Thank you very much for everyone for being here. It is my pleasure to have the Alamar team with us here today, Yuling Luo, the Chief Executive Officer, and Justin McAnear, the Chief Financial Officer. Yuling, Justin, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe just to start off, for an investor that might be new to the Alamar story, what is the best way to understand where the company is at today and how you fit into the broader ecosystem? Alamar is establishing a gold standard in protein detection and analysis. We all know proteomics has huge potential to improve our understanding of health and disease, leading to better treatment and healthier life. Despite all the great promise, this market remains to be largely untapped, mainly due to the limitation of the current technologies. The current proteomic solution is highly fragmented. On one end of solution, you have those high plex discovery technologies like mass spec or affinity-based high plex solutions. They are good for discovery, but they are not built for translation and diagnostics. The analytical performance are limiting, either lack sensitivity or specificity, or workflow are complicated. On the other hand, you have those clinical-grade, single plex immunodiagnostic assay that underlie the $20 billion diagnostic market, but their sensitivity are limited. They cannot multiplex. That is how we are going to change the game with our precision proteomics platform that will make changes in two aspect. The first aspect is analytical performance. We build a precision proteomics platform that combines five critical pillars of performance. This include, first, ultra-high sensitivity, second, high specificity, third, flexible high multiplex capability, and fourth, broader range, and the last, seamless automation, push-a-button automation. There is no other solution in the market that has this unique combination of these five critical pillars. Trade-off, you either lack sensitivity or specificity or workflow simplicity. We are the only solution that combines all five in one solution, and with exceptional analytical performance. The second differentiation is that this is the only platform that was designed for translation and diagnostics, but having capability for high plex discovery. It is the first platform that covers the entire customer journey from discovery to translation to future clinical diagnostics, connecting the multiplex protein measurement into a clinical outcome. So that really is the differentiation this platform have compared with all the solution in the marketplace. You all are one of the fastest growing proteomics companies or life science tools out there from a growth perspective. What is it about proteomics that you think is causing that inflection point? Why now? What is different relative to some of the other technologies that are out there? What is most important for investors to understand about why proteomics is seeing such incredible growth right now? Yeah. I think first is the science, right? There's more and more multiplex panels or signatures that's been discovered leveraging those high multiplex discovery platform, including ours. Those signatures have consistently show that they can characterize disease more precisely and better than a single marker-based test. Second, platform like ours finally have the capability to translate those signatures into future clinical diagnostics. That's one of the major bottleneck in the past, where you have thousands or tens of thousands of signatures that's been discovered and published, very few of them have been translated into the diagnostics. I think we're going to change that, right? Third part is that with our unique combination of ultra-high sensitivity for multiplex analysis, you open up a set of large market opportunity, such as early detection of disease risk prediction, minimal residual disease, where the disease signal is likely to be the weakest, that requires this combination of ultra-high sensitivity for multiplex analysis. Really, I think what our platform can do is that transition from a single marker-based test to a multiplex-based signatures for chronic disease. Very similar to genomics 20 years ago, where you see the transition from PCR-based singleplex test to NGS-based multiplex test, where the market application have grown from $10 billion to now $100 billion. I think we're going to see the transition in the proteomics as well, where single market test already underline $20 billion. It's the multiplex test that enabled by our platform, that's going to be the future for chronic disease and pretty much every chronic disease. That's going to be the future for large market application like early detection, minimal residual disease, and disease risk prediction. In the past, I think you talked about the total addressable market opportunity in proteomics more broadly, somewhere in the $50 billion range. How should investors think about how much of that is serviceable today versus more kind of near term, midterm, or long term? What do you need to be able to go tackle that broader TAM [unclear]? Yeah. We are in the advanced proteomic segment, which include ultra-high sensitivity plus multiplex applications. Within this market, in the research market today is about $3.7 billion and is estimated to reach around $11 billion. In this market, the fastest-growing segment is the mid to highplex discovery applications, anchored by discovery, translation, clinical study, and clinical trial, and expansion to different disease areas. Even the research market is a massive market opportunity over the next decade or so. Even bigger opportunity is the clinical diagnostic enabled by advanced proteomics technology like Alamar's. That market today is still small, roughly about $400 million, but expected to grow to $9 billion by 2035, and mainly driven by