EDGAR 10-K Filing

Company CIK: 1380106
Filing Year: 2022
Filename: 1380106_10-K_2022_0001380106-22-000010.json

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ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Item 1. Business.
Defining the future of pharmaceutical quality control
We are leading a global transformation toward fully automated microbial quality control within pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our products safeguard the most complex and critical bioprocessing workflows in the industry, enabling faster, safer, and higher capacity drug production. Through our unique expertise at the intersection of microbiology, robotic systems, and advanced vision algorithms, we are setting the foundation for end-to-end quality control automation to enable the future of advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Overview
We are an innovative life sciences technology company providing mission critical automation solutions to facilitate the efficient manufacturing and fast, safe release of healthcare products such as biologics, vaccines, cell and gene therapies, and sterile injectables. Our flagship Growth Direct platform automates and modernizes the antiquated, manual microbial quality control, or MQC, testing workflows used in the largest and most complex pharmaceutical manufacturing operations across the globe. The Growth Direct platform brings the quality control lab to the manufacturing floor, unlocking the power of in-line / at-the-line MQC automation to deliver faster results, greater accuracy, increased operational efficiency, better compliance with data integrity regulations, and quicker decision making that our customers rely on to ensure safe and consistent supply of important healthcare products.
Our Growth Direct platform is the only fully automated, high-throughput and secure MQC solution. Developed with over 15 years of active feedback from our customers, Growth Direct was purpose-built to meet the MQC challenges posed by the increasing scale, complexity, and regulatory scrutiny confronting global pharmaceutical manufacturers. Our platform delivers the robust and scalable automation necessary to support rapidly expanding demand for novel and complex therapeutic modalities, such as biologics, vaccines, cell and gene therapies, and sterile injectables. Our systems are designed to absorb and automate the vast majority of daily MQC test volume in any pharmaceutical manufacturing
facility and can be operated in networked fleets of multiple systems per facility or campus to scale up with high-volume manufacturing.
MQC is a ubiquitous and critical testing process, executed daily at massive scale globally, that ensures pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and products are free of microbial contamination from exogenous microorganisms such as bacteria, mold, and other foreign substances. MQC ensures the safety of final drug products released for patient use, via the constant testing for microbial contamination of raw materials, production environments, personnel, and in-process and final sterility testing for drug products. A single drug production facility may conduct anywhere from tens of thousands to over one million MQC tests per year to ensure product quality. This testing is mandated and closely monitored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and other global regulatory agencies to ensure the safety of all pharmaceutical products, with serious regulatory and financial consequences for lack of compliance.
The traditional method of MQC testing, or the traditional method, also known as the compendial method, involves detection of viable, potentially contaminating organisms by a process known as “growth promotion.” In this method, samples are manually collected on media plates, hand labeled and inventoried, physically transported to a centralized lab, and incubated at various temperatures for days to weeks. MQC specialists then visually inspect these plates manually, counting colonies of microbial organisms and recording their counts of thousands of plates by hand, which is a repetitive process predisposed to operator miscounts. In total, the traditional method can require 15 individual processing steps per sample. The benefit of this long-standing method is that it is trusted-a colony growing on media strongly implies the existence of viable, potentially contaminating organisms growing in the location or sample from which the assay was collected.
However, the manual traditional MQC method has become antiquated and is unable to match the growing scale of global pharmaceutical manufacturing-especially complex bioprocessing of biologics, cell, and gene therapies-principally because the process is slow to deliver results, entirely dependent on human labor, subject to technician fallibility and error, unsecured, and non-compliant with data integrity regulations. In time-sensitive, highly regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, these process vulnerabilities can expose organizations to significant operational, financial, and reputational risks, including loss of valuable product batches, reduced manufacturing capacity, lengthy regulatory investigations, costly enforcement actions, and delayed release of life-saving products.
Our Growth Direct platform improves the traditional MQC process, maintaining the fundamental trusted method of growth promotion, but applying advanced robotic automation, powerful optical imaging, algorithmic vision analysis, and data management to render it more scalable and efficient for the future of advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our proprietary technology works by replacing human counting of growing colonies with software and algorithm detection and counting based on image analysis. We exploit the natural autofluorescent properties of microbial organisms to count microcolonies by detecting minute changes to their brightness over time using proprietary vision algorithms, without any new reagents or additional sample prep. Our system wraps this core detection technology with fully automated, high-volume, walk-away robotic sample handling and incubation, locked behind a secured interface that enables compliance with data integrity regulations.
We believe the MQC market is poised for disruption and modernization via the widespread deployment of our Growth Direct platform, and we have embarked on the mission of transforming the MQC test market to standardize on our fully automated solution.
The Growth Direct platform fully automates and digitizes the process of pharmaceutical MQC and enables our customers to perform this critical testing process more efficiently, accurately, and securely. Our platform comprises the Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables, lab information management system, or LIMS, connection software, and comprehensive customer support and validation services. Our Growth Direct system is a fully automated, high throughput instrument for daily processing of MQC samples on our proprietary consumables-a microbiology quality control lab in a box. We have achieved an automated method that is faster and produces more accurate, reliable and accessible data than the traditional method. Growth Direct delivers faster results in half the time, and with its higher testing throughputs and capacity can absorb the vast majority of daily MQC testing in any facility. Our system increases
accuracy and efficiency through full automation of the MQC process. Customers depend on Growth Direct’s robust security, connectivity, and data integrity capabilities, reinforced by its high reliability with >99% uptime.
We believe we are the first company to solve the existing barriers to MQC automation. Our product platform reflects our expertise at innovating and integrating across multiple technology disciplines, including systems design, robotic handling, microbiology, optical imaging, software image analysis, data management and security, and process automation. Our business was specifically built to meet the needs of pharmaceutical manufacturing and has developed a track record of delivering reliable results for our customers, which is why we believe we are the trusted standard in microbial automation.
On a global scale, we estimate nearly 360 million MQC tests are conducted annually in thousands of dedicated pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities responsible for producing billions of doses of therapeutics every year. We estimate our total addressable market, or TAM, to be approximately $10 billion in 2022, which we expect to grow to over $16 billion by 2027. Our TAM includes both a system sales opportunity and a recurring opportunity from sales of consumables and service contracts, the latter of which is estimated to be approximately $5 billion in 2022. As we embed our products within global pharmaceutical manufacturing operations and begin to automate and digitize their workflows, we believe our platform is exceptionally well-positioned to enable the future of quality control automation and unlock further significant TAM expansion opportunities.
We employ direct commercial and service teams that drive the adoption of our products globally. We create a superior user experience from pre-sales, to onboarding, consultative validation services, onsite technical training, and continued customer support throughout our relationship. We have a scalable commercial infrastructure including a direct sales force in North America and Europe. This is supplemented with an extensive and highly specialized customer service and validation infrastructure. This infrastructure ensures successful on-boarding of the Growth Direct through both initial validation and follow-on purchases throughout the entire customer site network, where the highest volume sites may require dozens of Growth Direct systems. We currently have customers across approximately 70 sites in 14 countries and the majority of our customers have multiple Growth Direct systems and have deployed Growth Direct across multiple facility locations.
We launched the latest generation of the Growth Direct system in 2017 and have placed 116 systems and sold over one million consumables globally. Our customer base includes over half of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies as measured by revenue and the manufacturers of 25% of globally approved cell and gene therapies, including 67% of approved gene-modified autologous CAR-T cell therapies. Once installed and validated in our customers’ facilities, Growth Direct provides for recurring revenues through ongoing consumables and service contracts. Based on the significant value that our Growth Direct platform provides to our customers, we have experienced strong organic growth over the last two fiscal years, despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in combined product and service revenue of $21.6 million and $14.1 million for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively, representing an annual growth rate of 53.6%.
We seek to establish Growth Direct as the trusted global standard in automated MQC by delivering the speed, accuracy, security, and data integrity and regulatory compliance that our customers depend on to ensure patient safety and consistent drug supply.
Industry background and challenges
MQC overview
MQC is the principal method by which pharmaceutical manufacturers ensure the ongoing sterility of their facilities and finished products by detecting and stopping contamination from any outside microorganisms, such as bacteria, mold, and other foreign substances. MQC is a critical component of the bioprocess and pharmaceutical production process and is regulated and mandated by the FDA under current good manufacturing practice, or cGMP, and by other international regulatory agencies. Current MQC testing methods are manual, laborious, have lacked innovation over the past several decades.
Most bioprocess and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes follow a conventional high-level workflow:
1.
Raw Materials: Raw materials such as excipients, active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, and water are received and prepared.
2.
Upstream Processing: These raw materials are combined and transformed through various processing steps to produce drug product.
3.
Downstream Processing: The drug product is formulated and aliquoted into its dosage form in a fill / finish operation.
4.
Fill/Finish: Finally, finished doses are packaged and prepared for release.
These process steps occur in manufacturing suites in ISO designated clean rooms, with increasingly stringent controls denoted by escalating cleanroom class (with Class A the most controlled), as the process nears final product release.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing workflow
To guarantee the quality of the end products and the safety of patients who receive them, manufacturers must ensure that their products are free of potentially harmful microbial contamination. This requirement creates a considerable operational challenge, as the natural environment is rife with microorganisms that could pose serious risk to patients should they transit into these clean rooms and contaminate any aspect of the manufacturing process. Consequently, pharmaceutical companies must maintain strict sterility control in their manufacturing facilities by vigilantly monitoring their sites, equipment, and finished drugs, and responding quickly to any microbial contamination. This is accomplished through MQC testing, which generally encompasses four specific applications for testing of microbial contamination:
● Environmental Monitoring (EM)-tests the manufacturing environment, including circulating air, exposed surfaces, and personnel, and represents approximately 65-70% of global MQC test volume;
● Water (W)-tests any purified water used at any stage of the drug production process, including water for injection, or WFI, and represents approximately 15% of global MQC test volume;
● In-Process Bioburden (BB)-tests raw materials, drug substance and in-process product, and represents approximately 15% of global MQC test volume; and
● Sterility Release (ST)-final testing of finished product to ensure sterility before the product is released for commercial sale, and represents less than 5% of global MQC test volume.
MQC testing occurs at high volumes due to its importance across all dimensions of a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation and must be executed daily and implemented across all production lines. As a result, pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities may conduct as many as tens of thousands to over one million tests per year.
Legacy MQC techniques and key challenges
The traditional method of MQC testing, which we estimate accounts for over 95% of all MQC testing, involves detection of viable organisms by a process known as “growth promotion.” In this process, samples are collected from a manufacturing site (e.g., on equipment, water, raw materials) and deposited by various methods onto plates with a matrix (typically agar) containing growth media with nutrients that encourage microbial growth. These plates are hand-labeled, inventoried, and physically transported to a centralized MQC lab. The plates are incubated under various conditions favorable for microbial growth; a manufacturing operation may simultaneously maintain multiple different incubation conditions and processes. If the original sample is contaminated with microbial organisms, the transferred organisms will divide and expand on the test plate, eventually forming visible colonies on the surface of the growth media. Technicians inspect these plates manually, counting colonies and recording their counts by hand. Visualization of colonies indicates the original presence of viable-that is, living-organisms from the sampled location or substance, and a likely microbial contamination for investigation and remediation.
The typical MQC lab today using the traditional method
A typical MQC testing process using the traditional testing method involves 15 or more manual steps per sample, including sample collection, labeling, transport, inventory, incubation, multiple reading and re-incubation steps, final counting, data recording, and data entry. The process is inherently inefficient, with some of the early sample collection steps occurring inside the manufacturing suites spread across a campus, and others centralized in campus MQC labs, requiring sample transport. The manual handling aspect of the traditional method makes it more prone to human error than an automated alternative and can lead to extensive labor and other direct and indirect costs given the thousands to millions of MQC tests required annually per manufacturing facility.
15-step process for traditional microbial MQC method
The traditional method poses several operational problems:
● Delayed results - Colonies must grow to a certain size, typically 10 million cells, before the human eye is able to detect them. Across the range of organisms and incubation protocols that facilities handle, this growth time can range from 5-14 days. Until then, no definitive result can be determined, which delays any dependent processes.
● Test subjectivity - Once growth has occurred, a human operator will count the colonies and decide whether the number of colonies meets or exceeds their organization’s threshold for remediation. However, colonies can grow together or overlap completely, or can be mistaken for other artifacts, confounding operators’ ability to generate an accurate, subjective count, especially given the fact that human operators can only check plates a few times during the incubation cycle.
● Vulnerability to errors - Operators must manually categorize, label, track and manage numerous plates through a complex multi-step, multi-day process of incubation and analysis, risking the loss or mishandling of samples. Manual analysis of samples also requires human data collection and entry, introducing risk of mistakes during recording and transcription of data.
● Lack of data integrity and audit controls - The manual, traditional method of data handling faces challenges in meeting the current regulatory standards requiring data integrity. Current processes, which are often paper based, introduce risk of erroneous or fraudulent data as critical data entry points are reliant on the experience, state of mind, and motives of the individual recording them.
● Laborious process - Manual growth promotion is a labor-intensive, multi-step process that requires operators to cycle samples through incubators multiple times per day as they check for growth and often requires physical transport from a manufacturing facility to a centralized lab.
Lapses in traditional MQC processes and potential contamination have resulted in increased regulatory scrutiny and organizational risk, leading to lengthy regulatory investigations and costly enforcement actions in addition to product loss and resulting lost revenue. The risks and costs of inadequate traditional MQC testing include:
● Global data integrity risk - 40-50% of all warning letters issued globally contain a data integrity component.
● Lengthy regulatory investigations - The time to resolution of FDA 483s and warning letters is approximately 6-24 months, and even longer in some cases.
● FDA enforcement action risk - Risk of significant and costly FDA enforcement actions, up to and including consent decrees.
● Significant product loss - Up to $100 million annual product loss per company due to MQC failures has been observed in recent years.
● Shareholder value destruction - Potential shareholder value destruction in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars due to MQC issues, resulting product and financial issues, potential customer concerns, and impact from negative press.
In the last several years alone, there have been numerous publicized incidents involving leading pharmaceutical companies that highlight the risk of poorly controlled, manual MQC testing and protocols, resulting in lengthy site closures, CRLs, and delays to product approvals.
Furthermore, regulatory compliance pressures in the pharmaceutical industry have generally increased over the past decade, with the FDA issuing nearly 474 Form 483s and over 206 warning letters globally for various regulatory violations in 2021. More specifically, the proportion of FDA warning letters containing a data integrity complaint has risen in recent years, as the agency devotes greater attention to that topic. We expect there to be continued regulatory scrutiny as the industry shifts to more complex biological manufacturing and manufacturing returns domestically.
Increasing industry tailwinds
Key MQC automation growth drivers
We believe several industry trends are driving need for MQC automation, including:
● Increasing regulatory scrutiny - Regulatory compliance pressures in the pharmaceutical industry have increased over the past decade, as mentioned above. Moreover, between 2011 and 2020, FDA inspectors issued more than 280 warning letters related to data integrity problems, with a significant increase since new regulations took effect in 2016. Other international regulatory agencies are also defining and increasingly enforcing the highest standards for consistent data robustness, including the U.K. and the World Health Organization.
● Data integrity and need for remote, real-time monitoring of facilities - Facing increased data integrity scrutiny from regulatory authorities in their quality control lab and manufacturing areas, pharmaceutical manufacturers must focus on meeting these regulatory requirements as defined by the FDA and other
international regulatory bodies. Breakdown of data integrity, even if inadvertent, can result in warning letters, refusal to approve applications, and even product bans from a jurisdiction. Additionally, given the increasingly complex nature of biopharmaceutical manufacturing, there is a growing need to be able to monitor MQC testing in real-time and remotely to ensure the constant quality of production processes.
● Expansion of high growth biologics and advent of new, more complex therapeutic modalities such as cell and gene therapies - At $1 trillion in sales in 2021, the global prescription drug market is large and growing, driven by demand for new therapies, such as biologics and cell and gene therapies. The global biologics market is expected to grow at a 9.6% CAGR through 2026 according to EvaluatePharma, and account for 35% of prescriptions and 55% of total revenue of the top 100 drugs, driven in part by the rise in the burden of chronic diseases and growing demand for innovative therapies. Within the biotechnology segment, certain modalities are growing even faster, such as cell and gene therapies, where MQC testing volume is projected to grow at a 10-30% CAGR through 2026. Biologics, cell, and gene therapies require complex multi-step manufacturing processes which demand efficient automated MQC processes. These complex biologics have the highest MQC testing intensity per batch of manufactured product, given that they are often manufactured in a highly modularized fashion where each manufacturing batch often represents an individual dose to a specific patient. These dynamics extend to contract development and manufacturing organizations, or CDMOs, which continue to benefit from increased outsourcing and the need for contract partners that can manufacture these complex therapeutics.
● Greater efficiency and focus on six sigma lean manufacturing principles - The pharmaceutical industry is under significant pressure to commercialize products faster in order to maximize their patent life. There is continued focus on concepts such as lean manufacturing and six sigma to drive efficiencies in the manufacturing process and a greater emphasis on automating MQC testing to reduce errors and decrease manufacturing lead times and inventory requirements in supply chains. The complex nature of emerging biologics and novel therapeutics such as cell and gene therapy also require increased focus on efficiency and precision manufacturing. For example, autologous cell therapies require collection of patient tissue, ex vivo manipulation of these cells, and delivery via reinjection into patients-all steps which must be conducted within a short time span, and with absolute microbiological sterility. Such “vein-to-vein” processes require an intense focus on purity and contamination control throughout every step of the manufacturing workflow, given the value of the individualized ingredients and fast turnaround time required to deliver the therapy back to the patient.
● Rebuilding of domestic growth supply chain / increased scrutiny of outsourced materials with focus on reshoring drug development process - The pharmaceutical industry has historically embraced a global supply chain which has provided cost advantages made available by offshoring certain services, such as drug and API manufacturing. However, many companies are pushing to re-shore their global supply chains to resume domestic manufacturing, in part driven by recent supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the potential for geopolitical and intellectual property infringement risk. We believe the reshoring of manufacturing operations will further necessitate the need for efficient automated MQC testing.
Market opportunity
Our core market of MQC testing encompasses a ubiquitous and high-volume testing process deployed across all pharmaceutical manufacturing operations. We address a total systems, consumables, and services market that we estimate to be approximately $10 billion in 2022 and is forecasted to grow at an approximate 9% CAGR to over $16 billion by 2027. We based our estimated TAM on total potential demand for our products derived from research conducted by Health Advances LLC and our current pricing. Our TAM includes both a system sales opportunity and a recurring opportunity from sales of consumables and service contracts, the latter of which is estimated to be approximately $5 billion in 2022. We estimate that our global addressable MQC testing market represents approximately 360 million MQC tests annually in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9% to a total of approximately 507 million tests by 2027. This aggregate test volume is composed of MQC testing across several addressable end markets, including biologic therapeutics such as cell and gene therapies, vaccines, and protein therapies (approximately 130
million annual MQC tests); small molecule orals (approximately 95 million annual MQC tests); small molecule injectables (approximately 100 million annual MQC tests); and medtech products (approximately 36 million annual MQC tests). We serve this market across three geographic territories: North America, which accounts for approximately 35% of the global MQC testing market, Europe (approximately 32%), and the rest of the world (approximately 33%).
Our core total addressable market
We are especially focused on serving the high-growth biologics, cell, and gene therapy markets, which have the highest MQC testing intensity per batch of manufactured product. We seek to drive substantial growth by establishing Growth Direct as the standard for MQC automation in advanced bioprocessing for biologics, cell, and gene therapies. MQC testing for these complex therapeutics modalities is forecasted to grow at a 10-30% compounded annual growth rate through 2027. Because these advanced modalities require complex multi-step manufacturing processes with individualized batches and increased product handling, we believe traditional MQC will not scale efficiently to serve this end market, and that the Growth Direct is well positioned to address this opportunity. The need is further highlighted given we have observed an increased scrutiny by regulators and concerns over data integrity, particularly for complex therapeutic manufacturing where MQC is still dominated by legacy, manual processes. We estimate MQC testing for biologic therapeutics will grow at an approximate 13% CAGR from 2022 through 2027. As the sector continues to witness significant advancement, we estimate that nearly 50% of our total TAM growth through 2027 will be driven by the biologics, cell, and gene therapy end markets. Within the cell and gene therapy category, the need for faster, more efficient manufacturing presents an attractive targeted growth opportunity for Growth Direct. A quarter of globally approved cell and gene therapy products use Growth Direct to automate MQC, including two-thirds of approved gene-modified autologous CAR-T cell therapies, and the remaining 1,100+ cell and gene therapies in Phase 1 to 3 clinical trials represent a significant opportunity for our business.
Cell and gene therapy market and pipeline
Our business is further well-positioned to execute on several TAM expansion opportunities. We believe there is an opportunity to expand our existing automated MQC testing solution in adjacent markets such as personal care product manufacturing, where our Growth Direct platform is currently in use and which we estimate presents an approximately $8 billion opportunity with an estimated 270 million MQC tests annually. We based this estimated TAM on total potential demand for our products derived from research we commissioned conducted by Health Advances LLC and our current pricing. We also intend to develop services and products to allow us to deliver integrated QC workflows not currently addressed by our Growth Direct platform, which we estimate represents an approximately $10 billion opportunity. We based this estimated TAM on potential demand derived from our own market research and current pricing of comparable integrated products in other markets. Combined with our core TAM, we believe these expansion opportunities could increase our potential TAM to $32 billion.
The Growth Direct platform
Our proprietary Growth Direct platform fully automates and digitizes the trusted growth-based method of MQC and enables customers to perform this critical testing process more efficiently, accurately, and securely. Our platform comprises the Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables, LIMS connection software, and comprehensive customer support and validation services. The platform’s suite of products reflects our expertise at innovating and integrating
across multiple technology disciplines, including systems design, robotic handling, microbiology, optical imaging, image analysis, data management and security, and process automation, and is supported by our unwavering commitment to the highest level of customer support.
Our technology
To date, prior technology products have not succeeded in automating MQC workflow at scale, due to a combination of insufficient platform throughput, lack of full automation, and non-viable technology approaches. Most testing solutions on the market that seek to replace the traditional method diverge from directly measuring microbial growth, using alternative analytical technologies that often require additional reagent preparation and that do not deliver the same results as the existing traditional method. These methods are difficult to validate relative to the traditional method and have therefore seen low adoption across the industry.
Growth Direct method
The Growth Direct method relies on a fundamental property of all microorganisms-they contain cellular components required for growth, called flavins and flavoproteins, that autofluoresce, or glow, without the addition of reagents under certain frequencies of light. Our proprietary system detects microcolonies of microorganisms by illuminating them with blue-spectrum light and directing the resulting green-spectrum signal onto a Charged-Coupled Device, or CCD, chip-an array of independent photosensitive pixel elements. Our image analysis software interprets these light signals and counts the clusters of illuminated pixels representing each microcolony. The end result is an automated method that is faster and produces more reliable and accessible data than the traditional method. Our Growth Direct platform accelerates time to results by several days, a 50% improvement over the traditional method, and reduces MQC testing to a simple two-step workflow, eliminating up to 85% of the manual steps of traditional MQC, generating significant time, operational, and cost savings for our customers.
Traditional microbial method compared to Growth Direct method
Core detection technology
Our system illuminates samples using an array of high-intensity blue LED lights, which causes microcolonies to autofluoresce without destroying them. All microbial cells autofluoresce in the green-spectrum when illuminated with blue LED light. A CCD chip captures images with illuminated pixels wherever autofluorescence from microbial cells is detected. Our software detects and registers the clusters of illuminated pixels that represent underlying microcolonies. The system generates a time series of images as the sample incubates and is imaged every four hours. Finally, vision analysis software continuously evaluates the time series for evidence of growing colonies, represented by increasing signal intensity and size of illuminated groups of pixels.
Illumination of a sample via a blue LED light causes microcolonies to fluoresce
Growing autofluorescent S. aureus microcolonies in Growth Direct imaging time series
A key feature of detection via imaging of autofluorescence is that this approach does not harm cells, and as such is a non-destructive method. This provides several benefits, including ensuring that detected colonies represent actual viable microbial contaminations, and permitting detected microcolonies to grow into visible colonies for use in subsequent microbial identification for root cause investigation follow-up.
Our platform can detect microorganism growth at the microcolony stage at approximately 100 cells, which typically occurs in half the time required for visual plate counting to detect visible colonies by eye at approximately 10 million cells.
Growth Direct finds colonies earlier than operators using visual plate inspection.
System components and workflow
The Growth Direct system comprises two automated and temperature-controlled incubators, robotic sample transport systems, an advanced imaging system, two servers (one for system control, the other for image analysis) and associated hardware and staging required for the handling of up to 700 of our consumables.
The overall workflow of the automated Growth Direct method mirrors the traditional visual plate counting assays, allowing for operator familiarity of use, ease of integration into existing MQC protocols, and a streamlined regulatory validation process.
Growth Direct system components
The Growth Direct workflow begins when microbial organisms are collected on proprietary growth media plates using the same collection methods as the traditional method-via direct contact, air settling or air filtration for environmental monitoring testing, or via funnel filtration of liquid samples onto the membrane of the consumable for water or bioburden testing. For ease of use, our consumables are compatible with existing hardware, such as active air samplers or liquid filtration systems, and are supplied by us with identical nutrient agar media as traditional media plates.
A Growth Direct operator loads the system in bulk using two carriers designed to hold up to 60 of our consumables each. A key benefit of the Growth Direct is that the system can be placed directly in a production area, compared to the traditional method which often requires transporting samples to a centralized lab for testing. Our consumables are pre-labeled with unique bar codes for forensic trail identification, management and to enable data integrity compliance. Every consumable bar code contains a unique serial number that allows traceable information to be captured by two bar code scanners on the Growth Direct system. That allows metadata such as sample location, time, type, test protocol, and operator to be captured and associated with each consumable result. Intake sensors within the system automatically read, identify, and catalog the bar-coded samples, after which the samples are transferred from the loading queue to one of two independently controlled incubators, which together have a capacity of 700 of our consumables, and which support the operation of multiple custom incubation protocols. Once loaded into the system, consumables cannot be removed or tampered without generating an auditable record of actions by an operator.
During the incubation phase, the Growth Direct captures images of each consumable at intervals of four hours. To perform the imaging, the system transfers consumables from the incubator to the imaging chamber, illuminates them using a blue-spectrum light and captures autofluorescence signals in a high-resolution image using the CCD camera. Samples are returned to the incubators to continue their incubation protocols. Automated sample handling means no sample is ever missed for testing or replaced into the wrong incubator or accidentally discarded.
Over the course of the incubation protocol, the system’s image analysis software uses proprietary algorithms to analyze the behavior of autofluorescent objects over an accumulating time series of images, enabling the Growth Direct to identify and count growing microcolonies and distinguish them from non-living debris.
After the image analysis is complete, the system reports the number of growing colonies found on the surface of the consumable. The result data can be printed or transmitted to LIMS via our LIMS connection software for storage and user review. When a sample demonstrates growth that exceeds the threshold for contamination set by the organization, automatic email alerts notify quality personnel of a possible contamination before the end of the incubation period. A powerful yet intuitive user interface allows the operator to track the consumables in the system throughout the testing process and monitor the results in real time, which offers a significant advantage to the manual and traditional method that has to wait to the end of the incubation before counting. After results are reviewed, the consumable can either be unloaded to a carrier for further microbiological identification or automatically discarded as waste at the operator’s discretion.
Validation framework
We have demonstrated the accuracy, speed, and reliability of detecting microcolonies using the Growth Direct’s automated image analysis compared to conventional methods through numerous scientific studies.
Accuracy. The Growth Direct is highly accurate when compared to traditional methods. Studies of the Growth Direct comparing its vision-based detection and enumeration of colonies against the MQC gold-standard USP <61> benchmark reference set of micro-organisms demonstrate that the Growth Direct delivers the same results or better as traditional, manual verification of colonies.
The figure below demonstrates the accuracy of the Growth Direct imaging and analysis technology compared to a reference count produced by an analyst interpreting the image data created by the software. A wide range of organism types-both mandated by the United States Pharmacopeia, or USP, and those commonly found in pharmaceutical facilities-were evaluated.
Growth Direct colony count accuracy vs. standard reference
Speed. The Growth Direct is faster than the traditional method. Across a range of organisms of interest, the Growth Direct detects colonies in half the time or faster.
The figure below shows the time to detection, or TTD, and time to result, or TTR, in hours for a wide range of pharma lab-relevant microorganisms using the EM application on the Growth Direct system compared to the TTD/TTR window using traditional manual tests (72+ hours).
Growth Direct time to result vs. traditional method
Our value proposition by stakeholder is described below:
Reliability. The Growth Direct is more reliable than the traditional method for accuracy of organism enumeration. In studies of environmental monitoring plates incubated for five days, which compared Growth Direct’s vision-based detection and enumeration to visual counting conducted by technicians, the Growth Direct regularly identified and counted colonies that technicians missed, as shown by the counts in the shaded area in the figure below.
Growth Direct colony detection reliability vs. traditional method
Our Growth Direct platform
We pioneered the Growth Direct platform-a combination of our novel Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables, LIMS connection software, and comprehensive customer support and validation services-to fully automate and digitize the process of MQC in the sterile manufacturing of important health care products.
The Growth Direct system
Our latest version of the second-generation Growth Direct, launched in 2017, reflects our deep experience with delivering automation to the MQC market. The Growth Direct system is a fully automated, high throughput system for processing MQC samples-a microbiology quality control lab in a box. The Growth Direct contains two high-capacity incubators, an advanced imaging system and internal robotics for sample handling. The system enables walk-away bulk sample loading, holding 700 of our consumables per system. Its dual, independently controlled incubators automatically manage multi-temperature incubation protocols. Onboard imaging and vision software detects and counts microbial growth, delivering test results in half the time of the manual method. The system’s compact 57” x 39” x 95” size delivers these benefits in a footprint that allows customers to place the Growth Direct directly in manufacturing suites of various sizes compared to the traditional method, where samples are often required to be transferred to a centralized lab. Co-location in manufacturing minimizes delays to incubation and errors introduced by sample transfer to the quality control lab. Growth Direct brings the lab to the manufacturing floor, for in-line / at-the-line automated MQC testing, anywhere in the facility or manufacturing campus.
The Growth Direct system
Proprietary consumables
We offer two proprietary consumables plates to capture test samples for analysis on the Growth Direct: (1) an Environmental Monitoring, or EM, consumable and (2) a Water / Bioburden, or W/BB, consumable. Both types are custom-designed proprietary consumables with specific mechanical and optical features to facilitate automated handling and image processing within our Growth Direct system and have bar codes for tracking and data integrity. Two bar codes are used-one applied during our manufacturing process to define the media type and expiration dates, and a second that is generated by the Growth Direct system at time of testing that defines the sample ID and LIMS number. The consumables incorporate multiple standard media for each application as both products are based on the traditional growth method.
Growth Direct Environmental Monitoring and Water / Bioburden consumables
