Hi, everyone. This is Colin Rusch. I lead the Industrial Innovation Research practice here at Oppenheimer. We're thrilled to have the Ouster team with us today, Ken Gianella, the CFO, and Chen Geng, the SVP of Strategic Finance and Treasurer at Ouster, and longtime veteran of the company. We may have Angus be able to join us here as well, the CEO. To get started, guys, can we talk about the fact that you've got 14 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and you're sitting at a $55 million plus or minus run rate. As you bring Rev8 into the mix, how are you thinking about the impact to revenue and that product transition from REV7 to Rev8, and how that's going to start translating through the P&L? Thank you, Colin, and thanks again for hosting us at the event today. It's been a great day. Q2 was really our first full quarter as a unified platform with the launch of Rev8, and we also announced the launch of Stereolabs ZED X Nano. It's a camera specifically for the robotics industry. Really pleased with how the quarter performed. When you look ex royalties product-wise, we outperformed in Q2 than we initially anticipated, and our product revenue quarter-over-quarter for Q3 will be sequentially higher in Q3. Rev8, been very electric, the reception that it's gotten, multimillion-dollar orders already booked. Some from new, some from existing customers. A lot of brand new use cases that it opens up. The bookings, we've been really pleased with that. Rev8 is still in the early stages of its volume production ramps. We said on the call that we're looking for that to ramp, really getting to scale in the September timeframe as we go through Q3, and then carrying that on to Q4 into the out years. We expect Rev8 to become the core of our sensing platform for the business over the next several years. As product transitions go, this one's probably the longest tail that the company's had in its history. REV7 was a real workhorse for us. It's built into a lot of existing company production platforms already. So we expect that one to have a long tail and be part of our product suite for a while to come. The key for us looking ahead, though, it's really about continuing to grow the full product suite, continuing to grow the platform, Rev8 being a piece, big part of that. What you're going to start seeing as that growth and potential inflection is that platform play of bringing in compute in the software for the individual applications over the next few years. It raises a good point around the early stages of growth that you guys are in and the individual verticals that are seeing real adoption. The industrial vertical was the biggest contributor this last quarter, was smart infrastructure. How should we think about the durability, repeatability, and kind of mix shift from vertical to vertical as we go forward, and thinking about repeat orders and the consistency of margins as you see slightly different dynamics in each of those verticals? Right. Well, I think the one thing we've always talked about is the adoption and cadence is very similar across almost every vertical. You start with a prototype, you move to pilot, you lock into design win, then you scale to production. Once you land and you win that production, you're really expanding and building new use cases at a customer. We have several customers that we've been able to demonstrate that with, even within the early days. I think the largest thing for us, and just focusing on smart infrastructure for a second, is having that end-to-end play. Being able to be no code turnkey solution, think easy button, for these customers is what we're seeing start to emerge, especially within the DOT areas. For the industrial side, though, it's really about how can you get product to market that's durable and repeatable for the customer in a high quality. The ruggedness that you need within these environments, especially in the outdoor environments, that's what really sets Ouster apart from the competitors. I'm not going to make you pick which one we love the best, but if you think about these deployment schedules, you really got to love the industrial side, because once they get into that logistical production mode, it really takes off and it smooths out a lot of the lumpiness. You cited multiple multimillion-dollar orders, right? I think I would love to understand the significance of that. Certainly, we've seen a lot of demonstration of the technology integrated into large capital equipment, top AV providers, as well as some of the DOT applications. But the history of LIDAR, in some cases, has been around sampling and smaller order sizes and prototypes. Moving into these larger awards signals something different. I just want to understand that from your perspective and what that means for maturity of the physical AI space and where you sit in that ecosystem. Well, where we sit in the ecosystem has significantly changed with the acquisition of Stereolabs and bringing the compute piece to it. So we've moved from a single point provider to expanding to a platform player within physical AI for sensing and perception. So being able to come to these companies and provide them not only just a point LIDAR solution, but be able to offer the compute, the software, and a camera. We're already seeing