Small Cap Conference. I'm Alex Hantman, and I serve as an Equity Research Analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Today, we're pleased to be in conversation with COO and President, Joe Hazelton, of Dyadic Applied Bio solutions, ticker DYAI. During the presentation, please feel welcome to submit questions using the Zoom Q&A interface at the bottom of your screen. After the presentation, we'll open to your questions. With that, Joe, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks, Alex, and thank you everyone for joining today. My name again is Joe Hazelton. I'm the President and Chief Operating Officer of Dyadic Applied Bio solutions. Prior to joining Dyadic, I spent 16 years at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation helping or directing the launch of multi-billion dollar brands like Diovan, Gilenya, and Laris, as well as others. That experience, basically bringing innovation to market and then to scale, is really central to how I've been reshaping and restructuring Dyadic. When I came on board in 2022, we were a platform-based organization with roots in deep science. Since then, and over the past three years, we've restructured the team, we've rebranded the organization, and realigned our focus with high-growth non-therapeutic markets where we can generate revenue faster and more reliably. Today, we're executing a clear strategy with our precision-engineered fungal expression platform, C1 Adaptabus. We're producing high-yield, animal-free recombinant proteins at scale. We're no longer just a platform story; we're now a product story, and we're at a commercial inflection point. Now today, we'll dive into what's driving that. As always, please refer to our SEC filings for additional detail. Let's talk about our growth story. It's really based on our filamentous fungal expression platforms, which were originally developed in the early 1990s. We validated these platforms in 2015 with a successful exit to DuPont, where they purchased our industrial business for about $75 million. What that's done is it's given us validity and created an industrial workhorse that now we're transitioning and re-engineering to move into more high-value areas where we can apply our technology. The biggest change for us, though, is over the last three years, we began focusing on non-therapeutics. As all of you know, when you're in the biotech space and you're focusing on biopharmaceuticals, you have to deal with the FDA. You have to do human clinical trials. We realized, obviously, that that is an area that pushes your revenue out. In some cases, you know, if the product's not successful, it pushes it out infinitely. What we've done is we've refocused our efforts on these non-therapeutic proteins that are in high-value segments where we feel that our platforms have specific advantages, either in terms of yield, cost, or lower regulatory and development thresholds. We've been expanding our product pipelines. We're targeting about $25 billion in addressable market opportunities across life sciences, food, nutrition, and bioindustrial. Our commercial engines are live. We're seeing the first revenue streams becoming active, such as our partnerships and some of our launch products that I'll talk about a little later. We have strategic partners and revenue traction across all of our verticals. Just to talk a little bit about the history, as I mentioned, we started in the early 1990s focusing on the industrial bioindustrial bioproduction and cellulosic enzymes. We discovered the platform in the 1990s. We advanced that. We had our exit in 2015. In 2015, we started to re-engineer the C1 platform to basically express more complex targets. In doing so, we started to focus heavily on research development, grant funding, and that was our main sources of revenue. As the markets evolved and customers across the board, not just in biopharmaceuticals, but in food, nutrition, and bioindustrials, are demanding higher quality, more sustainable, and ethically produced proteins, that aligns with the advantages that we have with our platform and being able to provide consistent, high-quality, reliable scale and contaminant and animal-free products that are customizable and efficient. That's key to where the market is heading. That's really why we're now focusing on these non-therapeutic areas as the market shifts towards non-animal solutions. We believe we can be at the forefront of that. A little bit more about how we're addressing all three of these segments. Our C1 platform retains the benefits of the early industrial platform that we licensed or we sold to DuPont in 2015 in terms of having high yield as well as low-cost expression of these proteins. Anytime you re-engineer a platform to produce more complex proteins, you limit its ability to produce higher yields in some cases. While the C1 platform is extremely versatile and very good at producing high-quality and GMP-ready products in these biopharmaceuticals, as well as input ingredient or bioprocessing for like cell and gene therapies, higher or more complex targets, it's not going to, it doesn't have the same level of horsepower that you would need to target lower or higher volume, but lower margin markets like bioindustrial or food and nutrition. We're targeting areas like cell and gene therapies, cell culture media, molecular biology reagents. Now we're at a point with the C1 platform, now that we've proven that we have GMP capability, we're not just partnering some of these products, we're also launching some of our products in this space as well. We also developed the Dapibus platform, which retains the same benefits that the C1 platform has in terms of high yield, higher productivity, but it