In addition, we are developing a growth-based rapid automated sterility test for use on the Growth Direct system. Rapid sterility tests are utilized for final release testing in any facility that manufactures sterile products such as biologics and sterile injectables, as a final quality check before shipment. The traditional sterility test utilizes a growth method that requires at least 14 days to deliver final results, during which time dependent manufacturing steps are paused or proceed at risk, or final products are held in inventory. This causes delays to patient access and manufacturer revenue recognition as well as excess inventory costs. Sterility tests are especially valuable in vaccine manufacturing to enable faster release and greater capacity, and in cell and gene therapy manufacturing environments given the challenging balance of purity, contamination control, and speed required in the manufacturing of those products. For example, vaccine production requires two or more sterility tests during manufacturing, each of which imposes a 14-day delay on the production process. In total, release of critical vaccines can be delayed by months. Similarly, autologous cell therapies require collection of patient tissue, ex vivo manipulation of these cells, and delivery via reinjection into patients - all steps which must be conducted within approximately two weeks, which the traditional method of sterility testing exceeds, causing delays or requiring release of the product at risk.
We expect to start beta testing of our rapid sterility test with select customers in the second quarter of 2022. When commercialized, we expect our rapid sterility test will reduce the traditional method’s 14-day time to results by at least 50%, permitting faster final release, with the goal of speeding critical drugs and vaccines to market. When released, we expect our rapid sterility test will also deliver the other benefits of the Growth Direct platform, including increased efficiency, reduced risk of errors, and enabling data integrity compliance. Our development program was supported by contract funding from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research & Development Authority, or BARDA, which is supporting the development of improvements in vaccine production methods that accelerate the availability of vaccines against viruses with pandemic potential.
Growth Direct LIMS connection software
Our Growth Direct allows for two-way integration to LIMS enabling a fully paperless workflow. The bi-directional LIMS connection uses the widely supported comma-separated values, or CSV, file format to communicate, delivering compatibility with all existing LIMS. The connection supports the use of LIMS for Growth Direct created barcodes that are applied to our consumables. After sampling, the consumables are loaded into the Growth Direct system, which performs the incubation, detection and enumeration of colonies. Final results are automatically uploaded to the LIMS. This eliminates the risk of human error that could arise from manually entering the results, while improving efficiency. Moreover, the LIMS connection eliminates the need to use paper in the lab and delivers information to stakeholders in a secure manner, designed to enable compliance with data integrity regulations.
Growth Direct LIMS connection
Our service team works directly with customers’ IT teams to help integrate Growth Direct software into their LIMS for seamless connectivity.
Validation services
As part of our customer support experience, we offer full validation support to ensure customer success with the Growth Direct. This offering helps our customers validate their Growth Direct for full routine use faster, typically in just three to nine months, and develops confidence in the operation of our platform.
Support begins prior to system purchase when our sales representative brings in a validation expert for consultation about specific application requirements. The validation teams offer a complete array of documents and services to support validation efforts, including:
● Installation Qualification
● Operational Qualification
● Performance Qualification
● Time-To-Results Qualification, or TTR
● 21 CFR Part 11 Assessment
● Method Qualification/Method Suitability
Once initial systems are validated, our customized validation approach allows customers to quickly validate follow-on systems through a Technical Transfer Method, facilitating faster adoption throughout their site network.
Customer support
We offer full 24/7 maintenance support via our annual service contract. Purchase of the Growth Direct comes with one-year warranty, after which customers may purchase annual maintenance packages. Our maintenance support package offers access to a staffed online and phone help desk with knowledge base, remote management and troubleshooting, and a 24-hour response time from our on-site field service engineer team.
Key advantages of our Growth Direct platform
Several factors differentiate our technology and will continue to be significant drivers of customer adoption of Growth Direct:
● Faster Results at Higher Testing Throughputs and Capacity - The Growth Direct uniquely combines superior detection and enumeration capabilities-translating to a 50% reduction in detection time compared to the traditional method-with a high-throughput, 700-sample total capacity form factor. This allows Growth Direct to offer a large volume automated testing solution that allows for fewer investigations, more targeted interventions, and more uptime for manufacturers, therefore saving time and money.
● Increased Accuracy through Automation - The automation of both sample handling and enumeration virtually eliminates human errors from the MQC process. Samples are transferred automatically at the right time, reducing the risk of sample loss, misplacement or mislabeling. The Growth Direct also more reliably distinguishes distinct colonies, hence avoiding the subjectivity that human operators introduce through visual inspection of plates.
● Increased Process Efficiency - Faster time to results means faster decision-making and intervention in the event of contamination, preventing production of contaminated batches, and reducing waste and overproduction. Meanwhile, elimination of unnecessary manual labor allows skilled MQC specialists to spend time on test design, interventions, standard operating procedure, or SOP, updates and other critical tasks.
● Robust Security and Connectivity - Growth Direct can integrate with existing LIMS, allowing for seamless data transfer from the system to the LIMS. This connection not only makes it easier for quality control personnel to handle and process their testing data, but it also allows other stakeholders to instantly access information critical to continued production.
● Superior Data Integrity - By maintaining accurate, complete, and intact records within their original context, Growth Direct ensures the trustworthiness of data. Moreover, data reside in permanent form for the lifetime of the record, easily accessible to authorized users, which allows operators to analyze trends over time for timely, cost-saving decision-making. The system is designed to enable compliance with industry data integrity standards such as 21 CFR Part 11, which set forth the FDA’s standards for electronic records and electronic signatures.
● High Reliability with Clear Path to Validation - The Growth Direct delivers the reliability that customers need for their mission-critical manufacturing processes, with a consistent record of over 99% uptime in live production use. Our platform’s reliability is further supported by our 24/7 support infrastructure and extensive regulatory validation services to ensure quick and seamless integration with customer’s facilities and IT systems.
Competitive strengths
We believe our continued growth will be driven by the following competitive strengths.
● Our proprietary technology platform offering best-in-class automated and secure MQC testing - Our platform was purpose built to meet the growing demands posed by the increasing scale, complexity, and regulatory scrutiny of global pharmaceutical manufacturing. We believe that our Growth Direct leads
the industry in throughput, accuracy, reliability, security, and data integrity. Compared to the traditional method, our Growth Direct platform accelerates time to results by several days, a 50% improvement over the traditional method, and reduces MQC testing to a simple two-step workflow, eliminating 85% of the manual steps of traditional MQC, generating significant time, operational, and cost savings for our customers. Growth Direct is backed by our comprehensive validation and value-added service offerings, which create a continuous, positive touch point with our customers. Altogether, we believe our technology and service platform best address the growing needs of our customers.
● Our investment and patent-protected innovation across multiple technology disciplines - Our platform reflects our expertise at innovating and integrating across multiple technology disciplines, including systems design, robotic handling, microbiology, optical imaging, software image analysis, data management and security, and process automation. Through multiple years of development and investments from both investors and institutional partners, such as BARDA, we have amassed a set of technologies that form the foundation of our growing suite of products and solutions. We also believe that our first mover advantage in automated MQC testing reinforces our growing position in this market, with over 15 years of customer development and feedback, technical development, advocacy, and customer success. We continue to focus on investing in our business and have a well-defined product roadmap which includes development of new, innovative products, as well as advancements to our existing suite of technologies. Moreover, we have a strong intellectual property portfolio, including at least eighty-five granted patents globally with seven U.S. granted patents and five U.S. pending patent applications as of December 31, 2021.
● Top-tier customer partners establishing Growth Direct as an industry standard globally - We have cultivated long-standing and collaborative relationships with our significant and growing customer base. We originally developed our platform in close collaboration with our customers, and our customers’ success in validating our technology constitutes a major driver for platform deployment. Moreover, our comprehensive validation, value-added service, and customer support offerings create a continuous touch point with our customers, cementing the value and integration of our products. Through these efforts, we deliver high quality experiences at every step of the customer journey which creates and strengthens our customer loyalty.
● Deep integration into heavily regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing processes - Our products are entrenched within our customers’ workflow and the majority of our customers have purchased multiple systems and at multiple locations. For every drug product manufactured or in development, our customers are required to establish a validated QC process that they can execute consistently and reliably. Customers typically dismantle manual testing infrastructure after switching to our platform, creating enormous switching costs that get amplified by the network effect of linked systems and data aggregation across customer sites. Since initial installation, our relentless focus on providing robust validation support ensures assimilation of our platform into our customers’ SOPs, further contributing to customer captivity. We believe that our first mover advantage has further enabled us to become deeply rooted within our customer’s facilities and provide for ongoing opportunity with our existing customer base.
● Our highly attractive business model that leverages our growing installed base of systems to generate persistent recurring revenues through consumables and service contracts - Once embedded and validated in our customers’ facilities, our Growth Direct provides for recurring revenues through ongoing consumables and service contracts. When our customers invest in our technology, they commit to a long-term use of our products. Our customers regularly purchase our proprietary consumables to perform MQC testing and maintain their systems via annual service contracts. Our products are used daily in our customer’s facilities and their key workflows, reinforced by regulatory requirements that are driving the industry towards further automation. Once validated, additional systems can be deployed to absorb the majority of test volume in a facility. Moreover, once a Growth Direct system is installed within a customer’s facility, it provides for an opportunity to place additional systems in existing and new facilities, which can be installed and validated in a faster, more efficient manner given the comprehensive validation process for the initial system.
● Ability to leverage our extensive regulatory expertise to better serve our customers’ needs - We believe we are a thought-leader with respect to regulatory requirements. We have a long history engaging with the major regulatory bodies in our industry, such as the FDA and European Medicines Agency, or EMA, some of whom are also our customers. Our regulatory strategy has benefited our business in several ways, including: 1) by achieving the definition of the Growth Direct Technology as an “automated compendial validation” in key trade group and regulatory issuances, such as the Parenteral Drug Association, or PDA, Technical Report 33, and USP chapter <1223>; 2) by working with industry and regulatory forums to define a fast validation strategy that allows a short timeline routine testing implementation; 3) and by helping our customers obtain regulatory acceptance from the EMA and the FDA for the use of our technology and validation strategy for new drug applications with the Bioburden application (EM and water do not need regulatory license change). Our technology has also been audited regularly by regulatory inspectors as part of routine audits of customer sites, with no citations received to date. We have also succeeded in securing a substantial long-term government contract from BARDA to support development of new products as part of an ongoing partnership concerning areas of shared strategic interest regarding accelerated pandemic vaccine release.
● Our experienced management team and workforce with deep domain knowledge - Our management team combines strong subject matter expertise with a demonstrated history of commercial and operational execution. Moreover, our workforce has deep domain knowledge across a range of healthcare, technology and business disciplines, which we believe drives our continued commercial success. We have supplemented our diverse technical experience by assembling an operational team with expertise in manufacturing, legal, sales, marketing, customer service and finance. We believe this confluence of talent from multiple disciplines allows us to stay ahead of our competitors by identifying highly impactful opportunities and building products and solutions that address these opportunities.
Our growth strategy
We aim to position the Growth Direct as the industry standard for automated MQC testing. We believe we can achieve this through the following key growth strategies.
Leverage our first-mover advantage and our industry leadership to cement Growth Direct as the new standard of MQC automation in the rapidly growing bioprocessing market, including biologics, cell, and gene therapy manufacturing - Our MQC process automation platform is particularly well-suited to the manufacturing of biologics, cell, and gene therapies. These products are manufactured in a highly modularized fashion where each manufacturing batch often represents an individual dose to a specific patient. These therapies are therefore exceedingly valuable, and the manufacturing methods to produce them are time-sensitive and exposed to outsized risk of contamination given the amount of material handling and process change-over. We have demonstrated the value of our platform in cell and gene therapy manufacturing with our early success in converting customers in this segment. Furthermore, companies in this space are developing new approaches to manufacture these complex products, including novel facility layouts, new processes and workflows, and new quality and risk management frameworks. We intend to capitalize on our first-mover advantage to define the standard of MQC automation in this growing market by moving upstream in the cell and gene therapy manufacturing design practice, creating thought leadership on MQC automation in cell and gene therapy manufacturing, partnering with facility design firms who specialize in manufacturing infrastructure for these modalities, and targeting CDMOs, contract manufacturing organizations, or CMOs, and contract research organizations, or CROs, with significant exposure to this segment.
Drive new customer adoption of the Growth Direct platform by converting the leading manufacturers in our core markets, including but not limited to top 50 pharmaceutical companies and leading CDMOs - With the launch of our latest generation Growth Direct in 2017, over 30 global customers have adopted the Growth Direct platform to automate MQC testing in approximately 70 manufacturing facilities. We intend to drive global adoption by broadly seeking new customers in our core pharmaceutical manufacturing end markets. Our initial focus is on influential high-volume top 50 pharmaceutical companies as measured by revenue and global contract manufacturing organizations, which provide manufacturing services directly to pharmaceutical companies. Our existing customer base includes over 50% of the top twenty global pharmaceutical companies by revenue. Our target geographies include North America and
Europe and we are expanding our direct and indirect sales teams to access new customers in other geographic territories, such as Asia.
Expand implementation of the Growth Direct platform within our existing customer base by deploying additional systems across their global manufacturing site network and driving increased application utilization and consumable pull through on a system-by-system basis - We pursue a land-and-expand strategy to drive broad global adoption of our systems. Our approach begins by placing initial systems within our customers’ global manufacturing network. The majority of our customers, which comprise over 50% of the top twenty global pharmaceutical companies as measured by revenue, have global operations with multiple manufacturing facilities. We guide these initial sites as they gain experience with the Growth Direct, assisting their validation of initial applications, proving the value of our systems, and establishing a relationship as a trusted and reliable vendor. Our system is specifically designed to absorb the daily MQC testing volume at our customer’s facilities. We then successfully sell additional systems to support additional suites at existing sites as well as leverage our high customer satisfaction at existing facilities to drive adoption at new sites within our customers’ global manufacturing network. The majority of our customers have multiple Growth Direct systems per site and across different facility locations. We accomplish this expansion via direct peer-to-peer selling facilitated by our commercial team, and by partnering with executive decision makers to execute global customer rollout agreements. We simultaneously drive increased utilization on a system-by-system basis by providing our customers our full suite of applications that can be validated and used on the Growth Direct. Moreover, our customers’ strong desire to globally standardize and harmonize their MQC operations provides us a direct opportunity to grow with them, and after validating their first system we are able to install and validate more systems globally for them in a much faster time period given the initial validation process.
Increase the value of our platform by innovating and launching new applications, hardware, and software products that deliver the power of integrated automation across our customers’ QC workflows - We believe the depth, scalability and robust capabilities of our Growth Direct platform allow us to address key challenges facing MQC testing in the pharmaceutical industry. As an innovative leader in automatic MQC testing, we intend to invest in further enhancements in our existing platform as well as end-to-end workflow solutions in our core market. We have a well-defined roadmap for our existing products, which includes new consumables to expand our platform’s MQC testing applications, such as in sterility testing; improvements to on-board algorithms that enable greater insight from our image analysis; additional imaging modalities to unlock new testing functionality; additional system formats to accommodate new customer use cases; and new software to enable fleet management and analytics. Our product roadmap also includes new products to automate upstream and downstream workflow elements, such as microbial identification and automated sample collection, and data-rich products including data management, fleet integration, and predictive analytics. By expanding and continuously enhancing the Growth Direct platform, we believe we can drive incremental revenue from existing clients as well as broaden the appeal of our solutions to potential new customers.
Expand the Growth Direct platform into adjacent end markets with high volumes of manual MQC testing - We have identified markets that conduct high volumes of MQC testing under regulatory control and derive value from improving operational efficiency via MQC automation and we may opportunistically enter these markets. We could expand into these markets through our existing technologies, through adapting our existing technologies, or through developing new products specific to the unmet needs of adjacent markets. We have identified several market expansion opportunities which we expect to pursue in the near term, including deploying our existing Growth Direct platform into the personal care products market, in which an estimated 270 million MQC tests are performed annually, equating to an overall market of approximately $8 billion. We continuously seek to identify other market opportunities where our Growth Direct platform could enhance MQC testing.
Pursue opportunistic strategic investments, partnerships, and acquisitions - Our strong growth to date has been entirely organic as we continue to add customers to our growing install base of Growth Direct users, while also expanding our consumables and product offering to those customers. At the appropriate stage we may consider opportunistic investments, partnerships, and acquisitions which may strengthen our product platform, allow us to enter new markets, and enhance our growth profile.
Commercial
We launched the latest generation of the Growth Direct system in 2017, which includes the Growth Direct platform and consumables for three applications: environmental monitoring, water, and bioburden testing. Our principal commercial strategy since launch has been to focus on converting customers among the top fifty global pharmaceutical companies. Our land-and-expand approach concentrates on placing initial systems at leading pharmaceutical manufacturers, validating our products, driving high customer satisfaction, and then expanding throughout our customer’s network of sites with more systems and applications. We have simultaneously and opportunistically pursued other important customer types outside of top fifty global pharmaceutical companies, such as CDMOs, CMOs, CROs, vaccine manufacturers, pharmacy compounders (503Bs), among others.
With this approach, we have substantially grown our customer base to over 30 global customers and have placed 116 systems and sold over 1 million consumables globally. We have customers across approximately 70 sites in 14 countries and the majority of our customers have multiple Growth Direct systems per site and across different facility locations. Our customer base includes manufacturers of biologics, including cell and gene therapies, sterile injectables, small molecule pharmaceutical manufacturers, and CDMOs, among others. We have sold to over half of the top twenty global pharmaceutical companies as measured by revenue. Moreover, we serve customers who operate some of the most complex manufacturing modalities in the world; for example, we support the manufacturers of 25% of globally approved cell and gene therapies, including 67% of approved gene-modified autologous CAR-T cell therapies. Many of our customers purchase multiple Growth Direct systems at the same time and we expect them to use these systems for many years before needing to purchase new systems. As a result, a significant portion of our annual sales currently comes from the purchase of our Growth Direct system by a small number of different customers each year. We are working to expand our new customer base and sales within existing customers’ organizations to provide a steady stream of sales of our systems and to grow our recurring sales stream from consumables and service contracts.
We have a global commercial team that includes direct sales, commercial operations, validation, field services, strategic marketing, marketing communications and product management. This staff is primarily located in North America and Europe, and we also maintain direct customer support teams providing both validation and field service capabilities in the same territories. We intend to significantly expand our sales, support, and marketing efforts in the future by expanding our direct footprint in North America and Europe as well as developing a comprehensive distribution and support network in Asia where significant new market opportunities exist.
We increase awareness of our products among our target customers through direct sales calls, trade shows, seminars, academic conferences, web presence, social media and other forms of internet marketing. We supplement these traditional marketing efforts by fostering an active community of users of our products through user groups, customer advisory board meetings, forums and blogs with internally generated and user-generated content.
We employ a high-touch, customer-centric commercial approach focused on maximizing customer success. After a system sale is closed, our team works closely with customers to install systems and provide on-site validation and training support. We focus on supporting our customer’s transition to an automated MQC protocol and aim to ensure customer success in routine use. We maintain high customer satisfaction through a robust service and maintenance offering, including an online phone and help desk, remote support and on-site field service.
Manufacturing and supply
Our primary manufacturing facility is located in our headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts. The facility has over 52,000 square feet, with 20,000 square feet of manufacturing floor space that houses multiple manufacturing spaces and functions, including assembly of Growth Direct systems, an ISO-8 cleanroom with ISO-5 laminar flow hoods for consumable manufacturing, dedicated areas for media preparation. The facility has robust quality control from materials receiving to product distribution. We are working to complete a back-up manufacturing facility for consumables in Lexington, Massachusetts.
We believe that our manufacturing capacity is sufficient to meet our near-term growth targets for both systems and consumables. Our consumables manufacturing operation, in particular, is designed to meet the demands of high-volume
media supply necessary to serve our market. It is centered around a state-of-the-art automated production line that we believe has enough capacity to support near and medium-term growth. To support continuous supply for our customers, we have manufacturing redundancies and maintain inventory in multiple locations, including our Lowell headquarters, a second redundant storage location in the metropolitan Boston area, and at our third-party logistics, or 3PL, warehouses in Schiphol, Netherlands and Frankfurt, Germany.
Our manufacturing strategy includes direct manufacturing of certain products, and third-party outsourcing for certain components and subassemblies. We obtain components and subassemblies for our Growth Direct systems from multiple third-party suppliers and contract manufacturers. While some of these components are sourced from a single supplier, we have qualified second sources for several of our critical parts. We believe that having dual sources for our critical components helps reduce the risk of a production delay caused by a disruption in the supply of a critical component. We perform final assembly, commissioning, and inspection of the systems in our Lowell facility before shipping to customers. Our consumable plate assemblies and lids are manufactured to our specifications by manufacturing partners. We procure media from third-party suppliers and fill and assemble the final consumables in our Lowell facility. We contract with third party vendors to sterilize our consumables before shipping to customers.
We continue to invest in our manufacturing capabilities to increase capacity ahead of future growth, to ensure continuity of supply, and to make order fulfillment consistent and convenient for our customers. Our future manufacturing plans may include expansion of our existing facilities, additional global sites, additional automation lines, and further manufacturing redundancy plans. We are continually evaluating our supply chain and may proactively optimize certain aspects of our manufacturing and supply chain footprint to meet our business objectives.
License agreement
License agreement with Thermo Fisher
In May 2013, we entered into a patent license agreement, or the Thermo Fisher license agreement, with Thermo CRS, Ltd., or Thermo Fisher, pursuant to which we obtained a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-bearing, non-sublicensable license under Thermo Fisher’s patent rights relating to robotic devices. Pursuant to the Thermo Fisher license agreement, we paid Thermo Fisher one-time fees in the aggregate of $125,000 and are also obligated to pay royalties at a fixed dollar amount ranging from the low to mid four figures for our sale of each system containing the licensed products, subject to increase or decrease upon certain events. The Thermo Fisher license agreement will remain in effect until the last to expire of the licensed patent rights.
Intellectual property
Our success depends in part on our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection for our products and technology, including by seeking and maintaining patent protection, protecting our trade secrets and other proprietary information, obtaining and maintaining our licenses to use intellectual property owned by third parties, and continually evaluating third-party technologies for further licensing opportunities. We also seek trademark protection where appropriate to protect the names that identify us as the source of our products and services.
We own certain patents, patent applications and intellectual property and license certain patents and other intellectual property from third parties. We have also entered into certain supply and commercial agreements with various vendors and suppliers under which we receive rights to their intellectual property for use in our products. Our material licenses with Thermo Fisher are described in more detail above.
As of December 31, 2021, we own 7 granted patents in the United States, 77 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, China, countries in Europe, and Japan and Mexico, and 5 pending patent applications in the United States. Our issued patents and pending patent applications cover our technologies and products, including machines, manufactures, compositions of matter, and methods of use with respect thereto, related to the Growth Direct platform. Additionally, as of December 31, 2021, we license three issued patents in the United States, Canada and Europe from Thermo Fisher relating to a robotic carousel workstation. The issued patents that we own or that we in-license from Thermo Fisher and any patents that may issue from pending applications that we own have expiration dates
or, in the case of patent applications, projected statutory expiration dates, between 2022 and 2033, excluding, with respect to patents that may be issued from our patent applications, any additional term for patent term adjustments or patent term extensions, if applicable.
The term of our patents depends upon the laws of the countries in which they are obtained and commonly ends 20 years from the earliest date of filing of a non-provisional patent application. A provisional patent application is not eligible to become an issued patent until, among other things, we file a non-provisional patent application within 12 months of the filing date of the provisional patent application. If we do not timely file non-provisional patent applications, we may lose our priority date with respect to our provisional patent applications and any patent protection on the inventions disclosed in our provisional patent applications. In the United States, patent term adjustments may be available depending upon the time the United States Patent and Trademark Office takes to examine and eventually issue a patent. The protection of patents may vary on a country-by-country and claim-by-claim basis, which can vary the scope of protection afforded by such patents. In addition, we must generally pay fees to maintain our patents annually or at other specified intervals or risk the patent lapsing. We cannot provide any assurance that any of our current or future owned or licensed patent applications will result in the issuance of patents, or that any of our current or future owned or licensed issued patents will effectively protect any of our products or technology or prevent others from commercializing competitive products or technology.
Competition
As a life sciences technology company, we face competition from a wide array of companies in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. This competition includes both small companies and large companies with greater financial and technical resources and longer operating histories than our own.
Our competitors may have significantly greater financial resources, established presence in the market, and expertise in research and development, manufacturing, and sales and marketing than we do. These competitors also compete with us in recruiting and retaining qualified engineering, sales, marketing and management personnel, as well as in acquiring technologies complementary to, or necessary for, our programs. Smaller or early-stage companies may also prove to be significant competitors, particularly if they establish collaborative arrangements with large companies.
The key competitive factors affecting the success of the products that we develop are likely to be the continued growth of our market position, our ability to expand our integration with existing customers, our ability to develop new products and improve our existing products, and our ability to grow our sales and marketing capabilities. Our commercial opportunity for any of our products could be reduced or eliminated if our competitors develop and commercialize products that are more effective, are more convenient, or are less expensive than our products, or if they are able to more effectively integrate their systems with customers before we do.
We primarily compete with established manufacturers of traditional MQC testing products, such as petri dishes, incubators, and other manual testing equipment, which our products aim to displace. These companies include bioMerieux, Becton Dickinson, Charles River Labs, Merck Millipore and Thermo Fisher. We also compete with a limited number of companies that have or are attempting to enter the MQC testing market with alternative automated solutions, such as Interscience, which has developed a partially-automated system for MQC testing. There are also several established companies in the bioprocessing technology market with whom we do not currently compete, but that could develop products that will compete with us in the future. Many of the established companies have substantially greater financial and other resources than us, including larger research and development teams or more established marketing and sales and commercial teams.
Seasonality
Our revenues typically increase progressively over the course of each calendar year, with the first quarter being the lowest and the fourth quarter being the highest revenue quarter in the year. However, our revenues can vary from quarter to quarter as a result of seasonality, including factors such as our customers’ budgetary cycles and our customers’ budgetary cycles and extended summer vacation periods that could impact our ability to deliver products and provide
onsite services to our customers during those periods. Our revenues in fiscal year 2021 were not indicative of our typical seasonality due to the Omicron variant which intensified during the latter part of the fourth quarter of 2021 and contributed to our revised guidance for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. We expect this seasonality to continue for the foreseeable future, which may cause fluctuations in our operating results and financial metrics. However, our seasonality trends may vary in the future as our revenue mix shifts from non-recurring to recurring revenues.
Government regulation
We provide products and services used for quality-control testing in pharmaceutical product and medical device manufacturing. Although our Growth Direct platform is not directly subject to regulation by the FDA, our customers’ products and product candidates are subject to extensive regulation by the FDA and other federal and state authorities in the United States, as well as comparable authorities in foreign jurisdictions. In the United States, many of our customers’ products are regulated as either medical devices or drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, or FDCA, and its implementing regulations, or as biological products under the FDCA and the Public Health Service Act, or PHSA, and their implementing regulations, each as amended and enforced by the FDA. The FDA regulates the development, design, non-clinical and clinical research, manufacturing, safety, efficacy, labeling, packaging, storage, installation, servicing, recordkeeping, premarket clearance or approval, adverse event reporting, advertising, promotion, marketing and distribution, and import and export of medical devices, drugs and biological products to ensure that such products distributed domestically are safe and effective for their intended uses and otherwise meet the applicable requirements of the FDCA and PHSA. Failure to comply with the applicable U.S. requirements at any time during the product development process, approval process or after approval, may subject an applicant or manufacturer to administrative or judicial civil or criminal sanctions and adverse publicity.
The manufacture of our Growth Direct system and our consumables is subject to compliance with regulatory systems, standards, guidance and other requirements, as appropriate, including, but not limited to, laws and regulations for safe working conditions and certifications from the International Organization for Standardization. Our products are also subject to various federal, state, local, and foreign laws, regulations and recommendations, relating to the safe and proper use, transportation and disposal of hazardous or potentially hazardous substances. In addition, U.S. and international import and export laws and regulations, including those enforced by the U.S. Departments of Commerce, State and Treasury and OFAC, require us to abide by certain standards relating to the cross-border transit of finished goods, raw materials and supplies and the handling of related information. Our logistics activities must comply with the rules and regulations of the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, and the Federal Aviation Administration and similar foreign agencies. We are also subject to various other laws and regulations concerning the conduct of our foreign operations, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other anti-bribery laws as well as laws pertaining to the accuracy of our internal books and records. We also contract and may in the future contract with the U.S. government. As such, we are subject to certain laws and regulations applicable to companies doing business with the government, as well as with those concerning government contracts, including being subject to potential investigation for compliance with government contract regulations.
Human capital resources
As of December 31, 2021, we had 202 full-time employees across the globe, of which 60 were engaged in sales and marketing, 29 in research and development, and 61 in manufacturing and services. None of our employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We consider our relationships with our employees to be good.
We believe we are attracting and developing a diverse, equitable and inclusive work environment for our employees. We value diversity at all levels and continue to focus on expanding our diversity and inclusion initiatives from candidate attraction, employee onboarding and employee experience. We saw diversity levels increase across all levels within our Company year-over-year, including our professional and leadership positions. In 2022, we are focused on continuing to build our Company culture, to continue to enrich our employee experience.
Our key human capital objectives in managing our business include attracting, developing and retaining top talent while integrating diversity, equity and inclusion principles and practices into our core values.
We strive to attract a pool of diverse and exceptional candidates and support their career growth once they become employees. We also emphasize in our evaluation and career development efforts internal mobility opportunities for employees to drive profession development for every employee, which we believe also drives our retention efforts.
Our principles of accountability, honesty, integrity and customer-focused, serve as our cultural pillars. We focus our efforts on creating a collaborative environment where our colleagues feel respected and valued. We provide our employees with competitive compensation, opportunities for equity ownership and a robust employment package, including health care, disability and long-term planning insurance, retirement planning and paid time off. In addition, we regularly interact with our employees to gauge employee satisfaction and identify areas of focus.
Additional information
Rapid Micro Biosystems, Inc., a Delaware corporation, was incorporated in December 2006. We completed our initial public offering of our Class A common stock in July 2021.
Our Internet address is www.rapidmicrobio.com. At our Investor Relations website, investors.rapidmicrobio.com, we make available free of charge a variety of information for investors, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to those reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file that material with or furnish it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The information found on our website is not part of this or any other report we file with, or furnish to, the SEC. In addition, our filings with the SEC may be accessed through the SEC’s Interactive Data Electronic Applications system at www.sec.gov. All statements made in any of our securities filings, including all forward-looking statements or information, are made as of the date of the document in which the statement is included, and we do not assume or undertake any obligation to update any of those statements or documents unless we are required to do so by law.

