EXOZ

Everything in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, will be forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings to better understand eXoZymes as a business, our risk factors, and as an investment opportunity.

Welcome to the quarterly investor call. We've been looking forward to presenting for you and speaking with you all. We are four speakers today. I will open, Tyler will cover the product and platform progress, Damien will cover NCT from a partner selection and the commercialization roadmap perspective. Fouad will come and show us the finances, and then I'll end, where I can talk about the fundraising we did in Q2 and the strategic perspectives of how we are running eXoZymes. I know we today have a good mix of long-term investors and brand new investor candidates. So let me show you how we pitch eXoZymes in 30 seconds. It goes like this. eXoZymes makes highly valuable natural products that, until now, have been inaccessible.

Most of them are molecules someone have found in nature, but only in tiny amounts, enough for people to realize a huge market potential, but no practical way of building a commercial product or business. eXoZymes enables these new and valuable nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals with the next generation of biomanufacturing. I will start the update by expressing my super excitement about the news we released yesterday. Our R&D team and our product development teams have been super over-performing, and it's setting us up for success with NCT. Tyler, I'll let you go through that and what it means in practice. Over to you.

Hello, I'm Tyler Korman, CSO and Co-Founder of eXoZymes. I'd like to pick up on our recent work with NCT, namely the productivity work and what it took to get there. Back in March, we announced our first pilot scale campaign for NCT, run with Cayman Chemical. Our process went from 1 L to 100 L, with Cayman operating it independently, working from the package we handed them. They produced over 500 g of high purity NCT at 99.6% purity, with 99% of the feedstock converted to product. That campaign answered the first question any manufacturer asks, does this chemistry work outside our lab in someone else's hands at scale? It does. But working and being worth doing are two different things. Process can be perfectly reliable and still be too slow or too expensive to build a business on. In the months since March, we've focused on productivity.

There are three numbers on this slide I'd like to highlight. First, we now get about 67% more NCT out of every liter of reaction volume than we did in the pilot run. Same size tank, substantially more product. Second, the reaction finishes about five times faster. That's about 80% less time in the tank. That one number matters more than it might sound, because time in the tank is exactly what a contract manufacturer charges you for. Third, and this is the number we point you to, combining the first two gains with other improvements we've made, the process is roughly 10 times more productive than the pilot run. There's a fourth item on this slide that isn't a number, and I'd argue is just as important. We've moved the process onto commercially relevant unit operations.

These are the equipment and handling steps a commercial plant actually uses, rather than the ones that happen to be convenient in a development lab. 10 times the productivity is productivity a partner can actually receive. The pilot campaign in March demonstrated the process could work. This productivity work here is what we believe makes it economically attractive. We believe greater productivity and a simplified process strengthen the pathway toward technology transfer, though the timing and outcome of any transfer will depend on factors described in our SEC filings. I'll now hand it over to Damien, who will take the third piece, how we're approaching partner selection.

Realization activities this year has been advancing the next stage of NCT scale up through the selection of a manufacturing partner and site. Importantly, this work builds on two major milestones that we've already achieved. Earlier this year, we successfully completed pilot scale production with an independent manufacturing partner, demonstrating the scalability of our NCT process. More recently, we announced a significant process optimization breakthrough that further improved the economics and commercial readiness of NCT. With those milestones in place, our focus advanced to selecting the manufacturing partner who will help us execute the next stage of commercialization. Our partner evaluation extended well beyond just cost and equipment. With decades of industrial biotechnology scale-up experience, our team has learned that successful technology transfer depends more on the quality of collaboration as they do on the quality of the assets.

Strong communication channels and a shared commitment to problem-solving are frequently the difference between a smooth scale-up and a difficult one. By qualifying multiple manufacturing options, we have reinforced one of the core strengths of the eXoZymes platform. We do not need to build and operate our own manufacturing facilities in order to commercialize products. Instead, we can leverage an established global manufacturing ecosystem and focus our capital on product innovation. The short list also creates strategic optionality. In addition to selecting a primary manufacturing partner, we are establishing qualified backup options that can support future supply continuity and risk management as demand for NCT grows. We expect to finalize a partner selection by the end of the third quarter, and we look forward to advancing the next phase of NCT commercialization while continuing to build the manufacturing ecosystem that will support future products across the eXoZymes platform.

One of our major areas of focus this year has been advancing the commercialization roadmap for NCT. Importantly, the work we're discussing today builds on a series of milestones we've already announced, including pilot scale production, productivity breakthrough, and the screening process through production partner options. These achievements move NCT beyond technical feasibility and toward commercial readiness. Our focus has now expanded from proving we can make NCT, to building the ecosystem required to successfully launch it into market. Our commercialization strategy is centered on assembling an integrated ecosystem that can efficiently bring NCT to market. That ecosystem begins with the supply chain. Over the past year, we've tested and verified multiple suppliers for key production inputs, creating sourcing flexibility and reducing future supply risk. The next layer is manufacturing.

As previously reported in this meeting today, we've advanced through a comprehensive manufacturing partner selection process and are establishing a scalable asset-light production model that leverages world-class external manufacturing capabilities rather than requiring us to build our own facilities. We're also assembling the regulatory and clinical foundation needed for launch. Activities including GRAS preparation and supporting human studies are creating the framework necessary to support commercialization. The most important relationship we're building is our commercial and marketing partnership. This partner will play a central role in translating NCT from a novel ingredient into a successful market product by providing branding, channel development, commercialization expertise, and market reach. The opportunity is not simply to launch NCT, but to establish meaningful market adoption and product revenue. We're making solid progress screening and evaluating prospective launch partners and are encouraged by the quality of discussions underway.

We look forward to sharing details regarding that relationship toward the end of Q4. Our expectation is that this partnership will provide the capabilities, infrastructure, and market experience necessary to support an NCT product launch by mid-2027. Ultimately, this ecosystem is about more than one product. It demonstrates how the eXoZymes platform can repeatedly create new molecular opportunities and efficiently assemble the partnerships required to transform those opportunities into sustainable, high-value businesses. Thank you.

I want to spend two minutes on a question investors ask us often, what comes after our current programs? Everything we do starts with the same asset, our cell-free AI-enhanced biomanufacturing platform. What the platform produces, we call biosolutions, which we use to make molecules that are traditionally difficult, expensive, or impractical to make at commercial scale by conventional methods. NCT is our first biosolution. It is the program most of you know best and the clearest demonstration of what the platform is designed to do. Cannabinoids are our second. In June, the NIH awarded us a $2 million phase II-B SBIR to support development of rare and novel cannabinoid analogs. Beyond the phase II-B NIH grant, federal support has broadened this year.

In July, the Department of Energy selected us for its Genesis Mission, where we are working with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on AI-enabled digital twins for enzyme-driven biomanufacturing. In the NSF-funded CFIRE program, we have advanced our milestones over the past year. Together, this is non-dilutive capital totaling approximately $20 million to date. We believe it reflects the versatility of our platform. I would note, however, that these awards reflect the scientific merit of research proposals and are not an endorsement of eXoZymes or any product by the government. Which brings me to the next slide. We have built what we call the new ideas engine, a repeatable stage-gated process for identifying the next biosolution. Our scientists submit candidate molecules year-round, and each is scored against four criteria shown in the box on the left. We evaluate technical feasibility. Can we make it?

Market and commercial appeal. Can we identify a real market? We consider economic and operational factors. Do the unit economics and the scale-up path look like they could work? We ask if there is strategic differentiation. Does it build on or leverage our platform and intellectual property we already have? A candidate only advances when it clears all four. That discipline is deliberate. It keeps us from spending capital on interesting science with no path to a product. Candidates that advance follow the graduation path on the right side of the slide. Proof of concept in our incubator, biosolution development in our accelerator, and then commercialization. Today, five molecules are in rapid proof of concept evaluation. We are intentionally not naming them, and we are not making any claim about whether an individual candidate will succeed.

What we can tell you is that successful candidates would open opportunities across nutraceuticals, including supplements and cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. The takeaway is straightforward. eXoZymes is not a single molecule company. NCT and cannabinoids are the first two biosolutions out of this engine, and the engine keeps running.

