Nautilus ( NAUT ) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

fool.com · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Image source: The Motley Fool. DATEFeb. 26, 2026, 8:30 a.m. ETCALL PARTICIPANTSChief Executive Officer — Sujal PatelChief Scientific Officer — Parag MallickChief Financial Officer — Anna MowryNeed a quote from a Motley Fool analyst? Email [email protected]TAKEAWAYSOperating Expenses -- $15.4 million for the quarter, down 23% due to lower R&D and administrative costs, reflecting disciplined spending.Annual R&D Expenses -- $41.1 million in 2025, a 19% decrease driven primarily by a $4.5 million reduction in lab and equipment costs, $2.4 million in salaries and benefits savings from the Q1 reduction in force, and $1.9 million lower stock-based compensation.Annual General & Administrative Expenses -- $25.7 million, down 17% with declines mainly from $3.9 million lower stock-based compensation and $1.3 million in reduced professional service fees.Cash Position -- $156.1 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments at quarter-end.Cash Burn -- $50.2 million in 2025, an improvement from $57.8 million in 2024 due to lower headcount and development costs.2026 Financial Guidance -- Operating expenses projected to rise 15%-20%, primarily to support platform development, Early Access Program expansion, and commercial readiness; expected cash burn is $65 million-$70 million, with a cash runway through 2027.Revenue Outlook -- CFO Anna Mowry said, "I'm looking at a target of closer to, say, $0.5 million for 2026," primarily from The Michael J. Fox Foundation grant and a handful of early access customers; instrument-related revenue is anticipated in 2027.Early Access Program Launch -- Rolled out in January, featuring the Tau proteoform assay, shifted earlier than planned to advance partner engagement; initial customer feedback is described as "encouraging."Voyager Instrument Debut -- Revealed at US HUPO 2026, marking the first public demonstration to the proteomics community and generating highly positive researcher interest.Proteoform Pipeline Expansion -- Collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for alpha-synuclein proteoforms in Parkinson's disease, funded at $1.6 million ($1.2 million to Nautilus), to run 18 months starting in 2026.Broadscale Assay Advances -- Achieved largest-scale experiments to date and made technical progress with a new flow cell configuration, supporting plans to expand the affinity reagent library.Next Commercialization Steps -- CEO Sujal Patel said, "We expect to initiate our commercial launch in late 2026 by opening the Voyager platform for preorders with instrument installations at customer sites beginning in early '27."Sales Infrastructure -- As of the call, Nautilus has "absolutely 0 sales capacity" with commercial hiring to begin this quarter in a targeted manner ahead of broader rollout.SUMMARYNautilus Biotechnology (NAUT 16.61%) highlighted continued operational efficiencies, a strong cash position, and new strategic collaborations supporting the expansion of its proteomics platform. Evidence from early collaborations was characterized as demonstrating biological insights that are unattainable with conventional methods, and initial external customer feedback to both the Voyager instrument and new Tau assay is favorable. Management expects a modest $0.5 million in revenue for 2026, mainly grant-funded, and anticipates significant commercial scaling beginning 2027 with the ramp of instrument deployments and broader assay availability.Parag Mallick stated that proteoform-level analysis is now showing clear disease severity and regional differences in Tau biology, which are undetectable with standard proteomics technologies.Resource allocation in 2026 will focus on broadening application areas beyond neurodegeneration, including oncology, with the goal of launching an oncology-focused proteoform assay into early access in the second half of 2026.Sujal Patel confirmed that general availability at launch will include the Voyager instrument, Tau proteoform assay, and a second proteoform assay, with broadscale assay functionality targeted for release in the first half of 2027.INDUSTRY GLOSSARYIterative Mapping: Nautilus' proprietary methodology for high-throughput molecular analysis that quantitatively profiles single intact protein molecules across broad and targeted proteome applications.Proteoform: Distinct molecular forms of a protein resulting from genetic variation, alternative splicing, or post-translational modifications, which can influence disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets.Broadscale Assay: Assays designed for comprehensive proteome profiling across thousands of proteins, as opposed to targeted assays focusing on specific proteoforms.Full Conference Call TranscriptSujal Patel: Thanks, Ji-Yon, and thank you all for joining us today. Before turning to the quarter, I want to briefly remind everyone of what we're building and why we believe it matters. Nautilus was founded