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ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
Item 1A. Risk Factors.
Our business involves significant risks. Stockholders should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below and the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our business, financial condition, results of operations, or prospects could be materially and adversely affected if any of these risks occurs, and as a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline and stockholders could lose all or part of their investment. This Annual Report on Form 10-K also contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. See “Forward-Looking Statements.” Our actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of certain important factors, including those set forth below.
Risks Related to Our Financial Position and Need for Capital
We have incurred significant losses since inception, we expect to incur losses in the future and we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve and maintain profitability.
We have incurred significant losses since our inception. For the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, we incurred net losses of $73.5 million and $37.1 million, respectively. As of December 31, 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $315.1 million. We expect that our operating expenses will continue to increase as we grow our business and will also increase as a result of our becoming a public company. Since our inception, we have financed our operations primarily from private placements of our convertible preferred stock, the incurrence of indebtedness, our initial public offering, and to a lesser extent, revenue derived from our Growth Direct platform and non-commercial contracts. We have devoted substantially all of our resources to the development and commercialization of our Growth Direct platform and to development activities related to advancing and expanding our technological capabilities. We will need to generate significant additional revenue to achieve and sustain profitability, and even if we achieve profitability, we cannot be sure that we will remain profitable for any substantial period of time. We may never be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve or sustain profitability and our recent and historical growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance.
Our limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter.
We were established in 2006 and launched our current second-generation Growth Direct platform in 2017 for which we are continuing to grow our manufacturing and sales and marketing capabilities. Consequently, predictions about our future success or viability may not be as accurate as they could be if we had a longer operating history. While our product and services revenue has increased, if our growth strategy is not successful, we may not be able to continue to grow our revenue or operations. Our limited operating history, evolving business and rapid growth make it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter, and we may not continue to grow at or near historical rates.
In addition, as a business with a limited operating history, we may encounter unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications, delays and other known and unknown challenges. We are transitioning to a company capable of supporting commercial manufacturing, sales and marketing at scale. We may not be successful in such a transition and, as a result, our business may be adversely affected.
Our success depends on the success of our Growth Direct platform, which may not be achieved or maintained.
Our ability to achieve and maintain commercial market acceptance of our Growth Direct platform will depend on a number of factors, including:
● significant acceptance by drug manufacturers of automated microbial quality control, or MQC, testing;
● our ability to increase awareness of the capabilities of automated MQC testing and our technology and solutions;
● our customers’ willingness to adopt new technologies and workflows;
● our ability to integrate our platform with our customers’ existing workflows, including related to regulatory validation processes;
● whether our platform reliably provides advantages over the conventional, manual method of MQC testing and other automated technologies and is perceived by customers to be cost effective;
● the continued growth of the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, in particular biologics, cell and gene therapies;
● our ability to execute on our business strategy, including continuing to expand in the market for cell and gene therapies;
● the rate of adoption of our platform and solutions by drug manufacturers;
● prices we charge for our systems and consumables;
● the relative reliability and robustness of our platform as a whole and the components of our platform;
● our ability to develop new products for existing customers and to expand our capabilities within the MQC testing workflow;
● our ability to expand the use of our platform with existing customers;
● other competitive automated MQC testing platforms; and
● the impact of our investments in product innovation and commercial growth.
We cannot assure our stockholders that we will be successful in addressing each of these criteria or other criteria that might affect the market acceptance of our products. If we are unsuccessful in achieving and maintaining commercial market acceptance of our Growth Direct platform, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be adversely affected.
Our operating results have fluctuated significantly in the past and will fluctuate significantly in the future, which makes our future operating results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations.
Our quarterly and annual operating results have fluctuated significantly in the past and may fluctuate significantly in the future, which makes it difficult for us to predict our future operating results. These fluctuations may occur due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control, including, but not limited to:
● our customers’ tendency to purchase our Growth Direct system, including multiple systems, in a single transaction, resulting in significant variations in sales of our systems over time;
● the level of demand for our platform and solutions, which may vary significantly;
● the length of time of the sales cycle for purchases of our systems;
● seasonality in our business due to our customers’ budgetary cycles and time off during the summer vacation;
● lead time needed for validation prior to our customers’ using and purchasing our consumables;
● changes in demand for our consumables;
● the timing and cost of, and level of investment in, technology development and commercialization activities, which may change from time to time;
● the start and completion of manufacturing runs;
● the relative reliability and robustness of our platform;
● the introduction of new products or product enhancements by us or others in our industry;
● expenditures that we may incur to acquire, develop or commercialize additional products and technologies;
● expenditures involved in preparing, filing, prosecuting, maintaining, defending and enforcing patent claims;
● future accounting pronouncements or changes in our accounting policies; and
● general market conditions and other factors, including factors, such as inflation, unrelated to our operating performance or the operating performance of our competitors.
For example, we experienced a decrease in our installation of Growth Direct systems in 2020 due to the shutdown of a number of our customers due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid onset of the Omicron variant impacted system placements in the second half of the fourth quarter of 2021. The effect of one of the factors discussed above, or the cumulative effects of a combination of factors discussed above, could result in large fluctuations and unpredictability in our quarterly and annual operating results. As a result, comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. Investors should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.
Our revenue has been primarily generated from sales of our Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables and laboratory information management system, or LIMS, connection software, which require a substantial period of time to generate recurring revenue.
Product revenue, comprised of sales of our Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables and LIMS connection software, accounted for 66.8% and 68.4% of total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. We expect that sales of these products will continue to account for a substantial portion of our revenue and will increase as we grow our customer base and expand our business with existing customers. The Growth Direct system is fully functional for use by the customer upon delivery, as such we recognize revenue for sales of our Growth Direct system upon transfer of control of the system to the customer. After a system is placed with a customer and installed, validation services start to be provided, which typically can take anywhere from three to nine months. Once a system is validated, we generally expect our customers to transition from the traditional manual method of MQC testing to our automated method and begin regular utilization of consumables over a period of up to three months. Therefore, there can be a period of up to 12 months or more between installation of a system and revenue being generated from the regular sale of consumables for that system. As a result, it can be difficult for us to forecast our product revenue and there may be an extended period of time before we receive recurring revenue from sales of consumables. We may also experience fluctuations in our product revenue, which could have an adverse effect on our financial position.
If we cannot maintain the level of sales of our Growth Direct systems or the sales of our consumables and service contracts to existing customers declines, our future operating results would be adversely affected.
In the years ended December 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, 16.7% of our revenue was generated from one customer, and 46.1% of our revenue was generated from three customers, respectively. The revenue generated from
these customers was primarily derived from sales of our Growth Direct system. Many of our customers purchase multiple Growth Direct systems at the same time and we expect them to use these systems for many years before needing to purchase new systems. Our ability to generate revenue depends on our ability to sell our Growth Direct system to new customers or expand the use of our system by existing customers. As a result, in the near term, we expect a significant portion of our revenue to primarily be generated from a small number of different customers each year. We also rely on consumables and service contracts as a source of recurring revenue from our existing customers. These consumables and service contracts are purchased on an as-needed basis and, as a result, revenue from these sources may be subject to change, as customers’ purchasing practices and policies change or their demand for our consumables and service contracts change. If we are unable to sell our Growth Direct system to new customers, if our existing customers don’t expand their use of our system, or if our existing customers decide to purchase fewer of our consumables and service contracts or terminate their relationships with us, our revenue could significantly decrease, which would have an adverse effect on our financial condition and results of operations and could adversely impact our ability to execute on our growth strategy.
We may need to raise additional capital to fund our existing operations, improve our platform or develop and commercialize new products or expand our operations.
We expect to spend significant amounts to expand our existing operations, to continue to improve our Growth Direct platform and to develop new products and consumables. Based upon our current operating plan, we believe that the net proceeds from our initial public offering, or IPO, and our existing cash, cash equivalents, and investments of $203.5 million, and anticipated cash flow from operations, will enable us to fund our operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements for at least twelve months following the date these consolidated financial statements were issued. This estimate and our expectation regarding the sufficiency of the net proceeds from the IPO are based on assumptions that may prove to be wrong, and we could use our available capital resources sooner than we currently expect. Until such time, if ever, as we can generate sufficient revenues, we may finance our cash needs through a combination of equity offerings and debt financings or other sources. We do not currently have any committed external source of funds. In addition, we may seek additional capital due to favorable market conditions or strategic considerations, even if we believe that we have sufficient funds for our current or future operating plans.
Our present and future funding requirements will depend on many factors, including:
● our ability to achieve revenue growth;
● the cost of expanding our operations, including our manufacturing facilities, and our offerings, including our sales and marketing efforts;
● our rate of progress in launching and commercializing new products, and the cost of the sales and marketing activities associated with, establishing adoption of our Growth Direct system;
● our rate of progress in, and cost of research and development activities associated with, products in research and development;
● the effect of competing technological and market developments;
● the costs involved in preparing, filing, prosecuting, maintaining, defending and enforcing patent claims; and
● costs related to domestic and international expansion.
To the extent that we raise additional capital through the sale of equity or convertible debt securities, the ownership interests of our common stockholders will be diluted, and the terms of these securities may include liquidation or other preferences that adversely affect the rights of our common stockholders. In addition, debt financing and preferred equity financing, if available, may involve agreements that include covenants limiting or restricting our ability to take specific actions, such as incurring additional debt, making capital expenditures or declaring dividends. If we raise additional
funds through collaborations, strategic alliances or marketing, distribution or licensing arrangements with third parties, we may be required to relinquish valuable rights to our technologies, intellectual property, future revenue streams or products or grant licenses on terms that may not be favorable to us. Furthermore, any capital raising efforts may divert our management from their day-to-day activities, which may adversely affect our ability to advance product development activities. If we are unable to raise additional funds when needed, we may be required to delay, limit, reduce or terminate product development or commercialization efforts.
Repair or replacement costs due to warranties we provide on our Growth Direct system could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We provide a one-year limited assurance warranty on Growth Direct systems, which is included in the sales price. Existing and future warranties place us at the risk of incurring future repair or replacement costs. We establish our accrual for estimated warranty expenses based on historical information, current cost data and future forecasts. We exercise judgment in determining the expected product warranty costs, using estimated material, labor and other costs. While we believe that historical experience provides a reliable basis for estimating such warranty cost, unforeseen quality issues or component failure rates could result in future costs in excess of such estimates. As of December 31, 2021, we had an amount reserved for warranty costs of $0.6 million. Substantial amounts of warranty claims could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Risks Related to Our Business and Strategy
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted, and may continue to impact, our operations and may materially and adversely affect our business and financial results.
Since late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally, including to the Boston, Massachusetts area, where our primary office and manufacturing facility is located. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, and has led to the implementation of various responses, including government-imposed, shelter-in-place orders, quarantines, travel restrictions and other public health safety measures. In response to the spread of COVID-19, and its variants, and in accordance with direction from state and local government authorities, we have restricted access to our facilities mostly to personnel and third parties who must perform critical activities that must be completed on-site, limited the number of such personnel that can be present at our facilities at any one time, and requested that most of our personnel work remotely. In the event that government authorities modify current restrictions, our employees conducting development or manufacturing activities may not be able to access our manufacturing space, and our core activities may be significantly limited or curtailed, possibly for an extended period of time.
As a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have and may in the future experience severe disruptions, including:
● interruption of or delays in receiving products and supplies from the third parties we rely on to, among other things, manufacture components for our Growth Direct system and consumables, due to staffing shortages, production slowdowns or stoppages and disruptions in delivery systems, which may impair our ability to sell our products;
● limitations on our business operations by local, state, or the federal government that could impact our ability to sell our products;
● on-site visit limitations and prohibitions imposed by customers that could impact our ability to engage in pre-sales activities, such as in-person meetings and site visits, and to provide post-sale activities, such as installation and verification, training and service and support;
● delays in customers’ purchasing decisions and negotiations with customers and potential customers;
● business disruptions caused by workplace, laboratory and office closures and an increased reliance on employees working from home, travel limitations, cyber security and data accessibility, or communication or mass transit disruptions; and
● limitations on employee resources that would otherwise be focused on the conduct of our activities, including because of sickness of employees or their families or the desire of employees to avoid contact with large groups of people.
Any of these factors could severely impact our development activities, business operations and sales, or delay necessary interactions with manufacturing sites and other important contractors and customers. For example, we experienced a disruption in receiving supplies from third parties and a decrease in installations as a result of the shutdown of our customers’ businesses. These and other factors arising from the COVID-19 pandemic could worsen in countries that are already afflicted with COVID-19, and its variants, could continue to spread, or could return to countries where the pandemic has been partially contained, and could further adversely impact our ability to conduct our business generally and have a material adverse impact on our operations and financial condition and results.
The extent to which the outbreak may negatively impact our operations and results of operations or those of our third party manufacturers, suppliers, collaborators or customers will depend on future developments, which are highly uncertain and cannot be predicted with confidence, such as the ultimate duration of the pandemic, subsequent waves of infection or variant strains, including the impact of the Delta and Omicron variants, the timing, availability, and effectiveness of vaccines as well as vaccination rates among the population, travel restrictions, and additional or modified government actions and private sector actions to contain the spread of COVID-19 or treat its impact, such as social distancing, quarantines, lock-downs or business closures.
The continued success of our business relies heavily on establishing and maintaining our position in the market as a leading provider of automated MQC testing.
Our future profitability will depend on our ability to successfully execute and maintain a sustainable business model and generate continuous streams of revenue. Our business model is premised on the fact that we are and will continue to be a leader in automated MQC testing and the competitive advantages our position creates. Our Growth Direct platform, among other things, is designed to reduce the amount of time for MQC testing and the opportunity for human error in what we believe is a more cost-effective manner than traditional MQC testing. However, if competitors develop and commercialize an automated MQC testing platform that is comparable to ours and are able to obtain traction with customers, we may not be able to maintain our lead position and execute our business strategy, which could adversely affect our financial position and prospects. If we are unable to expand or continue to expand our customers in new areas of drug manufacturing, such as cell and gene therapies, continue to grow market adoption of our Growth Direct platform, and maintain our position as the industry leader in automated MQC testing, our business, prospects, financial condition and results of operation could be adversely affected.
It may be difficult for us to implement our strategies for improving growth.
Our success will depend on our ability to expand our business with existing customers and to target new drug manufacturing customers to capture a greater share of the MQC testing value chain. Our ability to grow our business with existing customers will depend on our ability to broaden the application of our automated MQC testing to a larger portion of the MQC testing workflow and to increase the number of Growth Direct systems in their manufacturing facilities. Our ability to expand our business will also depend on our ability to attract new customers and to integrate our platform with new methods of manufacturing, such as cell and gene therapies. Future revenue growth will also depend on our ability to develop and market new products, technologies and solutions to meet our customers’ evolving needs, as well as our ability to identify new applications and customers for our technology in additional industries beyond the drug manufacturing industry.
As we continue to scale our business, we may find that certain of our products, certain customers or certain industries may require a dedicated sales force or sales personnel with different experience than those we currently employ. Identifying, recruiting and training additional qualified personnel would require significant time, expense and
attention. If we are unable to drive new customer conversion to automated MQC and our Growth Direct platform, expand adoption of our Growth Direct platform into new industries and markets, or increase the usage and value of our platform to our customers, then our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be adversely affected.
We may not successfully implement our strategy to expand our Growth Direct platform to customers who manufacture cell and gene therapies.
Our ability to execute our growth strategy to expand our Growth Direct platform to customers who manufacture cell and gene therapies depends upon our ability to integrate our platform with the novel manufacturing processes being developed for these therapies. Companies that manufacture cell and gene therapies are developing new approaches to handle this manufacturing method, including novel facility layouts, new processes and workflows, and new quality and risk management frameworks. Unlike traditional “small molecule” drug manufacturing, the manufacture of biologics, such as cell and gene therapies, is more time sensitive and subject to increased risk of contamination due to material handling and process change-over. There are also currently a small number of cell and gene therapies approved by the FDA. While we have experience providing automated MQC testing for customers that manufacture a number of these approved therapies, we may encounter challenges or unexpected issues as we apply our Growth Direct platform to testing a greater number of therapies as they are approved in future. We cannot be certain that we will be able to successfully or consistently integrate our platform with this novel manufacturing process. If we are unable to successfully expand our Growth Direct platform into this growing segment of therapeutic manufacturing, our business and financial position may be adversely affected.
The size of the markets and forecasts of market growth for automated MQC testing and other of our key performance indicators are based on a number of complex assumptions and estimates, and may be inaccurate.
We estimate annual total addressable markets and forecasts of market growth for our Growth Direct platform. We have also developed a standard set of key performance indicators in order to enable us to assess the performance of our business in and across multiple markets, and to forecast future revenue. These estimates, forecasts and key performance indicators are based on a number of complex assumptions, internal and third-party estimates and market studies, and other business data, including assumptions and estimates relating to our ability to generate revenue from the expansion of our platform into new drug manufacturing areas and new industries. While we believe our assumptions and the data underlying our estimates and key performance indicators are reasonable, there are inherent challenges in measuring or forecasting such information. As a result, these assumptions and estimates may not be correct and the conditions supporting our assumptions or estimates may change at any time, thereby reducing the predictive accuracy of these underlying factors and indicators. As a result, our estimates of the total addressable market and our forecasts of market growth for our current or future products may prove to be incorrect, and our key performance indicators may not reflect our actual performance. If the total addressable market or the potential market growth for our platform is smaller than we have estimated or if the key performance indicators we utilize to forecast revenue are inaccurate, it may impair our sales growth and have an adverse impact on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
New product development involves a lengthy and complex process and we may be unable to develop or commercialize products on a timely basis, or at all.
Products from our development programs will take time and considerable resources to develop, and may include improvements or changes to our systems, software and consumables. We may not be able to complete development and commercialize them on a timely basis, or at all. There can be no assurance that our development programs will produce commercial products and solutions and before we can commercialize any new products, we will need to expend significant funds in order to:
● conduct substantial research and development, which may include validation studies;
● further develop and scale our engineering and manufacturing processes to accommodate different products;
● further develop and scale our infrastructure to be able to analyze increasingly large amounts of data; and
● utilize data and analytical insights generated from existing Growth Direct platform in our research and development programs in order to advance these programs.
Our product development processes involve a high degree of risk, and these efforts may be delayed or fail for many reasons, including:
● failure of the product to perform as expected;
● higher costs than anticipated; and
● failure to reliably demonstrate the advantages of our products.
In addition, if we are unable to generate additional data and insights from our existing Growth Direct platforms, then we may not be able to advance these programs as quickly, or at all, or without significant additional investment, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our product development efforts.
Even if we are successful in developing new products, it will require us to make significant additional investments in marketing and selling resources in order to commercialize any such products. As a result, we may be unsuccessful in commercializing new products that we develop, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
Our customers use our Growth Direct platform as part of their quality-control workflow, which is subject to regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and other comparable regulatory authorities.
We provide products and services used for quality-control testing in pharmaceutical product manufacturing. Our customers are subject to extensive regulations by the FDA and similar regulatory authorities in other countries, including, for example, cGMP regulations and associated requirements to validate the methods used to manufacture their products. To meet their regulatory compliance requirements, our customers have implemented quality-control workflows to monitor for microbial growth and contamination. While our Growth Direct platform is not regulated directly by the FDA or other comparable authorities and we have not verified our Growth Direct platform for compliance with such regulations, we have designed our platform to be integrated as part of a compliant quality-control workflow. If our Growth Direct platform is unable to meet regulatory standards for compliance or we are unable to update our platform to meet new regulatory requirements, we will lose customers and our business will be adversely affected. While under our agreements with our customers we are not liable for non-compliance of our Growth Direct platform, if a customer experienced a compliance failure due to our Growth Direct platform, our reputation could be harmed and our business prospects adversely affected.
If we are unable to support demand for the Growth Direct platform, and for our future product offerings, including ensuring that we have adequate capacity to meet increased demand, our business could suffer.
As the number of customers using the Growth Direct platform grows and our volume of installed systems increases, we will need to continue to increase our capacity for customer service and support, including maintenance services of our systems, and expand our manufacturing capabilities. As a result, we will also need to purchase additional equipment, some of which can take several months or more to procure, setup and validate, and increase our personnel levels to meet increased demand. There is no assurance that any of these increases in scale, expansion of personnel, equipment, manufacturing or services will be successfully implemented, or that we will have adequate space, including in our manufacturing facility, to accommodate such required expansion.
As we commercialize additional products, we will need to incorporate new equipment, implement new technology systems and processes, and hire new personnel, possibly with supplemental or different qualifications as compared to our current personnel. Failure to manage this growth or transition could result in product delays, higher cost of product revenue, declining product quality, deteriorating customer service and slower responses to competitive challenges. A failure in any one of these areas could make it difficult for us to meet market expectations for our products and could damage our reputation and the prospects for our business.
We have limited experience in marketing and sales, and if we are unable to expand our marketing and sales organization to adequately address our customers’ needs or to expand our customer base, our business may be adversely affected.
We have limited experience in marketing and selling our products and we currently rely on a small team to make direct sales in countries around the world. In order to support our planned growth, we will need to rapidly increase our sales and marketing team. Competition for employees capable of selling expensive instruments within the drug manufacturing industry is intense. There are significant expenses and risks involved with having our own sales and marketing team, including our ability to hire, train, retain, and appropriately incentivize a sufficient number of qualified individuals, generate sufficient sales leads and provide our sales and marketing team with adequate access to customers who may want to purchase our products, effectively manage a geographically dispersed sales and marketing team, and other unforeseen costs and expenses. We may not be able to attract and retain personnel or be able to build an efficient and effective sales organization, which could negatively impact sales and market acceptance of our products and limit our revenue growth and potential profitability. In addition, the time and cost of establishing a specialized sales, marketing and service force for a particular product or service may be difficult to justify in light of the revenue generated or projected.
We may also choose to engage distributors for the sale of our products. We would exert limited control over these distributors, and if their sales and marketing efforts for our products are not successful, our business would be materially and adversely affected. We may not be successful in locating, qualifying and engaging distributors with local industry experience and knowledge, or we may not be able to enter into arrangements with them on favorable terms. Even if we are successful in identifying distributors, such distributors may engage in sales practices that violate local laws or our internal policies. Furthermore, sales practices utilized by any such distributors that are locally acceptable may not comply with sales practices standards required under U.S. laws that apply to us, which could create additional compliance risk.
We may be unable to manage our future growth effectively, which could make it difficult to execute our business strategy.
We have experienced rapid growth in our product and service revenue and anticipate further growth in our business operations. Our growth has required significant time and attention from our management, and placed strains on our operational and manufacturing systems and processes, financial systems and internal controls and other aspects of our business. We expect to continue to increase headcount and to hire more specialized personnel in the future as we grow our business. We will need to continue to hire, train and manage additional qualified engineers, client and account services personnel and sales and marketing staff and improve and maintain our technology to properly manage our growth. We may also need to hire, train and manage individuals with expertise that is separate, supplemental or different from expertise that we currently have, and accordingly we may not be successful in hiring, training and managing such individuals. If our new hires perform poorly, if we are unsuccessful in hiring, training, managing and integrating these new employees, or if we are not successful in retaining our existing employees, our business may be harmed.
Developing and launching new products and innovating and improving our existing products have required us to hire and retain additional engineering, sales and marketing, software, manufacturing, distribution and quality assurance personnel. As a result, we have experienced rapid headcount growth. As we have grown, our employees have become more geographically dispersed. We serve customers located in multiple countries and plan to continue to expand to new countries as part of our growth strategy, which will lead to increased dispersion of our employees, including sales employees and employees who are in our service and support groups. Moreover, we expect that we will need to hire additional accounting, finance, legal and other personnel in connection with our becoming, and our efforts to comply with the requirements of being, a public company. As a public company, our management and other personnel will need to devote a substantial amount of time towards maintaining compliance with these requirements. We may face challenges integrating, developing and motivating our rapidly growing and increasingly dispersed employee base.
We may not be able to maintain the quality, reliability or robustness of our platform, or the expected turnaround times of our services and support, or to satisfy customer demand as it grows. Our ability to manage our growth properly will require us to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, as well as our reporting
systems and procedures. To effectively manage our growth, we must continue to improve our operational and manufacturing systems and processes, our financial systems and internal controls and other aspects of our business and continue to effectively expand, train and manage our personnel. The time and resources required to improve our existing systems and procedures, implement new systems and procedures and to adequately staff such existing and new systems and procedures is uncertain, and failure to complete such activities in a timely and efficient manner could adversely affect our operations and negatively impact our business and financial results.
If we cannot compete successfully, we may be unable to increase or sustain our revenue, or achieve and sustain profitability.
We currently primarily compete with established companies that provide consumables for MQC testing and with a limited number of established and early-stage companies that have automated MQC testing systems. In addition, our customers may also elect to continue to use the traditional MQC testing method rather than our platform and may decide to stop using our platform.
Our competitors and potential competitors may enjoy a number of competitive advantages over us, including:
● longer operating histories;
● larger customer bases;
● greater brand recognition and market penetration;
● greater financial resources;
● greater technological and research and development resources;
● better system reliability and robustness;
● greater selling and marketing capabilities; and
● better established, larger scale and lower cost manufacturing capabilities.
As a result, our competitors and potential competitors may be able to respond more quickly to changes in customer requirements, devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their platforms or instruments than we can or sell their platforms or instruments, or offer services competitive with our platform and services at prices designed to win significant levels of market share. We may not be able to compete effectively against these organizations.
In addition, competitors may be acquired by, receive investments from or enter into other commercial relationships with larger, well-established and well-financed companies. Certain of our competitors may be able to secure key inputs from vendors on more favorable terms, devote greater resources to marketing and promotional campaigns, adopt more aggressive pricing policies and devote substantially more resources to product development than we can. Further, competition in the automated MQC testing market, while currently limited, may increase in future, and we may not be able to maintain our leading position in the industry as a result. If we are unable to compete successfully, we may be unable to increase market adoption and sales of our platform, which could prevent us from increasing our revenue or achieving profitability.
We must develop new products, adapt to rapid and significant technological change and respond to introductions of new products by competitors to remain competitive.
We sell our products in industries that are characterized by significant enhancements and evolving industry standards. As a result, our customers’ needs are rapidly evolving. If we do not appropriately innovate and invest in new technologies, our products and services may become less desirable in the markets we serve, and our customers could move to new technologies offered by our competitors or decide to revert to the traditional MQC testing method. Though we believe customers in our markets display a significant amount of loyalty to their supplier of a particular product, we also believe that because of the initial time investment required by many of our customers to reach a purchasing decision for a new product, it may be difficult to regain that customer once the customer purchases a product from a competitor. Without the timely introduction of new products, services and enhancements, our offerings will likely become less competitive over time, in which case our competitive position and operating results could suffer. Accordingly, we focus significant efforts and resources on the development and identification of new technologies, products and markets to further broaden our offerings. To the extent we fail to timely introduce new and innovative products or services, adequately predict our customers’ needs or fail to obtain desired levels of market acceptance, our business may suffer and our operating results could be adversely affected.
Due to the significant resources required to enable access in new markets, we must make strategic and operational decisions to prioritize certain markets, products and services. We may expend our resources to access markets and develop products and services that do not yield meaningful revenue or we may fail to capitalize on markets, products or services that may be more profitable or with a greater potential for success.
We believe our platform has potential applications across a wide range of markets and we have targeted certain markets in which we believe our technology has significant advantages or a higher probability of success or greater revenue opportunity, such as the manufacture of cell and gene therapies. We seek to maintain a process of prioritization and resource allocation among our programs to maintain a balance between advancing near-term opportunities and exploring additional markets for our platform. However, due to the significant resources required for the development of products and services for new markets, we must make decisions on which markets to pursue and the amount of resources to allocate to each. Our decisions concerning the allocation of research, development, collaboration, management and financial resources toward particular markets, products or services may not lead to the development of any viable product or service and may divert resources away from better opportunities. Similarly, we may choose to pursue certain markets, which may not be as profitable as other markets that we did not pursue due to our limited resources. As a result, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be adversely impacted.
The Growth Direct platform may contain undetected errors or defects and may not meet the expectations of our customers, which means our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could suffer.
Our Growth Direct platform includes the Growth Direct system, proprietary consumables and our LIMS connection software. While we rigorously test our platform and its components, there could be undetected errors or defects. Disruptions or other performance problems with our platform or with the components that comprise our platform may adversely impact our customers’ manufacturing process, compliance work flow or business, harm our reputation and result in reduced revenue or increased costs associated with repairs or replacements. If that occurs, we may also incur significant costs, the attention of our key personnel could be diverted or other significant customer relations problems may arise. We may also be subject to warranty claims or breach of contract for damages related to errors or defects in our products. Additionally, we may be subject to legal claims arising from any defects or errors in our platform, and in the systems, consumables and software that comprise our platform.
Our success depends on, among other things, the market’s confidence that the Growth Direct platform is capable of substantially enhancing quality control in the conduct of manufacturing activities as compared to the traditional method of MQC testing, and will enable more efficient or improved drug manufacturing. Pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturing organizations, or CMOs, are likely to be particularly sensitive to defects and errors in the use of our platform, including if our platform fails to deliver meaningful improvements in MQC testing with results at least as good as the results generated using the traditional method of MQC testing. There can be no guarantee that our platform will meet the expectations of these companies or CMOs.
The complexity of our products and the amount of lead time required to deliver products to our customers have caused in the past, and may cause in the future, delays in releasing new products and workflows. In addition, we have experienced in the past, and may experience in the future, challenges with respect to the reliability of our systems. If there are delays in delivering our products to our customers, or if our products fail to perform as well as or better than traditional MQC testing or fail to generate reliable results for our customers, our revenue could be reduced or delayed, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
These complexities also require that we train our customers to operate our Growth Direct platform, which is expensive and time consuming. Any misuse of our products, including as a result of inadequate training, could cause our products not to perform as expected or to fail to demonstrate the process advantages of our products. The training requirement may also deter some customers from utilizing our products. Any of these results could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
Potential product liability lawsuits against us could cause us to incur substantial liabilities and limit commercialization of any products that we may develop.
The use of any product we may develop and the sale of any products exposes us to the risk of product liability claims. Product liability claims might be brought against us by pharmaceutical companies, CMOs or others selling or otherwise coming into contact with our products. If we cannot successfully defend against product liability claims, we could incur substantial liability and costs. In addition, regardless of merit or eventual outcome, product liability claims may result in:
● impairment of our business reputation and significant negative media attention;
● withdrawal of customers;
● significant costs to defend the litigation;
● distraction of management’s attention from our primary business;
● substantial monetary awards to claimants;
● inability to commercialize a product;
● product recalls or withdrawals;
● decreased market demand for any product; and
● loss of revenue.
The product liability insurance we currently carry, and any additional product liability insurance coverage we acquire in the future, may not be sufficient to reimburse us for any expenses or losses we may suffer. Moreover, insurance coverage is becoming increasingly expensive and, in the future, we may not be able to maintain insurance coverage at a reasonable cost or in sufficient amounts to protect us against losses due to liability. A successful product liability claim, or series of claims, brought against us could cause our share price to decline and, if judgments exceed our insurance coverage, could adversely affect our results of operation and business, including preventing or limiting the commercialization of any products we develop.
If we lose key management, cannot recruit qualified employees, directors, officers or other significant personnel or experience increases in our compensation costs, our business may be materially harmed.
We are highly dependent on our management and directors, including our Chief Executive Officer, Robert Spignesi, among others. Due to the specialized knowledge each of our officers and key employees possesses with respect to our
products and services and our operations, the loss of service of any of our officers or directors could delay or prevent the successful sales and expansion of our platform. We do not carry key person life insurance on our Chief Executive Officer or our other officers or directors. In general, the employment arrangements that we have with our executive officers do not prevent them from terminating their employment with us at any time.
In addition, our future success and growth will depend in part on the continued service of our directors, employees and management personnel and our ability to identify, hire and retain additional personnel. If we lose one or more of our executive officers or key employees, our ability to implement our business strategy successfully could be seriously harmed. Furthermore, replacing executive officers and key employees may be difficult or costly and may take an extended period of time because of the limited number of individuals in our industry with the breadth of skills and experience required to develop, market and sell our products successfully. Competition to hire from this limited pool is intense, and we may be unable to hire, train, retain or effectively incentivize these additional key personnel on acceptable terms given the competition among numerous technology companies for similar personnel. In addition, we rely on consultants and advisors to assist us in formulating our development and commercialization strategy. Our consultants and advisors may be engaged by entities other than us and may have commitments under consulting or advisory contracts with other entities that may limit their availability to us. If we are unable to continue to attract and retain qualified personnel, our ability to develop and commercialize products will be limited.
We depend on our information technology systems, and any failure of these systems could harm our business.
We depend on information technology and telecommunications systems for significant elements of our operations, including our knowledge management system, our customer reporting, our platform, advanced automation systems, and advanced application and LIMS connection software. We have installed, and expect to expand, a number of enterprise software systems that affect a broad range of business processes and functional areas, including for example, systems handling human resources, financial controls and reporting, contract management, compliance and other infrastructure operations. These implementations can be expensive and require significant time and effort. These information technology and telecommunications systems support a variety of functions, including manufacturing operations, data analysis, quality control, customer service and support, billing, research and development activities, and general administrative activities.
Information technology and telecommunications systems are vulnerable to damage from a variety of sources, including telecommunications or network failures, malicious software, bugs or viruses, human acts and natural disasters. Moreover, despite network security and back-up measures, some of our servers are potentially vulnerable to physical or electronic break-ins, computer viruses and similar disruptive problems. Any disruption or loss of information technology or telecommunications systems on which critical aspects of our operations depend could have an adverse effect on our business and our reputation.
Security breaches, loss of data and other disruptions could compromise sensitive information related to our business or prevent us from accessing critical information and expose us to liability, which could adversely affect our business and our reputation.
In the ordinary course of our business, we collect and store sensitive data, including personal information, intellectual property and proprietary business information owned or controlled by ourselves or our employees, customers and other parties. We manage and maintain our applications and data utilizing a combination of on-site systems and cloud-based data centers. We utilize external security and infrastructure vendors to manage parts of our data centers. These applications and data encompass a wide variety of business-critical information, including research and development information, customer information, commercial information and business and financial information. We, like all companies storing business-critical information, face a number of risks relative to protecting this critical information, including loss of access risk, inappropriate use or disclosure, unauthorized access or exfiltration, inappropriate modification, inappropriate destruction, and the risk of our being unable to adequately monitor and audit and modify our controls over our critical information. This risk extends to the third-party vendors and subcontractors we use to manage this sensitive data or otherwise process it on our behalf. The secure processing, storage, maintenance and transmission of this critical information are vital to our operations and business strategy, and we devote significant resources to protecting such information. Although we take measures to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access,
use or disclosure, our information technology and infrastructure may still be vulnerable to, and we have in the past experienced, attacks by hackers or viruses or breaches due to employee error, malfeasance or other malicious or inadvertent disruptions. Further, attacks upon information technology systems are increasing in their frequency, levels of persistence, sophistication and intensity, and are being conducted by sophisticated and organized groups and individuals with a wide range of motives and expertise. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may also face increased cybersecurity risks due to our reliance on internet technology and the number of our employees who are working remotely, which may create additional opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities. Furthermore, because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access to, or to sabotage, systems change frequently and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or implement adequate preventative measures. While we have measures in place to detect and mitigate security breaches, they are not failproof, so we may also experience security breaches that may remain undetected for an extended period. Any such breach or interruption could compromise our networks and the information stored there could be accessed or frozen by unauthorized parties, publicly disclosed, lost or stolen. Any such access, breach, or other loss of information could result in legal claims or proceedings, including for breaches of confidential information obligations with contractual counterparties, and liability under federal or state laws that protect the privacy of personal information, and regulatory penalties. Notice of breaches may be required to affected individuals, customers, or other state, federal or foreign regulators, and for extensive breaches, notice may need to be made to the media or State Attorneys General. Such a notice could harm our reputation and our ability to compete. Although we have implemented security measures to prevent unauthorized access, such data is currently accessible through multiple channels, and there is no guarantee we can protect our data from breach. Unauthorized access, loss or dissemination could also disrupt or halt our operations and damage our reputation, any of which could adversely affect our business.
We are currently subject to, and may in the future become subject to additional, U.S., state, federal, and foreign laws and regulations imposing obligations on how we collect, store and process personal information. Our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could harm our business. Ensuring compliance with such laws could also impair our efforts to maintain and expand our customer base, and thereby decrease our revenue.
We are, and may increasingly become, subject to various laws and regulations, as well as contractual obligations, relating to data privacy and security in the jurisdictions in which we operate. The regulatory environment related to data privacy and security is increasingly rigorous, with new and constantly changing requirements applicable to our business, and enforcement practices are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. These laws and regulations may be interpreted and applied differently over time and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it is possible that they will be interpreted and applied in ways that may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
In the United States, various federal and state regulators, including governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, have adopted, or are considering adopting, laws and regulations concerning personal information and data security. Certain state laws may be more stringent or broader in scope, or offer greater individual rights, with respect to personal information than federal, international or other state laws, and such laws may differ from each other, all of which may complicate compliance efforts. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which increases privacy rights for California residents and imposes obligations on companies that process their personal information, came into effect on January 1, 2020. Among other things, the CCPA requires covered companies to provide new disclosures to California consumers and provide such consumers new data protection and privacy rights, including the ability to opt-out of sales of personal information. The CCPA provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for certain data breaches that result in the loss of personal information. This private right of action may increase the likelihood of, and risks associated with, data breach litigation. In 2020, the California residents voted the California Privacy Rights Act (the “CPRA”) into law. The CPRA will impose additional data protection obligations on covered businesses, including additional consumer rights processes, limitations on data uses, new audit requirements for higher risk data, and opt outs for certain uses of sensitive data. The CPRA also created a new California data protection agency authorized to issue substantive regulations and could result in increased privacy and information security enforcement. The majority of the CPRA provisions will go into effect on January 1, 2023, and additional compliance investment and potential business process changes may be required. Similar laws have been proposed, and likely will be proposed, in other states and at the federal level, and if passed, such laws may have potentially conflicting requirements that would make compliance challenging.
A number of other states have proposed new privacy laws, some of which are similar to the above discussed recently passed laws. Such proposed legislation, if enacted, may add additional complexity, variation in requirements, restrictions and potential legal risk, require additional investment of resources in compliance programs, impact strategies and the availability of previously useful data and could result in increased compliance costs and/or changes in business practices and policies. The existence of comprehensive privacy laws in different states in the country would make our compliance obligations more complex and costly and may increase the likelihood that we may be subject to enforcement actions or otherwise incur liability for noncompliance.