also has lower costs and is able to essentially allow us to penetrate the food, nutrition, and the bioindustrial markets where it's more margin sensitive. Obviously, you're competing with animal-sourced products or plant-based products. In those cases, you need to have a recombinant system that not only produces high-quality targets, but can do so at the scale and the costs that are competitive with where they're currently sourcing them today. In terms of the markets that we're focusing on, the life sciences market, we estimate is around a $10 billion market opportunity for Dyadic Applied Biosolutions, with the key areas being cell and gene therapy media, diagnostics, and reagents, as well as therapeutic proteins. All of our biopharmaceutical programs, which I'll talk about later, will now be moved into what we call our legacy department. Essentially, those are going to be third-party or fully funded, externally fully funded initiatives that don't take our focus away from commercialization of non-therapeutic products across these segments. We're still going to support biopharmaceuticals, but it's not going to be the forefront of our revenue or our growth strategy over the next few years. In the food and nutrition space, we also feel that our Dapibus platform has a significant advantage in terms of its industrial heritage and being able to produce large amounts of low-cost recombinant proteins and enzymes. We're focusing on areas like animal-free dairy, cultured meats, as well as food and nutrition for like infant formula and other non-animal dairy products like medical nutrition. In the bioindustrial space, we're also getting back to our roots where we're producing and starting to launch enzymes for biomass conversion, such as creating ethanol, as well as bioprocessing aids for textiles and detergent industries. Those are, again, really getting back to what we've done well. We've partnered with Fermbox Bio, which I'll talk about when we dive a little deeper into these markets, that's allowing us to rapidly penetrate these segments. Why we're here today is we're at that inflection point. We've made the pivotal transition. We're no longer an R&D company that's essentially reliant on grant or research and development revenues in order to survive. We've rebranded the company. We've transitioned to a revenue-focused bioprocessing platform company. Now that that shift's been completed, we have our commercial engines of C1 and Dapibus that are live. They've been validated across all three of our core segments. We're starting to see the initial revenues coming in from partnerships. We expect to see revenues coming in this year from products that we intend to launch into the market as well. That focus has shifted as well from biopharmaceuticals to non-therapeutic focus, which allows us to shift our revenue into much shorter time horizons. It also doesn't make us beholden for licensing revenues as well because we're really focused on products. We have shorter times to market, very scalable and validated manufacturing platforms, and that equals faster revenue generation. We do believe that the legacy programs in biopharmaceuticals that are all externally funded partnerships, like with the Gates Foundation or CEPI, that'll maintain our visibility in the biopharmaceutical segment, as well as potentially provide us some longer-term value, you know, as we look into the past the next three years. Over the next three years, we're forecasting a step change in commercial revenue growth versus what we've been traditionally able to do. The heavy lifting's complete, and now we're positioned to scale that revenue. Diving a little deeper into the life sciences market, you know, as you look at these markets, these are obviously very large. Life sciences encompasses everything from biopharmaceuticals to, you know, diagnostic kits, you know, or tools that you put in diagnostic kits for, you know, COVID or testing for other diseases. Obviously, we're a smaller company, so we attack these in two different ways. From a company standpoint, we're focusing our development efforts in two high-value areas, one being cell culture media. These are essential products that you need for biomanufacturing of therapeutic proteins. However, they're used for the manufacturing. They don't require human clinical trials. They don't require FDA review. You have to make them at the quality as well as the cost that's required by the market, but then you're able to launch. We have a proof point in the cell culture media space, our partnership with Proliant Health & Biologicals. They're one of the largest providers of naturally derived bovine albumin in the world, and they've partnered with us to now begin offering to their global network, to their global customer base, a recombinant or non-animal protein to, again, take advantage of the market shift towards non-animal solutions. We do expect them to be launching three different grades of products in the albumin space, in the human albumin space in 2025. We expect to see other products like transferrin and growth factors. Those three products, albumin, transferrin, and growth factors, make up around 90% of the cost of cell culture media. When CDMOs are using these products to grow CHO cells to produce monoclonal antibodies, 90% of the cost, or approximately 90% of the cost of what they use to grow those cells to make a monoclonal, are between albumin, transferrin, and growth factors. We're targeting the high-value segments where there aren't efficient, cost-effective recombinant solutions today. Similarly, in the DNA and RNA technology segment, it's another fast-growing market where there aren't solid, cost-effective recombinant options today. That's