Earnings Labs

Movano Inc. (MOVE)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 24, 2022

$17.43

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Movano Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions]. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to, J. Cogan, CFO. Thank you. You may begin.

J. Cogan

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today. Our CEO, John Mastrototaro, will open today's call with prepared remarks about the progress we've made during Q4. Afterward, I will cover the highlights of our fourth quarter 2021 operating results and provide perspective on our financial position. Finally, Movano's Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Michael Leabman, will join John and me for the Q&A session. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements during today's call. Whether in prepared remarks or during the Q&A session, these forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risk and uncertainties. These risk and uncertainties are detailed in the risk factors section of our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically in the company's Forms 10-Q and 10-K. Except as otherwise required by federal securities laws, Movano disclaims any obligation to update or make revisions to such forward-looking statements contained herein or elsewhere to reflect changes in expectations with regards to those events, conditions and circumstances. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, John Mastrototaro.

John Mastrototaro

Analyst

Thanks J. And welcome everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for our Q4 earnings call and are excited to provide you a business update. Today's call happens to fall almost exactly on the one-year anniversary of our initial listing on NASDAQ. And when I take a step back to consider the progress we've made as a company over that time, I feel an immense sense of pride in our team. Since our IPO, we've been diligently laying the groundwork to build a platform of purpose driven, competitive and durable healthcare solutions while remaining dedicated to our mission of empowering and inspiring you to live a happier, healthier life. Despite the pandemic and various other external factors in which the business sector worldwide wide experienced countless interruptions, we feel extremely fortunate to have continued to grow with purpose and passion. We've met each milestone of our technology and clinical roadmaps, we've significantly grown our staff in areas of expertise, and we have developed and are in the process of preparing the business for our first commercial product, which we are now less than a year away from releasing the beta launch. In our previous earnings calls, I've talked about our crawl walk, run strategy for product commercialization in which we are taking incremental steps to our end goal of bringing a Class II FDA cleared solution to the market while also developing a pathway to get our technology in the hands of consumers sooner. In December of last year, as part of our virtual participation at CES 2022, we brought this strategy to light by unveiling plans for our initial product, the Movano Inc. The smart ring, and its accompanying app and cloud platform combined vital health metrics with personalized intelligent feedback and is designed for women of all ages…

J. Cogan

Analyst

Thanks, John. We detailed the financial results in today's 4Q earnings release, which you can find on our website, but I'll share a few key line items. Movano reported an operating loss of $6.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to an operating loss of $3.2 million in the year or ago period. For the 12 months ended of December 31, 2021, we reported an operating loss of $19.8 million versus $11.1 million in the 12 months ending December 2020. The increase was primarily related to the expansion of our team and R&D initiatives, as well as the inclusion of public company costs related to our March 2021 initial public offering. At the end of the fourth quarter, we had $33.6 million of cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments and total assets of $36.3 million. We will not be providing specific financial guidance, but as you've heard in today's quarterly report, as well as through our commentary on previous quarterly calls, we're making great progress across our small but mighty organization, we've separated the development of our platform of purpose driven health solutions and are now poised to bring the Movano ring to market in a beta release in the back half of 2022. At our third quarter earnings call, we highlighted that our cash burn would increase in the fourth quarter of 2021 and into 2022 and that remains our view at this juncture. That said, capital deployment and operating efficiency is critical to our strategic plan and when you consider the market opportunity and the progress that we've made to date on our invested capital, we feel very good about our trajectory and the opportunity ahead. As that concludes our formal remarks, we'd be glad to take your questions. Operator.

Operator

Operator

[Operator instructions] Operator looks like there's some in the webcast. So, why don't go ahead and get started. I can ask a few of those and we can see if there's anybody dialing in.

J. Cogan

Analyst

Okay, John, I can take the first question. It's on cash burn rate or there's one on strategic partners for you after that. You mentioned in your prepared marks that you continue to expect your cash burn to run higher into 2022. Can you talk a little bit, can you talk about that in a little bit more detail? Our cash burn, as we just mentioned was $5.7 million in the fourth quarter and we also had $33.6 million in cash equivalence and short term investments at the end of the year. As I'm sure you can understand and given our development stage, we're not at the point we're going to be providing specific financial guidance as a general practice, but taking a broad view, the more progress that we're making, developing our platform of health solutions, including preparing for the upcoming beta launch of the Movano ring, the more that we're going to want to invest behind that progress, including expanding our team, accelerating our R&D and clinical studies initiatives, and also preparing to launch the product. We said it before, but to reiterate one more time, we take capital deployment and operating efficiency very seriously, and we plan to continue to be good stewards of the cash on the company's balance sheet. We've got a small but mighty team and when you consider the market opportunity and the progress that we've made to date on our investing capital, we feel really good about our trajectory and the opportunity ahead. Okay. So the next question has to do with strategic partners. John, at your last earnings call, you stated that you'd be meeting with potential strategic partners at CES. How'd that go?

John Mastrototaro

Analyst

Yeah, well, certainly our yearend announcement, right before CES of the Movano ring, provided a catalyst for our company to engage with potential strategic partners. There's several elements of the ring and our mission that have resonated broadly in our conversations. Primarily the focus on women, the ring form factor, structuring ourselves as a medical device company with medical grade data and pursuing FDA clearances for many metrics that will be monitoring, providing intelligent insights that connect cause and effect. And finally having a solution that's affordable enough for a mass audience, all resonated really well and so, as you can imagine, we've had a lot of interest, At this point, we're not in a position to be specific about the status of conversations that we've had with strategic partners, but as we noted, we're great interest across healthcare industry, consumer and technology sectors and in fact, the interest level has definitely surpassed our expectations. And I think it really speaks to the appeal of what we're attempting to do right now and how that solution could be of great value to both consumers and potential partners.