early indications of that really driving us, Colin. As you start looking forward with this, the LIDAR business is really going to be a big driver of their technology needs because the Rev8 brings such a unique component to it that people are starting to build into their platforms. And where before you had a LIDAR that was great and had the right resolution, bringing revolutionary, speaking of perfect timing for you, Angus, speaking of the revolutionary Rev8 and the RGB that brings to the table. We're seeing these industrial customers call in, want to sign on now because they want to build that as part of their core platform to get that fusion right on the chip. Anything you want to add about the Rev8 launch, Angus, and how that does for industrial Angus, before you get started, let me refine the question a little bit. We were just talking about the significance of the larger orders that you guys are receiving. As you get into answering, kind of the significance of that for the physical AI ecosystem, the ecosystem here, just want to understand a little bit more about why that's so important for folks, right, from a product differentiation, and what that enables from a system level. If you could address both those. Yeah, absolutely. So it's important context to remember that we've been shipping a highly competitive REV7 product line for the last three years. We are largely regarded as having some of the best lidar sensors, if not in many cases for different use cases, the best lidar sensors on the market with REV7 for the past three years. That's why we've built such a suite of high-end customers for our history. Rev8 is taking something that's already really a leadership position and making it, I would say, obvious that there's no other choice by bringing even more performance capability and now RGB into the mix. If you've ever done sales, and I do a lot of sales and talking to customers, there's a big difference between a competitive sale and an obvious sale. When customers are just asking, they are not even debating or comparing against a competitor. REV7, you compare against a competitor, you think about it, you choose the REV7 because it has superior specs. Rev8, it has native color, it is functionally safe. We have long-range, hyper-capable OS1 Max versions. It is an obvious choice that does not have a comparison at all in the market, and that makes the sale even that much more faster, that much easier for us, and that much more confident on the customer to actually just place that order up front. We have seen a series of long-term REV7 customers immediately turn around. They have confidence in Ouster, they see Rev8, and they have signed on board with major multimillion-dollar orders. Just this morning, the Utah DOT is such a great example of this, turned around 160 intersections with OS1 Max Rev8 sensors on them. This is a brand-new product, brand-new hardware, brand-new software. It is not normal for traffic engineers to deploy this kind of technology at scale when it is this new. They have the confidence because it is built on the Ouster brand, the REV7 reputation, and it has got such obvious benefits with this native color and long-range capability. That is just one example of a use case with what I would call a conservative kind of customer, not a customer that wants to take any chances on quality and capability, reliability, and yet they have the confidence in Ouster. That is playing out across all of our industrial customers, all our smart infrastructure customers. They are seeing Rev8. They know it has got the capability and the quality that Ouster has become known for, and then they see native color performance, and it just becomes an obvious decision to adopt. I would love to just follow up on that RGB discussion. Why is that so hard? How long has it been in the works for you guys? I think that is something that takes some explaining for folks newer to the story, but it is a very, very big deal, and it is very, very hard from what we understand. We would love to get your perspective on why it is so hard, what is involved, and what that enables for you from a leadership and a ML perspective. Yeah, for sure. First, the concept or the definition, what is this native color technology in the first place? Native color lidar is lidar data that has RGB or color information at every point. The reality is, you and I do not perceive the world in just 3D. We also do not perceive the world in just color, 2D, camera-like imagery. We actually combine depth sensing and color to describe the state of the physical world. You need both channels. That is why historically, if you are a REV7 customer of Ouster, almost assuredly, you are buying a color camera in the last three years to pair with a REV7 lidar because you need both. You need to know that the blinkers are running on the car in front of you and the brake lights have fired and the stop light is green, not red. You get where all those things are with lidar, and you know you don't want to run into them, but you still don't know the state of a lot of those objects without color information. Our customers are already convinced of this fact, and they've been buying REV7 lidars with color cameras. Turns out that's not an ideal way to build most systems. The calibration, the