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Seer, Inc. (SEER)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 6, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Seer Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kelly Gura of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Kelly Gura

Analyst

Thank you. Earlier today, Seer released financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. If you've not received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an e-mail to investor@seer.bio. In addition, during today's conference call, we will be referencing a slide presentation that can be accessed on the Events and Presentations section of Seer's Investor Relations website. Joining me today from Seer is Omid Farokhzad, Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board; and David Horn, Chief Financial Officer and President. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ than those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release Seer issued today. For a more complete listing description, please see the Risk Factors section of the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2025, and in its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Seer disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, November 6, 2025. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Omid.

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

Thanks, Kelly, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I will begin our call today by providing updates on our business, and I will then turn the call over to David to provide more detail on our financial results for the third quarter of 2025 as well as our outlook for the full year. Starting on Slide 3. During the third quarter, our team continued to execute with discipline to advance the reach and impact of our platform. We saw a record number of third-party publications, demonstrating the value of the Proteograph and further validating its performance across a range of applications. As more customers generate data on the Proteograph, it is becoming increasingly clear that this technology is unlocking new biological insights that were previously not possible. Beyond publications, we delivered our third consecutive quarter of strong instrument shipments, reflecting continued demand for the Proteograph. In fact, in the first 9 months of 2025, we have shipped just under 3x as many instruments as we did in all of 2024, representing a significant step-up in our installed base. We ended the third quarter with $4.1 million of revenue, representing 2% year-over-year growth and a strong balance sheet of approximately $251 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments. As of September 30, we have repurchased approximately $22 million of our Class A common shares under our $25 million share repurchase program that was authorized in May 2024, reducing our net total shares outstanding by approximately 14%. It's been an especially challenging year with shifting government policies around tariffs and research funding causing uncertainty and capital spending constraints on our customers. The government shutdown has yet another headwind to these customers, escalating their uncertainty around budgets and availability of funding. That said, I'm even more confident in the value…

David Horn

Analyst

Thanks, Omid. Turning to Slide 9. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2025 was $4.1 million, representing an increase of 2% compared to $4 million in the third quarter of 2024. It was primarily due to higher product and service revenue. Revenue recognized primarily consisted of sales of Proteograph instruments, consumable kits and service revenue. Product revenue for the third quarter of 2025 was $2.8 million and consisted of sales of Proteograph instruments and consumable kits. We were pleased by the continued traction we saw in terms of instrument shipments and the purchase of consumable kits in the third quarter despite the continued pressure we are seeing on CapEx budget and elongated sales cycles for the outright purchase of new instruments. Service revenue was $1.2 million for the third quarter of 2025, including $300,000 of related party revenue and primarily consisted of revenue related to STAC service projects. We remain encouraged by the strong customer interest in running projects through STAC, particularly as more users gain access to Proteograph data. And as Omid mentioned, more than 2/3 of our instrument shipments in the third quarter were acquired by customers who had previously accessed STAC. Other revenue was $152,000 for the third quarter of 2025 and consisted of lease and shipping revenue. Total gross profit was $2.1 million for the third quarter of 2025, representing a gross margin of 51% compared to $1.9 million in the third quarter of 2024, representing a gross margin of 48%. Gross margins were driven by higher consumable and service revenue in the third quarter of 2025. We continue to expect variability in our gross margin on a quarter-by-quarter basis as the proportion of instrument consumable and service revenue fluctuates in any given quarter. At scale, we continue to believe our long-term gross margins will…

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

Thank you, David. Moving on to Slide 11. I'm encouraged by the traction we saw in the third quarter as exemplified by a strong quarter of instrument shipment, a record number of peer-reviewed publications and growing number of large-scale studies powered by the Proteograph. Together, these achievements highlight the growing adoption of our technology and reinforce our leadership in enabling deep unbiased proteomics at scale. I'm proud of our team's execution as we advance the reach and impact of the Proteograph Product Suite. With that, we will now open it up for questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Dan Brennan from TD Cowen.

William Ruby

Analyst

This is William on for Dan. I start out, just wondering if you could provide -- I know you talked about the partnership with Thermo on the call, I was wondering if you provide a little bit more update on that partnership and just if that's expected to be a material revenue driver next year. And then just over the last few quarters, you highlighted a number of large studies using the Proteograph platform. Just wondering if you could talk about the potential for more of these studies in the future? And what are the barriers to doing larger sample size products in the future?

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

David, why don't you take the Thermo question, and I'll take the larger study question.

David Horn

Analyst

Thanks, William. Appreciate the question. Yes, the Thermo partnership is going well. As we said on the call, we landed our first joint opportunity. We actually closed 2 different opportunities with Thermo during the quarter. So that was great. There continues to be a pipeline of opportunities that we're pursuing jointly. Again, they're looking to find accounts where they can sell Astrals and a lot of their customers are interested in also doing high-throughput proteomics in which we play a role, so they can offer the package solution. So it's been a very good partnership, not only that, but we're also working with Thermo to pursue some of these joint large biobank opportunities as well. We're working with them on one right now, and we're in discussions with others. So it's been a great partnership. They're a fantastic partner. And we continue to expect good things as we move into 2026 from that partnership, both on individual account wins, but also some larger biobank projects. And with that, I'll turn it over to Omid to talk about some of those studies.

