Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the authID Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there'll be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Grace DeFries, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. With me on today's call are Tom Thimot, CEO; Tripp Smith, our President and CTO; and Stuart Stoller, our CFO. By now you should have access to today's announcement on our fundraise, as well as our press release announcing our 2021 results. If you have not received these, these will be found shortly on our website at www.authID.ai under the Investor Relations section. Throughout this conference call, we will be presenting certain non-GAAP financial information. This information is not calculated in accordance with GAAP and maybe calculated differently from other companies, similarly titled non-GAAP information. Quantitative reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial information to their most directly comparable GAAP financial information appear in today's press release. Before we begin our formal remarks, let me remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of these risks are mentioned in our press releases today. Others are discussed in our Form 8-K and 2021 Form 10-K which will be made available at the SEC website. I'd now like to introduce our CEO, Tom Thimot.

Thank you, Grace. Welcome everyone to today's call, in which we'll talk about our progress made in 2021, and the groundwork we have laid to accomplish even more in 2022 and beyond. Since the Company's rebrand to authID.ai in June of 2021, significant progress has been made on our strategic objectives including completing an uplisting in the NASDAQ, and an $11.5 million investment round in August. And today, we are proud to announce that we closed a $22.5 million financing round through several means. We issued $9.2 million in senior secured convertible promissory notes to new and existing individual investors. We sold $3 million of common stock at a price of $3.03 to a new investor. An additional $300,000 of stock was purchased at a price of $3.71 by senior management and board members. Finally, we have secured a $10 million credit facility with an existing major investor that ranks behind the notes I spoke of above. This latest round which comes just seven months after our successful NASDAQ uplisting and equity financing rounds provides us with adequate cash to fund our working capital needs through 2023 based on our current projections. I know I speak for all of our new investors, our existing investors who reinvested, as well as our management team members who participated in this round that this fundraise speaks to the recognition of the strong market opportunity for secure identity authentication, and is also a strong endorsement of the Company's strategy, technology and goals. I'm going to move to Slide 4; Our Vision. With increasing growth of cyber-attacks, phishing and friendly fraud, our vision reflects that the multi-factor authentication market is moving to lower friction, yet more secure authentication with greater certainty. As we saw in our 2021 fintech survey, 84% of fintech executives plan to…

Yes. Thank you, Tom. All of my remarks will compare the year-ended December 31, 2021 with the year-ended December 31, 2020, unless specified otherwise. Turning to our financial results in early 2021 and early 2022, we achieved our goal of improving our balance sheet; let me take you through the steps. In June 2021 with the support of our then convertible note holders, we converted approximately $6.1 million of debt and accrued interest to equity. In August 2021, we raised $11.5 million in conjunction with our uplist to NASDAQ. As of December 31, 2021 we had outstanding and debtness and accrued interest of $0.7 million, with the balance now due in December 2022 after extending the due date from February 2022. As of December 31, 2021 the company has approximately $6 million of cash, not including the plus $22 million of cash availability secured today before expenses. As a result of all this progress, we now expect to have enough cash to operate our business through the end of 2023. We also anticipate that our independent auditors who move they're going concerned opinion [ph], this will be a substantial milestone for authID and enhance us standing with -- interacting with potential customers, suppliers, and with readers about financial statements. With respect to our annual results, the Company's 2021 revenue of $2.3 million was slightly favorable compared to 2020. This was mostly due to an increase in legacy revenue, compared with 2020 when pandemic shutdowns negatively impacted revenue. Looking ahead, we expect our core verified biometric revenue to grow as we expand the sales pipeline and complete agreements that generate ongoing sales through signed subscription agreements. As we discussed at our annual meeting, we will measure ongoing sales as BAR for book, annual and recurring revenue, as well as deferred identity…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]

Thank you, operator. Tom, while we're waiting for questioners to pose question, perhaps you'd like to explain a little bit more about the competition that we face in the marketplace and where we fit in; where authID fits in in the marketplace.

Thank you, Graham [ph]. Yes, as I explained in Slide 6; there are a huge number of companies, most of them venture-backed or private equity backed, not yet in the public markets, early stage, that are moving towards a password-less world where the username and password is replaced by a phyto-token on your device. And we see companies like Transmit Security, TELUS, Encode [ph]; great companies that are providing this technology. But the problem we're focused on is one step beyond that. How do you know who is behind that device? And it's intuitively obvious that sending an SMS to the same device you just checked the token was on doesn't really accomplish anything from an authentication perspective. Finally, I also get asked an awful lot about Clear [ph]. Clear [ph] is an amazing company in the public markets that most people are familiar with, from sporting events and airports; they are a leader in physical authentication when you're entering an event or entering an airport, where we have a solution that complements them very well is in the digital realm where we're completely focused. Thanks, Graham.

