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Seer - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

February 27, 2025

Executive Summary

  • Q4 2024 revenue was $4.0M, down 10% year over year on lower instrument sales and no grant revenue; gross margin improved to 51% vs 45% in Q4’23 as mix shifted toward consumables/services.
  • FY25 revenue guidance introduced at $17–$18M (+24% y/y at the midpoint); management also guided FY25 gross margin to 50%–53% and free cash flow loss to $40–$45M.
  • Cash, cash equivalents and investments were ~$300M at year-end; management reiterated belief this is sufficient to reach cash flow breakeven; 6.5M shares were repurchased in 2024 (~10% reduction) at an average $1.82.
  • Strategic and demand catalysts include the Thermo Fisher co-marketing channel (fully operationalized in 2Q25), stronger instrument placement pipeline vs 2024, and rising STAC demand/ASP; caution persists around NIH/government funding uncertainty (government ~12% of 2024 revenue; academia ~18%).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

  • Mix-driven gross margin expansion to 51% (vs 45% LY) on higher consumables/services; management sees FY25 GM 50%–53% and 70%–75% at scale.
  • Commercial traction via STAC: strong demand, repeat rates (~25% of customers), increasing ASPs; 135+ customers served across 20 countries; channel partners across EMEA/APAC, and Thermo Fisher partnership expanding access.
  • Robust platform validation: 30+ customer publications (23 in 2024), HUPO highlights, and emerging population-scale study discussions; CEO: “confidence…has never been greater”.

What Went Wrong

  • Topline contraction: Q4 revenue fell 10% y/y to $4.0M on weaker instrument sales and no grant revenue; Q4 operating expenses rose 5% y/y, widening net loss y/y.
  • Capex headwinds persisted; elongated sales cycles continued to weigh on outright instrument purchases through 2024.
  • NIH/government funding uncertainty driving pauses and timing delays among government/academic customers; management adjusted outlook assumptions accordingly.
View the full earnings report

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Seer Q4 and Full Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Carrie Mendivil, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Carrie Mendivil (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Earlier today, Seer released financial results for the quarter and year ended December 31, 2024. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to [email protected]. In addition, during today's conference call, we will be referencing a slide presentation that can be accessed on the events and presentation section of Seer's Investor Relations website. Joining me today from Seer is Omid Farokhzad, Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board, and David Horn, Chief Financial Officer and President. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated.

Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release Seer issued today. For a more complete list and description, please see the risk factors section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K and in its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Seer disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast February 27th, 2025. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Omid.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Thanks, Carrie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I will begin our call today by providing updates on our business, and I will then turn the call over to David to provide more details on our financial results for the Q4 and full year 2024, as well as our outlook for 2025. Starting with slide three, I'm excited to share the tremendous progress we've made over the past year. We're a pioneer of deep unbiased proteomics at scale, and in 2024, we further solidified our leadership in the field. This was driven by exceptional growth of customer publications and a highly compelling body of evidence validating the power of our technology.

Our Seer Technology Access Center, or STAC, played a critical role in expanding access to Proteograph data, allowing more researchers to experience its impact and get access to deep unbiased proteomic insights that they could not achieve otherwise. Demand for Proteograph data remains strong, and we have now served over 135 customers, including 12 large biopharma companies. We ended the quarter with $4 million of revenue, bringing total revenue for the year to $14.2 million, with approximately $300 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments.

Given the massive value we believe exists in our platform and the opportunity ahead, coupled with, in our view, the enormously dislocated market valuation of Seer, we used approximately $12 million of our cash to repurchase approximately 6.5 million shares during 2024, reducing the total shares outstanding by approximately 10% to 59 million shares. Despite ongoing macro-environment challenges, I am more confident than ever before about our future.

We're transitioning from a pioneer of deep unbiased proteomics at scale to a trusted partner for discovery, translational, and population-scale deep unbiased proteomic studies. As we expand upon the foundation we built in 2024, I believe we're well-positioned for a stronger year ahead. Now, I'd like to walk through our progress in 2024 across each of our strategic initiatives, which include, first, validating our platform by assisting customers to generate novel data. Second, focusing our resources on enhancing access to the Proteograph Product Suite. Finally, third, driving innovation through enhancements of our technology.