Alzheimer's disease, but other applications. We are quite excited about this market. We believe we have a highly differentiated technology platform, which can take the lead and capture a significant portion of that growth. Right. One of the key elements of your platform is NULISA. How should investors think about NULISA and how it translates into customer outcomes? What are the attributes? How did you design NULISA? Who is it most relevant for from an application standpoint? I think the key differentiation is the combination of sensitivity and the multiplex in a fully automated workflow. This combination of sensitivity and specificity is uniquely enabling for a lot of applications. As I mentioned, multiplex signature-based approach is likely to be the future for chronic disease diagnostics, and this combination is uniquely enabling, and we are the only technology today that has this combination of ultra-high sensitivity for multiplex. The automation is also critical for translation, for future diagnostics, where the workflow is extremely important and the data quality is extremely important, and that's what we deliver. How do you think about? You mentioned a little bit of the automation and the manufacturing and the know-how around that, the workflow, the IP. How should investors think about the competitive moat that you have relative to others in the proteomic space? How does that translate into some of the future growth opportunities around diagnostics, for example? Yeah, I think the major moat is the chemistry that we have. We are the first one who take the approach of suppressing the background noise to improve signal noise ratio. We achieved around 10,000-fold improvement in signal noise ratios, to the point that we believe we have achieved best-in-class sensitivity and maintain that level of sensitivity for multiplex analysis. So that really is the major moat of our technology, and it is protected by the combination of issue patterns as well as years of trade secret. It took us almost six years of development before we launched the product, which reminds me of my last company where we created this OmniScope technology. 20 years later, the patent has expired, but still nobody is able to replicate what we did with OmniScope technology, remains to be the gold standard in the industry, because it also protected by a lot of trade secrets. Great. Maybe shifting gears just a little bit on more of the commercial side, can you help paint the picture for an investor on what the commercial journey looks like for a given customer? How do they start out using your platform? How does that tend to change over time? Which customer segments are you finding have the most growth or the most interest from all the different applications that are relevant here? Do you want to answer this? Sure, I'll take that one. First, I'd say there's no quite typical customer journey, but I can tell you it would depend on the customer type, the budget, the kind of application that they're looking for. I could say the sales cycle is about six to nine months. Typically, they would start off with a TAP program, where they submit samples to Alamar. Alamar runs the samples on the customer behalf and then provides them high-quality data after that. Typically, the customer, once they get that data, they're able to go through it, that helps spur the instrument purchase. A customer would get the instrument, start using it, discover more broad applications for the instrument, expand into other panels, find other use cases internally, and then that can lead to additional panel adoption and additional instrument adoption. As far as the, we split out biopharma and academic and government, both are growing quite strong. I would say that on the biopharma side, we've seen that customers have been more apt to buy a second instrument sooner because their concern is typically the throughput that they can get today. Time is a concern. On the academic side, in particular core labs, they would tend to load the instrument up more because they can schedule experiments before branching in and buying a second one. Both segments have been quite strong. Got it. I think, looking at some of the available data out there, Alamar, the expectation is, I think, to add 100 placements during 2026. How should investors think about the mix of new customers, additional instruments, or placements into existing customers, or expansion into different sites? How would you break that down? Yeah, I would say that when we look at the 100 instruments that we've talked about being our goal to place this year, most of those to date have been to new customers. I would expect that most would go to new customers. There still is a meaningful amount where customers, on both academic and biopharma, are buying an additional instrument. We also noted on our earnings call that we've seen some good traction from CROs this year as well, and we think that's important, and we think that's a good indicator that those CROs are investing in instruments because they can see the demand that could be coming their way in the future. Got it. Within your sales organization, can you help give us some flavor of how you expect that to look over time? I think today you have somewhere around 25 reps. As your sales organization expands, how do you foresee the different segments that you might go into or preserving some of the productivity, which I think is really high amongst your reps today? When we look at last year, we ended at about roughly $3 million of revenue per commissioned sales rep. When we were doing the IPO, we talked about our use of proceeds. One key use of that would be to continue to invest in building out the commercial organization, adding additional commissioned sales reps, also building out the support structure, as well. I think we're a decent amount above $3 