Thank you. We have a question from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

Thank you. Hello, Tom. Hello, Stu. So I understand your reticence to not talk specific metrics until after Q2 but you are part of some big marketplaces; Microsoft, [indiscernible]. Can you talk about what the TAM looks like if we just think through those marketplaces and perhaps some of your existing partners, just to give us some indication of progress that you feel like you're seeing?

A company that I admire and like to draw comparisons because the business problem we're solving is the exact same one they solve today, and that is a company called Twilio. And Twilio today is the leading provider of step-up authentication when you're using a pin-code to verify a risky or high value transaction. So I think their market cap, I don't want to cite it, I don't have it right in front of me right now, but shows the significance of just solving this business problem irrespective of whether you solve it with a selfie or a pin-code; so we believe that's one parallel that you can look at. I think also, you can look at a number of software SaaS companies that have brought themselves to market, you know, bringing a new way to do an existing process; one that always comes to mind is DocuSign, we used to always physically sign documents and fax them around. And when they first came out with the idea that we do it digitally, the market was waiting patiently, but it was clearly a very large market. All of these SaaS markets where a vast user-base will be using a product lead to a very, very large TAM. And you know, whether it's measured in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and what percentage of that TAM we think we can get, we think we've got the most logical solution for the next step as password-less becomes the norm. I hope I answered your question?

I answered your curiosity, Twilio's is market cap is $28.9 billion.

Thanks.

Sorry, I didn't have it right in front of me.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We have a question from Ricky Solomon [ph], who is a private investor. Your line is open.

Hey, congrats on the financing. So, I'm curious if you could maybe expand upon the crypto use case? And how kind of -- we kind of integrate into that flow to make sure that there's not fraud? And how big a use case and how much fraud is there in the crypto space?

Thanks for keeping the question. Yes, crypto is one of the areas that I get most excited about, not as a personal investor in crypto, but how we can help that market. You know, first the biometric authentication; you're making a financial transaction that's an extremely valuable transaction, and I think we all can agree that storing a phrase or having a wallet that's accessible to determine your identity is not as secure as a facial biometric. And so for the crypto market, we see ourselves helping in two ways; first, helping to provide that step-up authentication to make sure the buyer of the crypto is who they're representing themselves to be -- both, the buyer and the seller. But then, you know, our patent protection in the ability to embed a biometric in a transaction record actually could pay huge benefit downstream to crypto because there will be no question about who made the transaction, when they made the transaction, because the biometric will actually be stored in the crypto transaction; so no need to remember that phrase, very easy for the proper use of crypto for financial purposes to have an audit trail, and a very clear indication of who bought it when they bought it. And we think this will make the crypto market much more secure and much more trusted because authentication is all about trust, and that's ultimately what we provide; the trust, that the person that's behind the transaction is who they are saying they are. Hope that answered the question, Ricky?

Yes, it does. Thanks. And one more follow-up. I would imagine that, you know, GDPR would be -- I didn't hear you speak about it, but it must be a huge opportunity for the company. Is there anything going on and kind of in that realm?

That's another great question. I mean, we put privacy first. And so anyone that uses the authID software, either on the consumer or employee side when authenticating, we make sure it is consented, and we do not store your personal identifiable information, your PII. Unlike many of the others in the authentication space, we store a representation of your face, that without a key that our customer holds, you can't unlock; and that has many, many benefits to authID and to our customers. First, it doesn't make us a honeypot for hackers to come after, to steal PII. But also, it ensures that our customer ultimately holds literally the key to allowing that transaction to go through; that authentication decision is made by our customer, not by authID. We basically say yes, we believe the face matches; the customer has the information of whose face it is, what their PII is, and decides when and how to allow the transaction to go through. We think this is very beneficial for GDPR because we're not keeping information about the customer that is private to them; we leave that to our customer to follow their own privacy and compliance with GDPR, California privacy, Illinois and the others. I hope that answers your follow-up question?

Yes, it does. Thanks.

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back to Tom for any closing remarks.

I'd like to thank everyone, particularly those that invested in this round. I think anyone that understands the macroeconomic environment today knows that it's not the easiest time to raise money but I think the fact that we were able to raise $22.5 million is a strong statement that authID really is skating to where the puck is going, to use the overused Wayne Gretzky analogy. But it would not be possible without an amazing investor base; so many of our existing investors stepped up, so many new investors joined us. I am really, really excited about the future at authID, and this now gives us the working capital cash that we need to operate through 2023. And I'm confident that the authentication market will move to biometrics, and we will become the leader in that market. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.