where our platforms have specific advantages, being able to produce larger quantities of lower cost, high-quality recombinant proteins and enzymes. In this particular segment, these are products that are used to create mRNA vaccines or lipid nanoparticle therapies. It's used in cell and gene therapies. These products essentially manipulate DNA and RNA, and they're particularly expensive. What we're targeting is one specific market, the DNase I market, which is, we estimate, around a $250 million recombinant market opportunity within a $2 billion molecular biology reagent segment. We've completed scale-up of DNase I. Basically, DNase I is a product that cleaves DNA, so it's used in everything from creating mRNA vaccines or other therapeutic options. It's also used for things like diagnostics and cleaning medical equipment to ensure that there's no residual DNA left on some of the equipment. We're currently in the launch phase of DNase I and negotiating OEM agreements where we'll provide direct sales or direct supply to customers that will sell product. We expect to see some initial sales in 2025 from DNase I and expand that portfolio with other products in 2026 and 2027. As you look into the other markets, we're targeting in food and nutrition. This is food and nutrition or alternative proteins, which is probably a better name for this segment. It's a massive market. We're targeting very specific sections where our products have specific advantages in terms of yield and cost. Non-animal dairy, as well as other functional ingredients, is one of those markets. We look at this as about an $11 billion addressable market opportunity between non-animal dairy and other functional proteins. We also have a proof point where we've partnered with Enzymes, and they're a partner of ours making non-animal dairy enzymes. We've already received about $1.2 million in upfront and milestones, and they're launching in this non-animal dairy space in late 2025. This is an area where we have products that we can either license to customers or start to create ourselves and sell them on the market. What's notable about some of the products in this space, like recombinant alpha-lactalbumin, that's a whey protein. It's basically the other side of beta-lactoglobulin. It's one of the products that is used quite frequently and found in high amounts in animal milk today, where alpha-lactalbumin is a higher value isolate in animal milk. It's not produced in quite as great quantities, which makes it a good target for recombinant systems. We have a very high producing strain. With recombinant alpha-lactalbumin, not only can it be used in things like infant formula or medical nutrition, it has other uses such as a supplement in cell culture media in life sciences. We have cross-category fertilization of these products. [Foreign language] Straight sales, hopefully in late 2025, early 2026, with food grade launches in 2027 in other significant areas. We will talk about the bioindustrial segment. Again, kind of getting back to our roots. Bioindustrial enzymes is probably a $100 billion total market. We are focusing on areas where we have either direct experience or knowledge, or we believe that our platforms have a specific. [Foreign language] The biomass processing input market, which we feel is about a $6 billion market opportunity. What's nice is the products being developed in this space don't just work in bioprocessing. They also can have application or work in things like pulp and paper or renewable biofuels. Our revenue model is basically bulk product sales, and we're doing that through a partnership with Fermbox Bio. In the first quarter of this year, they received their first large purchase order, which they delivered in the early third quarter. Post-utilization of that initial order, it would trigger a follow-on order in the magnitude of several thousand metric tons of products. As you look at these, these are very high volume segments. Obviously, they're a little lower margin, but it's an area that we know very well. We have a great partner with Fermbox Bio that's able to scale these products rather efficiently. They already have initial contracts that are starting to drive sales. We have a 50-50 profit share partnership with Fermbox Bio. We're starting to see the initial revenues coming in from these partnerships. We'll talk about our commercialization strategy. I alluded to it a little earlier. While having a recombinant expression platform, basically, if it has a DNA sequence, we can make it. What we're doing, what we do on a day-to-day basis is relatively the same. We engineer strains to produce a protein. We do that, obviously, in very targeted markets, but we also do it in a variety of segments for our third parties. What we do every day is the same. Even though I'm talking about things like biopharmaceuticals and all the way through bioindustrial products, our job is essentially the same: engineering high-performing strains that then we can monetize in three distinct ways. We can license those strains, like we've done with Proliant Health & Biologicals, where we've seen some initial revenues. We have $1 million in upfront and milestones. We expect another milestone here in the next couple of weeks for productivity. We could strategically partner, like we've done with Fermbox Bio or Enzymes, where we see some initial revenues and milestones, but we also have a larger share of the profits on the back end. We can use direct product sales. Sometimes it's a mix. Like with DNase I, as we're negotiating and getting ready to pull the trigger on OEM agreements where we'll provide product, we can also license that strain to others that want to produce their own. It gives us, in