million revenue per head right now, and it's great to be efficient, but we don't want to be dogmatic about it. We want to make sure that we're finding the right balance between being efficient and prioritizing growth. We are prioritizing growth but doing it in a responsible way. We are going to be investing now, and we have been going into next year in additional commissionable sales reps, and continuing to build out that structure to continue to drive revenue overall. Great. In addition to the kind of core instrument placements and consumables that you see, how should investors think about maintenance or service? Is that a meaningful line item in the P&L, and how do you expect that to kind of look over time? Yeah. So when our instrument ships, there is a one-year warranty, and so most of our install base is currently under that one-year warranty. Customers can buy a maintenance and service contract after that, typically in one-year increments, and then we recognize the revenue for that over the life of the contract. Given that most of the instruments are under the one-year warranty right now, that's not quite a meaningful portion of our services revenue line. I do think over time, though, as the install base grows and the vast majority of customers buy that maintenance and service contract, that could become a meaningful amount in the future. Recognizing that it's still early, how do you expect, or what have you seen in terms of the utilization curves for some of your earlier customers? How do you expect that to trend after a year versus maybe three years? Yeah. So first off, we've seen really strong demand for consumables. When we look at our Q2 results, consumables revenue almost tripled from Q2 of last year. So we're quite pleased with that. Our instrument pull-through has been above $400,000 per instrument, and we've also put out the goal of maintaining that for this year. We feel good about that. This can fluctuate quarter to quarter. If we were to place more instruments, particularly if you increase each quarter, that can put downward pressure on the pull-through metric. Seasonality can also come into play towards the end of the year. Because of those fluctuations and because it's early days, that's also why we've made that an annual metric, where at the end of each year, we'll release the instrument install base, and we'll also update the consumables pull-through. Is that ramp or utilization curve, should that look different for an academic center doing research as opposed to a biopharma or a core lab? Yeah. At this point in time, because of the different dynamics that we've seen in academic and biopharma being more apt to buy that second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth instrument sooner, and we do have customers that have that many. That does put downward pressure on pull-through. We also think it represents a great amount of potential for what future consumable revenue can be with those kind of instrument placements. On the academic side, we typically see them get to a higher pull-through number before they invest in buying a second or third instrument. Got it. I think your average pull-through is somewhere around $400,000 today. I imagine the capacity is much higher. What is a kind of realistic steady state or mature pull-through for a productive customer? Yeah. We're north of $400,000 per instrument right now. If you want to put that in context, a plate that's run through the instrument typically would hold 86 samples on it. One of those plates is between $9,000 to $10,000. If you ran one plate a week, 10 to 11 weeks out of the quarter for the full year, that would get you north of $400,000 per instrument. If a customer were just to do two plates a week, obviously that would get you to $800,000. If you were to load the instrument up, our instrument can run three plates in sequence, roughly eight hours a plate. If you were to load the instrument up where you were doing that four or five days a week, that's where you can get to the $6 million plus theoretical pull-through ceiling. I think that there's a good amount of headroom from where we are today with the $400,000 and the kind of activity that that represents, to what we could get to in the future. Yeah, I mean, just to add that, for a core facility in academic side, they have interest to run as high pull-through as possible, right? Leverage the capital budget. For pharma, time to resolve is more important than the pull-through. That is why they want to buy more instruments, so they can get the results faster. Makes sense. One of the interesting things among many that you all are involved in is the creation of these more kind of custom assays. Can you say a little bit about what that is and how you would like investors to think about that within the context of what you are doing with more standardized assays? Sure. A custom assay, it is pretty important. We have this called TAP program, Technology Access Program, which has three functions. One is new customer acquisition, is kind of like a trial before you buy. The second is customer asset development, where we basically develop assays for biopharmas, as well as customers who are potentially interested in developing proprietary diagnostic tests. For biopharma, as a customer, it is really important for us to understand what are the cutting-edge research the pharma are working on. So it is really important for us to get an insight of what is the latest and greatest pharma is doing on. For diagnostic potential biopharma, of course, there is interest for future diagnostics where you are likely to have high pull-through consumables. Both are important, and the important part is that we have the right to commercialize the target-based assays if we believe that they have a large market potential. So we do have potential to capture values not only