Okay, welcome back to the 2025 Stifel Healthcare Conference. I am Dan Arias. I'm the Life Sciences and Diagnostics Analyst here at the firm. Happy to have Rapid Micro Biosystems with us, CEO Rob and CFO Sean. Guys, thanks very much for spending some time with us. Thank you. You bet. Thanks, Dan. Maybe, Rob, a good place to start would be to just begin with Growth Direct and the value proposition for customers. I find that it's always useful just to sort of ground folks on the product and the business and what it is that you're doing for your customers. Sure. Yeah, our technology is the Growth Direct platform, and we're using it to modernize a very important part of pharmaceutical quality control called Microbial Quality control. This is a regulated process that all pharma companies have to go through. It's regulated by the FDA, the EMA, and all the equivalents. It's a process by which pharma companies go through to ensure their products are free of microbial contamination. Think bacteria, mold, etc. The challenge is the fundamental method hasn't changed in 100 years or so since Louis Pasteur invented it. Think slow, petri dish, paper, incubators, error-prone, very, very costly. The Growth Direct platform is automating and replacing all of that, leading to a very robust value prop. Customers can go through a data integrity challenge environment to a very robust environment, which is really important to the regulators and from a regulatory compliance standpoint. It's fully automated and rapid. Think of customers can get a very quick, reliable piece of data to make a decision on much more quickly. Ship to market faster, recognize revenue, turn inventory faster, move to the next processing step faster, finding problems faster. At some of these larger plants, if you find a problem in day one versus day seven, you effectively save six days of scrap production. The system is all machine-driven, AI, computer-driven. It's much more accurate than humans, which reduce costs and prevent things like recalls. It's a very robust value proposition, which has led to our current commercial footprint and momentum. We're proud to count three-quarters of the global top 20 pharma companies as customers and many of the top CDMOs. We operate and have customers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Okay, that's great. You're obviously focused on the biopharma customer base. How are you finding the conversation to be right now when it comes to spending? Obviously, a large part of the conversation on our end has just been the way in which these companies feel over the last couple of months or have felt and now feel, just given some of the political conversations and the way that MFN and tariffs have evolved. I'd love to just get your take on where it sounds like things are today and if they are at all different than where they might have been three or four months ago. Sure. Yeah, a couple of dimensions there. First, in the ordinary course, it's not demonstrably different over the past couple of quarters. I would say maybe a potentially clipped, more eased up a bit. Capital equipment is still going through its paces with the finance teams and procurement teams. As we've said on previous interactions and previous earnings calls, the top ROI, the compelling ROI of projects are getting through, and that has continued to happen. Consistent with, and a good example of that was a large win that we just announced. Moreover, what we see, which continues to be the case, strategic projects that have an enterprise-wide impact are also getting approved and getting through. In some cases, we're happy to be one of those types of projects that are a bit more resilient to the quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year budget challenges. I would say the reshoring that folks have heard quite a bit about is real. There has not been a demonstrable, I would say, business impact yet, but the conversations are definitely spooling up, and we are encouraged about what the outlook could be there as well. Yeah. I do not want to put words in your mouth, but the way that I have been describing it has just been to say that it feels like the CFOs and the decision-makers at these companies are breathing a little easier about investment and the way that they can spend money. That has not translated anything yet, but the assumption is that that at some point will lead to maybe some additional purchasing that it was hard to envision maybe six months ago. I think that's right. Yeah, it's definitely some easing for sure. Are you finding that multi-system orders are becoming a greater percentage of your sales mix? Can you just maybe talk about that? I do want to get to the large order and the specifics around it, but maybe just as background, going from selling one box to two boxes, is that something that you think you'll encounter more as the years pass? Yeah, I think we are seeing that, and we'll see that, largely because a majority of our sales are coming from existing customers. They understand the value prop. They understand where we are. There's a mutually supporting between companies, sort of, and we'll get into our Growth Direct day, I'm sure, at some point here, but the brand is resonating. We've been in the market long enough, so we're getting those repeat purchases. Those tend to be multi-system purchases. Certainly not the scale in every case like the one we just announced, but those can tend to be chunkier deals. As a consequence of current customers expanding, many of those, not all, but many of those can tend to be, I would say, smaller to mid-sized multi-system orders. Of course, some customers like the one we just announced are also expanding more aggressively, and those could be larger multi-system orders. The portfolio of options we have in front of us or opportunities we have in front of us has got quite a bit of a multi-system element to it. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the order that you just announced. It was a large pharma partner of yours. It was a large order. I don't think that you put an exact number on it, but I believe that the number has two digits in it, if I'm not mistaken. Correct. What are they going to do with those systems, and then what kind of recognition timing should we think? What kind of validation timing should we think about how that rolls out over the next couple of quarters? Yeah. Yeah, I'll start, and maybe Sean, you can tie in. But it's a current customer that really is consistent with other large customer deployments. Purchased a system, installed it, validated it, did another system, installed it, validated it, proved out the ROI in the business case, and then leaned in hard on a larger order. To me, this is a quintessential expansion case because the customer is, A, doing it. It's big, number one. Number two, it's global. Sites across North America, Europe, and Asia will receive Growth Direct. They don't already have one. They've also validated across the majority of our application suite. They've validated and will use environmental monitoring testing, water testing, and bioburden testing. All of our tests. The Growth Direct, notably, has been designed. It is not a niche sort of something you put in a corner and you use once a month. It is designed to be basically industrial automation you use every day for the majority of your daily tests. This particular customer, we anticipate, will be using it in that regard. It is in the biologic setting. It will be used mostly for monoclonal antibody production and release globally across, we anticipate, a couple of different product categories. Sean can put a fine tune on this if we want to dig deeper, but think of we will recognize systems in Q4, which drove, as you may imagine, a decent chunk of our raise. The customer wants to move quickly, so we anticipate half one next year will feature quite a bit of service revenue as we install and validate. We anticipate half two next year and beyond, into 2027 and beyond, recurring revenue through consumables and service contracts. It sets up nice for the next, certainly for 2026, and then, of course, recurring revenue to 2027 and beyond. Okay. Is there anything else from a RevRex standpoint you'd want to add? I think consumables obviously ramp. Yeah. They don't come out of the gate at 100% of where we expect them to be over time, and then the contracts will kick in in early 2027. Question on that, the ramp up on a system that's placed, is it fair to assume that by the, so a customer gets, let's just say, 10 systems. Is it fair to assume that the systems 6 through 10 might see a faster consumables ramp than systems 1 through 5? Or if we're just talking about a customer buying two, one- one year and one a second year, can the second year be a faster ramp up on consumables than the first? Essentially, what I'm asking is, do they get up the learning curve and start becoming productive faster and innovative? Yeah, so it's a good question. I would look at it as orders versus systems. Typically, like this customer is going to be more site-driven. If site A goes faster than site B, that tranche will spool up faster. Certainly, if a customer, for example, bought a handful of systems for site A in 2025 and then bought another tranche in 2026, we expect the second tranche to go faster. What typically happens is we call it a method transfer. You don't need to do all the work you did for the first installation, the initial installation. The customer can transfer the method and more quickly get through full validation, get it installed as a system of record and up and running faster. That's another thing too. I think it's important to note about our business is that not only are we getting faster with validations as we just perfect the process, but the mix of our systems are becoming more and more existing customers, which means by definition, more and more of those are method transfers, which go faster. Yeah. Validation, I guess the one blunt question would be, have validation timelines actually, the average validation timeline, if that's a metric that you track, and I imagine it would be, has that gone down, and do you expect that to continue to go down if so? Yeah, the quick answer is yes. You're going to reach an asymptotic; you can only go so fast with customers. We're at a point now where it's certainly contracted year- over- year- over- year, and we're quite happy with the efficiency of it. A recurring customer is well below six months. An existing customer is probably in that six-month category. I'm not an exact number right now, but six to seven months. There's marginal improvements every year we're making. It probably will unlikely customers have gone as fast as two or three months. There's a little bit of a spread between the customer, how many resources they give us, and how fast they can go. We continue to see improvement generally. I think that's one of the variables that I think we've gotten a lot better at managing too, is we have dedicated people inside our teams who are project managing essentially this work in advance, proactively, making sure that those resources are lined up both on our side and the customer's. You guys have kind of greased the wheel on your own too a little bit when it comes to just getting these customers the way that they need to be. Yeah, very high-touch model to Sean's point. We manage every piece of the process. Okay. You mentioned Biologics. When we first started getting to know you guys and covering the company, those were the drugs that seemed like it had the highest pull-through potential, kind of for obvious reasons, right? There's just an intensive workflow there that you need to manage. There have been a lot of things that have gone on in the biologics world over the last couple of years and the companies that are developing them. If you were to sort of take a snapshot looking back, would you be able to say that those customers are the revenue-generating customers that are at the higher end of the scale? They are the higher end of the scale in so much as Biologics is the largest segment