from private equity and traditional venture.

We're hearing that more and more from the RIAs and family offices and other investors that we talk to. What's happened over the last 20 years is we've seen up to 35% of these portfolios of these family offices allocated to private equity and traditional venture. We see that as being, you know, they're all coming to the same conclusion at the same time that that's not the place to be. They're all looking, they all see the benefits of having liquid securities that are priced at transparent pricing as opposed to the opacity that exists in private markets. I also think that the entrepreneurs that run the companies are recognizing the drawbacks of private equity and traditional venture.

We're helping them to understand that they can go public and actually do it in an efficient way and not believe all the things that have been said to them, which is it's super expensive to be public and companies die when they get in the public markets, etc. The companies that are growing and profitable are doing incredibly well in the public markets right now. What's really encouraging is not many underwriters have the process or platform to take these early-stage companies public like we do. We think we represent a really unique opportunity for these companies to go public. We're having great conversations with these people. I think that they're and companies in there finding that this is a very exciting alternative for them. We also, you know, we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We really started to think about what are we going to do in life sciences and how are we, where are we going to focus our efforts and where is really the big upside. We've had oncology got very, very overinvested and there were too many companies and it became very, very difficult in oncology. We really have started to think about where is the future in life sciences. We really believe that metabolic health is really the biggest opportunity of our time. Metabolic health is such a gargantuan opportunity that is now just being scratched upon the surface with what we're seeing with GLP-1 drugs. I can't overemphasize enough that if you look at the drugs for both diabetes and for obesity, and other therapies, we're looking at probably $200 to $300 billion, which dwarfs all of the other pharmaceutical markets.

We see this as one of the greatest opportunities. Obviously, there's a lot of other people investing in things like crypto and AI and other things. We think that AI is going to be a big driver in healthcare, but we really believe that what's going to happen in metabolic health is perhaps the biggest opportunity we've ever seen. Our team has done a great job of curating what we believe could be really some of the greatest opportunities in metabolic health. We're really focusing on this area, which we call the metabolic switch for these 100 bagger potentials. These are all kind of companies that we think can represent multi-billion dollar valuations. We're bringing them to our community at very modest valuations.

We've been out introducing Polyx Bio, which was built by a team that we worked with at Prevention that we had a great result with that got a drug approved for type 1 diabetes and was purchased by Sonilfeed for $2.9 billion. They came back to us with something that we find very exciting that could be the first small molecule drug to really regenerate beta cells, which are the pancreatic cells that generate insulin. This could be a first-of-its-kind drug that would be a massive win. All these things, all these companies have, in our mind, very near-term potential. These aren't long-term propositions that take a long time to figure out if they're valuable. With a modest amount of money, we believe that Polyx can generate hopefully positive data that can generate significant readout and significant value.

As some of you may know, Exosimes, which we launched and took public, has launched a new subsidiary called NCTX. NCTX is an unbelievable potential value driver in that they have figured out how to biomanufacture NCT. That has not been done. We see that NCT is one of the most promising platforms, both as a nutraceutical and a pharmaceutical, to mobilize pathogenic organ fat in both the liver and the pancreas. It works via a completely new approach using mitochondria to effectively mobilize fat as opposed to basically preventing people from eating like the GLP-1 drugs do. Lastly, GT Metabolic is a company that has what we think is an unbelievable metabolic switch through magnets that basically does incisionless, very fast laparoscopic procedure to do what they call a duodenal bypass. You swallow a magnet. It basically enables what we call an anastomosis.

They have super impressive patient data that in early patient studies, switches off diabetes and also causes sustained weight loss. We're super excited about all three of these. We think all of these have multi-billion dollar potential. I really want to thank the analyst team for all the hard work they've done to not only discover these, but put them together. We'll be presenting all of these at our September 4th event. Now talking a bit more about expanding our community. I'm going to let George maybe talk to this a little bit. Do you want to go ahead? One, it's something I work with every day. I think what Chris is alluding to, and it's very obvious, is that what we're seeing in venture and private equity is there is a confluence of moving to liquidity. Venture right now is constipated.