synchronization, the capability of today's cameras just isn't quite it's not at where it needs to be for you to have hyper safe, low latency, and incredible performance on the perception capability of these devices. It's much better if you could make one device that did all of it internally at a very, very deep architectural level that provided guarantees on the quality of the paired output of the depth and the 3D and the color. That's what Rev8 does. It's hard because to do it right, you have to do it at the lowest level possible, which is at silicon chip level. The Rev8 has a L4 architecture silicon chip in it that has color and depth sensing combined for the very first time onto a single chip, all using the same optics, shared optics in front of this silicon chip that's doing nanosecond-level timing, synchronization, and calibration of these traditionally two different data streams. It's really powerful. When you see it's obvious. This is a black and white TV to color TV transition. You're never going to go back from operating a color lidar once you've started using it. It's a really big deal, and Ouster's been investing years on it, and now we have this competitive edge because we're the only company in the market actually doing it. What do you think that does from a time perspective for you guys to go on sale? If we're making it an obvious sale, how long do you think it takes before someone comes along with something that can present itself as even in the same bucket of performance? Well, what's interesting is there have been companies that have said that they're doing colorized lidar in various forms over the last couple of years, and they've kind of been these non-events. I was just at CES in January, actually, and there was a lidar company saying they had an RGB lidar, and no one cared. The reason no one cared, customers didn't care, is because it was an afterthought. It was a poorly implemented, non-functional or non-useful kind of cobbled-together system, not something that was engineered at the silicon level. I expect there to be a lot of that kind of thing that happens for the next couple of years as companies try to market the idea of color lidar, but they won't derive the benefits of it because customers are smart. I say you never trick a customer into buying a lidar sensor. All customers are going to test before they buy. You can't kind of fake this color capability. I think we have multiple years, two to five years of head start, depending on which type of product and which environment we're using it in. A head start because of the silicon lead times associated with doing this correctly. In the meantime, there will be all kinds of press releases with companies claiming they've done it, and it will be irrelevant because it'll be kind of a demo prototype system that customers can't actually field at scale. Just shifting to the sensor fusion and software piece of this, right? That's something you guys have talked about. You've made some acquisitions that are related to some of the software, but sensor fusion has been historically a critical part of performance for these systems. Obviously with more information native to the sensor, you can redesign some of that sensor fusion in the computer. Can you talk a little bit about what you've done from an investment perspective around software sensor fusion, and what that means for system simplicity and performance? Yeah. Sensor fusion is a really nitty-gritty problem that every single customer has to solve. It involves timing synchronization and understanding where different sensors are pointed and getting all of that data into one reference frame that a machine learning algorithm can parse in a GPU. You have to take all that data from many different sensors, bucket it up properly, and give it to machine learning, and the quality of the machine learning output is directly related to how well you do all that fusing of data up front. That's why native color just gets to sidestep some of that, when we're talking about color camera versus lidar. But it also pertains to when you have multiple lidar sensors or maybe lidar sensors and stereo cameras, or monocular cameras, stereo cameras, lidars, and inertial measurement units. There's a broader ecosystem of sensors that all have to be calibrated, synchronized, and fused before you apply algorithms to them. I think this is a place that Ouster can provide huge value by building that software layer for customers and providing it as part of our SDK and software ecosystem. Providing the "it just works" platform of sensor perception and development that no other company has ever tackled. We've done this in a couple of ways, but the big one is that we acquired a company, Stereolabs, just at the beginning of this year, which is a leading provider of stereo cameras. So that's colorized point clouds from stereo cameras and monocular cameras that we can pair with our colorized Rev8 point clouds. Stereolabs has also invested in this SDK, the ZED SDK, that has over 10,000 users, something they've built over the last decade and a half. What it does is it fuses the disparate data streams from all these different sensors into one coherent stream that they can then pass to machine learning algorithms. So we have 10,000 customers currently using the ZED