J. Cogan

Analyst

I'll stop. Okay. We've got a few more in the webcast. This is for you as well John. What is the status of your blood pressure and glucose algorithm development efforts? Are you getting close to filing for an FDA clearance?

John Mastrototaro

Analyst

Yeah. Great question. Well, we aren't there yet. I'm going to start off by saying that we're not there yet, but we've really made a lot of progress and I'm remain very optimistic and there's a couple of things to keep in mind about the progress that we're making. So the first is related to the shrinking of the technology and the hardware. Every time that we'd gone from a larger prototype system to smaller so we started with something that was a size of a pizza box and went to something that was a size of a large iPhone. And then most recently, down to our first wrist worn prototype. When we got to the wrist worn prototype in the 110 subject study we conducted at the end of last year for blood pressure, for example, we found that the cleanliness of the data, that we get, the ability to process and filter the data all improves each time. And so we are really now looking forward to implementing the new single chip solution, which is the ultimate step, where everything is in a very small, like four by seven millimeter or so size chip, where we can have the antennas that are directing the energy in a much more direct contact with the body and where we want to go. So the hardware itself, every time we've shrunk it down, we've gotten better data. We've more data and cleaner data. Now, the second part is the work we're doing with both the signal processing and the algorithms. And we've got a really strong team. All the folks that we've got working on this have at least 2025 and upwards of 30, 35 years experience in the field and with every new set of data that we bring in,…

J. Cogan

Analyst

Okay. We've got a couple questions that are along the same vein. One about being a little bit more specific about the beta launch of the ring, including things like pricing and subscription model and then there was also another subscription model question. So do you want to start on that and I can help you as well?

John Mastrototaro

Analyst

Sure. Well, just with regards to the beta launch, I can first I'll tell you that there's no shortage of interested data testers. As we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we've received thousands of messages from individuals who are very excited and have requested and volunteered to participate in our beta launch. Obviously we're not yet prepared to go public with details of what we're going to do exactly for the beta launch, but our focus will be to thoroughly test the solution and make sure it's ready for both the direct to consumer as well as for B2B activities. And we want to ensure that the device itself, the hardware, the app experience and all the related support are all ready for prime time. It's certainly a lot of work to do through the course of this year, but it's very exciting for the organization and so that's a little bit about the beta launch, In terms about the details on the pricing and subscription model and whatnot, as you heard on the call and it seen in the recent releases, we're rapidly building our go to market team. And obviously they're going to work very closely with senior management on the launch of the ring and future products. And you should expect to hear more about our team in the coming weeks as well as some more in the future about how we're thinking about bringing this to market. Now, turn it over to Jay to maybe make a couple of comments there.

J. Cogan

Analyst

Yeah, I think that, we've been pretty clear that we want to make the solution attractive and excessive to a -- excuse me, accessible to a wide audience. We remain very committed to that. We believe good health is a fundamental, right. We've also discussed that we're leaning towards a subscription model, that would be approach to consumers and to potential partners, and that would enable the company to reinvest in our solution, allowing us to have more features over time. So, we're going to look to an economic model that works for, both our customers, and our shareholders and we feel good about where things are going in that regard. And I think our last question for the day, unless there's any questions on the phone lines, is just kind of a big picture question for you, John, after having been CEO for a year, the question is, you've been CEO for a year now. Movano has been a public company for a year as well. What are your biggest takeaways, biggest surprises.

John Mastrototaro

Analyst

Yeah. Great question. I've been in the healthcare space and specifically in med device for over 30 years now and then with smaller companies and larger companies throughout that time. A lot of my work has been dealing with chronic conditions and most of it in the space, in the area of diabetes and the solution we were developing were helping people who had type one diabetes who really needed a tool to help them live with the chronic condition that they had living with day in, day out. And this is somewhat different with what we're trying to do here at Movano. Number one, we're trying to help a broader group of people, much larger, many, many tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of people who just want to try to live healthier, who may have type two diabetes, who maybe have, have prediabetes who may have hypertension or be hypertensive and trying to do more on the preventative side versus the treatment side once people are, are sick. And this is very exciting to me because I think this is where we need to go a as a society and a and a country to really deal with the overwhelming healthcare related cost that we see in the rising rates of type two diabetes and hypertension. And so, because of that, I tell you it's very exciting because of how many people it really can apply to with what we're trying to do. And I think we're on the cutting edge of healthcare. I think that healthcare has got to move more consumer oriented. I think are getting more aware of their health and we need to help them understand their health better and so, trying to be more at this intersection between consumer devices and…

J. Cogan

Analyst

Okay. I think that does it for the questions. Yes, on my end. I'm not seeing anything. So Jay, I'll pass it back over to you for any closing remarks. End of Q&A:

J. Cogan

Analyst

Thanks operator. Thanks everybody on the call today, for your time. As a reminder, you can stay connected and up to date on Movano news and events by checking out our investor website @irdotmoana.com. Thanks, goodnight.

Operator

Operator

This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a great day. End of Q&A: