Welcome, everyone, to the MDB Capital Holdings Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Update Conference Call. Thanks very much for joining us today. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. Today's conference call is being recorded. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Remember, questions can only be seen by the moderator. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates or 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 risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results or any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most current Form 10-K for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading of Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be provided later on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He'll be joined later by George Brandon, MDB Capital President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead an update on the fourth quarter ending December 31, 2025. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Chris Marlett. Chris?

Thanks, Tony. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining today. I'm excited to be here and talk to you about what's been happening. It's been a while since our last call, and the year has gotten off to a really interesting start. And so I thought I'd first kind of just talk about our agenda, which I know most of you are very, very interested in where our assets are, what we think about our current investments and what we see for the future. But I wanted to take some time to give you sort of a view from the way we're looking at building this business and why we're so optimistic for the future of MDB. We just published, which you should all have as shareholders, a year-end shareholder letter, which will talk to a lot of what we're going to talk to today, but in a bit more detail. If you can get through it, it's about 9 or 10 pages. But I think it does a pretty good job of giving you a real good view of where we see the business, where we're headed and why we're excited about the future. So with that, I'll start off with just reminding everybody our story, really, we've taken this proven model of launching companies about 1 every 18 months where we helped to conceive of a big idea, bring it and position it for being public and having value in the public markets and then taking them public. And we did that before we were public, and it was a very nice business. And of course, the reason we decided to go public was that we believe we could scale that to 3 to 5 launches a year, maybe not overnight, but we really believe that we could do that,…

Let's just jump into it. [Operator Instructions] I'm going to start right off. Chris, I know you hit the positions we have the biggest stake in, but I just got a question on, can you talk a little bit about Cue, ClearSign and Beam and then also a question on Buda. That was unusual for us to do Buda. So can you just give a little bit of a view on those positions that many of our shareholders still hold?

Yes, yes. So ClearSign has certainly been on that long commercialization journey. And that's a company that Anthony knows much better than me. But from the -- and it's a very small position within our firm. But it -- they have been on this commercialization journey and their unique burner technology is more relevant than ever. We're going to be burning a lot more natural gas. And so I think that, that company is scaling. And I still think the prospects for that company are quite good. With regard to HeartBeam, HeartBeam did something that most people thought was impossible to get an FDA approval for a pocket 12-liter ECG, what's not told in that story is that, that ECG is even better than a 12-liter in many ways. And as they've signaled, could be the first device to be able to detect a heart attack, which is a game changer would save millions of lives. The commercialization journey is not easy for any of these small companies. And so -- but HeartBeam, we're still super -- we think everybody in the ECG space or health monitoring space, AI space should want to partner with HeartBeam because they have the most sensitive ambulatory ECG in the planet. Period. End of story. So we're very hopeful that the team is going to execute on making sure one of those partnerships happen, which will bring scale to a really unbelievable technology that could save millions of lives. Buda, I addressed it in the shareholder letter. You can look at it, but Buda, everyone said, well, geez, why are you going away from deep tech or what have you? Well, it was a bit serendipitous because a friend of mine really was the CEO of the company, and he was visiting me in…

And Cue Bio.

And Cue Bio. So Cue is struggling. I think they've struggled putting together a cohesive management and Board and getting that technology to commercialization. But that being said, they partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim and also partnered with ImmunoScape on 101. And now they're about ready to put 401 in the clinic. All of these are massive game-changer type opportunities. The stock doesn't reflect it. You'd never guess by looking at the stock that it has any value. But in fact, we believe that all 3 of those opportunities, those shots on goal are super valuable. And we're really -- we're still just as bullish about the technology as possible as we've ever been, but they've had their challenges in getting the execution side of it done.

So a question on -- moving on to eXoZymes in that conference call. We're going to jump right off this call and go right into Exosymes's year-end call here that starts in 15 minutes. So we'll wrap up before that. But what are you looking at for, obviously, they're going to have to raise money. What's the dilution going to look like in your mind? I'm getting a question on what do you -- how do you think the dilution works? And how does that work when you're looking at an asymmetrical opportunity?

Yes. So the great thing about Eosymes is that, again, much like if you think about mDBVat a $10 million OpEx level to create big opportunities, eXoZymes is the same way. Exosymes has about $10 million in OpEx to create huge opportunities. Now they've created now 2 gargantuan opportunities in NCT and cannabinoids. And they're going to talk all about that, so I won't go into it too deeply. But the combination of government grants and now that those opportunities being on the doorstep of commercialization. These aren't science projects anymore. These are -- so dilution is in our mind, is going to be relatively minimal because this is not like putting drugs in clinical trials. This is not -- they can outsource manufacturing. So it is super capital efficient. And we've worked really hard and they've worked really hard to create a high-impact organization to focus on big, huge platforms, where they can be -- where they can generate -- we're talking about TAMs in the hundreds of billions with the 2 platforms they're in. And they have the ability to be a major player in those platforms with a relatively small operating budget, which really speaks to how impactful their technology is. The reality is nobody believed they could do it. Nobody believed it would scale. I would just tell you, throw all your best scientists at it, go visit the company, go see where they're at, and you're going to see that this could be the biomanufacturing. This could really be the start of a huge biomanufacturing revolution. And in fact, the U.S. government, we can't continue to outsource manufacturing, especially pharma and nutritional supplement manufacturing overseas. And so -- this is a huge initiative. I think you're going to see continued government grants coming to them. And so I just think that it's in the right place at the right time. And now we just got to go out and tell the story.