As we look ahead over the next 12 months, we believe eXoZymes has one of the most catalyst-rich periods in the company's history. We've already started that momentum with the productivity breakthrough we recently announced, which significantly improved the economics of NCT production, and with the successful award of our $2 million SBIR grant supporting our cannabinoid program. These achievements reinforce both the value of NCT and the broader capability of the eXoZymes platform. Over the remainder of 2026, our primary focus is execution. We expect to finalize our NCT production partner, complete the NCT technology transfer package, and continue advancing the regulatory, clinical, and manufacturing foundation required for commercialization. Another key milestone will be the announcement of our NCT market launch partner.

This relationship is particularly important because it represents the bridge between technical success and commercial success, providing the market access needed to bring NCT to customers and generate revenue. At the same time, investors should expect to see proof points emerging from what we call our new ideas engine. These programs demonstrate how the eXoZymes platform can repeatedly generate differentiated product opportunities and new business creation. Taken together, these milestones position us for our targeted NCT market launch in the first half of 2027. More importantly, they represent the continued transformation of eXoZymes from a technology development company into a commercialization company capable of creating both products and platforms with significant shareholder value.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Fouad Nawaz. I am the VP of Finance at eXoZymes. Our financial results for the second quarter of 2026 are detailed in our Form 10-Q filing. I will provide a summary of the financial results, but encourage you to read the report for additional details. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus remains on prudent financial management while making targeted investments to drive our development objectives and achieve commercialization. As of the end of June of 2026, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $5.65 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support our ongoing operations and key initiatives into the end of 2026. We completed two financing events in June of 2026, which generated net proceeds of $5.86 million. This was done through the sale and issuance of 732,260 common stock and 366,130 warrants.

Our total operating expenses for the six months of 2026 were $5.34 million, which represents an increase of $1 million compared to the prior year of 2025. On a quarterly basis, our operating expenses were $2.95 million for the second quarter of 2026, which represents an increase of $405,000 compared to the same period in 2025. The increase in operating expenses continue to represent our investment in R&D, with additions in personnel and a focus on further developing our internal infrastructure. The net loss for the end of June of 2026 was $5.25 million, with a net loss for the quarter being $2.88 million. We have and continue to be disciplined in our spending approach and continue to ensure that capital is allocated efficiently to maximize shareholder value. Additionally, we continue to explore non-dilutive funding opportunities, strategic partnerships, and potential government grants to further strengthen our financial position.

That concludes my presentation for the financials. With that, I will pass the call back. Thank you.

Thank you, Fouad. Let me take you all through our capital position. I will start with some details about the raise we did in June. We ran two offerings off our Form S-3 shelf. On June 9th, we closed an underwritten public offering. With the over-allotment that the underwriter exercised on June 17th, that offering issued 660,000 shares and 330,000 warrants approximately for a gross proceeds of approximately $6 million. On June 30th, we closed a registered direct offering for a further 71,000 shares and the equivalent warrants for gross proceeds of $640,000. That is, in total, a gross proceeds of $6.59 million. The unit price of the offerings was $18, because each unit was two shares plus one warrant. That works out to a per share price at $8.99 and $0.02 per warrant.

As a result of this fundraising effort, the company now have approximately 9.3 million shares outstanding. I am getting a lot of questions about our float and how we get the daily trading volume up. There is a couple of ways we want to do that. We can and will engage in activities to bring new retail investors to look at eXoZymes as an investment opportunity. As a segment, they are known to be much more active in trading. We also have an uptick in the number of family offices reaching out to us wishing to invest. We will direct some of those to buy in the open market instead of waiting for a funding round. Turning to the balance sheet, we closed the quarter with $5.65 million in cash or cash equivalents. That is up from $3 million at year end.

We used only $3.6 million of cash in the operations across the first half year. This is due to the amazing help with our non-dilutive funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy, aka our grants. We believe we have sufficient working capital for the near future. We are actively pursuing additional grants, deal payments, and licensing opportunities and financing options. Now, over to the strategy part. Let us take on the last topic before the Q&A session. This is about the strategic perspective of eXoZymes. Why are we building NCT and other product assets instead of just selling development deals? Our original strategy focused on closing high volumes of partnership deals. We wanted to sign as many partners as possible across many different verticals, have them each basically fund the development work, and we would collect royalties on the back end.

It was a reasonable thesis, but it had a problem built in that held us back for a while. At the core of the problem is, how do you get the first partner to sign when nobody wants to go first on a brand-new science and technology platform? The partners' arguments and reasons were straightforward. Despite many companies being super interested in our technology, none of the established companies wanted to be the first to build on a genuinely new science and technology platform like our cell-free biomanufacturing platform, especially in the risk-averse market environment we have been facing the last couple of years. The conversations were enthusiastic, engaged, but they constantly ended up in one of a few places.

Either the partner was very interested but had no space in the budget in this cycle, or we were still seeing interest from people, but they asked us to come back when we had built and proven something at scale. Or, when the partner stayed at the negotiation table because they were very interested. They negotiated from a position of strength and wanted to have steep discounts and low royalty rates as they would be going to be the first on the platform, as we couldn't guarantee success because we didn't pick the molecules under that model, and the arguments were fair. If they should pay both for the development and carry all the risk, they should capture most of the upside.

If we had signed any of those deals we had on the table back then, we would have been leaving substantial value on the table and been locked into working on complex biosolutions in all kind of different spaces with no synergies and no knowledge we can bring on to the next product because they would be so different. I take full responsibility for those strategic choices. Also, despite that, I know it has caused some shareholder pain because things have gone a little slower than we had hoped in regards to making deals. We set aside the old strategy and found a very interesting new way of focusing. The result is a strategy where we enter into partnerships at a later stage in the development cycle on assets we have picked and basically made sure that they fit us and our unique technology.

That way, we can now faster and cheaper de-risk these projects ourselves. We no longer need to persuade anyone that the platform works because the proof precedes the conversation. We have working biosolutions we want to partner on. This is the role of NCT and the other first products. It demonstrates that we can make highly valuable molecules no one else can manufacture at scale, that we can do it faster and at lower cost than anyone else, and when the risk is retired before the negotiations begins, we retain all the upside and value we previously were conceding. We call our new strategy focus for nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential. It also sharpens what we pursue and how quickly we can determine whether a company is a potential partner for us.

It saves us a ton of time on the business development side instead of just talking to everybody and exploring all potentials. We targeted high-value natural product molecules that can reach market quickly as nutraceuticals. That is, for example, as supplements or as skincare products. They have the feature of carrying credible pharmaceutical potential with only a few but important changes to how the molecule is made on our platform. Two shots on goal per asset. The faster and the more inexpensive one comes first, and the slower comes second but has a much larger upside potential. Because of these nutraceutical with pharmaceutical potential molecules often share biochemistry and enzymes, every program inherits a lot of work that have already been completed by prior projects and uses a lot of the same infrastructure, supply chain, and sets of knowledge that we are building.

Each product asset, therefore, gets developed faster and cheaper than the one before, which means that there, over time, will be an accumulation of products and revenue without us having to do new investments every time. Accelerating and underpinning all of this is a new capability we have been building the past two years that also ties into this strategic recalibration. By applying advanced AI to biomanufacturing, we are creating a lot of competitive advantage. We now apply artificial intelligence and machine learning at both ends of the development progress cycles. On the front end, we use it to screen what the commercial potential is, how well of a fit there is between our technology platform and the molecules, and all of these things that Tyler had already presented so well earlier today.

On the back end, our cell-free laboratory generates a kind of clean and structured data that specialized AI models, especially the ones called protein language models and the similar zero-shot algorithms, are actively requiring to be trained on to become really good, which only a few organizations in the world can produce at all. We are one of them. We are probably the ones that can do it the fastest and the cheapest. It is a true competitive advantage, as it makes us faster and better at building our unique cell-free biosolutions, allowing us to unlock even more and better business cases. The more we run the cell-free AI-enhanced biomanufacturing platform on our deliberately focused domain, the nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential, the stronger the platform becomes. Product development cycles shorten. Cost, both for the development and the unit economics level, fall.

