Q4 2023 iSpecimen Inc Earnings Call

Participants

Phil Carlson; IR; KCSA Strategic Communications

Tracy Curley; CEO; iSpecimen Inc.

Eric Langlois; Chief Revenue Officer; iSpecimen Inc.

Presentation

Operator

So good day, everyone, and welcome to ice specimens Full Year 2020 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. This conference call is being recorded and a replay of today's call will be available on the Investor Relations section of ICE specimens website and will remain posted for the next 30 days.
I will now hand the call over to Phil Carlson, Investor Relations for introductions and the reading of the Safe Harbor statement. If there are any questions for the management following the call, please email ice specimen at TCSA. dot com. Please go ahead.

Phil Carlson

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to especially into 2023 and full year results conference call. With us on today's call is Tracy Crowley, Chief Executive Officer, and Eric Langan, Chief Revenue Officer.
Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call contains certain forward-looking statements from our management made within the meaning of Section 27 A. of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21 E. of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 as amended.
Concerning future events, words such as may, should, projects, expects, intends, plans, believes, anticipates, hopes, estimates, and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Company's Form 10 K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, filed with the SEC. Copies of this document are available on the SEC's website at www.SEC.com. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements or revisions or changes after the date of this call, except as required by law.
Now it is my pleasure to introduce Tracy currently, Chief Executive Officer. Tracy, please go ahead.

Tracy Curley

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. Throughout 2023, we work diligently to streamline our operations, reduce costs and right-size our business. By driving operational efficiency throughout the Company, we are increasingly able to realize the true value of the spectrum and marketplace quarter over quarter and even month to month.
On today's call, I will discuss how these ongoing improvements has strengthened. I specimens position operationally at what we believe to be the forefront of the bio specimen procurement market.
I will then turn the call over to our Chief Revenue Officer, Eric Lin growth will address the advancements we made in 2023 and the revenue enhancing initiatives for sequencing, which has launched a higher-margin revenue stream price investments.
Finally, I will review our financial results for the 2023 year end at the beginning of Q4 2023. And in preparation for 2024, we completed a top-to-bottom review of the entire business and concluded it focusing on specific initiatives capable contributing to our top-line growth would provide a clear path to future success to accomplish our goals. We launched several important marketing initiatives and realigned our sales efforts, several of which helped the company generate $1.7 million in revenue in December, the strongest sales month in our history. Also encouraging for the fourth quarter, we have fashion over $3.1 million in specimens. Unfortunately, Q4 revenue was negatively impacted by onetime customer credits of approximately $545,000, which reduced our GAAP basis revenue. This was due to our adoption of a more robust returns process.
As we continue to streamline our operations and focus on our core business, we believe we are well positioned to capitalize on these operational achievements to scale our proven bio specimen procurement platform and achieve improved levels of growth throughout the remainder of 2024, its driver of our record December sales results and our most promising initiatives for continued top line growth has been our next day quote program, which we launched in September 2023. Through this initiative, we believe we have successfully unlocked the underlying potential of the assessment marketplace, which we expect to yield strong financial results for the Company going forward.
In the fourth quarter, our first full quarter had a mixed stay closed. We significantly reduced the sales time line by improving the conversion of quotes to purchase orders, which in turn led to an increased sales momentum as well as a stronger backlog. As a result of the utilization of mixed quotes. During the fourth quarter, we achieved a 39% increase in conversion of quotes to purchase orders compared to the average from all prior quarters in 2023.
The success of this program can also be seen when looking at our sales breakdown in the fourth quarter where 32% of our total sales were attributable the next day program surpassing our internal projection. Based on the impact this program has had on our sales from customer and supplier feedback and the proven capabilities of our platform underlying technology, we believe mixed state quotes will increasingly contribute to sales.
Our goal is to steadily build this program so that next day, quote, eventually accounts for a significant percentage of our total sales. We believe we can achieve these results with the rollout of our supplier contract refresh program for new initiatives where we contract with our suppliers to improve their engagement with us. In doing so, we are mining comprehensive information from our suppliers, including detailed capabilities, standard minimum pricing, and I periodically scheduled a brief fresh list of their inventory. This program is enabling us to provide even more information than ever before to our customers on our platform, thereby greatly increasing the number of samples available via mixed workloads in 2023 we identified and implemented at four key supplier sites are embedded coordinator program, assigning dedicated, a specimen professionals charged with supporting and expediting the fulfillment of customer orders and ultimately driving increased revenue. We had expected to roll out more sites in 2023, but paused the program due to preparations related to our supplier contract refresh program, embedding a coordinator aside for certain business criteria are determined to be sustainable, both hand-in-hand with the objective of the supplier contract refresh program, and we are prepared to advance our embedded equivalent program in 2024 as we refresh contracts with suppliers.
Finally, we have reevaluated the quality of our supplier network to maintain our leadership position and support the evolving needs of our research customers we shifted our attention from quantity to quality If not, the quality wasn't historically being emphasized. Simply recognizing that maintaining the highest quality supplier network possible is paramount to our long-term success even if it means reducing the size of our overall network throughout 2023. In addition to finding new high quality supplier agreements and expanding the existing supplier relationships, we began identifying suppliers that no longer meet our business and technology criteria. Throughout 2024, we plan to terminate contracts with suppliers where our criteria are not being met. At the same time, we continue to expand our network to offer high demand, specimen cancer, hematology, cardiovascular, autoimmune, neurological, endocrine metabolic, any actions, disease categories among others.
I would like to now turn the call over to Eric Lambros, Chief Revenue Officer, to discuss the advancements that have strengthened the ICE specialty marketplace and provide a status update on our revenue enhancing initiative for sequencing as well as an update of the sales and marketing initiatives for 2024, all of which are expected to drive long-term growth for our specimen. Eric, please go ahead.

