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everyone to the MDB Capital Holdings fourth quarter and full year 2025 update conference call. Thanks very much for joining us today. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. Today's conference call is being recorded. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you have any questions during the presentation, you can type them into the Q&A chat to be answered during the Q&A session. Remember, questions can only be seen by the moderator. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results or any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most current Form 10-K for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading of Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon, is available in the investor relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be provided later on mdb.com.

Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He'll be joined later by George Brandon, MDB Capital President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead an update on the fourth quarter ending December 31, 2025. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Chris Marlett. Chris?

Thanks, Tony. Well, thanks everyone for joining today. I'm excited to be here and talk to you about what's been happening. It's been a while since our last call, and the year's gotten off to a really interesting start. I thought I'd first, you know, kinda just talk about our agenda, which I know most of you are very, very interested in, you know, you know, where our assets are, what we think about our current investments, and, you know, what we see for the future. I wanted to take some time to give you sort of a view from, you know, the way we're looking at building this business and why we're so optimistic for the future of MDB.

We just published, which you should all have as shareholders, year-end shareholder letter, which we'll talk to a lot of what we're gonna talk to today, but in a bit more detail. It's. If you can get through it's about nine or 10 pages. I think it does a pretty good job of giving you a real good view of where we see the business, where we're headed, and why we're excited about the future. With that, I'll start off with just reminding everybody our story. Really, we've taken this proven model of launching companies about one every 18 months, where we helped to conceive of a big idea, bring it and position it for being public and having value in the public markets, and then taking them public.

We did that before we were public and, you know, it was a very nice business. Of course, the reason we decided to go public was that we believed we could scale that to three to five launches a year. Maybe not overnight, but we really believed that we could do that, have a lot more impact, and build a real organization to build public venture really kind of into an asset class where we could actually build portfolios for our investors as opposed to just, you know, most of our investors historically had one or two of our companies in their portfolio. We did that for 29 years. We just did our 18th IPO. Never a failure means we never, you know, failed to get an IPO done.

Every one of them, you know, except for the last one, which is, you know, very new, it's only a couple of months old, have traded at a very significant premium to the IPO price. That really, I think, speaks to what we've done from an asymmetric value positioning perspective, bringing companies public at a reasonable valuation and the promise of them caused them to trade at values much higher than what we took them public at. All those companies had the opportunity to raise additional follow-on capital, and we create a lot of equity value, not just fees. You know, the scaling is really what we're talking about.

Talking about where we came from and, you know, I've been in the business now for 40 years and, you know, my mission has always been, before we even started MDB, was how do we get to the truth quickly? How do we understand the companies that we're getting behind or the opportunities we're getting behind and creating or many times creating these companies in conjunction with inventors or universities or entrepreneurs. In the old days, we would, you know, look at 10-Ks and 10-Qs. You literally have to call Washington and get these filings. It was a very haphazard approach to trying to learn about companies. These were all public companies. If we had a private company we were gonna take public, the information challenge was really crazy.

As a result of the Internet, you know, we launched PatentVest in 2003, which enabled us to really understand deep tech very much in a clearer way because we could get our minds around what somebody owned and how it was differentiated from somebody else out there in the technology landscape. That gave us, in our mind, a real ability to really understand the critical elements to building leadership. This leadership we saw was the critical element for these companies being able to trade at billion-dollar valuations or have the potential to trade at billion-dollar valuations.

As we refined it, we in our screening criteria and our processes and trained our analysts, we could start to filter, you know, companies where, you know, instead of going from a handful in the old days or maybe 100 a year after PatentVest, we got into the point where we could re-review thousands per year, really because we could get through an idea in an hour or two by understanding, did they have the ability to be a leader in a technology vertical pretty quickly with the development of PatentVest.

We still had really a bottleneck, and we've really experienced that bottleneck over the last, you know, couple of years since going public at MDB, which is we can, you know, find a big idea, we can pull it together, but really that process of getting a position to create real value in the public marketplace is a very, very labor and time-intensive process. The due diligence and all the market insertion risks and competitive mapping and the business IP strategy and then really getting the company positioned to be able to communicate its value add is very tough. It's still tough. It's always tough with a big idea. That would consume hundreds if not thousands of hours, and it would take, you know, many months to get these companies ready to go public.

This has really been our reality and quite frankly, our biggest challenge in scaling that we've had. I have to say, I referenced in my letter that AI really is a game changer for us, and we're committed as an organization to using it at every level. I would tell you that even the last 90 days has just been kind of earth-shattering for us in the ability for us and our teams to really solve that information challenge that almost every company faces, and we certainly face in getting these companies ready for being public. When you think about the Internet, it really did a great job of catalyzing and organizing that information, but it really created, you know, sort of overload and inertia.

You had almost too much information. Even when we were looking at patent data, when we first started, you would look at, you know, you would do a screen, and you would look at thousands of patents. Well, getting through those thousands of patents was virtually impossible. It would take, you know, really unbelievable amount of man-hours to make that happen and really understand how a company could differentiate itself from the other companies in that field. What AI has really done, and really done in a very, very tangible way, you know, literally in the last 90-120 days, is it eliminates that inertia. It really connects the dots at an unprecedented speed.

When you couple that with our expert analysts that have created the SOPs, if you will, to actually screen through these companies like we did very manually before, those SOPs applied through agentic models in AI is really become almost unbelievable. What we're seeing, whether it's with patents or whether it's with new business opportunities, we're able to get to the truth super fast. We're able to connect dots we could never connect before, and this is going to have a unbelievably profound impact on our business. I know AI is sort of the catchword of today and, you know, every AI company that comes in to look for funding, I'm always very skeptical of.

I can tell you that as far as using really off-the-shelf AI, things like Claude, you know, day-to-day within our operation and now building SOPs and agents to effectively execute what we can do, doesn't mean we're gonna actually lay off anyone or fire anybody like has been put in the press. What it enables us to do now is really scale in an unbelievable way. The transformative impact in a real tangible setting is becoming real, and we really believe that our ability to effectively boil the ocean of opportunities is achievable.

We're in the process of continuing to develop these agents where we can literally look not only for new companies through our patent data, but from grant databases, from, you know, conferences, anywhere we go where we see opportunities where we can feed it in with our specific criteria. These agents can now do the work of hundreds of analysts and then start to boil the ocean and get these things narrowed down to where now our analyst team, who are experts in understanding whether or not these are, you know, real genuine opportunities, can be boiled down very, very fast to, you know, a very small stack of companies.

Even if, let's say 5% of the opportunities made it through our screen, whether it was companies that were brought to us by friends or colleagues, you know, the real hard work was the deep due diligence. That deep due diligence was very, you know, that's what took the hundreds if not thousands of hours to do. In fact, you know, every one of these companies were facing the same thing. They're trying to get to the answers quickly. The boards are trying to figure out what strategy to employ. The information divide is just really, really difficult, especially when you're talking about deep tech or disruptive technology. We really estimate that we can compress that time by 2/3. It's really astounding.

You know, you're gonna see it, obviously, as investors, right? You can put in every one of our deals. You can put the prospectus in, you can query it, and you guys are getting the questions quicker. And we're seeing already in the last 90 days, the questions we're getting from investors and the insights we're getting from investors is really astonishing. I mean, it's really fun for us because, you know, our mission is to get to the truth as fast as possible. You know, we're experiencing this real time. It's like something I've never seen before. But then when you actually wanna prepare that company and take it public, it would take from six to 18 months, and I think we're gonna be able to get this done in weeks.

To give you an example, we just started on the S-1 for POLX to take it public. You know, our team could actually put together a pretty good draft for the S-1 pretty darn quickly. I think, and again, we're still in the early stages of really implementing all these processes within our organization. Whether it's the financial models, the business strategy, the IP positioning, we see this being done in weeks, not months, which has, you know, when you talk about the scale issue that we faced, you know, we're seeing this as a total game changer for our ability to scale. Throughout our business, whether it's through PatentVest, through, you know, all of our investor diligence, I mean, this whole thing is gonna change.

It's gonna change how our community reacts to deals. It's gonna change how deals get distributed. It's gonna change it at every level, and we're seeing it real time right now. Since we've gone public, one of the things that I don't think has been very apparent to everybody that is really just been focused on figuring out what one of our deals is worth or whether they should buy it or what eXoZymes might be worth is that we've been investing in MDB Direct in our clearing operations and PatentVest to really build those as separate discrete assets. Yes, they're very, they're very obviously critical and important in our daily operating business, but they really are distinct assets in their own right.

We've been investing about $4 million annually since the IPO in these assets. That is super apparent because we've been able to take and, you know, and stand up these two enterprises to where they now, in our mind, have significant independent value and are in effect big ideas that are going to be launched off into their own entities very soon. In MDB Direct, what we did was super unique. We knew that scaling IPOs, especially public venture IPOs, was going to not a thing that is done with traditional institutional investors. Traditional institutional investors are looking for ideas that are much more highly developed.

A lot of these companies that are, you know, sort of in the development phase that are going public, a lot of them were starting to get funded by crowdfunding and other platforms like this, Reg A pluses, things like that. Now we're seeing, you know, things like companies like Robinhood now being key distributors for these kind of offerings for big companies like, you know, the big major underwriters. Distribution is changing in a very, very dynamic way. The key differentiator is clearing. Folks like Robinhood had to become, had to go self-clearing. They used to clear it through other people. Most of the broker-dealers that operate in the microcap marketplace, none of them are self-clearing or virtually none of them are self-clearing.

They're recognizing to be able to operate and access these investors, clearing could be a clear differentiator. Clearing is also the ability to be profitable. In many cases, you know, stock loan, margin lending, etc. These things are key, you know, cash generators for any company in our space that has any kind of assets that are built on their platform. We know that what we've built here is a very, very valuable asset. It took five years of work, with our vendors and our software developers and what have you, to get this up and running.

It's a super valuable asset, and I think that we're looking forward to being able to scale that asset and at the same time create value and monetize the asset. Really the big opportunity for MDB Direct is a strategic partnership to monetize the asset and also help solve our distribution challenges at scale. I talk about it in the letter a bit, but. When you go from one company every 18 months with a very small community and effectively a few relationship managers that, you know, that work within our organization, to go to three to five companies a year and really start to scale this, we have to basically solve the distribution challenge.

Again, I spoke about public venture as sort of being a very much an individual investor-oriented asset class, where you can look back to the IPOs of even companies like Amazon and Tesla that went public through larger underwriters, but the institutional investors were not major players that drove valuation in those companies. Even today, you know, SpaceX is talking about going public and raising a lot of money. Elon Musk is smart enough to know that he needs to have retail distribution. He's figuring out ways to do that in the offering because he knows they're gonna end up being the people that really wanna own the stock. The institutional investors many times came a lot later.

We see an opportunity with these firms that don't have self-clearing, that are recognizing that distribution is gonna change, that this is a real opportunity to partner with either other firms to spin this off as its own entity, to sell it outright and then clear it through whoever we sell it to. We see this as a very valuable asset. You know, to our knowledge, there's no other clearing firms for sale or partnering capability right now. When we were looking to do this, there was only one clearing firm that was set up for sale or for partnership.

That firm, you know, even with a lot of challenges and really not, you know, a huge platform, sold for, you know, tens of millions of dollars. We see this as really exciting. It's now operational, it's working, and we're now just starting active discussions with various folks, and we're seeing this as a really a force multiplier. Not only generates some value for the shareholders, but also a partner on distribution, which I think could be a really great, you know, thing for what we're doing as we have the ability to curate more big ideas. PatentVest, just, you know, the other big idea, just, you know, as big as clearing was to become a law firm.

We had built a patent research company before and sold it before we had gone public. That company was very you know, very limited by the fact that we weren't a law firm, 'cause we could do research, but we couldn't really render opinions. We had to be careful with attorney-client privilege. A lot of our analysts were in Latin America, which made a lot of people nervous. With that, we were able to sell to a U.K.-based law firm. Because in the U.K., they were able to go public. Then as we, you know, went forward and the ABS program became a possibility, we became one of the first ABS IP law firms, and it's been really phenomenal.

Javier Chamorro, who runs you know the operation, has done a great job of getting this up and going to where we have all the core operations of a law firm from you know patent prosecution to foreign you know prosecution management to docketing to maintenance fees. All the various things you need to do that, in addition to all the front-end research that enables us to start to provide a lot more value and create higher quality patents and you know a better experience for small companies and large companies that are looking to be more efficient and create higher quality.

What we see is by being the you know the first potential ABS law firm to go public, which makes a lot of sense, and take this from being a real legal process to a business process, we can now partner with these big law firms like we used to before we sold the patent research business. We think that big law is facing an existential crisis with regard to what's happening in patent prosecution. A lot of the big law firms see that prosecution is a process business and that their high-level legal talent really can be best focused on strategy and litigation. We're having some great discussions with these law firms, and we're looking forward to seeing this develop. It turns out it's a huge business.

If you look at patent prosecution in the U.S., I think $10 billion-$15 billion is a conservative figure for how big that business is in the U.S. We really think that we can garner a really meaningful share of that business by partnering with big law firms. We're really excited about this. I think that the AI legal tech market is booming. Obviously, there's been tons of money going into that market. We don't wanna call ourselves an AI legal tech company, 'cause really what we are is a law firm that is going to embrace AI. I think that a lot of these platforms have been funded. There's probably. I wouldn't be surprised if there's 100 AI legal tech law firms out there currently.

