Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript May 11, 2026

Peraso Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.2 EPS, expectations were $-0.18.

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to Peraso Inc.’s First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, Monday, May 11, 2026. I would now like to turn the call over to your host for today’s conference call, Mr. Jim Sullivan. Please go ahead.

James Sullivan: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today’s conference call to discuss Peraso’s first quarter 2026 financial results. I’m Jim Sullivan, CFO of Peraso, and joining me today is Ron Glibbery, our CEO. Today, after the market closed, we issued a press release and related Form 8-K, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The press release and Form 8-K are available on Peraso’s website at www.perasoinc.com under the Investor Relations section. There is also a slide presentation that we will be using in conjunction with today’s call that may be accessed through the webcast link on the Investor Relations website. As a reminder, comments made during today’s conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended.

All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed as forward-looking. Peraso advises caution in reliance on forward-looking statements. These statements include, without limitation, any projections of revenue, margins, expenses, non-GAAP gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating expenses, adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net loss, cash flows or other financial items, including anticipated cost savings as well as any statements concerning the expected development, performance and market share or competitive performance of our products or technologies. Any statements regarding the sufficiency of the company’s capital resources and its ability to continue as a going concern, any statements regarding customer demand forecast and concentration risk and any statements related to prospective future financing arrangements or capital transactions and evaluation or pursuit of strategic alternatives.

All forward-looking statements are based on information available to Peraso on the date hereof. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Peraso’s actual results to differ materially from those implied by the forward-looking statements, including unexpected changes in the company’s business. More detailed information about these risk factors and additional risk factors are set forth in Peraso’s public filings with the SEC. Peraso expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Additionally, the company’s press release and management statements during this conference call will include discussions of certain measures and financial information in terms of GAAP and non-GAAP.

With respect to remarks on today’s call involving non-GAAP numbers, unless otherwise indicated, referenced amounts exclude stock-based compensation expense and the change in fair value of warrant liabilities. These non-GAAP financial measures, definitions and the reconciliation of the differences between them and comparable GAAP measures are presented in our press release and related Form 8-K, which provide additional details. For those of you unable to listen to the entire call at this time, a recording will be available on the Investor Relations page of our website. I’ll now turn the call over to our CEO, Ron Glibbery, for his prepared remarks. Ron?

Q&A Session

Ronald Glibbery: Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, and welcome to everyone joining us on the call and webcast. We appreciate you taking the time to be here today. First quarter results were generally in line with our published revised expectations with revenue negatively impacted by the anticipated delay of shipment of a sizable order, which represented a significant portion of our first quarter backlog due to material availability from one of our Asia-based suppliers. We shipped this order in the current quarter, and we have since also begun taking steps to reduce our future reliance on any single supplier. While our top line results reflected this headwind, during the quarter, we continued to maintain active customer engagement across all of our target end markets, including advancing multiple new opportunities for our 60 gigahertz technology in tactical communications and Edge AI applications.

Turning to Slide 4. Fixed wireless access continues to represent the largest and most mature end market for our 60 gigahertz solutions. Although a combination of current market dynamics, including the shortage and related increase in pricing of memory chips are contributing to subdued near-term demand and purchase order activity from existing customers, we believe that we remain well positioned to benefit from a recovery in orders once market conditions improve. As highlighted on our previous conference call, in March, we secured a notable new customer win with MikroTik’s launch of its next-generation 60 gigahertz nRay point-to-point product at Mobile World Congress, incorporating Peraso technology. With MikroTik’s global reach and market share across a broad number of wireless Internet service providers, we believe this newly introduced product will result in incremental fixed wireless access deployments using our industry-leading 60 gigahertz technology.

More broadly, our fully-integrated DUNE platform continues to resonate with operators that are pursuing high-performance, but also cost-effective wireless deployments in challenging urban environments. The combination of multi-gigabit throughput, low power, long range and point-to-multipoint capability remains a compelling alternative to traditional backhaul approaches. As such, we are continuously supporting a range of proof-of-concept evaluations with wireless ISPs worldwide, which we believe have the potential to translate into additional production orders for existing fixed wireless customers. Moving to Slide 5. The interest level in 60 gigahertz technology for tactical communications continues to gain momentum, and we increasingly see our expansion into this market as potentially significant contributor to Peraso’s future growth, although the timing and magnitude of orders remains uncertain.

