Arrive AI (ARAI) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript

Thank you. Hey, everyone. Dan O'Toole here. Thank you for joining us today. We're going to keep our prepared comments concise, so let's get right to it. I also want to say, why don't you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they definitely get at it. But I really want to say the elephant in the room is Arrive AI. We're seeing a huge uptick in big players wanting to explore deploying our technology, and that is what is really exciting. So let's get this going. To start this morning, I'd like to welcome Piusz Badke as Arrive AI's new CFO, Chief Financial Officer, effective August 17th. As detailed in this morning's press release, Pius brings more than two decades of Wall Street experience, including senior capital markets, roles at Bank of America, BTIG, and Jefferies, before moving into public company CFO leadership.

That combination gives him a rare vantage point. We sat on the banking side, structuring financing for growth companies, and we sat in the CFO seat managing the balance sheet and investor relationships that come with public company life. What stood out to me most is how aligned Fuge is with our vision for Arive AI. He understands the scale of the opportunity in front of us in autonomous logistics, and he's just as focused as we are on translating this quarter's commercial traction into long-term shareholder value, which I will elaborate on shortly. We'll hear directly from him on future calls and in the investor conversations as we move forward. I also want to thank Todd Pettmeyer for his contributions while here at Arrive AI.

Now let's get into what's driving the business forward, including real commercial traction, continued technology progress, and a clear opportunity ahead to Arrive AI. The prepared remarks you're about to hear will be delivered using AI-generated versions of both mine, our head of commercialization's voice, Ian Geis. That's the same format that we've used in the past. For us, this reflects how we think about artificial intelligence as a practical tool that can improve efficiency, scalability, and communication. The same philosophy that draws our platform, an autonomous logistics network. After the prepared remarks complete, we'll return to a live question and answer session of questions that were submitted ahead of this call.

So with that said, let's begin the prepared remarks.

Thanks, everyone. This quarter, we want to spend less time talking about where we're headed in the abstract and more time talking about the deals and partnerships and the progression we have made over the past several months. We expect to have more than a dozen AP3 Plus arrive points in stock and ready to ship by mid-September, representing our first wave of expanded availability and the solidification of our supply chain.

Looking ahead, we're already developing the AP4, which is targeted for the first quarter of 2027, and will build on what AP3 Plus brings to the network. This is ideal timing to take advantage of the commercial traction we are seeing in the second half of the year. To walk through that in detail, I've asked Ian Guess, our head of commercialization, to join us today for the first time. Ian leads our commercial pipeline, and he's going to provide you with an inside look at where things stand. Thanks, Dan. It's easiest to think about our pipeline across three industries where we're seeing the strongest traction right now. Healthcare, manufacturing, and specialty pharmacy delivery. In healthcare, Nexus AMR is pleased to partner with us to deliver end-to-end autonomous solutions for customers across multiple industries.

The integration of Arrive AI's products into their automation portfolio enhances productivity and expands the value they deliver to healthcare organizations and other businesses facing persistent and growing labor challenges. Customers from around the world regularly visit the TechNexus Innovation Center, where they showcase best-in-class autonomous mobile robots and emerging technologies. Nexys is proud to feature Arrive AI's innovative solutions and has welcomed us as a key strategic partner. Hancock Regional Hospital remains our anchor healthcare deployment, and this quarter Hancock expanded their network by adding an additional Arrive Point, enabling building-to-building movement. This is a significant milestone since demand for building-to-building movement and secure exchange will be paramount in healthcare and large campus facilities. In manufacturing, we've partnered with DXC to bring our technology into large pharmaceutical manufacturing environments, facilities with a global footprint, each spanning 500,000 square feet or more where moving product across the campus, including by drone for longer distances, is a real operational need.

DXC's systems integration expertise also helps us plug into large enterprise customers faster than we could on our own. We've also announced a letter of intent with Lifespan Pharmacy and Cardon to explore an autonomous drone pharmacy delivery program. We are also engaged in early-stage discussions with several Fortune 500 companies regarding potential pharmaceutical delivery opportunities. We're also seeing broader momentum with our autonomous delivery partners. Avrad, which builds autonomous delivery robots backed by one of the industry's longest-running autonomous driving programs, became the continuity partner for universities when Starship Technologies exited U. S. campus operations.

By the end of this year, Avrad expects to be operating on more than 20 campuses nationwide, working with Grubhub, Uber Eats, and major food service operators. What's next for Averite is more campuses, expanded city deployments, faster and more reliable service, and most importantly, where we fit in, creating partnerships across the ordering and logistics stack so last-mile delivery becomes truly autonomous end-to-end. This mutual goal will be key as we identify potential partners As of today we have a growing number of commercialization conversations underway and a meaningful subset of those have already progressed into second and third round discussions These later stage conversations are with partners we believe are the most likely to move forward into formal agreements We introducing this framing to give you a clearer view into the momentum we seeing and our traction with potential partners At the same time we continue to only treat agreements as firm once they signed and we announce each finalized partnership individually as it secured We expect to keep building on this across healthcare manufacturing and specialty delivery in the coming quarters Thanks, Ian.

On the financial side, given the very recent CFO transition, I will walk through the highlights for the second quarter results. Second quarter revenue was in line with Q1 at $14,700 for the quarter. Our recently announced expansion with Hancock is expected to produce incremental revenue in the third and fourth quarters this year, excluding revenue from a non-recurring consulting project in the year-ago quarter. Thank you. Cash and liquid investments on hand were $5.1 million at June 30th, an increase from $2.1 million in cash at December 31st. Our current cash burn rate is approximately $1.1 million per month. During the quarter, we completed the filing of an S-3 registration statement for up to $100 million. We also finalized the terms of our at-the-market offering or ATM offering up to a maximum capacity of approximately $15 million.

The amount and timing of sales under that agreement will be disclosed quarterly as required. In addition, we retain the available capacity of $19 million in future prepaid advances under our previous 2025 equity line facility. I also want to speak directly to something I know is on a lot of people's minds, our ability to keep funding this business going forward. We continue to have real optionality in front of us right now on financing, and Piyush's capital markets background is already helping us sharpen how we think about those paths. Our current cash burn reflects deliberate investment in the team, technology, and infrastructure required to convert our commercial pipeline into scaled revenue, And we're being careful about which financing and operating decisions we make and when to do what's right for shareholders over the long term.

At the same time, we are prudently managing operating and investment spend to drive growth while maintaining a disciplined focus on the balance sheet. I want to be direct about this. We are not in a position where we're at risk of running out of funds. We have options, and with Piyush's experience structuring financing for growth companies, we're working through them strategically and with real discipline.

To wrap up, this quarter is about proof, real partnerships, real deployments, and real momentum in our pipeline across healthcare, manufacturing, and specialty delivery. We appreciate your continued support and engagement.

With that, Ian and I will now return live for Q&A, along with the rest of our team. Thank you.

Hey, real quick. Thanks for being on the call here, Jack. Dan O'Toole, CEO. I just want to say that the over a dozen units that we mentioned in the earnings call represents a huge multiplier of our past deployments. So that while over a dozen isn't a huge number in the abstract, it really marks a lot of traction that we're seeing, and it's a huge multiplier on what we've had deployed so far. So I think the trajectory is really vertical for where we're going and what we're doing. I'm going to let Ian Geiser, head of commercialization, take the last part of that question. Go ahead, Ian.

Yeah, just to clarify this statement on campuses, the news that was iterated in that statement had to do with AvRide's takeover of Starship's departure from campuses to do on-campus delivery. We are in early conversations with AvRide right now of employing the Arrive Point network into potential pilot programs of which we could increase efficiencies for unattended delivery.