I think we're in this really great position to be able to participate in this area, create a lot of value, and we're looking to spin this out as an independent entity and finance it before year-end, as we touched on last year. Our portfolio assets, we have two portfolio assets outside of MDB Direct and PatentVest that I think can create a lot of value. Obviously, eXoZymes, which is public, and POLX, which we recently funded and are planning to take public later this year, are again a billion-dollar market cap potential, just like everything else we've done historically. Talking about eXoZymes.

eXoZymes is at a really critical point in its development, and I think that what had happened with eXoZymes is that initially the strategy was, let's go out and partner with, you know, pharmaceutical companies to go help them make stuff they can't make. We recognized at eXoZymes, as I'm on the board there, that in fact we could make things that nobody else could make. If we could do that, why wouldn't we just make them and sell those products? I think that the promise of SynBio is about ready, is upon us. Because companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, everybody thought that they had cracked the code for being able to scale manufacturing in SynBio, when in fact they hadn't.

They created a lot of partnerships, and they had a lot of sort of irons in the fire. What we realized is focusing in on a couple really big ones was really super critical and making sure that we could scale manufacturing. As you've seen, hopefully you've seen, that technology is now being turned over to contract manufacturers and being demonstrated that it scales, which is something that's never really been done in our experience in SynBio. It's again, this is a company that, you know, I don't know that anyone's gonna wanna, you know, value SynBio at $20 billion again, but I think that the headroom on this, when you look at the current market value of the company, is pretty immense.

We're pretty excited that we're at this critical point now. Paulex, I won't spend a lot of time on. We're gonna have an update for those of you that participated in Paulex, but quite frankly, we're hoping to initiate the clinical trial in September at the same time the IPO goes. Again, another game-changing potential drug that would touch both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes by producing insulin, by helping the body to produce insulin, again, or produce more of it. It's. You know, we started the company with some of the same folks that we started Prevention with, that know diabetes and that we've had a lot of success with. We're very excited. I think that, you know, look forward to this IPO later this year.

We're super excited that the clinical trial results, you know, could start to emerge at the end of this year or early next year. They could be really groundbreaking. When you look at our four principal assets as it stands right now, eXoZymes, you know, has a current sort of market valuation. At year-end, it was about $45 million. The stock's come down a little bit. It's at about $30 million in market value currently of what we own. POLX, we own 7.1 million shares of that. It's yet to be seen what we'll price the IPO at, but it could be a very substantial asset.

MDB Direct, again, you know, not making promises on the value, but, you know, clearing firms of this type have sold for tens of millions of dollars. I think we're in an environment where, you know, the value of this could be much greater with where the world is going from a distribution perspective of new offerings. Of course, PatentVest, we've been investing in for a long time, has, in our mind, a lot of value. We've invested, you know, many millions of dollars in the development of PatentVest since 2003, and even more so since we've been public, to get it ready as a law firm and ready for launch.

Then a combination of our cash, current assets through market securities, less all the current liabilities at year-end was about $22.3 million. One of the, you know, sort of footnotes was we thought we were gonna get Buda Juice done before year-end, but it ended up trickling into January, so it'll give us some benefit in the first quarter. When you look at the financial overview, I tried to simplify it as much as possible. Obviously, you can read the 10-K for yourself, but we have about $10 million in fixed operating expenses, and we burned about $5.7 million, if you look at the cash flow statement for the year.

If you look at the investment we've made in the clearing ops and PatentVest, it was about $4 million, which was $4 million as part of the $10 million. If you effectively took the $4 million off of the $5.7 million, we would have in effect burned $1.7 million. I think that a lot of people, when they're looking at, you know, our operating, you know, statements, I don't know that that's super clear to everybody. If, you know, post the spin-out of our clearing platform and PatentVest, you know, our OpEx will go down to about $6 million a year, which when you now look at the number of companies we can launch and how much equity we earn in those companies, we have huge financial leverage.

Even if you look at, you know, the equity position that we earn from, you know, co-founding Polaryx this year, that equity is certainly worth, in our minds, a lot, worth a lot more than what we burned from a cash perspective this year. We think we generate a significant equity value that's really not apparent in fiscal year 2025, but going forward, we've seen this leverage as being really, you know, unbelievable. I think that, you know, all of our things have, you know, billion-dollar capabilities, and if we can launch three or five a year, you know, on a $6 million in OpEx base, I think we're gonna have a really. You know, we could drive a lot of really important shareholder value.

What could go wrong? Well, this is not a sure thing, it's public venture, right? What I would say is that there's a lot of interesting things going on that we faced since we've started. There's obviously a lot of macro and global risk. I have no idea how it's gonna turn out, nor do I wanna venture a guess. The microcap market conditions have been very difficult. A lot of these companies, because of the venture markets and small public markets, were having such a difficult time. Many of these companies face such horrible dilution. There were lots of institutional investors investing in the space, but the dilution of these small companies was just horrific.

You know, we're hoping to see that change, you know, hopefully soon. Obviously, execution risk. Not only our execution risk, but obviously our portfolio companies have to execute. This distribution gap that we're looking to solve is probably the biggest worry I have. I'm not too worried about AI execution risk. We're already seeing those tools work for us. With regard to clinical and regulatory risk, those are always something to be faced with all the life science companies we're involved with. The path forward is pretty straightforward. We're now positioned to launch 3-5 high-quality companies a year.

You know, again, that's gonna depend a lot on our distribution and how we, you know, how we can build that. We've got a lot of, you know, we've talked about in the past, we're doing a lot of things and partnering with other distribution partners, and so we're hoping to make that happen, you know, in addition to what we're doing with spinning out the clearing platform. We're obviously gonna, you know, spin out PatentVest as well and monetize that. This, you know, cost scale efficiency improvement, I think is only getting better as we get better at what we're doing. As always, you know, shareholders retain preferred access to MDB deals. I wanna thank you all for having faith in what we're doing here at MDB.

You know, it's been a really tough couple years for us, watching our stock go down for the last, you know, last couple years since we took this company public. So I'm gonna use that for a second here to editorialize for one second. I know I've ran a bit over, you know, on this presentation. We're up to 37 minutes, but I'm gonna try and make this as quick as possible. You know, we've had a lot of people that have stuck in there, but a lot of people have sold our stock or the stock wouldn't have gone down.

I think a lot of people have been disheartened, and I think part of, you know, what I will take credit for is this was a lot harder than we originally thought to get up and going. You know, I could use the market backdrop as an excuse, but the reality was, is that we thought we had it in the bag. You know, when you looked at the batch of companies we launched right before we went public, all of them went to billion-dollar valuations. You know, if that had happened after we were public with our current batch, you know, we would not be having this conversation right now.

I think that, you know, a lot of our investors were like, "Well, you know, yeah, you got lucky with Prevention. One of the drugs worked and it sold." You know, how much were you really involved? Well, the reality was, we started that company. Those assets wouldn't have been licensed. There wouldn't have been, in my mind, that opportunity, and certainly not in a public realm, hadn't we been able to, you know, to help make that happen. You know, if you look at Post BioSciences, you know, investors have had, you know, it still trades, I think, for a $1.5 billion valuation or so, maybe close to $2 billion. I don't know where it's at right now.

Investors have had multiple opportunities to make many multiples of their you know of their investment from where we took that public. Even when you look at the most challenging one, which was Q BioMed, this company you know achieved a billion-dollar valuation on the promise. The technology worked, but it also highlights the difficult parts of what we do, which is you know the company's gotta execute. In that technology, we haven't given up on it. We still think the technology is brilliant and it should be you know broadly available to patients. It's you know it's had some challenges. When I look at the current batch of companies that we have here today, when you look at all four of the principal assets we have, I really believe all those have billion-dollar potential capability.

You know, obviously, if all of them hit $1 billion, we, you know, it would be, you know, crazy return to shareholders. I'm not saying that's gonna happen, and I don't expect it to happen. It would not surprise me if any one of them hit a billion-dollar valuation. I think that when you couple that with the pipeline of things that we see that we have coming, it seems inconceivable to me that we're not gonna find one of these companies to hit a billion-dollar valuation again and reward shareholders. Again, it's not a promise, it's with all the caveats, but that's the way we're seeing things and why we're excited. With that, I'm gonna open it up to questions. I think, George, why don't you come back on-

Yeah. Let's just jump into it. If you have a question, you get into the Q&A down at the bottom. Just scroll over the mouse, and you can type a question in there. I'm gonna start right off. Chris, I know you hit the positions we have the biggest stake in, but I just got a question on, you know, can you talk a little bit about Q, ClearSign, and Beat? Then also a question on Buda. You know, that was unusual for us to do Buda. Can you just, you know, give a little bit of view on those positions that many of our shareholders still hold?

ClearSign is, you know, certainly been on that long commercialization journey, and that's a company that Anthony knows much better than me. You know, from the perspective, and it's a very small position within our firm. You know, they have been on this commercialization journey, and their unique burner technology is more relevant than ever. We're gonna be burning a lot more natural gas and so I think that company is scaling. You know, I still think the prospects for that company are quite good. With regard to HeartBeam did something that most people thought was impossible, to get an FDA approval for a 12, you know, pocket 12-lead ECG.

You know, what's not told in that story is that that ECG is even better than a 12-lead in many ways. You know, as they've signaled, could be the first device to be able to detect a heart attack, which is a game changer, would save millions of lives. The commercialization journey is not easy for any of these small, you know, companies. HeartBeam, we're still super. You know, we think everybody in the ECG space or health monitoring space, AI space should wanna partner with HeartBeam because they have the most sensitive ambulatory ECG on the planet, period, end of story.

You know, we're very hopeful that the team is gonna execute on making sure one of those partnerships happen, which will bring scale to a really unbelievable technology that could save millions of lives. Buda. You know, I addressed it in the shareholder letter. You can look at it. Buda, everyone said, "Well, geez, why are you going away from deep tech or what have you?" Well, it was a bit serendipitous because a friend of mine really was the CEO of the company, and he was visiting me in Nicaragua.

We were sitting around, and he said, "Well, here's what I'm doing." I said, "My God, you're building a whole new category in a category that's gonna be everything." When you look at, you know, Buda, they're they have the opportunity to be not only the fresh juice leader, which is not, you know, widely known as, you know, you can't really buy fresh juice, you know, at scale in most markets like Walmart and Kroger across the country. This fresh movement is going big. Now ever since, you know, we started the thing, man, every one of these markets need a fresh element because all the shelf-stable processed foods are all gonna get shipped by Amazon. Quite frankly, everything's going against processed foods.

It was the opportunity to basically participate in what could be one of the biggest global shifts we've seen. Anybody that's shopped at markets in Europe knows that, you know, you're not. People go shopping, you know, couple times a week 'cause they want fresh. They don't want. They're not eating preservative foods and, you know, for the most part in Europe. This is a massive, huge opportunity, and we saw an opportunity to bring that to our community. It's a unique company that could be the leader in a space, and it happens to be profitable. We're super excited about it. What else did I miss?

Q BioMed.

Cue. Cue is struggling. You know, I think they've struggled, you know, putting together a cohesive management and board and getting that technology commercialization. That being said, they partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim and also partnered with ImmunoScape on CUE-101, and now they're about ready to put CUE-401 in the clinic. All of these are massive game changer type opportunities. The stock doesn't reflect it. You'd never guess by looking at the stock that it has any value. In fact, we believe that all three of those opportunities, those shots on goal are super valuable. We're, you know, we're really, you know, we're still just as bullish about the technology as we've ever been.

You know, they've had their challenges in getting the execution side of it done.

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

Yeah. The great thing about eXoZymes is that, again, much like if you think about MDB at a $10 million OpEx level to create big opportunities, eXoZymes is the same way. eXoZymes has about $10 million in OpEx to create huge opportunities. Now they've created two gargantuan opportunities in NCT and cannabinoids. You know, they're gonna talk all about that, so I won't go into it too deeply. The combination of government grants and now that those opportunities being on the doorstep of commercialization, these aren't science projects anymore. Dilution is gonna be relatively minimal in our mind because this is not like putting drugs in clinical trials. This is not, you know, they can outsource manufacturing. It is super capital efficient.

We've worked really hard, and they've worked really hard to create a high impact organization to focus on big, huge platforms where they can generate, you know, you know, we're talking about TAMS in the hundreds of billions with the two platforms they're in. They have the ability to be a major player in those platforms with a relatively small operating budget, which really speaks to how impactful their technology is. The reality is nobody believed they could do it. Nobody believed it would scale. I would just tell you, throw all your best scientists at it, go visit the company, go see where they're at, and you're gonna see that this could be the biomanufacturing. This could really be the start of a huge biomanufacturing revolution.

In fact, you know, the U.S. government, you know, we can't continue to outsource manufacturing, especially pharma and you know, and nutritional supplement, you know, manufacturing overseas. This is a huge initiative. I think you're gonna see continued government grants coming to them. I just think that it's in the right place at the right time. Now we just gotta go out and tell the story.