to address a long-standing challenge in life sciences, the lack of technologies capable of comprehensively measuring the proteome with the sensitivity, scale and reproducibility needed to fully understand biology and disease. Our proprietary Iterative Mapping methodology is designed to analyze single intact protein molecules at scale and generate highly reproducible digital protein counts. This methodology is delivered through the Nautilus platform, an integrated system of instrumentation, consumables and software, which can support both broad-scale proteome analysis and targeted proteoform characterization on a single platform.Over time, we believe this data foundation will unlock new biological insight, integrate more effectively with other omics modalities, support next-generation AI-driven discovery in human health and medicine and ultimately help accelerate the development of new therapeutics and diagnostics. With that context, Q4 marked a strong close to 2025 as we continue to make tangible progress towards commercialization, deepen external validation and build momentum with leading research institutions. A key highlight of that progress was our presence at the US Human Proteome Organization Conference, or US HUPO in St.Louis, Missouri this week, where we publicly unveiled the Nautilus Voyager instrument in dramatic fashion to a large audience of influential researchers and prospective future customers, providing the proteomics community with its first tangible view of the instrument we've been building. The response was highly positive and reinforced the strong interest we're seeing from researchers seeking a new class of protein measurement technology. Importantly, when designing Voyager, we were intentional about creating an instrument that looked and felt different, one that conveyed sophistication and innovation while still being approachable and easy to use. We wanted an instrument that reflected the ambition of what we're building while also fitting naturally into modern research environments.And the feedback we received confirmed that this balance resonated strongly with the community. Building on the capabilities of the Voyager instrument and supported by the encouraging tau data we've seen emerging from our early collaborators, we elected to launch our Early Access Program for Iterative Mapping in January earlier than previously communicated. This milestone represents a meaningful step in Nautilus' transition from development to active customer engagement, enabling partners to submit samples, receive data and provide feedback in a streamlined manner. Initial customer response has been encouraging.And while these early engagements are not intended to drive near-term revenue, they are designed to enable real biological discovery, support publications and grant applications and ensure our workflows and data outputs align closely with customers' needs, an approach consistent with how many transformative life sciences platforms has successfully entered the market. The Early Access Program will begin with our Tau proteoform assay and establish a foundation for future assay expansion covering additional proteoform targets and broad-scale applications. Importantly, we believe this early access launch also reflects a forthcoming diversity of assays for our platform beyond tau. For example, in late January, we announced a collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and The Michael J.Fox Foundation focused on alpha-synuclein proteoforms in Parkinson's disease. This MJFF-funded project, $1.6 million in total with $1.2 million coming to Nautilus, combines Professor Hilal Lashuel's deep expertise in neurodegeneration with Nautilus' ability to measure proteins and their functional variants at the single molecule resolution. Understanding alpha-synuclein proteoforms is a priority for MJFF, and we believe this collaboration is a strong example of how Iterative Mapping can be extended to additional high-value proteoform targets and disease areas over time. On the technology front, we continue to make strong progress as we moved into the later stages of our broad-scale assay configuration change. This work is designed to better align with our expanding probe library and improve overall platform performance.We're now seeing the first data from the updated assay on new chips and early readouts are encouraging. Parag will walk through these technical details in more depth, and I'll return later to discuss how this progress informs our expectations for 2026. Taken together, these developments reflect steady progress towards commercialization grounded in real samples, real data, real customer engagement and increasing external validation. Throughout 2025, we remain disciplined in how we invested our resources, meaningfully reducing expenses while continuing to advance our most important technical and strategic priorities. I want to recognize our scientific and engineering teams for their continued focus and execution. With that, I'll turn the call over to Parag.Parag Malli