We just put out a paper that Will Rossellini and Javier of PatentVest put out yesterday about the AI and the rise of deep tech and really the decline of the SaaS model software. AI is doing a number on a number of different areas. It's really positive to what we're trying to do and where we're going. I think family offices, RIAs, they're figuring it out. They figured it out a couple of years ago. They're not willing to really look for what was a 7 to 10-year hold going to 10 to 11 to 12. Public venture has become, we're kind of the new, new thing that's been around 28 years.

We're coming up with a number of different models to help not only these angel groups, but really RIAs and family offices to be able to invest and play along with our model over and above just being a shareholder in MDB and being able to participate in everything we do. That said, Chris, why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about, I mean, the very fact that you got invited to a family office conference. I don't want to give all the details on that because I don't have them all. Is that something you can, and I'll come back and talk about this, the Keiretsu announcement we just announced?

Speaker 2

Sure. No, it's interesting. George and team have really been out talking to a number of RIAs. We're just figuring out, you know, how do people look at what we've done, our track record, etc. It's great when, you know, when your stocks are down, you don't feel so good, right? We haven't felt so good about, you know, MDB stock being down and our stocks being down. When we really look critically at ourselves and we looked at it and we said, you know, we're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our job is to be in the right place at the right time. As we talk about what we do and the logic behind it, we've been getting unbelievable reception. We have a, I think, $150 billion RIA that's invited me to come talk about public venture in a couple of weeks.

As we talk to them, they're, you know, all of their clients have been allocated towards traditional venture and private equity, which has been just as bad as being in biotech and the public markets the last couple of years. They see public venture as the future. It's pretty exciting. I think that we're going to be out, you know, talking to a lot more of these folks. We're getting just unbelievable reception, which is, you know, feels good when your stock's down. George, I'll turn it over to George to talk about our new partnership, which I'm super excited about.

Speaker 0

Yeah, we've been working on this for a while. We just made the announcement earlier today around noon Eastern. If you haven't seen the press release, it's certainly available. You can find it. It'll be on our website, but also on really any PR site, financial site, you can get more details. Keiretsu is really one of the largest. They're unusual. We're talking about Keiretsu, Keiretsu Forum Mid-Atlantic. MST is Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Texas. Keiretsu is probably one of the largest angel groups in the world. They're unusual in the fact if you take a look at the dollars they put into early-stage investments, it dwarfs really all the others by a factor of about six or seven times. The gentleman who runs Keiretsu is a former Safeguard Scientifics employee.

Safeguard Scientifics, if you don't know Safeguard, we really stand on the shoulders of the founders of Safeguard, which was really one of the first public venture, publicly traded models. Howard Lubert is the Keiretsu director. When I found out, he actually came out of Safeguard, found the first big deal for Safeguard, which was Novell, and they put in somewhere between $19 million, $20 million and pulled out a billion and a half. He gets public venture. Really, the first angel director, and I've talked to a lot of them that really understands how public venture can work. They're very excited about this partnership. They formed a new group called IPO Angels. We're going to look at somewhere between two to four deals a year. They're going to help build a syndicate of angel groups in the nation, North America, and it includes Canada.

We're talking to some Canadian groups as well. There are 15,000 active angels, less than there were five years ago. Out of those 15,000, I think there's 200 groups that are associated and affiliated with the Angel Capital Association, ACA, which is the overall association. Really, to try to go out and hit each one of those up is a, is it would be a big effort. Tried some of that, emailed some of that, sat on a podcast with a group that we've been working with, Tech Coast Angels out of Orange County. It's been a great relationship. We'll continue that relationship.

To have someone who understands public venture in Keiretsu Forum Texas (MST), and Howard, that really is going to put his efforts in building out a syndicate of launching, you know, the companies that really Chris is talking about expanding to, companies that are near profitability or profitable that we can take into the public markets. Those angels are holding those investments that they make for, I think the average is 12 years. No one's got 12 years anymore. We're all getting older. When you can take a look at where we're going from, you know, A round to IPO within, you know, 12, 18 months, they don't, they think that's miraculous. We're going to work with them very closely. Now we've got one group that helps build that quilt of angel groups. I think this is a great group. There's a confluence going on where they're moving later.