by a long shot within our, I would say, end-market therapy mix or modality mix. We can do the numbers on this, but with regard to a per capita or per modality basis, cell therapy is probably the highest yielding from recurring revenue, just given that a lot of batches, a lot of interactions, a lot of testing going on, very, very important to get the speed and the turns down. That probably is a smaller market, of course, but it is probably a bit more intense and a bit higher revenue than the biologics. Okay. So it's not unfair for me to feel better when I hear that you place a system at cell therapy X than small molecule company Y, simply because there is a better revenue generation potential there. Yep. Yeah, think of it as cell therapy is probably the top end as far as sheer pull-through. Biologics is a close second. Steroid injectables is second to third, and then small molecule, like tablet manufacturing, which we do have sales into, is less intense from a testing standpoint. Okay. Maybe the Merck-MilliporeSigma collaboration. What does that do for you? How does that translate to a P&L benefit in one way or another? Yeah, it directly impacts the P&L from both a revenue and margin standpoint. First and foremost, it's a distribution agreement with committed minimums, which is a bit unusual for many of these relationships, which we're, and we believe MilliporeSigma is quite excited about. It's a multi-year agreement, and it's co-exclusive. We will maintain a direct sales channel to market, and then MilliporeSigma will also represent the product globally as well, not only in pharma, but also in personal care and cosmetics, and I would call it adjacent markets. P&L impact, number one, is acceleration of Growth Direct sales, and then as a consequence, consumables and services pull through. That's number one, and that's meaningful. Number two, the agreement calls for RMB to have the ability to purchase effectively product factors of input for our product that directly impact our cost of goods sold. Much of what we consume with regard to building our products, consumables in particular, MilliporeSigma sells. We are able to procure that at a lower cost, which would accelerate and flatter our gross margin expansion. The third element, which is less a direct hit to your question, but there is a technology and new product development collaboration contemplation as well. There's the, oh, sure. I'd just say on the margin point too, I think the factors of input are really important, and that's where the immediate focus is now, but there's a lot of discussion going on around how do you leverage the footprint and the capability of a company of that scale to benefit us. Things like leveraging transportation networks, distribution networks, those kinds of things as well. There are some very specific things related to the product, but then there are broader infrastructure type things that we're looking at as well. There is no selling. There will not be, there is no commercial activity that they will take part in, right? Or did I miss that? The distribution agreement, yeah. They will actually sell the Growth Direct to customers globally as well. That involves proactively selling it or facilitating the sale? Proactively selling it. Directly selling it to the customers. Yeah, including in personal care, cosmetics, markets where we have not traditionally had the resources or the focus on selling. Think of it as R&B is leveraging a much, much, much larger sales team. Right. And presumably in regions, I think you kind of alluded to, that would be hard to expand dramatically for you. I guess, is Asia a key part of that? Asia, it's globally in scope. We have teams in Asia. MilliporeSigma just has much larger teams. Think of it as not only better coverage of the planet for sure, but also we are relatively, call us low double-digit sales team, a direct sales team, and we tend to focus almost exclusively in the pharmaceutical market for a couple of different reasons. They're able to focus not only in pharmaceutical, but also, as we said, in adjacent markets where we have not been in, personal care being one of them, med devices and another good one as well. The whole strategy is predicated on having roughly an order of magnitude more people out there with a well-respected brand, which MilliporeSigma definitely is globally, representing the Growth Direct system as their automation platform for MQC testing. Yeah, and another part on the margin side for that, kind of get into a little bit of detail on the P&L impact, they have the ability to sell our systems and our consumables. They get distributor discounts effectively with those products. We retain all the services. From a service margin standpoint, as you're moving forward and start to generate more momentum with MilliporeSigma, that will generate incremental volume on services, which we've already demonstrated has a meaningfully positive impact on the margins in our service business going forward. Okay. Okay. So it's fair to say that maybe not, we wouldn't be able to tease it out, but you would be able to tease out both a placement benefit in 2026 and a margin benefit in 2026 that is attributable to MilliporeSigma. Yep. Definitely. Especially when they have committed minimums, and because without question, Dan, we're, I would say, growth-limited due to just sheer channel capacity and feet in the street. Yep. Okay. This is designed to address that. Sean, maybe we can talk about gross margins a little bit since we kind of alluded to them. What are the key drivers for you? You have a product line, you have a service line. Those factor into the quarterly dynamics around gross margin. They do. Seasonality factors into the gross margin line. Just maybe, I guess, as a high-level first comment, talk about the trajectory of gross margins and then how you would think about the ups and downs from a quarterly standpoint from here. Yeah. So I think as we look, maybe looking out from where we are right now, I mean, we've just hit our fifth quarter with positive