In addition, laws in all 50 U.S. states require businesses to provide notice to consumers whose personally identifiable information has been disclosed as a result of a data breach. Internationally, laws, regulations and standards in many jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, retention, security, disclosure, transfer and other processing of personal information. For example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which became effective in May 2018, greatly increased the European Commission’s jurisdictional reach of its laws and adds a broad array of requirements for handling personal data. EU and the European Economic Area, or EEA, member states are tasked under the GDPR to enact, and have enacted, certain implementing legislation that adds to and/or further interprets the GDPR requirements and potentially extends our obligations and potential liability for failing to meet such obligations. The GDPR, together with national legislation, regulations and guidelines of the EU and EEA member states governing the processing of personal data, impose strict obligations and restrictions on the ability to collect, use, retain, protect, disclose, transfer and otherwise process personal data. In particular, the GDPR includes obligations and restrictions concerning the consent and rights of individuals to whom the personal data relates, the transfer of personal data out of the European Economic Area, security breach notifications and the security and confidentiality of personal data. The GDPR authorizes fines for certain violations of up to 4% of global annual revenue or €20 million, whichever is greater.
In addition, the GDPR prohibits the transfer of personal data from countries within the EU to the U.S. and other countries in respect of which the European Commission or other relevant regulatory body has not issued a so-called “adequacy decision” (known as “third countries”), unless the parties to the transfer have implemented specific safeguards to protect the transferred personal data. One of the primary safeguards used for transfers of personal data to the U.S. was the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, certain recent EU court decisions cast doubt on the ability to use one of the primary alternatives to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield, namely the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, to lawfully transfer personal data to the U.S. and other third countries. In addition, the European Commission has recently published new versions of the Standard Contractual Clauses, which must be used for all new transfers of personal data from the EEA to third countries (including the United States) starting in September 2021, and all existing transfers of personal data from the EEA to third countries relying on the existing versions of the Standard Contractual Clauses must be replaced by December 2022. The implementation of the new Standard Contractual Clauses will necessitate significant contractual overhaul of our data transfer arrangements with customers, sub-processors and vendors. Use of both the existing and the new Standard Contractual Clauses must now be assessed on a case-by-case basis taking into account the legal regime applicable in the destination country, in particular applicable surveillance laws and rights of individuals, and additional supplementary technical, organizational and/or contractual measures and/or contractual provisions may need to be put in place.
Further, from January 1, 2021, following Brexit, companies handling personal data of individuals in the UK have to comply with the United Kingdom GDPR, or the UK GDPR, which, together with the amended UK Data Protection Act 2018, retains the GDPR in UK national law. The UK GDPR mirrors the fines under the GDPR, i.e., fines up to the greater of €20 million (£17.5 million) or 4% of global turnover. The relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union in relation to certain aspects of data protection law remains unclear, and it is unclear how United Kingdom data protection laws and regulations will develop in the medium to longer term, and how data transfers to and from the United Kingdom will be regulated in the long term. These changes will lead to additional costs and increase our overall risk exposure. On June 28, 2021, the European Commission adopted an adequacy decision in favor of the United Kingdom, enabling data transfers from member states in the European Union to the United Kingdom without additional
safeguards. However, the United Kingdom adequacy decision will automatically expire in June 2025 unless the European Commission renews or extends that decision and remains under review by the Commission during this period.
All of these evolving compliance and operational requirements impose significant costs, such as costs related to organizational changes, implementing additional protection technologies, training employees and engaging consultants, which are likely to increase over time. In addition, such requirements may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies, distract management or divert resources from other initiatives and projects, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with any applicable federal, state or similar foreign laws and regulations relating to data privacy and security could result in damage to our reputation, as well as proceedings or litigation by governmental agencies or other third parties, including class action privacy litigation in certain jurisdictions, which would subject us to significant fines, sanctions, awards, penalties or judgments, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We may acquire businesses or form joint ventures or make investments in other companies or technologies that could negatively affect our operating results, dilute our stockholders’ ownership, increase our debt or cause us to incur significant expense.
We may pursue acquisitions of businesses and assets. We also may pursue strategic alliances and joint ventures that leverage our technology and industry experience to expand our offerings or distribution. We have no experience with acquiring other companies and limited experience with forming strategic partnerships. We may not be able to find suitable collaborators or acquisition candidates, and we may not be able to complete such transactions on favorable terms, if at all. The competition for collaborators or acquisition candidates may be intense, and the negotiation process will be time consuming and complex. If we make any acquisitions, we may not be able to integrate these acquisitions successfully into our existing business, these acquisitions may not strengthen our competitive position, the transactions may be viewed negatively by customers or investors, we may be unable to retain key employees of any acquired business, relationships with key suppliers, manufacturers or customers of any acquired business may be impaired due to changes in management and ownership, and we could assume unknown or contingent liabilities. Any future acquisitions also could result in the incurrence of debt, contingent liabilities or future write-offs of intangible assets or goodwill, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to fully recover the costs of any acquisition. Integration of an acquired company also may disrupt ongoing operations and require management resources that we would otherwise focus on developing our existing business. We may not realize the anticipated benefits of any acquisition, technology license, strategic alliance or joint venture. We also may experience losses related to investments in other companies, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
To finance any acquisitions or joint ventures, we may choose to issue shares of our common stock as consideration, which would dilute the ownership of our stockholders. Additional funds may not be available on terms that are favorable to us, or at all. If the price of our Class A common stock is low or volatile, we may not be able to acquire companies or fund a joint venture project using our stock as consideration.
Our insurance policies are expensive and protect us only from some business risks, which leaves us exposed to significant uninsured liabilities.
We do not carry insurance for all categories of risk that our business may encounter and our policies have limits and significant deductibles. Some of the policies we currently maintain include general liability, property, umbrella and directors’ and officers’ insurance.
Any additional product liability insurance coverage we acquire in the future, may not be sufficient to reimburse us for any expenses or losses we may suffer. Moreover, insurance coverage is becoming increasingly expensive and in the future we may not be able to maintain insurance coverage at a reasonable cost or in sufficient amounts to protect us against losses. A successful product liability claim or series of claims in which judgments exceed our insurance coverage
could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects, including preventing or limiting the commercialization of any products we develop.
We also expect that operating as a public company will make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance, and we may be required to accept reduced policy limits and coverage or incur substantially higher costs to obtain the same or similar coverage. As a result, it may be more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified people to serve on our board of directors, our board committees or as executive officers. We do not know, however, if we will be able to maintain existing insurance with adequate levels of coverage. Any significant uninsured liability may require us to pay substantial amounts, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
International expansion of our business exposes us to business, regulatory, political, operational, financial and economic risks associated with doing business outside of the United States.
We currently have limited international operations, but our business strategy incorporates potentially significant international expansion. We currently maintain a small sales force internationally and engage one distributor. We also have relationships with customers outside of the United States and may in the future expand our international customer base. Doing business internationally involves a number of risks, including:
● multiple, conflicting and changing laws and regulations such as privacy regulations, tax laws, export and import restrictions, tariffs, economic sanctions and embargoes, employment laws, regulatory requirements and other governmental approvals, permits and licenses;
● failure by us or our distributors to obtain approvals to conduct our business in various countries;
● differing intellectual property rights;
● complexities and difficulties in obtaining intellectual property protection, enforcing our intellectual property and defending against third-party intellectual property claims;
● difficulties in staffing and managing foreign operations;
● logistics and regulations associated with shipping systems and parts and components for systems and consumables, as well as transportation delays;
● travel restrictions that limit the ability of marketing, presales, sales, services and support teams to service customers;
● financial risks, such as longer payment cycles, difficulty collecting accounts receivable, the impact of local and regional financial crises on demand and payment for our products and exposure to foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations;
● international trade disputes that could result in tariffs and other protective measures;
● natural disasters, the severity and frequency of which may be amplified by global climate change, political and economic instability, including wars, terrorism and political unrest, outbreak of disease, boycotts, curtailment of trade and other business restrictions; and
● regulatory and compliance risks, including severe penalties such as criminal and civil penalties, disgorgement and other remedial measures, that relate to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the U.K. Bribery Act 2010 and similar anti-bribery and anticorruption laws in other jurisdictions.
Any of these factors could significantly harm our future international expansion and operations and, consequently, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In addition, certain international markets are
subject to significant political and economic uncertainty, including for example the effect of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Significant political and economic developments in international markets for which we intend to operate, or the perception that any of them could occur, creates further challenges for operating in these markets in addition to creating instability in global economic conditions.
Certain legal and political risks are also inherent in foreign operations. There is a risk that foreign governments may nationalize private enterprises in certain countries where we may operate. In certain countries or regions, terrorist activities and the response to such activities may threaten our operations more than in the United States. Social and cultural norms in certain countries may not support compliance with our corporate policies, including those that require compliance with substantive laws and regulations. Also, changes in general economic and political conditions in countries where we may operate are a risk to our financial performance and future growth. Additionally, the need to identify financially and commercially strong collaborators and customers for operations outside the United States who will comply with the high legal and regulatory standards we require is a risk to our financial performance. As we operate our business globally, our success will depend, in part, on our ability to anticipate and effectively manage these and other related risks. There can be no assurance that the consequences of these and other factors relating to our international operations will not have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations.
Changing expectations for inflation and deflation and corresponding fluctuations in interest rates could impact our ability to place our Growth Direct systems with customers, as well as increase certain operating costs, such as employee compensation.
There is particular uncertainty about the prospects for growth in the global economy. A number of factors influence the potential uncertainty, including, but not limited to, rising government debt levels, prospective executive branch or Federal Reserve policy shifts, the withdrawal of government interventions into the financial markets, and changing expectations for inflation and deflation which may impact interest rates. For example, at its March 2022 Federal Open Market Committee Meeting, the Federal Reserve raised benchmark interest rates and expressed its expectation that additional increases will be made in 2022, partially in response to increasing inflation and a strong labor market. Increased interest rates may decrease demand for our Growth Direct systems, as our customers may face economic uncertainty as a result. A change in demand for our products and any steps we may take to mitigate such change could impact our overall growth. Furthermore, inflation and other economic pressures could negatively affect our financial condition, results of operations, cash flows and future prospects.
In operating our business, we may experience inflationary pressures on significant cost categories including labor, materials and freight. An inflationary environment, including factors such as tight labor markets and increasing freight and materials prices, could make it more costly for us to do business. In order to meet the compensation expectations of our prospective and current employees due to inflationary factors, we may be required to increase our labor costs, including wages and employee benefits, or risk losing skilled workers to competitors. In addition, changes in global shipping capacity and demand as well as the cost of raw materials and commodities such as oil (including derivative products including fuel and plastics) could negatively impact our freight and materials costs. If we see additional pressure on our labor, materials and freight costs, we could see negative effects on our results of operations (including product costs), cash flows and overall financial condition.
Global economic and political instability and conflicts, such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, could adversely affect our business, financial condition or results of operations.
Our business could be adversely affected by unstable economic and political conditions within the United States and foreign jurisdictions and geopolitical conflicts, such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. While we do not have any customer or direct supplier relationships in either country at this time, the current military conflict, and related sanctions, as well as export controls or actions that may be initiated by nations including the United States, the European Union or Russia (e.g., potential cyberattacks, disruption of energy flows, etc.) and other potential uncertainties could adversely affect our business and/or our supply chain, business partners or customers, and could cause demand for our products to be volatile, cause abrupt changes in our customers buying patterns, interrupt our ability to supply products, limit customers' access to financial resources and ability to satisfy obligations to us, or otherwise adversely impact our
ability to place our Growth Direct systems. In the event geopolitical tensions fail to abate or deteriorate further, additional governmental sanctions may be enacted adversely impacting the global economy, its banking and monetary systems, markets or customers for our products.
Our employees, consultants and collaborators may engage in misconduct or other improper activities.
We are exposed to the risk of fraud or other misconduct by our employees, consultants and collaborators. Misconduct by these parties could include intentional failures to comply with the applicable laws and regulations in the United States and abroad, report financial information or data accurately or disclose unauthorized activities to us. These laws and regulations may restrict or prohibit a wide range of pricing, discounting and other business arrangements. Such misconduct could result in legal or regulatory sanctions and cause serious harm to our reputation. It is not always possible to identify and deter misconduct, and any precautions we take to detect and prevent this activity may not be effective in controlling unknown or unmanaged risks or losses, or in protecting us from governmental investigations or other actions or lawsuits stemming from a failure to comply with these laws or regulations. If any such actions are instituted against us, and we are not successful in defending ourselves or asserting our rights, we could be subject to significant civil, criminal and administrative penalties, which could have a material adverse impact on our business. Whether or not we are successful in defending against such actions or investigations, we could incur substantial costs, including legal fees and divert the attention of management in defending ourselves against any of these claims or investigations, which could have a material adverse impact on our business.
We and our employees are increasingly utilizing social media tools as a means of communication both internally and externally.
Despite our efforts to monitor evolving social media communication guidelines and comply with applicable rules, there is risk that the use of social media by us or our employees to communicate about our products or business may cause us to be found in violation of applicable requirements. In addition, our employees may knowingly or inadvertently make use of social media in ways that may not comply with applicable laws and regulations, our policies and other legal or contractual requirements, which may give rise to regulatory enforcement action, liability, lead to the loss of trade secrets or other intellectual property or result in public exposure of personal information of our employees, customers and others. Furthermore, negative posts or comments about us or our products in social media could seriously damage our reputation, brand image and goodwill. Any of these events could have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, operating results and financial condition and could adversely affect the price of our Class A common stock.
Risks Related to Manufacturing and Supply
If our sole manufacturing and development facility becomes damaged or inoperable or we are required to vacate our existing facility, our ability to conduct and pursue our manufacturing and development efforts will be jeopardized.
We currently conduct our development and manufacturing at a single facility located in Lowell, Massachusetts. Our facility and equipment could be harmed or rendered inoperable or inaccessible by natural or man-made disasters, the severity and frequency of which may be amplified by global climate change, or other circumstances beyond our control, including fire, power loss, communications failure, war or terrorism, or another catastrophic event, such as a pandemic or similar outbreak or public health crisis, which may render it difficult or impossible for us to support our customers and develop products. The inability to manufacture our systems and consumables could develop if our facility is inoperable or suffers a loss of utilization for even a short period of time and may result in the loss of customers or harm to our reputation. Furthermore, our facility and the equipment we use to perform our manufacturing and development could be unavailable or costly and time consuming to repair or replace. It would be difficult, time consuming and expensive to rebuild our facility, to locate and qualify a new facility or license or transfer our proprietary technology to a third party. Even in the event we are able to find a third party to assist in manufacturing and development efforts, we may be unable to negotiate commercially reasonable terms to engage with the third party. Although we are working to complete a back-up manufacturing facility in Lexington, Massachusetts, it is not complete and these risks are not yet mitigated.
We also store a certain amount of inventory of components of our products at our Lowell, Massachusetts facility.
We carry insurance for damage to our property and the disruption of our business, but this insurance may not cover all of the risks associated with damage or disruption to our business, may not provide coverage in amounts sufficient to cover our potential losses and may not continue to be available to us on acceptable terms, if at all.
Our manufacturing operations are dependent upon third-party suppliers, including single-source suppliers, making us vulnerable to supply shortages and price fluctuations, which could harm our business.
We source the components of our Growth Direct system and consumables from third-party suppliers. We do not have supply agreements with most of our suppliers beyond purchase orders and, although we maintain an inventory of components, forecasted amounts may be inaccurate and we may experience shortages as a result of serious supply problems with these suppliers. There can be no assurance that our supply of components will not be limited, interrupted, or of satisfactory quality or continue to be available at acceptable prices. For example, we have experienced disruptions to our supply chain as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and may experience additional disruptions in the future.
Certain critical components of our Growth Direct system and consumables we obtain from single suppliers and the loss of supply from any of these suppliers could materially adversely affect our business. To protect against such loss, we maintain, or are working to obtain, sufficient inventory of these components to allow us to continue to manufacture our systems and consumables during the period required to qualify a new supplier. For example, the manufacturer of the camera used in our Growth Direct system intends to discontinue production of the camera, and we have obtained a supply we believe is sufficient to allow us to qualify a new camera supplier. While we believe we have, or will have, sufficient inventory to provide protection against changes in our sole suppliers, our estimates of the length of time required to qualify a new supplier or inventory level required to manufacture our systems and consumables during that time may be incorrect, and we may run out of inventory sooner than we anticipate. In addition, we have not obtained sufficient inventory for all of our single-source components and we may not be able to do so in the amounts we predict will be required. In addition, any change to a new supplier will require us to devote substantial time and resources, result in additional costs, and could involve a period in which our products might not be produced in a timely or consistent manner. We may also be unable to enter into agreements with new suppliers on commercially reasonable terms or at all. The occurrence of any of these events could adversely affect our business and customer relationships. In addition, loss of any critical component provided by a single-source supplier could require us to change the design of our manufacturing process based on the functions, limitations, features and specifications of the replacement components.
Several other non-critical components and materials that comprise our Growth Direct platform are currently manufactured by a single supplier or a limited number of suppliers. In many of these cases, we have not yet qualified alternate suppliers and rely upon purchase orders, rather than long-term supply agreements. A supply interruption or an increase in demand beyond our current suppliers’ capabilities could harm our ability to manufacture our products unless and until new sources of supply are identified and qualified. Our reliance on these suppliers subjects us to a number of risks that could harm our business, including:
● interruption of supply resulting from modifications to or discontinuation of a supplier’s operations;
● delays in product shipments resulting from uncorrected defects, reliability issues, or a supplier’s variation in a component;
● a lack of long-term supply arrangements for key components with our suppliers;
● inability to obtain adequate supply in a timely manner, or to obtain adequate supply on commercially reasonable terms;
● difficulty and cost associated with locating and qualifying alternative suppliers for our components in a timely manner;
● a modification or change in a manufacturing process or part that unknowingly or unintentionally negatively impacts the operation of our products;
● production delays related to the evaluation and testing of products from alternative suppliers, and corresponding regulatory qualifications;
● delay in delivery due to our suppliers prioritizing other customer orders over ours;
● damage to our brand reputation caused by defective components produced by our suppliers;
● increased cost of our warranty program due to product repair or replacement based upon defects in components produced by our suppliers; and
● fluctuation in delivery by our suppliers due to changes in demand from us or their other customers.
Any interruption in the supply of components or materials, or our inability to obtain substitute components or materials from alternate sources at acceptable prices in a timely manner, could impair our ability to meet the demand of our customers, which would have an adverse effect on our business.
We forecast sales to determine requirements for components and materials used in our products, and if our forecasts are incorrect, we may experience delays in shipments or increased inventory costs.
To manage our operations with our third-party suppliers, we forecast anticipated product orders and material requirements to predict our inventory needs and enter into purchase orders on the basis of these requirements. Our limited historical commercial experience and recent growth may not provide us with enough data to consistently and accurately predict future demand. If our business expands and our demand for components and materials increases beyond our estimates, we or our suppliers may be unable to meet our demand. In addition, if we underestimate our component and material requirements, we may have inadequate inventory, which could interrupt, delay, or prevent delivery of our products to our customers. By contrast, if we overestimate our component and material requirements, we may have excess inventory, which would increase our expenses. Any of these occurrences would negatively affect our financial performance and business results.
Shipping is a critical part of our business and any changes in our shipping arrangements or damages or losses sustained during shipping could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
Shipments of our products are subject to various regulations in the various countries in which we provide our products. For example, shipments of our growth media consumables may be required to comply with the shipping requirements promulgated by the U.S. Department of Transportation, or DOT, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, as well as shipment rules established by the International Air Transport Association. If we are unable to comply with any of these rules or regulations, our ability to deliver our products in a timely manner may be adversely affected. In addition, even if we are able to comply with these rules and regulations, compliance can result in increased costs. In either event, our financial results and condition may be adversely affected.
We also currently rely on third-party vendors for our shipping. If we are not able to negotiate acceptable pricing and other terms with these entities or they experience performance problems or other difficulties, it could negatively impact our operating results and our customers’ experience. Our products could sustain serious damage or be lost in transit. If a product is damaged in transit, including damage due to consumable temperature excursion, it may result in a substantial delay in the fulfillment of the customer’s order, and depending on the type and extent of the damage and whether the incident is covered by insurance, it may result in a substantial financial loss. If our products are not delivered in a timely fashion or are damaged or lost during the delivery process, our customers could become dissatisfied and cease using our products or services, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We use biological and hazardous materials that require considerable expertise and expense for handling, storage and disposal and may result in claims against us.
We work with materials, including chemicals, biological agents and compounds that could be hazardous to human health and safety or the environment. Our operations also produce hazardous and biological waste products. Federal, state and local laws and regulations govern the use, generation, manufacture, storage, handling and disposal of these materials and wastes. We are subject to periodic inspections by federal, state and local authorities to ensure compliance with applicable laws. Compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations is expensive, and current or future environmental laws and regulations may restrict our operations. If we do not comply with applicable regulations, we may be subject to fines and penalties. In addition, we cannot eliminate the risk of accidental injury or contamination from these materials or wastes, which could cause an interruption of our commercialization efforts, research and development programs and business operations, as well as environmental damage resulting in costly clean-up and liabilities under applicable laws and regulations. In the event of contamination or injury, we could be liable for damages or penalized with fines in an amount exceeding our resources and our operations could be suspended or otherwise adversely affected. Furthermore, environmental laws and regulations are complex, change frequently and have tended to become more stringent. We cannot predict the impact of such changes and cannot be certain of our future compliance.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property
If we are unable to obtain and maintain sufficient intellectual property protection for our technology, including the Growth Direct platform, or if the scope of the intellectual property protection obtained is not sufficiently broad, our competitors could develop and commercialize products similar or identical to ours, and our ability to successfully commercialize our products may be impaired.
We rely on patent protection as well as trademark, copyright, trade secret and other intellectual property rights protection and contractual restrictions to protect our proprietary technologies, all of which provide limited protection and may not adequately protect our rights or permit us to gain or keep any competitive advantage. If we fail to maintain, protect or enforce our intellectual property, third parties may be able to compete more effectively against us. In addition, we may incur substantial litigation costs in our attempts to recover or restrict use of our intellectual property.
To the extent our intellectual property offers inadequate protection, or is found to be invalid or unenforceable, we would be exposed to a greater risk of direct competition. If our intellectual property does not provide adequate coverage of our competitors’ products, our competitive position could be adversely affected, as could our business. Both the patent application process and the process of managing patent disputes can be time consuming and expensive.
As is the case with other technology companies, our success depends in large part on our ability to obtain and maintain protection of the intellectual property we may own solely and jointly with others, particularly patents, in the United States and other countries with respect to our products and technologies. We apply for patents covering our products and technologies and their uses, as we deem appropriate. However, obtaining and enforcing patents in our industry is costly, time consuming and complex, and we may fail to apply for patents on important products, services and technologies in a timely fashion or at all, or we may fail to apply for patents in potentially relevant jurisdictions. We may not be able to file and prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications, or maintain, enforce and license any patents that may issue from such patent applications, at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. If we delay in filing a patent application, and a competitor files a patent application on the same or a similar technology before we do, we may face a limited ability to secure patent rights. We may not be able to patent the technology at all. Even if we can patent the technology, we may be able to patent only a limited scope of the technology, and the limited scope may be inadequate to protect our products, or to block competitor products that are similar or adjacent to ours. Our earliest patent filings have been published. A competitor may review our published patents and arrive at the same or similar technology advances for our products as we developed. If the competitor files a patent application on such an advance before we do, then we may no longer be able to protect the technology, we may require a license from the competitor, and if the license is not available on commercially-viable terms, then we may not be able to launch our product. It is also possible that we will fail to identify patentable aspects of our research and development output before it is too late to obtain patent protection. We may not have the right to control the preparation, filing and prosecution of patent
applications, or to maintain the rights to patents licensed to third parties. Therefore, these patents and applications may not be prosecuted and enforced in a manner consistent with the best interests of our business.
It is possible that none of our pending patent applications will result in issued patents in a timely fashion or at all, and even if patents are granted, they may not provide a basis for intellectual property protection of commercially viable products or services, may not provide us with any competitive advantages, or may be challenged and invalidated by third parties. It is possible that others will design around our current or future patented technologies. It is possible that in the future some of our patents, licensed patents and patent applications may be challenged at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, or in proceedings before the patent offices of other jurisdictions. We may not be successful in defending any such challenges made against our patents or patent applications. Any successful third-party challenge to our patents could result in our patents being narrowed, invalidated or held unenforceable which could result in increased competition to our business. We may have to challenge the patents or patent applications of third parties. The outcome of patent litigation or other proceeding can be uncertain, and any attempt by us to enforce our patent rights against others or to challenge the patent rights of others may not be successful, or, if successful, may take substantial time and result in substantial cost, and may divert our efforts and attention from other aspects of our business.
The patent positions of technology companies can be highly uncertain and involve complex legal and factual questions for which important legal principles remain unresolved. No consistent policy regarding the breadth of claims allowed in such companies’ patents has emerged to date in the United States or elsewhere. Courts frequently render opinions that may affect the patentability of certain inventions or discoveries. If the breadth or strength of protection provided by the patents and patent applications we hold with respect to our products is threatened, it could dissuade companies from collaborating with us to develop, and threaten our ability to commercialize, our products.
Our current and future licensors may retain certain rights under their agreements with us, including the right to use the underlying technology for noncommercial academic and research use, to publish general scientific findings from research related to the technology and to make customary scientific and scholarly disclosures of information relating to the technology. It is difficult to monitor whether our licensors limit their use of the technology to these uses, and we could incur substantial expenses to enforce our rights in the event of misuse.
Patent terms may be inadequate to protect our competitive position on our products for an adequate amount of time.
Patents have a limited lifespan. In the United States, if all maintenance fees are timely paid, the natural expiration of a patent is generally 20 years from its earliest U.S. non-provisional filing date. Various extensions may be available, but the life of a patent, and the protection it affords, is limited. Even if patents covering our products are obtained, once the patent life has expired, we may be open to competition from competitive products. If one of our products requires extended development or testing, patents protecting such products might expire before or shortly after such products are commercialized. For example, while our patents and, if issued, our patent applications have terms that will expire through 2041, certain of our U.S. patents covering the Growth Direct system and its use are scheduled to expire in 2024, and the corresponding foreign patents are scheduled to expire in 2022. Although we own other patents with later expiration dates that cover various improvements and consumables for the Growth Direct platform, these other patents may not provide the same protection as the earliest-filed patents. As a result, our patent portfolio may not provide us with sufficient rights to exclude others from commercializing products similar or identical to ours, which would have a material adverse effect on our business.
The United States government may exercise certain rights with regard to certain of our inventions developed using government funding.
The United States federal government retains certain rights in inventions produced with its financial assistance under the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, or the Bayh-Dole Act. Certain of our inventions for which we have pursued, and in some cases obtained, patent protection were developed using federal funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research & Development Authority, or BARDA. As a result, the U.S. government may have certain rights, including so-called march-in rights, to any patent rights that were funded in party by the U.S. government and any products or technology developed from such patent rights. When new technologies are developed with U.S. government funding, the U.S. government generally obtains certain rights in any
resulting patents, including a nonexclusive license authorizing the U.S. government to use the invention for non-commercial purposes. These rights may permit the U.S. government to disclose our confidential information to third parties and to exercise march-in rights to use or to allow third parties to use our licensed technology. The U.S. government can exercise its march-in rights if it determines that action is necessary because we fail to achieve the practical application of government-funded technology, because action is necessary to alleviate health or safety needs, to meet requirements of federal regulations, or to give preference to U.S. industry. In addition, our rights in such inventions may be subject to certain requirements to manufacture products embodying such inventions in the United States. Any exercise by the U.S. government of such rights could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
In addition to our current inventions developed using BARDA funds, we also sometimes collaborate with academic institutions to accelerate our research or development. While it is our policy to avoid engaging our university partners in projects in which there is a risk that federal funds may be commingled, we cannot be sure that any co-developed intellectual property will be free from government rights pursuant to the Bayh-Dole Act. If, in the future, we co-own or in-license in technology which is critical to our business that is developed in whole or in part with federal funds subject to the Bayh-Dole Act, our ability to enforce or otherwise exploit patents covering such technology may be adversely affected.
If we are unable to protect the confidentiality of our trade secrets, the value of our technology could be materially adversely affected and our business could be harmed.
We rely heavily on trade secrets and confidentiality agreements to protect our unpatented know-how, technology and other proprietary information, including parts of our technology platform, and to maintain our competitive position and we expect our reliance to increase in the near term as the terms for certain of our patents expire. For example, while our patents and, if issued, our patent applications have terms that will expire through 2041, some of our U.S. patents covering the Growth Direct system and its use are expected to expire in 2024, and the corresponding foreign patents are scheduled to expire in 2022. Once these patents expire, we may have to rely more heavily on trade secrets to maintain our competitive advantage. Any disclosure, either intentional or unintentional, by our employees, consultants and vendors that we engage to perform research or manufacturing activities, or misappropriation by third parties (such as through a cybersecurity breach) of our trade secrets or proprietary information could enable competitors to duplicate or surpass our technological achievements, thus eroding our competitive position in our market. Because we expect to rely on third parties in the development and manufacture of our products, we must, at times, share trade secrets with them. Our reliance on third parties requires us to share our trade secrets, which increases the possibility that a competitor will discover them or that our trade secrets will be misappropriated or disclosed.
Trade secrets and know-how can be difficult to protect. In addition to pursuing patents on our technology, we take steps to protect our intellectual property and proprietary technology by entering into agreements, including confidentiality agreements, non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property assignment agreements, with our employees, consultants, advisors, collaborators and customers. However, we cannot be certain that such agreements have been entered into with all relevant parties, and we cannot be certain that our trade secrets and other confidential proprietary information will not be disclosed or that competitors will not otherwise gain access to our trade secrets or independently develop substantially equivalent information and techniques. For example, any of these parties may breach the agreements and disclose our proprietary information, including our trade secrets, and we may not be able to obtain adequate remedies for such breaches. Such agreements may not be enforceable or may not provide meaningful protection for our trade secrets or other proprietary information in the event of unauthorized use or disclosure or other breaches of the agreements, and we may not be able to prevent such unauthorized disclosure, which could materially adversely impact our business and financial position. If we are required to assert our rights against such a party, it could result in significant cost and distraction.
Monitoring unauthorized disclosure is difficult, and we do not know whether the steps we have taken to prevent such disclosure are, or will be, adequate. If we were to enforce a claim that a third party had illegally obtained and was using our trade secrets, it would be expensive and time consuming, and the outcome would be unpredictable. In addition, if we choose to go to court to stop a third party from using any of our trade secrets, it may result in a public disclosure of our trade secrets and corresponding loss of rights, which could have a material adverse effect on our business. In
addition, courts outside the United States may be less willing to protect trade secrets. We may need to share our proprietary information, including trade secrets, with future business partners, collaborators, contractors and others located in countries at heightened risk of theft of trade secrets, including through direct intrusion by private parties or foreign actors, and those affiliated with or controlled by state actors.
We also seek to preserve the integrity and confidentiality of our confidential proprietary information by maintaining physical security of our premises and physical and electronic security of our information technology systems, but it is possible that these security measures could be breached. If any of our confidential proprietary information were to be lawfully obtained or independently developed by a competitor or other third party, absent patent protection, we would have no right to prevent such competitor from using that technology or information to compete with us, which could harm our competitive position. If any of our trade secrets were to be disclosed to, or independently discovered by, a competitor or other third party, it could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We rely on in-licenses from third parties. If we lose these rights, our business may be materially adversely affected, our ability to develop improvements to our Growth Direct platform and to develop new technologies may be negatively and substantially impacted, and if disputes arise, we may be subjected to future litigation as well as the potential loss of or limitations on our ability to develop and commercialize products and technology covered by these license agreements.
We are party to a royalty-bearing license agreement with Thermo CRS, Ltd., or Thermo Fisher, that grants us rights to exploit certain patent rights that are related to our Growth Direct platform. We may need to obtain additional licenses from others to advance our research, development and commercialization activities. These and other intellectual property license agreements that we enter into with third parties may impose various development, regulatory and/or commercial diligence obligations, payment of milestones and/or royalties and other obligations on us. Our rights to use the technology we license are subject to the continuation of and compliance with the terms of these agreements. If we fail to comply with our obligations under these agreements (including as a result of COVID-19, and its variants, impacting our operations), we use the licensed intellectual property in an unauthorized manner or we are subject to bankruptcy-related proceedings, the terms of the licenses may be materially modified, such as by rendering currently exclusive licenses non-exclusive, or it may give our licensors the right to terminate their respective agreement with us, which could limit our ability to implement our current business plan and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
In some cases, we may not control the prosecution, maintenance or filing of the patents to which we hold licenses, or the enforcement of those patents against third parties. Our licensors may not successfully prosecute the patent applications to which we are licensed. Even if patents are issued in respect of these patent applications, our licensors may fail to maintain these patents, may determine not to pursue litigation against other companies that are infringing these patents, or may pursue such litigation less aggressively than we would. Without protection for the intellectual property we license, other companies might be able to offer substantially identical products for sale, which could adversely affect our competitive business position and harm our business prospects. Further, we may have limited control over these activities or any other intellectual property that may be in-licensed. For example, we cannot be certain that such activities by licensors have been or will be conducted in compliance with applicable laws and regulations or will result in valid and enforceable patents and other intellectual property rights. We may have limited control over the manner in which our licensors initiate an infringement proceeding against a third-party infringer of the intellectual property rights, or defend certain of the intellectual property that is licensed to us. It is possible that the licensors’ infringement proceeding or defense activities may be less vigorous than had we conducted them ourselves. In the event our licensors fail to adequately pursue and maintain patent protection for patents and applications they control, and to timely cede control of such prosecution to us, our competitors might be able to enter the market, which would have a material adverse effect on our business.
Moreover, disputes may arise with respect to our licensing or other agreements, including:
● the scope of rights granted under the agreements and other interpretation-related issues;
● the extent to which our systems and consumables, technology and processes infringe on the intellectual property of the licensor that is not subject to the licensing agreement;
● our diligence obligations under the license agreements and what activities satisfy those diligence obligations;
● the inventorship and ownership of inventions and know-how resulting from the joint creation or use of intellectual property by our licensors and us; and
● the priority of invention of patented technology.
In spite of our efforts to comply with our obligations under our in-license agreements, our licensors might conclude that we have materially breached our obligations under our license agreements and might therefore, terminate the relevant license agreement, thereby removing or limiting our ability to develop and commercialize products and technology covered by these license agreements. If any such in-license agreement is terminated, or if the licensed patents fail to provide the intended exclusivity, competitors or other third parties might have the freedom to market or develop products similar to ours. In addition, absent the rights granted to us under such license agreements, we may infringe the intellectual property rights that are the subject of those agreements, we may be subject to litigation by the licensor, and if such litigation by the licensor is successful we may be required to pay damages to the licensor, or we may be required to cease our development and commercialization activities that are deemed infringing, and in such event we may ultimately need to modify our activities or products to design around such infringement, which will consume time and resources and may not be ultimately successful. Any of the foregoing could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In particular, if our license with Thermo Fisher is terminated, we may suffer the foregoing consequences with respect to our business.
In addition, our rights to certain technologies are licensed to us on a non-exclusive basis. The owners of these non-exclusively licensed technologies are therefore free to license them to third parties, including our competitors, on terms that may be superior to those offered to us, which could place us at a competitive disadvantage. Moreover, our licensors may own or control intellectual property that has not been licensed to us and, as a result, we may be subject to claims, regardless of their merit, that we are infringing or otherwise violating the licensor’s rights. In addition, certain of our agreements with third parties may provide that intellectual property arising under these agreements, such as data that could be valuable to our business, will be owned by the counterparty, in which case, we may not have adequate rights to use such data or have exclusivity with respect to the use of such data, which could result in third parties, including our competitors, being able to use such data to compete with us.
Changes in patent law in the United States and other jurisdictions could diminish the value of patents in general, thereby impairing our ability to protect our products.
Changes in either the patent laws or in interpretations of patent laws in the United States or other countries or regions may diminish the value of our intellectual property. We cannot predict the breadth of claims that may be allowed or enforced in our patents or in third party patents. We may not develop additional proprietary products, methods and technologies that are patentable.
Generally, jurisdictions outside the United States have a “first to file” patent system. In the United States, prior to March 2013, the “first to invent” a claimed invention was entitled to the patent (assuming that all other requirements were met). After March 2013, following the passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, or the America Invents Act, the United States transitioned to a “first inventor to file” system, under which the first inventor to file a patent application on an invention is entitled to the patent (assuming that all other requirements are met) even if another party was the first to invent the claimed invention. The America Invents Act also included a number of significant changes that affect the way patent applications are prosecuted and that also may affect patent litigation. These include the introduction of derivation proceedings; expansion of the permitted content of third-party submissions to the USPTO during patent prosecution; and additional procedures to challenge the validity of a patent after issuance, including post-grant review and inter partes review. Because of a lower evidentiary standard in USPTO proceedings compared to the
evidentiary standard in United States federal courts necessary to invalidate a patent claim, a third party could potentially provide evidence in a USPTO proceeding sufficient for the USPTO to hold a claim invalid even though the same evidence would be insufficient to invalidate the claim if first presented in a district court action. Accordingly, a third party may attempt to use the USPTO procedures to invalidate our patent claims that would not have been invalidated if first challenged by the third party as a defendant in a district court action. The America Invents Act and its continued implementation could increase the uncertainties and costs surrounding the prosecution of our patent applications and the enforcement or defense of our issued patents, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects.
Depending on future actions by the U.S. Congress, the U.S. courts, the USPTO and the relevant law-making bodies in other countries, the laws and regulations governing patents could change in unpredictable ways that would weaken our ability to obtain new patents or to enforce our existing patents and patents that we might obtain in the future. For example, various courts, including the United States Supreme Court have rendered decisions that affect the scope of patentability of certain inventions or discoveries. These decisions state, among other things, that a patent claim that recites an abstract idea, natural phenomenon or law of nature are not themselves patentable. Precisely what constitutes a law of nature or abstract idea is uncertain, and it is possible that certain aspects of our technology could be considered to be or apply laws of nature. Accordingly, the evolving case law in the United States may adversely affect our ability to obtain patents and may facilitate third party challenges to any owned or licensed patents.
Issued patents covering our products could be found invalid or unenforceable if challenged in court or before administrative bodies in the United States or abroad, including the USPTO.
The issuance of a patent is not conclusive as to its inventorship, scope, validity or enforceability. Some of our patents or patent applications (including licensed patents) may be challenged in opposition, derivation, reexamination, inter partes review, post-grant review or interference. Any successful third-party challenge to our patents in this or any other proceeding could result in the unenforceability or invalidity of such patents, which could harm our business. In addition, in patent litigation in the United States, defendant counterclaims alleging invalidity or unenforceability are commonplace. Grounds for a validity challenge could be an alleged failure to meet any of several statutory requirements, for example, lack of novelty, obviousness or non-enablement. Grounds for an unenforceability assertion could be an allegation that someone connected with prosecution of the patent withheld material information from the USPTO or the applicable foreign counterpart, or made a misleading statement, during prosecution. A litigant or the USPTO itself could challenge our patents on this basis even if we believe that we have conducted our patent prosecution in accordance with the duty of candor and in good faith. Further, with respect to challenges to the validity of our patents, there might be invalidating prior art, of which we and the patent examiner were unaware during prosecution. The outcome following legal assertions of invalidity and unenforceability during patent litigation is unpredictable. If a defendant were to prevail on a legal assertion of invalidity or unenforceability, we would lose at least part, and perhaps all, of the patent protection on certain aspects of our platform technologies. The cost of defending such a challenge, particularly in a foreign jurisdiction, and any resulting loss of patent protection could have a material adverse impact on one or more of our products and our business. In addition, if the breadth or strength of protection provided by our patents and patent applications is threatened, regardless of the outcome, it could dissuade companies from collaborating with us to license, develop or commercialize current or future products. Enforcing our intellectual property rights against third parties may also cause such third parties to file other counterclaims against us, which could be costly to defend, particularly in a foreign jurisdiction, and could require us to pay substantial damages, cease the sale of certain products or enter into a license agreement and pay royalties (which may not be possible on commercially reasonable terms or at all). Any efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights are also likely to be costly and may divert the efforts of our scientific and management personnel.