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

Well, the good news about both the clearing, you know, MDB Direct, the clearing ops and PatentVest is we own 100% of both of them. So, you know, we're starting with a much larger share of those than we do with the other companies we have ownership in. our objective is to do a round of financing to bring in partners. we wanna bring in, you know, folks, can't mention names, whether it be law firms, big corporate strategics or other strategics, and we're talking to, you know, various strategics right now. Our goal is to get that funded and out of MDB as a company.

We're gonna look forward to taking it public in 2027, and then, you know, the method in which we do that and how we do it is not really completely formulated yet. That's gonna be largely dictated by, you know, what we do on the partnering front here in the short run in funding it as its own independent division here shortly.

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

You know, it's really interesting because, you know, the deal pipeline is great. I can only see it getting better. You know, the biggest point is really our ability to get them sold, right? We have to get them packaged and sold. You know, right now with, you know, where we're at, you know, the biggest constraint isn't the number of companies we're seeing. It's really gonna be to work out the distribution side of the equation and get that done. I think once we do that, you know, who knows how many we can do a year. Like you said, the biggest issue is solving the distribution thing.

Obviously, our stocks, you know, some have done okay, some haven't, you know, haven't done as good as we hoped. You know, obviously, if a couple of them work out pretty good, then that puts wind in the sails of everybody. We really need to add incremental distribution. Our community is still relatively small. While we have a couple thousand shareholders, we only have 675 active accounts, so it's still very small. You know, we're trying to broaden distribution so that we don't have, you know, a couple of really large investors in our deals. We're trying to broaden that a bit. As we do that, then, you know, our ability to get more of them done is gonna increase.

You know, I'm not worried about the number of companies that we can launch. I'm worried about just making sure that we can find investors for them all, so.

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

Yeah. I think to be 100% blunt, I think SaaS is gonna be crushed by AI.

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

Just to give you one segment that's a really, really big core thing of what we do. Let's take patentability, which is what is largely called prior art search, right? Any new inventor that comes up with a new idea wants to do a patentability or should do a patentability analysis. Here at PatentVest, you would maybe if you were, you know, subscribe to a patent database, you would go out, you would do your own patentability, you know, analysis and search. You would, you know, maybe pay PatSnap $10,000 or $12,000 a year or $15,000 a year to go do that. It would kinda get you part of the way there, maybe, right? You'd kinda...

You'd get a lot of data, and you'd say, "Well, you know, maybe this works." An expert user would use PatSnap and maybe five or six other databases and then get to a really, really good patentability, but very few people did it 'cause it was too expensive and too time-consuming. We've now just to give you an idea, what we were doing is we had expert-trained analysts in Latin America with PhDs and, you know, master's degrees in science. They would do a patentability analysis in 45 hours. Now, even though the cost was lower by doing it in Latin America, 45 hours is still a huge amount of inertia to actually go through and actually do that work.

We took the same SOPs for doing a patentability analysis, now run by that same expert analyst that we have in Latin America with AI, where we basically programmed the agent. We programmed the agent ourselves with an AI, you know, popular AI vendor, where the software needed to run that analysis was completely done in-house without a software developer, mind you. Okay? We can now do that patentability analysis with our expert patent searcher in an hour and a half, and it's better. That's today. We're doing that right now. I'm telling you, it's gonna completely change the SaaS business. These folks that are out there building AI solutions, you know, curated AI solutions, I think they're gonna...

I'm very skeptical of the value of them because we're building them with off-the-shelf AI solutions today with our own people. They're not even software developers. The curated data that we have, that we've invested in for all these years is super valuable now 'cause it's gotta be done behind a wall, right? We don't think that people should be putting their investments or their inventions into ChatGPT and doing this. That gives you a reason why I think SaaS is gonna be. I think human-in-the-loop IP development is the future, and we have a shot to be the leader in it because we're an ABS firm, because we have attorney-client privilege, because we have the ability to basically turn this into a unified business process. I don't see it as a SaaS business going forward.

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

All I can say is thanks. It's been a very, you know, tough road the last couple years since we've been public. I hope that by listening to, you know, where we see things going, that you have a bit more enthusiasm and you have the ability to kinda keep the faith and hang in there. We're super excited about the future for the firm. We're getting better and better every day. The entire team here is working their ass off to make things happen. It's been a rough thing. We haven't given people raises. We've taken back RSUs. We've really backtracked a lot, and a lot of the expectations that we had for ourselves were not met.

You just don't give up. You never say die. You just keep going and I appreciate everybody at the firm that's done it. It's not been easy. It's been a lot of really difficult discussions. That being said, when I look at what's bubbling up from what we have, I'm super excited. I'll leave it at that. George?

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

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

All right. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Bye.

Welcome everyone to the MDB Capital Holdings' Third Quarter 2025 Update Conference Call. Thanks so much for joining us today. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. Today's conference call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please be aware that we're not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion on these and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be available later on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He'll be joined later by George Brandon, MDB President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead an update on the Third Quarter ending September 30, 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett.

