Well, everyone, welcome to today's fireside chat with Gorilla Technology. I'm your host, John Roy. I cover technology here at Water Tower Research, and today I'm joined by Jay Chandan, the CEO of Gorilla. Jay, good to see you again. Likewise, John. Hope it's all has been well with you. Absolutely. I should mention that the company's safe harbor statements can be found on their website. Also, this fireside chat may not be reproduced or written transcript distributed without the express written consent of Water Tower Research. So with that, Jay, why don't we get started? And for those that don't know Gorilla, why don't you give us a quick overview of what the company does? Absolutely. So, John, first of all, thanks for having me once again. It's been a very exciting period for us. You know, we've been deploying mission-critical AI security platforms, as people understand it. It's video intelligence, post-event analytics, secure network intelligence, lawful interception, IPDR capabilities, as and when the customer's required. Now, we've pretty much built up to scale and resilience as we build for, you know, as we build for national infrastructure. But what is very unique about it is what the AI infrastructure we've been building has moved from being purely what I call software and the solutions company, but into a sovereign-grade AI compute with increased data center capabilities across the regions, whether it's Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, East Asia, and so on and so forth. Now, the headline example, for example, is the three-year contract we signed with Freyr for about $1.4 billion. And the first $300 million is currently being launched in Thailand as we speak. I'm actually sitting here right in Thailand right now. And the structure will lead to us building our AI infrastructure layer and the GPU deployments as we go forward. Now, when we go through the motions of that, if you look at the other side of it, we've pushed hard on the foundations. We are strengthening our inferences across multiple accelerator types, and we're extending all our capabilities with enterprise customers such as Toyota as well. It's not just, you know, sovereign AI data centers. We've also advanced our O.N.E. Amazon stack with our real sensors running on AWS with full operational capability layers with our NOCs and SSOs. We've also continued to work on lawful interceptions. You've seen that we won actually two other deals in Southeast Asia, and these were big IPDR programs with the customers, and there we were able to deploy our existing 5G LI solutions. At the same time, we started productizing our solution, our intelligent network director solutions as well, along with our firewall capabilities. I can proudly tell you today, John, that we're now building our solutions for post-quantum readiness, which means design today to withstand all of the security threats of tomorrow, and more importantly, make sure that we're already not being too late. Now, on the scale side, finally, you know, we've created our Indonesia data center program. We're in the final stage of closing the SOWs and the SLAs, and we're moving from paperwork into mobilization. Our phase I, as I'd mentioned, is $300 million of deployment, and in parallel, we're also now executing additional paperwork for the $450 million phase running alongside it as well. So we're working very, very tight timelines with our OEM partners, making sure we're working with NVIDIA to lock all the delivery timelines and so on and so forth, and bringing the best of breed of all of the GPU tranches in the Blackwell generation systems, including our GB200 plus architecture. So what are we doing? What does Gorilla do? We're investing behind execution. That means we're building out our R&D teams in Thailand. We're scaling up our engineering teams in India. We've expanded our footprints across Taiwan, Thailand, India, and we're increasing our hiring cycles to match both the delivery pipeline as well as making sure that we're able to create a productization schedule so that we're making our deployments repeatable. That's important. I'm also very proud to say that we will have our two new offices, one in Singapore and one in Indonesia over the next two weeks. We'll be hiring about 20 new people in our Jakarta office over the next 40 days, and we'll also be building our India data center team as we speak. So long and short of it is we're not trying to be noisy. We're just trying to be inevitable. That's Gorilla. That sounds like great progress. Speaking of progress, I mean, obviously Amazon is a big deal, and I believe someone won a Nobel Award for [audio distortion], or I should say was a finalist for the Nobel Award. Correct. Maybe you could give us a little insight and color on how that all came about and how crazy was it? It has been crazy since then. It's really difficult to overstate, John, what it means, what the recognition means, because nobody dreams of waking up one day or being born and saying, "Listen, I want to be part of the Nobel, you know, sustainability plan." Now, people often underestimate the weight behind it. This is not one of those awards where you just wake up one morning, you get it, you have a nice dinner, and everybody goes home, frame certificate, logo, blah, blah, blah. No. This was a formal nomination for 2025 Sustainability Awards in the category of leadership and implementation for Jay Chandan. Now, what that wording really matters because it's not just about the good intentions or the clever stacks we prepared. It's also about actually building on a national scale where sustainability is engineered into the infrastructure itself. Now, the Nobel Sustainability Trust, everybody knows about it, is an institution that has changed and shaped the global thinking on responsibility, right? I mean, when you say Nobel, everybody talks about responsibility. But it's also about how the progress is made for the future of this planet, and when I met with the Nobels, I spent a lot of time over the last few months with them. They are absolutely on top of it. They breathe sustainability, so for me, there's no shortcut to getting on top of that pyramid. It's not the way you can just bluff in and market your way in. For me, it was very meaningful, and most importantly, it was also very surreal. Why? Because I