Hey everyone, Lou Basenese here, President and Chief Market Strategist at MDB Capital. I am pleased to be joined today for this fireside chat by Michael Heltzen, CEO of Invizyne Technologies. Welcome, Michael. Thank you very much. We have a lot of ground that we want to cover today, for sure. But first off, I know that you wanted to start off with a big thank you on the heels of Invizyne's IPO in mid-November, so I'll let you take it away. Yeah, I think it's important we end the year here on a heartfelt thank you to our co-founders, all our team members that have been working so hard this year, MDB that helped us with the IPO and getting the company up to where it is today, and obviously all the investors that have shown us support and help with getting the company up to where it is today. So we have a lot of support from the investors, all the investors that have shown us support and help with getting the IPO done. We're now a public company, and we feel great about that. We have a number of other stakeholders around us. We have a number of grant agencies like the DOE and the DOD that, via different groups and funding abilities, have been supportive over the years to the tune of $14 million. So obviously very grateful for that. The people at, for example, National Renewable Laboratories and at Biomate, they're more than just the capital resources. It's also knowledge resources, support infrastructure, and all of those things. And we shouldn't forget that we are part of the community around us. So everything from UCLA, where our technology came from, and Caltech, where a number of our talented people come from, and the local community of Monrovia. And we had even some very friendly federal agents from the DOE, sorry, the DEA visiting us the other day. And everybody is doing these fundamental steps that allows us to be who we are today. And if we think further back than just this year, there has been tens of thousands of hours of scientists working on different parts of science that we are now putting together with the realizations they have had over generations to allow us to do what we do today. So a fundamental thank you to everybody. Yeah, no, I want to reiterate the thank you on behalf of MDB Capital. It was a difficult market to bring companies public in 2024 for sure, but we have long believed in Invisign and took the time necessary to make sure it got public. And thankfully, it's been very well received. And the good thing I'm also thankful for, Michael, as you mentioned, the DOE, the DOD, BioMADE, NREL, and the DEA, but not the DOG. We do not need the governmental official agency coming in yet. We've got a lot of work to do. So any more non-dilutive grant funding, the better that we can get. So we've got a lot of ground to cover, kind of where the company and the technologies come from, where it's going. I know you want to share kind of behind the scenes, a little strategy, understanding of that. But first, why don't we start, in very just simple layman's terms, what is it exactly that Invisign Technologies does? What does the technology do? Yeah, we build bio solutions. So basically, where humankind have built a lot of things based on petrochemicals, or things we have taken from nature and made into chemicals, we make a new generation of that. So we are able to re-engineer enzymes that we'll talk about in a minute here. Put them in a bioreactor and make them produce all kinds of chemicals that turn into products like drugs and nutraceuticals and flavors and fragrances and a lot of other things, all the way out to industrial chemicals like biofuels and everything that makes the modern life. Yeah, so I hear that definition and it makes me think synthetic biology, but I know that's a term that investors are familiar with, with companies that have come public and gone on large runs and then have come back down to earth. What's the difference between traditional synthetic biology and what Invisign is doing? Yeah, synthetic biology, for the people that have acquainted themselves with that, was this promise of basically using cells as chemical factories. And it's an amazing pitch. I will give it that for sure. The challenge, though, is that it doesn't work in most cases. And the difference between what we do and the first generation of biomanufacturing by synthetic biology is basically that cells don't want to do chemicals they don't benefit from. Cells don't want to do chemicals that potentially even kills the cells. So they're obviously fighting back. And even if you get cells to make some chemical for you, you end up with this cell slurry of all kinds of things where you then need to isolate your chemical out. And the isolation cost is often higher than the value of the compound. And you'll have no business case in that case. So it's not gone well for Zunbio. And what we hope to do for all of those fine people that have worked in that space and understood so much about how enzymes inside of cells can do this chemical production, we hope to partner up with them to help them liberate the enzymes. From the cells and all the problems that come from the cells and allow them to run the enzymatic pathways, as it's called. But basically these enzymes that break things down and builds them up in new versions of chemicals that ends up being our end product. So we help those people stuck in synthetic biology get unstuck. Or we help people that haven't been in that space at all and just want biosolutions that are everything from much cleaner and renewable into things that are just like completely new and allows for product and chemicals that otherwise haven't existed and therefore allows for new competitive advantages and product features and other good things like that. Yeah. So it's not really just the next generation. It's really a paradigm shift in the way things have been done in terms of biomanufacturing. What kinds of chemicals, right? As a layman, I hear chemicals and I start to gloss over. It's almost like reading organic chemistry when I took my pre-med classes, right? It's just not something that in my everyday life I understand. But the things that you're talking about Invisign and I know commercially in discussions about making are things that really impact us everyday life. For instance, drugs, pharmaceuticals, right? So can you give us an idea of what are the chemicals that you're specifically targeting to help people better understand really the potential of this technology? Yeah. So the opportunity when you have a technology and science breakthrough like ours is that you can do everything. That's obviously from a commercial point of view how you end up basically trying to drink the ocean and get nothing done. So specifically, what we want to do is we want to hone in on strategically focus on specific applications that has a high degree of value creation in a relatively short amount of time to get the platform going and then we can expand into other things. So next year we'll be talking about our strategy basically that is about nutraceuticals that has the potential of becoming pharmaceuticals and we will in addition to that also focus on extraordinary business opportunities. We can unpack that in a minute here. But... Why don't we go ahead? What's extraordinary? I mean, that's... Sure. So when you can argue that what we have experienced over the last number of years with the Department of Energy and others coming to us and saying it is of such high importance for the country that we can make isobutanol that can potentially be used for sustainable aviation fuel and a number of other things that they have been, first of all, sponsoring synthetic biology for many years and not a lot of things to show for that. But they came to us and said like, if we give you money, would you try to build such a bio solution for us? And in a business case where we get paid to build something and we get to own it completely, that's obviously an extraordinary business opportunity. You could dream about a world where all our partners would come and just pay for it all and let us have all the upside. That's not how life works. And honestly, we wouldn't want that. We want our partners to have healthy, motivational reasons for bringing our co-developed products to market. But that's an example of an extraordinary business opportunity. And other extraordinary is also a way of saying we have to focus in the beginning. And what are the bottlenecks of our system in the current version is that we can do a lot of different things. But obviously, if we start with the ones that are high value per volume, then we don't need to do as much work to get to revenue and value increase and the stepping stones that will bring the company forward. That's why we are honing in on pharmaceuticals that is often the most high valuable per weight that you can do, because that has a longer timeline. Then it's the specific versions where on top of living up to the value proposition of pharmaceuticals, it's also are there any of those that can be introduced as nutraceuticals? That basically means because they exist in nature already and people are already consuming those in small amounts, the FDA will recognize them as safe and therefore allow us and partners to bring it to market without FDA approval for certain use cases. Not treatment cases, but things like supplements and additives to foods and so forth. Yeah, so quicker to market and high value chemicals. Which I think would resonate with investors.