Hello, and welcome to the third quarter 2023 Cepton, Inc. business update and earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Hull Xu, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead. Thank you, and welcome to Cepton's third quarter 2023 earnings call and the business update. With me today are Jun Pei, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Mitch Hourtienne, Chief Commercial Officer. During the call, we may refer to our unaudited GAAP and non-GAAP measures in our earnings release. The non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are included in our earnings release. I'd like to remind everyone that comments made in this conference call may include forward-looking statements regarding the company's expected operational and financial performance for future periods. These statements are based on the company's current expectation and are subject to the safe harbor statements relating to the forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and the slides that accompany this call. Actual results for future periods may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements due to a number of risks, uncertainties, or other factors, including those discussed in the earnings release or during today's call and those described in our filings with the U.S. SEC. We are not undertaking any commitments to update these statements as a result of future events, except as required by law. As a quick reminder, this call is being recorded, and you can find the earnings release and the slides that accompany this call, as well as the webcast replay of this call at investors.cepton.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jun. Thank you, Hull, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining Cepton's third quarter 2023 earnings call. We will provide you with a business update and review our third quarter financial results with you. Before that, I'd like to congratulate Mitch on his promotion to Chief Commercial Officer. He has been a critical part of our business development efforts, and we look forward to his continued contributions in his new role. For the second straight quarter, I'm proud to announce that we have delivered a new company record for quarterly product revenue. This quarter, we shipped the highest number of lidar units to our automotive end customers as we continue to deliver on milestones to prepare for start of production. For the second straight quarter, we met our internal production targets. We're beginning to see our scale production efforts translate into revenue as we demonstrate our capability to meet demands of our customers. I'm proud to report that we have passed the final software milestone for launch of series production, fully integrating AUTOSAR and cybersecurity software under one of the most rigid set of requirements in the automotive industry. We're proud to be one of the first lidar companies in the industry that is series production qualified. While Cepton stands ready to meet start of production volume requirements, our lead OEM customer has experienced some recent automotive industry headwinds that was publicly known, which resulted in some vehicle launch delays. We're working through these and are confident our efforts in preparing for the anticipated production volume will be fully appreciated in the near future. On the smart infrastructure side, we have seen the smart city application flourish with the addition of a new city operator customer, while we continue to fulfill our existing smart city contracts. In addition, we continue to support applications for smart airports in partnership with The Indoor Lab. We expect these projects to mature into production orders for commercial deployment in the next few months. Moving on to technology. Our software development work has become increasingly important, matching our hardware development work with our customers. Through extensive collaboration with our automotive OEM customers, our software teams have developed the best-in-class automotive software validation suite for Ethernet-based sensors. In automotive applications, where our lidar is a key sensor modality, our domain expertise enables plug-and-play software solutions that can integrate into the broader ADAS stack. Our software development capabilities extends our domain expertise to both the manufacturing production line, as well as the quality control processes. So we have visibility in all stages of a sensor's life cycle. As we have discussed in prior quarters, we're continuing to build our business and delivered yet another record-setting quarter for revenue. Cepton remains steadfast in pursuing opportunities in automotive industry and remains in good position to win additional series production award with sourcing decisions on the horizon. With that, I'll turn over to Mitch for details on our efforts with customer programs. Thank you, Jun. With our lead OEM customer, Cepton has continued to deliver on software development, meeting software release milestones and fine-tuning software validation tools for production readiness. The delay in launch of certain contracted vehicle models was a result of the OEM wanting to fine-tune products at the system and vehicle level. Additionally, our partner, Koito Manufacturing, has publicly unveiled their automotive manufacturing line in Japan to support the production of our Vista-X90 automotive grade behind-the-windshield lidar. Thanks to our continued development and scaling efforts, our lidars are ready to go as we await further instructions from our OEM customer on vehicle rollouts and pursue new customer programs. On our RFI and RFQ activity, we remain in the final sourcing discussion for another major OEM's lidar sourcing decision for our long-range lidar, the same as we have reported last quarter. This decision is expected by the end of the year and has been delayed somewhat as a result of macroeconomic headwinds in the automotive industry. We've also entered final sourcing discussions with a major trucking OEM for our short-range lidar, with a decision also expected by the end of the year. We hope to share more details in the upcoming months about production sourcing awards. On the smart infrastructure side, as Jun mentioned, we continue to ship against our largest commercial contract in the tolling