Everything in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, will be forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings to better understand eXoZymes as a business, our risk factors, and as an investment opportunity. With that, I would like to welcome you to our Q1 2025 call, where we also have an update on NCTx. My name is Lasse Görlitz. I'm the VP of Communications, and I'll be hosting this call today. We'll shortly have an update from our management team. While presenting, you have the opportunity to ask questions, so please write them down, and at the end of the presentations, we will do a Q&A session. With that, let's get rolling. Thank you, Lasse. Michael Heltzen here, CEO of eXoZymes Incorporated. This earnings call has been recorded over the last couple of days as we are on the road for conferences and in personal meetings. Our agenda for the day is on the screen, and we have a lot to cover, so let's get started. First, I want to welcome all our new followers and investors and say that we will not be repeating our pitch and strategy for each earnings call, but we do have a lot of new people following us, and we have therefore made this online page available where if you're interested in getting the overview and introduction of eXoZymes Incorporated as an investment and business opportunity, this is where you can go. Our Q1 highlights and lowlights coming up. Basically, this specific quarter, starting in the beginning of the year, we have seen very high performance by our team, and I'm obviously super proud of that as the CEO. We are punching above our weight as a small team, and it's getting only better. Damien joining us has hit the ground running and is a really good fit, so we have a lot of hopes and expectations for an even better future. SynBioBeta is the biggest conference in the synthetic biology space. It was a hit, and we'll talk more about that here in a minute, but definitely a highlight. eXoZymes is being noticed, so our rebranding campaign and our new brand and our new way of introducing ourselves to the world and our bell ringing and the multiple interviews and being a cover story on Genetic Engineering News, of course, all helped with that. Our first commercial value and the inflection point of spinning out a company based on technology powered by eXoZymes has happened, the NCTx launch, and we will today also be going into that conversation. Let's now watch a video with Damien. G'day from San Jose. We couldn't be more delighted to be here at this gathering of the best and brightest in synthetic biology to share what's happening with eXoZymes. We are announcing that we're developing a target, NCT, N-trans-caffeoyltyramine, and the spin-out of our company called NCTx for the purposes of continuing the commercialization of this wonderful ingredient. What really, really impresses me is how quickly the team has been able to move from idea to proof of concept in about six weeks, and then coming together with conviction that this is a target we really want to commercialize and moving into a spin-out in a matter of 12. This is the conviction pin that our industry needs to be able to move with expediency and urgency towards meeting the demands of our future markets with the technology in our hands today. N-trans-caffeoyltyramine has already been shown in various research papers to have positive effects against fatty liver metabolism, gut barrier function, and mitochondrial health, giving us that inspiration that this is an ingredient that will have real-world applications in food and nutrition where consumers want to be able to eat healthier, but also in pharmaceuticals. There is another element here where AI comes into play because we're not just designing the process to meet the quality and volume needs of these two markets, but we're also designing analogs around NCT to offer our clinical development partners even further diversity to work with, to find molecules that may have even improved function against those future application areas they want to meet. Once again, we're super excited to be here and to be sharing this story with the world, with our colleagues in the world of SynBioBeta. Thank you. After SynBioBeta, Damien recorded the following update for us. G'day. We're all safely returned from San Jose, where we spent the last week attending the SynBioBeta 2025 conference. This is the global leading conference for advancements in synthetic biology and the future of our bioeconomy. We went to this conference with the following objectives. Firstly, to announce our spin-out NCTx and our lead development candidate for nutrition and pharmaceutical potential, N-trans-caffeoyltyramine. Secondly, we want to create connections and explore partnership possibilities for our enzyme services, eXoZymes Biosolutions, and for NCTx. Finally, we wanted to lift the eXoZymes brand value and its recognition. We accomplished the following. Our NCTx press release was one of just a few announcements highlighted on day one on stage by SynBioBeta CEO John Cumbers. This led to many follow-on discussions as partner prospects wanted to understand more about the story and our program going forward. The eXoZymes team was represented by VP of Research Tyler Korman, VP of Business Development Zachary Karl, VP of Communications Lasse Görlitz, and myself. The team was able to have over 60 unique meetings, resulting in over 35 documented follow-ups and next steps, creating much activity to follow. Our LinkedIn profile during the event averaged over 1,165 impressions per day, more than doubling our average from April and a 6x increase in following from March, demonstrating a brand recognition