Thanks, Tony. Well, welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining today. I saw it was a pretty crazy day in the market. And so it's been a really interesting period in time to navigate these markets. And I just want to thank all of you that have been supporting us and getting behind us, and we've had a really good last few months as our platform takes shape and as our pipeline builds. And so we're very enthusiastic despite all of the backdrop of uncertainty. So well, one of the things I wanted to do today was talk a little -- do a little bit of a different approach to try and help to explain what we do at MDB, why we create value or how we create value and why we went public because I want to remind everybody that we did this for a very specific reason. And there was a big why, if you will, why we went public. But I also want to recognize that so many of you that have believed in us have lived through the stock really going down. And while the stock is down, we've lived through so many different markets before. And sometimes, when you call me where I talk to some of our shareholders, they think that I'm not too worried about things. One, I'm not super worried, but I don't like the stock being down either. So we really are in this together. But I want to also reiterate that we're not changing what we do just because the market's down. What we've done for a long time has worked, and we think it's going to work again despite the fact that times are changing. There's a lot -- fewer small public companies out there. The small public company market has not been really great. And so we're just as excited as we've ever been, even though things are not unbelievable with our stock at this point. So the last, I would say, 2 years has been very challenging because we've had this great historical success, but it's certainly not reflected in the stock today. We've had 28 years of launching big ideas. And we've had really it's an incredible record that really no other firm has really matched. We've never failed at doing an IPO. There's been times that were super tough to get them done. There's good times, there's bad times, but we've been -- we've -- 100% of them we've ever tried, we've done. And amazingly, of all of our IPOs, 100% of them have traded at 2x the IPO price at some point post IPO. So that means that these companies got public. They did well. They had a chance to raise money. They don't all win forever, but we did what we were supposed to do was really launch these companies that have big potential. And so many of them have reached real significance as far as valuation. And I want to remind everybody that we've published sort of a historical perspective of those companies we've launched in the public markets. So we can remind everybody that this can work. And I think that what's wondering -- what's I think lingering in everyone's mind is the whole concept of, is public venture dead? And I think that I'm super excited because I think we're in sort of a whole new beginning for public venture. And I couldn't be more excited about what we have ahead. And again, reminding everybody why we went public. We really -- for 28 years, we only launched what was at 17 companies, so about one company every 18 months. And it was really -- I think a lot of you saw was sort of a founder-led operation led by me and our team. But quite frankly, people look to me for whether or not they should buy or sell something. And that was not something I look forward to, and I really felt like our results have proven themselves and it could be scaled. But we were really constrained by operational bandwidth. So the funding that we did for the IPO was really to put in a team to be able to scale this operation. And so it's been a proven model, but the big question has been, can we scale. And we really -- our goal is to get to 3 to 5 launches per year, which enables people to build a public venture portfolio because buying one company here or there is not really a strategy. It's just -- we're kind of deal salesmen as opposed to helping people to really build a diversified portfolio in public venture. And by doing that, we can bring our impact and our process to more and more companies. So I think the mission is always to build this operational framework, to make this sustainable and a long-term business that survives beyond the initial founders of MDB. And so that is our mission. We're sticking to it. And I think we're making great progress that I think will become very evident very soon. So simply what we've done, and I've talked to this in the past, is really we curate by looking through thousands of ideas. It does take looking through thousands of ideas to find ones that have that asymmetric profile that we believe is so important. And the reason why we've been able to do what we've done historically, you can't just episodically stumble across things. You have to really get out there and our team has done a great job of getting out there and looking through thousands of ideas. I know a lot of you that bring ideas to us get a bit disappointed sometimes because there's such a small percentage of the things that we actually end up getting behind, but we say just keep bringing them sooner or later, you're going to get better at finding one, and we really appreciate all of the companies that are brought to us by our community. It really is an important part of it. And I would tell you that a very high percentage of the things we do are actually brought to us by our community as opposed to us going out and finding them. Then we position them for success, and that's really the hard work, once we curate them, which is equally hard, but positioning them for success and being able to live in the public markets is really where the platform is really been built. And I'll talk to more of that later in the presentation. But I don't think that, that's really apparent to most shareholders today. I don't think that they really understand what we've built and why we have something that really nobody else has. And then, of course, launching them is the things that you see, which is really when they're ready to go public and trade in the public market. So what for the new people in the community that don't really know public venture. It's really this explosive growth potential of venture stage companies and bringing that public market liquidity and transparency that we now call public venture. We used to have an old tagline that we're bringing back, which I think is really something that we forgot about and really is important to understand what the value that we think that we bring in MDB is that we really see value others don't. Most of these opportunities would not be opportunities to any other firm. And I think that our ability to create value from those is really completely unique and not something that these entrepreneurs and inventors can just find anywhere. So it's this -- it's really this transformative magic of transforming these early-stage big ideas into investable public companies with $1 billion-plus potential. And I think that we've really thought about what it is that we do that adds value so that people understand how we actually earn these equity positions or are able to make this a business. When things come to us, they typically are really exciting, big ideas, but they're really underdeveloped without a clear commercial path. And they don't have an IP strategy or a protective moat around them that's completed. And it's kind of a bit unfocused because it's still early, but can be developed. And as a result, they have limited access to growth capital. And after we're done and they're ready for launch, they really have a clear mission as a new category leader, not to say that it doesn't pivot after they're public. It doesn't mean that it's 100% fully baked as a company, but they're really going to be a leader in a particular technology or business category. And they have a comprehensive IP strategy in a protective moat that we're experts now at making happen. And they really are differentiated and they're public ready for the public markets. And so these companies trade and are valued in the public markets as evidenced by our track record. And when they walked in our door, they really didn't have that capability. So I think that, that's what's exciting about what we do and how we create value for shareholders. And talk a little bit about what were -- that underpinning or that foundation for that is really this these integrated components that stand underneath this whole strategy. And I think that when we first went public, we didn't do a good job of communicating. I think a lot of people really believed that we were operating multiple businesses when really -- it's really one business to support this sort of launch of these public venture companies, stage companies. And it's really the foundation that enables us to provide this value that really nobody else can because there's really no PE firm or VC or underwriter that's built to do what we can do. There's -- we are completely unique, and I would say that, that leadership is clear in this category because just like the companies we're launching, this category of public venture there's -- we don't really believe we have any real competition. And so when you look at all of the services, and again, the -- I'll let you guys read this at a later date, but really, all of the things that we do, you do not find at an underwriter or a VC. And ultimately, why I think this is going to be super important. It's not just the companies that we find in academia that might have a great new technology that we have to formulate into a company, but it's also companies that are more developed like you would see with Buda Juice that we'll be soon during the IPO for, where we really help them to really go public, I mean, and be a leader because quite frankly, they can't just walk into an underwriter, and we provide all these services that enable them to get to that public offering much faster. And so we say 2 to 3x faster, that's hard to really quantify. That's just sort of what we believe. But we can take something like Buda Juice from a very early-stage company that didn't think they can go public. And in 6 to 9 months, really get it ready for going public and have it be super well in demand as a result of positioning it correctly. And so I think that's a big part of what we do. The other part of it is that a lot of times these companies are told it's going to cost you $2 million to go public. And that's just not our reality. We have -- whether it's law firms, accounting firms, et cetera, we have the resources to be able to take these companies public for their total all-in cost for going public outside of underwriting fees is usually less than $0.5 million, which is not something that most people or most entrepreneurs fully understand I think that they -- again, there's big misconceptions about what it costs to go public and et cetera. So to remind you how we create value, it's a combination of the fees and equity that is how the shareholders of MDB make money. And so when we transform these companies, there's some companies like in eXoZymes, which we cofounded effectively with the inventors from UCLA, we have to really work hard to position that company and develop that company from putting together the whole team, the strategy, the IP, et cetera, and that's a very time-intensive process. And those companies, we have more equity in a lot of cases, in the case of eXoZymes, we put also $5 million in capital into the company. Other companies like Buda Juice that you'll see, we'll have underwriters warrants and we'll have underwriting fees. And that -- we don't have as big underwriting -- of equity position, but we also didn't spend as much time, effort and capital to get behind it. It was a very different type of situation. But in all cases, with every company that we end up launching into the public markets, we will have an equity component because we want to bet alongside of our investors. We want to make sure that we're completely aligned with investors at all time and we're never going to be a fee-for-service -- traditional fee-for-service shop because we add too much value with this platform to just charge an underwriting fee like many underwriters. So I know there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace with that because everyone is a little bit different. But it's really just a function of how much time and effort it is to do it. And most importantly, it's making sure that we curate something for our investor community that works. That's always the way we think is, it's, number one, it's got to work, and number two, we have to be compensated fairly for what we're doing. And it's what I love about what we're doing now is that we have a lot of flexibility about the big ideas we can launch. But again, what always stays the same is our category-leading companies, whether it's a technology category or a business category like what we're doing with Buda Juice. So our goal from an operating perspective, and I've talked to you before, we have about $10 million in operating expenses, which is really -- in effect, our operating platform is really seed capital for the companies we're starting and launching because we're investing our time and effort to really position these companies for leadership, and that's really an investment in these companies. And I don't think, again, I don't believe that that's well understood. Even some of our biggest investors they say, well, geez, why do you guys get such a big equity position in some of these things. I said because we're providing the value. And I think that a lot of our co-founders and what have you, if you talk to the co-founders, a lot of these companies, I think that every one of these companies that we've launched and have taken public, I'm not so sure they could have gotten public without us. I'm not sure that they would have been public without us. And so I think that, that's where that transformation on the value creation is so evident. So scale is the issue for us. Obviously, the big difficult lift here is operationally how do we take one every 18 months to get to 3 to 5 year. Well, I really don't believe that the curation is our choke point. What we're seeing as far as opportunities are concerned, we have now a very deep pipeline of opportunities. So I'm not really worried about finding enough opportunities. In fact, even though we are going to be doing more companies, I believe that every one of the ones we launch going forward have a better probability of success than the ones we've done historically. And that's a big statement, and I really believe it comes from the fact that we are now -- we've broadened our team to be able to curate more and effectively analyze more, but I also believe we're just better at picking because we've made every mistake in the book. We've created dysfunctional boards, management teams. We've picked the wrong business strategies. We've picked companies that were -- that went public too early. We've -- like I said, we've made every mistake in the book historically, and I can tell you the one thing that we're all acutely aware of is we don't want to make those mistakes over again. The other major -- so the biggest part -- there's 2 -- really 2 big things that really dictate how many of these we can launch on an annual basis. One is our process because it's really standing up those companies and getting them ready to go public, everything from developing their business and IP strategy, but also getting the narrative and getting the team right, those are hard to do. And that's where the community is so important and we want to broaden our community because the bigger our community is, the bigger the influences, the easier it is to put these companies together. We want to be able to lean on our community more to help us find CEOs, board members potential joint venture partners for these companies. And so that community is critical to that process. But also the community is important from the perspective of really investing in these companies. And I think that in good times, it's much easier. We found sometimes in good times, we send an e-mail and we've got 3x over demand for an IPO. In bad times, you call your friends and they cringe when they see the color ID, right? So it's very cyclical depending upon the markets. But we've managed to continue to grow that community and work on that because we know that the more the people are exposed to public venture relative to all the things they can invest in that it just makes sense. And so we just have to continue to build it. George is doing a great job in the team and Tony and all the rest of the guys that are part of the whole community team. They're doing a great job. And every day, we're out there making new friends and it's really quite fun and we're seeing great progress on that front. So I think that's becoming evident as we're seeing the pace really pick up. And I think that we're excited because for the first time really in our history, we're going to be closing -- well, highly likely to be closing. We've received all the funds for Paulex and we'll be announcing the closing on that here shortly. And then Buda Juice, we expect to be priced here in the next couple of weeks, hopefully, if the SEC can hurry up and get back to work and get those comments in. So it will be the first time we've ever done 2 company launches in one quarter. So I'm pretty excited about that. But not just that, we've got a number of other companies in the pipeline, and I think we've got a very active calendar going into next year. So I think that there's 4 to 5 companies in late-stage negotiations. So I really believe we have a shot at making that 3 to 5 launches next year. I'm pretty excited about that. I also think the Microcap is going to make a major recurrence. I'm making a market call here because it's been such a horrible last few years for Microcap. But I'm making a market call that the transparency and liquidity that exists in the public markets is going to become a cool thing again. It was funny. I got a call from a very old friend in Indonesia, a very wealthy guy that has businesses in Indonesia. And he called me up and he said, Chris, I want to go to NASDAQ. And I said, well, why do you want to go to NASDAQ? And he goes, well, he goes in Indonesia, he goes, if I take my company public, I'll trade 10x earnings. He goes on NASDAQ I'll trade 40x earnings. And I was like that's pretty profound. Well, I think that, that's what you're seeing start to have happen is there are so few companies on NASDAQ now, these small companies that have any kind of revenue and earnings that are in the Microcap space are very highly demand. There's very few companies left in the U.S., ironically. So many of them are going to private equity route, the VC route, the PE route. And now you can talk to all the family offices and what have you. Nobody wants to allocate to that sector. But where can they get price transparency, liquidity, et cetera, it's public markets. And so I'm a huge believer that we're probably on the doorstep of really this taking off in a major way and I couldn't be more excited about being in the business at this time. So the third quarter financial update is pretty straightforward. Our goals, as I mentioned, are really to offset our operating expenses with financings. So we've used about $5.9 million for the first 3 quarters. We'll have a fair bit of revenue in the fourth quarter that will send that in the other direction for the balance of the year. And so I expect that we'll have a good fourth quarter, and we'll start to see that we're -- our OpEx are starting to get covered by the number of finances we're doing. In addition, more importantly, we're going to have important equity positions in Paulex Bio and Buda Juice that really give us, all of our shareholders' big equity upside going forward. And as always, we're trying to be very cautious with our OpEx and making sure that every dollar counts. And the team has done a great job. There's been -- the team has really dug in, working hard. I mean everybody on the team is been committed, and it's been a tough slog guys. It's been really tough, but we have a great group of people all across the organization. Everybody is really -- I couldn't be more pleased with everyone's commitment, and we have an unbelievable team as many of you know. And I think that we have significant equity holdings that are really unrecognized in our stock price, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So when you look about -- look at our stock being undervalued, if you take the eXoZymes position, the HeartBeam position and our cash, the market value is significantly higher than the market value of our stock right now. And that comes from, I think, people just being worried that, in fact, maybe public venture is dead, maybe MDB lost their touch and they can't figure it out how to navigate through this market, what have you. It's a commentary that I'm not proud of, but having lived through lots of cycles, I know that it can change and be on the other side of the equation, and we can be trading at a premium to our equity value. So I don't take it personally, but it does hurt because I know a lot of you bought the stock at higher prices. And we're trying to rectify that as fast as possible. And I can tell you the team has dug in to make sure that, that happens. But some things that aren't valued in the stock prices is really patent, which were we've made the decision to spin it out, and I'm super excited about having the first -- potentially, the first public law firm in the United States, and it couldn't be in a better sector, which is patent law, which is a federal practice. We'll talk a little more about it in the future, but I do believe that is an undervalued asset that's not valued at all on our balance sheet right now. And the other thing is we've been contacted by a number of people that want to be in the clearing business or associated with the clearing firm. And so I think there's a lot of potential value in our clearing platform as we move it forward. And so those are 2 assets that I think have significant value that can even be -- we can realize some real significant value. But I want to talk -- touch on a couple of the companies that many of you own stock in and of course, MDB owns a lot of stock in, which is eXoZymes and HeartBeam. I couldn't be more proud of the accomplishments that those companies are making, albeit not necessarily 100% recognized in their stock prices, but eXoZymes is making unbelievable progress and their platform is really going to be transformative. And really, you're going to see this, I believe, in the very near future. that we're going to see a new paradigm in pharmaceutical development enabled by their synthetic biology platform. And you're going to see that in paradigm-changing companies that will get spun out of eXoZymes and we're hoping to -- that gets sort of unveiled here very shortly. It's been a long time coming, but I think we're very close to making that happen. And HeartBeam, it's been a tough road to get through the FDA. But hopefully, we're right on the verge of FDA approval and it's -- it really is a life-changing opportunity in health care in the sense that now you're going to basically have a virtual cardiologist in your pocket at all times. If people carry this around, they're going to be able to get a 12-lead ECG to their doctor or to a cardiologist instantly. What does that mean? That could save millions of lives, millions of lives. And it's never been done before. And I think that hopefully, this FDA approval gets through and we get this product launch because it's a game changer. And both these companies I'm super proud of and I'm super proud of our team for helping get these companies launched. It really is an exciting time, even though it's been a tough market. These are game-changing companies that we couldn't be more proud of. So just to reiterate, we closed 3 to 5 deals a year. We really cover our operating expenses. And then as you can see, the equity that we earn in a company that we cofounded with Francisco Leon, and Miguel, we own a significant part of that. We really helped put together the license at Mount Sinai, and it's been a lot of hard work, but I really want to thank all of our investors that believed in us to get behind the launch of what could be a really game-changing company. So it was a long time coming. But again, it was the fortitude of our team and the belief from our investors that are making that launch possible. And I want to thank everybody that participated in. So really in summing up, I think that I want to remind everybody, we really have, in my mind, the only real public venture platform. And we have such a unique team of people. We have such a unique process that I believe is going to give life to lots of meaningful companies. And by being a shareholder, Obviously, in tough markets, it doesn't really matter that you have access to the deals. A lot of people have access to the deals. But in a better market, like I think is coming along, as a shareholder, you're going to have preferred access to each one of these opportunities to invest in. That's, I believe, an important reason to own MDB. And again, our proven execution historically, and I think our momentum is a great reason to start thinking about owning the stock if you don't own the stock already. And we have a lot of hidden value. Our economics are scaling as we get more companies through the pipeline. And I think we really have a moat around our business. They're just, I think, we are in a class unto ourselves in what we do. And so I think that, that gets recognized by companies looking to go public or looking to be positioned as a market leader. And I think that the timing couldn't be better to be a shareholder. I think that hopefully, we're seeing some shifts in the marketplace and people coming back into public venture. So as Tony said, our model has proven, the machine is scaling and the window is opening. So with that, I want to thank everybody and open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And at this point, I'd like to welcome George Brandon, MDB's President and Head of Community, who will facilitate the Q&A session. So George, welcome and take it away.

Okay. Chris, first question you're going to get it on every conference call. Can you give a little bit of your philosophy on when shareholders could expect to see a dividend, a little of your philosophy on eXoZymes. Obviously, that's performing really well. When would you think we would -- there would be a distribution? What's your philosophy there?

Yes, philosophy is we want to see that the company is out and really there's a developed market for the stock. And we don't want a dividend to get in the way of the development of the company. And so right now, the volume is pretty low in eXoZymes and what have you. And I think it's really just a matter of once the company's business model and execution is really clear. There's a broader market for the stock. It would make sense to do a distribution. And so I can't make any predictions, but I think our philosophy is to make those distributions when the company is broader ownership and more trading volume.

So a question to follow up on that. If -- as Obviously, eXoZymes is going to be raising money. However, they're going to do that, whether it's a spinout or a new technology. Do we expect MDB, do our shareholders expect to retain the same percentage of ownership as they raise funds? Or how do you see that working out?

No, any time you buy a public venture company, they're going to need to raise more capital. and we as shareholders are going to be diluted. Obviously, the better the company does, the less dilution that we suffer. But yes, there's always dilution as companies raise more money and -- but we always work to make sure it's as little as possible.

Let's move over to HeartBeam. Look, we're hoping, as they've said on their conference call, they expect to get FDA approval you can look at their balance sheets, how much cash to have. How do you see that playing out, and what do you see MDB's role in and around that? We certainly have right of reverse refusal on funding, just a question on that.

No. Listen, I think I think that the philosophy of the Board of the companies has been -- we have to be able to tell people what's going to happen with the FDA before we do raise more money. And I think that, obviously, the FDA is dragged out a little bit longer. But I think we're hopefully at the finish line here. And after you take the uncertainty of FDA approval will be the first 12 lead, first carrying your pocket 12-lead device ever approved by the FDA, which people understandably are skeptical that, that would happen. And so I think, hopefully, that happens. And then I think we take that off the table. And now it's just makes it a lot easier for an investor to make a decision whether they want to invest or not.

Got it. Look, we did a whole slide on kind of why I think the stock is where it's at and what's in the portfolio. But the question is, hey, look, we talk about creating value. For those that did the IPO at 12, we're down here in 340 or so. What's your thought on why we're trading where we're at. And I know this is just -- you don't have a crystal ball. You can't see into the hearts of those who own your shares. What's you're kind of -- doing this for a long time, what -- if you were to summarize that -- those reasons, what would they be?

Well, I think that the #1 reason is the market for Microcap has been pretty bad. There haven't been -- hasn't been a great space. That's probably the #1 reason. Number 2 reason is that people are -- because of that, people are saying, well, does MDB lost it? Do they have the ability to pick good stuff anymore. Do they matter anymore? And that's a totally legitimate thing. I think the other part of it is now we're getting into -- you're tax selling and people can sell stock and offset their NVIDIA gains with their MDB losses, right? And so I think there's bound to be some tax loss selling. And I think it's -- every one of these companies that we quasi modeled ourselves after at some -- they went -- they would trade from big discounts to big premiums depending upon how people felt about the company at the time. So one of the great companies in the public venture launch business was Safeguard Scientifics back in the '90s, and they would go from trading at a discount to trading at a premium of their liquidation value pretty regularly. And that's just -- it's kind of like a holding, sometimes you get a holding company discount, sometimes you get a holding company premium just purely based on how people feel about you at the time.