SDK. It's doing this really difficult technical challenge that every customer needs to solve, and now we're just investing more and more. We're getting Rev8 onto the platform. We're building it out to be more robust and rigorous for production environments. Because I want the heavy equipment manufacturers of the world that are going to put 10,000 construction machines out into the world that have to last for 10 years, I want them running our software and our sensors. This is the start of that autonomy platform play, which is a major investment for us for the next decade. Excellent. Just continuing on that, you guys have deepened the NVIDIA partnership, bringing Rev8 to DRIVE and Jetson and dedicated toolkits and drivers for Orin and Thor. How does that reference design position and the brand compatibility with NVIDIA translate into the sales process and adoption rates for the Ouster platform? Yeah. The partnership with NVIDIA has been great. We've really expanded our work. Rev8 did a couple things that immediately put us as a key partner for NVIDIA. The first is just ASIL B automotive safety standards and just safety qualifications. So we're an automotive Rev8 product line now, and so the NVIDIA DRIVE group is very interested in that aspect because they want automotive qualified sensors. In the robotics space, we now have all the monocular and stereo and cameras along with the Rev8 lidar cameras. So we have the full suite of robotic vision sensors that we can deploy into the NVIDIA robotics ecosystem, JetPack and NVIDIA Isaac. Then there's some other stuff that we can do in the future with smart infrastructure and things like that. We are a great partner because we have all of these sensors, they all work well together, and we are making the investment to make sure that they work in the NVIDIA ecosystems like DRIVE and JetPack. In some ways it is a similar play to what we are doing internally with our own SDKs to make everything interoperable and a great ecosystem. Some customers are going to want to work in an NVIDIA ecosystem, some customers are going to want to work in an Ouster ecosystem when it comes to software. Under the hood, it is still Ouster sensors, and it is still NVIDIA chips, whether it is our software platform or an NVIDIA DRIVE platform or an NVIDIA JetPack platform. Everyone is kind of winning no matter what. We are just providing a couple different ways to interface through software, whether it is an Ouster software SDK or an NVIDIA software SDK. That is part of the broader ecosystem play here. We want customers to have a lot of different options to go build this high-quality software. We are still under the hood, the key enabling technology and the hardware and the low-level work that has been put in on the software side on both ecosystems. That is super helpful. Ken, how are you guys translating that into evidence of pricing margins, durability of cash flow? How are you thinking about that? Maybe this is for both of you guys, but I will put you on the spot, Ken, and give Angus a minute to catch his breath. That is the real heart of this, right? Is the business model that you guys have built and the operating leverage plus the flywheel of amplifying sales here. How are you thinking about that mode evolving from here and translating into margin? Well, I think it is three steps. Number one is continuing this rotation into a platform, having the ability to offer customers both the LIDAR, the camera, the compute, and the software to it. That becomes very sticky and becomes value add versus just selling an individual component. Continuing that rotation to bring solutions to the marketplace that can help, it is like we do with BlueCity with a no-code turnkey ITS solution is a perfect example of how we are going to continue to innovate and grow this platform out. I think the second piece is continuing to be diverse in our product portfolio and finding ways that we can continue to go across our verticals with the products and offerings that we have. Not being niche or specific to a specific use case like ADAS or consumer ADAS has really benefited the company in not being price pointed down or being pressured into a point where you have to lower your standards in order to win business. Having a portfolio that can go across all these different use cases has really been invaluable to helping bolster that overall ASP and the value that people can see from our platform. Those two things really are the major drivers that we see in the long term. The last but not least is innovation. What Angus didn't say is with the new L4 chip that we released, we have programs and roadmaps we're working on today for next generation innovation. Continuing that investment into innovation, continuing to broaden our portfolio, not just from new chips, but also from form factors that can fit into different use cases using the same base technology. That's something you're going to see us invest in over the next 12 to 24 months. It's going to keep that ASP and that margin at a good level. Excellent. Just shifting gears a little bit into the supply chain. Obviously, you guys have been qualified for the Blue UAS, and there's a lot of Buy America activity right now, the tariff dynamics. Can you talk a little bit about how you're seeing the supply