MDB Capital Holdings (MDBH) 2026 年第二季法說會：精簡成本與聚焦核心資產

MDB Capital Holdings (NASDAQ: MDBH) 在 2026 年第二季暨上半年財報電話會議上，概述了一項精簡的營運模式，重點在於將四大核心資產變現：Public Ventures、PatentVest、eXoZymes 和 Paulex Bio。管理層目前的優先事項是創造投資組合價值的轉折點，而非加速推出新公司。

核心要點

• MDBH 計劃將年度營運費用降至約 500 萬至 600 萬美元，此舉將獲得預計進行的 PatentVest 拆分計畫，以及涉及 Public Ventures 清算業務的潛在合作或出售案所支持。
• 管理層不打算籌集額外資金或稀釋 MDBH 股東權益。其明確的優先事項是在關鍵的商業、融資或臨床里程碑實現之前，維護投資組合中的持股部位。
• MDBH 在 2026 年上半年完成了兩筆交易。該公司還參與了 Ticketplus 的 IPO，該案在第二季結束後不久完成。
• 該公司擁有 Public Ventures 和 PatentVest 100% 的股權，約 410 萬股 eXoZymes 股票及認股權證，以及約 710 萬股 Paulex Bio 股票及認股權證。
• Public Ventures 正與約 四或五家對象 就合作夥伴關係或潛在的平台出售進行洽談。管理層目標是在下個季度達成協議，但目前無法保證最終結果。
• Paulex Bio 即將提交潛在的公開登記說明書，管理層目標是在 2026 年第四季 進行 IPO，並預期在 2027 年初 取得初步臨床數據進展。

關鍵財務與投資組合數據

業務與營運表現

Public Ventures

MDBH 將 Public Ventures 打造為自營清算平台，但表示在公司限制新公司推出的情況下，該資產未得到充分利用。管理層正在評估合作夥伴關係，或潛在出售給能更廣泛運用其清算基礎設施的更大平台。

該公司已收到數家機構的意向與意向書。MDBH 認為，此類交易既能創造價值，又能為未來新公司的推出保留獲取分銷平台的管道。

PatentVest

PatentVest 已轉向 AI 賦能的專利法律模式。MDBH 計劃在亞利桑那州成立一家採用替代商業結構 (ABS) 的法律事務所，將專利律師與 AI 支援的工作流程相結合，用於初級律師工作、法務助理服務及外國專利申報。

MDBH 意圖對 PatentVest 進行融資並將其拆分為獨立實體。外部投資人將資助其未來發展，從而減輕 MDBH 的資金負擔。

eXoZymes

管理層表示，eXoZymes 專注於展示可擴充的製造能力，而非在產能建立之前宣布商業協議。據報導，該公司即將與有能力生產其小分子藥物組合的委託製造商或策略製造夥伴建立合作關係。

MDBH 預期一旦展現出製造規模，商業談判將會加速推進。管理層還指出，潛在的策略投資、針對特定分子的交易以及拆分案（包括獨立資助的 NCT 平台）都是減少融資需求並限制股權稀釋的可行途徑。

Paulex Bio

Paulex Bio 正在開發一種糖尿病治療藥物，旨在促進 Beta 細胞增殖和胰島素產生。管理層表示，該藥物在臨床前模型中展現出與 GLP-1 療法的協同效應。

該公司即將迎來潛在的 IPO，並持續進行聚焦於安全性與 Beta 細胞產生的臨床工作。MDBH 預期 Paulex Bio 將單獨更新試驗進展。

管理層展望

• MDBH 預計營運一個精簡平台，年度費用約為 500 萬至 600 萬美元，部分費用將由交易手續費抵銷。
• 管理層正在評估在 2026 年下半年進行多達兩筆交易，可能包括 Paulex Bio 和另一筆交易。
• 一筆正在籌備中、基於服務費的交易規模可能相當重大，但時間點與是否完成仍具不確定性。
• Public Ventures 管理層目標是在下個季度完成一項與合作或出售相關的協議。
• Paulex Bio 預計將在 2026 年第四季 邁向 IPO，臨床數據進展預計將於 2027 年初 發布。
• MDBH 已暫停先前每年擴展至三到五家新公司的目標，轉而回歸選擇性的「精準打擊」（rifle-shot）策略，直到微型股市場狀況改善為止。

