[Call Starts Abruptly] will follow the formal presentation. If you have questions during the presentation, you can type them into the chat to be answered during the question-and-answer period. Questions can only be seen by the moderator. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Before we begin the formal presentation, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates and other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today’s discussion we will attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q that we just filed. For a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors, please look at – go to the website for mdb.com. Also a replay of this call will be provided on our website. Your host today, Chris Marlett, CEO and Co-Founder of MDB, will present results of operations, a highlight of the results in the fourth quarter and for the full year as of December 31, 2024. At this time I’d like to turn the call over to MDB Capital Holdings’ Chief Executive, Chris Marlett.

Thanks, Kevin. Well, thanks everyone for joining. I’m going to display the slide deck here, which takes us through the – through our presentation. The – I want to, first of all, apologize, we – in Invizyne, we were notified by our auditors a few weeks ago that we were going to be deconsolidating the financial statements of Invizyne, which caused a – which causes – which is sort of good in, in one way and that it’s going to be very easy to analyze the financial statements of MDB. But it prevented us from actually filing until today and we were just informed by the SEC that the system is backed up because today is the deadline and so the actual 10-K is not yet formally filed even though we’ve submitted it. So, for that reason I cannot actually get too deep into any sort of financial results, but I can give you sort of an overview of what we’re doing and then we’re going to be delivering a detailed shareholder letter this week, which will get into those financial results. I also want to invite you to call, whether it’s me or Jeremy, our CFO, to discuss any questions you have once you see the 10-K and once you see the shareholder letter. So with that, I want to really just go over what we’ve accomplished this past year. I’m very excited about where we’re at today and all the accomplishments of 2024. So I’ll go over first by just sort of reminding you what we do. Many of the listeners today may not be shareholders for a long time or investors with MDB for a long time. So I’ll go through this part fairly quickly. But as most of you know by now, what we really do…

Yes, it’s November.

November, sorry. And we really worked hard. The team did a great job. It was not a great time to be bringing a Big Idea public. The market for these small IPOs has been really absolutely horrible. But the team pulled together, the eXoZymes team did a great job and we really are very appreciative of our investor community that came behind us and supported us to get this IPO done. It was one of the smallest IPOs we’ve ever done and yet it was still not easy in this environment. As I talked about before, we screened thousands of opportunities and that pipeline is building, very, very rapidly. And I think that you’re going to see a whole host of new opportunities be presented that are a very high quality, very shortly. We continue to increase our shoulder count. We’re up by 12%. We’re up to about 1,800 shareholders, I believe. And we’ve – as we’ve now launched MDB Direct on our clearing platform, we just started onboarding investors this year. We’re up over – I think over 500 now, but as of the end of year we’re at 456. And our new relationship with STRATA Trust is really helping us to also onboard IRA assets and it’s really a terrific self-directed IRA platform. One of the things that the community team has been working on pretty aggressively is how do we sort of transition from – many times before, we’d have very large investors that took up very large percentages of our offerings. Many of those investors in today’s environment are not quite as aggressive as they used to be. And we really recognize what we wanted to do was create really venture portfolios for RIAs, individual investors, family offices. And that process began, I would say four…

It’s been accepted.

Okay. So the 10-K has been accepted. So what I will do very quickly is go back to a slide that gives you a summary. And then what we will do is go back to – you’ll get more granularity on this as of the end of this week when the shareholder letter comes out. And again, please feel free to call either Jeremy or I or other people on the team here that you have a relationship with to get a little bit more visibility on this. So what we wanted to do on this slide, which was sort of very similar to what we were going to show in the investor toolkit, is keep track of sort of our net asset value, if you will, and our enterprise value. And as you can see, at 12/31, combination of cash and securities was $28 million and Big Idea investments, as represented by eXoZymes, was $64 million, which gave us total cash and securities of roughly $93 million. Our stock price as of 12/31 was $6.30, the shares outstanding approximately 9.9 million, which gave us a market value of $62 million. So effectively had a negative market value of $30 million, which basically doesn’t give us much credit for our ability to create these on a sustainable basis. And I know that our job is to show that we can do that sustainably and create great companies as we have in the past. I’ll caution you that, obviously these numbers are super volatile. As of right now, the biggest driver is eXoZymes’ stock price. So it’s been whipsawing with the volatility in the market the last 30 days. And we’ll continue – I don’t have any real commentary on the market per se, but I do think that volatility is…