We may not be aware of all third-party intellectual property rights potentially relating to our products. Publications of discoveries often lag behind the actual discoveries, and patent applications in the United States and other jurisdictions are typically not published until approximately 18 months after filing or, in some cases, not until such patent applications issue as patents. We might not have been the first to make the inventions covered by each of our pending patent applications and we might not have been the first to file patent applications for these inventions. To determine the priority of these inventions, we may have to participate in interference proceedings, derivation proceedings or other post-
grant proceedings declared by the USPTO that could result in substantial cost to us. The outcome of such proceedings is uncertain. No assurance can be given that other patent applications will not have priority over our patent applications.
If we cannot acquire or license rights to use technologies on reasonable terms, we may not be able to commercialize new products in the future.
In the future, we may identify third-party intellectual property and technology we may need to license in order to engage in our business, including to develop or commercialize new products or services, and the growth of our business may depend in part on our ability to acquire, in-license or use this technology. However, such licenses may not be available to us on acceptable terms or at all. The licensing or acquisition of third-party intellectual property rights is a competitive area, and several more established companies may pursue strategies to license or acquire third-party intellectual property rights that we may consider attractive or necessary. These established companies may have a competitive advantage over us due to their size, capital resources and greater development or commercialization capabilities. In addition, companies that perceive us to be a competitor may be unwilling to assign or license rights to us. Even if such licenses are available, we may be required to pay the licensor in return for the use of such licensor’s technology, lump-sum payments, payments based on certain milestones such as sales volumes, or royalties based on sales of our platform. In addition, such licenses may be non-exclusive, which could give our competitors access to the same intellectual property licensed to us. Our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be materially and adversely affected if we are unable to enter into necessary agreements on acceptable terms or at all, if any necessary licenses are subsequently terminated, if the licensors fail to abide by the terms of the licenses or fail to prevent infringement by third parties, or if the acquired or licensed patents or other rights are found to be invalid or unenforceable. Moreover, we could encounter delays in the introduction of products or services while we attempt to develop alternatives.
We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights throughout the world.
Filing, prosecuting and defending patents on our products in all countries throughout the world would be prohibitively expensive, and our intellectual property rights in some countries outside the United States can be less extensive than those in the United States. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries do not protect intellectual property rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States, and we may encounter difficulties in protecting and defending such rights in foreign jurisdictions. Consequently, we may not be able to prevent third parties from practicing our inventions in some or all countries outside the United States, or from selling or importing products made using our inventions in and into the United States or other jurisdictions. Competitors may use our technologies in jurisdictions where we have not obtained patent protection to develop their own products and may also export infringing products to territories where we have patent protection, but enforcement is not as strong as that in the United States. These products may compete with our products. Our patents or other intellectual property rights may not be effective or sufficient to prevent them from competing. In addition, certain countries have compulsory licensing laws under which a patent owner may be compelled to grant licenses to other parties. Furthermore, many countries limit the enforceability of patents against other parties, including government agencies or government contractors. In these countries, the patent owner may have limited remedies, which could materially diminish the value of any patents.
Many companies have encountered significant problems in protecting and defending intellectual property rights in foreign jurisdictions. The legal systems of many other countries do not favor the enforcement of patents and other intellectual property protection, which could make it difficult for us to stop the misappropriation or other violations of our intellectual property rights including infringement of our patents in such countries. Proceedings to enforce our patent rights in foreign jurisdictions could result in substantial cost and divert our efforts and attention from other aspects of our business, could put our patents at risk of being invalidated or interpreted narrowly and our patent applications at risk of not issuing, and could provoke third parties to assert claims against us. We may not prevail in any lawsuits that we initiate, or that are initiated against us, and the damages or other remedies awarded, if any, may not be commercially meaningful. In addition, changes in the law and legal decisions by courts in the United States and foreign countries may affect our ability to obtain adequate protection for our products, services and other technologies and the enforcement of intellectual property. Accordingly, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights around the world may be inadequate to obtain a significant commercial advantage from the intellectual property that we develop or license.
We may be subject to claims that our employees, consultants or independent contractors have wrongfully used or disclosed confidential information of third parties or that our employees have wrongfully used or disclosed alleged trade secrets of their former employers.
As is common in an industry like ours, we have employed and expect to employ individuals who were previously employed at other companies, including our competitors or potential competitors. Although we try to ensure that our employees, consultants, advisors and independent contractors do not use the proprietary information or know-how of others in their work for us, we may be subject to claims that our employees, advisors, consultants or independent contractors have inadvertently or otherwise used or disclosed intellectual property, including trade secrets or other proprietary information of their former employers or other third parties, or to claims that we have improperly used or obtained such trade secrets. Litigation may be necessary to defend against these claims. If we fail in defending such claims, in addition to paying monetary damages, we may lose valuable intellectual property rights and face increased competition to our business. A loss of key research personnel work product could hamper or prevent our ability to commercialize potential products, which could harm our business. Even if we are successful in defending against these claims, litigation could result in substantial costs and be a distraction to management.
We may not be able to protect and enforce our trademarks and trade names, or build name recognition in our markets of interest thereby harming our competitive position.
Our trademarks or trade names may be challenged, infringed, diluted, circumvented, declared generic or determined to be infringing on other marks. We may not be able to protect our rights in these trademarks or trade names or may be forced to stop using these names, which we need for name recognition by potential partners or customers in our markets of interest. We have not yet registered certain of our trademarks in all of our potential markets. During the trademark registration process, we may receive Office Actions from the USPTO objecting to the registration of our trademarks. Although we would be given an opportunity to respond to those objections, we may be unable to overcome such objections. In addition, at the USPTO and at comparable agencies in many foreign jurisdictions, third parties are given an opportunity to oppose pending trademark applications and/or to seek the cancellation of registered trademarks. Opposition or cancellation proceedings may be filed against our trademarks, and our trademarks may not survive such proceedings. If we are unable to obtain a registered trademark or establish name recognition based on our trademarks and trade names, we may not be able to compete effectively and our business may be adversely affected.
We may be subject to claims challenging the inventorship of our patents and other intellectual property.
We or our licensors may be subject to claims that former employees, collaborators or other third parties have an interest in our owned or in-licensed patents, trade secrets or other intellectual property as an inventor or co-inventor. The failure to name the proper inventors on a patent application can impact the validity and enforceability of patents issuing thereon. Inventorship disputes may arise from conflicting views regarding the contributions of different individuals named as inventors, the effects of foreign laws where foreign nationals are involved in the development of the subject matter of the patent, conflicting obligations of third parties involved in developing our product candidates or as a result of questions regarding co-ownership of potential joint inventions. Litigation may be necessary to defend against these and other claims challenging inventorship of our or our licensors’ ownership of our owned or in-licensed patents, trade secrets or other intellectual property. Alternatively, or additionally, we may enter into agreements to clarify the scope of our rights in such intellectual property. If we or our licensors fail in defending any such claims, in addition to paying monetary damages, we may lose valuable intellectual property rights, such as exclusive ownership of, or right to use, intellectual property that is important to our products. Even if we are successful in defending against such claims, litigation could result in substantial costs and be a distraction to management and other employees, and certain customers or partners may defer engaging with us until the particular dispute is resolved. Any of the foregoing could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
In addition, while it is our policy to require our employees and contractors who may be involved in the conception or development of intellectual property to execute agreements assigning such intellectual property to us, we may be unsuccessful in executing such an agreement with each party who, in fact, conceives or develops intellectual property that we regard as our own. The assignment of intellectual property rights may not be self-executing, or the assignment agreements may be breached, and we may be forced to bring claims against third parties, or defend claims that they may
bring against us, to determine the ownership of what we regard as our intellectual property. Any of the foregoing could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We may be involved in litigation claiming that we have infringed on a third party’s intellectual property, which could be time consuming and costly and may adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
In recent years, there has been significant litigation involving intellectual property rights. We may be involved with litigation or actions at the USPTO or foreign patent offices with various third parties that claim we or our collaborators or customers using our solutions and services have misappropriated or misused other parties’ intellectual property rights. We expect that the number of such claims may increase as the number of our products grows, we expand our market share and the level of competition in our markets increases. Any infringement claim, regardless of its validity, could harm our business by, among other things, resulting in time consuming and costly litigation, diverting management’s time and attention from the development of the business, requiring the payment of monetary damages (including treble damages, attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses) or royalty payments, or result in potential or existing customers delaying purchases of our products or entering into engagements with us pending resolution of the dispute.
As we move into new markets and applications for our platform, incumbent participants in such markets may assert their patents and other proprietary rights against us as a means of slowing our entry into such markets or as a means to extract substantial license and royalty payments from us. Our competitors and others have significantly larger and more mature patent portfolios than we currently have. In addition, future litigation may involve patent holding companies or other adverse patent owners who have no relevant product or service revenue and against whom our own patents may provide little or no deterrence or protection. Therefore, our commercial success may depend in part on our non-infringement of the patents or proprietary rights of third parties, or the invalidity of such patents or proprietary rights.
Our research, development and commercialization activities may in the future be subject to claims that we infringe or otherwise violate patents or other intellectual property rights owned or controlled by third parties. There is a substantial amount of litigation and other patent challenges, both within and outside the United States, involving patent and other intellectual property rights, including patent infringement lawsuits, interferences, oppositions and inter partes review proceedings before the USPTO, and corresponding foreign patent offices. Numerous U.S. and foreign issued patents and pending patent applications, which are owned by third parties, exist in the fields in which we are developing products. As the automated MQC testing industry expands and more patents are issued, the risk increases that our products may be subject to claims of infringement of the patent rights of third parties. Numerous significant intellectual property issues have been litigated, are being litigated and will likely continue to be litigated, between existing and new participants in our existing and targeted markets, and one or more third parties may assert that our products or services infringe their intellectual property rights as part of a business strategy to impede our successful entry into or growth in those markets.
Third parties may assert that we are employing their proprietary technology without authorization. Because patent applications can take many years to issue, there may be currently pending patent applications which may later result in issued patents that our current or future products and services may infringe. In addition, similar to what other companies in our industry have experienced, we are aware of a patent, and there may be patents of which we are not aware or that are issued in future, that may cover our platform or its components. Additionally, pending patent applications that have been published can, subject to certain limitations, be later amended in a manner that could cover our platform or its components. Under the applicable law of certain jurisdictions, the scope of a patent claim is determined by an interpretation of the law, the written disclosure in a patent and the patent’s prosecution history. Our interpretation of the relevance or the scope of a patent or a pending application may be incorrect, which may negatively impact our ability to market our products. We may incorrectly determine that our products are not covered by a third-party patent or may incorrectly predict whether a third party’s pending application will issue with claims of relevant scope. Our determination of the expiration date of any patent in the United States or abroad that we consider relevant may be incorrect, which may negatively impact our ability to develop and market our products.
There can be no assurance that we will prevail in any suit initiated against us by third parties, successfully settle or otherwise resolve patent infringement claims. Third parties making claims against us may be able to obtain injunctive or
other relief, which could block our ability to develop, commercialize and sell products or services, and could result in the award of substantial damages against us, including treble damages, attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses, if we are found to have willfully infringed. In the event of a successful claim of infringement against us, we may be required to pay damages and ongoing royalties, and obtain one or more licenses from third parties, or be prohibited from selling certain products or services. We may not be able to obtain these licenses on acceptable or commercially reasonable terms, if at all, or these licenses may be non-exclusive, which could result in our competitors gaining access to the same intellectual property. In addition, we could encounter delays and incur significant costs, in product or service introductions while we attempt to develop alternative products or services, or redesign our products or services, to avoid infringing third party patents or proprietary rights. Defense of any lawsuit or failure to obtain any of these licenses or to develop a workaround could prevent us from commercializing products or services, and the prohibition of sale or the threat of the prohibition of sale of any of our products or services could materially affect our business and our ability to gain market acceptance for our products or services. Some of our competitors may be able to sustain the costs of complex patent litigation more effectively than we can because they have substantially greater resources. Further, even if we were successful in defending against a lawsuit, such a defense would distract our management team from our operations, which could have an adverse effect on our business. In addition, any uncertainties resulting from the initiation and continuation of any litigation could have a material adverse effect on our ability to raise the funds necessary to continue our operations or could otherwise have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition and prospects. Furthermore, because of the substantial amount of discovery required in connection with intellectual property litigation or other legal proceedings relating to our intellectual property rights, there is a risk that some of our confidential information could be compromised by disclosure during this type of litigation or other proceedings.
In addition, our agreements with some of our customers, suppliers or other entities with whom we do business require us to defend or indemnify these parties to the extent they become involved in infringement claims, including the types of claims described above. We could also voluntarily agree to defend or indemnify third parties in instances where we are not obligated to do so if we determine it would be important to our business relationships. If we are required or agree to defend or indemnify third parties in connection with any infringement claims, we could incur significant costs and expenses that could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We may become involved in lawsuits to protect or enforce our intellectual property, which could be expensive, time consuming and unsuccessful.
Third parties, including our competitors, could be infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights. Monitoring unauthorized use of our intellectual property is difficult and costly. From time to time, we seek to analyze our competitors’ products and services, and may in the future seek to enforce our rights against potential infringement, misappropriation or violation of our intellectual property. However, the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary rights may not be adequate to enforce our rights against such infringement, misappropriation or violation of our intellectual property. We may not be able to detect unauthorized use of, or take appropriate steps to enforce, our intellectual property rights. Any inability to meaningfully enforce our intellectual property rights could harm our ability to compete and reduce demand for our products and services.
Litigation may be necessary for us to enforce our patent and proprietary rights or to determine the scope, coverage and validity of the proprietary rights of others. If we do not prevail in such legal proceedings, we may be required to pay damages, we may lose significant intellectual property protection for our products or services, such that competitors could copy our products or services and we could be forced to cease commercialization of certain of our products or services. Even if resolved in our favor, any award of monetary damages or other remedy we receive may not be commercially valuable.
Any litigation that may be necessary in the future could result in substantial costs and diversion of resources and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In any lawsuit we bring to enforce our intellectual property rights, a court may refuse to the stop the other party from using the technology at issue on grounds that our intellectual property rights do not cover the technology in question. Further, in such proceedings, the defendant could counterclaim that our intellectual property is invalid or unenforceable and the court may agree, in which case we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. The outcome in any such lawsuits are unpredictable. Even if we do prevail in any future litigation related to intellectual property rights, the cost and time
requirements of the litigation could negatively impact our financial results. Some of our competitors may be able to sustain the costs of such litigation or proceedings more effectively than we can because of their greater financial resources. Uncertainties resulting from the initiation and continuation of patent litigation or other proceedings could compromise our ability to compete in the marketplace.
Intellectual property litigation may lead to unfavorable publicity that harms our reputation and causes the market price of our Class A common stock to decline.
During the course of any intellectual property litigation, there could be public announcements of the initiation of the litigation as well as results of hearings, rulings on motions and other interim proceedings in the litigation. If securities analysts or investors regard these announcements as negative, the perceived value of our existing products, programs or intellectual property could be diminished.
Accordingly, the market price of shares of our Class A common stock may decline. Such announcements could also harm our reputation or the market for our future products, which could have a material adverse effect on our business.
Obtaining and maintaining our patent protection depends on compliance with various required procedures, document submissions, fee payments and other requirements imposed by governmental patent agencies, and our patent protection could be reduced or eliminated for non-compliance with these requirements.
Periodic maintenance fees, renewal fees, annuity fees and various other governmental fees on patents and/or applications will be due to be paid to the USPTO and various governmental patent agencies outside of the United States at several stages over the lifetime of the patents and/or applications. We have systems in place to remind us to pay these fees, and we rely on our outside counsel using an outside service to pay these fees due to non-U.S. patent agencies. The USPTO and various non-U.S. governmental patent agencies require compliance with a number of procedural, documentary, fee payment and other similar provisions during the patent application process. In many cases, an inadvertent lapse, including due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on us or our vendors, can be cured by payment of a late fee or by other means in accordance with the applicable rules. However, there are situations in which non-compliance can result in abandonment or lapse of the patent or patent application, resulting in partial or complete loss of patent rights in the relevant jurisdiction. In such an event, our competitors may be able to enter the market without infringing our patents and this circumstance would have a material adverse effect on our business.
Our use of open-source software could compromise our ability to offer our services and subject us to possible litigation.
We use open-source software licensed to us by third-party authors under “open source” licenses in connection with our products and services. Use and distribution of open-source software may entail greater risks than use of third-party commercial software, as open-source licensors generally do not provide support, warranties, indemnification or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code.
Further, some open-source software licenses require users who distribute software containing open-source software to publicly disclose all or part of the source code to the licensee’s software that incorporates, links or uses such open-source software, and make available to third parties for no cost, any derivative works of the open source code created by the licensee, which could include the licensee’s own valuable proprietary code. While we monitor our use of open-source software and try to ensure that none is used in a manner that would require us to disclose our proprietary source code or that would otherwise breach the terms of an open source agreement, such use could inadvertently occur, or could be claimed to have occurred, in part because open source license terms are often ambiguous. Despite our efforts to monitor our use of open-source software to avoid subjecting our platform to conditions we do not intend, there is a risk that open source licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to provide or distribute our platform. Additionally, we may from time to time face claims from third parties claiming ownership of, or seeking to enforce the terms of, an open source license, including by demanding release of source code for the open-source software, derivative works or our proprietary source code that was developed using, or that is distributed with, such open-source software. These claims could also result in litigation and could require us to make our proprietary software source code freely available, require us to devote additional research and development
resources to change re-engineer our platform, seek costly licenses from third parties or otherwise incur additional costs and expenses, any of which could result in reputational harm and would have a negative effect on our business and operating results. There is little legal precedent in this area and any actual or claimed requirement to disclose our proprietary source code or pay damages for breach of contract could harm our business and could help third parties, including our competitors, develop products and services that are similar to or better than ours.
In addition, if the license terms for the open-source software we utilize change, we may be forced to re-engineer our platform, incur additional costs to comply with the changed license terms or replace the affected open-source software. Although we have implemented policies to regulate the use and incorporation of open-source software into our platform and solutions, we cannot be certain that that such policies will be effective and that we have not incorporated open-source software in our platform and solutions in a manner that is inconsistent with such policies.
Risks Related to Our Common Stock
The market price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile and fluctuate substantially, which could result in substantial losses for our stockholders.
The market price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile. The stock market in general and the market for smaller technology companies in particular has experienced extreme volatility that has often been unrelated to the operating performance of particular companies. As a result of this volatility, our stockholders may not be able to sell their Class A common stock at or above the price they paid for them. The market price for our Class A common stock may be influenced by many factors, including:
● actual or anticipated fluctuations in our financial condition and operating results, including fluctuations in our quarterly and annual results;
● the introduction of new products or product enhancements by us or others in our industry;
● variances in product and system reliability;
● overall conditions in our industry and the markets in which we operate;
● disputes or other developments with respect to our or others’ intellectual property rights;
● actual or anticipated changes in our operating results or growth rate as a result of our competitors’ operating results;
● our ability to develop and market new and enhanced products and expand into new markets on a timely basis;
● fluctuations in the valuation of companies perceived by investors to be comparable to us;
● product liability claims or other litigation;
● announcement or expectation of additional financing effort;
● sales of our common stock by us or our stockholders;
● share price and volume fluctuations attributable to inconsistent trading volume levels of our shares;
● media exposure of our products or of those of others in our industry;
● changes in earnings estimates or recommendations by securities analysts;
● general market conditions and other factors, including factors unrelated to our operating performance or the operating performance of our competitors; and
● the other factors described in this “Risk Factors” section and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
An active trading market for our Class A common stock may not be sustainable.
It is possible that an active or liquid market for our Class A common stock may not be sustainable. In the absence of an active trading market for our Class A common stock, it may be difficult for stockholders to sell our shares without depressing the market price for the shares, or at all. Further, an inactive market may also impair our ability to raise capital by selling shares of our Class A common stock and may impair our ability to enter into strategic collaborations or acquire companies or products by using our shares of Class A common stock as consideration.
Our executive officers, directors and principal stockholders, if they choose to act together, will have the ability to control all matters submitted to stockholders for approval.
Following our IPO, based on the number of shares of Class A common stock outstanding as of December 31, 2021, our executive officers, directors and stockholders who owned more than 5% of our outstanding common stock before the IPO and their respective affiliates hold, in the aggregate, a majority of our outstanding voting stock. The holders of shares of our Class B common stock have the ability to convert any portion of their Class B common stock into Class A common stock. Our Class B common stock cannot be converted if, immediately following such conversion, the holder would beneficially own more than 4.9% of the issued and outstanding Class A common stock. Due to this conversion right, holders of our Class B common stock could, at any time, increase their voting control of us. As a result of their combined voting power, if our executive officers, directors and stockholders who own more than 5% of our outstanding common stock choose to act together, they would be able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, as well as our management and affairs. For example, these persons, if they choose to act together, would control the election of directors, the composition of our management and approval of any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets.
The dual class structure of our common stock and the option of the holders of shares of our Class B common stock to convert into shares of our Class A common stock may limit our Class A stockholders’ ability to influence corporate matters.
Our Class A common stock has one vote per share, while our Class B common stock is non-voting. Nonetheless, each share of our Class B common stock may be converted at any time into one share of issued and outstanding Class A common stock at the option of its holder, subject to the limitations provided for in our restated certificate of incorporation that prohibit the conversion of our Class B common stock into shares of Class A common stock to the extent that, upon such conversion, such holder would beneficially own in excess of 4.9% of our Class A common stock. Consequently, if holders of Class B common stock exercise their option to make this conversion, such exercise will have the effect of increasing the relative voting power of those prior holders of our Class B common stock (subject to the ownership limitation described in the previous sentence) and increasing the number of outstanding shares of our voting common stock, and correspondingly decreasing the relative voting power of the current holders of our Class A common stock, which may limit our current Class A stockholders’ ability to influence corporate matters.
Sales of a substantial number of shares of our Class A common stock in the public market, or the perception in the market that the holders of a large number of shares intend to sell shares, could reduce the market price of our Class A common stock.
As of December 31, 2021, we have 41,467,419 outstanding shares of Class A common stock and Class B common stock, collectively. This includes the shares that we sold in the IPO, which may be resold in the public market immediately without restriction, unless purchased by our affiliates. The remaining shares were previously restricted as a result of applicable securities laws or lock-up agreements and have recently become eligible to be sold, unless held by one of our affiliates, in which case the resale of those securities will be subject to certain restrictions under the Securities
Act of 1933, as amended, and the rules and regulations promulgated thereunder. Moreover, pursuant to an investors’ rights agreement entered into with certain of our stockholders, holders of an aggregate of 34,564,040 shares of our Class A common stock (including shares issuable upon conversion of our Class B common stock) will have rights, subject to specified conditions, to require us to file registration statements covering their shares or to include their shares in registration statements that we may file for ourselves or other stockholders, until the rights terminate. We have also registered shares of our Class A common stock issued and available for issuance under our equity compensation plans, which can be freely sold in the public market, subject to vesting requirements, volume limitations applicable to affiliates and lock-up agreements. If these additional shares are sold, or if it is perceived that they will be sold, in the public market, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline.
We are an “emerging growth company,” and the reduced disclosure requirements applicable to emerging growth companies may make our Class A common stock less attractive to investors.
We are an “emerging growth company,” as defined in the JOBS Act, and may remain an emerging growth company until the last day of the fiscal year following the fifth anniversary of the closing of the IPO. However, if certain events occur prior to the end of such five-year period, including if we become a “large accelerated filer,” our annual gross revenues exceed $1.07 billion or we issue more than $1.0 billion of non-convertible debt in the previous three-year period, we will cease to be an emerging growth company prior to the end of such five-year period. For so long as we remain an emerging growth company, we are permitted and intend to rely on exemptions from certain disclosure requirements that are applicable to other public companies that are not emerging growth companies. These exemptions include:
● not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements in the assessment of our internal control over financial reporting;
● reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation;
● exemptions from the requirements of holding a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and stockholder approval of any golden parachute payments not previously approved and from providing the pay ratio between our Chief Executive Officer and employees; and
● an exemption from compliance with the requirements of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board regarding the communication of critical audit matters in the auditor’s report on the financial statements.
We cannot predict whether investors will find our Class A common stock less attractive if we rely on these exemptions. If some investors find our Class A common stock less attractive as a result, there may be a less active trading market for our Class A common stock and our stock price may be reduced or more volatile. In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an emerging growth company can take advantage of an extended transition period for complying with new or revised accounting standards. This allows an emerging growth company to delay the adoption of these accounting standards until they would otherwise apply to private companies. We intend to utilize the extended transition period and, as a result, we will not be required to comply with new or revised accounting standards on the same time line as other public companies.
We are a “smaller reporting company” and the reduced disclosure requirements applicable to smaller reporting companies may make our Class A common stock less attractive to investors.
We are a “smaller reporting company” and are therefore entitled to rely on certain reduced disclosure requirements for as long as we remain a smaller reporting company, such as presenting 2 years of audited financial statements in our annual Form 10-K or reduced disclosure requirements for executive compensation. This reduced disclosure in our SEC filings due to our status as a smaller reporting company may make it harder for investors to analyze our results of operations and financial prospects. We cannot predict if investors will find our Class A common stock less attractive because we may rely on these exemptions. If some investors find our Class A common stock less attractive as a result, there may be a less active trading market for our Class A common stock and our stock prices may be more volatile.
If we fail to maintain effective internal control over financial reporting and effective disclosure controls and procedures, we may not be able to accurately report our financial results in a timely manner or prevent fraud, which may adversely affect investor confidence in our company.
We are not currently required to comply with the rules of the SEC implementing Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Section 404, and, therefore, we are not required to make a formal assessment of the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. As a public company, we will be required to comply with the SEC’s rules implementing Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which require management to certify financial and other information in our quarterly and annual reports and provide an annual management report on the effectiveness of controls over financial reporting. Although we will be required to disclose changes made in our internal controls and procedures on a quarterly basis, we are not required to make our first annual assessment of our internal control over financial reporting pursuant to Section 404 until the year following our first annual report required to be filed with the SEC. As an emerging growth company, our independent registered public accounting firm will not be required to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting pursuant to Section 404 until the later of the year following our first annual report required to be filed with the SEC or the date we are no longer an emerging growth company and a “non-accelerated filer.” At such time, our independent registered public accounting firm may issue a report that is adverse in the event material weaknesses have been identified in our internal control over financial reporting.
To comply with the requirements of being a public company, we will need to undertake actions, such as implementing new internal controls and procedures and hiring additional accounting or internal audit staff. Testing and maintaining internal control can divert our management’s attention from other matters that are important to the operation of our business. In addition, when evaluating our internal control over financial reporting, we may identify material weaknesses that we may not be able to remediate in time to meet the applicable deadline imposed upon us for compliance with the requirements of Section 404. If we identify any material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting or we are unable to comply with the requirements of Section 404 in a timely manner or assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports. As a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be materially adversely affected.
Our disclosure controls and procedures may not prevent or detect all errors or acts of fraud.
We are subject to the periodic reporting requirements of the Exchange Act. We are continuing to refine our disclosure controls and procedures to provide reasonable assurance that information we must disclose in reports we file or submit under the Exchange Act is accumulated and communicated to management, and recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in the rules and forms of the SEC. We believe that any disclosure controls and procedures, no matter how well conceived and operated, can provide only reasonable, not absolute, assurance that the objectives of the control system are met.
These inherent limitations include the realities that judgments in decision-making can be faulty, and that breakdowns can occur because of simple error or mistake. Additionally, controls can be circumvented by the individual acts of some persons, by collusion of two or more people or by an unauthorized override of the controls. Accordingly, because of the inherent limitations in our control system, misstatements due to error or fraud may occur and not be detected, which could have a material adverse effect on investors’ confidence in our reporting and the price of our Class A common stock.
Provisions in our restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company, which may be beneficial to our stockholders, more difficult and may prevent attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management.
Provisions in our restated certificate of incorporation and our amended and restated bylaws may discourage, delay or prevent a merger, acquisition or other change in control of our company that stockholders may consider favorable, including transactions in which our stockholders might otherwise receive a premium for their shares. These provisions could also limit the price that investors might be willing to pay in the future for shares of our Class A common stock, thereby depressing the market price of our Class A common stock. In addition, because our board of directors is responsible for appointing the members of our management team, these provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts
by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our board of directors. Among other things, these provisions include those establishing:
● a classified board of directors with three-year staggered terms, which may delay the ability of stockholders to change the membership of a majority of our board of directors;
● no cumulative voting in the election of directors, which limits the ability of minority stockholders to elect director candidates;
● the exclusive right of our board of directors to elect a director to fill a vacancy created by the expansion of the board of directors or the resignation, death or removal of a director, which prevents stockholders from filling vacancies on our board of directors;
● the ability of our board of directors to authorize the issuance of shares of preferred stock and to determine the terms of those shares, including preferences and voting rights, without stockholder approval, which could be used to significantly dilute the ownership of a hostile acquirer;
● the ability of our board of directors to alter our bylaws without obtaining stockholder approval;
● the required approval of the holders of at least two-thirds of the shares entitled to vote at an election of directors to adopt, amend or repeal our bylaws or repeal the provisions of our restated certificate of incorporation regarding the election and removal of directors;
● the required approval of the holders of at least two-thirds of the shares entitled to vote thereon to (i) effect a reorganization, recapitalization, share exchange, share classification, consolidation, conversion or merger, (ii) sell, lease, exchange, transfer or otherwise dispose of all or substantially all of our assets, or (iii) dissolve our company or revoke a dissolution of our company;
● a prohibition on stockholder action by written consent, which forces stockholder action to be taken at an annual or special meeting of our stockholders;
● the requirement that a special meeting of stockholders may be called only by the chairman of the board of directors, the chief executive officer, the president or the board of directors, which may delay the ability of our stockholders to force consideration of a proposal or to take action, including the removal of directors; and
● advance notice procedures that stockholders must comply with in order to nominate candidates to our board of directors or to propose matters to be acted upon at a stockholders’ meeting, which may discourage or deter a potential acquirer from conducting a solicitation of proxies to elect the acquirer’s own slate of directors or otherwise attempting to obtain control of us.
Moreover, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware, which prohibits a person who owns in excess of 15% of our outstanding voting stock from merging or combining with us for a period of three years after the date of the transaction in which the person acquired in excess of 15% of our outstanding voting stock, unless the merger or combination is approved in a prescribed manner.
Our restated certificate of incorporation designates specific courts as the exclusive forum for certain litigation that may be initiated by our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us.
Our restated certificate of incorporation specifies that, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware will be the sole and exclusive forum for most legal actions
involving claims brought against us by stockholders; provided that, the exclusive forum provision will not apply to suits brought to enforce any liability or duty created by the Securities Act, the Exchange Act, the rules and regulations thereunder or any other claim for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction; and provided further that, if and only if the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware dismisses any such action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, such action may be brought in another state or federal court sitting in the State of Delaware. Our restated certificate of incorporation further provides that, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the federal district courts of the United States of America shall, to the fullest extent permitted by law, be the sole and exclusive forum for the resolution of any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act. Any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring any interest in shares of our capital stock shall be deemed to have notice of and to have consented to the provisions of our restated certificate of incorporation described above; provided, however, that stockholders cannot and will not be deemed to have waived our compliance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.
We believe these provisions benefit us by providing increased consistency in the application of Delaware law by chancellors particularly experienced in resolving corporate disputes and in the application of the Securities Act by federal judges, as applicable, efficient administration of cases on a more expedited schedule relative to other forums and protection against the burdens of multi-forum litigation. However, the provision may have the effect of discouraging lawsuits against our directors, officers, employees and agents as it may limit any stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum that such stockholder finds favorable for disputes with us or our directors, officers, employees or agents and result in additional litigation costs in pursuing any such claims. In addition, while the Delaware Supreme Court ruled in March 2020 that federal forum selection provisions purporting to require claims under the Securities Act be brought in federal court are “facially valid” under Delaware law, there is uncertainty as to whether other courts will enforce our Federal Forum Provision. If a court were to find the choice of forum provision contained in our restated certificate of incorporation to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such action in other jurisdictions, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition or results of operations. The choice of forum provision contained in our restated certificate of incorporation may also impose additional litigation costs on stockholders who assert that the provision is not enforceable or invalid. The Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware and the federal district courts of the United States may also reach different judgments or results than would other courts, including courts where a stockholder considering an action may be located or would otherwise choose to bring the action, and such judgments may be more or less favorable to us than our stockholders.
Because we do not anticipate paying any cash dividends on our common stock in the foreseeable future, capital appreciation, if any, would be stockholders’ sole source of gain.
We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently anticipate that we will retain all available funds and future earnings for the development, operation and expansion of our business and do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends for the foreseeable future. As a result, capital appreciation, if any, of our common stock will be the sole source of gain on an investment in our common stock for the foreseeable future.
Our ability to use our net operating losses and research and development tax credits to offset future taxable income or income tax liabilities may be subject to certain limitations.
As of December 31, 2021, we had U.S. federal and state net operating loss carryforwards, or NOLs, of $137.5 million and $62.7 million, respectively, which may be available to offset future taxable income, if any, that begin to expire in 2037 and 2032, respectively. Additionally, we had federal NOLs of $124.7 million which do not expire but are (for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017) generally limited in their usage to an annual deduction equal to 80% of taxable income. In addition, we had federal and state research and development tax credits of $1.1 million and $2.1 million, respectively, which may be available to offset future tax liabilities and begin to expire in 2038 and 2024, respectively. In general, under Sections 382 and 383 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, a corporation that undergoes an “ownership change,” generally defined as a greater than 50 percentage point change by value in its equity ownership by one or more stockholders or groups of stockholders owning at least 5% of the corporation’s stock over a rolling three-year period, is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-ownership change NOLs and tax credits to offset future taxable income or income tax liabilities for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. Our existing NOLs and tax credits are subject to limitations
arising from previous ownership changes based on the preliminary results of the Section 382 study for ownership changes. The Section 382 study is expected to be completed in 2022 and may result in additional limitations. The IPO transaction, could result in ownership changes. For these reasons, we are not able to utilize a material portion of the NOLs and tax credits even if we attain profitability. For additional information on our use of NOLs, see the section entitled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations-Components of results of operations-Income tax expense” and Note 14-Income taxes to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
General risk factors
Changes in tax laws, including as a result of the upcoming congressional elections, may impact our future financial position and results of operations.
New income, sales, use or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be enacted at any time, or interpreted, changed, modified or applied adversely to us, any of which could adversely affect our business operations and financial performance. In particular, the upcoming congressional elections in the United States could result in significant changes in, and uncertainty with respect to, tax legislation, regulation and government policy directly affecting our business or indirectly affecting us because of impacts on our customers and suppliers. For example, the United States government may enact significant changes to the taxation of business entities including, among others, a permanent increase in the corporate income tax rate, an increase in the tax rate applicable to the global intangible low-taxed income and elimination of certain exemptions, and the imposition of minimum taxes or surtaxes on certain types of income. The likelihood of these changes being enacted or implemented is unclear. We are currently unable to predict whether such changes will occur and, if so, the ultimate impact on our business. To the extent that such changes have a negative impact on us, our suppliers or our customers, including as a result of related uncertainty, these changes may materially and adversely impact our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, or if they issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding our stock, our stock price and trading volume could decline, even if our business is doing well.
The trading market for our Class A common stock will be influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us or our business. We do not currently have, and may never obtain, research coverage by securities and industry analysts. If no or few securities or industry analysts commence coverage of us, the trading price for our stock would be negatively impacted. In the event we obtain securities or industry analyst coverage, if the analysts who cover us issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding us, our business model, or our stock performance, or if our product development or marketing and sales results fail to meet the expectations of analysts, our stock price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts ceases coverage of us or fails to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline.
If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies are based on assumptions that change or prove to be incorrect, our operating results could fall below our publicly announced guidance or the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America, or GAAP, requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in our consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities, equity, revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. If our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from our assumptions, our operating results may be adversely affected and could fall below our publicly announced guidance or the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.
We could be subject to securities class action litigation.
In the past, securities class action litigation has often been brought against a company following a decline in the market price of its securities. This risk is especially relevant for us because early-stage technology companies have experienced significant stock price volatility in recent years. If we face such litigation, it could result in substantial costs and a diversion of management’s attention and resources, which could harm our business.
We will continue to incur increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management will be required to devote substantial time to new compliance initiatives and corporate governance practices.
As a public company, we will continue incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company, particularly after we are no longer an emerging growth company and a non-accelerated filer. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the listing requirements of The Nasdaq Global Select Market and other applicable securities rules and regulations impose various requirements on public companies, including establishment and maintenance of effective disclosure and financial controls and corporate governance practices. Our management and other personnel will need to devote a substantial amount of time to these compliance initiatives. Moreover, these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs and will make some activities more time consuming and costly. For example, we expect that these rules and regulations may make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance, which in turn could make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified members of our board of directors.
We are evaluating these rules and regulations and cannot predict or estimate the amount of additional costs we may incur or the timing of such costs. These rules and regulations are often subject to varying interpretations, in many cases due to their lack of specificity, and, as a result, their application in practice may evolve over time as new guidance is provided by regulatory and governing bodies. This could result in continuing uncertainty regarding compliance matters and higher costs necessitated by ongoing revisions to disclosure and governance practice.