Yes. Here's a question on -- you made comments on you're bullish on the Microcap market. Certainly, I'm out there. I was at a conference with Keiretsu yesterday in Philadelphia. A number of the companies basically pushed back ongoing public early as the expenses of that. You talked about it a little bit more. Can you give a little bit more color of what makes you think that, that the cost of being public, whether accounting and legal, regulatory, is trending in a way that's positive for more listings.

Well, I think that it all comes down to how they're valued in the market. So right now, the companies that are profitable and growing in the Microcap sector are trading at big valuations. They're trading at last time we looked 1.15 PEG ratio. So if they're growing at 35%, they're going to be -- or 30%, they're going to be trading at 35 or so times earnings. And that's higher than what private equity firms are going to pay or and so it just makes sense for them to go public to raise additional capital and -- or if shareholders need liquidity or what have you. So we see it as that -- and there's very few of them out there when we did the screen of companies making a $1 million or more, growing at more than 10% and under $300 million in market value there was 34 companies. If you screen for foreign companies, we just did a foreign screen, and we had like 4,000 companies that fit that. And that's why a lot of these companies are going to want to come to NASDAQ. And they are you're going to see I think a delusion of these companies coming to NASDAQ. And I think we also have an opportunity to find some leaders in foreign markets that want to come public in the U.S. The other aspect of it is what's happened in the private equity, private debt and VC markets has been really amazing to watch. If you look at VC activity today, the big VCs, what are they doing? They're funding these big unicorn AI companies, they're putting in $100 million at a $5 billion valuation. And they're not doing anything like -- they're not putting $3 million or $4 million in a promising medical device or a biotech company right now. And even the ones the big VCs that are still doing the life sciences, they're writing $100 million checks for these opportunities, which we think is just crazy because we don't think that writing a $100 million check for an early-stage company makes a lot of sense. And I think that that's shown in the performance of these funds. And so I think that the investors are not going to be funding these funds much more, whether it be private equity, private debt, what have you, these things, we're now seeing in the private debt market. Companies that they had their debt marked at par. And next day, it's 0. And if you have publicly-traded debt today, you get marked every day. And I think that investors don't want -- they want the transparency and liquidity. I'm in these -- I'm in one of these men's kind of networking groups where we talk about investments. And if you were -- in these groups 2 years ago, they were all talking about these private equity deals we're getting into, I can get you into it, what have you. I can tell you right now, they're not talking about it at all, and you've been going to the Angel conferences and nobody wants to put money in private deals anymore. So I think that -- I think we're going to see a dilution of companies who want to go public. And it's just -- we couldn't be better positioned.

So little -- look, I think a little confusion in our history has been big ideas, mostly deep tech. We're still looking at deep tech and doing deep tech technology, big ideas. But the comment here or the question is, but yet our next big idea is a juice company. And one of your questions are, are fruit juices popular now. Can you delineate a little bit. We've got the venture side, we're competing against venture using public venture. But then against private equity to take the best and the brightest from private equity, such as Buda because Buda had a bid from private equity, and we're taking that deal. Can you kind of delineate deep tech versus some of these private equity deals?

To be 100% transparent. I mean Buda was a friend -- the CEO is a friend, and he was telling me the story about his company. And we were paying out and sort of pulled together, and he's telling me about it, and he's considering you in private equity. And I said ratio, I think you're a leader of a new beverage category, right? Fresh juice is in less than 5% of markets in America for a reason, you're going to be able to bring this fresh juice to every supermarket in America. I said that's a new category. And anybody that's had pasteurized juice versus fresh juice knows the difference, right? And so it's a category leader, number one, if it's not a category leader, we are not taking it public. That's number one. It will never -- it's usually a technology category. Then you marry the management expertise at the Board level and at the investor level at Buda, these guys created fresh. There's a moat. There's a moat around it, right? These guys know how to do it. You're not going to see PepsiCo go into this business anytime soon. If they're going to go into it, they're probably going to go in it because they buy someone like Buda. So the guys that pioneered fresh, which is now going to be a monster category because anything that's not fresh you can buy from Amazon now. So the reality is that we're launching a category leader with a moat around it in our mind, okay? It's not an actual note like we have with IP with all of our deep tech companies. But there's going to be companies like that, that we can launch that belong in a public venture portfolio, somebody was real funny. There was another -- I won't name the name of the company, but there's another company going public in the, let's call it, the food category that is doing $200 million in revenue. It's backed by private equity type folks, but it's losing a lot of money, right? And it's going public at $1 billion valuation. It's big, right? And so we have a small company, no one thought, geez, these small companies shouldn't go public, but it's profitable. If it's profitable when it's small, just think what happens when it's big. It's like when it gets big, it's going to be even more profitable. And so it's an extraordinary business opportunity. And again, that's what we do is we curate these extraordinary leaders, and that's what our team is doing a great job of doing.

Yes. So these profitable companies, this question doesn't apply to it. But can you just give kind of a back of the envelope, when you do a big idea and what you've done in the past, how long it typically takes those companies after they've IPO-ed to establish themselves economically. What have we seeing?

Again, I encourage everyone to read the paper that kind of gives a back story on all the companies we've launched historically. But some of them developed very quickly. The stocks do very well quickly, depending upon if it's the -- it captures people's imagination right out of the chute. Some of them take longer. And it's just -- it's really tough to say. And a lot of the things we're doing in biotech, the valuation metrics have nothing to do with revenue. It's all around clinical development. And in some cases, it's revenue that will drive the valuation. But again, it's just -- it's the asymmetric returns that we're looking for. And I think we're old enough. You and I have been doing this for what, 40 years now. So we know when we see it. And we're -- we know what has asymmetric return potential, and we focus in on it.

I'm not so sure I know when I see it, which is why I'm asking the question, so I can't answer. So, can you give us some clarity on the PatentVest spinout? What timing one -- best as you can tell, what's the potential over time revenue-wise? And what kind of market value do you think we can see? And how has that been now going to look to shareholders?

I'm not going to make any predictions on market value, but I think it could be -- other than to say that it could be seriously substantial. And here's why. So currently, the practice of law, there is not a lawyer you will meet in any practice of law. That isn't completely concerned about how AI is going to have an impact on their business. I can tell you that everything we do from drafting contracts to getting advice now is happening realtime with AI. And I can tell you that law firms are going to have a big, big dent in their revenue line from AI. So when you think about the disruption that's going to occur and how the practice of law is going to change, it is going to be a massive disruption. And I don't think anybody really disagrees with that. The interesting part about what we did, either we were smart or we were lucky is by believing that the ABS program in Arizona might be a great way for nonlawyers to be in the practice of law to align our interest with the clients and specifically focus on IP law because IP law is -- IP prosecution about a $25 billion a year business. that has not been a great business for the major law firms. But it's a $25 billion of your business that is a federal practice. So whether it's litigation or patent prosecution, it's a federal practice. Why is that important? It's because the -- a lot of the states and the lawyers in these other states don't want to lose business to an ABS law firm. But because it's a federal practice, you can -- anyone can practice patent law in any state. So the reality is, is when you look at what ABS represents as an opportunity, when you marry AI and the ABS platform patent law is by far the best business to be in if you're going to be in Arizona with these ABS law firms. And in fact, now you've got people like KPMG and other major consulting firms figuring out, hey, we need to start an Arizona law firm. I can tell you that -- and then now you marry AI with this and our ability to take PatentVest and put Agentic technology or large language models on top of our existing patent data, we have the ability to provide unparalleled support for those, I call them in imprimatur attorneys. So now if you're an attorney that wins in the court room, you're an attorney that really knows patent strategy, you now have the ability to do what you do even better, more efficiently, more importantly, efficiently. So you could see a patent litigation, a patent litigation that would normally cost $10 million to get to trial costs $5 million if managed properly. What does that do? It completely changes the economics around litigation. It also changes the economics of whether a firm can take something on contingency or not and align their interest with their clients. That's a game changer. We are going to be at the forefront of that, and we're going to be a leader in making that happen in the field of IP law. And that's what's so exciting. And we're having discussions with, I would call it, these imprimatur lawyers that -- where they see the ability to partner with PatentVest or join PatentVest to basically participate in the disruption of patent law. And so it's a big, big deal.

Look, we got about 5 minutes here. And the questions are piling up. I'm not going to be able to get to all of them, but I'll try to answer them privately, if I can. I guess one of the questions here does MDB need more robust investor relations efforts to address enterprise stock given the value of eXoZymes and beat and the other positions in our portfolio. And...

Yes. I would tell you, yes is the answer, but it's not -- I think it's upon us to go tell the story more. So we've been heads down. We're not -- we don't have a very deep organization, people-wise, we're very efficient. And we've been really focused on just launching new companies and really keeping our heads down in a really difficult environment. And to some extent, I feel like you're pushing on a string when people don't want to buy Microcap stocks anyways. But I think that, yes, we need to get out and tell the story more broadly. We went to our first Microcap Conference, the LD conference -- LD Micro Conference. It was great. I went and saw people I haven't seen in 20 years. Unfortunately, the people buying Microcaps the average age was older than me. And so I think that a new generation of investors are going to start to get involved hopefully in this space. And I think that it was great. I got up and gave a presentation. We have, what, 20 one-on-one meetings, George and I did. It was great to talk to people, and I think we need to do more of that. Selectively, I do spend most of my time working with these companies to get them launched. But we do need to spend more time out talking to people. And Investor Relations, what I've found is have a great business, communicate it well and communicate it often. We're trying to do a better job of communicating it well. We're doing a better job of making it a good business. It's been a great business historically. It's been a really bad business the last few years, and communicating it often, we're working on so...

So we've got about 3 minutes here, Chris. But a question -- I get it a lot out there on really eXoZyme, we really thought that we would have a few deals in the bag here. And where we're at right now, and I know you feel very comfortable with the management there and where they're going and the opportunities. Can you talk a little bit about when you kind of, one, why you think it's taken longer than what we had originally anticipated? What was kind of the shift there? And two, why do you think it's -- we got a bright future ahead?

I think it was a pivot that probably wasn't communicated as clearly as it could have been. And the pivot was you're out talking to people that want to make new molecules in pharma and other businesses. And they can give you a fee-for-service business where they'll pay you some amount of money to get started and you can spend a lot of time talking to them. If you look at the other Symbio companies and provided services or enzymatic people like Codexis and others, the business models were pretty challenged. And we came to the conclusion that we can make molecules that other people can't. So is it a better business model to launch new companies based upon that? Or is it a better business model to do fee-for-service and try and get license fees from other people. And we decided it's better to launch companies that have a ton of value. So we have 2 platforms that we think we can launch out of eXoZymes that have $1 billion market value potential. So in other words, every company that we launch out of MDB we believe, has $1 billion market cap potential. We have 2 more that we can launch out of eXoZymes that we believe have that, that are massively game-changing. And so there was a pivot. What does that mean? Now it's get those companies stood up and then those companies will go and do license agreements and partnering after they've developed a bit more. And I think that that's been the shift that hasn't been communicated. But I think Michael is doing a great job and the team at eXoZymes is doing a great job of positioning the company for success. I think it's going to become fairly apparent, fairly soon.

Actually, I don't know if people are aware, but our former partner Lou Basenese did a great interview with Michael last week. I think it came out a couple of days ago. It really kind of goes through that what you just described in 30 minutes. I think they did a pretty good job explaining it. So that's an asymmetrical upside on those 2, whether it's cannabinoids or NCT. That's -- you're about ready -- we're closing in the process of just closing and announcing in Paulex. Can you talk about -- this last the question, we're out of time after this, Chris, but elevator pitch, why is that asymmetrical? What do you like about it? How much we're going to own of it? What's the game plan going forward?

It's super simple. This pathway that has been focused on by the folks at Mount Sinai and others, which basically takes breaks off of being able to produce beta cells is -- we've got a drug that we believe is the best drug for this pathway to enable beta cell production. It's quite frankly, if you can reinvigorate beta cell production and produce insulin. It's the biggest thing going. So the asymmetric upside is -- it's super straightforward. It's a $40 million post-money valuation after Phase Ib, which should be about a year, we start producing beta cells in patients. I'd be shocked if -- it's got to be a multibillion-dollar valuation. So while it is a bit risky, the upside -- you get paid with the upside. And I mean, it's significant. And we've got an unbelievable team. These are the guys that made prevention worth $2.9 billion in the sale, and we get to partner with them again. And I'm not saying that this is going to be the only drug. We might have another drug come into the pipeline, but these are the kind of guys that can execute clinically. One, they've got great pickers. They have the ability to pick something great. And number two, they have the ability to execute, get it through trials and get it to success. So we're super excited to be partnered with Francisco and Miguel. We think that they're superstars and we own a nice chunk of this company. I think it's going to be 6 million or 7 million shares. So I don't know if...

What's the timeline on it, Chris, how long we got to wait to figure it out?