built my career with building complex systems across the world, whether it was Nigeria, whether it was Thailand, whether it was Latin America, whether it was India, very complex markets, and I was never chasing flaws, but to suddenly find that our work is being acknowledged by an institution associated with a Nobel legacy, for me, it was about a pause and think, "Okay, what does that mean?" Maybe all those late nights I did, all those stubborn decisions weren't completely irrational. Now, for Gorilla, it was a validation. What did it mean for Gorilla? It tells the market, "We're just not talking nonsense. We're not talking about sustainable AI. We're deploying it at national scale," right? Whether it's the O.N.E. Amazon, whether it's the Taiwan Airport, whether it's the, you know, for the Thai projects, whether it's the India investments we're currently making and looking, going after the AI across the Indian subcontinent, I often say sustainability only counts when it survives the contact with reality, so for me, the challenge is not about being nominated. It's about being recognized, and frankly, I wouldn't have it another way, but it makes me even more now think larger than I've ever done before. Wow. Congratulations again. You certainly deserve it. Thank you, sir. Now, you have continued to make investments in other ways. I believe you made an acquisition recently or closed on a deal, Astrikos? Astrikos, yes. We invested in the company. Yes. So we did not invest. I've been watching all the, you know, the blogs and so on and so forth. And I've seen people talk about, "Hey, it's just another fancy logo." No, it's not. We invested in India because it's the fastest moving theater right now for AI adoption and national scale digital infrastructure deployment. Now, what does Astrikos do? Astrikos is building AI-driven platforms and built a whole product suite aimed at turning infrastructure into operational outcomes across different verticals. What most people don't realize is that they actually have a whole bunch of product suites, which is now deployed in various cities and states in India. They have a contract with NEOM, and they're also very actively engaged in the United States. Now, so what did that do? Their product, you know, they've got a whole bunch of products, you know, Omnific, Cognus, this company we have a product called Kolaz, KIM, and so on. These are all about measuring impacts across different data collection platforms so that they can make decisions at scale. Now, what is the biggest challenge for us when we went into India is that there were three different market categories we wanted to address: AI compute, data centers, and more importantly, sovereign security. Now, if you look at AI as a strategically compelling story in India today, the demand, according to, I think, Grand View Research, in 2024, they were at about $15 billion, but by 2033, they're going to more than $330 billion. That's a 40% CAGR. Okay? I would be a fool to ignore that market and that incremental growth. But on the other side, if you look at data centers, they're growing from what, $9-$10 billion, again, according to Grand View, to about $30 billion by 2032, 2033. Again, that's something we cannot ignore. And there's also proof in the pudding. If you look at the hyperscalers, for example, they've actually proven the thesis. Microsoft recently announced, I think as recent as about three days ago, announced a $17.5 billion investment into AI in India. Amazon has already planned more than $35 billion of investment. And Google just recently committed, I think, about $15 or $16 billion. So what does that mean for Gorilla? What does Astrikos mean? We're actually building a serious delivery engine across India and Southeast Asia so that we can scale up demand. Now, Astrikos provides us a complementary product portfolio where we can actually go out to the market, not just in India or the neighboring regions, globally, where our data center programs can actually provide compute foundation for the AI adoption rates, which the globe is going through right now. So we're investing in India purely because India is where we believe AI will become infrastructure and infrastructure will become national capability. So that's Astrikos. That's one. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. There's been a lot of news flow about India, certainly, for sure. Yeah. So you've mentioned, obviously, a variety of projects. Maybe if you were to take a step back for a second and just kind of highlight the top three or four that you see that are going on right now that are, I'd really like to hear about differentiated stuff, right? Stuff that you really think makes Gorilla shine. Yep. That's a really good one. You put me on the spot there. I'm trying to figure out the four. Okay, let me give you four. The short answer for me would be we have execution and we have references. Okay? Now, as you know, we signed a very large project with the government of Egypt. You know, at that point in time, people were like, "Oh, Egypt, come on. What's happening there?" Now, I can tell you the project is running at full speed. We've, you know, built our, you know, Air Gap Network program. The mission-critical sovereign infrastructure is running. Parts of the data center environment have already been built. They're ready, tested, and the program is now progressing across all of the FAT, which is Factory Acceptance Testing, rollout planning, and all of the delivery milestones are being met. What is more important is that the customer is paying us on time. Proof in the pudding. Right? The second one is our 5G lawful interception. Now, in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, we had a lot of these wins recently. And again, I don't think most people understand we were the first 5G LI solution to be deployed globally. Okay? This is a time when people didn't have a product at all. Now, we built these products, and these are not isolated projects. They are national scale platforms where, you know, we're delivering in highly regulated environments where performance, security, compliance are completely non-negotiable. Now, when you look at these deployments, we're all live and operating at scale. Okay? Why this matters is because if you look at all these 5G programs across the globe, they're either a