Todd Fruchterman
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead, Josh. Your line is now open
Thank you Heather and good morning. I'd like to start the call off today a little bit differently than I have in the past. I thought it would be worth taking a step back and reminding everyone of the path we are on here at Butterfly and what makes us fundamentally different, so you can better understand why Butterfly. This context will be important as we get further into our discussion because it will help you better understand how we view the results of this quarter, our growth in the near term, and how we are taking our learnings from the market to drive our future growth and care transformation with ultrasound information at scale. Many of you will remember that we entered the market as a truly remarkable and transformative device. By putting ultrasound on a semiconductor chip, we became a disruptor in the industry, based on our innovation and hardware alone. We're proud to say we are leading in the handheld ultrasound segment today. And we continue to invest in this area to maintain our edge. Our technology works and it keeps getting better. Some of our initial learnings in the market, however, made us recognize that we were not where we needed to be in order to realize the full value of our technology and the impact to healthcare. So we went to work on our enterprise level software, and workflow solutions. We have spent the last year investing heavily in the development of our software solutions, blueprint and compass. Significant progress in software development has created best-in-class, image management and workflow software across ultrasound platforms, both internal and external to Butterfly. As a result, we have gone from software that was objectively lagging to software that is now highly valued. And we continue to innovate and push it beyond the status quo based on what we're learning from our customers. We know that software is the enterprise enabler. We are proud that enterprise level software development has now become a positive differentiator for Butterfly, a platform for our solution and a catalyst for providers to begin their journey of care transformation. But given the significant strains on practitioners throughout the healthcare system, we've learned that they need specialty applications that are highly focused, streamlined, easy to learn, and easy to use. The burden of learning ultrasound cannot be put on them. All practitioners don't want to learn, nor do they have time to become experts in ultrasound. So we have reorganized our product, clinical and commercial teams around the coordinated pursuit of specialty applications that only Butterfly can enable. Providers want to quickly learn the applications that are most relevant to their practice. And that will dramatically improve their ability to care for their patients and streamline their workflow. And at Butterfly, we are committed to delivering our technology in a way that accomplishes this. We are developing clinical partnerships that will provide clear evidence to support applications specific adoption and usage that is relevant and impactful. Our backlog of applications is deep, proprietary and unique to Butterfly. Our strategy and roadmap are confidential for obvious reasons, and will be revealed as we launched them. We realized this is challenging for the outside world to monitor our progress. But we believe long-term value is maximized by hitting the market with tailored solutions that are unique to Butterfly without competitive distractions. With the hardware and software now working complementary to one another, Butterfly has truly become the practical application of ultrasound information into the workflow. The experience with a Butterfly is fundamentally different than any other ultrasound device that has come before us. With Butterfly, providers now have the ability to use ultrasound to guide their assessment, instead of doing an ultrasound to confirm their decision. This is what separates us from the pack. This is what Butterfly and semiconductor based ultrasound makes possible. And it's this distinction that we believe will lead to a major shift in how medicine is practiced, and how care is delivered across all settings. We expected this shift to take time because leading people through behavior change takes time, both in practice and implementation. But just as others are experiencing within the industry, the budgeting and workforce pressures have intensified, resulting in implementation delays. Some of our future partners are simply delaying implementation and commitments until they can catch up on people. We are prioritizing the appropriate coordination for successful launches and rollout over the speed of short-term revenue generation that doesn't meet our long-term objectives. With that said, the signals we are receiving and the conversations we are having in the market reassert that Butterfly’s message is clearly resonating, and that we have the ability to fundamentally change the care experience for providers and patients alike with how care is delivered across all settings. And without context, I'd like to discuss our business performance and briefly comment on the third quarter high level financials. From a revenue perspective, we ended Q3 with $19.6 million in quarterly revenues, a 34% increase versus the third quarter of 2021. While this was our highest quarterly revenue to date, and an acceleration in our revenue growth over our first half levels, it is lower than our internal expectations due to increased challenges at the macro level. Heather will speak to this more. But the broader macro environment is waging a toll on health systems. The environment has placed additional demands on frontline health care workers and management that has pushed out their inevitable innovation in the very near term. The impact of this environment, is