I think don't quote me exactly, but it's -- we'll be in the clinic next year, and we'll start to get clinical results pretty quickly.

Well, with that, that's the last question. I didn't get to all of my, tried to reply specifically if you didn't hear the answer to your question, hopefully, there's a reply in your Q&A. Appreciate all the questions, very great questions. And I'm going to throw it over to you, Chris, to close it. And Tony, you can take it from there.

All right, everyone. Well, thanks again for hanging in there. It's been a great time. The team has done a great job at MDB, we're slugging it out to make this a big success. So we're excited for the future. And we want to thank you for being here and hanging in there and being part of the community. So thanks again.

And thank you, everybody, for attending today's presentation. This will conclude today's conference call.

She joining us this afternoon. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Before we begin with our formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone of several important things. First, a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you have questions during the presentation, you can type them into the chat to be answered during the Q&A session. Questions can only be seen by the moderator. And as a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, and they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of any new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we will attempt to present some important relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most current Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly those under the heading risk factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon, is available in the investor section of our website mdb.com. Also, a replay of this will be provided on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of MDB Capital Holdings, LLC Class A common. And he's joined by George Brandon, MDB Capital President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead the update on our second quarter ending 06/30/2025. So at this time, I would like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett.

Alright. Thank you, Tony. Well, thank you all for joining today, and I wanted to welcome George to the call. George is going to be talking to what we are doing on community development and other areas. And so I will kick it off with the financial perspective. So as you all know, our revenue is largely from financings, and we did not complete any financings this quarter. So we had some revenue from Pat and Vest as we are now starting to scale those operations. And our goal is really to offset operating with financings and then the equity in the finance company and our big idea companies is really the upside for shareholders. And so we incubate as we incubate more of these, you know, the current revenue from launching more developed companies really offsets any sort of the cash operations of the company. And there's always this balance of, you know, how much equity are we looking to generate versus fee income. And it's a balance, and we are trying to be cautious. We are also trying to balance making sure we have enough companies so that our community can effectively build a public venture portfolio. For the first six months of 2025, we had cash utilization of $3.4 million, and we expect to be closing some finance in February '25 to reduce or eliminate that cash usage. So let's talk about where we are headed, not so much where we have been. Because it's been a challenging last, you know, sort of year for all of us as shareholders. And I think that what's happening and what we are feeling is very different from what's being reflected in the stock price right now. So all I can tell you is that public venture is really building, and we are super confident in what we've built. And we really do have the most sort of unique and capable platform to curate and deliver these market-leading companies that really have this sort of 10 to 100 bagger potential. And we've been doing it for twenty-eight years. We recently published a report that talks about the 17 companies we've kind of and taken public. And I think it gives a really good overview, which we've been, really, you know, presenting to a whole new group of investors that have never seen public venture before. And we're really getting a great response. And what we're really finding is that they see this as an unbelievable asset class to position investing, you know, their investments in going forward. But we also recognize the key bottlenecks that we really have kind of, you know, realized what's happening over the last, you know, year. And quite frankly, the investor hesitation towards deep tech life science investments right now has been, you know, quite obvious. What's happened is that this has been the absolute worst segment of the market. And we, you know, we understand that that's where we've basically made, you know, created billions of dollars of wealth for investors and for, you know, founders and for people who have worked in MDB over the years, and that's just not been the place to be. The other thing we've recognized is that as we start to scale the number of companies we bring out, we need to scale up our investor community to really, you know, support, you know, these high-quality opportunities we're creating. I can tell you that our team has done a phenomenal job on all fronts. And we're, you know, our analyst team as far as curating and standing up new opportunities, which I want to talk to you about in a second. And then really expanding our investor community, George, and his team has been doing a phenomenal job, and so we'll get into that. So to really realize the promise of what we build as a platform, we really need to bring investors what they want to invest in now. And I think that the opportunities in profitable growing early-stage companies still have an asymmetric return potential, and public market liquidity is really what we're hearing people want. And, you know, thankfully, we're very well positioned to add value to these opportunities beyond life sciences. And in addition, obviously, we need to expand our distribution as I touched on, and we're reaching out to these new investors and you'll hear more about that from George as we get into it. That is, you know, going incredibly well. And what we've realized is we provide a really attractive alternative for allocating capital versus sort of traditional venture or angel investing. So the product mix, what we've learned is again, life's early-stage life science companies lacking revenue momentum, or profitability are really struggling. You know, these companies that we've done are taking longer to develop as is many times the case. But in, you know, different markets, the markets were a lot more forgiving. We funded these companies at what we believe super attractive valuations but, you know, obviously the market has to know, value that. And right now, it's just not that's just not going to be the case. And so investors want to really balance, you know, quicker returns with their venture bets. And I think that that's why we're starting to expand the universe of companies we're looking at. The other thing we realized is that profitable growing companies with revenue momentum are super highly valued in the current market. And that's really good news because I think that that's going to have a profound impact on, you know, how companies look to raise capital or to see their companies highly valued. That's not happening in the private venture world today or in private equity. And so we think more and more of these kind of exciting growth companies are going to go public. And so we see a big opportunity on the horizon, and our team has done a great job of sort of curating more and more of those companies. So as we expand our product mix to include these profitable companies, with revenue momentum, we think that, you know, we're going to get a lot better, you know, reception from all the various investor groups that we're talking to. And, you know, I think that today, we announced our, you know, our first profitable company that we're going to be taking public. It was filed with the SEC, which we'll talk to a little bit here in a bit. And we're still continuing to focus on companies that can become new leaders and create new, you know, new categories. We're not just, you know, doing companies that are profitable. These are still companies that still have that 10 to 100 bag of potential that are blazing new trails and creating new businesses. So it really, we believe, will enable us to get more deals done by expanding the investor interest beyond life sciences. So to that end, today, we filed the prospectus for what I think is going to be potentially the next, you know, monster beverage type opportunity in the beverage space. And what these what Buttigieg has done is created this new category called ultra-fresh. Today, grocery stores don't have fresh juice because they have to juice inside the stores. There's a shelf life issue, and these guys have figured out how to do centralized juicing, and they're getting big track with big chains. It's super exciting. They're growing rapidly. And we expect great things from them. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's been a great sort of experience in working with the CEO who I've known, and they were very much looking forward towards going into or being, you know, partnering with private equity, and they had some, you know, experience with private equity in the past, and I think they really saw that the public markets are a better place for them to really grow their company raise additional capital, to meet the expansion that they see coming in the, you know, the very near future. So look forward to talking to you more about that company. As we take the company out and complete the IPO. So again, we really believe that the public market is the place to be in, and we see a dramatic shift occurring away from private equity and traditional venture. And we're hearing that more and more from the RIAs and family offices and other investors that we talk to. You know, what's happened over the last, you know, twenty years is we've seen up to 35% of these portfolios of these family offices allocated to private equity and public venture, excuse me, traditional venture. And we see that as being, you know, they're all coming to the same conclusion at the same time that that's not the place to be. And so they're all looking, you know, they all see the benefits of having liquid securities that are priced at, you know, transparent pricing as opposed to the opacity that exists in private markets. And I also think that the entrepreneurs who run the companies are recognizing the drawbacks of private equity and traditional venture. And we're helping them to understand that they can go public and actually do it in an efficient way and not believe all the things that have been said to them, which is it's super expensive to be public and companies die when they get in the public markets, etcetera. The companies that are growing and profitable are doing incredibly well in the public markets right now. And what's really encouraging is not many underwriters have the process or platform to take these early-stage companies public like we do. So we think we represent a really unique opportunity for these companies to go public, and we're having great conversations with these people. And I think that they're and companies and they're finding that this is a very exciting alternative for them. We also, we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and we really started to think about what are we going to do in life sciences and how are we where are we going to focus our efforts and where is really the big upside. You know, we've had, you know, oncology got very, very overinvested, and there were too many companies and became very, very difficult in oncology. And so we really have started to think about where is the future in life sciences. And we really believe that metabolic health is really the biggest opportunity of our time. And metabolic health is such a gargantuan opportunity that is now just being scratched upon the surface with what we're seeing with GLP one drugs. And you know, I can't overemphasize enough that if you look at the drugs for both diabetes and for obesity, and other therapies, we're looking at probably $200 to $300 billion, which dwarfs all of the other pharmaceutical markets. And so we see this as, you know, one of the greatest opportunities. Obviously, there's a lot of other people investing in things like crypto and AI and other things. We think that, you know, AI is going to have a is going to be a big driver in health care. But we really believe that what's going to happen in metabolic health is perhaps the biggest opportunity we've ever seen. And our team has done a great job of curating we believe could be really some of the greatest opportunities in metabolic health. And we're really focusing on this area, which we call the metabolic switch. For these 100 bagger potentials. These are all, you know, kind of companies that we think can represent multibillion-dollar valuation and bringing them to, you know, to our community at, you know, very modest valuations. So we've been out introducing Pollux Bio, which was built by a team that we worked with at prevention that, you know, we had a great result with that got a drug approved for type one diabetes. And was purchased by Sanofi for $2.9 billion. They came back to us with something that we find very exciting. That could be the first, you know, small molecule drug to really regenerate beta cells, which are the pancreatic cells that generate insulin. So this could be a first of its kind drug that would be a massive win. All these things, all these companies have in our mind very near-term potential. These aren't long-term, you know, propositions that take a long term to figure out if they're valuable. So with a modest amount of money, we believe that PollEx can generate, hopefully, positive data. They could generate, you know, a significant readout and significant value. As some of you may know, exosomes, which we launched and took public, has launched a new subsidiary called NCTX. And NCTX is an unbelievable potential value driver in that they have figured out how to bio NCT. And that has not been done. And we see that NCT is one of the most promising platforms, both as a nutraceutical and a to mobilize pathogenic organ fat and both in the liver and the pancreas. And it works via a completely new approach. Using mitochondria to effectively mobilize fat as opposed to basically, you know, preventing people from eating like the GLP one drugs do. And then lastly, GT Metabolic is a company that has what we think is an unbelievable metabolic switch through magnets that basically does incisionless, very faster, you know, laparoscopic procedure to do what they call a duodenal bypass. You swallow a magnet, it basically enables what we call an anastomosis, and they have super impressive patient data that basically in early patients that he switches off diabetes, and also causes sustained weight loss. We're super excited about all three of these, and we think all these have multibillion-dollar potential. And I really want to thank the analyst team for the hard work they've done to not only discover these, but, you know, put them together. And we'll be presenting all these at our September 4 event. Now talking a bit more about expanding our community. And I'm going to let George maybe talk to this a little bit or do you want you want me to talk to it, George? You want to go ahead? Well, I mean, you know, one, I it's something I work with every day. And I think what Chris is alluding to, and it's very obvious, is that what we're seeing in venture and private equity is there is a confluence of moving to liquidity. They're venture right now is constipated. We just put out a paper that Will Rossellini and Javier of Pat Invest put out yesterday about the AI and the rise of deep tech and really the decline of the SaaS model software. And AI is doing a number on a number of different areas. It's really positive to what we're trying to do and where we're going. And so I think family offices, RIAs, they're figuring it out. They figured it out, you know, a couple of years ago, and they're not willing to really look for the was a seven to ten-year hold going to ten to eleven to twelve. And so public venture has become we're kind of the new new thing that's been around twenty-eight years. And so we're coming up with a number of different models to help not only these angel groups, but really RAs and family office to be able to and invest and play along with our model over and above just being a shareholder in MDB and being able to participate in everything we do. That said, want Chris, why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about, I mean, the very fact that you know, you got invited to a family office conference don't want to give all the details on that because I don't have them all. Is that something you can and I'll come back and talk about this the Caratsu announcement we just announced.

Sure. No. It's interesting. George, and team has really been out talking to a number of RIAs, and really, we're just figuring out, you know, how do people look at what we've done, our track record, etcetera. And it's great when, you when your stocks are down, you don't feel so good. Right? And we haven't felt so good about, you know, MDB stock being down and our stocks being down. But we really look at critically at ourselves and we looked at and we said, you know, we're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, our job is to be in the right place at the right time. And so but as we talk about what we do and the logic behind it, we've been getting unbelievable reception. We have a think, a $150 billion RIA that's invited me to come talk about public venture. A couple weeks. And as we talk to them, they're, you know, all of their clients have been allocated towards traditional venture and private equity, has been just as bad as being in biotech in the public markets the last couple of years. And so they see public venture as the future. And so it's pretty exciting. And, you know, I think that we're going to be out talking to a lot more of these folks and getting just unbelievable reception, which is, you know, feels good. Your stock's down. So George, I'll turn it over to George to talk about our new partnership, which I'm super excited about.

