Ronald Glibbery
Analyst · Benchmark
Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, and welcome to everyone on the phone and the webcast. We appreciate you joining us for today's conference call. We had a solid and productive second quarter marked by continued market momentum and growing demand for Peraso's industry- leading mmWave technology. Revenue from our mmWave products increased 45% sequentially and more than 200% year-over-year as we continue to ramp shipments to an expanding customer base and across multiple targeted end markets. Further highlighting sustained market leadership of our 60 gigahertz solutions, we achieved a significant milestone having surpassed 2 million cumulative shipments of our mmWave devices. Complementing the growth of our mmWave products, we have continued to exercise disciplined cost management, resulting in lower run rate operating expenses and significant year-over-year improvement in our operating results for the quarter. Looking at Slide 4. Fixed wireless access continues to represent the largest and fastest-growing market opportunity for mmWave technology due to its unique ability to deliver reliable, high-speed and low-latency broadband connectivity to homes and businesses without the cost burden associated with fiber infrastructure. Throughout the first half of the year, we have already -- we have seen a steady and broadening recovery in both market demand and customer orders for our fixed wireless access solutions. Highlighting our most recently announced win in July, we announced one of our leading partners, Tachyon Networks, selected Peraso's mmWave modules to power its latest outdoor 60 gigahertz fixed wireless solution. Our advanced mmWave module enabled Tachyon solution to deliver fiber-class speeds at a breakthrough price point, supporting rapid broadband deployments in both dense urban and rural markets. More specifically, their latest solution offers gigabit connectivity, has an over 3-kilometer range and is compatible with Tachyon's existing TNA-300 Series. With the ability to support up to 48 client connections per sector, this win and our ongoing collaborative partnership with Tachyon Networks are a testament to Peraso's recognized technology leadership for high-performance mmWave solutions. Today, we remain engaged with numerous wireless Internet service providers that are utilizing Peraso's mmWave's technology in proof of concepts for future fixed wireless access deployment. We expect these and additional new opportunities to contribute to our sustained future growth as we convert successful proof of concepts into new initial production orders. Now turning to Slide 5. In addition to capitalizing on the recent momentum with the fixed wireless access market, we continue to be excited about the growing interest and market opportunity for mmWave technology in next-generation tactical communications and military defense applications. Following a series of early prospective discussions and initial engagement with potential customers and ecosystem partners, we have become increasingly confident that the inherent characteristics of our mmWave technology are well matched to solve a number of critical communication challenges encountered in tactical defense environments. As discussed on our previous call, we demonstrated our first commercial proof point earlier this year with a strategic contract with a specialized defense contractor to deliver mission-critical wireless application to global military and defense forces. We have since been working in close collaboration with this lead customer to refine a jointly created and deployable system solution for a first-of-its- kind tactical defense application. In June, we announced a significant milestone with the delivery of initial production shipments of our advanced 60 gigahertz wireless solutions in support of this jointly developed solution. More specifically, this new deployable system solution leverages Peraso's technology to provide heightened communication and situational awareness to help safeguard both military personnel and noncombatants, such as medics and humanitarian responders operating in high-risk environments. As a company, we are proud to be part of enabling this next-generation tactical communication solution designed to mitigate and prevent unnecessary human casualties. This notable win is also further validation of the performance and versatility of our mmWave technology, helping to establish Peraso's commercial presence and accelerate our strategic expansion in the broader tactical defense communications market. With increasing awareness of its inherent performance attributes and advanced capabilities, including ultra-low latency, high reliability and stealthy multi-gigabit data transmission, we believe that 60 gigahertz mmWave technology is poised to gain substantial market traction across a broad span of mission-critical applications. As just one prominent example from our previously mentioned early discussions with prospective future customers and ecosystem partners, we've recently observed heightened interest around leveraging the benefits of mmWave for various drone-related applications. More generally, we are highly motivated by both the significant and growing commercial potential of mission-critical applications as well as the associated opportunities to contribute to future positive real-world impacts. We believe Peraso's advanced mmWave technology and commercially proven solutions represent a unique strategic advantage that we can capitalize on and continue to scale over time. As such, we remain committed to expanding our market presence, collaboration