We're talking to a couple of groups on the micro-cap public space that is looking for not only companies that can be in the micro-cap space and do well, but that they could take advantage of QSBS 1202. If you're not familiar with QSBS 1202, you need to write it down. You need to look at it. You need to tell your accountant about it because everything we do usually is QSBS 1202. The big beautiful bill just changed the rules and the benefit of these types of investors. They've moved the target from you got to have a minimum of $50 million or a maximum of $50 million of assets, not market cap, assets. They moved it to $75 million to qualify. That is really going to qualify pretty much everything that we ever look at.

They've changed from what was a five-year hold for the greater of 10 times your money or $10 million to a three, four, and five-year opportunity for tax benefits. This is a major situation that really plays into our hands and certainly will cause family offices and wealth managers to take it very serious. That's about all I got. I mean, that's, you know, we are going to continue to expand the community. It's really important. When you're doing one deal every 18 to 24 months, it was pretty easy to take the community we've had and put those deals up. When you're going to go to, you know, two, three, four, five, six deals a year, we've got to expand our community multiples. We've got some things in place. Obviously, today's announcement is one of those opportunities. I'll kick it back to you, Chris.

Speaker 2

Sure thing. I think we touched on RIAs and their eagerness to talk to us and try and figure out how to fit what we do into their platforms. Obviously, some of these guys that are managing multi-billions, we're not putting that much to work. I think that what they see is that this is something that you don't have to allocate 35% of someone's net worth to. You can allocate a very small percentage and make a meaningful investment for their clients. They're really in the business of curating the best stuff. They can't be left out of stuff that's working. They're really curators of investments and managers of investments in general. We really believe we are the best curators of these, the leaders of tomorrow, these potential 100 baggers that we've focused on for our entire existence, if you will.

The other thing that we're looking at quite closely, and there's been a lot of discussion with our group, is sort of these new age distribution platforms. What's happened is regulation. We made a bet when we first went public that we needed to be a clearing firm because regulation was going that they were going to shut down micro-cap. Obviously, things changed dramatically. Now we're talking about tokenization of equities. Regulation, as a result of the election, has gone exactly the other way. Reg A+, which I never thought was going to survive because I just didn't see that advertising offerings online and on TV and things like that were going to work long term, exactly the opposite's happened. What's happened is Reg A+ is happening. We're seeing very large offerings happen using Reg A+. What we now realize is that Reg A+ is, quite frankly, a reality.

There's no reason why we can't utilize Reg A+ and other distributions like platforms like that going forward. There's also things like Robinhood and all these other companies are starting to participate in IPOs that other underwriters are doing. We historically have never worked with any of those kind of folks before. We've never looked at it as a real opportunity. Now we're out actually talking to these people. We're having a great reception in the sense that they look at what we do as being, you know, sort of master creators or curators of these opportunities. They see the logic of partnering with us. We're hoping to see that we can also partner with what I call these new age distribution platforms. We're making a lot of progress on that as well.

The last major theme that I want to communicate before we get to summation is basically, as we've been scaling up PatentVest and getting that operational as a law firm, our revenues are starting to scale. We're getting a lot more momentum from companies now that we sort of figure out exactly how to position the firm. We're starting to add clients at a much more rapid rate. What's become very clear to us is that the practice of IP law is going to change dramatically. The emergence of AI is not just impacting IP law, but I think it will have potentially more impact on IP law than any other space in law.

Luckily, we did become this Arizona business law firm, which enables us to have non-lawyer ownership, but also enables us to partner with not only companies, but lawyers and also partner in litigation as well as IP development like no other law firm can. Traditional law can't do that. Traditional law is very much wrestling with what they do with AI. The old law firm models of the billable hour is not what companies really want to hear anymore. Companies want to hear about value creation. They don't want to hear about how many hours you work for them. We think there's a massive transformation happening in law, but specifically IP law. We've made the decision that as that sort of new big idea of this law firm is developed, it's ready to be spun out as its own independent public company.

