Good afternoon and welcome to Nuvve Holding Corporation's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Eduardo Royes, Managing Director, ICR. Please go ahead.

Thank you. On today's call are Gregory Poilasne, Chief Executive Officer; and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvve. Earlier today, Nuvve issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2020 results. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call up for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements. While these forward-looking statements reflect Nuvve's best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking projections. These risk factors are discussed in Nuvve's filings with the SEC and in the earnings release issued today, which are available on our website. Nuvve undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Gregory Poilasne, Chief Executive Officer of Nuvve. Gregory?

Thank you, Eduardo, and hello to all. We thank you for joining our second quarter 2023 results call. We are proud to have yet again achieved a record order quarter in Q2 2023, topping the record set in Q1 and delivering yet another quarter of strong year-over-year growth across key metrics, including revenue, megawatts under management and backlog. We came into 2023 discussing our optimism that we were finally hearing an overdue inflection point in both interest in and adoption of vehicle-to-grid technology and specifically our differentiated EV offering. Our results in the first half of the year evidenced this, and we are pleased to have increased visibility in our business. Our conviction and optimism, however, are funded on much more than just the improvement in orders and activity in the first half of the year. Nuvve remains the only pure-play public company today with a proven track record in deploying commercially available and scalable V2G technology worldwide and players across the EV charging and grid infrastructure landscape are taking notice. As we sit here today, the interest from companies looking to explore ways in which to partner with us or leveraging our technology is noticeably higher than it was just 6 or 9 months ago. Industrial participants are increasingly recognizing, one, the value of our technology and IP across areas such as Power Flow Control and EV charging management and the work we are doing with AI; and two, the importance of our experience and relationship networks in being able to provide a holistic fleet electrification solution. The same cannot be said we believe about all aspiring V2G providers. We look forward to building on this momentum as we go through the second half of 2023 and beyond. Now, to summarize our key accomplishments in the quarter and since…

Thanks, Gregory. I will start with a recap of second quarter 2023 results. In the second quarter, we generated total revenues of $2.1 million compared to $1.3 million in the second quarter of 2022. Further, as Gregory alluded to, unit orders of our DC fast chargers remained at elevated levels in Q2 2023, growing over 15% from Q1 and over 75% higher than Q2 of 2022, supporting an increase in backlog in excess of $6 million, which in turn will support solid revenue generation in the back half of 2023. Margins on product and service revenues were 4.8% for the second quarter 2023, which was lower than the first quarter of 2023 of 17.9% due to the impact of the timing of expenses associated with the customer sale through a long-term lease arrangement and installation costs for 2 other long-term projects. Under the lease accounting rules, the sale, hardware and installation costs were recognized as an expense upfront, while a large portion of the associated revenues will be recognized over future periods. As a reminder, margins can be lumpy from quarter-to-quarter depending on the mix. DC charger gross margins at standard pricing generally range from 15% to 25%, while AC charger gross margins are approximately 50%, but in dollar terms are a smaller fraction of the revenue of a DC charger. Grid service revenue margins are generally 30%. Operating costs, excluding cost of sales, was $8.5 million for the second quarter of 2023 compared to $10.3 million in the second quarter of 2022. The decrease was primarily attributable to lower public company fees. Cash operating expenses, excluding cost of sales, stock compensation and depreciation and amortization expense was $7.3 million in the second quarter of 2023, declining from $8.3 million in the second quarter of 2022 and relatively unchanged from…

Thanks, David. To conclude, myself and the team are pleased with the progress we have seen in our business so far in 2023. The EPA Clean KOBAS [ph] program has underpinned strong growth. And in Q2, we continue to enhance our offering with the formation of UV1 and further evolving Astra, while progressing on getting our Circle care program up and running. Interest in V2G and Nuvve and its technology specifically continue to increase as the role of V2G will play in the energy transition becomes increasing the appearance -- thank you for joining us today and look forward to updating you on our November call. With that said, I would like to now turn the call back to the operator to begin our Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Eric Stine with Craig-Hallum.

Maybe just starting out, I know that your primary focus or a big part of the focus is on the school bus industry, but a lot of OEMs making more and more noise about bidirectional charging, bidirectional capabilities. So just curious, how do you view those offerings? I mean potentially, I would love to hear if there's any interest coming out of the auto OEM world in partnering with Nuvve? Just any thoughts along those lines would be helpful.

I mean I think we are definitely perceived as the leader in the subject and not just in the U.S. but also in Europe and in Japan. And so I would say there is always interest I think the big question for the OEMs in general is always do I do it myself? Or do I do with a partner? And the other piece, the next question are really what are the features and functionalities that are -- that my customers are going to care about. And you see that forward with the F-150 and powering basically vehicle-to-home. That's what they are pushing. Now the truth is once you have that functionality in place, and it's a cost-effective way of doing it, then you can really think about what are the full features that I can promote to my customers. And it's what we call the charge management piece is really how do we make the life easier of somebody who is choosing to get on a car. And that's definitely an area where we spend a lot of time today. And we see that not just applicable to fleet, but also pitable to consumers.

Is this something as this gets out into the market and people realize the potential of that and how it could be expanded. Is this an area where we would expect Nuvve to play at some point?

Yes. We are very focused on fleet today because, one, this is where we see the volume today. This is also -- the school bus is the killer app for -- but we are involved in different areas. One example is Circle Care, which is really addressing the consumers and how do we extract more value with infrastructure that is being rolled out to support the consumers, but then in face with the platform we now provide certain grid services.