風險與關注事項

• 管理層指出，市值低於 2 億美元的市場區塊需求疲軟且資金流入有限，是 MDBH 無法控制的最大外部變數。
• 預計該公司的手續費收入和交易活動仍將呈現不平均的狀態，因為在當前的市場狀況下，MDBH 並未追求每年推出三到五家新公司。
• Public Ventures 的洽談、PatentVest 的融資、eXoZymes 的商業合作夥伴關係，以及 Paulex Bio 的 IPO 與臨床里程碑，仍面臨執行風險。
• eXoZymes 必須展現出可擴充的製造能力，並將商業談判轉化為正式協議，其平台才能實現更廣泛的商業化。
• MDBH 的策略仰賴於避免過早出售投資組合持股，同時產生足夠的手續費以資助營運，從而避免稀釋股權。

管理層問答亮點

管理層表示，MDBH 在 eXoZymes 中扮演積極參與的角色，包括協助商業化、簡化其技術訊息，並將該公司與潛在合作夥伴對接。對於 Paulex Bio，MDBH 正在協助評估 IPO 的時間點，以及是否應在發行前或發行後引進策略合作夥伴。

關於 HeartBeam，管理層表示，該公司以合作夥伴導向的策略比起獨立推出產品更具資金效益。潛在的合作夥伴可能包括心電圖 (ECG) 製造商、動態監測公司、穿戴式裝置企業或外國政府。

關於 eXoZymes 約 600 萬美元的融資案，管理層強調了股權稀釋的控制。策略投資、商業協議以及獨立資助的分子平台都有可能減少未來的資金需求，不過 MDBH 並未承諾此類交易必然會發生。

完整財報電話會議記錄

完整財報電話會議逐字稿

管理層陳述

Tony Dammicci

Welcome, everyone, to the MDB Capital Holdings Second Quarter and First Half 2026 Update Conference Call. Thanks so much for joining us today.

[Operator Instructions] Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking.

While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation.

Also, please be aware that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results or any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors.

A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be provided later on mdb.com.

Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. Chris will be joined later by George Brandon, MDB President and Head of Community Development.

Chris will lead a business update for the quarter ending June 30, 2026, and subsequent developments. So at this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett. Chris?

Christopher Marlett

Thanks, Tony. Well, great. Let's get the deck up here. Great. Thanks again, Tony.

Everyone, thank you for joining today. I wanted to thank you all for joining. It's been a really interesting time period for us, and we're making a lot of very important changes. And I think that I'm excited to communicate our focus and where we're headed going forward for the balance of the year.

So quick overview of the agenda. Really, I wanted to talk about sort of the backdrop of the microcap markets and what it means for us and really our plan for maximizing our core assets. I don't think that we've done a good enough job about talking about our core assets. So we kind of like to change up the presentations occasionally to basically give you a different way of looking at it, understanding what we've built at MDB and what we think the value is. And those four core assets, some of you might know about, but I'll talk a little bit more as we get in the presentation.

We've also got real financial discipline. When you look at our financial statements, it's very hard to really discern exactly what's going on. I'm trying to simplify that so that you understand that we have really a core operating platform that we can make very efficient that has a lot of leverage.

So our objective is to provide that leverage without any real dilution. That's the key with all of our companies, whether it be a portfolio company that we're trying to help to get to commercialization and value creation and whether it's MDB doing the exact same thing. It's called leverage without dilution. That's sort of what's inherent in all the companies that we get behind.

So not to use as an excuse, but really I don't know that it's generally well known that the sector that's sort of the sub-$200 million market cap area that we operate in of companies were taking public has been really sort of evacuated to some degree. And where all the concentration is really, if you take the top 20 companies that are public today, they comprise over 50% of the total equity market value in the U.S. And if you look at even venture funding, such a huge percentage of it is going to these very, very large companies.

The small companies are really languishing not only in sort of the public markets, but also in the private markets. When you look at the headline numbers of the Anthropic and OpenAI is getting funded, the money moving around is really staggering. But then when you look underneath it and you look at these small companies, it's a very, very different picture.

When you look at overall funding, about 70% of all funding has gone towards AI-focused companies. And while we have what I think are some great AI-based companies in our portfolio, I don't know that, that translates into total valuation. But I do believe that we've got a great shot of our sort of AI-enabled companies getting into that trend, and that's really what we're focused on for the balance of the year.

So if you really look at it, both ends of the barbell are very different. And sort of all these kind of tiny companies, both in the traditional venture world and in the Public Venture world are sort of being neglected. And so, when you look at these small IPOs, we've talked about it before, but the number of public companies has been dropping in the U.S. And so we've gone from roughly 8,000 public companies around 2,000 to less than 4,000 today. And even though there's 1,000 companies sort of in the sub-$200 million market value area, it only comprises about 2% of the total market capitalization.

So, if you figure 25% of the companies are in this space, it only comprises 2% of the equity market value. And so, these institutional investors, not that they necessarily drive stock prices, but it's just really an indicator of fund flows. What we found is once a company gets to a certain market value and institutions start to participate, we start to see value expansion=. many times.

The game is really how do you get enough coverage, how do you get enough people involved so that eventually, what ends up happening, when these companies get to a certain market value, they start to really scale in valuation. And we see that consistently. When you look at a lot of these companies, there's a huge difference between a company trading at a $100 million valuation and a $500 million valuation. You'll see vast valuation differences.

I think the game is, as it gets bigger, it gets a wider audience of people looking at it. So even though you'll say, "Oh, wow, the small-cap indices rebounded sharply in the second quarter, the average market cap of the, let's say, the Russell Microcap is over $2.5 billion, which is a totally different market than the market we're playing in.

Again, it's just an artifact that we haven't seen before historically in the development of MDB. It's sort of gone to an extreme level. We do think that at some point, money rotates, money typically rotates to value at some point or where there's the most upside. We actually think if the really big end of the spectrum, today, we made new highs that if that segment got pressured, we don't really see that as a real risk for our segment.

We actually think that money will still have to rotate somewhere. And so we do think that if the big market comes down, it's not necessarily going to hurt the small ones that we think are actually sort of on the floor. So, we look at it as it's kind of hard to fall off the floor. Again, no promises. Plenty of risk factors there. But I just think that, that's our view of where the markets are and what we see as the potential opportunity as money rotates again.

So, what does that mean for us and what we're doing? We're not happy with where we're at. We certainly didn't go public with the idea of this happening and our stock being down from where we took the company public. But when you think about when we went public, the last three companies we had taken public before we had gone public all went to $1 billion valuations. And so, we expected that in that kind of marketplace, our shareholders would do phenomenally well if, let's say, our next companies went to $1 billion valuations.

That, of course, has not happened. But it doesn't mean that our companies don't have that potential. And in fact, many of these companies that we launched before, we were trading at very, very low valuations. And the next thing you know, things changed. I mean if you look at something like a company like Pulse Biosciences that we that we took, we really started the company, formed it, took it public, the stock went, we took it public at $4, it went to $40 or high 30s, came down again, went to the $40 again, down to $1. Everybody thought it was left for dead. And today, it just made another new high at $46 a share. So again, it can be super volatile and fortunes change with these things. It's really amazing to see what's happened over the last five, six years in this microcap sector. I can't emphasize any more that we feel you're sort of as good as your last performance.

When we had Provention get bought for $2.9 billion, again, everybody thought it was dead and going nowhere. And next thing it gets a buyout offer close to 5x the price it was trading at. Again, this is not a promise. It's just perspective. It's really all as it is.

So many times, we've seen these companies do this, and it doesn't shape our conviction in the potential of these companies, but the price is the price, right? You guys are looking at the prices and saying, wow, maybe these guys in MDB aren't so smart. Our perspective is we've been through this before. Again, I sit here the same way you do. I don't like seeing my stock being down. I certainly don't like the fact that we sold this to other people and the stock is down.

But it doesn't change how we feel about what we've developed. We still feel very bullish about what we've developed. We also feel very bullish about our ability to create new companies and a lot of value. We think that we've built a great team, a great platform and a great process for doing that. But you got to have winners, and a part of that is the rotation of the asset class, and part of it is picking the right things and making sure they get to commercialization.

So really, what we're doing is we're working very hard to realize the potential of each asset. And that's where we sort of redoubled our focus on our existing portfolio to make sure they get to those key value inflection points. So, what we've done, we talked about scaling from one launch every 18 months to three to five, what we talked about at year-end. We talked about AI transforming our sourcing and diligence and our launch models.

We still believe all of that and building a venture portfolio so that we can broaden the risk amongst many companies. And much of our operating expenses have been invested in those big ideas like PatentVest and like our clearing platform that we believe are smart investments. as of right now, what we're looking at is, okay, right now, going out and launching new companies is great. We're still looking for new companies, want to launch new companies, but monetizing our four core assets is really important.