We really, really believe that this is a transformational shift. We are now making preparation to spin that off as its own company and take it public sometime in 2026. While we'll still be very connected to PatentVest, obviously, the processes that we developed to really develop sort of IP and technology leadership for these companies, we're still going to be employing within MDB Capital Holdings, but we really believe that PatentVest is going to be a very valuable entity in its own right. We want to spin that off to shareholders and develop that as its own independent business, separate and aside from what we're doing in public venture. We are super excited about it.

We're putting together the plans, the team, etc., to also monetize that as an investment for the shareholders, which currently is certainly not being recognized in the value of the shares of MDB Capital Holdings currently. All of this, you've now, I'm sure you've heard about our investor summit that's happening next week at Old Parkland in Dallas. We have, I think, what is the number of seats we have for the?

Speaker 0

We have 140, and we're right there.

Speaker 2

Are we going to record the conference? I guess I should ask you.

Speaker 0

We're going to record parts of it. It's not going to be streamed live, and there'll be an opportunity to go back and listen to presentations from a recording.

Speaker 2

We're going to have all of our existing companies there as well as these new opportunities. We're going to talk about what we're doing in metabolic health. We're going to have a special presentation from Buddha Juice to kick off their roadshow. We're also going to have our new friends from the Keiretsu and IPO Angels be there. I think it should be a great event. For those shareholders, if you haven't already registered, you should go ahead and register. I think we'll look forward to seeing you next week. I think it'll be a great event. Any other words about the event, George?

Speaker 0

We also have Matt Burris. If you're not familiar with Matt Burris, it's B-U-R-R-I-S. It's the Venture Studio Forum. What's happening is these Venture Studios, which you may not be aware of or familiar with, I know we weren't, he is one of the lead leads in that. He's creating a Venture Studio kind of Morningstar report. Our track record puts us up at the top of any deep tech Venture Studios. A Venture Studio really is a firm that finds an idea, puts the board together, puts the management together, puts the financing together, and helps these companies get commercialized and to an exit or to a liquidity event. We've been a Venture Studio all along. We just didn't know what a Venture Studio was. Once we found out we were one of the top Venture Studios in the world, we thought, yeah, we're a Venture Studio.

Love Venture Studios. We'll always be a Venture Studio. He'll be there and presenting. He'd be great. If you're going to be there, you want to meet Matt Burris as well as Howard of Keiretsu. They'll have some visibility of where we're going in both of those areas.

Speaker 2

All right. To sum up, we are really, you know, the team has done a great job of really figuring out how we want to move forward, expand the potential, and really leverage our platform, you know, that we've built now. Our team has done a great job of expanding our product mix to really understand and meet, you know, sort of investor demand. George's team has done a great job of really positioning ourselves well with not only, you know, these angel networks, but RIAs. As we curate these, the best early-stage companies, you know, that have really market-leading potential, I think we're, you know, we're going to have, you know, great success, you know, going forward based upon what, you know, the way the optics of the way things are looking right now from all the companies that we are working with currently.

Lastly, really leveraging our unique asset in PatentVest. As it becomes an independent public company, I think it's going to create a lot of value for the MDB Capital Holdings shareholders. With that, I'm going to turn it over back to Tony for questions.

Speaker 1

Okay. Thanks, Chris. If you would like to ask a question, please type your question into the chat. You can find the chat down at the bottom of the Zoom window. Use that button and go ahead and type it in. Remember, only the moderator can see the questions, so we'll be able to take them from there. We'll give you just a second for those of you who haven't taken a minute to bring a question in. Chris, give me one sec. Let me queue them up. Here we go. Our first question, are there vulture opportunities in your core life science market?

Speaker 2

You know, vulture is, as they say, an ugly word. Maybe not ugly, but it's, I think, listen, what happens in tough markets is the opportunities get better, right? When there's hot money around, like there was when interest rates went to zero, there was too much money around, you know, so you didn't really have great opportunities. That's why, after COVID and all the stocks ran up, we kind of took our foot off the gas pedal in life science. We got back in too early. We thought it had dropped enough. I think we were a bit early. Some of the companies we backed, again, it was just, it was the companies are doing phenomenal from a technical perspective, but it's not reflected in the market price. Being too early is the same as being wrong.