Starting with the validation of our platform on slide four. To date, there have been 33 customer publications, preprints, and reviews showcasing the capabilities of our platform. In 2024 alone, 23 new peer-reviewed publications have been released, with many appearing in high-impact journals. Multiple preprints have already emerged this year, including a particularly compelling one added to bioRxiv last month that I will briefly highlight. Turning to slide five, as a pioneer of deep unbiased proteomics, we're seeing other providers emerge that are attempting to replicate our approach. However, they consistently fall short on delivering the depth, scale, and reproducibility that sets the Proteograph apart.

A recent head-to-head comparative study led by Professor Josh Kuhn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison directly compared Seer's technology against other plasma proteomic methods attempting to emulate the performance of our engineered nanoparticle approach. The results show that Seer outperforms across key metrics, detecting more low-abundance protein while retaining the lowest noise levels on par with neat plasma. Specifically, this outperformance is shown across depth of coverage, reproducibility of the assay as measured by the coefficient of variance, quantitative metrics such as limit of detection or LOD and limit of quantitation or LOQ, as well as the best-in-class measurement completeness to reliably see the same protein across samples.

Similar findings to Professor Kuhn's data have been validated by multiple other academic and industry leaders, reinforcing Seer's position as the trusted partner in deep unbiased proteomics at scale. Importantly, we believe our performance across these metrics represents only the tip of the iceberg of what our platform can do. There are so many other areas where we believe Seer is far superior to other approaches. These include, for example, batch-to-batch and lot-to-lot manufacturing robustness that makes it possible to run longitudinal population-scale studies, and our quality and IT systems are ISO 13485 and ISO 27001 certified today. We're proud of the best-in-class quality and performance of our Proteograph Product Suite, making us a trusted partner for our customers.

We saw continued validation of our platform at the 21st Annual US Human Proteome Organization, or HUPO, conference earlier this week, as our customers, collaborators, and Seer's scientists demonstrated new breakthroughs enabled by our technology across 13 posters and oral presentations. This research highlighted the role of the Proteograph in understanding tissue biology, uncovering biomarkers with cardiometabolic dysfunction, interrogating downstream proteomic changes in response to novel RNA cancer therapeutics, enabling breakthroughs in mass spectrometry proteomics throughout, and leveraging model organisms to advance human health. I'd like to highlight a seminar at HUPO held by Dr. Jinjun Shi, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Professor Shi is among the pioneers in RNA nanomedicine and among the very first nanomedicine investigators to study the downstream proteomics perturbation in cells after siRNA and mRNA nanoparticle delivery. In the studies he presented at the HUPO earlier this week, he discussed work from his laboratory where they turned off activated tumorogenic drivers of cancer with siRNA to silence androgen receptor expression while concurrently turning on the expression of tumor suppressors using mRNA that encode the p10 protein. Using prostate cancer as a model, the team then followed the downstream effects of these synergistic therapeutic modalities at the molecular level, looking at changes in the cellular proteome, and the biological insight was highly differentiated.

We're proud that the Proteograph Product Suite is enabling prominent researchers like Dr. Shi to accelerate advancements in precision cancer research and ultimately improve human health. We believe we are reaching a clear inflection point as more customers' data validates our technology and the scale of project increases in size. We expect the pace of customer validation to further accelerate this year as more researchers get access to our technology. Now, moving to slide six to take a closer look at our progress with accelerating access to the Proteograph Product Suite. Our global reach is growing with over 135 customers served across 20 countries. To capitalize on the increasing demand, we made significant investments in our commercial infrastructure in 2024 and doubled the size of our commercial team in North America.

New sales reps typically take six to nine months to ramp up, and we are seeing these new team members become increasingly productive as they approach this stage. We now have six channel partners covering Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East to accelerate market development and drive adoption globally. In addition, we're excited to welcome Amber Faust as our new Vice President of Global Sales. Amber brings over 15 years of experience and was most recently at Standard BioTools, where she led the North America sales team for SomaLogic products and previously held commercial roles of increasing responsibility at Olink, Metabolon, and Waters.

