Gideon Ben-Zvi
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead
Thank you, Michal. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Valens kicked off 2025 on a high note, delivering solid performance across key metrics. We reported revenues of $16.8 million, which exceeded the top end of our guidance. GAAP gross margin for the first quarter came in at 62.9%, above the guidance and adjusted EBITDA loss was $4.3 million within the guidance range. Beyond the numbers, I’d like to highlight some of our key achievements in Q1 that reinforce my confidence in our growth potential for the near future. And I will start with our Cross-Industry Business unit, or CIB, which consists of a variety of industries, professional audio/video, industrial, machine, vision and medical. In Pro AV, last quarter, inventory digestion continued to impact our sales. But as expected, we are emerging from the bottom of the cycle. As such, we are seeing an increasing interest in our solutions, which are currently being integrated into products that are set to hit the market by the middle of 2026. The interest of our Pro AV solutions was most apparent during a couple of industry events. First, in February, we were at ISE, the industry’s most renowned international conference for innovations in video conferencing, education, digital signage, entertainment and more. There, we showcased a variety of meeting rooms setup powered by our latest chipset, the VS6320 and the VA7000. We also announced the integration of the chipset into next-gen products from top manufacturers and showcasing products from customers such as Sennheiser and Logitech. These partnerships reflect key industry trends more rooms, more displays, more video equipment, all creating more opportunities for Valens. Second, in InfoComm China in April, we were honored with a Best of Show Editor’s Choice Award in the Best Technology Application category. This award was for our innovation in USB 3 extension with our VS6320 chip and is further testament to the superiority of our technology. InfoComm China is an influential conference, and China is a large and growing market. So this sort of recognition is important as we continue to promote our chipset offering. As mentioned in previous calls, we are seeing growing adoption of our VS6320 chipset for the extension of USB 3. There are now over 70 products that have hit the market with our chip inside. Examples of recently released 6320-based products include whole technologies discovery featuring, inorganic and IPAV extenders, all of which hit the market over the last couple of months. Staying with our cross-industry business unit, I would like to discuss another industry, machine vision, where once again, a recent international conference shines the spotlight of our technology with very positive customer feedback. In March, at the Embedded World event in Nuremberg, we showcased our innovative connectivity solutions, the VA7000 and VS6320. Initially developed for the automotive and for the industries, these chipsets are already proven and mass produced and are now being repurposed to extend common use machine vision protocols. At the conference, we met with the leading players in the industry, all of whom were impressed by our technology. There is no substitute for seeing live demonstrations of our chipset and this renowned industry event was an excellent opportunity to further broaden our customer base. Our project with leading machine vision sales continue to progress, and we are confident that our A-PHY based solution will soon begin to reach this industry open. One machine vision partnership I would like to mention, which we announced just prior to the show is with RGo Robotics, and CHERRY Embedded Solutions. This collaboration integrates RGo’s advanced perception engine, Valens VA7000 chipsets and CHERRY’s Rockchip-based hardware module. The collaboration delivers unprecedented design flexibility, cost efficiency and performance for mobile machine manufacturers, enabling AI robotics applications. Valens chipsets offer a number of important advantages in this industry. First, Valens chips support the high-resolution video, increasing the precision of automated machine vision solution. Second, the Valens chips are standardized, facilitating the implementation of smaller form factor camera modules. Third, like all our other chips, Valens solutions are the most – in resilience on the market, important for ensuring 24/7 operation in the noisy electromagnetic environment of the factory floor. And fourth, due to the ability to operate over low-cost cables and connectors, these chipsets enable significant total system cost reduction. Here is what the head of BD and CHERRY had to say, and I quote, the addition of Valens VA7000 MIPI A-PHY connectivity into our portfolio opens new opportunities for our platform. The Co-Founder and CEO of RGo Robotics agreed and I quote again, our Robotics Perception Engine demands high-quality video data, and that’s exactly what Valens’ connectivity solution provides while allowing us to distance the processing unit from the sensors. Next week, at Automated Choice, we will be showcasing our machine vision solutions with partners that are adding A-PHY technologies to their platforms such as D3 embedded and Framos. In addition, our A-PHY chipset has been short-listed for the shows, innovation award. We are very proud of this industry’s recognition. In all, we continue to support our customers in bringing solutions to the market based on our VA7000 and VS6320 chipsets, and we are confident that the machine vision industry will become an even more significant source of revenues for us before long. We expect initial revenue from the end of 2026 with significant potential growth during the following years. I would like to turn now to the automotive industry. As a reminder, our opportunity in automotive is dominated by the VA7000 chipset, the first in the industry to comply with the MIPI A-PHY standard for high-speed sensor connectivity. Late last year, we announced 3 design wins with leading European OEMs solution, gaining a strong foothold for A-PHY within the OEM community. The momentum for MIPI A-PHY continued to build in Q1 2025 as we announced two significant milestones. The first is that Mobileye, a global leader in ADAS systems, selected our chips for the in-car sensor to compute connectivity infrastructure for Mobileye’s EyeQ6, high production programs underway with a group of global automotive brands. That is to say the design wins we announced last year came about through a strong collaboration with one of the most central automotive Tier 1 in the industry, Mobileye. Most importantly, in announcing this partnership, we are signaling to the OEM community that A-PHY has the backing of a key industry player like Mobileye and that they will be working with us to bring this solution to other OEMs around the world. Here is what the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Mobileye’s said, MIPI A-PHY delivers efficient and robust high-performance standardized connectivity and we look forward to working with Valens to broaden the MIPI A-PHY ecosystem and deliver this technology to more market-leading automakers. The second significant milestone that we announced is the successful interoperability with 7 vendors of A-PHY Silicon. Not that interoperability is a hallmark of any true standard. So having multiple suppliers for MIPI A-PHY can only broaden the A-PHY site or the A-PHY as I like to call it. I will make special mention to one of these A-PHY vendors, OmniVision, a global supplier of imaging solutions of automotive OEMs, which is integrating A-PHY directly inside the sensor. After Sony, OmniVision is the second major company to announce this type of integration, which is only possible because A-PHY is a standard. Heng Fan, Senior Director of design at OmniVision said, integrating MIPI A-PHY directly into our sensors provides significant value for our OEM customers and partners. I would like to take a moment to discuss the growth of MIPI A-PHY in China. We are hearing that the Chinese automotive ecosystem is rapidly adopting the A-PHY standard from a variety of local A-PHY silicon vendors to Tier 2 and Tier 1 suppliers designing around this specification to significant interest from OEMs in this technology. Of course, China is unlike any other country in the world. They are fast to adopt new technologies, but there are also a series of regulations that we are required to adhere to when attempting to penetrate this market. To address some of these challenges, we have partnered with a local Chinese firm, ESWIN Computing to present Chinese automakers the opportunity to source locally manufactured production-ready MIPI A-PHY chipsets for both sensor and display connectivity. This partnership allows us to access the large and growth MIPI A-PHY business opportunity that exists in the Chinese market. Additionally, with regards to our activities in China, we were proud to display our A-PHY technology at the Auto Shanghai Conference at the end of April. At our booth, we unveiled a number of A-PHY demonstrations with major players in the automotive industry. First, we had Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride for evaluation platform with A-PHY connectivity. Second, we had Chinese Tier 1 supply beside – with A-PHY surround system. Third, we had the RGo Robotics journeys platform with A-PHY and finally, an ADAS reference design with Sigmaar based on A-PHY. It’s clear that the momentum around A-PHY continues to build. We continue to participate in several evaluation processes at various stages with multiple OEMs. With that, I will turn the call to Guy to discuss our financial performance in more detail.