We love the technology, they're doing a great job, but if the stock goes down, you're wrong, right? Now, what we're seeing is valuations are super reasonable. Yes, if you want to look at it from a vulture perspective, I think there's some great opportunities. If you look at what we're doing with Polyx, we're basically doing this funding at a $20 million pre-money valuation. That's super cheap. If we get a readout, if you take that pill and you produce a bit more insulin, you're talking about elephant country. That could be a multi-billion dollar valuation. Again, there's no promises here, but you at least have that asymmetric upside. That asymmetric upside did not exist three or four years ago, and before. That asymmetric upside is really available today where it wasn't available back then. Same thing with NCTX and what we're going to be doing with GT Metabolic.

These valuations based on where they're at are super reasonable. Yes, in a sense, there are. I don't think that, the most important thing that you have to look at investing in life science is, is it going to work? That's the most important thing. If it works, then it covers up a lot of things. Before, there were some things, even if they worked, you wouldn't make money. That's changing. Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity. We have our finger on the pulse. I think we're going to continue to curate some of the best ones possible in that sector.

Speaker 0

Hey, Tony, let me pose the next question because actually, you could be part of the answer for this question. A really good question regarding, you know, IRPR, whether it's MDB Capital Holdings or Exosimes, or our portfolio companies. What's the plan? I mean, we're seeing these, you know, our companies, we're seeing very little volume. What's the plan in order to, you know, as we execute on the model, what's your thoughts, Chris? You've got a lot of experience in, you know, small cap, micro cap, low volume companies. What's your thoughts on that, you know, for the street to learn about them, to get behind them, support them, and so we could see volume and liquidity go up in these names?

Speaker 2

Yeah. I think the first thing you have to do right, as any public company, is you have to have your narrative correct, right? In other words, you have to recognize the environment that's changed. It's a different environment than what it was before. A lot of times, these companies have to come up with different strategies to basically say, hey, listen, we're going to get through to the other side. We're going to get through to either commercialization or we're going to get through to a major inflection point technically. These companies are doing that. I think you're going to see them position themselves for success. In some cases, they may be cutting their budget down to deal with this current market environment. In some cases, they're going to look to partner maybe a bit earlier than they normally would.

They're going to adjust their business models and their narrative to reflect the environment. That's job number one. Number two is they've got to focus on things that are near term, right? They've got to focus on inflection points that are super near term and make it super clear to investors. I think strategically, all of our companies are doing that. I think they're doing a super good job. I think over the next 90, 120 days, you're going to see evidence of that. As far as getting it on the radar screen, that is, as you reposition it, you open it to a different audience of investors as well. I think it's starting to happen. I mean, I think you can see volume really is a function of money coming into the asset class. Low volume, a lot of times, is a good sign.

It means that you might, you're near the bottom, right? They say price begets volume. I think that as we've seen a couple of these small biotechs that have good news go up dramatically. One that we were tracking and we almost did a financing for went up like 11 times in the last month because on good news. I think that some of these things are prime, and then the volume goes parabolic. Some of these things are trading no volume, trading at very low prices, and then all of a sudden, something happens. Next thing you know, you've got a ton of volume. That's the way I see it. I think that's what's going to end up happening. IR, in my mind, has been overrated. It's have a good narrative, get it in front of the people that you should, that they care about it.

I would tell you over the last two or three years, the major problem has been people don't care about it. That's in venture, in traditional venture, and public venture in the life sciences sector.