This is how our strategy brings us a competitive position that progressively becomes harder to challenge. Thank you all for your time. We hope this helped to inform you better about eXoZymes. Let's now take the first questions. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to answering some of these questions that have come in. I will start by thanking all our investors for all the support you continuously give us. I can then set the stakes a little bit today by saying we have presented a lot about NCT and the nutraceutical side. Therefore, I can see in the questions that there is an appetite for talking also about the pharma side of this. So let's take some of those questions. Maybe you start by giving me a question.

Sure. So one of the initial questions that came in, we understand that people are fascinated by what we've described in terms of a new form of chemistry. The question is, does our platform potentially give pharma or even other industries access to new chemical space that they couldn't get to before?

That is a super question, and it feeds into the strategy conversation just before here. Why did we pick nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals? We wanted to have something where we could go fast to market, and at the same time, something where we could have a high upside potential. We needed to have competitive advantages in both. I think we have fully described on the nutraceutical side that perspective. From the pharmaceutical side, it is exactly the core of the question. It is new generation of medicinal chemistry. We can, with enzymes, literally bring these different things together that in normal chemistry is forced together. It is a very elegant way of controlling how things are either taken apart or put together. So it is a big fat yes. That is exactly what the competitive advantage on the pharma side is.

Just to remind people, sometimes we talk about it as BioClick as a name for the tools we are using to basically using the enzymes to build small molecules.

Well, let us pull on that thread a little bit further because it does tie up with another question that we received. I think we are going to go into translation now. You have talked about a capability, and let us direct this one to you, Tyler. Do you see this as hypothetically giving those pharma companies optionality to solve bottlenecks that existed before, whether it be on previous drug candidates, maybe improving existing drugs, or even manufacturing new drugs designed by AI?

I think that is a really good point. I think what we have developed is this ability to—Once you understand why things have failed or what things could be applicable in the natural product space or the drug space, this allows us to modify really quickly.

We can do things using a technical term, group transfers. This is what the BioClick is based off of. We can add different parts of different molecules to existing scaffolds. We are agnostic where a lot of those targets come from initially, but we know that we can modify or build very quickly using a bunch of different types of building blocks, which is very amenable to this development of new molecules, new chemistries.

I would add to that the times where we have sat with a medicinal chemist from a pharma company that have gotten the aha moment of what the platform can do, it is actually exactly that. It is when we get to the point of them typically saying, well, I can do that already. But that would be so expensive that we would never go that route, or that would be so polluting that we would never go that route. Or it would be so unpure. They kind of make the argument themselves, and that is where they get the aha moment. It is like, oh, so you can do this without what was keeping them from doing it. And that is where we have seen the light bulb go on a couple of times with medicinal chemists that are gone from being skeptical to becoming very intrigued.

It is really a different way of doing medicinal chemistry. It is not your traditional kind of synthetic approach where you have to try lots and lots of things, and then after you finally found some kind of chemistry that works, you have to then apply it and apply it at scale. That is not what we are doing here. What we are doing is we are starting with enzymes and enzyme cascades, and we are leveraging that ability to engineer enzymes around specific substrates and then control what we are feeding it to now actually build up increased diversity in terms of the molecules that we can make.

It is really a different type of approach to medicinal chemistry. That is the type of team that we have built here, and that is the expertise that we have, my background in structural biology and a number of the other team members, to understand how natural products are made and how we can leverage the tools that we have developed to now make products faster and better.

This opens up for a question we have seen a couple of times with people basically saying, do you have what it takes to basically do the journey from idea and all the way to a drug someday? I would say this question probably falls into that. Given that eXoZymes' expertise is towards building cell-free enzymatic pathways, what expertise does the company have in medicinal chemistry and rational design, given that these are distinct specializations?

I think that's where a lot of our core lies in this enzyme engineering and this ability to understand both how enzymes are specific, but also how they're promiscuous. We can leverage this to now add in different inputs that maybe it's like an amino acid analog or something like that. That now gives you the ability to make a new molecule that has new composition of matter, that we can file IP on. Then leveraging our network of consultants and partners to basically figure out how to match a lot of those capabilities to indications of interest.

Maybe adding onto that, something I find super fascinating. There's so much money going into AI drug design right now. It's probably one of the hottest life science areas. A lot of these AI companies are able to sit down and predict how a small molecule will bind to a drug receptor, and therefore theoretically what the small molecule should look like in the optimal reality. But they can't make them. That's where I think our platform is so intriguing that we can also do a lot of the predictions, and we can work together with these other companies as partners.

Then we can actually sit down and say, well, it's not enough to kind of have a theoretical key that could unlock this drug receptor. We can actually make that, and we can start engineering and having control over the manufacturing process so that it turns out to be the best analog version. Frankly, that is what it takes to get the patents and get the business opportunity.

Even taking a step back and kind of building off of what was said in some of the presentations, this is where this ability to have a nutraceutical focus initially. It is some natural product you find in nature. It does something. If you have identified what receptor it can bind to and how it does that, well, now you not only have this natural molecule that can be used as a supplement, potentially, but then you can modify it to now improve its properties in some way.

Getting even closer to a specific indication. So it might be generally good as a supplement, but for a specific disease or indication, it needs to be optimized to hit that goal specifically. Damien, time for you. You are having too easy of a time here. Yesterday's announcement said-

That does have to change.

Well, we will see. Yesterday's announcement said that you would be getting increased yield. The question says, I think from memory on a slide deck you had, it showed predicted high growth margins already. Does this improve on those, or was it built in?

The short answer to that question is our commercialization targets have been improved upon and exceeded. When we sat down and we made our projections early on in the program, we said, these are the productivity metrics we need to see in the development journey to justify taking this product commercial. We've gone past those metrics. It's a part of the discipline of development, you build what we call a techno-economic model.

That looks at all of the inputs, both from the technology program, but also all of the external inputs, like your raw material costs or the fees you would be charged by a contract manufacturer to produce, and all of the other costs associated with taking that product into market. Every time we learn a new piece of information, whether it be a gain on the science and the performance of the process, or maybe it's a change in the pricing landscape for your raw materials, that feeds into that techno-economic model, so you're constantly tracking where you are. The announcement we shared where we'd increased productivity 10 times was a very meaningful step change in our expectations now of what the profitability would be of NCT in market.

But also, there's still a lot of work to be done to take a product like NCT into the market. There's a lot of other bits and pieces we will learn. Seeing that sort of magnitude of improvement gives me, I think gives all of us a lot of confidence that this thing's going to turn up in the market, it's going to be profitable, and it's going to be exciting. It was a great result. I think collectively, you don't always see that kind of significant change during an optimization period. So, kudos not just the hard work of Tyler's team, but it's sort of an endorsement of the technology at whole that it's able to sort of exert that level of control and that level of change over the process.

If I kind of put you on the spot a little bit more, thinking towards that product journey. It's not enough to just make it. You want to be able to have somebody that's going to use it at a certain point. So if you're putting this in the context of a nutraceutical or pharma company, what are the things that they want to see before signing a deal for a product? In vitro studies, commercial scaling? How are these activities tracking right now?

So we do see a range of answers to questions like that from the different partners that we engage with. I think we're blessed in that just the networks we have at the business level, say, between Michael and myself and some of our board members. We've been able to have really, really good conversations. Your team comes back from these technical conferences, having met R&D people in these companies as well, and the dialogue on what they're looking for is a rich sort of dialogue of expectations. Typically, what we're hearing more frequently is that they want to see the particular analog or the particular compound we want to commercialize in pharma as having animal results against targeted indications.

But I will say two things are kind of influencing that. One, this space of metabolic health, particularly as you think about obesity, these disease conditions are rich in deal-making right now. So that kind of encourages pharma to become a little more active in what's in that discovery pipeline. So we see the phone gets answered pretty easily. The emails come back pretty quickly as we engage there. But also, what we're seeing more and more these days is the interest around mechanisms. And not just molecules. What are the mechanisms people want to invest in against targeted indications?

HNF4A, which is the mechanism we target with NCT, that's one that's really underserved. So I think that's sort of a great open space opportunity for partnering.

I find it so fascinating when you start reading back in time who have looked at this drug receptor, who have worked on it and basically come up somewhat empty-handed, but understanding the mechanisms and the potential. Actually, from the top of your head, how many publications have there been on that one target over time?