for us is growing substantially just through our organic activities. Finally, after a busy week, I must say it felt a little bit like camp. We started the week reconnecting with many old friends and previous partners and finishing the week with many new connections and promises to write and follow up. Thank you. With that exciting update from SynBioBeta from Damien, I can also point out that there has been a lot of other activities in the quarter. We have had a number of interviews and articles and news events happening. Obviously, from a getting attention point of view, the bell ringing and NASDAQ was a big thing. We had just done the rebranding, and we got all of that positive attention on us and on the brand right as we had done the rebranding, obviously by design, but it was very positive to see it working out well. We have had a number of articles written about us. Some of them are here on the page. We had interviews that also ended up being shown on TV, so that was really good. We got the BioClick grant that in itself is a big financial help, but also to do the development work, but also a really good story that made people understand technically what it is we are capable of. We also made a publication, a peer-reviewed publication together with a number of our partners, and it became the cover story of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. That has restarted a conversation about next-generation biomanufacturing and specifically how to use cell-free enzymatic pathways outside of the cell that we have now termed eXoZymes as a concept via this publication. We are also going to talk about how there were lowlights this quarter. Overall, if you are a public company, you probably have noticed that there's a lot of uncertainty going around. Without pointing fingers, it is about also seeing the opportunities in the somewhat uncertain times. For us specifically, I believe that there might be a good opportunity for U.S. biomanufacturing, moving manufacturing from abroad back to the U.S. and figuring out exactly how to make the drugs and the chemicals of the future on U.S. soil. That might be a benefit. The harder part where it's to find the silver lining is the future of grants. There's a lot of uncertainty in that area, and we have been good at getting grants, so we are slightly concerned that that opportunity might be less in the future. It's just overall a time for tough prioritizations and making sure we're really capital efficient. The good news on that is that we're really good at that. We have been good at that from the beginning, and we will continue that. It basically allows us to apply our hardcore focus on what it is we are building from only buying and spending money on what is need-to-haves and not the nice-to-haves. Overall, it's also sometimes painful as an ambitious CEO to see that we have more opportunities than we have bandwidth, but that's just because we are a young state and still growing. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Fouad Nawaz, and I serve as a VP of Finance at eXoZymes. Our financial results for the first quarter of 2025 are detailed in our published 10-Q. I will take a moment to review these results. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus remains on prudent financial management while making targeted investments to drive long-term growth. As of the end of March 31st, 2025, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $8.51 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support ongoing operations and key initiatives into 2026. Our total operating expenses for the quarter were $1.95 million, which represents an increase of $942,000 compared to the first quarter of 2024. The increase in 2025 was primarily driven by R&D investments, professional expansion of the leadership, operations, and an R&D team. Bonus accruals, additional legal, audit, and tax, and other professional fees to build, support, improve our internal operations and overall infrastructure. The net loss for the quarter was $1.86 million. We remain disciplined in our spending approach and ensure capital is allocated efficiently to maximize shareholder value. Additionally, we continue to explore non-dilutive funding opportunities, strategic partnerships, and potential government grants to further strengthen our financial position. That concludes my presentation of the financials. I wanted to take a brief moment and walk through our website and maybe show you a few components of our website that are a little bit more relevant to an investor. There is a lot more information on the website pertaining to news and specific to the company, a lot more than you would see in our SEC filings. I just wanted to go through and walk you through some of that. For instance, we have our most recent earnings call, and that's easily provided there. There's a sign-up function for you to provide your email address and get news updates from our business. There's a lot of video and news content, a direct link to our stock price and any other relevant financial information. More importantly, if you go into the news section, there's a good, I mean, there's approximately seven or, sorry, five pages of information here that is very relevant to somebody who's trying to understand exactly what we do and how we're progressing towards that objective. If you go through our governance documentation, you'll see a lot of our policies and governance documents. If you go through our SEC filings, you'll be able to link directly to all of our SEC filings. More importantly, there's a lot of video content relating to our technology, how we're progressing, updates in the business. For