in the customer asset development, but potential future commercialization of some of those targets. Do these custom assays more kind of stay within a particular customer, or are there examples of something that you've developed early on with a customer that has become a more standard offering Yeah for Alamar? Yeah. A good example is IL-31. As you know, it's a drug target for atopic dermatitis, a very hot space. This target very difficult to measure because the abundance level is very low. We believe we are still the only one who have developed the assay for it. It turns out multiple pharma biotech have asked us to develop this assay, so we know there's market for it. So that's the one we intend to build a commercial assay that we intend to launch into the broader market. Great. Maybe just in terms of how you think about expanding content. You launched Neuro 220, Immune 340, a multiplex tau assay, and a number of others in 2026. How should investors think about your roadmap in terms of therapeutic categories or other assay types? What's most important to take away or understand? Yeah. When we, in the roadshow, we articulate that our strategy in the first part is to double down on what we win, we lead. Which is expansion of content on current two products. One is the Neuro 220, one is Immune 340. We launched the Neuro 220 in March, end of Q1 this year. Very quickly, we see exceptional adoption. By Q2, it became the flagship product. On the immune side, Inflammation 250, which has been around, have contributed roughly about 30% of revenue since launch. In a market where there are products for decades, right? Immunology. This is a market where it takes time to get customer to appreciate the performance of the technology, the sensitivity, multiplex combination can really generate unique biological insight that other platforms just cannot deliver. With the launch of 340 in July this year, you just have many more of those targets that other technology either just don't have sensitivity to measure or they cannot measure reliably, accurately. We're quite excited about this new panel as well, and we already see some large orders already. Do you see customers expand or migrate from a smaller panel to a larger panel, or do the larger panels open up just completely net new - Great question. applications? How should people think about that? Yeah. We've definitely seen some of the customers who run the CNS 120, and they order 220 again to run on the same set of samples because it proves that the new marker we added is additional value. The customer feel like they cannot miss. On the other hand, the Neuro 220 also contains a lot of new markers to cover different disease. For example, the collaboration with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research that allow us to incorporate a lot of unique, difficult to measure Parkinson's disease-related biomarkers. We also have a collaboration with CHDI Foundation to develop markers for Huntington's disease, the only one that's out there, right? In addition to double down on the Alzheimer's disease area, but also expand into other neurodegenerative disease such as Parkinson's, Huntington's, MS, ALS, et cetera. So, broaden the customer base with the Neuro 220. Same thing with Immune 340. We've got a lot more immuno-oncology related marker in this panel, unlike the 250, which is mostly autoimmune disease focused. How do you think about prioritizing different panels or where you choose to expand into? Is that driven by the demand that you see on the customer side? Is it new and interesting emerging applications in science? Is it some of both? How should people think about that? Yeah. I think it is really combination of those. First is unmet need in science, and that is why we launched the Neuro first, and the Immune first, right? Now, we are thinking about cardiometabolic panels, the oncology panels, and aging. Those are market where the KOL, the science telling us there is still significant unmet need. Second is the need for our kind of technology, where the combination of sensitivity and the multiplex play a key role. Third is the disease area where the market opportunity is large and the funding is strong. Cardio, oncology always all have great funding. Those are the criteria that we use to select which other disease area we focus on next. Got it. On the diagnostic side, with ARGO HT, DX, and your planned FDA submission, what is the right way to think about the package that that looks like? Is it a specific assay? Is it the instrument? Is it some combination, a platform authorization? What is the right way to think about that? Yeah. So it is a combination of ARGO DX diagnostic instrument along with the assay. Now, we have not disclosed what assay it is including, but you could imagine that we want to include an assay that can highlight the need for high sensitivity and highlight the need for multiplex capabilities. We have told the market that we intend to submit for FDA clearance by the end of next year. We are on track for that. Got it. I guess, what kind of clinical evidence or analytical validation or manufacturing work do you have to do in order to be ready or be in a position to make that submission? Yeah. For a clinical diagnostic test, you have to do the whole nine yards, GMP manufacturing, analytical performance validation, and clinical validation, the whole nine yards. We have already done pre-submission with FDA, so we understand with FDA's guidance as to what analytical and clinical study should look like. We know what we need to do. Yeah. That's great. Is there a world where eventually if you receive an FDA marketing authorization, does that help you on the research side? Absolutely. I think for one thing, with FDA cleared diagnostic platform, you are likely to spur a lot more specialty diagnostic lab and IVD company to