And so when you look at whether it's Public Ventures, PatentVest, eXoZymes, and Paulex Bio, we see great potential in all those platforms, and we're in the process of really doubling down to make sure that those four assets get to a value inflection point.

Our plan has never been after going public to ever really dilute the MDB shareholders. We're not looking to raise more money. We're not looking to go out and spend more money. We, as we said, nothing's changed from when we started MDB. We want to distribute the value of those assets we create them as we create them. But more importantly, we want to run now with this marketplace, it's not so much, let's be aggressive and step on the gas.

It's really how do we run a very lean platform? How do we run this thing on $5 million to $6 million a year, but still not only monetize the companies we have that have had historic $1 billion leverage, but create new ones in a very cost-efficient manner.

That's what we did before we went public. And our big idea of scaling those launches is the timing is just not right. And we do think that environment will change. And when it does change, and we can go back to saying, okay, can we do more of them. But right now, we don't need to do more. We just need to monetize and leverage the ones that we've done and take a very, go back to a rifle-shot approach until the environment is better for what we do.

So, I'll delve more into each one of these companies and tell you what we see and why we're excited about them as we've always been and drill down on those and a little bit more on our results.

Public Ventures.

We always looked at self-clearing as a really important thing as these markets transform. A lot of what's happened in the securities markets is things have transformed from companies getting funded with traditional institutional investors at the low end to being heavily influenced by influencers. We've seen money shifts to platforms like Robinhood and others that are much more momentum-based, much more different than sort of your core fundamental bottoms-up investors in the microcap space. So, we think that having a platform that can respond to that was very important. That's why we started Public Ventures. We got this up and running. It was a really great effort by our team to get this up and going.

It was about a five-year effort. It wasn't easy. And we built it on a very, very lean budget. We built our back office in Latin America, which we think is super valuable to be able to support the platform. As many of you who are clients of MDB, you know that you can always pick up the phone, get somebody to make a trade for you or actually give you good customer service. That's not an easy thing to do in this world today, and we've built that and got it up and running.

But that being said, we're not really leveraging it. In other words, if we're not launching a lot of companies, if we're not putting out four or five new companies a year and building that marketplace, then what we built actually has value. So, we're looking to partner it with somebody else out there that has a broader platform and can really use it and really enables us to focus on what we do where all the leverage is, is launching big ideas.

We've been in discussions now with several parties, currently about four or five parties, and I think we'll be probably a few more. We've actually received some interest, letters of intent to do partnerships or even sales of the platform. So, we're in the midst of that. I do think that we want to try and get something wrapped up in the next quarter. And I think there's a very good chance of that with the folks that we are talking about, and we're excited to announce how that public clearing or the Public Venture or clearing platform can create more value by offering a much broader platform.

To our knowledge, there's no clearing platforms really for sale or for partner right now. So currently, if you look at the discrete clearing platforms that are out there today, there's about 100 of them. And we're 1 of 100 but so many of them are owned by the household names that you're familiar with. It's a unique opportunity for a lot of different types of people to do that. I also think that what we do in investment banking, public venture, some might call it crowd funding. It is attractive to a lot of different people. We're just trying to find the best fit for MDB so that longer term, as we create new big ideas, we have a great platform and great partner to launch those with.

PatentVest.

So, AI took us by surprise to a certain degree. Again, it's doesn't seem like that should be a surprise. But if you look at the realization that we hit at the end of the year was AI was changing very rapidly, not only was the capabilities of AI changing very rapidly, but we saw a lot of the AI platforms being very commoditized. What we're seeing is that a lot of people were investing heavily in software development, and we were seeing that, geez, what's going to get commoditized in this space?

What we realized was the platform we have built at PatentVest was really unbelievably well positioned to pair with AI to build the law firm of the future, the patent law firm the future. So we have pivoted our strategy quite dramatically to respond to the realization of that. And so there has been, as you've seen, a whole host of legal tech firms out there getting funded. It's now turned into a mega value market.

Just four or five months ago, things like Harvey AI and these things that are serving law firms getting valued at several billions of dollars of value. But what's even more interesting about patent law, it's very different than traditional law is that it is a federal-only practice. And so that's why we made the decision to start what we call it ABS law firm in the state of Arizona, which enables us to be an owner of a law firm and bring in business processes that are critical to lawyers to providing great patent work.