instance, we've just hired Damien Perriman as our CCO, and there's an interview with him, Fox Business News interviews. There's a lot of content here that will really give you an understanding of what it is that we do and how we're progressing towards that objective. I would urge you to sign up so that you can continue to see additional information as it comes along, and it'll be very beneficial for you to get a better understanding of the business. Thank you so much for taking the time. With that, I'll pass the call back. Thank you. Okay. So we've had the highlights and the lowlights. Let's now look at what we call the headlights. What is ahead of us here? Headlights, we have a lot of work to do with all the amazing conversations and opportunities that arose from SynBioBeta. Again, a focus exercise. Who are the top five, the top 10% of all of those opportunities that we should really be spending our time and energy on? NCTx, as a company, our spin-out, has become the hot news in the industry. A lot of people are talking about it. What are we up to? Why that specific market? Also, how does our new technology result in competitive advantages that have not been seen before? I have, amongst other things, been interviewed in a podcast that will be airing soon. Of course, we'll share that when it becomes publicly available. We have a lot of people that would like to talk to us about this business opportunity, and we will soon be issuing a call for partnerships, reaching out broadly to whoever would be interested in participating in building NCTx, either from an investment point of view or from building the company, supplying the company, taking part in the company, and also reaching out to see what talent is available for this opportunity. All of those things are our next steps in the process of creating this new company and making sure to create as much shareholder value as possible. We are also working on the next business opportunity. Obviously, I can't and won't talk about that until we are ready and can broadly share the information with everybody. We can open up for the point that it's most likely a joint venture or a spin-out opportunity as well. These are opportunities we launch ourselves to basically prime the system. When we talk with our licensing potential partners, they can see things that have been built with the technology, they can better understand the competitive advantages our technology provides when we have specific conversations about specific markets. At the same time, they can definitely, because of the design of the setup here, sit down and study those cases. They're like, "Okay, if they can do that with this molecule in this space, then they can do that with our molecule in our space." Therefore, basically, people can license not just technology, but competitive advantages. That is really where the commercial value comes from. We have a relentless focus on execution. That's just a must being a smaller, young company that is growing. That means we're focused on hitting our value inflection points. It means the partnership and the business development efforts and overall growing the company and always having an eye towards our talent, the talent we have been so lucky to be blessed with already, but also attracting new talented people. It is with excitement that I can now talk about how we have launched our first fully owned subsidiary, a.k.a. spin-out business, NCTx. NCT, that is the small molecule, X showing we can make many different versions of it, also called analogs. Let's start with how it fits into our strategy. We have talked about how on the last earnings call, how nutraceuticals that has a relatively fast path to market and to licensing opportunities that is especially interesting if they also have a pharmaceutical potential is really the area we want to specialize in first. NCT is a great example of that, especially because we can make new-to-nature analogs of this natural compound called NCT, and that basically widens the pharmaceutical value and potential. In other words, a way of really getting value out of our technology. The first fully owned subsidiary is focused here short-term because we can much faster bring these guys to market and also learn from the development while we are building these things at scale, learning so we can conceptualize that scaling-up process both from the nutraceuticals and the pharmaceutical potentials so those conceptual things can be baked into the next either spin-outs, joint ventures, or with time, the licensing deals. It is a slightly longer business development route to set up licensing deals, both because larger companies are less nimble and less fast and concise as we are as a smaller company to take decisions, but also because it is fair game that before someone puts their product line or their department or their whole company on our new technology platform, they want to see that we have eaten our own medicine, so to say, or at least used our own technology to make business. You can argue therefore the spin-outs and the joint ventures also serve a dual role of basically warming up, priming the market for this next generation of biomanufacturing. I think it's important when we talk about powered by eXoZymes that we realize that people are not necessarily looking for new technology when they're buying these kinds of things. They're actually looking for competitive advantages. We are very, very focused on where our current version of the technology brings the most competitive advantage. We will now dive into NCT as a business opportunity. On today's earnings call, I'll just give you an overview. We will, on a later