application. This quarter, we added a new tolling operator customer, expanding our geographic reach of Cepton lidars into new U.S. states as well as internationally. We are also happy to announce continued maturity of projects in the airport application with our partner, The Indoor Lab, with design wins at Tampa, New York's JFK, Denver, and San Francisco airports. The initial use case of our lidar sensors will be security and passenger traffic management, but we'll be expanding into operations optimization and efficiency improvement for both indoor and outdoor applications. We started shipping sensors to fill these orders this quarter, and we expect several other airports to enter the decision and deployment phases, both domestically and internationally, in coming quarters. I'll turn it back to Hull now. Thank you, Mitch. Starting with our third quarter results, total revenue for the quarter was $3.8 million, an increase of 112% compared to the prior year period and up 38% compared to our previous quarter. Product revenue was $3.8 million, a new record for the company this quarter, an increase of 114% compared to the prior year comparable period and up 37% compared to our previous quarter. Our strong product revenue growth was driven by an increase in shipment volumes to the automotive OEM customers. There was minimal development revenue this quarter. We achieved a positive gross margin of 13% on a GAAP basis, primarily driven by revenue mix shift between automotive and smart infrastructure customers and a fixed cost leverage on a record level of unit shipments. Third quarter GAAP net loss was $11.3 million, or 71 cents per share, basic and diluted. non-GAAP net loss was $9.2 million, or 58 cents per share, basic and diluted. As a reminder, we completed our previously announced one-for-10 reverse stock split this quarter, so all historical per-share metrics have been adjusted for comparative purposes. Third quarter non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was - $9.9 million. As of September 30th, 2023, we had approximately $61 million in cash and short-term investments and no debt. As a result of our lead OEM startup production delay, we are revising our full year guidance to reflect the impact on our business. We now expect our full year revenue to be between $9 million and $11 million, and we expect our non-GAAP operating expenses for the year to be below $15 million, driven by higher operating efficiencies and increased discipline on expenses. And with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Today's first question comes from Tom Narayan with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking the question, and, yeah, congrats, Mitch. The first question is on, I guess the major OEM you called out with the delay there. Just curious, I mean, that OEM has also talked about pushing out their, I think, their EV schedule as well. And I guess the question is just understanding their what their ambitions are in light of issues they've been having also with their robotaxi business and delays there. You know, how convicted are you that that business is just it's just a matter of a delay as opposed to something more serious? That's the first question. Yeah, thanks, Tom. This is Mitch. I can speak to that. So we can't get too far out in front of the OEM in terms of, of details. So we'll defer to them on, you know, specific vehicle and, and feature details for the launch. The information we have now is, is it's a few months delay. This was indicated in GM's earnings release on October 24th. They talked a little bit about, the new software organization led by Michael Abbott and the fact that they're gonna be doing some software fine-tuning at the vehicle and, and system level. And we've reflected that in our, our Q4, revenue update today. Okay. But it- Tom, Tom, this is Hull. Just to add to- Yeah to answer your question. You're asking how committed we are in terms of that program. From Cepton's point of view, we are very committed to supporting GM in that program, so nothing on that has changed. Okay. There's—I mean, there's no indication on your end that there is a risk to that. You know, it's more of a delay, is the point, not a cancel—not like an about-face completely, right? That's- Yeah, it's Jun here. That is correct. You can refer to GM's Yeah Earnings call transcript for that. It's really meant to be a delay. Yes. Okay. And then the other OEM, Mitch, you talked about, anything just to give a sense of what order of magnitude or anything we can understand about that OEM, you know, potential there? Yeah, it's relatively the same size as our initial, maybe even bigger than our initial OEM series production win. You know, we advanced even further through the process, through the quarter. I, you know, I indicated there's been some small delays on the final decision because of some of the headwinds out in the market that you're aware of. But we still expect a favorable decision before the end of this year. Okay. And my last one, you know, on that macroeconomic backdrop, you know, obviously, EV slowdown and there is a narrative that OEMs might, you know, if the price mix falls in addition with higher labor costs, that they may try to reduce content per vehicle. What is your sense of the appetite for you know, lidar, you know, in the vehicle? Like, is there some concern? Is it more of a I mean, just kind of a narrative of what I've been asking before, is like more of delays as opposed to outright cancellations, it sounds like. I mean, how do you see this macro backdrop, you know, impacting? I mean, how committed do you think OEMs will be to, you know, to lidar and Yeah in those specific technologies? Yeah. Thanks, Tom. That's a good question. We're still very engaged with all of our target OEM customers. We believe this is more of a transitory impact, these delays, as they reorg and figure out how they want to launch. I mean, let's remember, lidar is part of the safety suite. There's no ending appetite for safety. So, with that comment, it's not tied strictly to EVs. You know, some of our contracted vehicles are also ICE vehicles. So the need for increased safety is real, and the investments by the OEMs continue to increase. And we don't see that going away. We think this is a delay as they reorganize and figure out how to launch. Yeah, and I'll, I'll add, Tom, here, you know, since we're talking about the macro and the whole, whole industry, automotive industry trend, right? You know, on the EV side, you know, OEMs are definitely going into a, you know, price war, right? Led by- Mm-hmm by Tesla. And margins are gonna compress, because of that. ASP is coming down, and also, you know, the labor cost is going up. Mm-hmm. So, you know, if you think about where they make money is actually on the optional equipment. Mm and for lidar, you know, all the, you know, safety is a necessity, but initially, those are going to be optional equipment, right? So that's actually- Mm where they could make some profit margin. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, you may press star then One. The next question comes from Kevin Garrigan with WestPark Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hey, guys. I appreciate you taking my questions, and congrats on the progress. So in your previous answer, you had mentioned that you're, you know, seeing delays a lot with EVs. Are the companies that are developing internal... or the car OEMs that are doing more internal combustion engines not nearly as delayed as automotive OEMs that are kind of focusing more on EV platforms? That's a good question, Kevin. This is Mitch. Yeah, so the traditional OEMs have both, right? They're transitioning from ICE to EV, but they're going to maintain the ICE vehicles. And, you know, Mary Barra talked about it in the GM earnings release, about the traction they had gained in the luxury segment. And that expands across ICE and EVs. So, I wouldn't say, you know, one way or the other, there's been delays on ICE versus EVs or traditional companies versus up-and-coming companies. I think this resorts back to the mega trend Hull was talking about. Yeah, and there's also just the macro events associated with the automobile industry that is pretty obvious in the last couple months that is finally resolved, as you may be aware of. And all of these are not EV specific, so it kind of across the board. So it's not one way or the other, it's really a macro effect here. Yeah, and I'll add that, you know, EV, although it does kind of change the OEM's priorities, right? You know, EV has been the priority for quite some time, maybe a couple of years. And the recent headwind on EV, you know, having some of the OEMs refocus their attention on ICE vehicles and bring those vehicles up to, you know, technology standard. So that internally would take some time. And the good thing with our award is that we are awarded both ICE vehicles platform and also EV platforms. Okay, perfect. No, I appreciate that color. And then, you mentioned you're fully integrating cybersecurity software. How big of a talking point is cybersecurity in dealing with, you know, lidar systems and perception software? Yeah, I mean, cybersecurity is table stakes for launching a lidar for automotive. I mean, it's similar to radar, cameras. Any element of perception that could pose a threat if it was accessed externally goes through very rigid cybersecurity requirements. Our lead OEM, General Motors, is, you know, has a notable requirement on that front that's one of the most rigid in the industry. And that's what we talked about today, finally integrating all those requirements. Okay, perfect. I appreciate the color. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Kevin. Thank you. The next question is from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group. Please go ahead. Hey, thank you for taking my question. Can we, I guess with respect to your to the delay of your primary automotive customer, did that change or does that delay any further decisions on new vehicle platforms or programs at that OEM? Or can you talk about how those conversations and decisions are progressing? Yeah, Matt, good question. That's Mitch. This is Mitch. We have to defer to the OEM in that case. We can't get into too many specifics on vehicles. You know, we've been concentrated on the contracted and awarded vehicles, of course, and we're still engaged with General Motors, right? We're still engaged with our target customers, so we're constantly talking about additional vehicles, additional programs, features. I think I have to just leave it at that, for- The communication we have been getting from GM is really these few months of delay based on, you know, basically their release. There is no discussion on the further vehicle platforms one way or the other. Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay. I guess two quick follow-ups. One being, I guess, past the automotive decision that you expect between now and the end of the year, are there any other programs that you're far along in that you expect to be decided in 2024? Or is that sort of the end of the decisioning process for the time being? Yeah, this is Mitch. There's one other major opportunity we've been working on, a major European trucking OEM. That's for our short-range lidar called Nova. And we're in the final phase of that RFQ and expect a decision before the end of the year. Got it. Okay. But for just automotive, the non-truck, in 2024, that's pretty much all you're able to talk about today? Okay. You're asking other automotive, long-range- Yeah lidar sourcings in 2024? Yep. Yeah, there's always OEMs in the pipeline. There, there's some in the RFI phase right now. I don't, I don't think there's anything as immediate as you know, the couple we talked about today, but there, there will be additional sourcings next year for sure. Got it. All right. Last question from me is just on the smart infrastructure opportunities. You know, it sounds like you're building off that base and expanding out with it. Can you give us a maybe preliminary sense of what you have in the pipeline, what that means at the maybe baseline, looking out to 2024, just, you know, given delays on the automotive side, and I assume, you know, you're not really in a place to talk about that side of the business at this point. But on the infrastructure side, can you give us kind of a preview of what we should expect for, for 2024? I think one comment I can make is, you know, we talked about our tolling customer that we landed earlier in 2023, a multi-million-dollar contract that we've been fulfilling this year. Today, we updated, we have another major customer in the tolling space. We see the airport, you know, we're offering more details on the airport installations. I'll just say the size of the contracts are all in that multi-million-dollar range. And we expect to be fulfilling, you know, multiple contracts in 2024, whereas we just basically filled one major contract in 2023. Got it. All right. Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Well, thanks, guys, for taking my questions. Jumped on the call late here, so during the Q&A, and I want to follow up on an answer that I don't think I heard the question very clearly. Sorry if I'm repeating this, but I think you talked about an award here, and I think it's referring to the one you listed in the on the front page of your press release here, about final sourcing decisions for another major vehicle OEM award. Is that the one that you're referring to when you said it's perhaps a bigger size of initial at the initial start of ramp than your current one? And is that the one you expect to be decided before the end of this calendar year? Hey, Richard, this is Mitch. Yeah, that... You're exactly right. That's, that's the one I, we were talking about. Okay. Are you aware of whether you are the only one at this stage, or there's still competition present? I can't comment on, you know, if there are others. We know it's down to the final stage. We've been in this process for six months now, so at this stage, there's likely no more than one or two company. Okay, fair enough then. I want to follow up on an industry dynamic here in terms of software integration, you know, on the broader sensor suite, including lidar, that seems to be, you know, presenting some issues across the industry. Wondering if you're seeing any further signs of that and of those issues that have come up here. Have those generally been solved, and are you seeing any, you know, delays in sourcing decisions because of this dynamic? Yeah, I think one thing Jun talked about today is the integration of Ethernet-based sensors. So, most lidars have an Ethernet output. A lot of the, the newest radars have an Ethernet output. So we've developed a suite of software validation tools, working on the GM program, that's really state-of-the-art. But that's a big challenge to overcome. Outside of that, there's the perception software side, which, you know, we're, we're not taking care of, for this particular OEM contract. So I think that's another area that's, that's challenging, and I think, you know, what you're seeing today isn't much different from some of the other news that you're talking about from other OEMs over the past year. Yeah. So the ADAS software integration is indeed challenging, but it's not really specific to lidar. In fact, Cepton, we make lidar, and we try to make our lidar with these Ethernet-based tools, validation procedures to make it certainly not the bottleneck of the entire stack of ADAS. And, and we actually very much shine in that. But there is a, you know, there are certainly challenges in the entire stack, integration, as you can see in the industry, but it's part of the growing pain, and it will be over in a few months. Okay, fair enough. One last question from me, and I'll jump on line here. Another interesting passage here in your press release is about technology. In fact, you're on track to launch your next-gen long-range lidar. What's your, what's your timeframe for launching? And assuming that everything stays on track here, what would be the first time you'd be like in C- sample and then getting to production? Is this something that could happen in calendar 2026, or is it farther, farther out than that? Yeah, the next-gen sample will definitely be ready for calendar year 2026 and beyond. We're already starting to demonstrate to some of the lead candidate OEMs, and we'll continue that process through the first half of next year. And even working with Koito, you know, on some of their customers on that. Okay, fair enough. That's all from me, guys. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is a follow-up from Tom Narayan with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the follow-up. I actually just had a follow-up on something Hull was saying about safety. And, you know, just wondering if, you know, right now it's an optionality you were talking about, but I wonder if you could kind of flip the script maybe, and is this something that maybe you guys could lobby or maybe the greater lidar industry could lobby regulators to potentially mandate? You know, something like, you know, use of lidar in addition to radar camera, but just like Level 2+, Level 3, even further offerings. Is that something that you guys do, lobbying regulators, or do you see that as a potential catalyst for you guys down the road? You know, we've all seen the numbers on safety. You know, the Tesla FSD notoriously gives those stats. I think their product is, like, five times safer than the regular car on the road. So yeah, just on that greater topic of lobbying regulators to make this mandatory, is that something that you think could happen? Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, definitely. Thanks for the question. So that's a great point. In fact, I did have a meeting with the Department of Transportation officials, maybe a couple of months ago, about, you know, some of these topics. It's broader, but all centered around safety, whether it's vehicle or service safety or infrastructure safety. But absolutely, we do see lidar taking the path of cameras and seatbelts and, you know, airbags in the safety of vehicles over time. So, and that's exactly what we're driving toward. And the prerequisite of that also, you know, is one of economics, too, right? So, you know, the cost has to come down over time, and that's exactly what we are working on. You know, performance goes up, goes up, cost goes down over a period of time. Got it. Thanks a lot. Of course. Thank you. This concludes our question and answer session, and I would now like to hand the call back to CEO, Jun Pei, for closing remarks. Yeah. Again, thank you very much for joining us, summarizing this record revenue quarter. We look forward to meet again next time to tally up this exciting year of 2023 and share more exciting news. Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.