Angus Pacala
Analyst · Rosenblatt. Please go ahead
Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today. Ouster had a terrific third quarter, we delivered over 11.2 million in revenue, our second highest quarter ever, representing a 44% increase over the third quarter last year. We shipped 2136 sensors worldwide for an average selling price of $5,246 and did so while also recording the highest gross margins in Ouster’s history at 33%. We continue to grow our business with approximately 80 new customers bring our total 12-months customer count to approximately 700 across over 50 countries. We signed four new Strategic Customer Agreements or SCAs. During the third quarter, bring our total current SCA count to 84. While we delivered strong quarterly growth supported by our world class, commercial and operations teams, we also executed on our product roadmap and doubled our serviceable obtainable market through the launch of our breakthrough L2 chip, our upgraded OS sensor suite REV7, and with it are all new OSDome sensor. This is our largest expansion in songs since first entering the market and a game changer in our ability to win an expanded set of deals. Our focus on digital semiconductor design continues to set us apart in the lidar industry. Digital Products aligned with the exponential performance path of Moore’s Law to eventually displace legacy technologies. Engineered the state-of-the-art 3d backside illumination, the L3 chip packs an incredible amount of processing capability within a compact die area. With 125 million transistors on chip and a maximum computational power of 21.47 giga max, the L3 is capable of counting and processing approximately 10 trillion photons per second. This allows the sensor to output up to 5.2 million points per second, while consuming less power than previous generations. A 10x increase in photon sensitivity enables our REV7 sensors to deliver 2x increase in range, a 50% improvement in precision and a 7x improvement in object detection and new features that we can now offer are approximately 700 customers and many more prospective customers across our fast growing markets. With the extended range of REV7, we are unlocking an all new category of long range and higher speed use cases, essential for many robotaxi, shuttle bus and truck operators. The REV7 OS2 opens up the unique ability to track vehicles and objects beyond a quarter mile in all directions. The 10x signal improvement of the L3 also improves near range detection. Automotive and industrial customers alike can expect incredible detection performance on challenging objects such as tires, black cars, cables, fencing or the forks on a forklift. This also makes REV7 excellent fit for mapping applications with a combination of longer-range, high point density and upgraded precision are based on direct feedback from this customer set. We are seeing incredible demand for REV7 from our customers. Ouster’s first REV7 customer signed a multiyear SCA for several hundred OS1 and OS0 REV7 sensors through 2023. After working with us for some time, the performance and reliability increases of REV7 made it the clear center of choice for scaling production of their commercial applications including transit buses, Class 8 trucks and yard trucks. We are also seeing traction with early adopters of the OSDome, including some of the world’s largest companies, one of which has already ordered several hundred sensors for initial rollout of cloud analytics technology in their retail stores. Our partner SkyFi, a global software technology company, is also an early adopter of the OSDome and plans to offer the sensor as part of its cloud analytics solution to help businesses enhance the guest experience, boost revenue and optimize operational efficiency. SkyFi and Ouster have several active cloud analytics deployments across globe, including at international airports, major event venues and retail stores. With the unique capabilities of the OSDome, we are better positioned to sell into more use cases and scale deployments with existing customers. We are thrilled with the product performance of our new REV7 suite and fantastic early response from customers. We are excited to get the products into more hands this quarter as we ramp production and shipments. The benefits of RAV7’s performance upgrades will also support Ouster’s recently released 3D industrial sensor suite, configured to meet the unique requirements of forklift, forklift equipment and autonomous mobile robot manufacturers with high volume pricing to enable adoption on production fleets. Complemented by the all new OSDome with a hemispherical field of view for floor to ceiling and wide area coverage, our industrial sensors are an excellent fit for material handling applications. We expect these new offerings to accelerate expansion into the estimated $15 billion warehouse automation market. With the incredible range and precision improvements of the L3 powered REV7, we now offer the highest performing family of sensors on the market. It also provides a glimpse of what will be possible by applying the same advancements to our upcoming Digital Flash or DS sensors for automotive