either video or online meeting, be going much deeper into the NCT business opportunity with more focus on the details. Also, because we are still in a position where we have just announced it and we are getting the very positive reactions from a lot of different people, we want to have those things basically interviewed and organized and maybe even partly committed to by the time we create the overview of how we want to execute exactly with the NCTx entity. The last note on the slide that says powered by eXoZymes, it's very important to understand that when we do this spin-out, we are obviously capturing all of that value in the spin-out company, in the eXoZymes Incorporated company. If you're an investor in eXoZymes already, then you are indirectly already an owner of NCTx, and we have it as a fully owned subsidiary. If we take a decision to let other people come into that ownership circle, then that is only because they bring more to the table than basically what percentage of the company they will get. We will have the eXoZymes shareholders very, very much in mind when we take these decisions. This is both true short-term when we do partnerships, but also long-term when we potentially and we will be selling off these companies with time. Of course, that is with the eXoZymes shareholders in mind. I am not going to try to pronounce NCT because Damien did it so well already. I can skip over that. It is a small molecule that is a natural ingredient or natural compound found in nature, observed in nature first, and by preclinical research understood to have very interesting health benefits potentials. If you go to the webpage of NCTx.1, we will link to that as well, then you can read about basically these, you can read these publications yourself and see the potential benefits that is theorized. There is a very clear focus on fatty liver because it is a huge unmet medical need, but also a nutraceutical opportunity. 30%, actually more than 30% of all people are already having non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. That is the first stage of a liver disease where people can end up in some very, very tough situations. This is obviously because of our lifestyle and our access to basically too easy access to food. We have the whole obesity challenge in our generation. What this specific compound allows for is our liver specifically to shed fat, which is a very, very important thing for our overall health as our liver is basically the recycle and sorting mechanism in our body for everything we get into our body. Studies suggest that there are also other potential benefits: gut barrier functions, reduced inflammation, and some opportunities related to a drug receptor that is called HNF4α. Having the ability to hit this drug receptor, especially with our analogs, makes it a very interesting pharmaceutical potential. If you look at how NCT is made today, basically, you can see back to our core pit of why it's so difficult to make chemicals sometimes and these medicinal compounds. Either you try to harvest it from nature, but if you take it from where it exists, for example, in the hemp seed, then you end up with, from the plant material, you get 0.015%. That's basically nothing. It's a trace amount. It means you're going to burn through a whole lot of hemp seeds to get enough that it has any nutraceutical nor pharmaceutical opportunity. It's literally just not a way of providing the market. People have tried with some biocell-based approaches, and we've already talked about how that can be very costly, very slow, can end up with relatively low purity, and be very hard to commercially scale. None of that allows for these very precise analogs where we have design and engineering-level control. Basically, the existing methodologies limit the market opportunity. It is very satisfying for us to be able to, in record time, build a bio-solution that produces NCT. We have done that at a fraction of the cost, much faster. Just to repeat it because we are so proud of it, we can make and engineer analogs of NCT. That means we can get IP protection on those, and we can get potentially better outcomes. These are the kind of real competitive advantages we talk about when we say powered by eXoZymes. We have obviously put a patent application on this new methodology to make NCT and the new analogs. That is for the pharma side. From the nutraceutical side, this is a naturally occurring compound. That means you can't patent the natural product. Therefore, it becomes a game of who can become the cost leader, who can produce it the most efficient and therefore the cheapest. That is another business opportunity that we are well-positioned to be successful in. This is the short overview. If you're more interested in further details, exactly how we're going to do these things, there will be a presentation or video about that later, partly because it's too early for us to disclose these things, partly because some of the things we want to make happen have not happened yet, and also because this is an earnings call. Giving you an overview of this spin-out is the first thing to do. With that, just want to remind everybody, if you know someone that is in a pharmaceutical business or in a nutraceutical business that could be interested in NCT, then of course, when we have the material ready, you can send that. Otherwise, we have the webpage of NCTx.1. That is a very good starting point for people that have an interest and want to have more of the background material, for example, the preclinical studies that have been done. With that, we will conclude with questions. With that, we go over to the live session. All