white paper or they're proof of concepts. These are not proof of concepts. You know, governments and telecom operators, they want to talk to each other, but when you deliver at that level, word travels really fast, and if you look at the other two projects which we recently signed, they were word of mouth. They reached out to us and said, "We're seeing this direct influence on the government of Taiwan. Can you help us out?" Right, and so the third one is on the AI infrastructure. Now, we had a lot of, you know, publicity on the AI infrastructure side. So the first program we're kicking off is about $300 million, as I mentioned, and that's the first phase, and that's on the way. The mobilization is already kicking off. In parallel now, I can tell you we did this today. We have now started directly the second phase of $450 million, and that will move alongside, but of course, we have to go through the SOWs, the SLAs, and so on, and we finished finalizing the next steps on all of the different phases with Freyr today. We sat in our offices. We closed all of that, so what is, if you look at what is consistent, the pattern is very consistent because we're now delivering at national scale. We're no longer becoming a POC company. We're becoming a global reference, and that's exactly what is happening today, you know, in terms of where our projects are. Great. No, that's some very good highlights. So now for the numbers, guys, what do you think you're going to be able to do in 2026 in terms of, I mean, I know you guys have a lot of cash ready to go to use. You had a lot of cash committed. You're going to need investments. You're going to need to make investments. Give us kind of a flavor of what you see 2026 is going to be like. Not guidance, just kind of what is it going to be to you? Absolutely. For me, okay, so 2026 is about scale for me with discipline and personally a little less caffeine for our finance team. Don't tell that to Bruce. He's not here today. He loves his coffee, by the way. No, see, revenue, for us, revenue with real visibility is no longer a wishful thinking. Okay? We are, you know, I know we gave a broad guidance of $137 million-$200 million, but that was because we were being very prudent and very factual with what we have. We have $85 million of signed contracts and a backlog already, which we have to deliver towards. Now, that range is driven by timing, not by demand. We're seeing a broader customer diversification across the globe for us, not just in Asia. So we're trying to reduce the concentration risk. So if you look at how we evolved as a company and you look at our concentration risk, 2026 will be the year of what I call reduced concentration across different customers, across different industries, across different geographies. Now, the Freyr timing for us is also a swing factor. Why? Because the only real variable in the guidance for us is the timing of the first Freyr deployment, which is happening in the first half of 2026. Our numbers deliberately assume minimal contribution from the Freyr in the other phases of the projects and the later phases of the projects as well. So think about it this way. Optimism for me is fun, but I think discipline actually pays the bills, right? So Freyr deployment now changes for us the scale of the company itself. So once the Freyr programs are fully deployed, we will have what is called a very strong annualized revenue, predictable month-on-month, quarter-upon-quarter, which means Gorilla stops being a growth story and starts becoming a steady infrastructure platform. That's a very key message, which I wanted to kind of deliver. But as that happens, margins improve, right? The AI infrastructure ramps up. Now, data centers, for example, being a very different margin profile, when on balance sheet, we're expecting about 75% gross margin, 60%-65% EBITDA. But with a 20%-25% operating margin, what happens is these assets sit in SPVs with a non-recourse debt. This is something which the market is also not able to understand and visualize because we're not putting this, whether it's debt or equity, we're not putting this, at least on the debt on the balance sheet, we're getting the upside without turning the balance sheet into a stress test. Now, we have over $110 million of cash today. We have reduced our debt well below $15 million, which is kind of, you know, making us quite, you know, and we haven't sold our asset yet. And our asset's now valued about $25-$26 million. We have a further $20-$30 million of collections expected over the next few weeks. That gives us the flexibility to execute without having to tap into the equity market every time we build something large and expensive. Now, capital intensive, yes. Reckless, no. Okay? Most people are expecting, you know, they're like, "Hey, you signed this $1.4 billion contract. When's revenue coming?" Right? There is upfront cash burn because GPUs don't grow on trees, right? And paybacks are within two, two and a half years. And we're seeing financing offers, you know, at 85%-100% loan to cost. Okay? We've actually got term sheets. So equity is already in place for the first two deployments, and leverage only increases when the revenue is contracted. So I think that's the key message we want to leave to the market. Less equity, more leverage, non-recourse debt off balance sheet, SPVs. That's kind of, you know, where we are, and that's the outlook for, you know, 2026 for us. Great. Well, Jay, we're kind of running at the end of our time here. We're going to have to leave it. I want to thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, sir. For investors, if you want to learn more about Gorilla, please visit their website or access the research on the company that we have at WTR at www.watertowerresearch.com. I want to remind everyone that the views expressed in this fireside chat may not necessarily reflect the views of Water Tower Research LLC and are provided on informational purposes only. This fireside chat may not be distributed or reproduced without the written consent of Water Tower Research and should not be considered research nor recommendation. WTR is an investor engagement firm, not a licensed broker or broker-dealer market maker, investment banker, underwriter, or investment advisor. 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