Thanks, Jack. We appreciate the thoughtful questions and the opportunity to share these answers that I'm sure a lot of people are thinking about. I'm going to ask Mark Ham, our COO, to take that one, Mark.

Yeah, thanks, Jack, for the question. You know, in Q1, we consolidated our roadmap, our product plan, our supply chain, and the delivery of the 12 units in September. That's the first installment on new units. It's called AP3 Plus that have our new operating system and our new software that enables operators and customers to see everything that's going on with their ride points and their network. Then what comes in Q1 is AP4, which is the first product that will support multiple deliveries at once, AMR pickup and drop-off at the same time, drone delivery. And that supply chain has been designed to scale to hundreds over the course of 2027. Remains to be seen if we deploy that many, but that's what we're looking at supply chain-wise.

And then the following year we would have prototypes at the end of next year for APX the future generation or AP5 you may hear it called which is designed for even greater capacity and more automated handoffs in more situations And that supply chain is being designed for thousands tens of thousands So it a progression a ramp and kind of in parallel once the supply chains are in place for that then GoToMarket follows that and provides the opportunities Okay.

Yep. Thank you.

Yeah, real quick. This is Dan. I'm going to take this opportunity to introduce Piyush Fadke, our new CFO. Piyush, thanks for joining the call, and thanks for joining the company. I'm really excited. I want to give a quick back shout out, I guess, to Adele with Alliance Advisors, a trusted partner in our investor relations firm. They knew we were looking to get a really like-minded, educated, or streetwise, I guess you could say, CFO, somebody that, you know, my personal wish list was somebody that was entrepreneurial, somebody that could navigate the capital markets, could narrate an earnings report to analysts and investors, and be M&A-minded. And I think we got exactly what we're looking for. Kiyush, if you're there, I'd like to say hey to you and have you give a little bit of background on yourself to our investors.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. And thank you to the team and to investors who have joined this call. So I'm Kiyush Fadke. I'm the new CFO of Arive AI. I am very excited to be here. I really believe in the mission and believe we are the future of autonomous deliveries. You know, for me, joining was all about fit. I came to the office near Indianapolis last week and spent time, spent three days there with everyone. You know, from Dan to all the C-suite developers, engineers, and, you know, the thing that I noticed was just really the energy that, you know, that flows from Dan. But really, everyone was just so excited to, you know, to be there and to be able to, you know, to be able to be building something that's going to be big.

And I was able to see kind of a demo of an arrive point, and I had never seen it before other than kind of on the website. And it was really interesting to kind of see that live and see how the different technology works. So I'm really excited for the opportunity, and I'm looking forward to doing a lot of great things with Dan and team.

Thanks so much, man. We're looking forward to really leveraging your relationships and getting our sleeves rolled up and getting us to the next level. So really excited that you're on our team, man. I can't wait to hit the ground running here. I want to turn this over to Kasha Jones, our head of marketing, and she's going to tee up some questions, I think. Yes, the first question we have here, we received several questions about the stock price and the NASDAQ compliance, including concerns about a potential deal listing or liquidity issue.

This comes from Leon, Jake, Robert, and Franz Guy.

I'm going to the way we're going to format this, I'm going to assign questions so we're not tripping over each other. I'll sign answers. I'm going to take this one myself, Dan O'Toole, CEO. Obviously, you know, the big theme every day is share price, traction, you know, delisting, all these kind of things. Yeah, I can tell you this. We went public over a year ago, 5,000 pre-public investors on our cap table. So we have everyone shoulder to shoulder with us, and we think about share price, market traction, having a great product. There's a whole formula of specifics that come together that equals your share price, your market cap, and how you're being in the market.

And I can tell you, when we went public a year ago, it was never in the plan to be profitable day one. It was never in the plan to be revenue neutral day one. What was in the plan was to lose money. That wasn't because we wanted to lose money. It's just a reality. When you're running in a race, you don't start at the fastest speed. You start from a speeding stop, and you get faster and faster. I can tell you, you are getting faster and faster. The amount of inbound inquiries coming into our company are bigger than we've ever seen. In the last 30 days, we've had more inquiries than we've had in the history of the company put together.