With a proven track record of expanding market reach and driving revenue growth in the proteomic space, we look forward to her contributions to accelerate adoption of our Proteograph Product Suite and strengthen our customer relationships. Looking ahead, we will continue to make strategic investments in direct sales and support as needed throughout 2025. A key driver for our performance in 2024 has been the growing demand of STAC, which allows a Proteograph user to run samples in their own lab and have Seer run the mass spec, or alternatively, provides end-to-end services from sample to proteomics data and analysis. We opened our first STAC in the US in late 2023, and given the demand we saw, we expanded into Bonn, Germany, with a second STAC in 2024.

Approximately a fourth of these customers have returned to repeat STAC projects, and we've seen multiple STAC customers purchase the Proteograph Product Suite to bring the instrument in-house. Importantly, we continue to see strong interest from large biopharma companies who are eager to access our technology, and STAC has been an important catalyst for accelerating this adoption. The Proteograph Product Suite is applicable to a wide range of sample types and works with any species, including the model organisms typically used in medical research and drug development. Notably, approximately a third of the STAC projects have utilized samples from model organisms, demonstrating a clear unmet need for differentiated technology.

We believe this increased access through STAC will continue to catalyze the generation of third-party data and publications, further highlighting the transformative potential of the Proteograph Product Suite and facilitating broader adoption. We saw a lot of traction throughout the year with our Strategic Instrument Placement Program, or SIP. Multiple customers have now purchased instruments through this program, including several large biopharma companies. SIP has been an important catalyst for adoption, and we expect for it to continue to remove barriers to access for our customers who are capital constrained given the current macroeconomic environment. In November, we announced an expansion of our partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific to co-market and sell the Proteograph Product Suite alongside the Orbitrap Astral Mass Spectrometers.

This powerful pairing makes it possible for the first time to achieve population-scale deep unbiased proteomics with exceptional robustness and reproducibility. In addition, this partnership further strengthens our commercial reach and makes it easier for their customers to access a seamless end-to-end solution for unbiased proteomics. As part of the expanded agreement, we will also conduct joint marketing initiatives and research studies, including population-scale studies, to showcase the combined power of the proteomics platform. We're currently training the Thermo Fisher salesforce and expect to complete the process in the Q1 of 2025. We look forward to continuing to operationalize this partnership and will provide updates on our progress throughout the year.

This momentum underscores our commitment to making deep unbiased proteomics more accessible than ever, and we're excited about the opportunities ahead in 2025 and beyond. Now, turning our effort to drive product innovation and application expansion on slide seven. In 2024, we upgraded our Proteograph Analysis Suite, or PAS, to be the most scalable proteomic analysis solution available today. Our upgraded PAS significantly accelerates end-to-end workflows and has reduced data analysis time by over 95%. We remain committed to investing in our software and data analysis capabilities to further enhance efficiency and scalability for our customers. In addition to these advancements, we launched a new product application for the Proteograph XT earlier this month, specifically designed for cell lysate proteomics.

This expansion extends the power of the Proteograph XT beyond plasma and tissue analysis, enabling researchers to expand intracellular proteomics across virtually any cellular compartments. This new capability adds to a growing list of over 10 Proteograph protocols available to conduct proteomic analysis on a diverse list of sample types, including non-human plasma or serum, conditioned media, cerebrospinal fluid, and dried blood samples. By leveraging the Proteograph for this application, researchers are expected to gain access to a significantly greater number of proteins, unlocking deeper biological insights.

These innovations represent our ongoing commitment to providing the most powerful and scalable solutions for deep unbiased proteomics, and we look forward to continuing to expand the capabilities of the Proteograph Product Suite throughout the year. I remain incredibly bullish and excited about the potential of our technology to transform our understanding of the proteome. With that, I will now turn the call over to David. Thanks, Omid. Total revenue for the Q4 of 2024 was $4 million, representing a decrease of 10% compared to the $4.4 million in the Q4 of 2023. It was primarily due to lower instrument sales and no grant revenue recognized in the quarter, offset by an increase in consumable and service revenue. Revenue recognized primarily consisted of sales of Proteograph SP100 instruments, consumable kits, and service revenue, of which $389,000 was attributed to related parties.