So this is an exciting time to build a home for great patent lawyers, and it really makes a lot more sense for those patent lawyers to operate not in a traditional law firm structure that exists today. We're super excited because what we're effectively doing is bringing our team of people with best-in-class AI processes to complete the workflow that patent lawyers should be doing, whether that's associate work, whether that's paralegal work, whether that's foreign filings, we can do that and basically take these great patent lawyers that are the brilliant minds and provide the platform that they need that works for them that's very different than what they may be experiencing in a small law firm that has limited resources or a very large law firm that's structured differently for patent law.

More importantly, it brings an efficiency level to these companies where we can bring unprecedented efficiency without taking money out of the pockets of these patent lawyers. These patent lawyers can actually make more money while delivering greater efficiency. That's the real story with what AI is going to enable.

Great lawyers are still going to get paid for their value. But it's going to be delivered in a much more efficient platform and the inefficiency that's in that is going to be taken out. So, we think great lawyers are going to want to come to patent us. We think the most innovative companies are going to see our ability to transform how patent prosecution takes place. So, we're very excited about it.

What we thought was a very forward-looking AI-enabled ABS law firm in the immigration space was recently funded at a $750 million pre-money valuation in the VC community. So, we see that the logic of pairing ABS law with a law firm, a federal practice, just like they did in immigration law, but in a much bigger market than immigration law could have huge strategic value. Javier Chamorro, who's been running that platform has done a great job along with the team to basically put together a great strategy.

We're out going to be executing a financing for that company to get it off the balance sheet or I shouldn't say off the balance sheet. We're going to get it spun out as an independent entity where MDB is no longer funding the development. It will be funded by independent investors. We're giving independent investors the opportunity to invest in PatentVest and then participate in the growth of this platform that we think is truly innovative and is the future of patent law.

eXoZymes.

So eXoZymes has really been making an unbelievable transformation. And I think that one of the things that's most misunderstood about eXoZymes is that since we took the company public, people had not seen real commercial traction.

I think that, that was a bit of misdirection. I think that what we were focused on was pivoting eXoZymes to seeing that we could scale manufacturing because the bane of synthetic biology is it didn't scale. You had companies that created multibillion-dollar valuations like Ginkgo Bioworks and Amyris and others that were public. And they made great announcements. They announced a lot of commercial deals, but they couldn't deliver. They couldn't deliver on manufacturing.

So we felt like we had to go out and make sure that we could deliver on that and while also looking for all the molecules where we can really, really get huge valuation inflection. And so that started with NCT, but I think the great news is now we have several other molecules, which we've talked about, and I think will be talked about by eXoZymes in their conference call next week that really broaden our ability to bring in commercial partners.

I also believe that they are very close to executing a relationship with contract manufacturers or one manufacturer as a strategic partner that could effectively make all of the small molecules that they're developing. So, we can take the thing that's really held back synthetic biology, the manufacturing thing off the table with multiple compounds, which now opens up the ability to have real commercial discussions.

Those commercial discussions have been taking place, and I think are going to be accelerating now that we are developing the ability to scale manufacturing. So, I think it's a very exciting time. When you saw the great valuation expansion of those other companies, you saw them signing commercial relationships, which led people to believe that this would scale, but then they disappointed.

I believe that now we can prove we can scale manufacturing. Those commercial relationships will have a lot more value and could drive what we always believe multibillion-dollar value just like these other companies did. Stay tuned. I think this is really a great time for eXoZymes. It's been a long road, but we think we're very close to seeing those very tangible commercial inflection points that will bring value to eXoZymes and our portfolio.

Paulex Bio.

Paulex Bio is really getting to an exciting point in time. So, I think that the company is very close to filing its registration statement for the IPO. And it's quite simply, potentially one of the most earth-shattering developments in diabetes. And the reason we funded Paulex Bio is very simple. We believe that this drug has a reasonably good shot at enabling beta cell expansion, which is insulin production, increasing insulin production, whether it be in a type 1 or type 2 diabetic. We believe that when you look at that and you do that at a very early stage, the implications to the diabetes and obesity wars that are happening in Pharma right now is really earth-shattering because this could be the core differentiator for all of these GLP-1 platforms or any of the other cocktails that are happening in this arena, which basically is completely synergistic.

Not only is our drug very synergistic with GLP-1s in preclinical models, but it also effectively, as you increase beta cell production, you create a whole different metabolic profile. We're very excited about it, and I think we're getting very close to demonstrating that it's safe and that core value inflection point, which is beta cell production.

