Vicarious Surgical Inc. (NYSE:RBOT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Adam Maeder: Okay. That’s helpful, Bill. Thank you for clarifying my question there. And I guess I also just wanted to ask about kind of the message around time lines because on one hand, I kind of heard no change to previous time lines, but then I also heard — and hopefully, I’m recalling this correctly, but reduction of resources, maybe introducing some additional time line risk. So exactly what is the message from a time line standpoint? And do you still expect to make FDA submission for ventral hernia in late calendar ’24? And then I had 1 more follow-up.

William Kelly : Yes. I’m going to say…

Adam Sachs: I’m sorry, Bill. So I definitely want to emphasize that we are still on track for FDA submission in late calendar year ’24. The difference here is around some additional time line of risk. So to look forward at a few particular activities, we are — as Bill mentioned, we have significantly reduced SG&A spending. And that doesn’t really have any impact to time line risk going forward. I think a lot of those activities, frankly, have been successful so far, and some of the headcount was not necessary or not prudent in the current market environment. Going forward, though, some of the reduced external spending budget that we have does have some additional time line risk around our ability to rapidly and quickly respond to anything that comes up during the VNB process.

So it is their — the time line that we have today is absolutely — it is still the same for filing around the end of 2024, but with some added risk that is in our ability to rapidly and quickly respond to issues as they come up through that process.

Adam Maeder: Okay. That’s helpful, Adam. I appreciate the extra color there. And then just one last one, if I can sneak it in. Good progress on the Beta 2 system productive demo day this past December. And it sounds like you’re targeting design lock for the 1.0 system in the next, you said, month or so. Maybe just talk about kind of the manufacturing process and building out the systems. What are the goals there? How many systems do you have to build for the clinical trial and just level of confidence that you can do so in a timely manner?

Adam Sachs: Yes, absolutely. The trial is likely to be, again, I’m saying likely because it does depend on the agency, likely to be just a small handful of systems. We’re confident in our ability to build those out. We built a handful of each of our builds today in-house. The more challenging effort actually is around the consumables, the arms, the camera, the tools rather than the capital systems production. And we’re — we started building out the supply chain and the production lines for that around a year ago at this point. So we’re well on our way to building that out. We’ve actually had, at this point, full cameras with no support and assistance from our company produced by our main contract manufacturer, who is, frankly, one of the big CMs in the space. So we’re confident that within the time line, we’ll be able to ramp these CMs up. It’s frankly the reason we’re using them.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Kyle Rose with Canaccord.