with ecosystem partners and customer engagement in the tactical defense communications market over the coming quarters. Move to Slide 6. Although we traditionally dedicate a majority of our quarterly calls and commentary to updates on our two largest target end markets, I want to take the opportunity on today's call to briefly highlight both the versatility of our mmWave products and the incremental growth opportunities that exist in adjacent end markets. Kindly note, we generally separate and refer to our collective target adjacent and end markets as two distinct categories. The first being transportation and the second category we call professional video delivery. While the typical revenue contribution from both these categories is smaller relative to fixed wireless access business, we do have a combination of current or recurring level customers sales as well as active engagements in both these adjacent markets. Having provided that background as context, the most important takeaway is that mmWave technology delivers a uniquely compelling value proposition for overcoming complex connectivity challenge across diverse applications in both our target and adjacent markets. It's largely the same inherent high performance and advanced capabilities that mmWave brings to fixed wireless and tactical communications. These same attributes make mmWave a critical enabler and frequently the only practical economic solution for applications requiring robust high data rate connectivity. As a recent example, further highlighting mmWave's unique capabilities and value proposition in adjacent markets, in June, we received and have since shipped a production order of our 60 gigahertz wireless solution in support of a new customer's wireless video system for classroom environments. This customer chose to incorporate Peraso's 60 gigahertz wireless mmWave technology to enable its solution for the reliable delivery of high-performance, low-latency video and high-density school environments while also operating completely independent of schools frequently congested existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. Also notable, this was our first-ever production shipment in support of a solution specifically tailored for education and therefore, reflected an expansion of our served addressable market. Looking now at Slide 7. Borrowing from the layout that we utilized to show our overall pipeline in previous quarters, we recently introduced this new pipeline slide in order to specifically track and visualize the progression of our customer base over time. Noting the time frame between the 2 respective funnels from Q4 2023 to Q2 2025, representing approximately 18 months, we are very pleased with the substantial progress we have made towards expanding our customer base over this relatively short period, especially when viewed in the context of how time and resource-intensive it can often be to acquire a single new customer and then successfully advance engagement on a specific program for initial evaluation through the design process and ultimately see a customer's finished product be released to production. Although doubling our number of customers that are now in production from 7 to 14, hopefully speaks for itself. There's another potentially more subtle takeaway that I want to highlight. In addition to successfully attracting and securing new customers, this slide also demonstrates our ability to effectively advance a growing number of funnel opportunities and program engagements across an increasingly diverse group of end market applications. Turning to Slide 8. This is another view of our pipeline over the same 18-month period ending in June, but shown in terms of the number of SKUs or individual device models, irrespective of whether an individual SKU is associated with a new or existing customer. The overall trajectory is definitively positive and similar to the prior slide also demonstrates our substantial progress on advancing a sizable number of engagement opportunities and to finish customer products released into production. The other two takeaways that I want to briefly highlight are, first, the number of customer SKUs that are now currently in production have increased 90% over the last 18 months. This metric alone reflects a dramatically more diversified base of existing products with the potential for revenue contribution. Lastly, as of quarter end, we had 7 additional engagements in the preproduction stage, representing potential incremental revenue contribution in the relatively near future as customers release these products into production. In summary, we are pleased with our demonstrated growth and market momentum through the first half of the year as we continue to ramp production shipments of our mmWave solutions in support of an expanding and increasingly diverse customer base. Combined with our ongoing commitment to disciplined expense management, we have meaningfully improved our operating results and significantly reduced our quarterly cash burn. Looking forward, we have good visibility into near-term orders for mmWave solutions with an existing backlog that supports continued sequential growth. In fact, we currently expect record quarterly revenue contribution from our mmWave products in the third quarter. Having said that, we continue to be diligently focused on converting our healthy pipeline of existing customer engagements into new design-ins and incremental production orders in support of sustained growth in 2026 and beyond. I'll now turn the call back over to Jim to review the financials and provide our current revenue outlook for the third quarter of 2025.