There's hundreds. I think from when it was discovered in the early 1990s, to now, there's been a lot of different academic and industrial groups studying the potential for this receptor. Not just how it works, but how it could be served as a drug target. There is a wealth of knowledge out there, but currently, it's underserved in terms of things that are actually used to treat.

Let's sort of go back to what you were saying in the earlier part of this presentation about one molecule, two shots. It's because of that receptor, it's because of that mechanism, we have two shots. I think what we do in nutraceuticals for NCT also elevates the awareness of and the discussion around HNF4A, which then just creates more demand, I think, more interest in that as a mechanism to be addressed.

But wait, there's more, as they say on advertising. There's two shots on goal, but you just made me think of that on the pharma side of NCT and this specific drug receptor. I'm personally hyper-fascinated by how nature and evolution have decided to give that drug receptor, you can almost say two distinct roles, or at least two different organs that it heavily influences. Maybe you can unpack that statement a little.

It's been shown that this HNF4A is predominantly in the liver. It helps affect things with metabolism and kind of management of metabolism. But it's not just found there, it's found also in the gut. It might be a slightly different isoform, but it's almost completely identical. It's about 90% the same as the one found in the liver. They both bind most likely NCT. Or whatever their ligands, they bind them similarly. Now, you have two different locations in the body that can affect different types of indications, gut health and kind of overall metabolism, and management of fatty acid oxidation.

Two very large markets. It's actually two shots on goal on just the pharma side and then obviously nutraceuticals first.

Michael, we've got another question here, and I think the context for this is really rich because we just spent the first half an hour talking about the progress we've made to date, but we've got a really rich set of prospective milestones in front of us. What are the plans to increase the investor awareness and the reach that the company has so that we can actually get the story out about these milestones that we are walking through?

A little bit of hindsight. First, we needed to figure out exactly who we were, how we would want to deliver on this journey and this value built that we are doing. Getting the whole nutraceuticals with pharmaceutical potential in place, getting it built up, getting it supported by our AI platform, and doing all of these things have led us to now being able to start making these predictions into the future. These are things that are going to happen, and it is the similar kind of business we are going to do after that. You can argue it has been an exclusive club of people that have been willing and capable of listening into the potential when it was as undefined as it has been up until a while ago. Now, it is getting very defined. It is getting tighter and tighter all the time.

At some point, when we have launched NCT as a nutraceutical, it is going to be a very different conversation. Because we have all of that coming up, it is also time for us to start engaging in speaking to the broader world. Obviously we will continue our investor calls like these and the other activities we have done, but there are tools and mechanisms where you can get in front of much bigger audiences. We now have that story that is ready for that prime time. Without giving too much away, I can say we have just engaged with a number of people and outlets that will basically help ensure that. Yes, as I said in the presentation, we want more and a diverse set of investors. Retail is known for being smaller position trading faster.

There is definitely a lot of family offices that are literally reaching out and asking if there is an opportunity to buy blocks instead of just buying in the open market because they're afraid of pushing the price up too high with the amount of investment they would like to make. All of those things are coming together now. I would say that is a definite yes. More awareness is coming up. Those are the questions we have here in front of us. Would you give me the two ones over there? Yes, those.

These are the impromptu ones?

These are the ones that make sure that it's not too easy to be us. For future joint venture partnerships, does eXoZymes expect to receive initial upfront payments and milestone payments, or is a partnership mainly based on shared equity in a subsidiary? I will start by unpacking that a little bit, then I am going to throw it over to you. It depends on the business case. It depends on the partner. It depends on what position we are, the packages we are bringing to the table, the assets we are bringing to the table. I would say, from a top-down perspective, we will be thinking of this exercise of picking the right partners and the right deal models as a portfolio approach, where we will have in the beginning, this stated need to really go deep and fast together with a partner on NCT.

While at the same time, that might not be the case in five and 10 deals from now. Maybe at that point we are more of like, let's focus more on royalty streams and building biosolutions for partners where we won't take part in the actual building and owning that business opportunity. So it depends a little bit, but I am curious to hear what you are thinking.

It's like, yes. But I think about the start of a rugby game. You have 15 people on the field, and the opposition is about to kick off. You don't know where they are going to kick the ball, but you are ready for anything. That is kind of how I think of this is, like we could do any of these things. It is really going to depend on the engagement we have with the partner. If you want a little bit of directional on this, earlier on in this journey for us, we understand the risk profile better than anybody.

The premium we get by hanging on to more of the equity going into these arrangements is going to be higher, versus if we had sort of equal sharing of risk understanding between the two, then it becomes a little more transactional. We will style these types of structures to a way that sort of prioritizes speed to get them done, because speed to market is where we maximize value, not getting an extra percent on an equity deal. We will focus in on capabilities. Are people being incentivized through the structure in the right way that mobilizes capabilities in the right sequence? Then we will look for like, can we get the biggest piece for us so that we have got the levers to make sure that our interests are being looked after.

You cannot put your interests first and foremost in these types of deals, otherwise you do not do a deal. It is about finding that ground. You have got to survive the kickoff, hope the ball comes to me because I am ready to run it up. But you have got to be ready for anything.

That kind of builds on to the next thing here, actually. Let us just give ourself a frame of reference here. On the one side we could and will, in some cases, own everything as we do with NCT right now, and therefore pace forward at the speeds that we desire. Then we can find the right partners to joint venture style, join us in that pursuit, and that is where we are starting to get into the joint venture and spin out territory. Then leaning over to the side of licensing where we will build specific biosolutions in the future, and I especially think that is going to be true on the pharma side, for people that comes in and knows very particularly what it is they are looking for. So you can argue they bring a lot of the science and the medicinal chemistry to the table.

If that rings, then just to show that there's even other perspectives that can be worked in here. There's a question here specifically, what is the strategic benefits of building cell-free solutions for santalene even though its market opportunity is smaller than your other programs? That's a good example of why did we do that? Well, we literally had a funding opportunity where the National Science Foundation came to us and had specifically a need for helping to educate the world and standardize some of the things that cell-free does, and they put us in a position of recognizing us as the leader in the space. At the same time, they wanted to have a concrete project to build on and implement that on. We get santalene for free.

Are we willing to take on things that is maybe smaller, but if they're paid for by a partner? That comes into this whole portfolio thinking, and it's even more complex than just what is the best thing. It's then held up against the resource allocation we have quarter-by-quarter. What are the different teams in our company building on already? How is it important from a time to market versus a lower cost, but it's okay if it's slower kind of perspective. The portfolio of what we are building of assets and business opportunities can actually kind of de-risk each other to some degree.

I think I'm excited about the santalene project that we're doing under that CFIRE grant. Let's unpack santalene in just a moment. The team is also coming up in parallel with a new tool for how we drive the reaction, how we drive that cell-free reaction. If you think about it, going from a raw material to a target product in any system requires energy. What we get to unpack in this CFIRE grant with santalene is the development of a toolset that could even make the energetics of moving our reactions for any target product more and more effectively, which brings down cost.

Overall, it has that economic output. I think that's exciting about that project. Secondly, because santalene is coming out of that project almost as it rides along, we get to be a little patient with it and see where it goes, because it's a fragrance compound. The thing about fragrance compounds is, until someone smells it, you don't really understand the note and where it sits in the potential landscape for someone who's designing perfumes to know where they would fit it in. It's one of these things where a little bit of patience, we get some samples out of that project, we can test the notes. We can see where it fits. We can understand its economic value. Really what we're getting is this really cool new tool for driving cell-free reactions.

I look at it in a similar way from kind of leading the R&D effort. We spend a lot of time focusing as a company on production. How do we make this molecule and make it as much as we can for as fast as we can, as cheap as possible? We need to continue to invest in our production capabilities. What are those things that are going to come next? How can we enable this next generation of compounds, get into different classes?

This is a perfect example of that. Not only is it a different class of molecule, but it's also a different tool that we can then use and apply to other systems as well.

Taking that edge of driving process faster, what you did with NCT in going from 20 hours down to 4 hours is, I can't understate how extraordinary that is. To have a reaction that goes that quickly, to be able to turn those tanks over and use them again, I think as you summarized.

10 hours wasn't even slow.

20 hours wasn't. You're right. Absolutely wasn't slow, compared to, say, microbial-based systems, which can be counted in the days until your process is complete. This is extraordinary. But to think you could even drive that further is incredible.