The opportunity in tactical communications stems from the fundamental attributes of our millimeter wave (sic) [ mmWave ] technology, including narrow beam directional links, dynamic beam steering, oxygen attenuation and utilizing unlicensed spectrum. Together, these attributes provide for inherently stealthy communications, low probability of detection, low probability of interception and robust anti-jamming performance, making 60 gigahertz uniquely well-suited for mission-critical applications. On today’s increasingly modernized battlefield, the need for secure and clandestine communications naturally spawns numerous different send and receive scenarios, including forward operating bases and surveillance, vehicle-to-vehicle, air-to-ground and ship-to-shore communications.

After extensive collaboration to evaluate potential applications for our technology within tactical communications, in March, we achieved a notable milestone with the announcement of InTACT as a defense contractor customer. Our initial engagement with this customer began in 2024 and resulted in a jointly-developed system solution for enhanced situational awareness on the battlefield. This novel deployable solution continues to generate positive feedback and is scheduled for additional planned field trials in the August time frame. Separately, as part of our customer announcement in March, we disclosed that InTACT selected Peraso’s 60 gigahertz mmWave technology for its next-generation Drone Identification Friend or Foe system. For additional context, this is a purpose-built solution designed for highly-contested electronic warfare environments.

It enables secure real-time mutual authentication between friendly drones and ground forces, allowing counter drone systems and operators to quickly distinguish friend from foe. Peraso’s integrated beamforming wireless transceivers provide the low-power, highly directional connectivity that’s essential for maintaining stealth and reliable communication in dense battlefield conditions. In mid-April, we delivered initial limited production shipments of our optimized modules in support of InTACT’s next-generation drone platform. This expanded engagement with our lead customer further reinforces our view that tactical communication represents a significant long-term market opportunity. Our announced collaboration has also served to increase the visibility and awareness of 60 gigahertz technology and the advantage that it brings to mission-critical tactical defense applications.

In recent months, we’ve been approached by additional prospective customers and partners seeking to explore how Peraso’s 60 gigahertz mmWave technology could be incorporated into their future product road maps. Needless to say, we’re excited about our growing momentum in tactical communications. Turning to Slide 6. In addition to tactical communications, we continue to identify and be actively engaged on prospective growth opportunities in other areas outside of our core fixed wireless access market. We have frequently referred to these areas as adjacent markets because they are seemingly diverse and not easily grouped into a common end markets category. That said, a majority of the adjacent opportunities we are targeting today involve the application of Edge AI in areas such as last-mile delivery, autonomous vehicles and drones.

One specific example that I highlighted on our previous conference call was our announced collaboration with Virewirx on their VX60 platform for robotaxis. Regardless of whether it’s an autonomous vehicle, drone or humanoid robot, implementing Edge AI frequently comes with the burden of requiring high-bandwidth wireless connectivity to upload massive amounts of captured data from various sensors and cameras, and then also download large blocks with updates to the device’s operating system or instructions. While this requirement is relatively easy to address in scenarios with a single vehicle drone or robot, a fleet of vehicles parked side by side, a swarm of drones in the air or a factory floor full of robots could easily pose a significant challenge for traditional wireless technology.

Although purely illustrative, this slide provides a clear visual depiction of the challenges as well as the value proposition delivered by 60 gigahertz wireless solution. At the bottom, with the traditional 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi network, signals flood the space like a light bulb, creating widespread co-channel interference that collapses capacity and impairs reliability. Whereas at the top of the slide, 60 gigahertz technology utilizes directional narrow beam links that eliminate interference, enabling numerous simultaneous multi-gigabit connections with low latency in the same density footprint. With 60 gigahertz, you not only overcome the challenge, but you achieve maximum throughput, 0 co-channel interference and reliable real-time robot control.