Product revenue for the Q4 of 2024 was $2.4 million, including $36,000 of related party revenue, and consisted of sales of SP100 instruments and consumable kits. We continue to see pressure on CapEx budgets and elongated sales cycles for the outright purchase of new instruments in the Q4. Service revenue was $1.6 million in the Q4 of 2024, including $353,000 of related party revenue, and primarily consisted of revenue related to STAC service projects. We continue to be encouraged by customer interest in running projects through STAC and their ability to gain access to Proteograph data. With this continued interest in our opening of our European STAC facility, we saw sample volumes increase year over year and on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

As we have stated previously, we may continue to undertake projects for key strategic studies that will result in additional presentations and publications in the near term, but are conducted at a lower price point than our typical STAC service projects. Grant and other revenue was $51,000 for the Q4 of 2024 and consisted of lease and shipping revenue. Total gross profit was $2 million for the Q4 of 2024, representing a gross margin of 51%, compared to $2 million in the Q4 of 2023, representing a gross margin of 45%. Gross margins were driven by a higher mix of consumable and service revenue in the Q4 of 2024 relative to the Q4 of 2023. We continue to expect variability in our gross margin on a quarter-by-quarter basis since the proportion of instrument consumable and service revenue will fluctuate in any given quarter.

Total operating expenses for the Q4 of 2024 were $25.5 million, including $6 million of stock-based compensation, an increase of 5% compared to $24.2 million, including $7.3 million of stock-based compensation in the Q4 of 2023. Research and development expenses for the Q4 of 2024 were $12.6 million, an increase of 13% compared to $11.2 million in the Q4 of 2023. The increase in R&D expenses was primarily due to an increase in laboratory expenses. Selling general and administrative expenses for the Q4 of 2024 were $12.9 million, a decrease of 1% compared to $13.1 million in the Q4 of 2023. The decrease in SG&A expenses was primarily due to a decrease in stock-based compensation expenses, offset by an increase in professional service expenses.

Net loss for the Q4 of 2024 was $21.7 million compared to $17.8 million in the Q4 of 2023. Turning to the full year, total revenue for the full year of 2024 was $14.2 million, representing a decrease of 15% compared to $16.7 million in 2023. Revenue recognized primarily consisted of sales of Proteograph SP100 instruments, consumable kits, and service revenue, of which $2.3 million was attributed to related parties. The decrease in total revenue was driven by lower product sales and no grant revenue recognized during the year. However, total product and service revenue in 2024, excluding related party and grant and other revenue, increased approximately 11% year over year to $11.7 million from $10.5 million in 2023. Product revenue for the full year of 2024 was $10.2 million, including $1.5 million of related party revenue, and consisted of sales of SP100 instruments and consumable kits.

Service revenue was $3.8 million for the full year of 2024, including $828,000 of related party revenue, and primarily consisted of revenue related to STAC service projects. Grant and other revenue was $223,000 for the full year of 2024 and consisted of lease and shipping revenue. Going forward, we will be providing retrospective annual figures for consumable pull-through. In order to provide informative consumable pull-through information, we will shift from reporting instruments shipped to instruments installed. We shipped 10 SP100 instruments in 2024, bringing our cumulative instrument shipped to 72 as of December 31, 2024. Our install base of instruments as of year-end was 49 instruments.

The difference between these two numbers reflects instruments that have been sold and shipped, yet not installed, and instruments that have been sold to our channel partners but not placed in customer sites as of year-end, and any instrument that has been retired or, in the case of a loaned instrument, returned to us. For 2024, the consumable spend across that install base represents a pull-through per instrument of approximately $174,000. Going forward, we will be reporting consumable pull-through and instrument install base on an annual basis. We will provide an update to these numbers retrospectively for the previous year on our earnings call to report Q4 and annual results. We will not be providing updates on a quarterly basis.

