Angus Pacala
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC. Please go ahead
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I’ll start with a brief recap of the quarter, an overview of the market and an update on our strategic priorities. Chen will cover our financial results in more detail before I close with some final thoughts. Our first quarter results demonstrate our commitment to continued operational execution. We reported revenue of $32.6 million and gross margin of 41% which includes certain patent royalty of $1.5 million. First quarter shipments exceeded 4,700 sensors. Our balance sheet remains one of the strongest in the industry ending the quarter with $171 million of cash and equivalents with zero debt. During the quarter, we won multimillion-dollar deals across all four of our verticals. Within our smart infrastructure vertical, we expanded our relationship with LASE PeCo and signed our largest ever contract for software-attached sales in Europe. LASE will upgrade to REV7 along with Ouster Gemini to power real-time people counting, mobility analytics and perimeter protection. Within the industrial vertical, we closed a multimillion-dollar deal with Komatsu, one of the world’s largest heavy equipment manufacturers to equip their next generation autonomous mining equipment. By replacing legacy 2D Lidar systems with short-range and long-range REV7 sensors, we are helping Komatsu increase productivity and reduce the total cost of ownership. Within automotive, we were chosen by the mobility subsidiary of a global OEM to supply both short-range and long-range sensors to support the development of their autonomous vehicles. Finally, in our robotics vertical, we continue to expand our relationship with the world’s largest provider of mapping and navigation. Ouster is a physical AI company, leveraging our expertise in advanced perception solutions to enable intelligent real world autonomy across industries. Our digital lidar sensors combined with our AI software empower autonomous systems to perceive, understand and interact with the physical world in real-time. Physical AI demands hardware and software that is not only intelligent, but rugged and scalable, qualities that we embed in every product. Turning to our 2025 strategic priorities, we progressed across all three key focus areas. 1. Scaling the software-attached business. 2. Transforming the product portfolio, and 3. Executing towards profitability. Starting with the software-attached business, we had our strongest quarter yet landing our largest ever contract for software-attached sales in Europe. Another highlight of the quarter was our partner, Econolite, winning a five-year contract with the Utah Department of Transportation to deploy REV7 and Ouster BlueCity to enhance traffic flow, safety and operational efficiencies at intersections and roadways throughout the state. The Utah DoT assessed multiple lidar detection systems and our solution in conjunction with Econolite received the highest overall score. In addition to Utah, we see the potential to expand into additional states as part of the United States DoT’s grant for the Connected West Project. Moving to lidar development, we are excited to be transforming our entire product portfolio in 2025 with new hardware, upgraded firmware capabilities, enhanced features in the Ouster SDK and expanded software functionality. I want to share some updates on a few of these products discussed in our last call. We continue to see robust customer interest in On-Sensor 3D Zone Monitoring. For industrial and material handling operators, this firmware feature supports collision avoidance on moving vehicles with warnings, deceleration and emergency stop. By leveraging REV7 and 3D Zone Monitoring, we recently secured a Collision Avoidance Program with one of the world’s largest manufacturers of material handling equipment. I’m optimistic that we will be able to further expand our industrial footprint with this feature. We are also pleased to see rapid customer adoption after the recent launch of our cloud portal for Ouster Gemini, which enables our customers to seamlessly and securely configure, manage and view all of their lidar deployments through a single unified interface. Since its launch last quarter, we already have dozens of customers managing hundreds of their sites on Gemini portal, allowing these customers to optimize their operations at anytime and anywhere. With Gemini portal, we have combined the convenience of cloud data and device management for Gemini customers for the first time, a key feature for scaling customer deployments. Gemini portal also supports Ouster BlueCity, our turnkey traffic management solution to improve traffic management and road safety for all road users. BlueCity is the first digital lidar solution to leverage a deep learning model for traffic management. And, in the first quarter, we achieved a major development milestone in our collaboration with NVIDIA to bring physical AI to cities around the world. BlueCity’s proprietary AI model has now been trained on over 4 million labeled objects collected from 800 sites encompassing diverse traffic patterns, intersection designs and environmental conditions using NVIDIA’s advanced computing technology for real-time inference at the edge. Deep learning offers significant advantages over classical algorithms, including improved generalization, persistent object detection and continuous improvement. This expands upon Ouster’s long-standing relationship with NVIDIA, including our integration with NVIDIA DRIVE for autonomous vehicles, NVIDIA Isaac for industrial and robotics and the NVIDIA Metropolis ecosystem for smart city applications. In addition to reaching new milestones and shipping new firmware and software products, our next generation L4 and Chronos custom silicon remain on-track to bring significantly improved performance, reliability and security to the Ouster product family. Recent conversations with leading automotive and industrial accounts reinforce the value of our digital lidar roadmap and we estimate these innovations will more than double our current addressable market. Finally, our solid first quarter results represent another step in our execution towards profitability. We continue to align with our long-term framework of 30% to 50% annual revenue growth, maintaining gross margin of 35% to 40%, and operating expenses at or below third quarter 2023 levels irrespective of the patent royalty. Last week, we announced the appointment of Ken Gianella as Chief Financial Officer effective May 19. Ken was most recently the CFO and COO at Quantum Corporation and has extensive operations and finance experience in the technology and communications industries with both public and private companies. I am confident he will have a positive impact on Ouster. I also want to thank Chen who will remain with Ouster in his expanded role as Senior Vice President of Strategic Finance and Treasurer for leading the finance group through this transition period. I’ll now turn the call over to Chen, who will provide more context on our first quarter financial results.