Although purely illustrative, the relative outcomes shown here are representative of the real-world challenges associated with implementing Edge AI at scale in close proximity. And I want to briefly emphasize that these exact same dynamics and respective outcomes extend beyond the factory floor to effectively any centralized hub for autonomous Edge AI devices. Today, we are working to advance ongoing discussions and have technology evaluations underway with multiple new prospective customers across a series of Edge AI and connected autonomous device applications. To the extent we are successful at converting these activities into design wins and future product ramps, it will represent expansion of our existing served market and also contribute to diversification of our future revenue base.

In closing, while near-term visibility, particularly within fixed wireless access, is below where we would like to due to a combination of broader market dynamics and irregular customer order patterns, we remain optimistic about the breadth of our customer engagements. We believe there’s a growing recognition of 60 gigahertz mmWave’s unique value proposition, and we are continuing to pursue expanding opportunities for 60 gigahertz wireless technology within tactical communications as well as other markets that require high bandwidth and secure connectivity beyond our core fixed wireless access business. Our primary focus over the coming quarters is to secure new purchase orders while also increasing the conversion rate of existing customer engagements into design wins with the goal of achieving renewed top line growth.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Jim to review the financial results and share our outlook for the second quarter.

James Sullivan: Thank you, Ron. Turning now to the results for the first quarter of 2026. Total net revenue for the first quarter was $1 million compared with $2.9 million for the prior quarter and $3.9 million for the first quarter of 2025. Product revenue in the first quarter was $0.7 million compared with $2.8 million in the prior quarter and $3.8 million in the first quarter of 2025. The decrease in product revenue for the first quarter of 2026 from the comparable periods was primarily attributable to lower shipments of mmWave products and year-over-year also reflected a significant reduction in shipments of legacy memory ICs due to the previously announced product end of life. Specific to sales of mmWave products, revenues were $0.6 million in the first quarter of 2026 compared with $2.4 million in the prior quarter and $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2025.

Gross margin was 61.5% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with 52.2% in the prior quarter and compared with 69.3% in the year ago quarter. The sequential increase was primarily attributable to a higher mix of revenue contribution from nonrecurring engineering products, while the year-over-year decline primarily reflected the decrease in sales of legacy memory ICs. GAAP operating expense for the first quarter of 2026 was $3.1 million compared with $2.8 million in the prior quarter and $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. Non-GAAP operating expenses, which exclude stock-based compensation, were $2.9 million in the first quarter compared with $2.7 million in the prior quarter and $3.1 million in the first quarter of 2025. Our recent non-GAAP operating expenses level of approximately $3 million per quarter continues to reflect the benefits realized from previously implemented cost reductions and ongoing cost containment initiatives.

GAAP net loss for the first quarter of 2026 was $2.5 million or a loss of $0.22 per share compared with a net loss of $1.2 million or a loss of $0.13 per share in the prior quarter and compared with a net loss of $0.5 million or a loss of $0.08 per share in the same quarter a year ago. Non-GAAP net loss, which excludes stock-based compensation and changes in fair value of warrant liabilities for the first quarter of 2026 was $2.3 million or a loss of $0.20 per share. This compared with a non-GAAP net loss of $1.2 million or a loss of $0.13 per share in the prior quarter and a net loss of $0.4 million or a loss of $0.07 per share in the same quarter a year ago. The weighted average number of basic and diluted shares outstanding for purposes of calculating both GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter of 2026 was approximately 11.6 million shares.

Adjusted EBITDA, which we define as GAAP net income or loss as reported, excluding stock-based compensation, change in fair value of warrant liabilities, interest expense, depreciation and amortization and the provision for income taxes was negative $2.3 million in the first quarter of 2026 compared with negative $1.1 million in the prior quarter and negative $0.3 million in the first quarter of 2025. With regard to the balance sheet, as of March 31, 2026, the company had approximately $2.7 million of cash compared with $2.9 million as of December 31, 2025. The net decrease of approximately $0.2 million in the company’s cash balance at quarter end reflected the operating loss and capital expenditure of $2.5 million, partially offset by $2.3 million of net proceeds from sales under the company’s at-the-market offering program during the first quarter.