Total gross profit was $7.1 million for the full year of 2024, representing a gross margin of 50%, compared to $8.5 million in 2023, representing a gross margin of 51%. While we continue to expect overall volatility in our quarterly gross margins, we anticipate that overall gross margins for the full year of 2025 will be in the range of 50%-53%. We continue to believe that, at scale, our long-term gross margins will be in the range of 70%-75%. Total operating expenses for the full year of 2024 were $107.2 million, including $26.6 million of stock-based compensation, a decrease of 4% compared to $112 million, including $32.9 million of stock-based compensation in 2023. Research and development expenses for the full year of 2024 were $50.6 million, a decrease of 5% compared to $53 million in 2023.

Selling, general and administrative expenses for the full year of 2024 were $56.6 million, a decrease of 4% compared to $59 million in 2023. Net loss for the full year of 2024 was $86.6 million compared to $86.3 million in 2023. As previously announced, our Board of Directors authorized a $25 million share repurchase program in May of last year. Under this program, we repurchased approximately 6.5 million shares of Seer Class A Common Stock at an average cost of $1.82 per share during the year, reducing our shares outstanding by approximately 10% to approximately 59 million shares of Class A and Class B Common Stock. As of December 31, 2024, we had approximately $13.2 million in authorization remaining under this share repurchase program.

Consistent with our share repurchase program, we have taken two additional actions that leverage our strong balance sheet and fundamental belief in the long-term value of the Seer platform to make prudent investments while limiting or decreasing shareholder dilution whenever possible. First, given our visibility to organizational growth, we believe that the existing equity incentive plan is sufficient for 2025, and thus we opted to forgo the annual automatic refresh of the plan in 2024.

Second, we net share settled and retired approximately 360,000 shares as part of our February 2025 RSU vesting date, further reducing our outstanding shares by approximately another half of a percentage point on top of the 10% reduction achieved with our share repurchase program. Free cash flow loss was approximately $49.4 million for the year-end at December 31, 2024, significantly less than our free cash flow loss of $66.4 million in 2023. Looking ahead for 2025, we expect free cash flow loss to be in the range of $40 to 45 million for the year. We ended the year with approximately $300 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. We aim to continue to manage our significant cash balance in an extremely prudent manner and to continually evaluate our deployment of capital in order to maximize shareholder value.

Importantly, we believe that with our current cash, cash equivalents, and investments on hand, we have sufficient capital to reach cash flow break-even. While our long-term target is to become a profitable company, we are balancing that goal with the investments needed to innovate and build the company to drive sustained growth in the future. We believe that our strong balance sheet is an important differentiator and puts us at a significant advantage to capture the massive opportunity ahead. Turning now to our outlook for the year on slide 9, we expect revenue to be in the range of $17 to 18 million for 2025, representing growth of 24% at the midpoint over the full year of 2024. Our guidance range assumes continued macroeconomic uncertainty and budget pressure for our customers, similar to what we have seen in the second half of 2024.

However, the NIH and government funding environment remains extremely uncertain and volatile. In 2024, revenue from government entities represented approximately 12% of our overall revenue, and any fluctuations in NIH and government funding uncertainty may impact a portion of these customers in 2025. Given this uncertainty, we have adjusted our outlook for these accounts, and this is reflected in our guidance. At this point, I would like to turn the call back to Omid for closing comments.