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

And then regarding the question about the -- what does it take to do these large-scale studies? I mean I think it's worth just taking a step back of where were we and how did we get here. Mass spec has always been considered a gold standard for doing proteomics work. It's just that before Seer, mass spec approaches did not scale. And in fact, if you wanted to do deep proteomics, meaning you wanted to look at a large number of proteins in a sample, the workflow to process those samples was so complicated that a very deep proteomic study usually would be limited to tens of samples. So that was the state-of-the-art in mass spec proteomics prior to the introduction of the Proteograph Product Suite. Since then, with the innovation that we've had and most recently, we launched Proteograph ONE together with the SP200 Automation Instrument and together with the Proteograph Analysis Suite, or PAS, that lets the customer go from mass spec data to insight. It is now possible to do very large-scale studies, tens of thousands of samples or even hundreds of thousands of samples and to do it at the depth of thousands of proteins, approaching 10,000 proteins per sample. With that then comes the customers, the biobanks now have a choice. They can use their samples in their biobank to do proteomic using conventional targeted approaches, which is historically what they've done. I mean we've seen large-scale studies get published with the SomaScan with the Olink platform. But increasingly, those same biobanks are approaching us and asking us what would it take to do 10,000, 100,000, 600,000, 500,000, million samples. And the answer is, the existing technologies absolutely makes it possible to do those types of studies. And the velocity and cost and the ease the reproducibility, those are all becoming so relatively comparable to the alternative that the customers now have an absolute choice of doing one or the other. And of course, everyone recognizes that the mass spec is the gold standard. And in many ways, if you have the data set from targeted approaches paired with the mass spec approaches, it's extremely complementary and very powerful. So the first half of the year, and David mentioned, we did the 20,000 sample study with Korea University. We did a 10,000 sample study with Discovery Life Sciences, another biobank study involving Thermo Fisher and some colleagues that we have not announced yet. And we're in multiple discussions with other biobank doing studies that are much, much larger. And my prediction, by the way, is that, the first study of 100,000 sample using mass spec is right around the corner, probably in 2026. And so, I'm super excited about the biological insight that's going to come from these types of studies, these very large-scale studies.

William Ruby

Analyst

Got it. If I could just ask one more? Just wondering if you could just speak to the trends you're seeing among academic customers now that we're well into the new fiscal year, has spending gotten better or worse? And do you expect -- I guess you're talking about what the government shutdown impact would be, but just wondering kind of trends on academic.

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

Yes. Maybe I'll start off, and I'll have David add additional layers of information to it. I mean, look, this has been an interesting year because of a lot of challenges that we've had in terms of policies, the macroeconomic picture. And so, there have been uncertainties both in biopharma and CapEx spending and academics and there are uncertainties about the grant, especially also in the government sector. And so, we have been dealing with this since the beginning of the year. And that -- despite of that headwind, what has been constructive for us is that the tailwind for us has been getting stronger. Customer publications are robust and increasing at a high velocity. This quarter, we saw 13 customer publications, which was a record for us. And I think that momentum is continuing. And by the way, it isn't just the number of publications. It's the magnitude of what these publications means. So if you look at the papers that are coming from Claudia Langenberg's group or the [indiscernible] Group, the biological insight that they're revealing using this platform and large-scale mass spec-based proteomics, deep mass spec-based proteomics is very differentiated to what was possible. So that tailwind is helping us. Now, of course, the government shutdown happened outside of the Q3 window. But we saw almost a pause to academic spending. And of course, government, they have no choice because government shut down. Most recently at a conference -- at the ACT conference, it was a very light presence in that conference. And I think part of it is because of this guarded demeanor that the shutdown has layered on top of an already complex macroeconomic picture that we've been dealing with. So the headwinds have been very strong. In fact, this last month, even stronger -- but the tailwind also is strong and they continue to get stronger. So I'm very, very bullish and optimistic about what's ahead. But boy, does it seem like it's a bumpy road. And when you think you have a break, another challenge comes in front of you that was an unforeseen one. David, I'm not sure if you want to add anything in addition to that.

David Horn

Analyst

Yes. No, the only thing I would add is, again, I think we -- to kind of echo Omid, it is encouraging that we see increasing interest from academics. Just to give you a stat for revenue year-to-date, the first 9 months of the year, about 40% of our revenue was from academic and government customers. That's a higher percentage than last year. So academics are applying for their grants. They're getting their grants. They're spending money with us. But as Omid said, it's just super challenging when a lot of that source for some of that funding, i.e., the NIH is essentially shut down right now. And so, it just creates more uncertainty. And even if people do have money, they are pushing the pause button a little bit while they wait to see what's going to happen. So great interest from that academic and government, and we're very bullish long-term, but we just have to kind of get through these near-term challenges that are beyond our control right now.

Omid Farokhzad

Analyst

And let me just add one more layer of information to this, which is I alluded to it in our prepared remarks. We'll elaborate on it in the very near-term. There was a very large consortium of scientists that got a very, very large multi-tens of millions NIH grant and that's a multiomic study. And they did a very thorough investigation in terms of the proteomic platform that would be used for that multi-institutional consortium. And I was very, very proud that Seer was selected for that. So when I say that the tailwind is getting stronger for us, this is an example of that. But it's also been extremely challenging given the broader picture that both David and I alluded to.

Operator

Operator

There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question-and-answer session. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.