As of today’s call, the company has approximately 14.2 million shares of common stock and exchangeable shares outstanding. As previously disclosed, the company has been exploring potential strategic alternatives, including a merger, sale of assets or other similar transactions as well as various potential sources of additional capital. Aside from confirming that the strategic review process continues to be ongoing in coordination with the company’s financial advisor, there are no related updates to share on today’s call from what we have previously disclosed. Now turning to our outlook. As Ron previously discussed, overall visibility into future near-term demand is lower due to regular lumpy order patterns from our customers. Additionally, we believe that certain of our customers are being negatively impacted by the higher pricing and reduced availability of memory devices.

Based on shipments to-date and existing order backlog, the company currently expects total net revenue for the second quarter of 2026 to be approximately $1.2 million. This concludes our prepared remarks, and we thank you for your time this afternoon. Operator, please commence the Q&A session.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we have a question from Kevin Liu of K. Liu & Company.

Kevin Liu: I just wanted to start here first on kind of the supply chain challenges that impacted the Q1 orders. Did you guys see that affect other orders outside of the large one that we shipped here in Q2? And is there any sort of ongoing spillover effect in that, even though you’re able to ship that one, maybe there’s still shortages that are affecting other orders? Just wondering what sort of color you can give us there?

Ronald Glibbery: Sure. I can speak to that, Kevin. Thanks for joining the call. I mean the product that was affected is not exclusive to that specific customer. So it was really a broad — it affected a broad product line, although clearly, the main — there was really one customer that was affected. It’s kind of a long story, but the issue has been completely resolved. The manufacturer was testing parameters that were not important to us. We’ve kind of resolved that. And obviously, we’re back on track. Of course, in the meantime, it exposed just a flaw in our supply chain that we’ve now, I would say, robustly fixed in terms of having alternative suppliers. So we don’t expect to see this again. I mean, this is a one-off, but unfortunately, it hit the first quarter and — but it’s — we feel it’s fully resolved.

Kevin Liu: That’s good to hear. And with respect to your FWA customers, both on kind of the existing customer side as well as some of the newer ones that are starting to move into production, — just wondering what exactly it is that’s creating the visibility challenges. Are they working through more significant inventory levels after purchases last year? Is this more related to them being slow on new production given some of the memory shortages? Just wondering what exactly we could pinpoint this to.

Ronald Glibbery: Well, I mean, definitely, the consistent feedback is the memory issue. So that’s just a fact in the marketplace now that several customers have confirmed. So obviously, if we look around the industry, we’ve seen that with other companies that rely on DRAM. We’re hoping the situation stabilizes in the next quarter, but we’ll wait and see. But I would say that’s most consistent. Obviously, a lot of these are new customers that are coming online and sometimes there are glitches just kind of ramping up. For example, one customer had an issue just sourcing their casing from a supplier, and that’s completely resolved now, but a bit of a growing plane, so we expect to see a much better performance over the course of the rest of the year.

Kevin Liu: Got it. And on the defense side of things, now that the Friend or Foe system is shipped and is in production, I’m wondering what you think the cadence of orders looks like either over the course of this year or kind of in future years? Is this a small initial shipment with much big volumes behind it? And then more generally, if you could just speak to — I think you mentioned some field trials coming up in August. How does that opportunity kind of differ from what you guys have done so far on the defense side?

Ronald Glibbery: Yes. I think from our perspective, I think broadly for the company, just to put all this in perspective, I mean, we — our fixed wireless business, we really feel that we’ve got a very high percentage market share. And that business will stabilize. So from our perspective, the kind of the military, defense, security, communications business is a very, very important part of our future. And Kevin, just — I mean, I think you know this, but just to remind you, like the real win there is — the broad win there is secured communications that can’t be detected, again, because of our beamforming, very difficult time detecting, but even more difficult time to jam. And this is becoming broadly an issue in military, but in — very — in particularly with regards to drones.

And I think we’ve all seen the footage from the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, where there’s so much drone activity. But a lot of that activity historically has been facilitated by wireless. But of course, the enemies are getting very smart at how to jam wireless. And you’ve seen a lot of like non-jammable systems or people going to fiber optic. But those solutions have many, many problems. I think broadly, our win in military is the stealth capability, the non-jammability, and we’re seeing some real traction there. The IFF that we announced is, I would call that a subset, an important subset. Like obviously, the key win there is the fact that it can’t be detected. And of course, the pain point in the battlefield is friendly fire. But that was — ironically, the friendly fire was kind of our first foray into the market.