Yes. All right. Great. Thanks, Chris. The first question actually, I’ll answer this, Chris is – does Lou Basenese still work for the organization? Lou left MDB, and we’re sad to see him go. He’s been a friend of the firm for 15 years. And he had an opportunity to spend a lot more time on his media presence. He’s been doing a lot of time on TV, and he’s really been making a name for himself. And I think he has a little bit more freedom now to do that. He’s always been a friend of the firm and a backer of our companies and we – he’s still a friend of the firm and still showing us ideas, and he’s behind us all the way. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that, Chris.

Now Lou, we’ve known – I guess I met Lou for the first time in 2010 when we started talking about our method of, sort of, not only launching Big Ideas, but how to analyze new companies and look at deep technology. And Lou always has been a great communicator. And I think that, I think Lou stays very interested in the asset class and I think in a lot of ways it’s easier for him to participate in what we’re doing from the outside than it is from the inside. And we wish Lou a lot of success with his endeavors. I know he’s reignited his newsletter and is continuing his TV appearance. So that’s we’re very happy.

Yes. Perfect. The other question is, Chris, understanding that you don’t have the ability to go into the numbers regarding eXoZymes, can you discuss in general terms what the deconsolidation will mean for MDB stockholders and for eXoZymes’ investors?

In reality, it’s just going to be very simple. So what it was is that, before, we would have all their assets and liabilities on our balance sheet. We would also have their revenue and operating losses in our financials. So you really couldn’t see what MDB was doing very easily separated from what eXoZymes was doing. So now that’s going to be super clear from both an income statement and balance sheet perspective. And you’ll see a bit of that in the 10-K. The 10-K will still need a bit of explanation, but it will be much easier to understand. As a result of that deconsolidation, we took our investment of about $5.6 million, and it was effectively valued at the time of the IPO, if I’m not...

Like around $40 million.

Around $40 million. So we had a gain, so we’ll show a gain on the deconsolidation, if you will. And going forward, the treatment will be reviewed periodically. And we...

For impairment.

[indiscernible] and for impairment and what have you. So it won’t be marked up. If the stock goes up, it will not be marked up on our balance sheet, but it will be easy to tell because you can tell by how many shares we have and what the stock price is. So it won’t be very difficult for us to be able to do the calculation, like we provided on that one slide, to be able to break out the value of eXoZymes on our balance sheet going forward and separate it from an operational perspective from our operations.

Terrific. Great. The next question is; how many Big Idea companies do you reasonably expect to stand up in 2025? And what might the IPO timelines look like for such companies? And then I’ll just also tie in – the other one is, is there any particular sectors that will be involved? Gary, can you talk about the sectors?

Yes. I think that – I think what I see optically for the next year, we’re going to have these companies that are, I would say, a bit more developed, maybe even some that have revenue that we’re working to help stand them up, but in a much less extensive way. We’re not having to put a lot of capital in them, but we’re really working to prepare them to go public. That’s an exciting new avenue of business for us, because I see that whether it’s previously backed VC companies or private equity companies are coming to us that could utilize our platform and our community to go public. And I think that, that’s going to give us the ability to do more because we don’t have to – it’s not as much work, quite frankly. And so we’re seeing the opportunity to take some of these companies’ public. I think I can think of one that we are in advanced discussions to hopefully bring public in September. And then we have, I would say, two to three others that are – that we’ve been working on for quite some time, that could end up being more traditional Big Ideas where we have a significant embedded equity interest. And we’re hoping to be able to announce those shortly. Again, we put those in the probability – high probability of happening. But again, anything can happen. We can’t promise them. These are still forward-looking statements. But I’m just giving you optically where I see we should be able to present three – we’re hoping three to four new Big Ideas this year. In the public company sector, we’ve had now a couple of public companies come to us for financings, and I think that we’re kind of excited about some opportunities there. We’ve made a lot more relationships with existing public companies. We kind of have a good idea of the ones that we’re pretty fond of, and we have a lot of relationships building there. And so I think we’ll also potentially being able to offer some more interesting existing public company ones. So with any luck, we’re hoping to be able to present maybe an additional one or two of those this year. So again, no promises, but it looks like the activity is much greater going forward than it’s been historical, is the way we’re looking at it right now.