This gives me the opportunity to kind of ask myself a question that I've been asked a couple of times. Why did we pick the nutraceutical to pharmaceutical? Are we leaving opportunity on the table? I will be honest to say it is more nuanced than kind of the hardcore definition of a nutraceutical. We will be more than fine with also doing basically skincare molecules, fragrant molecules, and other things. What is important for us is that it fits into that frame definition that we need to be able to use our platform to get to a state where we have a competitive advantage that other people can't get to, that there is a high degree of market opportunity.

We absolutely prefer when we can kind of build on top of each other. Santalene is a great example to show that, yes, of course it should carry its own weight on its own merits. But at the same time, the things that will unlock afterwards by having that extra technology component is also why it's so exciting to build a platform. I think that's going to be basically, unless you guys have questions you want to ask yourselves, then I think we're going to call it-

No, it's good.

Good.

We've had a steady parade of scientists walking past the window here, giving us thumbs up and encouragement. Everyone needs to get back to work.

That is true, and I want to end on, as I've done before, thanking our investors. Thank you for joining the journey. It is an exciting journey. There's still much more to be done, and we are on it. I also want to thank the team. It is mind-blowing the kind of thing we're building together here. I am super impressed with the team over how basically concise we are in our work. We get so much done so fast with a capital-light approach. That is just a joy to see.

I want to thank the team for that, and I look forward to having this conversation again in a quarter. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome to today's investor call. I look forward to updating you all on 2025 and up until now, we have had so much progress and there's a lot of news to share. What you're looking at here is today's agenda. We will be going over the following topics. We have been made aware of that a few of our IPO investors are not getting our updates via our newsletter. Please make sure if you or someone you meet isn't getting the updates, that you go to our webpage and sign up for our newsletters. We're obviously sending to everybody that we have the names and emails on. Thank you. If you have questions for today's presentation, please use the Q&A feature in the browser.

We love getting questions, and we can take them in the end of the call here. I will say that it's not necessarily everybody we can answer because we often get more questions than we have time, and especially because we have been asked to keep our investor calls short and concise. In case you ask a question that is not answered here on the live session, then we will reach out to you afterwards. Our focus, scaling up and execution. 2025 was the year of focus, scaling up and execution. We went from being a company with a large potential via the big idea platform to becoming a commercially focused entity, going after the very valuable products we can make and basically capturing the extraordinary business opportunities.

As you will remember from the Q3 call, we talked about how we started realizing that the idea of having a lot of different partners and be relatively broad with many solutions was less optimal for us and our shareholders. I want to point out that exact point. We were in a lot of negotiations. People were interested and is interested in our biosolutions, but the reality is that we are in a market, in an industry where a lot of people suffers from having burnt their fingers on synthetic biology. They have spent a lot of time and money and seen nothing come in return. Therefore, when we show up with a new generation of biomanufacturing, they are naturally skeptical. The people that still wanted to work with us wanted very large discounts and very, very favorable licensing terms.

That's obviously not in our interest and your interest as our shareholders. What we decided to do was to be the icebreaker ourselves, sit down, and especially when we started realizing with, for example, NCT, how much value and potential we can build in a matter of a short time and without that much capital, we decided to double down and take it forward ourselves. The refocusing that happened in 2025 was really about securing shareholder value by taking projects further along than maybe originally planned for. By doing more of the work, we will end up in a position owning more of the pie and the upside, and the potentials are simply too great as we will be talking about.

While talking to partners and potential investors, it became obvious for us that cell-free is a brand-new concept that takes people a little time to understand. It was very clear that there was a lot of people that already many years ago understood the enormous potential of biomanufacturing and synthetic biology, but obviously was sitting back with burnt fingers and disappointed outcomes. Those people that understand the potential but bet on the wrong horse or bet on the wrong generation of horses are obviously people we're happy to talk to, show the difference between cell-based and cell-free biomanufacturing, all the benefits that comes with this new generation. Our technology platform showed in 2025 and keeps showing all the way up till today that this is the next generation of biomanufacturing.

Not only are we much, much faster from the idea inception state to getting to a pilot project, getting to a tech transfer package, that is really the commercial handover point, no matter if it's to a spin-off of our own, a joint venture with someone else or a future licensing package. On top of that, we are showing parameters and performance that the old generation just cannot keep up with. We have unheard of purity, we have unheard of conversion of feedstock to end product, and we have this very, very intriguing engineering-level control over building natural products of high value or natural product-inspired drug versions that are new to nature. With that, let's dive right into our asset and value creation. We want to hear Damien talk about NCT. Over to you, Damien.

G'day. My name is Damien Perriman, Chief Commercial Officer at eXoZymes. Today I'd like to walk you through our accelerator strategy for NCT. NCTx is a commercial vehicle created by and formed around breakthrough technology from biotechnology innovator, eXoZymes. Currently owned and controlled by eXoZymes, it is the company's first product innovation to support healthy quality of life outcomes for consumers worldwide. On this slide, I lay out the core opportunity behind NCTx. Many of the most natural and powerful molecules are incredibly difficult to make with traditional chemistry, which has historically limited their use, even when they target the most important of pathways. eXoZymes changes that. Our cell-free biomanufacturing platform lets us produce these rare, high-value molecules quickly, affordably, and at scale. This is the breakthrough that enables NCTx. We can now access and optimize compounds to activate a particular critical metabolic pathway.

Ultimately, this positions us to upgrade health span by making previously inaccessible solutions commercially viable for the first time. Across the world, metabolic health is spiraling into crisis. Obesity has doubled since 1990, now affecting over 1.2 billion people. Diabetes and fatty liver disease are among the fastest growing chronic diseases. These conditions are deeply interconnected, yet most treatments still depend on long-term lifestyle changes that many struggle to sustain. This widespread growing burden underscores the urgent need for new approaches. Years of long work days, little movement, and convenient meals has created one of the world's largest public health problems. It is too easy to blame willpower and lack of discipline, but the truth, in many cases, is that metabolism has become dysfunctional and cells are struggling to convert fuel into usable energy.

The fix must start where the breakdown begins, in the mitochondria, the engines inside our cells. Lifestyle has overloaded the mitochondria, undermining fat burning and energy output. It is an energy utilization problem. HNF4α is a master metabolic regulator. It is a switch for mitochondria and fat burning. It regulates thousands of genes and is central to liver, pancreas, and gut function. When it's activated, cells upregulate programs for mitochondrial growth and fat oxidation, exactly the levers we need to restore energy utilization. Nature holds for us a breakthrough, NCT, a naturally occurring molecule that is the only known potent agonist for HNF4α. NCT has the potential to support a number of interconnected conditions important to health span and quality of life. In diet-induced obesity mouse models, NCT changed the way energy was processed.

Approximately 30%-40% less weight gain on the same calories with mitochondrial markers up and liver fat down, pointing to restored cellular output rather than appetite suppression. Early, but compelling. NCT has always been a molecule with extraordinary potential, but it's been almost impossible to access. In nature, it exists only in trace amounts. Peppercorns, for example, contain less than 15 parts per million, far too little to be useful. Traditional chemistry can't produce NCT at a scale or at a reasonable cost. As a result, the promise of NCT has been locked away for decades, until now. eXoZymes has cracked the scale barrier with cell-free biomanufacturing. No living cells, high control, high purity, and strong yields. With faster cycle times than conventional routes and a clean, predictable process that unlocks reliable economical NCT for productization. High purity is what finally makes NCT scalable.

With greater than 99% food and pharma grade purity, we eliminate the variability and the impurities that complicate formulation and regulatory review. That consistency means every batch behaves the same every time, giving us the confidence to scale production, to simplify safety profiles, and to deliver a reliable, high-performing ingredient to market. Here's the difference in one snapshot. Conventional methods produce a messy mix of byproducts. You can see it clearly in the HPLC trace with multiple unwanted peaks. cell-free flips that completely. With full control over every enzyme and reaction step, we generate a single clean product with no side reactions stealing yield or creating variability. That precision is what makes scale-up fast, predictable, and repeatable. Because if the process is clean at small scale, it stays clean at large scale. cell-free gives us a cleaner, faster, and more controllable production engine.