But really, what we’re discovering now, and I think what you’re going to start seeing the orders and I’ll get to that in a second, is really broadly this stealth and non-jammable communications capabilities. We — our customers — for the August field trials, we expect to start to see volume in later in Q3 and Q4. But certainly, even in Eastern Europe, we’re seeing a real sense of urgency to get non-jammable wireless solutions. And so, I think we’ll start to see NRE later this year and then real production in the first half of ’27. But one interesting point in kind of conversations with customers over the last couple of weeks, for example, is kind of the situation with Starlink in these war zones, which, again, is also a mmWave technology. But a core problem is that it relies on GPS.

And the way guys like Iran are jamming that is to actually jam the GPS, and that makes the system a bit inoperable. And in our — and of course, with our technology, we don’t need GPS. So look, I mean, military communications, I think we’ve saturated the market in fixed wireless. I think we’re going to just start — once that stabilizes and memory prices stabilize, we’ll see that market grow. But from our perspective, we see the military market being at least as big, but probably much larger than that market. And you can expect to hear a lot of focus from us over the last — over the next few quarters with regards to what we’re doing on that front.

Kevin Liu: Yes. I appreciate the detail on that. And then just with respect to NRE, I’m wondering what sort of programs are contributing to that number in the first quarter? And then to what extent those continue versus any sort of other opportunities you want to highlight within your pipeline, either related to Edge AI or some of those [ fixed access? ]

Ronald Glibbery: Yes. Well, yes, that’s — so yes, there’s really 2 broad areas there. So with regards to military, the term that we refer to as size, weight and power. So people want them smaller, they want them smaller and they want them lighter, and they want less power consumption. So all those things, especially — I mean, pretty much everything for the military is battery operated. I mean think of drones, think of soldiers, they’re all in the field and they’re battery operated, so power consumption. So optimizing all those parameters for our customers is a source of the NRE, and that will definitely continue. And then for Edge AI, so the Edge AI, I’m sure you saw the slide. And I think that slide that we showed about Edge AI, where we show the — essentially the silos created by our technology versus traditional Wi-Fi technology really underscores the win there.

I mean one of our engineers called it our superpower, like it really is amazing how on a factory floor, for example, the only way to solve that — the interference problem with Wi-Fi is to create little rooms for each of the robots, which is not obviously practical. So some of the first quarter NRE was attributable to actually optimizing our system for Edge AI. But I think we’ll continue to see that grow over the course of the rest of this year as we get more and more customers involved in that space. And the idea is to, again, optimize for those situations. So the 2 main sources or the 2 main markets we feel are contributing to our NRE is tactical communications as well as Edge AI.

Kevin Liu: Got it. And maybe last couple of housekeeping ones for Jim before I turn it over. On the gross margin for the Q2 guidance, obviously, there was a nice margin for Q1. Is that sustainable given the mix of revenue that you see? Or is it going to shift more heavily back towards the product side?

James Sullivan: No, we expect it to shift more heavily back to product side. Obviously, with that large order, as Ron talked about, pushing the NRE was a larger percentage. So it pushed up the margins. We’ll see a much higher percentage of product revenue in Q2. So I expect the margins to come back down into the 50s.

Kevin Liu: Yes. Makes sense. And then just lastly, what’s kind of the appropriate share count we should be thinking about now for Q2 and beyond?

James Sullivan: I’m sorry say that again, what sort of?

Kevin Liu: The share count, just wondering where you guys stood either at quarter end or today that we can use in our model?

James Sullivan: Yes, in the script, we said approximately 14.2 million. We’ve been active in our ATM program. We’ll provide a full update on that in the 10-Q filing. But we’re probably with additional activity, probably around 14.5 million shares — common shares and exchangeable shares outstanding.

Operator: Thank you. I show there are no further questions in the queue at this time. That will conclude today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.

Ronald Glibbery: Thank you.