Thank you, David. Moving on to slide 10, I'm incredibly proud of our team and their execution in 2024. We've made significant progress in driving customer publications and validating the power of our technology. Despite ongoing macroenvironment challenges, I believe we are well-positioned for a stronger year ahead. We're focused on four key growth drivers in 2025, which include expanding our user base and continuing to enhance access, driving larger cohort studies, continuing to drive product innovation, and enabling more customers to generate meaningful and actionable biological insights. I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. With that, we will now open the call up for questions. Operator.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press Star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press Star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Dan Brennan of TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. This is Kyle on for Dan. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to start with guidance for 2025. You talked again about budgets sort of being constrained and things looking similar to how they did in the back half of 2024. I guess in the context of you guys placing around 10 instruments in 2024, how should we think about sort of the split between instruments and consumables in 2025? Maybe how should we think about 1H, 2H pacing? Thank you.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Kyle, thank you. Omid here. Let me start it, and then I'll hand this to David to give you some additional color, if you don't mind. 2024 was a really tough year in terms of CapEx. If I look at that instrument placement in 2024, it was very much tilted toward the back half of the year. The beginning of the year was really tough. If I look at our pipeline, including what I expect would happen in the beginning of the year in 2025, we feel good about the guidance being given. By the way, this is in the context of the broader picture, which is the challenges around uncertainty with the NIH budget. All of those are factored in. I think that the expectation for instrument placement to be very meaningfully different from last year is reasonable.

While we're not going to give quarter-by-quarter placement, if I just look at the pipeline, including what's available in Q1 and Q2, I think the pace is going to be a very different pace than what we saw in 2024. I would attribute this increase in velocity largely to the progressively strengthening tailwind that we're experiencing as the validation of our technology in the hands of customers is becoming more and more robust. Despite the challenges in the macroenvironment, and by the way, even more complexity around some of the budgeting with the NIH, I think the tailwind is strong enough that I do feel very good about the guidance being provided. Let me have David give you additional color on that. David.

David Horn (CFO and Prersident)

Yeah, thanks, Omid. Yeah, Kyle, I think in terms of how we think about 2025, I think we probably see it shake out similar in terms of the breakdown. If you looked at where product revenue was in 2024, it was around 72% of overall revenue, and I'm including related party in that product revenue. Service was about 27%. I think the breakdown will probably be pretty similar this year. Again, we do, as Omid said, expect more instrument placements. 2024 was a really tough year. We are seeing some loosening of that and more interest in the technology. At the same time, we're also seeing interest in bigger projects. Consumable revenue will obviously be a significant portion as well.

Got it. Thank you. Maybe another one on the STAC program. It looked pretty strong in Q4, at least Q over Q. Is there anything you can discuss on the STAC pipeline and backlog, and maybe how we should think about the trajectory of STAC revenue as we move throughout this year?

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Yeah, Kyle. We said this when we started the US STAC. We repeated it when a year later we added the European STAC in Bonn, which is that we're not interested in becoming a service company. The STACK capacity that we built in the US and the capacity that we built in Europe, my expectation is that we're going to keep that capacity fairly consistent. If there is a surge, the opportunity is for those service projects to then go to our centers of excellence. We have excellent centers in Europe and the US that would be able to service those customers extremely well. Now, if you look at the STACK revenue and the STACK capacity, you'll see some increasing in revenue. I think a large part is because the purpose of the STACK was to lower the barrier to access. We did some important collaborations with key lighthouse accounts with key KOLs. Those STACK projects were done at a lower price point early on.

As the technology is getting more and more validated, the STACK projects tend to be closer to what the normal service project would be priced. You are going to see an increase in revenue. In terms of capacity, the STACK is running largely at the capacity that we would expect, and we are not going to be able to add additional capacity. At some point, STACK revenue will begin to plateau. There is opportunity for us to do improvement in product offering, and those offerings will also translate into product offerings in the STACK that may alter, if you would, STACK capacity.

In terms of the infrastructure for services, what we have built is largely what we're going to keep. If anything, in terms of additional capacity, it will likely come in terms of adding a STAC maybe in Asia, though I do not have any immediate plan to do that in the first half of 2025. Let me have David give you some additional color in terms of the kinds of customers we're seeing. By the way, some of the repeat accounts that we're seeing, I think some additional color with the STAC may be helpful. David?

David Horn (CFO and Prersident)

Yeah. Kyle, Omid kind of hit on it. The growth was really we had done some strategic collaboration projects early on, but we are continuing to see good demand, both from large pharma, who we've got quite a number of large pharma customers now testing the technology through our STAC. We have had a good number of repeat customers that want to do bigger studies and things. Generally, the trends are very positive. We are seeing an uptick in the ASP relative to STACK.

The growth is coming from not only increased volumes, but increased prices from large pharma and also academic customers. Interestingly, we also see a lot of model organism projects as well. About a third of our projects last year were model organisms. That is really encouraging that people want to test different species, which our technology can obviously do very well. All signs are very encouraging just around STACK in general. We are very optimistic for it in 2025.

Got it. Thanks, guys.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rachel Vatnsdal of JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Hello.

Marta Zaremba (Analyst)

This is Marta Zaremba on for Rachel Vatnsdal from JPMorgan. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to dig into the NIH headlines we have been recently hearing that you touched a little bit in your prepared remarks on. Can you discuss what you heard from your research customers related to these NIH risks? Are you perhaps seeing more hesitation from customers? Can you also discuss January and February trends with your academic customers? Thank you.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Marta, maybe I will open it up, and again, I will have David comment, which is if I break down our government customers, and that includes the likes of NIH and then academic customers that also rely on NIH funding, about 12% of our revenue in 2024, overall revenue, came from government entities. An additional 18% came from academic groups. In aggregate, it was about 30%.

If I look at what the customers are saying, keep in mind that the indirect funding does not directly impact the funding that the PI has to spend. An indirect funding is the additional funding that goes to the organization in terms of paying for the overhead. The actual money that a researcher spends, that is part of their direct funding, and there is no immediate plan to reduce that. That said, there is a general level of anxiety in terms of the unknown. What is happening? Is the reduction in indirect actually going to materialize or not? If it does, it impacts how a broader research organization makes infrastructure investments, not necessarily that specific PI spending money on their research, but a much broader type of investment that you make in a research organization. I think that uncertainty is making everyone kind of pause and think.

We factored all of that into the guidance that we provided. Our current guidance assumes a very constrained, a very cautious mindset in terms of that roughly 30% of our account, 12% government, 18% academic, and how they may view their funding and how they may view their spend. By the way, as a former academic, I'm actually optimistic that at the end, science will prevail. Ultimately, what has made this country great is our innovation, and investments in those innovations are going to remain intact. I have to assume that some of the uncertainties that we're seeing over the course of the coming months are going to clarify, and I think are going to put the scientific community more at ease. David, let me hand it to you as well.

David Horn (CFO and Prersident)

Yeah, just to address your second question, Marta, around what we're seeing in the early part of the Q1 here, I think it just is consistent with what Omid said. A lot of uncertainty. People are unsure if their funding's there. There's no change in the desire to bring the technology in. It's just, am I going to have the funding to be able to do that? We have had people kind of pause. In certain instances, they've gotten clarity that they do have their funding. It is intact. They're moving forward. Others are still kind of more uncertain. I think there's no better word for it than just uncertainty. That's creating some time phase delays and sometimes not. It's really case by case. We try to boil the aggregate in our guidance. To the extent there's significant changes one way or the other, that will obviously impact that.

Marta Zaremba (Analyst)

Understood. Thank you. Can you discuss what the publication pipeline for 2025 looks like? Are you seeing any exciting projects on the horizon similar to the large government contracts that you called out last quarter and the projects you called out today? Thank you.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

Marta, the publications have been really a bright light for us. We saw our first customer publication in 2023. 2024 was really a robust year in publications, and now we have more than 30 of them. I'm beginning to see the flywheel start to take place as researchers are seeing really uniquely what is possible using the Proteograph. I expect that same velocity in terms of publication will continue in 2025 in terms of the number of publications coming.

The STAC has been a great source of that, by the way, because it lets the customer access data very quickly. That data then translates for the customer in terms of possible presentations or possible mechanism to write grants. I think the pace of publications will take off. The evidence that the customers are putting forward is accelerating adoption by others. It's terrific to see this. We just did the HUPO, by the way, earlier this week. There were 12 total posters and oral presentations. Again, a fantastic conference, a lot of visibility for Seer. One of our customers gave an excellent talk in terms of looking at RNA medicines. When you treat models of prostate cancer with RNA therapeutics, what is the downstream effect in terms of proteomic perturbation?