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ITEM 1B. UNRESOLVED STAFF COMMENTS
Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments.
None.

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ITEM 2. PROPERTIES
Item 2. Properties.
Our principal office is located in Lowell, Massachusetts, where we lease 67,663 square feet of office, laboratory, manufacturing and inventory-storage space. We lease this space under a lease agreement, as amended, which expires in July 2029. In June 2021, we entered into a Sublease agreement for 33,339 square feet of office and back-up manufacturing space in Lexington, Massachusetts, which expires in June 2029. Further, we maintain inventory at storage a warehouse in Noord-Brabant, Netherlands as well as various offsite warehouses in the United States and Europe. We believe that our facilities are sufficient to meet our current needs.

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ITEM 3. LEGAL PROCEEDINGS
Item 3. Legal Proceedings.
From time to time, we may become involved in litigation or other legal proceedings. We are not currently a party to any litigation or legal proceedings that, in the opinion of our management, are probable to have a material adverse effect on our business. Regardless of outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

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ITEM 4. MINE SAFETY DISCLOSURE
Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures.
Not Applicable.
PART II

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ITEM 5. MARKET FOR REGISTRANT'S COMMON EQUITY
Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities.
Market Information
On July 15, 2021, our Class A common stock began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “RPID.” Prior to that time, there was no public market for our common stock. There is no established public trading market for our Class B common stock.
Holders
As of March 21, 2022, there were 53 holders of record of our Class A common stock and 2 holders of record of our Class B common stock.
Dividend Policy
We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our capital stock. We currently intend to retain all available funds and future earnings, if any, for the operation and expansion of our business and do not anticipate declaring or paying any dividends in the foreseeable future. Any future determination related to our dividend policy will be made at the discretion of our board of directors after considering our financial condition, results of operations, capital requirements, contractual requirements, business prospects and other factors the board of directors deems relevant, and subject to the restrictions contained in any future financing instruments.
Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities; Purchases of Equity Securities by the Issuer or Affiliated Purchaser
Other than as disclosed in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, the Company did not sell any equity securities during the year ended December 31, 2021 that were not registered under the Securities Act. On July 16, 2021, we filed a registration statement on Form S-8 under the Securities Act to register all of the shares of our Class A common stock subject to outstanding options and all shares of our Class A common stock otherwise issuable pursuant to our equity compensation plans.
Use of Proceeds
On July 19, 2021, we completed our IPO, in which we issued and sold 7,920,000 shares of our Class A common stock at a price to the public of $20.00 per share. We raised net proceeds to us of approximately $143.8 million, after deducting the underwriting discount of $11.1 million and offering expenses of $3.7 million. On August 4, 2021, the underwriters exercised their option to purchase additional shares in part for 1,086,604 shares at the public offering price of $20.00 per share less underwriting discounts and commissions, for additional net proceeds to us of approximately $20.2 million. All shares sold were registered pursuant to a registration statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-257431), as amended, or the “Registration Statement”, declared effective by the SEC on July 14, 2021. The offering terminated after the sale of all securities registered pursuant to the Registration Statement. No payments for such expenses were made directly or indirectly to (i) any of our officers or directors or their associates, (ii) any persons owning 10% or more of any class of our equity securities or (iii) any of our affiliates.
The net proceeds from our IPO have been invested in cash, a money market fund comprised of U.S. Government and U.S. Treasury securities, and short and long-term investments in U.S. Government Treasury Bills. There has been no material change in the expected use of the net proceeds from our IPO as described in our Registration Statement.