Eric Langlois

Thank you Tracey. First, the technology recap, we've been strategically focused on leveraging the technology advancements we've made in the first half of 2023 to unlock the full potential of our core business, which we're now seeing in our operational and financial results. The technology efforts consisted of upgrading search function functionality, improving the user interface, increasing automation and enhanced matchmaking. The matchmaking module allows us to automatically match the buy-side to a project based on the specific criteria paired with the site capabilities. This module, in particular, when combined with our next-day quote initiative, it had immense impact on the speed of our sales funnel, allowing our sales team to move opportunities to quote more rapidly, leading to a higher win rate. Our ability to consistently innovate and improve the assessment marketplace feel makes our platform one of the premier solutions for connecting researchers and providers. In addition, these advancements have allowed us to effectively roll out and revenue-enhancing programs.
Finally, we have also enhanced our curator remnant program, which has allowed us to update our supplier as well as the test and analyte codes we offer in order to locate a greater array of specimen. Importantly, we began seeing improved results from our revenue line of business in Q4 2023, and that has carried over into Q1 2024 next cancer sequencing, one of the most impactful and visionary revenue initiatives with our cancer sequencing program. In addition to having the potential elevate Isetan the leadership position in our industry, it also offers the opportunity to significantly change the future of cancer research through our cancer sequencing program, we can provide cancer researchers with on-demand access to sequence bio specimens that enable them to advance their research. There is a tremendous value in having extensive access to MUK. mutation characterized formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded cancer tumor tissues as these characterized tumor tissues are extremely difficult to find and obtain. While this program has been well received by our customers, the sales cycle has taken longer than we had originally anticipated for commercial team is currently making the necessary marketing and sales adjustments to ensure the level of detail and follow up required to secure and grow our sequencing business in a timely manner. These efforts are beginning to achieve traction, as evidenced by the increased momentum in customer convert conversations as new budget and research projects were initiated at the beginning of 2024, launching a new product line cost effectively requires ongoing new business development, which takes consistency and patient before 2023. In Q1 2024, our prospecting efforts have secured a pipeline of approximately $1.5 million in new business opportunities comprised of both existing and new customers. We've investigated 55 projects which have resulted in 25 confirmed orders. Many of the projects that have not resulted in a win. I've been the direct result of being unable to find that particular marker is being requested. The overall pricing and value proposition of the program have been very well accepted by our customers.
Now for our sales and marketing initiatives for 2024, can you continue to scale? We've launched a new sales strategy to maximize new business opportunities in 2024, we've moved to a team and line of business oriented sales structure with key account management being a primary focus. Five global zones have been created each zone comprised of an account director and specialists in remnant and banked specimens. These all teams are associated with our line of business teams internally, which fosters better communication internally from marketing through fulfillment also giving accounts more focused and specialized attention. Both team members are properly incentivized to focus on closing purchase orders and growing key accounts rather than fulfillment, which is the domain of our operations team.
Most recently, we entered a pilot program with TriNet Life Sciences, a provider of digital pathology laboratory and AI workflow and automation solutions for hospitals, pathology, diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies initially focusing on a substantial, a substantial subset of solid tumor type resource, utilizing tremendous AI powered automated digital pathology solutions. This partnership is expected to help standardize an enhanced tissue sample evaluation, furthering our ability to support our research customers with the highest quality tissue samples available today, we're currently conducting a pilot test to screen a cohort specimens next steps are technology and media integration, sales and marketing cross-training, and finally, operational steps to ensure continuity. This relationship will allow assessment. Sales and marketing teams highlight a focus on enhanced quality for our tissue customers has also allowed sales personnel to offer cost and time effective add-on services for tissue related projects, which helps address important limitations.
Tracy, I will now hand it over to you.