right. Back to the live session. Thank you for sticking around. Now I am joined by eXoZymes CEO, Michael Heltzen. Good to see you all again. Yes. Thank you for all the questions during the presentations, quite a few. We have selected no less than eight different questions, actually. I guess the Q&A will be a little longer today. Let's go ahead, and I'll ask the questions, and then I'll let Michael answer. First question, why was NCT chosen as eXoZymes' first commercial compound? Yeah, that's a very good question. Basically, we have built a filtering mechanism where we're looking at all the different opportunities and what fits us well. The reason why NCT goes first is because it's very evident that our technology is a good fit for that specific compound, that there is a very big opportunity. Other players have already put a lot of time and effort into trying to provide bio-solutions and compounds for NCT and have spent almost a handful of years and more than $100 million on it. Just to show the power of our technology that we can, in a matter of weeks instead of years, make the first versions of these bio-solutions. Also, we got very intrigued about the fit to our focus strategy of having a nutraceutical component, that this is something that can very likely be recognized as safe, a GRAS opportunity from the nutraceutical perspective. Because we have the ability to make analogs of this natural compound, we can address the pharmaceutical side. Short put, from a short perspective, it's just a really good fit from the technology to the need of that market. With the right partners, we'll be able to bring something to market that has a really strong competitive advantage. That was why we chose NCT. Thank you. We'll skip to the next question here. Can you explain to your investors why you are taking the approach that you are to spin-out NCT as opposed to doing other types of monetization? That's a good question. Finding the balance of our business model where we are licensing out packages of technology versus, on the other end of the scale, bringing it to market ourselves is basically the point of a spin-out. It is basically the range of what we can do. With joint ventures in the middle, where you can argue that is a combination of the two, specifically for NCT, and because it is the first compound, we decided to go with a spin-out because we have seen that there is interest in the market. By going out and showing how fast we can make the progress, we are not just creating the NCT opportunity itself. We are also helping to show the power of the platform. There's that dual perspective in it. Will the NCT spin-out be joined by potential investors, partners, and what is the gearing of that going to be? That is to be shown over the next quarter or quarters, basically, as we are taking from SynBioBeta all the way to now making a call for partners. We're taking that in and setting up the winning team there. Why the spin-out? Because it goes fast. A number of the licensing deals that we are in conversations about are going to take a long time. They're with very large companies. They are, from a decision-making speed perspective, never going to be as fast as us taking internal decisions. Good. All right. Thank you for the short answer. No, I think it's of course, that's what this question requires. Just yep, we'll skip to the next one. Tell us more about the new natural product and what is in the pipeline for health and nutrition. Yes. We already talked about NCT here in the presentation. This question allows us to go a little bit deeper in why is it natural products, so compounds that are found out in nature already, that are a good fit for us, especially here in the beginning of the platform. It's basically because when it's a known natural product, someone else has found a compound and either theorized or proven that it has some kind of beneficial opportunity in nutraceuticals or in the pharmaceutical space. Basically, we don't need to do that work. Number two, because it's a natural product, we know the genetic code for the enzymes inside of that plant or the organism. By basically having that already as a starting point, it makes it much, much easier for us to then have that as a starting point, using our AI and bioengineering capabilities to make the enzymes into eXoZymes and therefore building the bio-solutions. From that perspective, natural products in general are a good fit. NCT, we already talked about why that went first. Obviously, I can't disclose any of the things in the pipeline before we have signed on those deals and announced them. It is fair to say that because we are coming from natural products in a number of the conversations we are in, it will be health and nutrition-oriented because that is where nutraceuticals typically go, especially if they have a pharmaceutical potential. Great. We'll go on to the next one. Will eXoZymes seek patent protection for the NCT variants? Yes, and has already been done. Again, just to unpack that, NCT is a natural product. The natural product can't be patented on its own. What can be patented is the treatment use of that. There are people that have patented NCT with certain indications. Of course, we respect that. What makes us in a unique position is that by making the analogs that are basically natural compound plus/minus a feature from a chemical perspective, we can most likely end up with something that is, depending on what the feature is, more potent or has less side effects or other features. That is a new-to-nature compound. That means we can get a 20-year patent on that. We have already sent in the patent application. All right. Here is