applications. The advancements in the L3 architecture paved the way for Ouster’s upcoming premise chip, the automotive grade fully custom digital lidar silicon receiver that will power our DEF sensors, which is slated to be integrated into the first DEF units in 2023. Auto makers and Tier 1s alike have responded with consistent abatement after seeing the incredible performance of our first DFA samples, and are eager to begin testing with B samples next year. While product features and performance upgrades will represent major growth drivers for our business, for the foreseeable future, we also have a significant access on which to catalyze new business, vertical specific product and safety certifications as well as software solutions. We are on track to achieve ASIL-B and IATF-16949 functional safety certifications for automotive, SIL-2 safety certifications for industrial and NEMA TF2 certifications for smart infrastructure applications within the next 12 to 24-months. The mechanical and electrical upgrades we made to our OS sensors with REV7 put us even closer towards achieving these market expanding certifications. These included reducing their power draw and doubling the resistance to shock and vibration, while maintaining the same small, lightweight and power efficient form factor design of previous generations. All REV7 sensors include approximately 95% automotive brake components feature in upgraded FPGA that is qualified for functionally safe automotive and industrial applications and offer an option for a thousand based T1 automotive Ethernet. We also see an immense opportunity to speed our customers time to market build stickiness, and drive higher margin revenues through verticalized software solutions. We continue to build a robust software ecosystem built on three foundational pillars, a best-in-class software development experience that provides resources and tools to reduce our customers time to test, validate and integrate our sensors, and expanded partner platform to bring targeted solutions to our customers, and verticalized software solutions that drive new customers and higher margin revenues. In the third quarter, we released an updated version of the Ouster SDK and new firmware. We continue to expand our partner platform and started working with applied intuition. A provider of software solutions for autonomous systems development, including sensor simulation, to create, test and release synthetic models of our lidar data to empower customers to generate synthetic data that accelerates the deployment of perception systems. This is just the beginning of what is in store for our software ecosystem. And we are excited to share more about it early next year. I’m as confident as I have ever been in our ability to make ousters digital lidar the sensors of choice across autonomy and intelligent infrastructure applications. I believe we have a clear and winning strategy to make our technology more affordable, more performance and more ubiquitous. That said, execution on our strategy requires thoughtful capital management. With this in mind, we took proactive steps to optimize our cost structure and reduce our gross cash spend in the third quarter. While these steps bolstered our cash runway and path to profitability, we are taking advantage of another exciting opportunity to accelerate the adoption of lidar across fast growing markets and further strengthen our financial position, merging with Velodyne. This morning, we announced our plan to merge with Velodyne and an all stock merger of equals transaction that is expected to drive significant value creation for our customers, our company and our shareholders. As one combined company led by new CEO and Ted Tewksbury as Executive Chairman of the board, we will be a leading lidar company with a deep history, strong balance sheet, industry leading technology and world-class commercial organization. Together, we can offer robust product offerings, including verticalized software to serve a broader set of customers. We expect the proposed merger to unlock significant synergies creating a company with the scale and resources to deliver stronger solutions for customers and society, while accelerating time to profitability and enhancing value for shareholders. Overall, this proposed merger accelerates our ability to reduce product costs through volume purchasing and scaled manufacturing. Develop a combined product roadmap of low cost performance sensors that aligns with the future needs of the market, cast a wider net to reach a broader set of customers and strengthen our competitiveness against other established something modalities like cameras and radar. We are excited to build on both of our strengths. I look forward to providing the market with more information around the combined companies strategy upon closing, which is expected in the first half of 2023. For more information on the proposed merger, please refer to our joint release and webcasts published on both company websites earlier today. I will now turn it over to our CFO, Anna Brunelle who will provide an update on our third quarter performance and our expectations for the remainder of the year.