If you look at this in an unbiased way, meaning you're not coming to it with any preconceived notion of what protein you should be looking at to be up or down regulated, and in turn, you look at the totality of the cellular proteome, for example, in response to an upregulation of a tumor suppressor or downregulation of an oncogene, and really what happens to that cell and all the proteomic changes, it's just fascinating the types of biological insight that is emerging. I'm very, very bullish in terms of our customer publications. Just earlier this week, I heard of another customer, a government customer, researcher at a government entity who just got a nation-level paper accepted. I think the velocity is taking off, Marta. It should be an exciting year for us in terms of papers.

Marta Zaremba (Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Lai of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Jason Lai (Analyst)

Hi. This is Jason on for Yuka Oko. Thank you for taking our questions. You announced a co-marketing and sales agreement with Thermo Fisher last quarter. Just wondering, what's baked in the 2025 guide for this collaboration? Are you expecting a material contribution this year from this collaboration? If so, does that imply a material 2H ramp? I believe it's a non-exclusive agreement. How are you thinking about opportunities for future co-marketing collaborations like this one, and what criteria are you looking for in a partner? Thank you.

David Horn (CFO and Prersident)

Thanks, Jason. Yeah, I'll take the first question. In terms of the co-marketing, we did announce that back in the Q4. This quarter, we are currently working with Thermo to train their salesforce. We're working through that this quarter. It's going well. We expect to see that completely operationalized in the second quarter. Excited about the partnership and what it can do. In terms of what we guided or how much is built into our guidance, I think we were pretty modest in that. I think we just want to see how things come together over the course of the next quarter or two. We try to be relatively circumspect around that. We remain very, very excited for it. They've been great partners. We're looking forward to a good year with them. I'll let Omid speak to the other potential partnerships.

Omid Farokhzad (CEO)

David, thank you for that. Thank you for that, David. Look, the Thermo partnership was based on or built on several years of an excellent relationship that we had with them. It is non-exclusive to give us flexibility really to work with other mass spec providers. Key is that we're always looking for ways to enhance access to the Proteograph. Our enthusiasm for the partnership with Thermo was based on the exceptional performance that the Proteograph and the Orbitrap Astral did together and the value that that would then provide to our customers. Now, as great as the Astral is and as unparalleled the performance of it is with the Proteograph, the Proteograph also significantly enhances the performance of every other mass spec, including those by SCIEX and by Bruker.

We've had many customers or even our own labs that have demonstrated the meaningfully enhanced performance of those other instruments through many presentations and many publications. We continue to have dialogue with these parties as well for potential partnership in various different areas. They may not look the same as the Thermo partnership. They may be in other areas. Our approach is really just facilitating access to the Proteograph, ultimately to help the customer get the best data they need for their studies.

Jason Lai (Analyst)

Thank you. That was helpful. If I may ask a follow-up, I believe I heard you say about $174,000 on consumables pull-through per instrument. Please correct me if I misheard. Just wondering, what is your assumption in the guide for consumables pull-through for 2025? How do you see this number trending over the next few years? How much more room is there for this number to grow on your platform? Thank you.

David Horn (CFO and Prersident)

Yeah, thanks, Jason. Look, we're not going to guide in terms of the overall pull-through. You did hear the number correctly as $174,000 per instrument. Look, I think there's obviously, it's customer-dependent. Obviously, our commercial customers, which are well north of that number, and the academics are kind of below that number. This is kind of where it averages out. I think there's plenty of capacity in a single Proteograph to do more than that per year. It really is just going to be project-dependent and what types of projects customers are working on, whether they be small or large.

I think the encouraging news is we are talking to folks about doing large population scale studies now. We previously haven't really had significant opportunities in that area, but we're definitely in conversations with parties now. There's room. We also hope to grow the installed base more rapidly this year, right? That's the tension. How fast does the installed base grow relative to the pull-through on that? We are not going to give guidance now. Again, we feel good about that pull-through number. We will continue to monitor it as we go forward and update you in a year.

Jason Lai (Analyst)

Thank you. Appreciate the caller.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. I am showing no further questions. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

View Q4 2024 Earnings Summary