partner with us to develop high value, differentiated, multiplex diagnostic tests. The second, I think, is the pharma, where they care a lot more about data quality and regulatory standard. Now with FDA clearance, I would expect they use a lot more of this platform, not only for discovery, but for translation, for clinical study, clinical trial, for even future companion diagnostics. With the research market knowing that they have a clear path from discovery to diagnostic on the same platform, I think it will spur more discovery with our platform. Right now, I think that's one of the major bottleneck in the market, where when they use some of the other discovery platforms, there's always been a challenging for them to move into diagnostic. That's why you see so few of those signature-based diagnostics in the market today, despite some of the platform has been on the market for decades. Got it. Maybe for Justin, just on financials for a moment. How do you want investors to think about the growth algorithm for the company, the types of opportunities that you are pursuing and ultimately, how that drives growth from a volume standpoint versus ASP versus ultimately what happens on the top line? Yeah, great question. We are focused on revenue growth, we are focused on placing instruments, developing additional panels for those instruments, and continuing to expand usage with existing customers, and then bringing on new customers as well. I think when you look out over the longer term and you compare it to today we are really only in two main disease areas. When you think about the potential of what this could turn into as we expand into additional disease areas, bring on additional customers, expand into enabling diagnostics, and then other initiatives that we talked about, too, it gets pretty exciting. That all starts with our business model of placing instruments and then driving utilization with those instruments, a classic razor blade model. That is also why we have picked as our key annual metrics, placements and pull-through. Those are the factors that are going to help drive our business in the near term, and then additional content and additional solutions in the longer term. Okay. What about in terms of the gross margin profile or the operating margin profile for the company, anything in particular that you think that is helpful or maybe more nuanced for investors to understand? Yeah, I think going back to Q2, basically getting over 60% margin for the first time, that was exciting. I also talked about on the earnings call in the near term, think about that as mid to high 50s that can fluctuate quarter to quarter. The biggest factor behind driving gross margin fluctuations is going to be product mix. Consumables have a much higher gross margin profile than the instruments, and services is somewhere in between. When we mix higher consumables, that is going to help pull the company margin up overall. We also have the opportunity to improve the gross margin within consumables as we continue to scale, as we continue to realize economies of scale, larger batch sizes help enable improved gross margins. We do have a path to improving the instrument gross margins as well. When you talk about operating margin, it all starts with revenue growth and then a strong gross margin. We do believe that over time, you will continue to see the gross margin increase as the mix of consumables increases, and there should be a good amount of leverage in the future, a good amount of operating leverage on the model that we have because we are basically focused on improving this platform, introducing similar platforms, driving additional content. There are all economies in doing that rather than being in a cycle where we are developing a new platform every year or something like that. Great. Maybe one final question. What do you feel like is maybe least well appreciated or that you wish more investors understood about Alamar? I think maybe it is the sensitivity, right? Because some people may say, "Well, why sensitivity is needed?" I would say sensitivity really underlie a lot of large market application. A good example is in the neuro space, where due to the blood-brain barrier, the biomarker that leak from brain to the blood are extremely low abundant. That is why we are the first one to develop and commercialize brain-specific p-tau217, which we believe is better than the total p-tau217 that was currently approved by FDA. Due to the brain specificity, that can reduce the false positives. p-tau217 reflects tau pathology, but MTBR, we are also the first one to commercialize MTBR that reflect tau pathology, and this one even lower abundance than brain-specific p-tau217. So, sensitivity matters there. Sensitivity also matters in terms of large market applications such as early detection of disease, minimal residual disease risk prediction where the disease signal is the weakest. Sensitivity also matters in other metrics. Like if you want to measure something in urine, you need sensitivity because very low abundance proteins. If you want to do at the home sample collection, tiny amount of blood, and ship at room temperature through dried blood spot, you really need a high sensitivity to measure them, and that's kind of the future that we envision for early detection and health monitoring. Even for some of the target that other technology can measure, but if it's a low abundance, they may not able to measure accurately with robustness, with precision. The improved sensitivity can give you higher data quality that's suitable for clinical diagnostic. There's a tremendous amount of need for sensitivity people may not fully appreciate. All right. Especially we do it in a multiplex setting. Exactly. All right. Well, thank you very much Yuling, Justin. It's been a pleasure to have you. Appreciate it. Thank you.