Yeah. We've been working on this for a while, and we just made the announcement earlier today around noon eastern. So if you haven't seen the press release, it's certainly available. It's you can, you can find it. It'll be on our website, but also on really any PR site, financial site. You can get more details. Correct. So is really one of the largest. They're unusual. And we're talking about Kuretsu a Carrezza Mid Atlantic MST is Mid Atlantic, Southeast, and Texas. Karetsu is probably one of the largest angel groups in the world. They're unusual in the fact if you take a look at the dollars they put into early-stage investments, it dwarfs really all the others. By a factor of about six or seven times. And so the gentleman who runs Karetsu is a former safeguard scientific employee. Safeguard scientific at you don't know Safeguard, we really stand on the shoulders of the founders of Safeguard, which was really one of the first public venture publicly traded models and Howard Lubert is the Kuretsu director. When I found out he actually came out of Safeguard, found the first big deal for Safeguard, which was Novell. And they put in somewhere between $1.92 billion dollars and pulled out a billion and a half. He gets public venture. Really, the first angel director, and I've talked to a lot of them, that really understands how public venture can work. So they're very excited about this partnership. They've formed a new group called IPO IPO Angels. Gonna look at somewhere between two to four deals a year. They're gonna help build a syndicate of angel groups. You know, in the nation, North America, and it includes Canada, and we're talking to some Canadian groups as well. There are 15,000 active angels less than there were five years ago. But and out of those 15,000, I think 200 groups that are associated and affiliated with the Angel Capital Association ACA, which is the overall association, and really to try to go out and hit each one of those up is a would be a big effort. Try done some of that, emailed some of that, sat on a podcast with a group that we've been working with, Tech Coast Angels out of Orange County, and it's been a great relationship. We'll continue that relationship. But to have someone who understands public venture and, you know, MST and Howard that really is gonna put his efforts in building out a syndicate of launching, you know, the companies that really Chris is talking about expanding to, companies that are near profitability or profitable that we take into the public markets, those angels are holding those investments that they make for I think the average is twelve years. And no one's got twelve years anymore. We're all getting older. And when you can take a look at where we're going from, you know, a round to IPO within, you know, twelve, eighteen months, they don't they think that's miraculous. And so we're gonna work with them very closely. It's now we've got one group that helps build that quilt of angel groups. I think this is a great group. There's a confluence going on. Where they're moving later, and then we're talking to a couple of groups on the microcap public space. That is looking for not only companies that can be in the microcap space and do well. But that they could take advantage of QSBS twelve o two. And if you're not familiar with QSBS twelve o two, you need to write it down. Need to look at it. You need to tell your accountant about it because everything we do usually is QSBS twelve o two. And the big beautiful bill just changed the rules and the benefit of these type of investors. They've moved the target from you got to have a minimum of $50 million or a maximum of $50 million of assets, not market cap assets, they moved it to $75 million to qualify. That is really gonna qualify pretty much everything that we ever look at. And they've changed from what was a five-year hold for 10 the greater of 10 times your money or $10 million to a three, four, and five-year opportunity for tax benefits. This is a major situation that's really plays into our hands and certainly will cause family offices and wealth managers to take it very seriously. So that's about all I got. I mean, that's you know, we are gonna continue to expand the community. It's really important. When you're doing one deal every eighteen to twenty-four months, it was pretty easy to take the community we've had and put those deals up you're gonna go to, you know, two, three, four, five, six deals a year, we've got to expand our community multiples. And we got some things in place. Obviously, today's announcements is one of those opportunities. I'll kick it back to you, Chris.

Sure thing. I think we touched on RIAs and, you know, their eagerness to talk to us and try and figure out how to fit what we do into their platforms. Obviously, some of these guys that are managing, you know, multibillions, we're not putting that much to work. But I think that what they see is that this is something that you don't have to allocate, you know, 35% of someone's net worth to. You can allocate a very small percentage and make it a meaningful investment for their clients. And they're really in the business of curating the best stuff. They can't be left out of, you know, stuff that's working. And so they're really curators of investments and managers of investments in general. And we're really the what we believe is the best curators of these of these the leaders of tomorrow, these potential 100 baggers that we've focused on for our entire, you know, existence, if you will. So the other thing that we're looking at quite, you know, quite closely and we're there's been a lot of discussion with our group is sort of these new age distribution platforms. And what's happened is regulation we made a bet when we first went public that needed to be a clearing firm because regulation was going that they were gonna, you know, shut down micro cap. Well, obviously, things changed dramatically. Now we're talking about tokenization of equities and we're, you know, regulation the, you know, as a result of the election, regulation's gone exactly the other way. Reggae plus, which I never thought was gonna survive, because I just didn't see that advertising offerings online and on TV and things like that were gonna work long term. Exactly the opposite's happened. And what's happened is reg a plus is happening. We're seeing, you know, very large offerings happen. Using Reg A plus. And what we now realize is that Reg A plus is quite frankly, it's a reality. And there's no reason why we can't, you know, utilize Reg A plus and other distributions like platforms like that going forward. And then there's also things like Robinhood and all these other companies are starting to participate in IPOs. That other underwriters are doing. And so we historically have never worked with any of those kind of folks before. We've never looked at it as a real opportunity. But now we're out actually talking to these people. And again, we're having a great reception in the sense that they look at what we do as being, you know, sort of master creators of or curators of these opportunities that they see the logic of partnering with us. So we're hoping to see that we can also partner with what I call these new age distribution platforms. And we're making a lot of progress on that as well. So the last major theme that I want to communicate before we get to summation is basically we've as we've been scaling up patent vest, and, you know, getting that operational as a law firm, you know, our revenues are starting to scale. We're getting a lot more momentum from companies. Now that we sort of figure out exactly how to position the firm. We're starting to add clients at a much more rapid rate. And what's, you know, become very clear to us is that the practice of IP law is gonna change dramatically. And the emergence of AI is not just impacting IP law, but I think it will have potentially more impact on IP law than any other space in law. And luckily, we did become this Arizona business, you know, law firm, which enables us to have non-lawyer ownership, but also enables us to partner with not only companies, but lawyers and also partnering litigation as well as IP development like no other law firm can. Traditional law can't do that. Also, traditional law is very much wrestling with what do they do with AI. And the old law firm models of the billable hour is not what companies really want to hear anymore. The companies want to hear about value creation. They don't want to hear about how many, you know, how many hours you work for them. So we think there's a massive transformation happening in law, specifically IP law. And so we've made the decision that as that sort of new big idea of this law firm is developed, it's ready to be spun out as its own independent public company. We really believe that this is a transformational shift. And so we are now making preparation to spin that off as its own company and take it public sometime in 2026. And while we'll still be very connected to Invest, well, obviously, the processes that we developed to, you know, to really develop sort of IP and technology leadership for these companies. We're still gonna be employing within MDB, but we really believe that Padvest is gonna be a very valuable entity. In its own right and we want to spin that off to shareholders and develop that as its own independent business and aside from what we're doing in public venture. So we're super excited about it. We're putting together the plans, the team, etcetera, to, you know, also monetize that as an investment. For the shareholders which currently, you know, is certainly not being recognized in the value of the shares of MDB currently. So all of this we really we've now we've I'm sure you've heard about our investor summit that's happening next week at Old Parkland in Dallas. We have think, what is the number of seats we have for the we have a hundred 40 we're right there. So gonna are we gonna record the conference? I guess I should ask. Well, we're gonna record parts of it. It's not gonna be streamed live and, you know, there'll be an opportunity to go back and listen to presentations from a recording. So we're gonna have all of our existing companies are gonna be there as well as these new opportunities, and we're gonna talk about what we're doing in metabolic health. We're gonna have a special presentation from Buttigieg's to kick off their roadshow. And we're also gonna have our new friends from the and IPO angels be there. And I think it should be a great event. So for, you know, those shareholders, if you haven't already, you know, registered, you should go ahead and register. And I think we'll look forward to seeing you next week. And I think it'll be a great event. And any other words about the event? George? I'm We also have Matt Burris. If you're not familiar with Matt Burris, it's b u r r I s. It's the Venture Studio Forum. What's happening is these Venture Studios, which you may not be aware of or familiar with, I know we weren't, He is one of the lead leads in that. He's creating a venture studio kind of Morningstar report. We our back test our track record puts us at up at the top of any deep tech venture studios. And a venture studio really is a firm that finds an idea, puts the board together, puts the management together, puts the financing together, and help these companies get commercialized and to an exit. Or to a liquidity event. You know, we've been a venture studio all along. We just didn't know what a venture studio was. So once we found out we were one of the top venture studios, in the world, we thought, yeah, we're a venture studio. Love venture studios. We'll always be a venture studio. So he'll be there and presenting. He'd be great. If you're gonna be there, you wanna Matt Burris, as well as Howard of Koretzu. Other they'll have some visibility of where we're going in both of those areas.

Alright. So to sum up, we are really, you know, the team has done a great job of really figuring out how we want to move forward, expand our potential, and really leverage our platform, you know, that we've built now. And so, you know, our team has done a great job of expanding our product mix to really understand and meet, you know, sort of investor demand. We really Jordan's team has done a great job. Of really positioning ourselves well not only, you know, these angel networks, but RIAs and as we, you know, curate these the best early-stage companies, you know, that have really market-leading potential. I think we're, you know, we're gonna con we're gonna have, you know, great success going forward based upon what, you know, the way the optics of the way things are looking right now from all the companies that we are working with currently. And then lastly, really leveraging our unique asset and patent vest in as it becomes an independent public company, I think it's gonna create a lot of value for the MDB shareholders. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to back to Tony for questions.

Okay. Well, thanks, Chris. If you would like to ask a question, please type your question into the chat. You can find the chat down at the bottom of the Zoom window. Use that button and go ahead and type it in. Remember, only the moderator can see the question, so we'll be able to take them from there. We'll give you just a second for those of you who haven't taken a minute to bring the question in. And, Chris, give me one sec. Let me queue them up. And here we go. So, our first question are there vulture opportunities in your core life science market?

You know, vulture is a, as they say, ugly word, maybe not ugly, but it's I think listen. What happens in tough markets the opportunities get better. Right? When there's hot money around like there was when interest rates went to zero, there was too much money around, you know, so you didn't really have great opportunities. And that's why, you know, after COVID and all the stocks ran up, we kind of took our foot off the gas pedal in life science we I get, you know, we got back too we got back in too early. We thought it had dropped enough. And, you know, I think we were a bit early. You know, some of the companies we backed, you know, are again, it was just it was the companies are doing phenomenal. From a technical perspective, but it's not reflected in the market price. So being too early is the same as being wrong. You know, we love the technology that they're doing a great job, but if the stock goes down, you're wrong. Right? Well, now you know, what we're seeing is valuations are super reasonable. So, yes, you know, if you want to look at it from a vulture perspective, I think there's some great opportunities. If you look at what we're doing with Pollak, we're, you know, we're basically doing this funding at a $20 million pre-money valuation. That's super cheap. If we get a readout, you know, we if that you take that pill and you produce a bit more insulin, you know, you're talking about elephant country. That could be a multibillion-dollar valuation. Again, there's no promises here but you at least have that asymmetric upside. That asymmetric upside did not exist, you know, three or four years ago. And before. And so asymmetric upside is really available today where it wasn't available back then. Same thing with NCT and what we're gonna be doing with GT Metabolic. These are these valuations based on where they're at are super reasonable. And so, yes, I mean, in a sense, there are. I don't think that, you know, the most important thing that you have to look at investing in life sciences, you know, is it gonna work? That's the most important thing. If it works, then it covers up a lot of things. But before, there were some things even if they worked, you wouldn't make money. And so that's changing. And so, yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity and we have our finger on the pulse and I think we're gonna continue to curate some of the best ones possible in that sector.

Hey, Tony. Let me pose the next question because actually you could be part of the answer for this question. A really good question regarding, you know, IRPR. Whether it's MDBH or Exozyme or portfolio companies. What's the plan? I mean, we're seeing these comp you know, our companies, we're seeing very little volume. What's the plan in order to, you know, as we execute on the model, what's your thoughts, Chris? You got a lot of experience in, you know, small cap micro cap, low volume companies. What's your thoughts on that, you know, that for the street to learn about them, to get behind them, support them, and so we could see volume liquidity go up in these names.

Yeah. Well, listen, I think the first thing you have to do right as any public company is you have to have your narrative correct. Right? In other words, you have to recognize the environment that's changed. It's a different environment than what it was before. And so a lot of times, these companies have to come up with different strategies to basically say, hey. Listen. Gonna get through to the other side. We're gonna get through to either commercialization or we're gonna through to a major inflection point technically. And these companies are doing that, and I think you're gonna see them, you know, position themselves for success. In some cases, they may be cutting their budget down to deal with this current market environment. In some cases, they're gonna look to partner maybe a bit earlier than they normally would. They're gonna adjust their business models and their narrative to reflect the environment. That's job number one. Number two, is they've gotta focus on things that are near term. Right? They've gotta focus on inflection points that are super near term. Make it super clear to investors. And I think strategically, of our companies are doing that, and they're I think they're doing a super good job. And I think over the next, you know, ninety, hundred and twenty days, you're gonna see evidence of that. As far as getting it on the radar screen, that is, you know, as you reposition it, you open it to a different, you know, audience of investors as well. And so I think it's starting to happen. I mean, I think you can see, you know, volume really is a function of money coming into the asset class. Low volume a lot of times is a good is a good sign. It means that you might you're near the bottom. Right? And then, you know, they say price begets volume. And so I think that as, you know, we've seen a couple of these small biotechs that have good news. Go up dramatically. You know, one that we were tracking and we almost did a financing for, went up, like, 11 times in the last, you know, last month. Because they on good news. So I think that some of these things are primed and then the volume goes parabolic. So some of these things are trading no volume, trading at very low prices, and then all of a sudden something happens. And next thing you know, you've got a ton of volume. So that's the way I see it. I think that's what's gonna end up happening. IR is in my mind, has been overrated. It's have a good narrative. Get in front of the people that you should that care about it. I would tell you over the last two or three years, the problem major problem has been people don't care about it. And that's in venture at venture and, you know, public venture in the life science sector.