No living systems means no variability, no byproduct surprises, and dramatically shorter cycle times. The result is lower costs, higher reliability, and far better return on investment. In short, cell-free lets us scale breakthrough natural products with the predictability of chemistry and the efficiency investors have been waiting for. NCTx is first advancing nutraceutical formulations aimed at fat oxidation and supporting healthy span. Through partners, we will accelerate our drive into the nutraceutical market and dive deeper into pharma-grade analogs that will investigate activation of HNF4α for chronic disease conditions. NCT works in a fundamentally different way than GLP-1 based therapies. It targets a different receptor and does not act as an appetite suppressant.

Instead, NCT is designed to support the body's natural metabolic processes, which connects directly to three wellness areas that consumers care most about, supporting healthy fat metabolism, helping maintain liver and gut balance, and promoting sustained energy and endurance. It's a completely different wellness-first approach. To win with NCT, we're building an ecosystem of partners that spans the full supply chain, from brand launch to white label to business-to-business ingredient sales. This multi-channel strategy lets us scale quickly, stay asset light, and put NCT everywhere at once, driving broad market penetration from day one. By pairing this ecosystem approach with a capital light contract manufacturing model and a high gross margin product, NCTx can stay focused on what drives value, product execution, and revenue growth. The result is lower fixed investment, faster market entry, and a cleaner path to strong return on investment and future exit opportunities.

Market adoption is driven by a deliberate multi-channel strategy. While direct-to-consumer builds the NCT story and brand connection, business-to-business partnerships drive volume to scale. Together, this approach supports a trajectory of 6 million bottles within five years, with a long-range growth curve targeting 8 million consumers served by year 10. Moving ahead, we're de-risking commercialization, completing process optimization, long compositions, human use studies to elevate marketing impact, and completing the GRAS regulatory dossier, and moving into contract manufacturing operations at the end of the year to be 2027 product launch ready. In parallel with the nutraceutical launch, we'll begin early screening to identify optimized NCT analogs that pass initial cell-based safety and activity assays. At the same time, the nutraceutical program builds real-world awareness and validation around HNF4α activation. Together, this creates a strong foundation, de-risking the pathway while setting up future clinical development opportunities.

Pharma is paying real premiums for mitochondrial innovation. Recent multi-billion-dollar acquisitions show that clinical stage assets with compelling proof of concept are being rewarded with strong valuations, especially for mechanisms that complement GLP-1s. This round is focused on launch readiness and scalability. The majority of capital goes into process scale-up and tech transfer, ensuring reliable production through our contract manufacturing organizations. We're also funding human use studies and regulatory work to support a strong market launch, while a portion is allocated to early pharma screening to preserve upside. In short, this capital de-risks commercialization, accelerates first to revenue, and maintains future pharma opportunity. Thank you.

What a fantastic presentation, Damien. Thank you very much. NCT gets me excited. This is really where we're starting to see all the hard work and efforts of eXoZymes turning into tangible assets and value. NCT is not a new molecule. It's been studied for decades. Why haven't it become a success already? Well, it's simply because nobody could make it at scale. There could be made small batches, microgram scale, where people could toy around with it, use it for research projects, prove the principle and the potential, but couldn't manufacture it. That is where we locked in last year. 2025, we decided, let's really take this as the example of the platform of the kind of value we unlock when we build these biosolutions.

We sat down and we, in record time, built the first version and started building on top of that version all the way up to the pilot scale that we were reporting on via the press releases earlier. Mid last year, we basically set the goal for end of the year in regards to where we wanted to be with NCT. It was a very ambitious plan. We wanted to scale from where we were to where we wanted to be 100 times. We wanted to make sure that we maintained what we have been saying for years now, that we have a platform that when we scale, we don't go down in performance.

That's why we're so happy about the Cayman Chemical partnership, where not only did we show for the first time that we can take our cell-free eXoZymes biomanufacturing technology and hand it over to someone else that doesn't know how the technology is built and how it works, but they can produce with it. Not only did it work, it actually lived up to the expectations. We delivered exactly what we had said we would do. More. We had extraordinary performance when it came to purity. We had really amazing performance when it came to basically going from feedstock to end product. That conversion is unheard of, what we did in this project when you compare it to other synbio.

If you haven't seen the video with Cayman Chemical talking about our technology and this project, then feel free to go to our webpage and study it. It is nice to hear that someone else than ourselves sees the potential. With the Cayman project, we showed that we are now at kilo scale, not microgram scale. We yielded more than half a kilo of ultra-pure NCT. This means we're now going from the R&D phase of making the system work and perform to now optimizing towards how can we make it better, faster, cheaper? How can we make the unique economics of producing NCT the best possible so that we can have the highest possible profit margin? With this pilot production behind us, we are now in a great position interacting with potential partners.

Everything from researchers that are interested in testing the material in this purity level to potential marketing partners, to potential biotech and pharma partners that are intrigued about NCT analogues. NCT is also really becoming the proof point on cell-free biomanufacturing. You cannot get this kind of purity, you won't be able to get to these price points if you are cell-based, either via isolating from nature or by genetic engineering via a cell-based biomanufacturing. The proof points of the next generation is really being delivered by NCT. NCT going as a nutraceutical and as a pharmaceutical is also a business model we will be applying to a number of other types of molecules. Our capabilities in engineering small molecules with the enzymes and eXoZymes that we use is unheard of.

When I talk to a number of people from pharma, medicinal chemists, they literally disbelieve the kind of chemistry abilities we have until they see that we can do them. What then happens is that they turn around, and they go like, "But if you can do that over here in the cannabinoid, why wouldn't you be able to do it over here on my drug, on my drug class, in all of these ideas I have?" That's where the aha moment for people really starts, that this is a new generation of medicinal chemistry that is coming from this new generation of biomanufacturing. By the way, dear shareholders, potential investors, do yourself a favor and go in and use your favorite AI tool to do due diligence on NCT.

The market potential and all of that will be nicely explained to you, and then you don't have to take my word for it.

My name is Tyler Korman, CSO of eXoZymes. You've heard some exciting developments about NCT and the work that we've been doing at eXoZymes to advance that program. NCT is not all that we do here at eXoZymes. We have a number of other programs that I'd like to tell you about. Specifically, I'd like to give you a window into where we are at scientifically, those areas that are generating momentum, delivering results, and allowing us to build the platform to move into 2026. First, let's talk about cannabinoids and the progress we've made on our cannabinoid program. Cannabinoids have always been a compelling fit for our eXoZymes platform. The biochemistry of cannabinoid biosynthesis is well-characterized.

The target molecules are high value, and the regulatory environment, which as many of you know, has been shifting meaningfully at the federal level, is creating new opportunities for both research and commercial development that simply didn't exist a few years ago. What I can tell you is that internally, the scientific case for cannabinoid production using our platform has only gotten stronger. Our cell-free eXoZyme approach offers real advantages here. We're not just growing cells, we're navigating the compliance complexity of working with scheduled substances inside a living organism. We make the pathway, we run the reactor, and produce the target cannabinoid in our chosen form. That's a cleaner, faster, and more defensible route to these molecules than most current approaches in the market.

Additionally, we are encouraged by our ability to leverage our platform to produce not just rare cannabinoids, but also new to nature cannabinoid analogues, for which we recently submitted a provisional patent application. We're watching this space carefully, and I'm optimistic by what we're seeing, both in terms of scientific fit and commercial timing. I'll note, our ability to identify novel cannabinoid analogues as targets and to design the enzymes to produce them is increasingly informed by AI-assisted enzyme engineering tools. This is a core part of how we work across all of our programs. Next, let's talk about santalene and the progress we've made hitting grant milestones. Our santalene program is progressing exactly as planned as part of a multi-year grant, hitting its technical milestones on schedule.

For those less familiar, santalene is a sesquiterpene precursor to sandalwood fragrance compounds, a high-value target in the specialty fragrance and personal care market, where natural sandalwood supply is constrained and sustainability pressures on traditional sourcing are intensifying. The fact that we are delivering on milestones here is significant, not just for this asset, but as a proof point for the platform itself. We set expectations and deliverables, we're meeting them, and the underlying science is confirming what we believe about our enzymatic pathway design. That's the kind of disciplined execution that builds credibility with partners and validates the broader platform story. I'd also like to tell you about our pipeline innovation system. We've built a structured idea management system, one that integrates AI-assisted screening to actively generate and filter new program candidates.