gross margins, and we're building momentum there, I would say. I think as you look forward, we expect that to accelerate as we go into 2026. What's going to drive that? I think number one on services, the key drivers for service margins for us are sales volume, revenue, the amount of work we get done in a given period, and productivity. Things we're doing internally to get more productive time out of the field service and validation folks we have out in the field. We've made some good progress on that. You take that, you kind of layer on top of that this large multi-system order that we have and the fact that those services are all going to layer in in a relatively short period of time next year, that is going to be a tailwind to help us on services. I think we just talked about Merck and over time, not necessarily 2026, but 2027 and beyond, we should start seeing incremental volume layering from that. Those are things that are tailwinds that are going to drive service margins over time. The amount of revenue we generate in service in a quarter, as we are going to see in Q4, does have a pretty significant impact on what the margins look like quarter to quarter. I think over time, as we look at that, we expect that trajectory to look nice and get us up above 50% over the midterm here. In product, the things that have been driving more margin improvement, I think, are the things that will continue to drive that from my perspective. I think getting cost out of our products, particularly in consumables, but also in systems, direct materials, the Merck supply is a part of that, but it's by no means all of it. There are a lot of internal things we're doing to continue to take material cost in particular out of our products and improve our margins from that standpoint. Volume is really important. If we can build more product, I think, as you know, we have a relatively fixed overhead base. It's pretty significant due to investment we've had to make to support the customer base that we're serving. The good news is we have capacity to expand into the future with very little growth in that cost base. As we continue to grow and build more product, we're spreading that pool over a larger set of production. That means that cost per unit goes down and margins go up. Volume's a meaningful contributor to that over time as well. That should be something that you think you can get some volume leverage next year. We should be able to. Okay. Does it sound like the, or does it feel like the quarterly cadence of positivity can continue? I mean, the quarters are what they are and there is seasonality and it is not the end of the world to go from up to down, but there are investors that look for these companies that are going to stay positive, be positive and stay positive. Yeah. So I think we said on our call, we expect to be positive on product margins in Q4. The goal would be to be there all four quarters next year. I think where does Q1 come in? Q1, as you know, tends to be seasonally our weakest quarter just because of the way that kind of customers behave in terms of where they place orders coming into a new year. They tend to take a little time to wake up coming out of the holiday. I think if there is anywhere that we will have to look at that a little more closely, it is probably Q1, but the goal would be that we are positive all four quarters next year. Just on productivity and initiatives around efficiency, etc., are there things that you can do there? Obviously, we were talking about Thermo and Danaher earlier. It's easier for them to put these well-ingrained processes in place, and it is a smaller company. Yet, I'm sure you have identified areas where you can be more efficient. How far along that journey are you right now? I'm thinking a lot of different things, but I'll give you an example. We have an automated manufacturing line for our consumables. My expectation is that the throughput on that system is going up next year, and it's going to go up the year after that. There are continuous improvement things like that that we continue to get better at and drive productivity out of. I think if you look at our systems manufacturing, there are things that we are doing around how we lay out the line to manufacture the systems to be more efficient in that process and reduce the amount of time and labor it takes to build the system. I think those are just two examples. In service, I think there are a lot of examples as well. Dan, I think it's important to note, even though we're a smaller business in the Thermo and Danaher of the world, many of us come from those places. We've brought best practices with us, and we've comported it at the right level for our scale to impact it. The way I like to think we're running the company is we're finding that sweet spot of, yes, it's a small business, but it's global. It's integrated. We don't outsource much. We control the efficiency initiatives, and we bring best practices from our background and apply it in the business, and it's having an impact. Okay. So that's the point. It's not necessarily the scope that you would see elsewhere, but the set of best practices that you see elsewhere can be deployed and yield material benefits. Exactly. Yeah. I'd say, and I'd like to believe, I'm pretty sure we can move a lot faster. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm going to take that to mean, Sean, that gross margins can go up from here, and that's stopping me from. They will go up from here. Yes. That's a fair conclusion, Dan. Yep. Okay. Maybe just thinking more about cost structure and profitability, what are the big investments that you think you need to make in the business going into the end of the year, really going into next year? Is it a commercial effort that you think you need to support menu or just R&D activities in general in a way that you haven't? I'd love to just hear about that. Yeah. I can give the general strategy, Sean. You can give me financial point. You said big, so I'm not sure I'd go that far. Just to qualify that word. I think you'll see us make marginal investments, probably the best way to put it, in commercial. Just not only supporting and buttressing the direct team, but the enablement thereof. I think you'll see that investment. And R&D as well. Not only do we have a sustaining part of R&D, but we also have a new product development part of R&D. We do have some exciting products in our pipeline that we have not disclosed to the market yet that the team is working on. Stand by for more on that. I would say, again, I probably wouldn't use the word big, but I would use the word marginal. Incremental? Incremental. Okay. How about sterility since that's kind of an easy way to move to what was your, what was the most recent new. Announcement. You had to the market? Can you talk about whether that's lived up to expectations and what the benefits to the customer and the challenges that may be encountered have been? Yeah. For those listening and who aren't aware of it, we launched a Rapid Sterility Cassette. It is designed to work with the Growth Direct system. This is a critical end-of-line test. It is typically the last test a customer will do in the actual package vial or syringe. It is really important. Then it goes to a patient. It has to be basically perfect. It is designed, as its name implies, to make sure the actual product format, and these are all injectable type infused type products, is in fact sterile and ready for consumption. It is a critical test. We have developed a consumable that would do that in an accelerated fashion, so three to five days versus the current speed is about 14 days. Huge advantages in time. I would say customers are, there's strong interest in it, but it's methodically, we're going through a methodical process with customers where they're doing their diligence. We're doing tests. We're doing follow-on tests. Customers are taking their dotting I's and crossing T's before they adopt it. Is it a click slower than we'd like? Sure. We are getting that customers are going through the process with us on it. We expect it to feature a bit more prominently in 2026 and, of course, beyond, but they are going to take their time to make sure it actually fits their workflow and delivers on its value prop, which we believe in, but customers have to prove it scientifically as well. Yeah. It's hard to have individual products be needle movers in a sense that they just dramatically change the trajectory. I know sterility is not that, but do you see 2026 as a year where sterility can be a contributor to higher pull-through or just higher overall revenue per account if, in fact, they decide to use it in a meaningful way? Essentially, is it going to be a meaningful component to the P&L in some way next year? I think it'll be a contributor probably more on the system side originally, and the pull-through can take some time. There are some regulatory elements to it as well. I think you'd see more of a feature on the system side versus consumables or services next year. Okay. What about competition? It's not an area where we've heard of a lot, but we have seen some new smaller competitors come up. There are some larger players that have seemingly decided to dabble in the space. I don't know how real that actually is. In a moment of brutal honesty, what are you seeing out there in terms of products that could be competitive? It's a fair question. I would say it's evolving. I mean, I think you did a nice summary. What you're seeing is big companies as well as startup companies. There aren't a ton of them. It's early days, but you're starting to see, I would say, some movement into the space. We think our success has definitely woken some folks up. You see some folks bringing technologies that were born in the food market into pharma or in the clinical market into pharma. Those usually aren't fit for purpose. No one that we can tell is taking the approach of full automation, multiple assays, etc. Moreover, we have first mover advantage and have been through the process of the regulatory audits and just customer knowing us. It is also making sure that the systems are robust for daily use inside big pharma. It's early days, I would say, on this evolving front. The headline is, yes, I think the market is evolving and you have some folks that are, I think we're going to try to get into it, one or two of them for sure. Okay. Okay. Last question, I guess, for Sean, but Rob, you can jump in here anywhere you like. I mean, if I think back on the last five years, there was a period where you underwent some changes operationally and the rigor with which your forecasting and sales funnel was being implemented. The market changed, and now it does feel like operationally you're better, and with a little luck, the market environment is better from here too. The question is, if you've done three years of 20% revenue growth, which you have, are you comfortable with that as a trajectory going forward, barring any sort of real big dislocation in market dynamics, etc.? Yeah. I mean, I think that's aligned with our internal targets. I think what do we need to get there? I think if I look at 2026, the things that we'll be looking at, and I think this is consistent with some comments Rob made on the call, this large multi-system deal already kind of creates some backlog for us going into the service and potentially the consumable side during the year, which we've talked about. The MilliporeSigma contribution, their commitment for 2026 is going to be meaningful. I think looking at our funnel, we feel good about the funnel. I think we've talked about the fact that there are multiple multi-system orders in that funnel and continuing to push those opportunities ahead and bring more of them to fruition in terms of POs. I think if we're able to continue to do those things, then we should stay on that type of a trajectory. Not only 2026, but beyond. Yep. Okay. That is good too. Gentlemen, I am going to leave it there. I do appreciate you spending some time. Thank you very much. Yep. Thank you, Dan. Appreciate it.