chain evolve as you start to scale up a little bit more actively and start to see some of these other elements impact the sales process and as well as just component availability and pricing? Well, I can start with that, Angus. I think number one is having the ability to buy ahead on long lead time parts. The good thing about having visibility in a backlog with your partners is you know what they're looking for, what quantities they're at. So, we've been able to go out into the marketplace and secure enough components to give us visibility, sometimes 18 to 24 months into the future, to make sure that we have that inventory on-hand. You might have seen, if you look at our balance sheet, it's ticking up a little bit, and that's predominantly because of two reasons. One, we're going to continue to invest more in the supply chain. We want to be a provider that can do quick turns with folks, particularly within the Stereolabs business. You are going to continue to see us invest more in that finished good inventory to be able to supply and meet the market demand pretty quickly. Continuing to invest in the supply chain and the capacity at our CMs is something that we are going to focus on here over the next 12 months. Angus, would you talk anything that you would supplement around that? Then obviously Yeah. Maybe around the strategic aspects with customers, I think is part of the question you are asking is things like Blue UAS, which is a certification around the source of our supply chain components, purely a domestic source or Western partners for sourcing strategic technologies like lidar. There has been a lot of effort to make us a preferred partner for companies that need a secured supply chain of this, of lidar. It has been years of effort. We have divested from a Chinese supply chain as one example, which is no small feat, and it is why we are able to get a certification like a Blue UAS certification. These are not just window dressing. This is real effort, and getting the certification was a huge lift. It is just one that we have been investing in for years at this point. There is definitely, when I go into customer conversations now, it is one of the first questions that gets asked is, "Where are you buying your parts? Where are your major suppliers? Where are you manufacturing the product? How can I guarantee that I am going to maintain a supply of this product, and you do not have undue risk in your supply chain?" Part of it is about geopolitics, and part of it is about just things like semiconductor crunch and continuity of supply and things like that. We have a world-class operations team and supply chain team that has built very deep partnerships with our critical single-source suppliers. It is just not something you build overnight. We have been working on this for years, and I think we are way ahead of kind of the average technology company when it comes to this. Excellent. Speaking of de-risking, you guys have raised a lot of money in the last 12 months, right? You put yourself in a fantastic position from a balance sheet perspective and all. You kind of stayed disciplined on your spending. You got kind of single digit, low single digit millions of EBITDA losses per quarter, over $450 million of cash after this last transaction. Talk to me about what that does for you from a customer perspective and a planning perspective for the organization as you think about trying to become the, well, really being the dominant lidar player in North America and Europe on a go-forward basis. Yeah, I mean, the first thing is we got to this point because we were good stewards of cash, and we're going to continue to be good stewards of cash, despite having $450 million plus on the balance sheet. It is a critical. It's a selling point. When I'm in customer conversations, a lot of times now these are C-suite level conversations because lidar has become a critical technology for the future of autonomy platforms kind of the world over, and there aren't that many places to buy lidar. Ouster is one of very few companies that a lot of companies are able to source from. So they want to know that we have a long history ahead of us. This completely removes, these raises that we did completely remove any kind of financial funding risk from Ouster. We said on the earnings call, we see this as we have a fully funded business model. Regardless of kind of what happens or what directions and investments we make in the future, we're fully funded. So that resonates internally, it resonates with investors, and it resonates with customers. It's definitely a strategic selling aspect of what we've done here. As you guys look at the landscape, the physical AI space is evolving pretty quickly, where are the biggest risks that you guys are thinking about right now? Where's the most rapid evolution that you're going to have to respond to? I think as folks start to digest the impact of AI and on some of the design cycles, there is some improvement and some kind of just fluff about what's happening here. So there's, I think, a lot of BS, and then there's some real things that are happening. So curious how you guys are thinking about technology risk and market risk on a go-forward basis, and how Ouster is getting ready for that. We diversified fundamentally because it