What that means in practice is that we're using AI tools to evaluate platform fit, market signal, and technical feasibility at a speed and scale that simply wasn't possible before. Our scientific team isn't just executing on defined assets like NCT and cannabinoids. They're continuously scouting, evaluating, and qualifying new directions based on platform fit, market signal, and technical feasibility. The pipeline you see today is not the ceiling. We have a process designed to surface the next generation of assets in a disciplined way that leverages platform capability and can also allow us to make new classes of molecules, whether that's nucleosides, flavonoids, or other complex natural products, in a way that's grounded in what our platform actually does well. That kind of structural innovation capacity is, frankly, a differentiator, and it gives me confidence that we'll continue to have compelling directions to bring forward.

While remaining product-focused, we continue to invest in our core eXoZymes platform. A key area of progress in 2025 and into 2026 has been expanding our data generation capabilities, enabled in part by our cell-free protein synthesis screening platform. This allows us to produce and characterize enzymes rapidly and cost-effectively. This data directly feeds our AI-assisted enzyme design tools, improving the speed and quality of our science across all programs. We believe these investments in platform infrastructure position us well to accelerate our existing programs and to pursue new opportunities as they emerge. Across cannabinoids, our santalene program, and our pipeline of innovation, what I hope you take away is this. The science is working. The platform is proving itself. We are able to now generate those next ideas that will allow us to push biomanufacturing into the next generation.

I'm excited about where we are, and I look forward to providing additional updates in the future. Thank you.

Thank you, Tyler. Now it's time to look at the financials. That means let's get over to Vlad.

Good afternoon, everyone. Our financial results for the year of 2025 are detailed in our press release that was just issued. I encourage you to read the report, and I'll take a moment to review and summarize the results. As a pre-revenue company, our primary focus remains on building asset value and getting to revenue under prudent financial management. We continue to make targeted investments to drive commercialization goals and achieve long-term growth. As of the end of December of 2025, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $3.04 million, providing us with sufficient liquidity to support ongoing operations and key initiatives into the middle of Q2 of 2026. Our total operating expenses for the year were $9.72 million, which represents an increase of $3.78 million compared to the prior year of 2024.

The increase in 2025 was primarily driven by R&D investments, personnel expansion of the leadership and the R&D team, with a focus on further developing our internal infrastructure and developing our flagship products. The net loss for the year was $9.16 million. We have been disciplined in our spending approach and continue to ensure that our capital is allocated effectively to maximize shareholder value. Additionally, we continue to explore non-dilutive funding opportunities such as new grants, strategic partnerships, and potential government programs to further strengthen our financial position. That concludes my presentation of the financials, and with that, I'll pass the call back. Thank you.

Thank you, Vlad. Nice insight. I would like to add on top of that a more fundraising-focused element. It's no news to anyone that we raised the IPO money to build us up to where we are today, have these value inflection points of having proven the technology, is showcasing the business potential to then do another round of fundraising. I wanna start by saying that us fundraising doesn't mean we will start turning up the burn and become a different kind of company. We are lean. We're really good at being capital efficient and making a lot of progress with the resources available. There is a lot of innovation that comes out of that pressure field of having a little bit too little resources. We really have to be smart and thoughtful about what we're working on.

We'll continue that also in the coming years. As mentioned on the Q3 call last time, we would use this period to start preparing for and warming up to a financing round, and so we did. January 16, we filed S-3. That is the foundation for us to have conversations with investors that have shown interest in investing into our company and us opening up for a number of roadshow style deep dives into what we do, everybody gets the chance to be fully up to speed with the business and investment opportunity by the time that we relatively soon will open up a round with concrete terms and start taking in people's investment indications.

If you're sitting on this call and you're thinking, I want to hear more, I want to be a part of some of those meetings, you can either just be signed up to our newsletter and we will ongoingly tell you what the opportunities are. If you want to be proactive, send us an email on investor relations, that is basically [email protected] and indicate your interest. We'll make sure you become part of the roadshow or the online group presentations.

I'm excited about all the value and assets we managed to build in 2025 and the first weeks of 2026. We have done exactly what we set out to do in a capital-light fashion, built something that allows us to have unique capabilities to produce biosolutions, tech transfer packages, products that has competitive advantages the world had not seen before. Either because the small molecule natural product was not possible to manufacture at scale at all, or it's a natural product that we can then customize for a pharmaceutical use case. The value creation, the asset built, and with time, the revenue growth is what makes me super excited about how we are ramping up as a company.

With NCT, with the cannabinoid program, and the tail of other development projects we'll be doing over the coming years, I am absolutely certain that you will see a number of value inflection points happen also already this year. Based on our leadership principles, all the great work by the team, the tools and systems we are building for talent management, and making sure we are coordinated and focused, all of that is starting to pay off. That is how I am sure that the future is bright, not just because we are building biomanufacturing solutions, but also because we are becoming a really high-performance company. I look forward to the rest of the year, and all of these things are obviously the things that makes me fall asleep with a smile on a daily basis.

Before we go to the Q&A session, I just want to end on that the next generation of biomanufacturing is here. It's cell-free, and it's going to make the future bright.

Well, go. Sorry, again.

Thank you all for the questions. We have gotten more than we can answer in this session, but we'll take a handful, and then we'll get back to the rest of you either in writing or setting up a call. Damien, why don't you pick a question for me, and then we get started?

Sounds good. I grabbed this one because I think it's a good place to start. It's a question we can direct to you, Michael. Do you have enough operating cash on the balance sheet to get to operating break even? When will that occur?

Yep. As you have just seen from the presentation, we are fundraising, and it's going well. We'll start taking in and locking down indications in April. That is how we finance the company, as you are aware of. This question also allows me to kind of unpack how we create value and how it translates into shareholder value. Let's just dive a bit into that. First of all, we built biomanufacturing assets, basically, with the next-generation biomanufacturing tech transfer packages that we built, we enable our upcoming spin-outs and joint ventures and our partners to basically have competitive advantages in their specific markets.

That is, for example, when people can produce a product that is otherwise impossible to produce at scale, that is a real competitive advantage to be able to offer that. That value creation that we trigger there, we basically do in a super capital-efficient way compared to synthetic biology in general. Synbio have been known to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take many, many years to bring something to market. Frankly, most people didn't even bring anything to market in the end. From that perspective, we are proud that we can translate this effort into shareholder value. Let me just point that out exactly how that works. When we built the spin-outs and we built the joint venture positions, that opens up for exit opportunities.

That's how we create assets and how we turn that into capital that comes back to us and you as shareholders. It's also when we do licensing deals with partners in the future. There will be payments associated with that, and that's basically how we build the cash flows. From a short-term perspective, what I want you to kind of keep an eye on is when we hit our value inflection points. That's basically how we make sure that people start to understand exactly what it is we're building, why it's so valuable. I think today's presentation have, with NCT and our cannabinoids, given a lot of meat on that bone.

I think there's a nice question that we got too that layers on top of that, and I'll address another one to you, Michael. eXoZymes has consistently indicated it's working towards specific milestones before signing partnership agreements. Shareholders have not been given visibility into what those milestones can be. Can you provide a clearer milestone roadmap? Will you look to provide more guidance going forward to keep shareholders better informed?

Yes, we'll certainly try, but it is not because of bad will. It is a true challenge to find this right balance between following a roadmap with milestones versus doing what is actually best for us, the company, and you as shareholders. I think 2025 was a good example of that. We did our refocusing strategically by basically going from, "Let's make a lot of partnerships deals," into realizing that the better way of capturing value was to basically investing our time and efforts into these amazing business opportunities we have in front of us with the cannabinoids and with NCT.

Let's say if I had sold, let's say 50% or even 100% of NCT for a couple of tens of millions of dollars, then I think everybody should and would hate me, even at this point, but especially in the future when people start realizing the very large potential that this has. Us going from a big idea platform company to become product and market-focused and delivering on that was a shift and therefore also from a communication point of view, a little bit of a challenge to fit into a roadmap because we frankly didn't know in the beginning of the year, what we knew in the end of the year. Will we do our very best to be better at it? Absolutely. I would say with NCT—

Yeah

It gives us some good opportunities to kind of start having conversations about what those value inflection points and milestones are. I'm thinking human use studies for NCT is something I as in the shareholder would keep an eye on that is very valuable, basically generating our own data and proof for the capabilities of our ultra pure version of NCT. I would also say that when we get to finish up the tech transfer package of NCT and basically be ready for the commercial production, that is also a large value increase that will be triggered there. Yeah, on the last point, if I were to kind of mention a couple of the things, milestones to keep an eye on, I would say cannabinoids.