We believe big pharma is going to have to take notice and we see, again, huge valuation inflection potential very much like we had in Provention, which we started with the same folks that we started Paulex Bio with. So, we had the first disease-modifying type 1 diabetes drug at Provention. The size of the market with this dwarfs what Provention's discovery was. So, we're super excited. We think that, that data will start to play out in the early part of 2027.

I think that everything is on track to our knowledge with clinical trial. I think they're going to be coming out with their own update very quickly. We'll be getting close to the IPO in the fourth quarter of this year. Our hope is that this could be not only groundbreaking for patients, but groundbreaking from a value inflection point for Paulex and for MDB.

So when you look at the core four positions, we have 4.1 million shares plus some warrants on eXoZymes. We have approximately 7.1 million shares and some warrants on Paulex with not only core value-creating readouts coming shortly, and we're hoping with eXoZymes some core value-creating commercial partnerships soon.

We own 100% of Public Ventures and we own 100% of PatentVest. So, if you start to do the math and you start to look at through the numbers of MDB and through the balance sheet of MDB, you start to look at that and say, okay, what could those be?

Well, we think that there's significant multibillion-dollar potential in things like eXoZymes and Paulex. We think there's perhaps not in the short run for Public Ventures and PatentVest that kind of potential. but we think there's great potential for those as well. And so when you look at how much of these we own and what it can mean and you do the math, you divide by roughly 10 million shares outstanding, you could start to realize that there's a lot of leverage embedded in MDB shares and that we certainly don't think it's being reflected in current stock price.

So, there's no value predictions on this page by design. But I think what you'll see is we have a core belief in all of them. Nothing's changed. And we're looking to make sure that we focus on getting all these things to a value inflection point as soon as possible.

I don't need to read Tony's long risk factors again, but all these things, there are no sure things in life. What we want to say here is while we're super optimistic, you never know what can happen. So, the microcap market is probably, in my mind, the biggest variable that we're not in control of.

I think execution, we still have to execute on all these. We feel confident in our execution. We're working every day to make it happen, and we're super excited. So when you zoom out a bit, what we're really trying to do is protect against dilution and distribute the value, again, as we've always talked about, monetize or get to a value inflection is really where we're at, not dilute MDB and distribute those things out because if we can operate on $5 million to $6 million a year, and we generate some fees to offset those., you have an enormous amount of leverage in your ownership in MDBH.

So, looking at first half operations, again, that marketplace, our ability to get things done. We got two transactions done in the first half. We participated in an IPO for Ticketplus, again, closed right after the end of the second quarter. We didn't do a lot of transactions, but it did offset some of our overhead.

So, our first half numbers do reflect those two transactions. The pipeline remains active. we have a lot of really great things in the pipeline. Our quality bar is unchanged. But some of these things, again, you really want to make sure that the backdrop is great to launch these things. The backdrop does impact how many of these we do. So, when the backdrop is bad, you got to focus on ones that you can absolutely pound the table with impunity with to get done. We've, if you look back at the history of MDB, there's been times, I referenced Pulse Biosciences when we did that IPO, we barely got it done.

It was a really, really, really bad time to do IPOs, and we got it done through conviction and through pounding the table. And it's provided unbelievable returns for our shareholders. So, we're still going to pound the table and get life-changing things done, but it's not like we're going to be able to get them done at the same rate while the markets are the way they are.

We're looking at two transactions, could be Paulex, could be another one in the second half. So, when you look at our sort of our fee income to offset expenses, look to those kind of transactions in the second half of the year. We have one fee transaction that we're working on that could be quite significant. There is a lot of leverage in what we do at MDB. So, we're hoping to surprise you with some things that we're working on that are not necessarily apparent today.

Again, I talked to the capital discipline. As we spin out PatentVest and as we partner off the clearing ops, we can bring down our platform to about $6 million in total operational expenses that can be offset.

That's a really sort of critical number because it provides us sustainability without dilution. And that's where, as a shareholder, I'm trying to protect against and not have to sell our positions too early and wait for those key inflection points. In some cases, if I saw an opportunity to invest more to do more, the great news is I don't see that.

What I see is that we've invested in these things. they're ready. They need to go off on their own. The ones that are already public or about to go public are, they can live on their own. So, we're excited. We think it's a sustainable thing. It's going to be lumpy. It always has been lumpy historically. Since we're not doing three to five transactions a year of new big ideas, it's going to be lumpy, and there's no way to get around it.