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ITEM 6. SELECTED FINANCIAL DATA
Item 6. Reserved

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ITEM 7. MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS
Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.
You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with our consolidated financial statements and the related notes appearing at the end of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Some of the information contained in this discussion and analysis or set forth elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including information with respect to our plans and strategy for our business, includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. As a result of many factors, including those factors set forth in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, our actual results could differ materially from the results described in or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in the following discussion and analysis.
Overview
We are an innovative life sciences technology company that enables the safe and efficient manufacture of pharmaceutical products through our rapid automated microbial quality control, or MQC, detection platform. We develop, manufacture, market and sell the Growth Direct system and related proprietary consumables, and value-added services to enable rapid MQC testing in the manufacture of biologics, cell and gene therapies, vaccines, sterile injectables, and other healthcare products. Our system delivers the power of industrial automation to bioprocessing and pharmaceutical manufacturing firms by modernizing and digitizing their MQC operations. Our Growth Direct platform, developed with over 15 years of active feedback from our customers, was purpose-built to meet the growing demands posed by the increasing scale, complexity, and regulatory scrutiny confronting global pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our Growth Direct platform comprises the Growth Direct system, optional laboratory information management system, or LIMS, connection software (which the majority of our customers purchase), proprietary consumables, and comprehensive field service, validation services and post-warranty service contracts. Once embedded and validated in our customers’ facilities, our Growth Direct platform provides for recurring revenues through ongoing sales of consumables and service contracts.
Our technology fully automates and digitizes the process of pharmaceutical MQC and is designed to enable our customers to perform this critical testing process more efficiently, accurately, and securely. Our Growth Direct platform accelerates time to results by several days, a 50% improvement over the traditional method, and reduces MQC testing to a simple two-step workflow, eliminating up to 85% of the manual steps of traditional MQC, generating significant time, operational, and cost savings for our customers. We seek to establish the Growth Direct as the trusted global standard in automated MQC by delivering the speed, accuracy, security, and data integrity compliance that our customers depend on to ensure patient safety and consistent drug supply.
Since inception, we have devoted a majority of our resources to designing, developing, and building our proprietary Growth Direct platform and associated products, launching our Growth Direct platform commercially, expanding our sales and marketing infrastructure to grow our sales, building a global customer support team to deliver our value-added services, investing in robust manufacturing and supply chain operations to serve our customers globally, and providing general and administrative support for these operations. Prior to our IPO, we funded our operations primarily with proceeds from sales of preferred stock, borrowings under loan agreements and product and service sales as well as our cost-reimbursement contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research & Development Authority (“BARDA”). All funding under this contract was fully earned by the fourth quarter of 2021 and, as such, we do not currently anticipate recognizing any non-commercial revenue in the year ending December 31, 2022.
On July 19, 2021, we closed an initial public offering of our Class A common stock (the “IPO”), which resulted in the sale of 7,920,000 shares of our Class A common stock at a public offering price of $20.00 per share, before underwriting discounts. The IPO resulted in gross proceeds of $158.4 million and net proceeds of approximately $143.8 million after deducting underwriting discounts, commissions and estimated offering expenses payable by us. Additionally, on August 4, 2021, the underwriters exercised their overallotment option in part and purchased 1,086,604 shares of Class A common stock at the initial public offering price of $20.00 per share less discounts and commissions. The overallotment option exercise resulted in net proceeds of approximately $20.2 million. Immediately prior to the completion of the IPO, all of the outstanding shares of our Series A1, Series B1, Series C1 and Series D1 preferred stock converted into 24,200,920 shares of Class A common stock and all of the outstanding shares of our Series C2 and Series
D2 converted into 6,903,379 shares of Class B common stock. As of December 31, 2021, no shares of our preferred stock remained outstanding.
Since our inception, we have incurred net losses in each year. We generated revenue of $23.2 million and $16.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively, and incurred net losses of $73.5 million and $37.1 million for those same years. As of December 31, 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $315.1 million. We expect to continue to incur net losses in connection with our ongoing activities, including:
● growing sales of our products in both the United States and international markets by further expanding our sales and marketing capabilities;
● scaling our manufacturing and supply chain processes and infrastructure to meet growing demand for our products;
● investing in research and development to develop new products and further enhance our existing products;
● protecting and building on our intellectual property portfolio; and
● attracting, hiring and retaining qualified personnel.
Until such time as we can generate revenue sufficient to achieve profitability, we expect to finance our operations through a combination of equity offerings and debt financings. If we are unable to raise capital or enter into such agreements as, and when, needed, we may have to significantly delay, scale back or discontinue our expansion plans including the further development and commercialization efforts of one or more of our products, or may be forced to reduce or terminate our operations.
We believe that the net proceeds from the IPO, together with our cash and cash equivalents and investments as of December 31, 2021, will enable us to fund our operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements for at least twelve months following the date these consolidated financial statements were issued. We have based this estimate on assumptions that may prove to be wrong, and we could exhaust our available capital resources sooner than we expect. See “Liquidity and Capital Resources.”
COVID-19 update
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and various resulting government directives, we took proactive measures to protect the health and safety of our employees, customers, and partners, while maintaining our ability to supply and service our customers. We continue to monitor the implications of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on our business, as well as our customers’ and suppliers’ businesses. Some of the measures we have taken follow:
● During this pandemic, we moved quickly to implement several business continuity initiatives aimed at maintaining uninterrupted manufacturing and supply capabilities while keeping our workforce safe, including instituting a COVID-19 task force, forming multiple manufacturing teams with staggered shifts, increasing inventory safety stock levels, and establishing appropriate protective equipment and distancing policies for essential on-site personnel.
● We have been designated an essential business that can continue operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In early March 2020, we promptly instituted protocols to have many personnel work remotely. At the same time, because of our continued designation as an essential business, many employees continue to work on-site at our facility in Lowell, MA to undertake manufacturing activities that support essential operations to provide mission-critical MQC testing products to global pharmaceutical customers manufacturing life-saving drugs. We have also restricted business travel and have limited access to our facilities mostly to personnel and third parties who must perform critical activities that must be completed on-site. We continue to limit the number of such personnel that can be present at our facilities at any one
time and request that most of our personnel work remotely. To date, these arrangements have not materially affected our ability to maintain our business operations, including the operation of financial reporting systems, internal control over financial reporting and disclosure controls and procedures.
● Our production, shipping and customer service functions remain operational to maintain a continuous supply of products to our customers. We are communicating regularly with our suppliers and logistics partners so that our supply chain remains intact and we have not experienced any material supply issues to date. Our customer service teams around the world are operating remotely and remain available to assist our customers and partners as needed.
● As a result of travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders, we experienced an impact on our ability to sell, ship, install and validate systems, as well as train customers in certain geographies, which negatively impacted our product and service revenues during 2021 and 2020. To counter some of the effects of these restrictions, we implemented several measures including remote and customer-assisted support activities to support the continued growth of our business. However, the rapid onset of the Omicron variant limited the effectiveness of these measures during the second half of the fourth quarter of 2021, which contributed to our weaker than expected system placements in that period.
● We continue to actively review and manage costs to navigate the current environment.
While the disruption due to COVID-19, and its variants, is currently expected to be temporary, there is considerable uncertainty around its duration. We expect these disruptions to continue to impact our operating results. However, the related financial impact and duration of these disruptions cannot be reasonably estimated at this time.
Factors affecting our performance
We believe that our financial performance has been, and in the foreseeable future will continue to be, primarily driven by multiple factors as described below, each of which presents growth opportunities for our business. These factors also pose important challenges that we must successfully address in order to sustain our growth and improve our results of operations. Our ability to successfully address these challenges is subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors.”
New customer adoption of the Growth Direct platform
Our financial performance has largely been driven by, and a key factor to our future success will be, our ability to increase the global adoption of our Growth Direct platform in our key markets. We plan to drive global customer adoption through both direct and indirect sales and marketing organizations in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
We are investing substantially in these organizations and expect to continue to do so in the future. As part of this effort, we increased our direct sales and marketing team by 14 employees, representing a 78% increase in headcount in the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to the prior year-end.
Expansion within our existing customer base
There is an opportunity to increase broader adoption and utilization of our Growth Direct platform throughout our existing customers’ organizations by existing customers purchasing more systems. These additional systems will allow our existing customers to convert more of their test volume at existing locations, to support multiple locations, to meet redundancy requirements, or to increase capacity. As of December 31, 2021, a majority of our customers have purchased Growth Direct systems for multiple sites, and approximately 60% of our customers have purchased multiple Growth Direct systems. Increased utilization amongst existing customers can also occur as customers advance through the Growth Direct platform adoption cycle from early validation of initial applications to validation and conversion of multiple applications on the Growth Direct platform.
Innovating and launching new products on the Growth Direct platform
We believe the depth, scalability and robust capabilities of our Growth Direct platform allow us to address key opportunities and challenges facing MQC testing in the pharmaceutical industry. As an innovative leader in automated MQC testing, we intend to invest in further enhancements in our existing Growth Direct platform as well as end-to-end workflow solutions in our core market. We plan to further invest in research and development to support the expansion of our Growth Direct platform through development and launch of new applications to capture greater share of customer testing volume, new product formats to broaden our ability to serve different market segments and launch of new products and technologies to address adjacent segments of the overall MQC workflow. We plan to continue to hire employees with the necessary scientific and technical backgrounds to enhance our existing products and help us introduce new products to market. We expect to incur additional research and development expenses as a result. By expanding and continuously enhancing the Growth Direct platform, we believe we can drive incremental revenue from existing clients as well as broaden the appeal of our solutions to potential new customers.
Expanding Growth Direct into adjacent end markets
We have identified several market expansion opportunities including deploying our existing Growth Direct platform into the personal care products market. We continuously seek to identify other market opportunities where our Growth Direct platform could enhance MQC testing. We could expand into these markets through our existing technologies, through adapting our existing technologies, or through developing new products to specifically address the unmet needs of these adjacent markets. We may drive our expansion into these markets by building commercial infrastructure to specifically target customers in those markets, or by partnering with other participants in those markets.
Revenue mix
Our revenue is derived from sales of our Growth Direct systems, our LIMS connection software, proprietary consumables, services and our cost-reimbursement contract with BARDA. During the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, Growth Direct system revenue was the single largest component of our revenue. Because Growth Direct system revenue involves a capital selling process and tends to be somewhat concentrated within a small (but varied) group of customers each year, it is subject to variability from quarter to quarter. While we expect Growth Direct systems revenue to continue to be the largest contributor to our revenue over the near- to mid-term, as our base of validated Growth Direct systems continues to grow, we expect our recurring revenue (consumables and service contracts) to grow at a faster rate than our non-recurring revenues (Growth Direct systems, validation and other services), which we expect to drive variability and longer-term trends in our revenue mix.
Our non-commercial revenue is generated from long-term contracts with governmental agencies and third parties that are typically fixed in terms of scope and value. As a result, the amount of non-commercial revenue recognized in each period is subject to variability depending on factors such as the number of active contracts as well as the work performed and value remaining under each contract. All funding under our contract with BARDA was fully earned by the fourth quarter of 2021 and, as such, we do not currently anticipate recognizing any non-commercial revenue in the year ending December 31, 2022.
Key business metrics
We regularly review the following key business metrics to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate financial projections and make strategic decisions. We believe that the following
metrics are representative of our current business; however, we anticipate these may change or be substituted for additional or different metrics as our business grows and evolves.
Year Ended
December 31,
Change
Amount
%
(dollars in thousands)
Systems placed:
Systems placed in period
11.5
%
Cumulative systems placed
33.3
%
Systems validated:
Systems validated in period
37.5
%
Cumulative systems validated
64.7
%
Product and service revenue - total
$
21,637
$
14,083
$
7,554
53.6
%
Product and service revenue - recurring
$
7,819
$
3,908
$
3,911
100.1
%
Growth Direct system placements
We consider a Growth Direct system to be “placed” upon transfer of control of the system to the customer, at which point the revenue for that system is recognized. We regularly review the number of Growth Direct systems placed and cumulative Growth Direct system placements in each period as a leading indicator of our business performance. Our revenue has historically been driven by, and in the future will continue to be impacted by, the rate of Growth Direct system placements as a reflection of our success selling and delivering our products. We expect our Growth Direct system placements to continue to grow over time as we increase penetration in our existing markets and expand into new markets.
The number of Growth Direct system placements and rate of growth varies from period-to-period due to factors including, but not limited to, Growth Direct system order volume and timing, and access to customer sites (including COVID-19 related restrictions). As a result, we expect to experience continued variability in our period-to-period number of Growth Direct system placements due to the aforementioned factors.
Validated systems
We regularly review the number of Growth Direct systems validated and cumulative Growth Direct systems validated in each period as indicators of our business performance. Management focuses on validated Growth Direct systems as a leading indicator of likely future recurring revenue as well as a reflection of our success supporting our customers’ validating placed systems. We expect our validated Growth Direct systems to continue to grow over time as we increase our base of cumulative systems placed and then validate those systems. After a Growth Direct system is placed with a customer and installed, we work with the customer to validate the system, which typically takes anywhere from three to nine months. Once a validation has been completed, we generally expect our customers to transition from their legacy manual method to our automated method and begin regular utilization of consumables over a period of up to three months.
The number of validated Growth Direct systems and rate of growth varies from period-to-period due to factors including, but not limited to, Growth Direct system order volume and timing, whether customers have previously validated Growth Direct systems within their site or network, access to customer sites (including as a result of COVID-19 related restrictions and delays in 2021 and 2020), customer site readiness and the time to install and validate each individual system. As a result, we expect to experience continued fluctuations in our period-to-period number of Growth Direct systems validated due to the aforementioned factors.
Product and service revenue
We regularly assess trends relating to our combined product and service revenue as an indicator of our business performance. Product and service revenue represents all of our commercial revenue for the business. It excludes non-
commercial revenue, which typically supports other business functions such as research and development and is by its nature subject to significant variability.
During the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, restrictions on travel and access to customer sites related to COVID-19, and its variants, negatively impacted our ability to ship, install and validate systems, as well as train customers in certain geographies. This negatively impacted our product and service revenue in the year. While we expect these disruptions to continue to impact our operating results, the related financial impact and duration of these disruptions cannot be reasonably estimated at this time.
Recurring revenue
We regularly assess trends relating to recurring revenue, which is the revenue from consumables and service contracts, based on our product offerings, our customer base and our understanding of how our customers use our products. Recurring revenue was 33.7% and 24.3% of our total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Our recurring revenue as a percentage of the total product and service revenue will generally vary based upon the cumulative number of validated Growth Direct systems in the period, as well as other variables such as the volume of tests being conducted, and the test application(s) being used on those Growth Direct systems. As our base of validated systems continues to grow, we expect our recurring revenue streams to grow at a faster rate than our non-recurring revenue streams and that this will ultimately result in our recurring revenue constituting the majority of our revenue over the longer term.
Components of results of operations
Revenue
We generate revenue from sales of our Growth Direct system (including our LIMS connection software), consumables, validation services, service contracts and field service as well as our contractual arrangement with BARDA. We primarily sell our products and services through direct sales representatives. The arrangements are noncancelable and nonrefundable after ownership passes to the customer.
Year Ended
Percentage
Year Ended
Percentage
December 31,
of total
December 31,
of total
revenue
revenue
(in thousands)
(in thousands)
Product revenue
$
15,512
66.8
%
$
10,992
68.4
%
Service revenue
6,125
26.4
%
3,091
19.2
%
Non-commercial revenue
1,595
6.9
%
1,994
12.4
%
Total revenue
$
23,232
100.0
%
$
16,077
100.0
%
Product revenue
We derive product revenue primarily from the sale of our Growth Direct systems and related consumables as well as our LIMS connection software, which the majority of our customers purchase. As of December 31, 2021, we had placed 116 Growth Direct systems to over thirty customers globally, including over half of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies as measured by revenue and the manufacturers of 25% of globally approved cell and gene therapies.
Growth Direct systems
Growth Direct system revenue is a non-recurring product revenue stream that we recognize as revenue upon transfer of control of the system to the customer. The Growth Direct system is fully functional for use by the customer upon delivery and, as such, transfer of control occurs at shipment or delivery depending on contractual terms. We expect our Growth Direct system revenue to continue to grow over time as we increase system placements in our existing customers and markets and expand into new customers and markets.
Consumables
Our consumable revenue is a recurring product revenue stream composed of two proprietary consumables to capture test samples for analysis on the Growth Direct system, an Environmental Monitoring or EM, consumable, and a Water/Bioburden consumable, or W/BB consumable. Both proprietary consumables support the growth-based compendial method for MQC testing mandated by global regulators and provide results that are comparable to traditional consumables. Our consumables are designed with features that enable automation on the Growth Direct system, with bar coding for tracking and data integrity, and physical characteristics for robotic handling, to support vision detection, and to prevent counterfeiting.
We expect consumable revenue to increase in future periods as our base of cumulative validated Growth Direct systems grows and those systems utilize our consumables on a recurring, ongoing basis.
LIMS Connection Software
Our LIMS connection software is a non-recurring product revenue stream. Although optional, the majority of our customers elect to purchase this software, which allows Growth Direct systems to export result reports and securely link to a customer’s two-way LIMS connection software to completely eliminate manual data entry and drive productivity.
Service revenue
We derive service revenue from validation services, field service including installations, and service contracts sold to our customers. Revenue from validation services and field service are non-recurring service revenue streams, while revenue from service contracts is a recurring service revenue stream.
We offer our customers validation services (including related documentation) that enable them to replace their existing manual testing method and utilize their Growth Direct systems in compliance with relevant MQC regulations. Validation services are recognized as revenue over time as these services are provided to the customer.
We offer our customers service contracts that can be purchased after the expiration of the one-year assurance warranty that all of our customers receive with the purchase of a Growth Direct system. Under these contracts, they are entitled to receive phone support, emergency on-site maintenance support and two preventative maintenance visits per year. These service contracts generally have fixed fees and a term of one year. We recognize revenue from the sale of service contracts over time as these services are provided over the respective contract term.
We also offer our customers field service which primarily consists of services provided by our field service engineers to install Growth Direct systems at customer sites. We recognize revenue from field service over time as these services are provided to the customer.
We expect service revenue to increase in future periods as the number of placed and validated Growth Direct systems grows and we are able to generate increasing non-recurring revenue from validation services and field service for newly placed systems and increasing recurring revenue from service contracts for validated systems.
Non-commercial revenue
We generate non-commercial revenue from long-term contracts with governmental agencies and third parties. To date, our non-commercial revenue has been derived from contracts with BARDA. Our current contract with BARDA is a cost-reimbursable, cost-sharing arrangement, whereby BARDA reimburses us for a percentage of the total cost incurred which includes allowable indirect costs. We recognize revenue from non-commercial revenue over time using an input method based on cost incurred to date in relation to total estimated cost.
Since the underlying contracts are typically fixed in terms of scope and value, the amount of non-commercial revenue recognized in each period is subject to variability depending on factors such as the number of active contracts as well as the work performed and value remaining under each contract.
In April 2021, we received additional funding from BARDA under our then-active contract with them. All funding under this contract was fully earned by the fourth quarter of 2021 and, as such, we do not currently anticipate recognizing any non-commercial revenue in the year ending December 31, 2022.
Costs and operating expenses
Costs of revenue
Cost of product revenue primarily consists of costs for raw material parts and associated freight, shipping and handling costs, salaries and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense, contract manufacturer costs, scrap, warranty cost, inventory reserves, royalties, depreciation and amortization expense, allocated information technology and facility-related costs, overhead and other costs related to those sales recognized as product revenue in the period.
Cost of service revenue primarily consists of salaries and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense, travel costs, materials consumed when performing installations, validations and other services, allocated information technology and facility-related costs, costs associated with training, and other expenses related to service revenue recognized in the period.
Cost of non-commercial revenue primarily consists of salaries and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense, consulting expense, materials, travel and other costs related to the revenue recognized as non-commercial revenue during the period. Our contract with BARDA is subject to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR and is priced based on estimated or actual costs of producing goods or providing services. The FAR provides guidance on the types of costs that are allowable in establishing prices for goods or services provided under U.S. government contracts.
We expect that our cost of revenue will generally increase or decrease to the extent that our revenue increases or decreases, but that such costs will increase more slowly than the related revenue streams over time.
Research and development
Research and development expenses consist primarily of costs incurred for our research activities, product development, hardware and software engineering and consultant services and other costs associated with our technology Growth Direct platform and products, which include:
● employee-related expenses, including costs for salaries, bonuses and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense, for employees engaged in research and development functions;
● the cost of developing, maintaining and improving new and existing product designs;
● the cost of hardware and software engineering;
● research materials and supplies;
● external costs of outside consultants engaged to conduct research and development associated with our technology and products; and
● allocated information technology and facility-related costs, which include direct and allocated expenses for rent, maintenance of facilities and insurance as well as related depreciation and amortization.
Our research and development costs are expensed as incurred. We believe that our continued investment in research and development is essential to our long-term competitive position, and we expect these expenses to increase in future periods.
Sales and marketing
Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of salaries, commissions, benefits and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense as well as costs relating to travel, consulting, public relations and allocated information technology and facility-related costs for our employees engaged in sales and marketing activities. We expect sales and marketing expenses to increase in future periods as the number of sales and marketing personnel grows and we continue to expand our geographic reach and capabilities, broaden our customer base and introduce new products.
General and administrative
General and administrative expenses consist primarily of salaries, bonuses and other personnel costs including stock-based compensation expense for our finance, legal, human resources and general management employees, as well as professional fees for legal, patent, accounting, audit, investor relations, recruiting, consulting and other services. General and administrative expenses also include direct and allocated information technology and facility-related costs. General and administrative expenses are expected to increase in future periods as the number of administrative personnel grows to support increasing business size and complexity.
Following our IPO in July 2021, we began incurring incremental accounting, audit, legal, regulatory, compliance and director and officer insurance costs as well as investor relations expenses associated with operating as a public company.
Other income (expense)
Interest expense
Interest expense is comprised of interest cost associated with outstanding borrowings under our loan and security agreements and the amortization of deferred financing costs and debt discounts associated with such arrangements, as well as interest expense related to our capital lease obligation.
Change in fair value of preferred stock warrant liability
In connection with the May 2020 term loan facility we entered into with a lender, or 2020 Term Loan, we issued 1,195,652 warrants to purchase shares of Series C1 Preferred Stock at an exercise price of $1.15 per share. These warrants were immediately exercisable and expire 10 years after the issuance date. We also have other outstanding warrants to purchase preferred stock issued in connection with previous financing arrangements.
We classified all of our warrants to purchase preferred stock as a liability on our consolidated balance sheets until our IPO because the warrants are freestanding financial instruments that may require us to transfer assets upon exercise. The liability associated with each of these warrants was initially recorded at fair value upon the issuance date and was subsequently remeasured to fair value at each reporting date. The resulting change in the fair value of the preferred stock warrant liability was recorded as a component of other income (expense) in our consolidated statements of operations. We continued to recognize changes in the fair value of this preferred stock warrant liability at each reporting period until the IPO, when the preferred stock warrants were converted into common stock warrants that are equity classified.
In connection with the IPO, the preferred stock warrants were automatically converted to Class A common stock warrants. We determined the event resulted in equity classification of the Class A common stock warrants and derecognized the fair value of the preferred stock warrant liability as of the IPO date and reclassified to equity.
Loss on extinguishment of debt
Loss on extinguishment of debt includes a loss from the conversion of the 2020 Convertible Notes into Series C1 Preferred Stock in April 2020. In addition, the loss on extinguishment of debt includes unamortized issuance costs, back-end fees and early payment fees related to the refinancing of our $18.0 million term loan with a new $25.0 million term
loan in May 2020. We determined the loss on extinguishment of debt to be the difference between the reacquisition price of the debt and net carrying value of the extinguished debt.
Loss on extinguishment of debt recognized during the year ended December 31, 2021, includes a loss from the extinguishment of the 2020 Term Loan. In addition, the loss on extinguishment of debt includes unamortized issuance costs, unamortized prepaid commitment fees, and early payment fees associated with the 2020 Term Loan repayment.
Other income (expense)
Other income (expense) primarily consists of interest income as well as other miscellaneous income and expense unrelated to our core operations such as foreign currency transaction gains and losses.
Income tax expense
We generated significant taxable losses during the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, and, therefore, have not recorded any U.S. federal or state income tax expense during those periods. However, we did record an immaterial amount of foreign income tax expense during each of those periods.
We have not recorded any U.S. federal or state income tax benefits for the net operating losses we have incurred in each year or for the research and development tax credits we generated in the United States. As of December 31, 2021, we had U.S. federal and state net operating loss, or NOLs, carryforwards of $137.5 million and $62.7 million, respectively, which may be available to offset future taxable income and begin to expire in 2037 and 2032, respectively. Additionally, we had a federal NOL carryforward of $124.7 million generated since 2018 that will never expire. As of December 31, 2021, we also had U.S. federal and state research and development tax credit carryforwards of $1.1 million and $2.1 million, respectively, which may be available to offset future tax liabilities and begin to expire in 2038 and 2024, respectively. Utilization of the U.S. federal and state NOL carryforwards and research and development tax credit carryforwards may be subject to a substantial annual limitation due to ownership changes that have occurred previously or that could occur in the future.
The Company is in the process of performing a Section 382 study to assess whether a change of control has occurred or whether there have been multiple changes of control. These ownership changes are expected to materially limit the net operating loss carryforwards and research and development tax credits available to offset future tax liabilities. We expect to finalize the current Section 382 study during 2022.
We have recorded a full valuation allowance against our net deferred tax assets at each balance sheet date.
Results of operations
Comparison of the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020
The following table summarizes our results of operations for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020:
Year Ended
December 31,
December 31,
Change
Amount
%
(dollars in thousands)
Revenue:
Product revenue
$
15,512
$
10,992
$
4,520
41.1
%
Service revenue
6,125
3,091
3,034
98.2
%
Non-commercial revenue
1,595
1,994
(399)
(20.0)
%
Total revenue
23,232
16,077
7,155
44.5
%
Costs and operating expenses:
Cost of product revenue
23,434
18,642
4,792
25.7
%
Cost of service revenue
5,922
3,386
2,536
74.9
%
Cost of non-commercial revenue
1,617
2,120
(503)
(23.7)
%
Research and development
9,781
6,531
3,250
49.8
%
Sales and marketing
11,815
5,962
5,853
98.2
%
General and administrative
17,895
9,976
7,919
79.4
%
Total costs and operating expenses
70,464
46,617
23,847
51.2
%
Loss from operations
(47,232)
(30,540)
(16,692)
54.7
%
Other income (expense):
Interest expense
(2,650)
(3,447)
(23.1)
%
Change in fair value of preferred stock warrant liability
(19,643)
(69)
(19,574)
28,368.1
%
Loss on extinguishment of debt
(3,100)
(2,910)
(190)
6.5
%
Other income (expense):
(808)
(830)
(3,772.7)
%
Total other income (expense), net
(26,201)
(6,404)
(19,797)
309.1
%
Loss before income taxes
(73,433)
(36,944)
(36,489)
98.8
%
Income tax expense
(43)
(32.1)
%
Net loss
$
(73,524)
$
(37,078)
$
(36,446)
98.3
%
Revenue
Product revenue increased by $4.5 million, or 41.1%, with the increase attributable to higher Growth Direct system placements as well as higher consumable shipment volumes due to an increase in cumulative validated Growth Direct systems. A $0.5 million benefit from higher average selling prices in the period was offset by a negative impact of consumable product mix of $0.5 million.
Service revenue increased by $3.0 million, or 98.2%. The increase in service revenue was primarily due to a $2.1 million increase in validation and installation revenue due to the increase in Growth Direct systems placed during 2021, as well as a $0.9 million increase in service contract revenue, driven by an increase in cumulative Growth Direct systems validated and under contract.
During the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, restriction on travel and access to customer sites related to COVID-19, and its variants, including the rapid onset of the Omicron variant in the second half of the fourth quarter of 2021. COVID-19, and its variants, negatively impacted our ability to sell, ship, install and validate Growth Direct systems, as well as train customers. This had an adverse impact our product and service revenue in the periods. While we expect these disruptions to continue to impact our operating results, the related financial impact and duration of these disruptions cannot be reasonably estimated at this time.
Non-commercial revenue decreased by $0.4 million, or 20.0%. The decrease in non-commercial revenue was primarily due to a reduction in cost sharing expenditures due to the stage of the project, partially offset by an increase in cost sharing percentage during the year ended December 31, 2021.
Costs and operating expenses
Costs of revenue
Cost of product revenue increased by $4.8 million, or 25.7%. The increase was primarily driven by $3.4 million in incremental costs related to higher sales volume of Growth Direct systems and consumables. Also contributing to the increase was higher freight cost due to incremental sales volume and inflation of $0.4 million, an increase of $1.8 million in personnel-related costs resulting from higher headcount to support increased production volume and manufacturing support activities as well as to provide redundancy in the event of potential disruptions from COVID-19 and its variants, and a $1.5 million increase in facilities and information technology costs. The increase from these factors was partially offset by a reduction in product cost and of $2.0 million driven by fixed cost leverage resulting from increased production volumes as well as a reduction in other product cost of revenue of $0.3 million.
Cost of service revenue increased by $2.5 million, or 74.9%. This increase was primarily due to higher headcount- related costs of $1.8 million associated with additional validation and field service employees hired in 2021 and 2020 to support increasing service activity, an increase in allocated facilities and information technology costs of $0.3 million, an increase of $0.3 million in materials and supplies, and $0.1 million in other cost of service revenue.
Cost of non-commercial revenue decreased by $0.5 million, or 23.7%. This decrease was primarily due to a reduction in spend due to the timing and extent of development activities in our contract with BARDA.
Research and development
Year Ended
December 31,
Change
Amount
%
(dollars in thousands)
Research and development
$
9,781
$
6,531
$
3,250
49.8
%
Percentage of total revenue
42.1
%
40.6
%
Research and development expenses increased by $3.3 million, or 49.8%. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $2.8 million in employee-related costs due primarily to higher headcount to support increased new product development activities, partially offset by a reduction in consulting expense of $0.5 million. In addition, the increase was also due to $0.3 million in higher spending on materials and prototypes used for research and development activities, an increase in allocated facility and information technology costs of $0.4 million, and a net increase of $0.3 million in other general research and development expenses.
Sales and marketing
Year Ended
December 31,
Change
Amount
%
(dollars in thousands)
Sales and marketing
$
11,815
$
5,962
$
5,853
98.2
%
Percentage of total revenue
50.9
%
37.1
%
Sales and marketing expenses increased by $5.8 million, or 98.2%. This increase was due to an increase in employee-related costs (including commissions earned) of $2.7 million primarily due to the expansion of our direct sales and marketing organizations, to drive sales growth, an increase in marketing consulting of $2.4 million, an increase in marketing activities of $0.4 million, and an increase in allocated facility and information technology costs of $0.3 million.
General and administrative
Year Ended
December 31,
Change
Amount
%
(dollars in thousands)
General and administrative
$
17,895
$
9,976
$
7,919
79.4
%
Percentage of total revenue
77.0
%
62.1
%
General and administrative expenses increased by $7.9 million, or 79.4%. This increase was driven by a $4.1 million increase in employee-related costs due to business headcount increase and higher benefit costs, $2.4 million increase in legal, audit, and business insurance costs driven by incremental services and policies associated with operating as a public company, an increase in consulting fees of $0.6 million, increase in facilities and information technology costs of $0.4 million, as well as a net increase of $0.3 million other costs.
Other income (expense)
Interest expense
Interest expense for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 was $2.7 million and $3.4 million, respectively. The decrease of $0.8 million, or 23.1%, was due primarily to the repayment of our $25.0 million 2020 Term Loan in September 2021.
Change in fair value of preferred stock warrant liability
The change in fair value of preferred stock warrant liability was a loss of $19.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, compared to a loss of $0.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2020. The change was due primarily to an increase in the fair value of the underlying preferred stock used to determine the value of preferred stock warrants, to reflect the IPO price in 2021. The increase in fair value was recorded upon the IPO prior to the conversion to Class A common stock warrants and reclassification to equity.
Loss on extinguishment of debt
Loss on extinguishment of debt was $3.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, compared to a $2.9 million loss for the year ended December 31, 2020. The $3.1 million loss in 2021 was comprised of a $1.8 million prepayment penalty, $1.1 million expense related to unamortized discounts, and $0.2 million in unamortized prepaid facility fee and other charges and was incurred as a result of the repayment of the 2020 Term Loan. We determined the loss on extinguishment of debt to be the difference between the reacquisition price of the debt and the net carrying value of the extinguished debt. The loss for the year ended December 31, 2020 was comprised of unamortized issuance costs, unamortized prepaid commitment fees, and early payment fees due to the extinguishment of the 2018 Term Loan as well as a non-cash loss from the conversion of the 2020 Convertible Notes into Series C1 Preferred Stock incurred during the year ended December 31, 2020.
Other income (expense)
Other expense was $0.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to less than $0.1 million income for the year ended December 31, 2020. The increase was due to the Exit Fee expense described under Contractual Obligations and Commitments below.
Income tax expense
Income tax expense was $0.1 million for each of the years ended December 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020. The expense relates primarily to tax expense recorded for our foreign entities.
Liquidity and capital resources
Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses. To date, we have funded our operations primarily through proceeds from sales of redeemable convertible preferred stock, borrowings under loan agreements, revenue from sales of our products, services and contracts and proceeds from our IPO. As of December 31, 2021, we had cash, cash equivalents and short- and long-term investments of $203.5 million. We believe that our cash, cash equivalents and investments will enable us to fund our operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements for at least twelve months following the date these consolidated financial statements are issued.
Contractual obligations and commitments
In October 2013, we entered into an operating lease for office and manufacturing space in Lowell, Massachusetts, which expires in July 2026. The terms of the lease include options for a one-time, five-year extension of the lease and early termination of the lease in July 2024 as well as a $0.7 million tenant improvement allowance which has been drawn down in full. Future minimum commitments under this lease through July 2026 were $2.2 million as of December 31, 2021, including $0.5 million in short-term obligations.
In December 2016, in connection with the amendment of a then-outstanding loan agreement with the lender, we entered into an agreement under which we are obligated to pay the lender an exit fee in the amount of $0.8 million in the event of a “qualifying exit event” prior to December 31, 2026. As defined in the agreement, a “qualifying exit event” includes a public offering of its common stock. No amounts were accrued at December 31, 2020 as a “qualifying exit event” was not deemed probable. Subsequently, the IPO was deemed to be a “qualifying event” and we expensed and paid the exit fee in July 2021.
In March 2020, we entered into an agreement with a supplier to secure future supply of certain materials used in the manufacturing of our Growth Direct systems. As of December 31, 2021, we had committed to minimum payments under these arrangements totaling $0.9 million through December 31, 2022. We had $0.1 million accrued for the supply agreement as of December 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020.
In December 2020, we entered into a non-cancelable agreement with a service provider for software as a service and cloud hosting services. As of December 31, 2021, we had committed to minimum payments under these arrangements totaling $1.1 million through January 31, 2026, including short-term obligations of $0.2 million. We had $0.1 million and zero accrued for the software subscription as of December 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively.
In June 2021, we entered into a Sublease agreement for office and back-up manufacturing space in Lexington, Massachusetts, which expires in June 2029. The Sublease agreement includes an option to terminate the sublease in July 2026, subject to an early termination fee. Monthly rent payments are fixed and future minimum lease payments over the term of the sublease are $5.6 million, including $0.7 million in short-term obligations. We also have the right to use furniture and equipment specified in the Sublease agreement for an additional $0.6 million in future payments over the term of the Sublease with the option to purchase the furniture and equipment at the end of the Sublease term. Short-term obligations related to the furniture and equipment are $0.1 million as of December 31, 2021. Concurrent with entering into the Sublease agreement, we executed an Option Agreement with the property owner which provides us the option to enter into a new direct lease for the Lexington facility for an additional five-years following expiration of the Sublease.
For additional information on our contractual obligation and commitments please see Note 16 - Commitments and Contingencies to our consolidated financial statements.
Cash flows
The following table summarizes our sources and uses of cash for each of the periods presented:
Year Ended December 31,
Net cash used in operating activities
$
(54,964)
$
(30,996)
Net cash used in investing activities
(13,289)
(15,670)
Net cash provided by financing activities
216,745
64,234
Net increase in cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash
$
148,492
$
17,568
Operating activities
During the year ended December 31, 2021, operating activities used $55.0 million of cash, primarily resulting from our net loss of $73.5 million and net cash used by changes in our operating assets and liabilities of $8.0 million, partially offset by non-cash charges of $26.6 million. Net cash used by changes in our operating assets and liabilities for the year ended December 31, 2021 consisted primarily of an increase of $6.8 million in raw material inventory to build safety stock and support a projected increase in demand. An increase of $1.1 million in prepaid expenses and other current assets primarily due to insurance costs premium increases associated with operating as a public company. An increase of $0.9 million in other long-term assets primarily related to costs capitalized as a result of the implementation of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) software during 2021. A decrease in deferred revenue $1.1 million due to timing of advanced billings for validation services and performance of the related services partially offset by an increase in advance billings related to a higher number of systems under service contracts. These net operating cash uses were partially offset by an increase of $1.8 million in accrued expenses, accounts payable and other current liabilities primarily due to timing of invoicing and cash disbursements, as well as an increase of $0.1 million in deferred rent.
During the year ended December 31, 2020, operating activities used $31.0 million of cash, primarily resulting from our net loss of $37.1 million and net cash used by changes in our operating assets and liabilities of $1.1 million, partially offset by non-cash charges of $7.2 million. Net cash used by changes in our operating assets and liabilities for the year ended December 31, 2020 consisted primarily of an increase of $3.4 million in inventory to build safety stock and support a projected increase in demand, an increase in accounts receivable of $1.4 million, an increase of $1.3 million in prepaid expenses and other current assets, and an increase of $0.4 million in other long-term assets. These cash uses were partially offset by an increase of $2.5 million in deferred revenue, an increase of $1.8 million in accrued expenses and other current liabilities, and an increase of $1.0 million in accounts payable. The increase in accounts payable and accrued expenses was due to timing of invoicing and cash disbursement. The increase in accounts receivable was a result of higher product revenue. The increase in deferred revenue was due to an increase in advance billings for validation services related to the volume and timing of Growth Direct system placements as well as an increase in advance billings related to a higher number of systems under service contracts.
Investing activities
During the year ended December 31, 2021, net cash used in investing activities was $13.3 million, consisting of capital expenditures of $3.2 million and $10.1 million in net purchases of investments.
During the year ended December 31, 2020, net cash used in investing activities was $15.7 million, consisting of $15.0 million in net purchases of short-term investments and capital expenditures of $0.7 million.
Financing activities
During the year ended December 31, 2021, net cash provided by financing activities was $216.7 million, consisting of net proceeds of $164.1 million from the initial public offering of Class A common stock, net of issuance costs, $79.7 million of net proceeds from the sale of the Series D1 and Series D2 Preferred Stock, net of issuance costs, and $0.9 million from the issuance of common stock upon exercise of stock options and purchase of restricted stock awards.
Partially offsetting cash provided by financing activities in 2021 was the repayment of term loans of $26.2 million and payment of debt extinguishment fees of $1.9 million.
During the year ended December 31, 2020, net cash provided by financing activities was $64.2 million, consisting primarily of net proceeds of $49.9 million from the issuance of Series C1 and C2 redeemable convertible preferred stock, net of issuance costs, $24.1 million in net proceeds from borrowings under our 2020 Term Loan and $9.5 million in proceeds from the issuance of the 2020 Convertible Notes. These cash inflows were partially offset by a $19.4 million cash outflow for principal and debt extinguishment fees paid in conjunction with the repayment of our 2018 term loan.
Long-term debt
In May 2020, we entered into the 2020 Term Loan which provided for borrowings of an initial $25.0 million tranche upon closing and options to borrow up to an aggregate of $35.0 million in two additional tranches of $20.0 million under the second tranche, or the Term B Loan, and $15.0 million under the third tranche, or the Term C Loan, subject to certain Growth Direct system sales milestones.
At closing, we issued warrants to purchase 1,195,652 shares of Series C1 Preferred Stock to the lender with an exercise price of $1.15 per share. We paid a $0.8 million facility fee in connection with the 2020 Term Loan.
In September 2021, we agreed to pay in full all of our outstanding obligations under the 2020 Term Loan in the amount of $28.7 million, comprised of the principal amount of the 2020 Term Loan, interest previously paid-in-kind, accrued cash interest, a prepayment premium, and other fees and expenses. As a result, the 2020 Term Loan, all liens and security interests granted thereunder, and all obligations thereunder (other than the warrants issued to the lender) were satisfied, released, discharged and/or terminated in full, except in respect of certain surviving obligations.
Seasonality
Our revenues can vary from quarter to quarter as a result of seasonality. For a more detailed discussion of the seasonality of our business, please see “Seasonality” in Part I, Item 1. “Business” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Critical accounting policies and significant judgments and estimates
Our consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements and related disclosures requires us to make estimates and judgments that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, costs and expenses, and the disclosure of contingent assets and liabilities in our consolidated financial statements. Our estimates are based on our historical experience, known trends and events and various other factors that we believe are reasonable under the circumstances, the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets and liabilities that are not readily apparent from other sources. We evaluate our estimates and assumptions on an ongoing basis. Our actual results may differ from these estimates under different assumptions or conditions.
While our significant accounting policies are described in more detail in Note 2 - Summary of Significant Accounting Policies to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, we believe that the following critical accounting policies are those most important to the judgments and estimates used in the preparation of our consolidated financial statements.
Revenue recognition
Product revenue
We derive product revenue primarily from the sale of Growth Direct systems and related consumables. Product revenue is recognized when control of the promised systems and consumables is transferred to our customers, in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to be entitled to in exchange for those products or consumables (the
transaction price). For Growth Direct systems and consumables sold by us, control transfers to the customer at a point in time.
Service revenue
We derive service revenue primarily from the sale of validation services, service contracts and field service (including installation). Revenue is recognized when services are provided to our customers, in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to be entitled to in exchange for those services (the transaction price). Service revenue is recognized over time using an input method based on time lapsed for service contracts and using an output method based on milestones achieved for validation services and field service.
Performance obligations
A performance obligation is a promise in a contract to transfer a distinct product or service to a customer that are both capable of being distinct, whereby the customer can benefit from the product or service either on its own or together with other resources that are readily available, and are distinct in the context of the contract, whereby the transfer of the product or service is separately identifiable from other promises in the contract. Our main performance obligations in customer arrangements are Growth Direct systems, LIMS connection software, proprietary consumables, validation services, field service and services due under service contracts.
Multiple performance obligations
Our contracts may include multiple performance obligations when customers purchase a combination of products and services such as Growth Direct system sold together with the LIMS connection software, proprietary consumables or services. For these arrangements, we allocate the contract’s transaction price to each performance obligation on a relative standalone selling price basis using our best estimate of the standalone selling price of each distinct product or service in the contract. The primary methods used to estimate standalone selling prices are based on the prices observed in standalone sales to customers or cost-plus margin depending on the nature of the obligation and available evidence of fair value. Allocation of the transaction price is determined at contract’s inception.
Non-commercial revenue
We generate revenue from a long-term contract with BARDA, which is part of the U.S. government. The contract is a cost-reimbursable, cost-sharing contract, whereby BARDA reimburses us for a percentage of the total costs that have been incurred including indirect allowable rates. We include the unconstrained amount of consideration in the transaction price. The amount included in the transaction price is constrained to the amount for which it is probable that a significant reversal of cumulative revenue recognized will not occur.
Stock-based compensation
We measure stock-based option awards granted to employees, officers and directors based on their fair value on the date of grant using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. Compensation expense for those awards is recognized over the requisite service period, which is generally the vesting period of the respective award. We account for forfeitures as they occur. The straight-line method of expense recognition is applied to all awards with service-only conditions.
The fair value of each stock option is estimated on the grant date using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, which uses inputs such as the fair value of our common stock and assumptions we make for the volatility of our common stock, the expected term of our common stock options, the risk-free interest rate for a period that approximates the expected term of our common stock options, and our expected dividend yield.
We measure all restricted common stock granted to employees based on the common stock value on the date of grant. The purchase price of the restricted common stock is the common stock value on the date of grant. The restricted common stock includes a repurchase right, whereas upon the occurrence of a specific event, we have the right to
repurchase unvested restricted common stock shares. As such the fair value of the restricted common stock is included in other long-term liabilities in the consolidated balance sheet.
Determination of fair value of common stock
As there had been no public market for our common stock prior to the IPO, the estimated fair value of our common stock prior to our IPO was determined by our board of directors as of the date of each option grant, with input from management. The board considered our most recently available third-party valuations of common stock and an assessment of additional objective and subjective factors that it believed were relevant and which may have changed from the date of the most recent valuation through the date of the grant. These third-party valuations were performed in accordance with the guidance outlined in the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Accounting and Valuation Guide, Valuation of Privately-Held-Company Equity Securities Issued as Compensation.
Prior to our IPO, our common stock valuations were prepared using either an option pricing method, or OPM, or a hybrid method, both of which use market approaches and income approaches to estimate our enterprise value. The hybrid method is a probability-weighted expected return method, or PWERM, where the equity value in two or more of the scenarios is calculated using an OPM. The PWERM is a scenario-based methodology that estimates the fair value of common stock based upon an analysis of future values for the company, assuming various outcomes. The common stock value is based on the probability-weighted present value of expected future investment returns considering each of the possible outcomes available as well as the rights of each class of stock. The future value of the common stock under each outcome is discounted back to the valuation date at an appropriate risk-adjusted discount rate and probability weighted to arrive at an indication of value for the common stock. A discount for lack of marketability of the common stock is then applied to arrive at an indication of value for the common stock. The OPM treats common stock and preferred stock as call options on the total equity value of a company, with exercise prices based on the value thresholds at which the allocation among the various holders of a company’s securities changes. Under this method, the common stock has value only if the funds available for distribution to stockholders exceeded the value of the preferred stock liquidation preferences at the time of the liquidity event, such as a strategic sale or a merger.
In addition to considering the results of these third-party valuations, our board of directors considered various objective and subjective factors to determine the fair value of our common stock as of each grant date, including:
● the prices at which we sold shares of preferred stock (including our sale of Series D1 and Series D2 redeemable convertible preferred stock in March 2021) and the superior rights and preferences of the preferred stock relative to our common stock at the time of each grant;
● the progress of the research and development of our products;
● our stage of development and commercialization and our business strategy;
● external market conditions affecting our industry and the global pharmaceutical industry;
● our financial position, including cash on hand, and our historical and forecasted performance and operating results;
● the lack of an active public market for our common stock and our preferred stock;
● the likelihood of achieving a liquidity event, such as an initial public offering, or IPO, or sale of our company in light of prevailing market conditions; and
● the analysis of IPOs and the market performance of similar companies in the life sciences tools and diagnostics industries.
The assumptions underlying these valuations represent management’s best estimates, which involve inherent uncertainties and the application of management’s judgment. As a result, if we had used significantly different assumptions or estimates, the fair value of our common stock and our stock-based compensation expense could have been materially different.
For valuations after the completion of the IPO, the fair value of our common stock is determined based on the quoted market price of our common stock on the date of grant.
Valuation of warrants to purchase preferred stock
We have historically classified warrants to purchase shares of our redeemable convertible preferred stock as liabilities on our consolidated balance sheets as these warrants were free-standing financial instruments that may have required us to transfer assets upon exercise. The preferred stock warrant liability is initially recorded at fair value on the issuance date of each warrant and was subsequently remeasured to fair value at each reporting date. Changes in the fair value of the preferred stock warrant liability were recognized as a component of other income (expense) in our consolidated statements of operations. We adjusted the liability for changes in fair value until the warrants were exercised, expire or qualified for equity classification.
We utilized the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, which incorporates management’s assumptions and estimates, to value the preferred stock warrants. We assessed these assumptions and estimates on a quarterly basis as additional information impacting the assumptions was obtained. Estimates and assumptions impacting the fair value measurement include the fair value per share of the underlying redeemable convertible preferred stock, the remaining contractual term of the warrants, risk-free interest rate, expected dividend yield and expected volatility of the price of the underlying preferred stock. We determined the fair value per share of the underlying preferred stock by taking into consideration our most recent sales of our preferred stock as well as additional factors that we deemed relevant. We have historically been a private company and lacked company-specific historical and implied volatility information of our stock. Therefore, we estimated expected stock volatility based on the historical volatility of publicly traded peer companies for a term equal to the remaining contractual term of the warrants. The risk-free interest rate was determined by reference to the U.S. Treasury yield curve for time periods approximately equal to the remaining contractual term of the warrants. We estimated a 0% dividend yield based on the expected dividend yield and the fact that we have never paid or declared dividends.
Upon closing of the IPO, all the warrants to purchase shares of redeemable convertible preferred stock became exercisable for shares of common stock, at which time we adjusted the redeemable convertible preferred stock warrant liability to fair value prior to reclassifying the redeemable convertible preferred stock warrant liability to additional paid-in capital. As a result, following the closing of the IPO, the warrants were no longer subject to fair value accounting.
Valuation of inventory
We value inventory at the lower of cost or net realizable value. Cost is computed using the first-in, first-out method. We regularly review inventory quantities on-hand for excess and obsolescence and, when circumstances indicate, we record charges to write down inventories to their estimated net realizable value after evaluating future demand, expected product life cycles and current inventory levels. Such charges are classified as cost of product revenue in the statements of operations. Any write-down of inventory to net realizable value creates a new cost basis.
Valuation of derivatives
We record derivatives initially at fair value upon the issuance of our Unsecured Subordinated Convertible Promissory Notes, or Convertible Notes, issued in February 2020 which relates to a conversion option whereby upon the closing of a specified financing event the Convertible Note will automatically convert into shares of the same class and series of capital stock we issued to other investors in the financing at a conversion price equal to 80% of the price per share of the securities paid by the other investor. The initial fair value was determined using management’s assumption on the likelihood a qualified financing event would occur. Changes in the fair value of the derivative liability were
recognized as a component of other income (expense), net in the consolidated statement of operations. In April 2020, the specified financing event was consummated, and as such, the notes were converted into shares of Series C1 Preferred Stock, and the derivative liability was extinguished, and the unamortized derivative discount was recognized as an extinguishment loss.
Recently issued accounting pronouncements
A description of recently issued accounting pronouncements that may potentially impact our financial position, results of operations or cash flows is disclosed in Note 2 - Summary of Significant Accounting Policies to our consolidated financial statements appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Emerging growth company status
The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act, permits an “emerging growth company” such as us to take advantage of an extended transition period to comply with new or revised accounting standards applicable to public companies until those standards would otherwise apply to private companies. We have elected to use this extended transition period for complying with new or revised accounting standards that have different effective dates for public and private companies until the earlier of the date we (i) are no longer an emerging growth company or (ii) affirmatively and irrevocably opt out of the extended transition period provided in the JOBS Act. As a result, we will not be subject to the same new or revised accounting standards as other public companies that are not emerging growth companies, and our financial statements may not be comparable to other public companies that comply with new or revised accounting pronouncements as of public company effective dates. We may choose to early adopt any new or revised accounting standards whenever such early adoption is permitted for private companies.
We will cease to be an emerging growth company on the date that is the earliest of (i) the last day of the fiscal year in which we have total annual gross revenues of $1.07 billion or more, (ii) the last day of our fiscal year following the fifth anniversary of the date of the closing of the IPO, (iii) the date on which we have issued more than $1.0 billion in nonconvertible debt during the previous three years or (iv) the date on which we are deemed to be a large accelerated filer under the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Further, even after we no longer qualify as an emerging growth company, we may still qualify as a “smaller reporting company,” which would allow us to take advantage of many of the same exemptions from disclosure requirements, including reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements.