So let me go then to Tony because you're, you know, on the marketing community side. Some of the efforts and what we're doing is to get the story out, you know, I we've tried a lot of different things, and we're gonna continue to try a lot of things, whether it's influence or and on a particular name. But can you speak to that a little bit, Tony, what we've been doing?

Yeah. I sure can. I think a couple things are really important for us. Recognizing, as Chris just said, that media loves success stories. Right? And as companies that we're financing have their own success stories and are creating newsworthy newsworthiness in the marketplace, it certainly helps MDB. But for us, being able to have speaking opportunities like the one Chris is about to do in Boston in a couple of weeks. George, you've been out on the circuit. Speaking with angel groups and Matt Hayden being out there with RIAs and big family office groups and things. Getting in very highly targeted selected audiences where we get the opportunity to tell the MDB story in a greater length than a fifteen-second blurb blast on social media or whatever. Think is a really quality over quantity in that sense is really important to getting our story out there. Podcast that the two of you have been on recently, is another great example of an opportunity in a setting where we know we have interested investors and interested financial writers and financial media listening is another great place that we continue to mine, and we're finding success in that. And then always we're working to find and create our own content. And right now, George, you mentioned at the top of the broadcast, Pat Invest has been terrific about creating reports in really helping to give investors education and information that demonstrates the breadth and depth of what MDB does and what Pat Invest does. That really separates us in our diligence and our curation and we fully intend to continue to do more of that and distribute it. So I would say those things are really the bedrock of what we're doing. Obviously, the block and tackling among press releases social media posting, and things, of course, we're gonna do that. But it's really the quality and the depth to our story that sets MDB apart.

So just the last part here, Chris, and we didn't really talk about it, but I got a question. We get questions on it all the time about what does the holding own? What's the kind of the plan to, you know, harvest, whether there's, you know, assuming there's gains there and what's the what's your plan on a distribution? I think it's always gotta be reviewed and kinda what you're thinking and how we're gonna, you know, proceed going forward as these companies. So, you know, some of these companies go to where we think they could go.

You know, I think that listen. What we said when we went public and we've said consistently is that, you know, I can tell you as a larger shareholder, I'd love to get a distribution. So from my perspective, Exercise is our biggest position. And that patent vests we'd like to distribute that. We just made an announcement right now that we're gonna spin out, you know, in some form or fashion and take it public. So, you know, my sense is that 2026 is the right year for that. I think that the trading volume in Exercise has been so low that I think distributing it out right now before there's really a big sort of event to happen with exosomes is probably I think the best time to do it is when there's good news on Exozymes. And you off the cuff just kinda give the whole of the various holdings of the holding company right now?

Well, we have we have roughly 4 million shares of ExoZyme's. So in current market, that's, you know, close to $10. So, what, $40 million, and then we have a numb don't know the exact number of shares, but a couple million shares, I think, of HeartBeam warrant. So and we have then we have, you know, patent vest as a we own a 100% of it, and it'll be spun out. And then we have some smaller warrant positions that are not meaningful. But I think those are the major positions. And so if you add up that, you know, it's a substantial number, and the idea is to not keep that buried. I mean, right now, our enterprise value at current market is, like, $35 million. So it's below, you know, significantly below our the value of exercise and our cash and other securities. And so, you know, I we don't I think going forward, we're not gonna really need much capital to operate as we do more financings that offsets our operating costs. So, really, it's distribute out as much equity as we possibly can. And so, hopefully, in 2026, I think that's kind of the year makes sense. I think do it into a stronger environment for mark Microcap and when these companies have a sound footing than it's, you know, makes all the sense in the world to distribute it. We've always, you know, I always tell people we started MDB with when we, you know, when we started in 1997, we started with, like, you know, a few $100,000 and an idea. And I always tell people the rest is profit. You know? We created, you know, multibillion-dollar companies with no capital. And so, you know, what we did do is scale up our operations to do more than more than, you know, one company every 18 months, and scaling up took, you know, it increased our operating expenses. But, you know, we should be able to offset those operating expenses with, you know, fee income and what have you. And I think that it also becoming a clearing firm increase our OpEx a bit as well. So combination of scale, the clearing firm, and scaling up patent vest, you know, it increased our OpEx from, you know, roughly $5 million a year to $10 million a year. But the great news is that intellectual capital created like I said, multibillion-dollar companies. And I don't think we're getting stupider. I think we're getting smarter. But I can tell you, I felt pretty stupid last few, you know, last couple years being involved in deep tech and biotech. And so certainly, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like I said, or being too early is the same as being wrong. So we gotta pivot to being right. And that's what we're hoping to do right now.

So, Chris, to follow-up on your comments about patent vest, the question here says, are you planning to take it public in the same way you have done all the others? Will MDBH remain a controlling or large shareholder in PatentVest?

Again, our goal would be to, again, is take it public. I think that from my perspective, again, I'd like to get it the hands of the shareholders as fast as possible. There's no real reason MDB to control it going forward. You know, if we spin it out, I'll still have a pretty, you know, existing shareholders and also have a pretty good interest in it. And so the goal would be to get as much of it into the shareholders' hands as possible. But the exact plans as far as exactly how we're gonna take it public, whether it's through an IPO or through maybe just a distribution to shareholders. That hasn't been fully baked yet. But we'll be announcing, you know, those plans as we develop it later this year.

And here's a pipeline question that came in. Are there other companies like Buddha Juice being a nontraditional big idea type company? Currently in the MDB pipeline?

Yes. So you know what's kind of fun is, you know, I've been feeling down been feeling pretty, you know, as our socks are down, I'm, like, not feeling so smart. But we've had, you know, we've had a lot of calls from people. And, you know, the way Buddha came in, it was a relationship and someone just asking me for advice, and that's how it turned into an IPO. Had one of our community members call me recently and he's got a really exciting company. I can't tell you the sector or what they do, but I'm super excited about it. It's got, you know, significant revenue momentum. And really exciting space. And, you know, he said to me, you know, Chris, listen. I, you know, I think taking this company public makes all the sense in the world. And there's nobody else I would take it to except MBB to take it public. And that made me feel really good that, you know, twenty-eight years of working, doing what we're doing, that people recognize that, you know, our reputation and the value we can bring. But also GT Metabolic that's gonna be at the conference. What an unbelievable story and opportunity and, you know, someone like me that's battled metabolic disease my whole life, like roughly fifty percent of the country now is it's a wicked, wicked, wicked. It is a disease. Yeah. You know, eat too much. Right? And you're overweight, but it's way more complicated than that. And GT Metabolic again, Thierry Tore who's the CEO of GT Metabolic, he we he had been on the board of Pulse Biosciences that we took public. And he said, Chris, he goes, public venture. He goes, man. He goes, you know, he's talking to VCs. He's talking to other people and what have you, strategics. And he said, you know, I think going public is the best thing for us. You know? And, again, a relationship and an experience with our form of public venture is why he came to us. And so it makes me feel real good that our reputation and our experience and, you know, and rep and relationships that we're seeing a lot of really cool things. So stay tuned, whether it's GT or others. I think we're gonna end up having a deep pipeline. But more importantly, I think I'm super excited because I believe, you know, I've been hearing for the last twenty years. Why would I go public? Why would I go public? Why would I go public? It's for the first time in a long time that I've, you know, these companies are walking in going, jeez, you know, everybody's saying we should go public. And so it's really it's all changed. Right? And it's really what I see is kind of the death of traditional venture, at least in the small company space. You're still seeing billion-dollar deals happen in the big, you know, the big funds doing huge AI deals and things like that. But for these smaller opportunities, where they don't need a 100 or $200 million, those companies are struggling. You know, the VCs are coming to us. Ironically, the VCs are coming to us also bringing us deals. So the whole game has changed. From my perspective. And I think that, you know, we went from 8,000 public companies at the end of the Internet boom to 4,000 public companies today. It's been the worst thing you could ever imagine for going public. But I think that I'm a big believer that's that shift is occurring. I sense it. I'm not, you know, I'm only right half the time. So hopefully this half I'm right. And so I think that going public is gonna be the thing to do, and so we're crazily we're so well positioned, for that wave that I think is gonna come.

There's a question here about it. Are you looking locally in as we expand our focus, are we looking locally in the Dallas DFW area, which is an incredible area, and there's a lot of venture studios here in venture. And the answer is absolutely. And I think, you know, the fact that we have our own fully clearing broker dealer we're not only looking at venture studios locally in Angel Groups locally in the Dallas area, but internationally that are coming to us that have a portfolio and are going like, we have mature companies. Could you help us take them public? So I think the pipeline is not an issue. But for me, I'm all community. I'm about building the network. So that's to me where the biggest issue is. And the biggest opportunity for us to do. Once we build it, they aren't even coming. They're here. And, you know, certainly in the Dallas area, I think the fact that we're taking a local company that's very well known in Dallas public when it could have been private equity in Buddha Juice, I think it's gonna help it kind of expand our following and interest in what we're doing in the DFW area. Any comments on that, Chris? Does that sum it up?

No. You know, listen, I think that, you know, Dallas has traditionally not been a hotbed for life science or companies, but there's a lot of great companies in Dallas. And I think that, you know, there's been a huge transition in the Dallas community. There are, you know, some life science companies that have started to percolate in the DFW area, but there's so many other companies, and it's a dynamic field. I mean, you've got what's happening in Dallas is crazy from, you know, Goldman Sachs opening up and bringing in what is it, 800 employees to Dallas. You've got, you know, so many people moving to Dallas. And you're also seeing hedge funds, private equity. All these guys are sort of congregating in Dallas. And so it's become, you know, a hotbed. I think we're gonna see a lot of activity. You know, we've been very specific about what we do. So for the most part, you know, Dallas has not been a biotech community, so quite frankly, there wasn't a lot of things to talk about with Dallas people. And so I think that going forward, though, that's gonna change, and I think that excited that we have a platform based here that I think can serve the market. But, you know, not just the Dallas market, but be.

Hey, Chris. We're at the end of our time here, and I want to get this one question out. It's a question about, you know, in the future, do you see you have to be an MDB shareholder in order to participate in offerings, which would certainly be a great place be for, you know, shareholders, existing shareholders to MDB. How do you see that playing out?

Well, I think it's still the same thing. Right? In other words, we've always, you know, we've told everybody that this is a community-based effort. And so being a shareholder in MDB is you're always gonna have priority over outside people to participate in offerings. That's it hasn't been a huge, you know, when you're doing life science companies, that are, you know, not the hottest part of the market, you know, being an MDB shareholder hasn't been that critical. But, you know, for those of you that have known MDB and participate in MDB historically, there were times where, you know, I was in the very uncomfortable position of getting phone calls from people begging me to get into offering. Right? And I like those days better by the way. So hopefully, it's coming around the corner again. And but, you know, and so part of the reason for going public was we anticipated that to be the case. Right? And it hasn't turned out that way in the short run. But, you know, going forward, that was the whole idea. And so we're, you know, we have a long memory. We're not gonna go back on what we said. So, you know, being a shareholder is gonna be important. To being, you know, for that. So Lastly, we're leaving, and that was lastly, but not really lastly. There's a number of patent best questions. I am assuming as we get further down the road, we're gonna have a call just on the patent vest, this AI law firm to answer what the model is, how that works, how what we see the value drivers to be. Is that accurate?

Yes. I mean, the team, you know, we've all been working on, you know, the business strategy for it, and it's pretty well developed. And I think you'll, you know, I think we're gonna be ready to present that to shareholders so they understand the value that Pat Investor represents. And I think had a lot of discussions with patent lawyers that want to join had a lot of, you know, discussions with strategic partners to, you know, come in and be part of the fold. So it's developing quickly. And so I expect that we'll be able to give some color on that here shortly to the shareholders.

Alright. Chris, any closing remarks?

No. Thank you guys for hanging in there. It's been it's not been a wonderful, you know, start to being a public company. Like I said, we've been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I think, you know, we're working real hard to be in the right place at the right time. And I think we've, you know, the team has done a phenomenal job. You know, from our team that, you know, our analyst team and banking team that's putting together deals and team these things up, they're doing an awesome job, and I couldn't be more proud of the work they're doing. And I take total responsibility for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not their fault. And as far as community development is concerned, you know, George and Tony and the whole team as far as what's going on there has done a phenomenal job. And we're, you know, really expanding beyond our historical MDB community and really getting out there and seeing how do we really scale so that we can bring, you know, several investments to people a year. And the whole team at Patvest that's really catalyzed and figured out how to create a real opportunity with that. So I couldn't be prouder of all the efforts of everybody but it's time to go put some points on the scoreboard. We gotta go win. So again, I appreciate all of you for sticking in there and over, you know, what's not been a great time. So thank you, everybody, and this will conclude our call today.

Thank you.

Thanks. Bye bye.