I would say that as a public company, sometimes you have to deal with the lumpiness. Unfortunately, there's sort of no way to get around it. But the underlying value, we're still very excited about. I think I pretty much covered this. Basically launch big ideas, operate lean and own equity in meaningful new companies, tons of leverage. Any one of them becomes a $1 billion enterprise like the three we launched before we went public. The return, the leverage to MDB shareholders is massive.

And it's easy to get morose in environments like this and say, "Oh my God, it's never going to happen." From my perspective, I always say you're only as good as your last performance.

So that faith and basically that we can recreate the magic is everyone gets tried in these environments. Certainly, whether it's employees, myself, all of us, we get tried, but we still really believe in what we're doing.

I'm energized every day to launch these new enterprises. So, if you look at 17 IPOs over the 29 years, all of them have traded a significant premium at some time post IPO and reach valuations enabling follow-on capital. So again, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns, but we're highly confident that as rotation happens, our companies are going to get noticed. It is a difficult environment for microcaps, but it's also the place if you're patient and you research your positions well, and we have some really sophisticated investors in our community.

It's an opportunity for them to do their research, dig in, understand them, and they represent really great opportunities. We're trying our best to get those investors to go visit these companies, understand what they're doing and gain their own conviction because that's the key in these hard times.

So, what keeps us excited is we know that we're creating companies that make a positive difference. That's what keeps me still working today is in doing what I'm doing in difficult times.

We know that these companies are game-changing potential companies that really, really will make a difference.

It's the only reason I do what I do today. It's an exciting time to be alive with what's happening in AI, what it's enabling for companies like eXoZymes, like PatentVest and others, it really is one of the most transformative periods in our history. And we really want to thank you for being part of our community and at MDB and help driving what, to make a difference in what we do and with all these companies we love.

So, with that, George, I'll open it up to you.

George Brandon

Look, so the first question is, can you talk a little bit about how these portfolio companies, obviously, with PatentVest and the Public Ventures broker-dealer, you have control of those. But like say, eXoZymes and Paulex Bio, what are you doing to help these companies kind of recognize their full value or help them for people to know about them and learn about them. What are you doing for portfolio companies? What impact are we having as a firm on those companies?

Christopher Marlett

I think that what we have to offer, especially after launching, is our close to three decades of experience of how to manage it. If you look at, eXoZymes is a great example. I spend, we all have been spending a lot of, our team to be spending a lot of time on eXoZymes. And the markets have pivoted and changed, right?

To us, it should be obvious that these guys could be finally deliver on Synthetic Biology SynBio, but we've had to pivot and say, listen, guys, let's help on commercialization. Let's pick up the phone. Let's actually help eXoZymes secure those commercial relationships. And our community, us, we have a lot of relationships that can bring to bear on that. And we're doing that.

We're spending real time with the team at eXoZymes, not taking anything away from them. It's hands on deck, right? With regard to getting recognized, we have to really dig in and help them to translate that to the world. It's very, very difficult. It's a complex science. But we've spent a lot of time working with the team to simplify it and translate it. So you take a company like Paulex, same thing. You've got, the life science sector in a sense has come back a bit. Obviously, the sector they're in is super exciting, super vibrant. But making very tough decisions about what's the best way to go public.

Do you go public with a partner on board already? Or do you just do the IPO before, which is what our plan has been. There's a lot of real considerations in helping develop these companies and helping develop the value of these companies. And I think connecting the dots is really the key thing for all these small companies.

These small companies there's a wall of doubt and worry that surrounds all these things, and it's really making it obvious to investors that they have the right plan to get there, right? And we spend a lot of time on that. And then just getting them in front of people, right? That's what you do in the community. We got to get them in front of people that can make a difference. I don't think that your average, we're not really an investment bank per se, even though we own one.

But most investment banks are just interested in getting a transaction done and getting paid. We're interested in seeing the stocks go up. So, we're redoubling our efforts. And when the markets are slow, it gives us more time as a small organization to help these companies.

So that's great. It also gives us more time to focus on the launch of PatentVest and also more time to get some sort of value-creating deal with Public Ventures as well. If the current market is slow and new launches are more difficult, then you focus on the ones you have and helping get them there. We're a small but mighty organization in our own mind and you just got to focus. I think the idea behind this presentation was to say, hey, we're focused on getting these core assets that we haven't fully realized to realization of their value.

George Brandon

So it's great, it was great hearing about the different companies. But as a shareholder for MDB, can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing, what you're planning to do? This is a pretty good story. If you buy into the leverage here, how are you getting that story out and the message out to other shareholders so that people would join in here with where the stock is at. What have you been up to?