Got it. And then I guess, sticking with Circle K, you I think your plan was that you would start generating grid service revenue in the second half. I might have missed it earlier in the call, but curious if you've kind of started those -- or that rollout? And is it still the plan that you would expect revenues here in the second half?

We have a few sites connected to our platform now, and we definitely expect revenue to happen in the second half of the year.

Got it. Well, maybe last one for me. Just on megawatts under management, I know you've got the 2 buckets stationery and EV. I mean is it fair to say that the EV side is going to be the majority -- or is stationary an area where there actually is an opportunity beyond what you've got in Japan? And maybe I'm just curious, could you remind me how the economics might differ between both of those applications.

Yes. So I mean, I think the -- what we see in general is that on a site, you might have some stationary store studies deployed at the same time as the EV. And so we want to be able to provide unidirectional, bidirectional and EVs and the storage. So we definitely want to be providing extract value from all those resources. But what we see very often is that the storage very rapidly is dropped compared to the size of the capacity of the EV deployments and it's really hard to provide more resiliency. Now ideally, what we have done, like in Japan, where we have some quite a bit of storage, we also like to look at multipurpose storage, right? Not just one thing you can do at storage, but how do you provide multiple services, which is what we are doing with EVs, right? EVs, the primary purpose is to drive around. But then we are doing a variety of great services -- we've been in the region where the vehicle is connected. And so we really look at the station storage in the same way as we look at BD and developing multiple purposes.

Got it. But you would say that, I mean, not surprisingly, EVs, that's the real growth driver that will be the vast majority of the megawatts under management as we look out a couple of years. Okay, alright.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Brian Dobson with Chardan.

So looking at your order momentum in 2Q, those are impressive stats. I guess how do you expect that to continue through the back half of the year? And with the EPA rebate deadly [indiscernible] later this month, would you expect that to also potentially spur demand in the back half?

I think I can start, and then David, I'll let you follow up. But I think this mix order is lumpy, right? So that's -- and we saw that last year. So on the one hand, it's great, we have this backlog that we are delivering on to. This new round of EPA is really build next year deployments, and we are very excited about it. And it's a different rule, it's different way of deploying it's more larger projects, but we are very excited about the opportune associated with those.

Yes. And I'd add to that Brian, to reiterate what Greg said, our backlog is up about 50% because we're seeing some strong order activity, which really helps us think about our revenue generation for the balance of the year that we already -- once you get the contract locked in just a matter of timing. And as we said in the prepared remarks that roughly $3 million of that is likely to flow through the back half of the year based on the customer date we've been given. So we feel pretty good about our revenue going into the back half of the year. And of course, we're going to have incremental organic growth because we can see that on our proposal pipeline. And what you're starting to see is people are starting to get their hands on a lot more vehicles, which really helps us get our pipeline higher and close on the order activity.

Yes, very good. I guess just turning to your AI initiatives. Why did you choose to roll those out in the Nordic countries? And should we expect to see that technology further integrated into the United States in the near future?

For sure, to question two, for sure, is going to be -- being rolled out everywhere, right? The reason why we started in the Nordics is because it's the combination of 2 things, right? One is the fact that we are bidding in markets there. And so forecasting the market, it's something that is important in area demonstration here of the [indiscernible] platform, combined with the forecasting of the vehicles. And so that's why we like there. But if you think about -- if we are capable of forecasting when the vehicle are going to be there, when they're going to be leaving, the amount of energy they're going to need to recharge and we feel able to forecast energy crisis, sorry [ph].

We are able to basically procure energy very early for our customers. I mean, 72 hours in advance potentially. So that to avoid being exposed to potential volatility on the energy costs.

And finally for me, regarding the California school bus market, it's very likely that California leads the way in electrification for school buses. I know that you have some good relationships with school districts in that region. Do you think you could quantify the potential size of that market for us?

Yes. So I mean, we look at it in different ways. But if you look at it -- first of all, as you might know, there is 480,000 school bus on the roads in the U.S. They usually have a life of 12 years, a replacement rate of about 40,000 per year. Those are average because there is volatility. So it's a very large number. 24 million kids that are transported by school bus every year. Now there is a variety of how those buses are being run. You've got 3 large fleet owners, first dent being the largest and owning about 50,000 scopes. But you got a bench of medium operators that are running fleets of 10 to a few hundred school bus. But the bulk of the market in terms of who owns the buses or the school is -- the bulk of that market is the smaller school districts that are very distributed. It's 274,000 school buses that owned by smaller school districts. So it's a very -- it's very various market and how you're addressing it is important. At the end of the day, it's really about how do you make the transition from internal compression engine to electric as easy as possible for those either fleet operators or school districts. And that's why we are in the process of releasing our next -- or we'll be rising in September Nextera [ph] platform that is really integrating a lot of what we call the charge management, helping the co districts understand where the bus are going to be ready if there is a problem, how do they deal with it? And the V2G PC is fully integrated into that and help producing the cost of owning those vehicles. But the priority for co-districts is number one, making sure the bus is ready for the driver, so that the driver can give on time. Number two, if there is a problem, it needs to be fixed as soon as possible so that they can go back on schedule.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Gregory Poilasne for any closing remarks.

Thank you everybody for listening to us today, and we are looking forward for our next [indiscernible]. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.