reduced risk, diversified commercially into our four markets, automotive, industrial, smart infrastructure, and robotics, because it reduces risk. A lot of the risk is technology risk associated with a particular type of customer scaling an emerging technology. When we founded Ouster in 2015, the emerging technology that had risk was robotaxis. We were smart to diversify into many different verticals. We still sell into robotaxis, and today we have a great business in our robotaxi, robot trucking customers. But man, was it a longer timeline to scale than most people predicted in 2015. Other than, we were one of the few that kind of had a realistic view on this. That is not to say that there was not a lot of revenue generated along the way for things like lidar sensors into robotaxi companies. I take that same viewpoint to the current scaling of robotics. Obviously, everything that is happening with advanced robotics is real, is here to stay. There are going to be humanoid robots doing productive work in our society, guaranteed, and they already are in some cases. But we have purposefully diversified to the point that we do not know the exact trajectory of that scale up a few months. It is very frothy right now, and people are deploying a lot of that type of robot, or building a lot. We are selling a lot of cameras and a lot of lidars into those applications. That is great revenue, but it is also not the only revenue that we generate. We are diversified because no one can predict the way that this set of physical AI robotics is going to progress, in kind of fine-grained detail. All I can say is that I know that it is growing very significantly, and Ouster is a core part of it. Now we are coming to the end here, and we have spent a lot of time on technology, which I kind of enjoy, as much as some of the finance pieces. But, as we think about a robotic future, right, and the interaction of robots in human environments and human-machine interaction, you guys ruled out, even though there is a lot of attention around RGB elements of the lidar, the functional safety piece of the lidar is a big deal, right, in terms of where risk sits at the product level and who takes this on. The way you guys explained it to me was just like, it is like automatic braking, right, and that sort of functionality. Talk to me about how important that is as folks start to figure out human-machine interaction with these bots and what you bring to the table in terms of facilitating that market adoption and growth. Yeah, this is somewhat of a subtle part of our strategy, or maybe we haven't been communicating enough about how important safety certified sensors are and safety in general is for physical AI. A world in which there are millions and millions of these powerful, capable robots in our world is only a good future if those robots are safe. Humans are bad at judging the level of safety required for us to be comfortable with technology. This is not 99% safety. We can't have one in 100 robots doing something unsafe, falling on your toddler in your home. You can't have one in 100 days, a robot breaking the dishes in your dishwasher. You can't do this over one in 1,000 days if it comes to human safety. It might be, if you ask people, maybe one in every 10,000 days across the robot population, you can have a robot doing something mildly unsafe in your home, but not when it comes to your kids. Then maybe one in 100,000 robots can do something unsafe every year in someone's home. That's probably the level where most people will accept it. That is vastly beyond where we are today for this technology. The path from getting where we are today to getting where we need to be ultimately comes down to, well, it's many layered, but a core component is certifiable perception. Knowing that the world around you that you're sensing is being sensed in a guaranteed certified way that is, quote, "functionally safe" and is correct in kind of all ways and is fault-tolerant. That's what we're beginning to sell is certified safety critical lidar sensors. All Rev8s are going to have this option, and it means that you will literally be able to trust your life and the life of everyone around you on the output of Ouster's Rev8 lidar products. That's how we bridge the gap from a robot that works one in 100 days to a robot that works 1 in 100,000 days, which is where we need to get. There are many more layers to it, but a really critical and hard part of it is the underlying sensing hardware, and there's a huge amount of value to capture from being a company that gets there and builds a reputation on providing that kind of technology first. Well, given the fact that we're just about at time, and that's a very big idea for people to digest and think about how to value that, I think we'll leave it there. Guys, I want to thank you all for your time and your partnership here. We value the working relationship with you guys, and are excited about what you're building. For the investors here, please give me a call if you have any questions. We're happy to answer questions or get you in touch with the company as it makes sense. So thanks, guys, for the afternoon, and we'll look forward to talking to you soon. Always a pleasure. Thank you.
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