The market is taking note of what we're doing and then realizing that autonomous delivery and pickup of all sorts will not happen without an arrive point in that ecosystem. We unlock autonomy. We're creating a frictionless environment between drones, robots, ADs, and people, and that is what the market needs. shareability when you're dropping things on the ground or picking them up on the ground is a non-starter. When you add unintended delivery from Arive AI, it all changes. When you guys invested in this company, you invested in our IP.

Our IP starts where autonomous delivery and pickup starts. So if you have a locker or a mailbox, that's fine. That's public domain. That's old. When you have this new element of autonomous delivery and pickup where everything is going, That is a Rive AI. We are building that infrastructure. We own the doorstep to every home of business throughout the world. So that's what you're investing in. Tash, I'm going to head back to you.

Yeah, so we also received a couple questions asking us to describe our growth plan for the remainder of this year and next, including how we plan to scale revenue and secure purchase orders, letters of intent, and strategic partners' agreements. This was Raul and Albert's question.

I'm going to hand that one to Ian. Ian's our head of commercialization.

Go ahead, Ian. Thank you for the question. I think we addressed most of that in my prepared statement, but I'll go ahead and answer it, especially off the great words that Dan just stated, and that is the amount of awareness that is now for the inefficiencies of drop-off, pickup throughout all of the different companies that have been launched, whether it's drone companies or robotics companies, there's more and more awareness for what is lacking, and that is, indeed the arrive point of being able to do the handoff and the pickup. Nexus saw this clearly and we created that partnership with Nexus and we're getting more and more leads that are coming in the pipeline or hospital systems, medical, pharmaceutical, and they keep growing exponentially.

So we anticipate very big things from all of these different elements of our pipeline. And as Mark stated in terms of the product deployments, we are being very careful with how we are allocating that product and getting it the best fit for the next 12 months and forward.

Okay. So this next one comes from Ryan, who's been with us since the drone deck days.

What do you feel has been the biggest challenge with running a new publicly traded company in front of such a broad audience with the ability to say whatever they want, whenever they want, and what's been the biggest advantage? You know, I would say no challenge, Ryan, just opportunity. Thanks for asking. Thanks for being with us since the beginning. Now, I won't forget the OG guys. Brian Greedsby, Jeff Conn, others. Appreciate everybody that's out there listening today. We know that you care. You know just opportunity No two days are the same Every day is an exciting new day You come in I know Piyush mentioned the energy in the office Every day I come in here it palpable You can see high morale You can see dizzying evolution of projects People are prideful Everyone trying to outmaneuver the next guy with great ideas and pride and be able to show off We have a normal showcase of sharing what happening here We all rally and share that every day I be a hypocrite if I said anything was a negative While there things that aren great sometimes you got to take the bad with the good This is everything that I signed up for It better than I could have ever imagined I know our share price is down and I'm not diminishing that, but what I'm saying is I've come up with a mantra, what goes down must go up.

It's anti-gravity, and that's what we're doing here at Arrive AI. I welcome questions not just on these earnings calls, but everybody knows how to reach me, and I want to be there for you guys.

So thank you for that question, Rob. Okay, and next one is, we received a question about brand awareness, specifically how we're approaching marketing, given that many investors say they don't hear Arrive AI's name come up in their industries.

Mark, you want to take that one? So, yeah, so just as we go through phases on developing our product and our supply chain, there are natural phases to how we develop our capabilities to go to market and along with that, our brand. While it took a lot of attention and evangelizing the future of drone and robotic delivery to get here and to get funded and to put these resources and team in place, I think everybody's well aware of all the efforts from Walmart and ZipLine and just everybody out there, DoorDash, so that's no longer in question. And what we're focused on now is kind of that rifle shot approach to enterprise accounts and partners that are really the early innovators, the strategic investors in infrastructure like ours, and what does it mean to market to them account by account.