Great. And how about – the next question is, how do you see the regulatory winds? Have they changed under the Trump administration? Do you expect any significant change in approval time lines?

All right. So regulatory is a big question. So we have – I think there’s a lot of cross currents. And so I think regulatory from broker-dealer perspective, it’s something that we – we always are having to deal with regulators, and I think a lot of times it’s frustrating for us to have at our own financial firms the regulation that we face. I think that, that is going to be a breath of fresh air. I think that you can almost sense from the regulators that there’s change happening, which I think will make it easier for new offerings to get done. And I think we saw a – very big offering traded. It’s the Newsmax offering that – digital offering that helped us go public, do – and I mean, they raised $200 million from accredited investors and took it public. And I’m not so sure that would have been as easy to get listed and what have you if there wasn’t a change in administration, because it was a very complicated, complex deal that they allowed to go to public. So, I think that regulatory environment is good for what we do. I think, again, it’s why we are probably pretty bullish on public venture versus traditional venture going forward. Regulatory, in other senses, may become a bit clouded in the short run. So the FDA, right now, we’re – if I had to worry about anything, it would be – I think the FDA is under a lot of change and I think that we don’t know what that will have. Maybe in the short run, it may be negative with regard to getting things through the FDA. In the long run, it may be a benefit. So, it’s very, very hard to tell with regard to that. I think that the other axis that we think about is grant funding, and I think grant funding is also – Invizyne is – or eXoZymes has had a fair bit of grant funding historically. Right now, the grants that have been granted through the DOE and others are still there. But I think there’s a big cloud. If you talk to university researchers and other people, it’s still cloudy as to what’s going to happen regulatorily or in the grant world as well. So that’s – all the things affect us. That’s kind of our optics right now.

Terrific. Thanks. And how about any plans for a – when do you expect to make any type of dividend?

Well, with regard to – the only material position that’s – right now is eXoZymes. And I think that the way we look at it is, when is the company sort of maturing, right? You’d hate to distribute all those shares out before there’s a solid footing underneath the company. The company still trades relatively small volume. And so I think our goal is to see sort of a value-creating event happen within eXoZymes. And when there’s more trading volume, and then I think that would probably be a good time to make a distribution. I think as the largest shareholder, I would love to see a distribution. So I’m on your side with that. It’s just – I think doing it at the right time is really just as important, so that we don’t disrupt the market for the shares.

Terrific. And actually, just to tie into that, the last question is, as a shareholder of MDB, how should I think about the investment in cash and resources relative to value creation? So, like you just mentioned with Invizyne. If I remember correctly, I think we invested $6 million or so.

$5.6 million.

Yes, a lot of time, a lot of firm resources, and then you spin that out.

Yes. I think that we want to keep a modest – amount of cash available to take – to basically when we have new opportunities like Invizyne to write a check. The thing that we’re finding in some of these right now is that we don’t have to write a check and or a material check. And the value-add that we’re providing is significant for us to earn a fairly large equity position. But I think that, we do see that writing checks gets us leverage to get bigger equity positions. So I think if we were to monetize any of the eXoZymes at some point, we may look to deploy a little bit of that before we distribute the rest of it out. But again, we’ve never been a real capital-intensive operation, so we’ve never needed, historically, tons of cash to operate. And I’d like to keep it that way. And we create value. And I think as time goes forward, I really don’t want to change that much. I really want to kind of operate MDB like we’ve operated it for the last 27 years, which is – provides a lot of leverage to the shareholders.

Terrific. And that wraps it up on the Q&A, Chris.

All right. Well, everyone, thank you for your time. I apologize for not getting more granular on the financials, but you’ll see that in the shareholder letter that we hope to have out by the end of the week. Obviously, you can read the 10-K, and I’ll provide my interpretation of that 10-K in that letter. So, with that, we’ll sign off. Kevin, thanks.

Yes. Thanks, Chris.