Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Williams: Sorry, I was on mute there. My apology.

Ron Glibbery: I thought I lost you, sorry about that.

David Williams: No. I was talking away and didn’t want to clutter in the background. So, I guess if we kind of think about and I think you mentioned this on the new WiFi standards and the potential for that to be included in the protocol. Can you talk a little bit about that just to help me understand what that means?

Ron Glibbery: It’s kind of late-breaking news. But last week, there was a formal vote at the IEEE to actually study the use of €“ including 60 gigahertz in the next generation of WiFi. So, it’s by no means like said, but there is now a study group that’s really formally looking at how that people can make that happen. So, I would say there are two driving applications. Again, from a 100,000 foot level. One application is really, the €“ I guess, historically, 60-gig has been a technology that stays within rooms, a real problem for WiFi is in apartment complexes overlapping networks. I mean you can literally have 100 overlapping networks. So, what better way to solve that problem than with the technology that actually stays in room, so I think that’s one benefit.

The other is just AR/VR. I mean VR just demands a lot of bandwidth, but not just bandwidth, uninterrupted bandwidth. And again, this whole concept of interference is really coming in place certainly in the fixed wireless market, but also certainly in the VR market. And that is just, again this concept of overlapping networks causes interference. The other €“ of course, the other benefit of mmWave technology, certainly, what we do is beamforming and narrow beams that really, again give you a much more secure link for applications such as VR.

David Williams: Fantastic. And I don’t want to take up too much time here. I just had a couple of other quick ones. Jim, maybe to you real quick on the cash burn, just €“ you had some collections this quarter. It sounds like you have got some nice cost savings coming in. As I kind of run that through the model, it turns out quite nicely in terms of that profitability or reaching neutral or breakeven. How do you think about the momentum in terms of those cost reductions and how that plays throughout this year? And then as we kind of think about what level our OpEx should be kind of for this year, can you kind of give us a level set there to help out on the modeling side?

Jim Sullivan: Yes. Obviously, on the cash burn, we are in the fourth quarter, collected the tax credits, closed the financing, had an initial collection from that lead customer, albeit the majority of the collections have come here in the first quarter, which greatly helps our cash position. We made really kind of started with reductions in the fourth quarter on expense-wise, fourth quarter of 2022 because we do use a number of consultants, obviously, that provide flexibility and projects, etcetera, and we started kind of leaning back to use. We did eliminate some employee positions in kind of mid-February. It takes a little time with severance payments to get the benefits of that. But we are obviously looking to drive the cash burn much lower than it was in 2022 through a combination of those expense reductions, revenue growth, improved margin on the €“ particularly on the mmWave projects.

And also looking at some NRE transactions, NRE licensed transactions, where we can kind of monetize use of our technology and ideally develop new product customers out of that. From a kind of non €“ talking about non-GAAP OpEx on a quarterly basis, we have some kind of swings related to any tape-out related activity. But we are looking to hopefully keep that in the kind of $4 million, $4.7 million a quarter range.