So you probably don't run into a lot of advertising for GE or Rolls-Royce aircraft engines in your life because you're not the purchaser of those things. We're looking for those equivalents in our industry that need to understand the awareness, the tradeoffs, the chain of custody advantages, the efficiency advantages that our network brings to their fleets and their communities and their campuses. And that's where our marketing is focused and our branding is focused.

Thank you. Yeah, finally, you guys have had some strong patent news internationally. What's next? Are you guys looking at Asia?

This one's from Rohan. Excuse me, I want to ask John Richeson, our chief legal counsel and our patent attorney.

John? Thanks, Dan. That's a great question. I appreciate that question from the standpoint. Excuse me, I'll lead in to talk a little bit about our IP. I'm going to break it up into two parts.

First, let me speak to the U. S. IP. We currently have 10 approved patent or issued patents. We've got four more pending in the patent office. And with that, we believe that we've got covered the initial IP that we need for a strong moat to keep us in a competitive position. I think Priya mentioned about the energy that he saw when he was there. I say it's more than energy. There's a lot of strength in our young engineers. The men and women that are out there have come up with a lot of great ideas. I don't know of any other, I'm sure they're out there, but I don't know of any other company right off the top that's got their IP attorney right on site with their engineers.

That's one thing that we do, and we try to strongly take those ideas. Currently, we've got about 19 ideas that are in the hopper. Those are coming through at the rate as the engineers finish up their design and development. But again, that's the U. S. Now let me turn to the second part, and that's the international. We haven't talked much about the international, but we've been very strong in getting our patents across the pond and working out there. The specific question was Asia. To date, we've got 13 issued patents. Most of those are in Asia, with the exception, I think, of South African and Brazil patents. The rest of them are in Asia proper, India, Singapore, Australia, Japan.

I could list them, but that takes too much time. That's exciting from a standpoint that Asia is an immediate place that we have decided to start working hard on trying to look at how we can take these international patents and doing some licensing with local concerns. The other part of international that we don't talk about much, and I don't want to get too technical, but that's Europe. Most of the people in this room know it, but I'm sure the people on the call don't. We just recently got approved with our first patent for the European Union. That opens up the entire European for us to go ahead and open up those additional countries. So, along with the Asian efforts, we now have the strong results, and we'll start heading up into Europe with our international licensing opportunities.

Turn it back to Dan. John, another quick question. You would agree that we have a strong first position in this space, right?

I don't have it memorized like Dan does, but we beat several strong companies, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, a few others. And with that, when I say beat, our patents got out and approved by the patent office before theirs did. So that put us in a first position. But I also be less than honest with you if I didn't say that a first position is nice, but our first position also comes with a strong number of claims. So we've got a lot of components and features in there. I thought that they were pretty well complete. And then I met these 40 engineers that we got on site that are thinking totally out of the box. So we've got a lot more stuff coming down the pipe.

One more patent that people don't think about us for, if you could just hear something about this, our witch patent for a grand limited.

Yeah, that was one of the things with our strategic purchase. We hold in what we call around here our witch patent, which is a different way to handle the product coming from the drones. It's unique, and it allows you to focus or drop that package in a much more organized and controlled method.

Thanks a lot. I just want to say appreciate everybody listening to the call, caring enough to want to know what we're up to. From a bird's eye view here at Arive, I just want to say that the trajectory is strong. We are on track with every deliverable that we mark and take note of, and we are right on pace with every aspect of this business. We're running on all cylinders. Things are amazing in the regard of getting recognized in the marketplace. And I want to thank everybody for joining the call today. I also want to give a shout out to my son, Bryce Untoole, who's listening from his investment banking internship in New York City right now.

Go get them, Bryce. Thanks, everybody.