Michael DePasquale
Analyst · Maxim Group.
Thanks, Bill, and thank you all for joining us today. After my remarks and CC's financial review, we will open up the call to investor questions. From a big picture standpoint, we reported revenue of approximate $1.55 million in Q3 '25, roughly in line with revenue in the first 2 quarters this year, and we reported year-to-date revenue of slightly under $5 million. The roughly $600,000 decrease in both the third quarter and year-to-date revenue in 2025 compared to last year. It is largely due to quarter-to-quarter variability resulting from the timing of some larger customer orders. We had particular strength in last year's third quarter from 2 large orders, one from a long-time banking customer, which was more of a catch-up for expanding their deployment and another one from an ongoing rollout of solutions by a long-time defense industry customer. Both customers are still very, very active. And the defense customer had a $140,000 order after the quarter closed in October that we really expected to get in the third quarter rolled over to the fourth quarter. And we continue -- and we expect continuing deployments in orders even this quarter and beyond. In addition, we expect our large banking customer to renew their contract, their subscription contract in early 2026 on their steadily expanding deployment of our solution. The customer has over 29 million users enrolled in our solution with the potential for meaningful future additions. They made a major expanded investment in our solutions in 2023 and 2024, including a $900,000 upgrade to our fingerprint only biometric customer identification technology. And this option or solution allows them to identify clients with just a single fingerprint scan eliminating the need for any other identifiers, including a card or an ID number. And that, in essence, is saving them approximately 30 seconds per transaction, which time is money, which is meaningful for them. Their current annual license fee is now over $1 million scheduled for renewal in early 2026. And whether they choose a 1- or a 2-year contract, we expect that we'll see $1 million to $3 million in business and renewal in the first quarter. Across the board, and this is general within our business, we enjoy very high renewal rates in excess of 90%, meaning our churn rate is in the single digits. The lumpiness that we see in our quarter revenues is more of a function of timing of renewals, new deployments, our large customer expansions, and there can also be true-ups for additional software licenses. Q3 is generally a seasonally slower period for us, particularly in Europe due to the summer holiday period. But we expect to close out the year very strong as we advance our channel sales efforts in the broader Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, where we are now focused solely on BIO-key branded solutions. Additionally, we're in the final stages of developing new marketing messaging for our website and our business development. This messaging and collateral should be implemented during the fourth quarter to get us well positioned for the start of the new year. To support this project, we engaged an external marketing firm earlier in the year to work with us on our new website content and targeted marketing strategies. We're finalizing a major website overhaul, focused on improving again the content, the navigation with a plan released prior to the Gartner IAM Conference, which is held mid-December. We also plan to release a significant update to our PortalGuard identity platform. PortalGuard operates as a single MFA, multifactor authentication user experience providing a broad set of 17 factors of authentication, including, of course, our identity-bound biometric options to meet virtually any use case. Version 7, which is the new version represents our most significant update ever. It features major platform modernization, enhanced configurability with improved deployment capabilities. Development is expected to conclude within the coming weeks, after which we'll undergo rigorous internal and third-party security testing. The time line for general availability is late Q1 or early Q2 in 2026. Also in Q3, we introduced our new FBI FAP 20 certified EcoID III fingerprint scanner, which is aimed primarily for the regulated industries. Although BIO-key is primarily a software company, providing a total solution, including state-of-the-art hardware is essential in supporting our annual recovering revenue software model. The EcoID III reader pairs encrypted device to host communications with liveness detection for faster, more secure authentication. We've delivered initial volume EcoID III orders for defense and government customers in Q3. We also expect government-related and highly regulated industries like financial services, higher education and health care to gravitate towards our new reader. Our PortalGuard platform, our IDaaS, Passkey:YOU solution, all pair very, very nicely with the new EcoID III fingerprint sensor. As I mentioned on our call last quarter, we launched our cyber defense initiative in response to increased global defense spending, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, and our success with some significant high-profile deployments in these markets. Incorporated in these rising defense budgets is a significant emphasis on cyber resiliency and security as a priority. Today, two of the top four largest global defense agencies by spending are using BIO-key technology to secure all of their critical information. We are well positioned to capitalize on these growing defense budgets and spending and are advancing a growing pipeline of opportunities based on the deployment of our solutions by some of the most respected military security and defense ministries and agencies. Supporting this initiative, we are adding select resources to engage with contractors who will help us expand our market reach. We expect to see a growing base of new contract activity from these efforts, building on deployments this quarter and beyond. A primary factor in defense industry deployments is our ability to support critical infrastructure and access to sensitive environments with advanced biometrics and our multifactor authentication technologies without reliance on mobile devices or hardware tokens. Biometric authentication is better suited than these engagements given its enhanced security, accuracy, convenience and ability to better prevent fraud and unauthorized access compared to traditional methods. Biometrics minimize false positives and improve the precision of access control. In addition, uniquely tying individuals to actions and access events, aids in monitoring traceability and insider threat management or improved accountability and audit trails. Streamlining access processes also reduces time spent on logins and boost productivity for defense personnel while maintaining strict security. For defense agencies managing highly sensitive data and infrastructure, we believe biometrics are growing as a preferred choice over traditional methods alone. And our references in that space gives us a unique competitive advantage. We are gaining momentum, as I just described in the defense sector as well as in banking, government, higher education as the rising incidence of security incidents highlight potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In addition, growing regulatory requirements and increasingly stringent cyber insurance underwriting standards requiring MFA adoption helped create opportunities for our superior biometrics and portable authentication options. We are excited about the growth prospects into next year. And though given our size, and as I just described, the variability of our business, our business may continue to fluctuate on a quarterly basis based on the timing of larger orders. But as we work to build the business, we'll continue to keep a sharp focus as well on our cost structure, seeking to reduce our breakeven levels and support our goal of positive cash flow and profitability. Ceci will walk through the numbers but let me highlight that we have been able to reduce our operating expenses by over 10% through the first 9 months of 2025, while at the same time, expanding our global reach and suite of solutions. Finally, as far as funding our runway to profitability after the close of the third quarter, we were able to raise approximately $3 million net of fees and related expenses through a warrant exercise transaction priced at $1.02 per share. This funding significantly expands our cash liquidity, puts us in a stronger position to pursue growth. And as we expect, they close a strong close to 2025, we are in a very, very good position from a financial perspective to be able to grow our business and actually overachieve our objectives coming into the new year. With that, let me turn the call over to Ceci to review the financials, and then we'll take questions.