another question. On the eXoZymes website, it states that NCTx is the only company that can make NCT and its analogs. I believe I came across some publications from another company that's already done this. Could you elaborate on that? Yep. Absolutely. It is true that there are a number of companies that have been intrigued about NCT already. NCT was found a couple of places in nature, but specifically, the company you're probably talking about found this compound in the husk of hemp seeds. Very tiny, tiny trace amounts. As you can probably imagine, when it's the husk of the seed, you would need an enormous amount of seeds to get enough compound to work with. For these companies that have tried the isolation route, and that is basically impossible or impractical, there are people that have tried to create it from the medicinal chemistry point of view. First of all, that will never lead to a nutraceutical by definition. Also, even getting it to scale for the pharmaceutical use is very difficult. There are most likely people that have tried out with SynBio related, and they might or might not have been successful in that. We are pretty sure in competition with our systems, we would be in a good position. Now to the core of this, it is not so much about the natural version of NCT. It is that we, with our enzymes, eXoZymes, that are able to do things you cannot do otherwise, that opens up for the whole analog opportunity. That is really where we believe we will have our competitive advantages. We are not too afraid that there are other people in the space. For us, it is actually just a verifier that it is a very, very intriguing space with very large opportunities to make positive impact and also to make value in the future, short future. Yeah. Perfect. All right. On to the next question, which will be this and two more. Yes. How will launching NCT help with future compound launches or spin-outs? What are the main lessons eXoZymes hope to learn from this first adventure? I really like that question. It actually loops up to one of the first questions, like, why spinning it out? We want to learn every single step of the way. We are very focused on conceptualizing as much as we can so that when we do things the next time, the next bio-solution, that we are either reusing as much as possible or we are at least using the same protocols and standards and methodologies so that all of these things get very scalable and basically understood step by step. We hope and frankly expect to learn a fair bit putting this into biomanufacturing production. I could probably spend most of an hour talking about all the things we can learn from that. The main lessons is basically how we do this balancing of how fast we should push the nutraceutical angle versus the pharmaceutical potential and how we make sure to maintain that double dip position without overspending or without overfocusing on just the one side. That is going to be very intriguing to learn. There's some great opportunities in putting the compound in production for nutraceuticals and then making analogs at the same time. We can reuse a lot from that perspective. Yep. All right. Can you estimate how large the NCT opportunity could be over time? Yes. I am obviously not going to put numbers on. We have, as we talked about on the video, a deeper dive into the NCT market opportunity. We have a number of negotiations and opportunities we need to settle first to have some cornerstones for that conversation. It depends on exactly what we do. If you just start with the simple fact that what looks very intriguing from a perspective of fatty liver disease, we're talking about a disease that is a huge unmet medical need that 30% of everybody has already today. That's a disease that very few people had a generation ago. It is obviously because of our lifestyle and how we live. That is an enormous opportunity to be able to address that market. Without putting numbers on, a very, very large opportunity. We will get back with more precise guidance on that. That is not going to be on this earnings call. Excellent. There was a lot of questions surrounding NCT, which, of course, is to be expected as that is sort of the new and the big milestone. Let's finish off with the last question, which is not NCT. What's the impact of getting the cover story in Gen Biotechnology? Yeah. Okay. That's a good question. That is maybe harder for most investors to just look at and understand the impact opportunity. First of all, let's take the short version. It basically is a way we get recognized as a key opinion leader when it comes to this new space of eXoZymes and using a new generation of biomanufacturing that is cell-free instead of cell-based. It is clearly a recognition that this is an important topic. It is an important direction that biomanufacturing is taking. Obviously, us co-publishing together with prominent people, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL, and others, being able to start communicating that there are new ways of doing biomanufacturing is a great opportunity, maybe less investor-related, but clearly in the industry and on SynBioBeta and other places, a very big deal. It is always an honor to be the cover story. Absolutely. It is going to have impact, maybe more on the scientific side, yes? Yes. But in partners. Absolutely. Of course, it goes hand in hand with the overall image that we are projecting to the whole world of eXoZymes. With that, I would like to conclude today's call. Thank you all for participating. This recording will be made available and also as a transcript within the next day or so. Thank you all and have a great day. Thank you.