A question on PatentVest. How systematically or structurally, how do you see that spin out? If I'm a shareholder of MDB, how is that going to impact me? Do you have an idea of what that path is on valuation and spin out? I know you said, hey, you weren't really sure about what the valuation is going to be. But how -- if I own a share of stock, what am I going to see as a shareholder?

Well, the good news about both the clearing -- MDB Direct, the clearing ops and PatentVest is we own 100% of both of them. So we're starting with a much larger share of those than we do with the other companies we have ownership in. And -- and so our objective is to do a round of financing to bring in partners. So we want to bring in folks, I can't mention names, whether it be law firms, big corporate strategics or other strategics, and we're talking to various strategics right now. Our goal is to get that funded and out of MDB as a company. Then we look -- we're going to look forward to taking it public in 2027 and the method in which we do that and how we do it, it's not really completely formulated yet. But that's going to be largely dictated by what we do on the partnering front here in the short run and funding it as its own independent division here shortly.

Can you talk a little bit about what your deal pipeline looks going forward in the next 12 to 24 months?

It's really interesting because the deal pipeline is great, and it's -- I can only see it getting better. So the biggest point is really our ability to get them sold, right? We have to get them packaged and sold. And so right now, with where we're at, the biggest constraint isn't the number of companies we're seeing. It's really going to be to work out the distribution side of the equation and get those and get that done. So I think once we do that, who knows how many we can do a year. So like I said, we -- the biggest issue is solving the distribution thing. Obviously, our stocks, some have done okay, some haven't done as good as we hoped. And obviously, if a couple of them work out pretty good, then that puts wind in the sails of everybody. But we really need to add incremental distribution. Our community is still relatively small. We have -- while we have a couple of thousand shareholders, we only have 675 active accounts. So it's still very small. And we're trying to broaden distribution so that we don't have a couple of really large investors in our deals. We're trying to broaden that a bit. And so as we do that, then our ability to get more of them done is going to increase. So I'm not worried about the number of companies that we can launch. I'm worried about just making sure that we can find investors for them all.

Okay. So I got a question here that -- it's a good question, but I'm just going to read it. I normally paraphrase, but would or have you considered a SaaS model for PatentVest that in turn for its analysis? This would serve not only to generate revenue but attract IP contribution to increase IP content to evaluate the combination of IP to uncover unexplored opportunities.

Yes. So I think to be 100% blunt, I think SaaS is going to be crushed by AI.

Go into that a little bit. How, why, and why do you think that?

Yes. So just to give you an idea. We -- just to give you one segment that's a really, really big core thing of what we do. So -- let's take patentability, which is what is largely called prior art search, right? So any new vendor that comes up with a new idea wants to do a patentability or should do a patentability analysis. So heretofore, you would -- maybe if you were -- you would subscribe to a patent database, you would go out, you would do your own patentability analysis and search, you would maybe pay PatSnap $10,000 or $12,000 a year or $15,000 a year to go do that. And it would kind of get you part of the way there, maybe, right? And you kind of -- you get a lot of data and you'd say, well, maybe this works. An expert user would use PatSnap in maybe 5 or 6 other databases and then get to a really, really good patentability, but very few people did it because it was too expensive and too time consuming. We've now -- just to give you an idea, what we were doing is we had expert trained analysts in Latin America with PhDs and master's degrees in science. They would do a patentability analysis in 45 hours. Now even though the cost was lower by doing it in Latin America, 45 hours is still a huge amount of inertia to actually go through and actually do that work. We took the same SOPs for doing a patentability analysis, now run by that same expert analyst that we have in Latin America, with AI, where we basically programmed the agent. We programmed the agent ourselves with a popular AI vendor where the software needed to run that analysis was…

Okay. Well, we're at the end here, and I'm going to go ahead and turn it back to you and let you go ahead and close it out.

All I can say is thanks. It's been a very tough road the last couple of years since we've been public. But I hope that by listening to where we see things going that you have a bit more enthusiasm and you have the ability to kind of keep the faith and hang in there. We're super excited about the future for the firm. We're getting better and better every day. We're not -- the entire team here is working their ass off to make things happen. It's been a rough thing. We haven't given people raises. We've taken back RSUs. We've really backtracked a lot and a lot of the expectations that we had for ourselves were not met. But you just don't give up. You never say die, you just keep going. And we -- I appreciate everybody at the firm that's done it. It's not been easy. It's been a lot of really difficult discussions. But that being said, when I look at what's bubbling up from what we have, I'm super excited. So I'll leave it at that.

George?

You want me made the ending? Well thank you, everybody, for coming. Tony, that was your job. You're supposed to jump on there, close it out, start it, close it out.

That's all right. I'm ready to do it. So we'll say thank you very much for attending today's presentation. This will conclude our conference call.

All right. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Bye.