AGM 2024
After all the talk about Renesas and Megachips bringing out products by the end of 2023 what happened to that? What is a realistic timeframe to start seeing revenue from Renesas and a megachips?
Sean Hehir - you know you’ve heard me comment in the past that is their business and we can’t comment on the future plans for their time.
If we can’t get a demonstration retail project out there with a partner will the company consider making its own, perhaps with an Akida 2.0 chip?
Sean Hehir - we’re looking at one right (ie. Edge box) here so that’s exactly one of the target markets for this is a retail product, VVDN , let’s be clear this has been enable by VVDN, they are the primary sales agent, we have it up on our website as a way for smaller volumes but this has much higher volume expectations for VVDN. One of their target markets, and I fact a video should be released today, is retail. They mention this thing has two primary purposes, one is security of store for theft and the other one looking at volumes real time in the store. So that’s the primary use case that this box is targeting for VVDN.
Some have publicly stated they are using Akida, or actively developing products, (eg. ESA, MYWAI, EdgeX, Circle 8 etc). With no revenue to show, are you allowing companies to use BrainChip technology for free? How are we remunerated? How is our IP protected?
Sean Hehir - no we absolutely don’t let people use our products for free. Now we have ecosystem relationships and that’s what many of those are and we will sell them at a discount and of course we are just looking to build the ecosystem and relationship. Or we have limited use licenses where certain companies make references to considering deployments, we’re looking at them and there putting our IP in there but no we would not let them take it to production without revenue.
What are BrainChip’s sales and marketing plans in south east Asia?
Sean Hehir - well specifically in south east Asia, in fact we were having dinner last night, we have presence in certain countries and we’re going to expand our sales efforts in there, certain countries there we’re trying to hire in right now, I’d prefer not to tell you but we’ll expand our sales presence for sure. And of course when you try to sell anything you have to market in those regions. You know it’s interesting, when you look at what we do you go to the markets that have a high propensity to build chips and a lot of those are south east Asia so yes we are going to increase our sales efforts there.
How do the sales and marketing people function? Because where we stand today it’s not an impressive view. So a couple scenarios an Australian drone defence company has enquired about the suitability of the Akida 2.0 chip in their radar system, do you open BRN communications or do you refer this company to Dr Joseph Guerci of ISL knowing his ground breaking development of radar systems using Akida? The second scenario is. US transport company planning to drive driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston by years end. The navigation system is well developed however they would like to see if Akida 2.0 could improve the performance of the 24 sensors carried on each rig. Do BRN operatives introduce the prospect to Arm or one of the partner companies or just wish them well or is BRN tightly involved in the developing process?
Sean Hehir - when we engage I made the comments earlier in my speech on closing, we look for qualified deals, I can’t comment on those particular ones. Particularly on the IP side, are they a large company, do they build chips, do they have a chip on the roadmap, do they have the money to build it. If they don’t, we don’t engage. Now if they’re smaller volumes of chips we do have our test or reference chips, we will engage those with a junior sales person and consider for those for those kind of smaller chip opportunities. But unless they’re large volumes of chips, ones that are worthy of a potential future tape-out then that’s not the business we’re chasing, it’s not the way to build it. The way we’re building it is by IP licences that I described the qualifications to engage and / or if somebody wants to buy massive amounts of chips perhaps for something like a box, but for smaller use cases we would not engage.
Antonio - another way to answer that question, if you think about being the drone company you’re going to have macro requirements that you want for your drone and then you’re going to have a slew of vendors that you’re going to tap into to basically create the drone that you’re trying to create, from plastic fins all the way down to the circuitry, there’s no drone company right now on the plant that actually creates its own silicon. They will engage with an ST, they’ll engage with a Samsung, they’ll engage with a Broadcom or somebody like that to have custom silicon made for their drone and then that chip, or subsystem, essentially becomes one element of their manufacturing process for their drone. So the way BrainChip would engage with a drone company is we might talk to them at a very high level, like Sean May talk with them or Dr Lewis, somebody may engage and then what happens we basically showcase to them what BrainChip could potentially bring to the equation and then we want to find out from that drone company who is your source for your silicon, where are they buying their silicon, and then we would want to work with that silicon provider on creating a custom solution for that drone or if the requirements were such that they could use some silicon that’s effectively off the shelf so to speak then we’d point them into that direction. So in terms of the value chain or the supply chain we’re kind of one level below that in terms of using drones as an example. However, as we go forward what we should be doing as a company is creating a poll, we should be talking to our customer’s customer, and when you talk to your customer’s customer and you sell them on what we bring to the table, they then go to their suppliers and they say “we really like that BrainChip stuff , pleas go take a licence from BrainChip so I can buy product from you”. That’s how the commercial cycle works. That is part of the overall growth and initiative plan of BrainChip, that is exactly what we’re doing. We internally refer to it as segments strategy we are putting together marketing platforms that answer the question why BrainChip in drones? Why BrainChip in automotive? Why BrainChip in industrial? And that is part of this evolutionary process that we’ve been going through these last couple of years in terms of revamping our architecture and revamping our product.
Sean spoke about competetive analysis, acquiring competitors products and pulling them apart. I was reading about a company the other day and I thought for sure I was reading about BrainChip but it turned out I was reading about a company Aon devices, they spoke about hearing aids, noise cancelling. It turned out the founder of that company spent some time with BrainChip in the early days. Are the company aware of that company or can comment on that company now or a bit later? because it sure sounded like I was reading about BrainChip.
Sean Hehir - the right answer is you’re right, we will comment a little bit later on it but I had a lot of questions about competition so let me talk about it. We welcome competition because it signals interest in the market. You would be worried if you didn’t have competition because you would think “we’re the only one seeing this market so there might be something wrong”, we welcome the competition. The idea with our benchmarking is to ensure that we’re always better than the competition. I can’t answer specifically about that company but we’ll certainly add it to the list to take a look at.
I think I read it on social media that the statement says we are embedding our IP into everything everywhere. It turns out it’s also a statement on our website in the technology area. As a shareholder what am I to interpret from that statement in terms of sales and revenue?
Sean Hehir - it’s simply a statement of usability in the broadness of use cases, it’s not a statement of fact that we’re in everything everywhere. It’s saying that the flexibility of our product works virtually anywhere. That’s all it says.
Are we able to close any deals yet on sales? Or have we reached a point of partnership trial and testing. Have we started to close one deal, any deals? And with now knowing the market place and knowing how AI takes a while for people to understand if you come (inaudible) when do you expect to see project revenue coming in? On a conservative level.
Sean Hehir - well I think I addressed that in my opening comments that’s why I went through all my opening comments. All the signs are indicating that we’re tracking in the right direction on several key engagements. Can I absolutely predict a day or a week or a quarter? I can probably predict a quarter but I certain,y can’t predict a date. We are tracking all those points. Down selection is there, the meetings are there, we’re winning on benchmarks, we know that they’ve got tape out dates, so all the signs are pointing in the right direction. Can a guarantee a date or a win? No, but all the signs are pointing towards something coming.