Speaker 0

Let me go to Tony because you're on the marketing community side. Some of the efforts and what we're doing is to get the story out. We've tried a lot of different things, and we're going to continue to try a lot of things, whether it's influencers and on a particular name. Can you speak to that a little bit, Tony, what we've been doing?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I sure can. I think a couple of things are really important for us. Recognizing, as Chris just said, that media loves success stories, right? As the companies that we're financing have their own success stories and are creating newsworthiness in the marketplace, it certainly helps MDB. For us, being able to have speaking opportunities like the one Chris is about to do in Boston in a couple of weeks, George, you've been out on the circuit speaking with angel groups and Matt Hayden being out there with RIAs and big family office groups and things, getting in very highly targeted, selected audiences where we get the opportunity to tell the MDB story at a greater length than, you know, a 15-second blurb blast on social media or whatever, I think is a really quality over quantity in that sense is really important to getting our story out there.

Podcasts that the two of you have been on recently is another great example of an opportunity in a setting where we know we have interested investors and interested financial writers and financial media listening is another great place that we continue to mine, and we're finding success in that. Always we're working to find and create our own content. Right now, George, you mentioned at the top of the broadcast, PatentVest has been terrific about creating reports and really helping to give investors education and information that demonstrates the breadth and depth of what MDB does and what PatentVest does that really separates us in our diligence and our curation. We fully intend to continue to do more of that and distribute it. I would say those things are really the bedrock of what we're doing.

Obviously, the block and tackling among press releases, social media posting, and things, of course, we're going to do that. It's really the quality and the depth to our story that sets MDB apart.

Speaker 0

Just the last part here, Chris, we didn't really talk about it, but I got a question. We get questions on it all the time about what does the holding company own, what's the kind of the plan to, you know, harvest, whether there's, you know, assuming there's gains there, and what's your plan on a distribution? I think it's always got to be reviewed and kind of what you're thinking and how we're going to, you know, proceed going forward as these companies, some of these companies go to where we think they could go.

Speaker 2

I think that, listen, what we said when we went public and we've said consistently is that, I can tell you as the largest shareholder, I'd love to get a distribution. From my perspective, Exosimes is our biggest position, and I think that we'd like to distribute that out. We just made an announcement right now that we're going to spin out PatentVest in some form or fashion and take it public. My sense is that 2026 is the right year for that. I think that the trading volume in Exosimes has been so low that distributing it out right now before there's really a big sort of event to happen with Exosimes is probably, I think, the best time to do it is when there's good news on Exosimes.

Speaker 0

Can you off the cuff just kind of give the holdings of the various holdings to the holding company right now?

Speaker 2

We have roughly 4 million shares of Exosimes. At current market, that's, you know, close to $10, so, what, $40 million? Then we have, I don't know the exact number of shares, but a couple million shares, I think of.

Speaker 0

Yeah, it's north of $2 million.

Speaker 2

Of Heartbeam plus Warrants. We have PatentVest as a, we own 100% of it, and that'll be spun out. We have some small other warrant positions that are not meaningful, but I think those are the major positions. If you add up that, it's a substantial number. The idea is to not keep that buried. Right now, our enterprise value at current market is like $35 million. It's significantly below the value of Exosimes and our cash and other securities. We don't, I think going forward, we're not going to really need much capital to operate as we do more financings that offsets our operating costs. Really, it's distribute out as much equity as we possibly can. Hopefully in 2026, I think that's kind of the year makes sense. I think do it into a stronger environment for micro-cap.

When these companies have a sound footing, then it makes all the sense in the world to distribute it. We've always, I always tell people we started MDB with, when we started in 1997, we started with like, a few hundred thousand dollars in an idea. I always tell people the rest is profit. We created multi-billion dollar companies with no capital. What we did do is scale up our operations to do more than, more than one company every 18 months. Scaling up took, it increased our operating expenses. We should be able to offset those operating expenses with fee income and what have you. I think that, and also becoming a clearing firm increased our OpEx a bit as well. A combination of scale, the clearing firm, and scaling up PatentVest, it increased our OpEx from roughly $5 million a year to $10 million a year.

The great news is that intellectual capital created, like I said, multi-billion dollar companies. I don't think we're getting stupider. I think we're getting smarter. I can tell you I felt pretty stupid the last few, last couple of years being involved in deep tech and biotech. Certainly being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like I said, or being too early is the same as being wrong. We got to pivot to being right. That's what we're hoping to do right now.

