Ron Glibbery
Analyst · Benchmark
Thank you, Jim. Good morning and welcome to everyone joining today on the phone and via webcast. I'm pleased to report that Peraso had a strong start to the year, highlighted by continued growth driven by record product revenues from a combination of our millimeter wave solutions for the fixed wireless access market as well as our memory IC solute products. More specifically, total revenue in the first quarter increased 29% sequentially and 48% year-over-year with product revenue coming in at $4.9 million. Our near-term focus remains on expanding Peraso's leadership a millimeter wave fixed wireless access as wireless ISP seek to aggressively deploy multi-gigabit connectivity in the unlicensed 60 gigahertz spectrum to secure market share of a rapidly growing subscriber base. Today, there are approximately 6.7 million listed subscribers in the U.S. according to the Carmel Group which is expected to grow to 12.7 million subscribers in 2025. Looking at the historical data, the trend suggests a doubling of subscribers every 5 years. Multiple large government programs designed to support universal broadband access are also helping to fuel the market's growth, especially in rural community. In addition to the momentum with WISPs', fixed wireless access continuing to capture a growing share of the broadband market. According to latest third-party market research fixed wireless access has consistently represented over 90% of the net adds by the top broadband providers in the U.S. over the past 3 quarters. As discussed on previous calls, fixed wireless access the natural extension of 5G deployments, enabling carriers to maximize available bandwidth capacity while also offering faster, lower latency and symmetrical connectivity to customers. As further validation, T-Mobile and Verizon collectively added nearly 3.2 million fixed wireless subscribers in 2022 which represented 300% growth over 2021. The market opportunity across just these 2 leading carriers is truly substantial with each having 5G fixed wireless access service that has the potential to reach tens of millions of homes. Importantly, 5G millimeter wave fixed wireless access isn't easy to North America and is increasingly recognizing around globally, leading carriers in multiple countries including Australia, Italy and India are either actively have plans to deploy 5G fixed wireless access in the 28 and 26 gigahertz bands. We are seeing this ramp in the form of prospective engagements which increased meaningfully during the first quarter. This client interest also span the entire ecosystem for major OEMs and equipment vendors to 5G baseband providers and makers of frequency converted devices. Based in part on our conversations with several prospective customers and potential partners, we believe there's clear industry recognition that Peraso's 5G beamformer is ideal for enabling cost-effective equity needed for deployment of high-speed fixed wireless access. Turning to Slide 7; I want to share something new, the recent significant progress we've been making to expand our engagement pipeline. Keeping in mind that Peraso historically been focused on supporting a very constant group of core customers. Late last year, we began a strategic initiative to extend our commercial reach and diversify our customer base. This included the appointment of Mark Lanford, who is fundamental to our online efforts to expand Peraso's new business pipeline. And this slide is a simple diversion of one of the tools we use internally to measure both the breadth and projected economic value of our existing pipeline. Although we've removed the implied economic values that we use internally, the number of engagements indicated on this slide represent our current pipeline. Therefore, this shows that our combined full and active engagements have grown from 60 in the first quarter to 75 as of May 2023. In addition, this slide shows the progression of customer engagement phases through to preproduction. As of May 2023, you can see that increasing number of customers in the technical design process which includes comatocapture, layout, design, prototyping, test verification and early pre-production. So not only do we see the overall level of customer engagement increasing, we also see an increasing level of the status of those engagements as well. Switching gears, I want to review an important update related to our memory IC business. which, as a reminder, Peraso acquired as part of the business combination with MoSys in late 2021. This all foundry for our memory devices at TSMC. They recently informed us that the manufacturing process used to fabricate wafers for our memory ICs would be discontinued in the second half of 2021. Given these are legacy products and require a unique nonstandard process which is not easily transferable to another foundry, we've begun multiplying customers of end-of-life on our memory devices. As part of the EOL, we requested our customers to provide us with a forecast and purchase orders for last time buys by the end of 2020. We currently expect to fulfill last-time buy POs primary IC through next year 2024. That said, the timing of EOL shipments will ultimately depend on both delivery time lines from our suppliers as well as the scheduling related by our customers. Although it is too early to forecast the size and linearity of customers' last time purchase orders, we do anticipate the implemented UL to reset a potential pull forward of future demand and revenue related to our memory IC products as we fulfill customers' POs during 2024. We now turn back to our core [indiscernible] silicon business which is placed to become the primary driver of Peraso's growth. As I previously mentioned, the resilient of the fixed wireless access market has been impressive, especially considering the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. Our focus to 2023 is to further capitalize on Peraso's existing leadership position in the unlicensed 60 gigahertz segment of the fixed wireless market where risks are aggressively growing subscribers for multi-gigabit connectivity. In addition, our highly integrated 5G beam former product positions us well for emerging opportunities in the licensed fixed wireless market as well, including 5G CPE applications and 5G millimeter wave in the carriers market. Longer term, we believe there's significant incremental opportunities for our technology next-generation applications such as ARV on connectivity as well as future Wi-Fi standards. In closing, we believe we are well positioned with leading technology and a strong product portfolio in our millimeter wave business and we continue to be encouraged by the sustained momentum in the fixed wireless market. Acknowledging the current macro environment, we continue to prudently manage expenses and cash as we begin to realize the benefits from previously taken actions to streamline our organization. Looking ahead, we are focused on driving an expanding pipeline of new business engagements both domestically and abroad as well as diversification of our customer base in support of future growth. With that, I'll turn the call back to Jim to review the first quarter financials and speak to our outlook for the second quarter.