causing a delay in our growth, and as a result, we are adjusting our guidance to $73 million to $76 million. Because we have proactively and fully offset this lower revenue with expense reductions, there is no change to our adjusted EBITDA loss. While our top line revenues reflect the market dynamics we have discussed, we're also acutely aware of the opportunities it creates for Butterfly, because we have a tool that quickly becomes part of the solution for hospitals and clinicians. We are confident that our business is foundationally strong and growing, based upon these five things; first the texture of our revenue shows that we are growing where it matters, and health systems and software and services. Hospitals realizing they need to have the right infrastructure in place to manage and use our technology want oversight, life management, credentialing and QA solutions. As critical first step the technology leading to care transformation Butterfly delivers here. Second, there is improved customer and client experience that is driving increasing usage and validity to our vision. Third, we are meeting our customers where they are with our blueprint and compass enterprise software, as well as building a pipeline of applications and product introductions that fit the needs of enterprise customers, individual practitioners and patients. Fourth, we have a building pipeline of leading institutions whom we are engaged with to drive specific applications with accelerating adoption in the coming periods. While we are not going to project large client deals in the near term, our backlog has clearly built in quality. And fifth, we are giving institutions and providers the foundation upon which they can build transformational programs that use ultrasound information to change the way care is delivered across the continuum. Everywhere we evaluate the needs of patients and providers can only be best satisfied with Butterfly. To help address these market dynamics, and further ensure Butterfly remains well positioned to capture this value, as we head into 2023 and beyond. Today, I'd like to announce some changes to the executive leadership team. To Start, Stacey Pugh, our Chief Commercial Officer has chosen to pursue another opportunity outside of the company and will leave Butterfly as of November 24. I'd like to personally thank Stacey for her contributions to Butterfly and their commitment to this organization. She has helped lead Butterfly through this time of transformation, and has expanded our reach and healthcare institutions around the globe. We wish her the best in her future endeavors. As Butterfly continues to grow and evolve, it is important that we continue to look at the business to make sure it is structured optimally. With Stacey’s departure, we took an opportunity to assess the needs of our organization to ensure we have the right structure and leadership. As of November 1st, our commercial function is now broken up into two entities, commercial operations and commercial development. The commercial operations function will include all commercial operations and activities for North America in our core markets. The commercial development function will be responsible for all marketing operations, the veterinary business, and the international business and expansion. This new structure is intended to drive focus and tighter execution for our sales and marketing teams. With that said, I'm excited to announce two new additions to the executive leadership team to lead these respective functions. On November 1st, Mike Bhatia [ph] joined Butterfly as Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations, and Nikki Montgomery joined as Senior Vice President, Commercial Development. Mike and Nikki are two highly accomplished leaders with deep relevant experience and track records of success with the specific challenges Butterfly is facing right now. I look forward to their partnership and expertise to help us achieve our revenue goals and market adoption. As I have said before, we are making steady progress in the market, and I would like to discuss some of our achievements in Q3. This past quarter, we introduced Butterfly’s, Cloud 2.0. Software, a launch that included several new product features, and a proficiency management solution for our BluePrint Platform that makes it even easier to manage your workflows and analysis across an institution. After implementation, Dr. Ryan Gibbons, Director of Ultrasound Education at the Temple University School of Medicine said the Butterfly proficiency management system will lead to more recognition of the value that Butterfly brings to clinical assessment at the bedside. We know the power that ultrasound information can bring when it is unlocked at scale. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for people to acquire that information. Our proficiency management tool does that system wide. And we believe this will help institutions accelerate the adoption and utilization of ultrasound information in patient assessment, diagnosis and treatment. We continue to see milestone achievement in each of our four pillars that are built on our foundational principles of easy everywhere and economical. We take a look at hospitals and health systems. For example, the Butterfly solution is showcasing its relevancy across the country irrespective of geography. We close deals in major health systems, large IBNs and rural health care institutions like monument health, a community based health care system in South Dakota that will now have Blueprint system wide coupled with a probe deployment. We are now providing Blueprint at Yale New Haven Health and signed a new contract with Stanford that includes an expanded system footprint of our enterprise software, and probes. And we continue to make progress embedding our overarching solution in major academic medical institutions across the U.S. This includes