Speaker 1

Chris, to follow up on your comments about PatentVest, the question here says, are you planning to take it public in the same way you have done all the others? Will MDB Capital Holdings remain a controlling or large shareholder in PatentVest?

Speaker 2

Our goal would be to take it public. I think that from my perspective, I'd like to get it into the hands of the shareholders as fast as possible. There's no real reason for MDB Capital Holdings to control it going forward. If we spin it out, the existing shareholders and I will still have a pretty good interest in it. The goal would be to get as much of it into the shareholders' hands as possible. The exact plans as far as exactly how we're going to take it public, whether it's through an IPO or through maybe just a distribution to shareholders, hasn't been fully baked yet. We'll be announcing those plans as we develop it later this year.

Speaker 1

Here's a pipeline question that came in. Are there other companies like Buddha Juice, being a non-traditional big idea type company, currently in the MDB pipeline?

Speaker 2

Yes. You know, what's kind of fun is, I've been feeling down. I've been feeling pretty, you know, as our stocks are down, I'm like not feeling so smart. We've had a lot of calls from people. The way Buddha Juice came in, it was a relationship and someone just asking me for advice. That's how it turned into an IPO. Had one of our community members call me recently, and he's got a really exciting company. I can't tell you the sector or what they do, but I'm super excited about it. It's got significant revenue momentum and really exciting space. He said to me, you know, Chris, listen, I think taking this company public makes all the sense in the world. There's nobody else I would take it to except MDB Capital Holdings to take it public.

That made me feel really good that, 28 years of working, doing what we're doing, people recognize that, our reputation and the value we can bring. Also, GT Metabolic that's going to be at the conference. What an unbelievable story and opportunity. Someone like me that's battled metabolic disease my whole life, you know, like, roughly 50% of the country now is, it's a wicked, wicked, wicked, and it is a disease. You eat too much, right? You're overweight. It's way more complicated than that. GT Metabolic, again, Terry Tor, who's the CEO of GT Metabolic, he had been on the board of Pulse Biosciences that we took public. He said, Chris, he goes, public venture. He goes, man, he's talking to VCs, he's talking to other people and what have you, strategics. He said, I think going public is the best thing for us.

Again, a relationship and an experience with our form of public venture is why he came to us. It makes me feel real good that our reputation and our experience and, in relationships that we're seeing a lot of really cool things. Stay tuned, whether it's GT Metabolic or others, I think we're going to end up having a deep pipeline. More importantly, and I think I'm super excited because I believe, I've been hearing for the last 20 years, why would I go public? Why would I go public? Why would I go public? It's for the first time in a long time that I've, these companies are walking in going, geez, everybody's saying we should go public. It’s really, it’s all changed, right? It’s really what I see is kind of the death of traditional venture, at least in the small company space.

You’re still seeing billion-dollar deals happen in the big, you know, the big funds doing huge AI deals and things like that. For these smaller opportunities where they don’t need $100 or $200 million, those companies are struggling. The VCs are coming to us. Ironically, the VCs are coming to us also bringing us deals. The whole game’s changed from my perspective. I think that, you know, we went from 8,000 public companies at the end of the internet boom to 4,000 public companies today. It’s been the worst thing you could ever imagine for going public. I think that I’m a big believer that that shift is occurring. I sense it. I’m not, you know, I’m only right half the time. Hopefully this half I’m right. I think that going public is going to be the thing to do.

We’re crazily, we’re so well positioned for that wave that I think is going to come.

Speaker 0

There's a question here about, are you looking locally in, as we expand our focus, are we looking locally in the Dallas DFW area, which is an incredible area, and there's a lot of venture studios here in venture? The answer is absolutely. I think the fact that we have our own fully clearing broker-dealer, we're not only looking at venture studios locally and angel groups locally in the Dallas area, but internationally that are coming to us that have a portfolio and they're going like, we have mature companies, could you help us take them public? I think the pipeline's not an issue. For me, I'm all community. I'm about building the network. That's to me where the biggest issue is and the biggest opportunity for us to do. Once we build it, they're already here. They aren't even coming. They're here.