one strain, multiple ways to monetize. That's going to help lead us to recurring revenues. We're already starting to see that through the products we're launching through our partnerships or on behalf of ourselves. It's also showing that it's a shorter time to market than traditionally what you've seen in the therapeutic space. Let's talk about what that timing looks like. How quickly can we turn these strains into money? Essentially, from the time we decided that we were going to focus on the cell culture media market and selected the DNA sequence for recombinant human albumin, we were able to engineer that strain, do the initial testing and analytics, and create the processes for manufacturing. We were able to partner with Proliant. They're a global leader in albumin. They have a global distribution network and customer base. They're the second largest producer of non-animal albumin in the world today. We started to see initial revenues in a little less than 12 months from initiating that strain. We expect to see recurring revenues within 15- 18 months from the initial revenues that we saw. These are much quicker than biopharmaceuticals, where even if we're successful in expressing the protein, we still have to rely on our partners to take it forward through human clinical trials and FDA review, which could be a five to ten-year process. Even though we may receive some milestones along the way, it's not an efficient recurring revenue model in the short-term. We have products like DNase I. This was another one where, within less than a year, we've taken it from concept through product development, done the testing and analytics, and actually scaled up the process at a CDMO in the EU. We're beginning to manufacture product for actual sale and negotiating OEM agreements. In less than a year, we're able to turn these production strains or these products into revenues. That's really the key differentiator from the Dyadic of the past. In terms of our near-term pipeline across life sciences, we talked about Proliant. We expect that they're going to be launching in 2025. Again, we've received licensing revenues, and we expect a milestone here in the third quarter. We expect to start seeing product sales in early 2026 from our partnership with them. DNase I, again, that's launching this year. We have OEM agreements that we're currently working through. We have additional products like transferrin that we're using across categories, not only in the life sciences space. It's also used in cell culture media for growing animal cells for cultured meat. We're starting to see some traction, and we expect to see potentially some initial revenues even in late 2025 from transferrin, but obviously accelerating in 2026. Similarly, the growth factor market, right now we're focusing on, you know, human FGF and bovine FGF for cell culture media, both in the life sciences space as well as cultured meat. We're sampling that product right now, and we expect to potentially see some initial sales in early 2026. We're developing additional DNA and RNA manipulation products that'll complement our DNase I franchise. We have other products like human lactoferrin and human alpha-lactalbumin that, while they fit under food and nutrition, they'll have applicability that we can commercialize sooner as cell culture media supplements in the life sciences space. We're taking a strain that, you know, may not be ready for food use, or in this case, this would be like mimicking human breast milk. You would use human alpha-lactalbumin or human lactoferrin. It can also be used in the research segment. As we're developing it for use in food products or food replacement products, it can be driving revenues for Dyadic in a research segment as well. It's an area where we have multiple opportunities to monetize. Along with that, in 2025, we have our partner Enzymes that we received milestones from in 2025, and we expect that they will launch in late 2025 in their first non-animal dairy enzyme. As I mentioned, we have bovine transferrin and cell culture media. We expect to see revenues starting to come in in this year. Bovine alpha-lactalbumin, we expect to see some licensing opportunities in this calendar year, but product sales starting, you know, in 2026 and 2027. The same thing with human alpha-lactalbumin. There are multiple opportunities in those segments. In bioindustrial, as I mentioned, our partnership with Fermbox, they're already delivering products to partners. We're sampling other partners, not only in the biofuels and biomass processing, but also in pulp and paper, textiles, and other areas. We expect to see some direct sales in 2026 from some of these products, as well as revenue starting to come in from our Fermbox agreement. As a pipeline, we're also developing hyaluronidase for use in things like cosmetics. It also can be used in life sciences for injectables. We expect to see some revenues going out. As you can see, we're building a portfolio. We've built a portfolio that we're starting to commercialize now to start driving revenues and then layering in additional products to help us accelerate revenue in 2026 and 2027. With all of that, as I mentioned before, we're not going to abandon biopharmaceuticals. We still believe that it provides good sources of non-dilutive funding, but it's really the strategic validation and global visibility of the C1 platform to produce therapeutics that we're gaining from this. We have partnerships with the Gates Foundation. We received a $3 million grant, $1.5 million milestone, $1.5 million milestone we received in 2025. We're also part of the European Vaccines Hub, which is a $170 million initiative where our platform, our C1 platform, is