Tracy Curley

Thanks, Eric. Turning to our results for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2023, revenue was approximately $9.93 million compared to approximately $10.4 million for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022. The decrease in revenue for the 2023 fiscal year was primarily due to a decrease of 2,938 specimens or 11%. We expect an account from 27,503 specimen during the year ended December 31st, 2022 to 24,565 investments during the year ended December 31st, 2023.
The effect of the decrease in specimen count was partially offset by a change in the specimen mix, which resulted in the average selling price per specimen increasing by approximately $26 or 7% from approximately $378 per specimen during the year ended December 31st, 2022, to approximately $404 per specimen during the year ended December 31st, 2023 would like further color regarding the full year results.
During our Q1 2023 earnings call, we expressed our concern about what we perceived as a general economic uncertainty in our industry and an overall downturn in business. These concerns were realized as our business was negatively impacted in Q2 2023, despite the fact that we recognized record levels of opportunities and close, we experienced lower than expected conversion of quotes to purchase orders in Q1 2023, which in turn left us with a much lower backlog of purchase orders at the beginning and early portion of Q2 2023 compared to prior quarters.
As a result, we recorded approximately $1.63 million in revenue for Q2 2023. The average quarterly revenue recorded for the other three quarters of 2023 was approximately $2.77 million. Cost of revenue increased by approximately $63,000 or 1% from approximately $4.76 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, to approximately $4.82 million for the year ended December 31, 2023. Although there was an 11% decrease in our number of specimens a session during the year ended December 31st, 2023, over the same prior year period, the average cost per specimen increased by 13% from approximately $173 per specimen for the year ended December 31, 2022, to approximately $196 per specimen for the year ended December 31st, 2023.
For the year ended December 31st, 2023, we increased our cash spend for technology to approximately $5.39 million from approximately $4.45 million for the same period in the prior year. The increase in spend for the year ended December 31st, 2023 compared to the same prior year's period is directly related to the record level of technology investments in 2023, which we believe has enabled the continued advancement of our online marketplace to be innovative in our industry. This spend was significantly greater at approximately $3.4 million for the first half of 2023.
For the year ended December 31st, 2023, this cash outlay was comprised of approximately $3.77 million of capitalized internally developed software and approximately $1.62 million of technology expense. We were not able to capitalize and therefore classified as technology expense. The remainder of technology expense for the year ended December 31st, 2023 was comprised of approximately $1.95 million of noncash amortization related to internally developed software and approximately $142,000 related to stock compensation expense.
Total technology fee expense for the year ended December 31, 2023, was approximately $3.57 million compared to approximately $2.66 million for the same period in the prior year.
Sales and marketing expenses increased by approximately $511,000 or 15% from approximately $3.45 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, to approximately $3.96 million for the year ended December 31, 2023.
The increase was primarily attributable to increases in payroll and related expenses of approximately $325,000, external marketing expenses of approximately $201,000, and general and operating expenses related to sales and marketing of approximately $6,000, which was partially offset by a decrease in advertising and promotion expense or approximately $41,000.
General and administrative expenses decreased by approximately $998,000 or 14% from approximately $6.93 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 to approximately $594 million for the year ended December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2023, our specimen had approximately $2.34 million of cash and approximately $2.66 million of available-for-sale securities with maturities ranging from one to six months for combined total of approximately $5.01 million compared to a cash balance of approximately $15.31 million as of December 31st, 2022.
For 2023, the company had a cash burn of approximately $10.31 million, primarily comprised of approximately $5.58 million of operating expenses and of approximately $4.73 million for capitalized development of the specimen marketplace technology and our sequencing data, we have plans for significantly lower levels of operating expenses and capitalized investments in 2020 for the deliberate investments this past year in our technology and sequencing initiatives, coupled with our inability to generate increased levels of revenue and negatively impacted our cash and cash equivalent balances during the year.
Throughout the year and primarily on September 6, 2023, the company executed a reduction in workforce, resulting in an estimated reduction in monthly compensation costs of approximately 29% and additional expenditure reductions estimated to be over 50% of mix with expenditures for the remainder of the year after streamline operations and rationalizing resources to focus on key market opportunities.
As a result, the Company experienced a significant decrease in expenditures during the second half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2023. The best way to articulate the impact of this is to understanding the quarterly cash burn for 2023. For Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4, the quarterly cash burn was approximately $4.29 million, $2.81 million, $2.55 million, and $657,000, respectively. As we focus on the 2024 strategy and budgeting process, we have been mindful of our cash position and continue to have a goal of being cash flow positive in 2024.
On March fifth, 2024, we entered into an at-the-market offering agreements whereby we may issue and sell shares of our common stock from time to time on the open market with an aggregate offering price of up to $1.5 million through our shelf registration statement. We may seek additional funding through public equity or other sources to fund further capital investments or for general corporate purposes.
I would like to thank everyone again for joining us on today's call and for your continued support. We have achieved great progress operationally in 2023, and we believe we are on track to advance our new revenue generating sequencing opportunity in 2024. And with a stronger operational infrastructure in place. We look forward to updating you on our progress on our Q1 2024 results call during our quarterly conference call. It is anticipated to take place in May 2024. With that, thank you and have a great day.

Operator

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.