Certainly in the Dallas area, I think the fact that we're taking a local company that's very well known in Dallas public when it could have been private equity in Buddha Juice, I think is going to help it kind of expand our following and interest in what we're doing in the DFW area. Any comments on that, Chris, or does that sum it up?

Speaker 2

No, listen, I think that Dallas has traditionally not been a hotbed for life science or companies, but there's a lot of great companies in Dallas. I think that there's been a huge transition in the Dallas community. There are some life science companies that have started to percolate in the DFW area, but there's so many other companies. It's a dynamic field. I mean, what's happening in Dallas is crazy from Goldman Sachs opening up and bringing in, what is it, 800 employees to Dallas. You've got so many people moving to Dallas. You're also seeing hedge funds, private equity, all these guys are sort of congregating in Dallas. It's become a hotbed. I think we're going to see a lot of activity. We've been very specific about what we do. For the most part, Dallas has not been a biotech community.

Quite frankly, there wasn't a lot of things to talk about with Dallas people. I think that going forward, though, that's going to change. I think that we're excited that we have a platform based here that I think can serve the market, not just the Dallas market, but beyond.

Speaker 0

Chris, we're at the end of our time here. I want to get this one question out. It's a question about, in the future, do you see you have to be an MDB shareholder in order to participate in offerings, which would certainly be a great place to be for shareholders, existing shareholders to MDB. How do you see that playing out?

Speaker 2

I think it's still the same thing, right? In other words, we've always told everybody that this is a community-based effort. Being a shareholder in MDB Capital Holdings means you're always going to have priority over outside people to participate in offerings. That's it. It hasn't been a huge deal. When you're doing life sciences companies that are not the hottest part of the market, being an MDB Capital Holdings shareholder hasn't been that critical. For those of you that have known MDB Capital Holdings and participated in MDB Capital Holdings historically, there were times where I was in the very uncomfortable position of getting phone calls from people begging me to get into offerings, right?

Speaker 0

I like those days better, by the way.

Speaker 2

Hopefully it's coming around the corner again. Part of the reason for going public was we anticipated that to be the case, right? It hasn't turned out that way in the short run. Going forward, that was the whole idea. We have a long memory. We're not going to go back on what we said. Being a shareholder is going to be important to being, you know, for that.

Speaker 0

Lastly, we're leaving, and that was lastly, but now really lastly, there's a number of PatentVest questions. I am assuming as we get further down the road, we're going to have a call just on the PatentVest, this AI-driven IP law firm to answer what the model is, how that works, what we see the value drivers to be. Is that accurate?

Speaker 2

Yes. The team, we've all been working on the business strategy for it, and it's pretty well developed. I think we're going to be ready to present that to shareholders so they understand the value that PatentVest represents. I think we've had a lot of discussions with patent lawyers that want to join. We've had a lot of discussions with strategic partners to come in and be part of the fold. It's developing quickly. I expect that we'll be able to give some color on that here shortly to the shareholders.

Speaker 0

Okay.

Speaker 1

All right, Chris, any closing remarks?

Speaker 2

No, thank you guys for hanging in there. It's been, it's not been a wonderful, you know, start to being a public company. Like I said, we've been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I think, you know, we're working real hard to be in the right place at the right time. I think we're, you know, the team has done a phenomenal job. From our team that, you know, our analyst team and banking team that's putting together deals and teeing these things up, they're doing an awesome job. I couldn't be more proud of the work they're doing. I take total responsibility for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not their fault. As far as community development is concerned, George and Tony and the whole team as far as what's going on there has done a phenomenal job.

We're, you know, really expanding beyond our historical MDB community and really getting out there and seeing how do we really scale so that we can bring, you know, several investments to people a year. The whole team at PatentVest that's really catalyzed and figured out how to create a real opportunity with that. I couldn't be prouder of all the efforts of everybody, but it's time to go put some points on the board, and we got to go in. Again, I appreciate all of you for sticking in there and, over, you know, what's not been a great time. Thank you, everybody. This will conclude our call today. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thanks. Bye-bye.