Us basically getting to the next level in that business case and I think there's so much potential there, and with the rescheduling you talked about and other things, we will definitely get some opportunities that only we can address and therefore frankly dominate and make a lot of value from. Okay, my turn to pick a question here. I'm gonna give you one, Tyler. Your website references cannabinoid-like and cannabinoid-inspired molecules, but in the past, you have indicated that eXoZymes would also produce rare naturally occurring cannabinoids maybe for the consumer market. Are you still pursuing a dual-track strategy for cannabinoids similar to NCT?

Yeah. That's a great question. We have made both rare cannabinoids. We can and have made both rare cannabinoids and new-to-nature cannabinoid analogs. Like I said earlier, we just recently filed a provisional patent that covers a number of new-to-nature cannabinoid analogs. Needless to say, there's a massive underserved potential of targeting the endocannabinoid system. While that is true, while the regulatory environment is shifting in what looks to be meaningful ways at the federal level, under the current regulations, we are still focused on the pharma opportunities for those cannabinoid assets. That being said, we will still keep an eye on the changing regulatory landscape to make sure that we keep our options open depending on what those regulatory changes are.

That's good. Damien, time for you to get a question here. Let me see.

Okay.

Let me pick something here. I'm actually gonna do a combo question here. James and Rodney are kind of asking the same thing here, so let me see if I can sew it together. Basically, Cayman Chemical was recently seen making public encouraging statements about eXoZymes. What is the nature of the relationship going forward? Is Cayman positioned as a long-term CMO partner, or is it primarily a partner for external validation in the smaller scale range? Sewing in the question of how do you get from 100 L to 10,000 L, and what is the necessary commercial scale volume that is gonna be needed for NCT, and how do we know if there will be or will not be scaling issues down the road?

I thought this might be one of the questions you'd pick on, so I sketched a few milestone points here because I think one of the things we're hearing over and over from our investors is understanding our milestones is understanding our value.

Yeah.

I sketched a few things on the milestones.

Great.

I wanna make sure I get those right. Let me start by just saying Cayman Chemical's been an incredible partner. Right.

Absolutely.

They demonstrated both our transferability of a process technology, and they demonstrated the scalability, and they demonstrated the performance repetition, right, from us to them. Just what a professional outfit to work with, right? You know, being able to take our methods and deploy them, encounter a few hiccups that they did, but, you know, being able to keep things within spec and keep things within boundaries. Like, they were a solid operator from that perspective. I think the teams have built a solid working rapport. You probably agree with that.

Yes. Absolutely.

Tyler, leading that team.

I think what that means with Cayman is there's more we can do with a group like that, you know, that become an asset in that relationship. I think as we march forward in 2026 and beyond, as we look at various applications of NCT and as we look at other molecules, there's definitely more work we can do with Cayman. We need to have a conversation with Cayman to come and set that up. Let me state for our investors, it's been a great relationship. Cayman's not everything for us though, right? As we commercialize NCT and we go to larger scale, we'll need a network of contract manufacturing organizations to provide scale, yes, but also continuity. We wanna make sure we build a supply chain that is robust, right?

That can survive a shock to the system somewhere, and we're not so dedicated to one and only one way of making the material that we make. In terms of the milestones ahead, where do we go next? Well, we've got to take the learnings from Cayman Chemical, and we need to optimize our process methods. Yeah. Get that feedback, make sure we've optimized our methods with that feedback. We need to then go into robustness testing, ensure we know enough about our process that it can encounter shocks, it can encounter deviations, and we know how to remedy that. That's about us becoming the master of our technology, which is really, really important. We're already underway with supply chain validation and contract manufacturing organization validation. We've got an RFP process out where we're interviewing and we're validating who—

What is RFP?

RFP is a request for proposal.

Yep.

It's two phases. We send out information on our process under nondisclosure agreement to a handful of CMO organizations, and we're asking them to put a proposal to us on how they would operate our process at scale and at what cost. Key features for our business case on NCT. Once we've selected, we need to do cross-validation of our methods into their hands to make sure everything works as the way it's intended. We'll then put our tech transfer package together, which then allows the CMO to operate with our technology at larger scale, which is a key step to being launch ready for NCT. Those are the milestones we're working towards in 2026. In 2027, you know, the engine get turned on for commercial production of NCT.

How do we make sure as we go from where we are now to where we need to be at the end of the year, that we don't encounter unexpected problems, right? How do we know that there won't be issues in that scale up? The honest truth is, we don't. Scale up is not a game of perfection, it's a game of preparedness, which means we need to make sure we're working with good partners, we need to make sure we understand well our methods, we need to work with good consultants. We have a team of manufacturing and supply chain consultants working with us right now. All that needs to come together to ensure that we're ready for the scale up. I wanna reference people back to slide 11 in the NCT presentation I gave.

There's a really compelling visual of how cell-free allows for very clean product compositions. That's the underlying magic for why we've been able to scale so efficiently and so easily, and I guess that's where I would leave that question, is understand what that difference is in cell-free.

Yeah. Well put, Damien. There's a lot of good work going on. We have time for one last question, I think.

Yep.

Um-

Let's do one.

Yeah. Michael, this is for you. I mean, we—

Yep

—we've talked a lot about nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, you know. Do you see eXoZymes evolving into a pharmaceutical platform company, or remaining more focused on specific assets in the near to medium term?

Okay. Thank you for the question, David, that asked the question here. Basically, it allows us to obviously, as you've seen from the presentation today, we are going to double down on NCT and cannabinoids. It is where we are creating the most value per day per dollar. Right now it is really clear to us that this is an important focus, and it also will basically do the proof to the world that this is a new generation of biomanufacturing that allows for a new kind and new kinds of products. From that perspective, we will have focus on our flagship efforts there. When that's said, I can pull the conversation back to the pharma perspective because we have a lot of conversations with biotech and pharma companies.

I would say a year and a half ago when I was talking with people, I would say the general almost feeling in the room would be dismissive. Nobody can do that. That's too ambitious. Like, there's no way you can kind of do new medicinal chemistry. Where now it's changed. People are really starting to understand that this is real, and especially the people that are studying our work on the cannabinoid side. They're starting to be very interested and asking about how they get access to the core technology. Like, because if you can do this on the cannabinoids, why can't you do it over on my drug? We can.

You can argue, as it sometimes is in life, when we were looking for partners the most, it was difficult finding the exact right ones. Now when we are focused and we know exactly what we're going for, now the partners are coming to us. That is overall what will lead us in the direction of absolutely utilizing our platform. You will see more assets being built on it, and we will go from being just a spin-out and joint venture focused also over to licensing focused with time. What the gearing is there and getting it on a milestone timeline, that's unfortunately not something I can offer because the world is moving so fast right now.

I can offer the commitment to doing our very best to get there as fast and as capital efficient as possible. Okay. I think that's for the questions. I wanna take this last minute to thank our team. You guys are doing an amazing job. I don't think most people will ever be able to realize how deep our technology stack is, how pioneering it is, what we're doing from a biotech perspective, and it is because of all the ladies and gentlemen on the team that is really pulling the weight on a daily basis, putting efforts and achievements into eXoZymes. That is just something that makes me proud and happy. Thank you very much for that. Thank you for investing your super talent into this mission.

Dear shareholders, a big thank you to you as well. Thank you for trusting us with your trust and your capital and all of the support you are giving us. We are grateful and really benefit from all of you that are reaching out with ways of helping us by basically making introductions, coming with ideas and new market opportunities to us, and all the other ways you support us. Not are we just thankful for that, we also wanna encourage you to keep going on doing that. Introduce us to as many new people as possible. We are obviously still a company that not everybody in the world have heard about yet, and therefore help us break into those new opportunities from a shareholder perspective.

With that, I wanna say thank you for your time and attention.