Christopher Marlett

Well, I've been doing a few podcasts. I don't know how, again, sometimes we go out and go to these conferences and what have you. But we went to the Planet MicroCap conference, and it's kind of, they put on a wonderful conference. I don't want to take anything away from them, but it's a little depressing to see how unpopulated these conferences are, right? We've been to two microcap conferences. And we know that waxes and wanes and changes and whatever else, but there's just not a lot of new blood there.

So you get out to conferences where I'm doing a few podcasts. I don't know how much reach they really have. You try and simplify and tell the story in a different way. But when your asset class is out of favor, you got to, it's challenging. But like I said, nothing stays constant, everything is always changing.

So you just be consistent with out there informing people, telling getting the message spread the best you can. We talk to these Family Office platforms or RIA platforms. It's really interesting. What I love is people love the concept of what we're doing, and they understand it from an intellectual perspective. But that's not where the money is flowing. So they're no longer putting money in private equity as much.

They're no longer putting money in traditional venture as much, but they don't need to because you can buy NVIDIA and just get all the liquidity you want and make lots of money until you can't, right? So I think that that's the way I look at it is we just stay consistent, do that work, continue to tell the thing. If anybody, and by the way, if anyone's got any bright ideas, we're all ears, right? So we're not, we certainly don't believe we've got it all figured out. So we rely upon our shareholders telling us what they think and what we can do.

George Brandon

So HeartBeam didn't make your four horsemen there, but our share position on that is small compared to the other four, obviously. But one of the questions here is how do you feel about HeartBeam right now and the technology and where the company is at?

Christopher Marlett

It can be completely transformative. Nothing's changed. They've got the ability to, with an ambulatory device read ECG signals better than anybody that we know of. I think that they've now acknowledged that trying to launch the product on their own was not the right approach. I think that there are plenty of people that can integrate that technology platform into their product or service category. And it's more capital efficient.

If the market is not going to give, it's going to dilute you, why would you continue, you've got one of the best technologies out there. Why would you dilute your shareholders to do something that's super capital intensive at this price, right? And quite frankly, they don't have the team to launch the product appropriately. We try to give good counsel on them, but we don't run the company, right?

But I think that their strategy now is the right strategy. And now they need to, whether it's work with foreign governments or work with other ECG makers, other ambulatory monitoring companies, whether it be wearables or whoever, this device needs to be in every airport, and every airplane in every public office and every sports team. This device needs to be everywhere, every health clinic in the world because it's going to save millions of lives. But they got to get, they have to do the partnership deals, much like eXoZymes. It's all about partnership deals. You've got to leverage your technology platform with people that have the channels open already.

So I'm very happy to see them moving in that direction. It extends the runway and enables them to get to commercialization with less dilution. And so nothing's changed except the stock price is depressing. But again, for somebody that does their work and goes in there and understands it, spend some time with management. I think now that their strategy is, I think, the right strategy, this could represent an unbelievable opportunity for investors.

George Brandon

Back to eXoZymes and final question. If you have a question, go ahead and hit that Q&A button down at the bottom of the screen and type it in. We've got time for one or two more questions. But regarding eXoZymes' financing, they were hoping to raise a lot more money, ended up raising around $6 million. Can you kind of characterize the challenges? I think you kind of have already, but you might want to resummarize kind of where they were at and where they're going.

Christopher Marlett

You want to manage dilution. Again, they're also capital efficient. They have huge asymmetric upside. They're OpEx, depending on grants or whatever, around $10 million a year. And I think that one of the things that we've talked about is if NCT becomes its own platform that's funded separately, that becomes a real, not only value-creating event, but also lessens the capital needs of developing NCT.

But I think there's other molecules that they can do deals on as well. So I think that you could see strategic investments, you could see spin-outs that help fund things that are nondilutive, right, that actually create value. I'm not promising those things. I'm just saying that I know those are things that they're working on and that could happen. I think once you get to a value inflection point by these commercial deals happening, these offerings become less dilutive.

More importantly, it becomes easy to do a financing once people clearly see that this thing is going to be commercial and it's no longer just a technology platform. I think that as soon as we see those commercial deals happen, I think people are going to get it.

George Brandon

Okay. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. Tony, do you have any closing comments before Chris wraps up?

Tony Dammicci

No, George. I think if that's all we've got for today, we just want to say again, thank you for attending, and this will wrap up today's call. Thanks, everyone.