part of the discovery pillar. Dr. Rino Rappuoli is probably one of the foremost thought leaders in vaccinology. If you don't know who he is, he's definitely worth a Google. He was head of vaccinology for both Novartis, Chiron, and GSK. He's leading this initiative to develop basically pandemic preparedness for this European Vaccine Hub and is a strong believer in the C1 platform. The key is these are all going to be fully funded partnerships that will be externally funded. It's not going to take resources in terms of human capital or financial in order for us to keep these moving. We do expect that these will provide us some additional lift as we get into seven to eight years from now. These products take a long time to develop. You have to do the clinical trials. You have to get the product approved. We have strong partnerships that are well funded in order to see some of these through. We're not abandoning it, but it's not detracting us from our focus today, which is on near-term recurring revenues. To kind of wrap everything up here, we have proven platforms. We know that our platforms can produce large amounts of low-cost recombinant proteins and enzymes, that it's capitalizing on the market push for high-quality, sustainable, non-animal solutions. We have two platforms that help us address separate segments of these markets. We have C1 for life sciences and everything from reagent and research use all the way through therapeutics. However, our focus is on non-therapeutic products, which enables us to have nearer-term revenues because we don't have the regulatory or the financial burdens that are attributed to biopharmaceuticals. We have a broad pipeline both in partnerships as well as internal products that are targeting about a $25 billion total market opportunity. We're continuing to expand that pipeline in these larger markets. Right now, we're at that inflection point. We're actually beginning to commercialize products that are getting onto the market. That's the key differentiator from the Dyadic of the past, where we were hopeful that a pharma company would either license the technology or take a vested interest in the company. We're no longer reliant on that licensing or R&D revenue. We're actually generating products, and we've evolved from R&D to these first revenue streams that we're looking to accelerate. We have active partnerships with outstanding partners across all three of our segments. We expect, obviously, some big things from Proliant, Enzymes, and Fermbox as we move forward. With that, I'll pause there and see if there's any questions. Great, Joe. Thank you very much for sharing all of that exciting information. Maybe we'll combine a few questions. I think you gave us a really nice picture of some of the different end markets and market sizes. Could you help us tie it together to understand what might be the revenue ramp over the next few years and sort of that path to profitability and how it aligns with the current capitalization of the company? It's a great, great question. The nice thing about Dyadic is we do have a relatively low burn rate between $4 million- $5 million a year. We anticipate, you know, by the end of 2026 to be cash flow positive. That's going to be from the products that are launching today, either through partnerships or through ourselves, in addition to licensing and other revenues that we will see coming in, either from partnerships that we're going to execute or third-party projects that are coming in. As we are now shifting from biopharmaceuticals, we're starting to see much more inbound interest in our technology because we're applying it to these broader segments, such as industrial or food and nutrition. As far as ramp and what could be achieved, you look at a market like, let's just say, cell culture media. There are individual albumin products like Albumedix. They have a Recombumin. Recombumin is their product. It's basically a recombinant human albumin that's used for vaccine stabilization or high-grade clinical use. That company was purchased by Sartorius for $500 million in 2022. That was based on basically their initial revenues, which was a very good multiple. As you look at it, these individual products are very valuable and there aren't good recombinant solutions. We're partnered with one of the largest players in the global albumin space with Proliant Health & Biologicals. Just that product alone is entering a billion-dollar market. They're targeting billion-dollar market opportunities with a customer base that probably already makes up 70% of the total utilization of albumin in the world. We expect, obviously, that could, you know, we're not expecting, you know, tens of millions overnight, but we expect that to ramp rather quickly through the partnerships. In addition, we have other products like transferrin and growth factors that'll quickly come in to supplement that growth. Again, cash flow positive by the end of next year. The goal is in three years that we are obviously profitable and then some. I can't give you, you know, obviously specifics until we start to see the market uptake and the penetration in some of these segments. That's just one segment. That's just cell culture through Proliant as well as some of our other products. You have to layer in food and nutrition and bioindustrial where we're already starting to see revenues in both of those spaces as well. We do think the future is very bright in terms of growth. Makes sense. I think that's a nice spot to end. I'd like to thank you, Joe, for sharing the Dyadic story with us. I also thank everybody listening for spending time with us today. Absolutely. Thank you all for your time. Always happy to entertain other questions.