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ITEM 7A. QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE DISCLOSURES ABOUT MARKET RISK
Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk.
Interest rate risk
As of December 31, 2021, we had cash, cash equivalents and short- and long-term investments of $203.5 million, which consisted of cash, money market funds, U.S. treasury bills, and U.S. treasury notes. Interest income is sensitive to changes in the general level of interest rates; however, due to the nature of these investments, an immediate 10% change in interest rates would not have a material effect on the fair market value of our investment portfolio.
Foreign currency exchange risk
We are not currently exposed to significant market risk related to changes in foreign currency exchange rates. Our operations may be subject to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates in the future.
Inflation risk
While we have experienced some impact from inflation related mainly to our materials, labor and freight costs, we have been able to mitigate further impacts through the maintenance of increased inventory levels and long-term contracts
and commitments with key suppliers, some of which was implemented under our COVID-19 risk mitigation strategy. As a result, we do not believe that inflation has had a material effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. If our costs were to become subject to significant incremental inflationary pressures, we may not be able to meaningfully offset such higher costs through price increases. Our inability or failure to do so could harm our business, financial condition or results of operations.

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ITEM 8. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data.
The financial statements required to be filed pursuant to this Item 8 are appended to this report. An index of those financial statements is found in Item 15 of Part IV of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

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ITEM 9. CHANGES IN AND DISAGREEMENTS WITH ACCOUNTANTS
Item 9. Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure.
None.

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ITEM 9A. CONTROLS AND PROCEDURES
Item 9A. Controls and Procedures.
Limitations on effectiveness of controls and procedures
In designing and evaluating our disclosure controls and procedures, management recognizes that any controls and procedures, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable assurance of achieving the desired control objectives. In addition, the design of disclosure controls and procedures must reflect the fact that there are resource constraints and that management is required to apply judgment in evaluating the benefits of possible controls and procedures relative to their costs.
Evaluation of disclosure controls and procedures
Our management, with the participation of our principal executive officer and principal financial officer, evaluated, as of the end of the period covered by this Annual Report on Form 10-K, the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures (as defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Exchange Act). Based on that evaluation, our principal executive officer and principal financial officer concluded that, as of December 31, 2021, our disclosure controls and procedures were effective at the reasonable assurance level.
Management’s annual report on internal control over financial reporting and attestation report of independent public accounting firm
This Annual Report on Form 10-K does not include a report of management’s assessment regarding our internal control over financial reporting (as defined in Rules 13a-15(f) and 15d-15(f) under the Exchange Act) or an attestation report of our independent registered public accounting firm due to a transition period established by rules of the SEC for newly public companies. Additionally, our independent registered public accounting firm will not be required to opine on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting pursuant to Section 404 until we are no longer an “emerging growth company” as defined in the JOBS Act.
Changes in internal control over financial reporting
There were no changes in our internal control over financial reporting (as defined in Rules 13a-15(f) and 15d-15(f) under the Exchange Act) during the quarter ended December 31, 2021 that have materially affected, or are reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.

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ITEM 9B. OTHER INFORMATION
Item 9B. Other Information.
None.

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ITEM 10. DIRECTORS, EXECUTIVE OFFICERS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance.
The information required by this Item 10 will be set forth in our Proxy Statement for the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K by reference.

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ITEM 11. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION
Item 11. Executive Compensation.
The information required by this Item 11 will be set forth in our Proxy Statement for the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K by reference.

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ITEM 12. SECURITY OWNERSHIP OF CERTAIN BENEFICIAL OWNERS
Item 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters.
The information required by this Item 12 will be set forth in our Proxy Statement for the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K by reference.

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ITEM 13. CERTAIN RELATIONSHIPS AND RELATED TRANSACTIONS
Item 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence.
The information required by this Item 13 will be set forth in our Proxy Statement for the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K by reference

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ITEM 14. PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTING FEES AND SERVICES
Item 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services.
Our independent public accounting firm is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Boston, Massachusetts (PCAOB Auditor ID: 238)
The information required by this Item 14 will be set forth in our Definitive Proxy Statement for our 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is incorporated in this Annual Report on Form 10-K by reference.
PART IV

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ITEM 15. EXHIBITS, FINANCIAL STATEMENT SCHEDULES
Item 15. Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules
The following documents are filed as part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K:
(a)(1) Financial Statements.
For a list of consolidated financial statements included herein, see Index to Consolidated Financial Statements on page attached to this Annual Report on Form 10-K, incorporated into this item by reference.
(a)(2) Financial Statement Schedules.
Financial statement schedules have been omitted because they are either not required or not applicable or the information is included in the consolidated financial statements or the notes thereto.
(a)(3) Exhibits.
The exhibits filed as part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K are listed in the Exhibit index immediately preceding the signature page, which Exhibit Index is incorporated herein by reference.