UC Irvine, who for the fourth year in a row is utilizing Butterfly for the next generation of doctors, each new student gets his or her own Butterfly, a one-to-one model, we are replicating across med schools. Because of this, the students are learning Butterfly powered assessment from the beginning of their training, and they will now have this skill set as they become physicians, and the ability to practice medicine differently. These are significant milestones in their own right, and we're just getting started. With that said, let's move on to our international pillar. This past quarter, Butterfly officially deployed 500 Butterfly iQ+ devices to healthcare practitioners in Kenya, at an event at Kenyatta University. This deployment is supported by a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced earlier this year that will provide 1000 health care workers predominantly midwives in Sub Saharan Africa, with the world's only handheld full body ultrasound probe to advance maternal and fetal health. According to the World Health Organization, regional office for Africa, about 830 women die from pregnancy or childbirth related complications around the world every day, with more than half of these deaths occurring in Sub Saharan Africa. A total of 500 practitioners will be trained by the end of the year in partnership with the global Ultrasound Institute bringing ultrasound capabilities to over 50 facilities in rural, underserved communities facing maternal health challenges. This is just phase one of this deployment. Another 500 probes will be deployed to South Africa early next year. From a global health context, this is the largest deployment of medical imaging in history. And we are already hearing about the life saving impact it is having in this region for mothers and their unborn infants receiving ultrasound exams for the very first time. Moving on to our third pillar, home based care. You've heard me say, as a digital health company, we are focused on unlocking information and helping make more informed medical decision no matter where they take place, especially as care is moving outside of the hospital. By facilitating more advanced assessment in non-traditional settings, Butterfly is key to advancing care outside the hospital, where we see enormous potential for Butterfly to be an invaluable tool to help monitor and manage the health of those living with chronic conditions. This past quarter, we kicked off a clinical study for heart failure patients with the John Muir Cardiovascular Institute Research Department. This is a first of its kind feasibility study that will evaluate a novel tool developed by the Butterfly that is designed to provide novice clinicians and patients with the ability to assess pulmonary congestion themselves, the most common reason for morbidity and mortality and congestive heart failure patients against an established implanted device. The value of Butterfly, a non-invasive technology, providing similar data to an implanted device could be a tremendous opportunity for managing the care of a rapidly growing population of CHF patients. This type of work that is demonstrating the capabilities of Butterfly to transcend the lens of traditional ultrasound and its current market is what makes us confident in our strategy and confident in our ability to reach a non-consumption user as an advanced clinical assessment tool, a tool that is far more valuable to a lot more people and allows us to take advantage of our core semiconductor technology, because it's about using information from ultrasound technology to guide care decisions and improve the lives of people. It's not about ultrasound machines, or doing ultrasound. And finally, let's discuss our work in adjacent markets. As many of you know, we continue to find value in markets adjacent to healthcare, such as veterinary medicine. This past quarter, Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, announced that it will integrate Butterfly iQ+ Vet into the first year of their veterinary medicine programs. We're also excited to share that Texas Tech University will be expanding their partnership with us. The School of Veterinary Medicine has acquired additional Butterfly iQ+ Vet probes to assign every incoming student with a device for the duration of their education. We also added 10 Vet as a new distributor; they are a regional distributor for the Eastern United States, which is the largest market in terms of volume for both Vets and Vet hospitals in the country. Lastly, as we help veterinarians along their journey of care transformation, through the use of ultrasound information, we announced the collaboration with -- solutions, which will provide real time one-to-one veterinary ultrasound education and care support services for hospitals. We believe as strongly today, as we ever have, that Butterfly has the power to be as ubiquitous as the stethoscope, and its utility and patient assessment across all specialties, species and care settings. Providers using Butterfly now have access to valuable information when and where they've never had it before. They now have the ability to use the information that ultrasound provides much earlier in the care of a patient and in care settings where it's never existed. Only Butterfly can make that possible, because our hardware enables the acquisition of information and our software makes that information usable and valuable to providers of all skill sets in any setting across the entire continuum of care. Our path to transformation at scale is on the right track. And we are a young and agile company with fiscal discipline, organizational optimization, and learnings from in market experiences working to create every opportunity to accelerate growth and adoption. Heather will speak to this further and also take a deeper dive into the financials to give you a clearer picture of the results we are seeing.