Cibus, Inc. Class A Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

I would like to thank you for taking the time to join us for Cibus' second quarter 2026 financial results and business update conference call and webcast. Presenting with me today is Craig Wichner, our chief executive officer, and Peter Beetham, co-founder, president, and chief operating officer. Greg Gocal, chief scientific officer, is available to participate during the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin the call, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast, including those regarding future financial results and future operational goals and industry prospects, are forward-looking and may be subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the call. Please refer to Cibus' SEC filings for a list of associated risks. The conference call is being webcast.

The webcast link, along with our press release and corporate presentation, are available on the investor relations section of cibus.com to assist you in your analysis of our business. With that, I would like to turn the call now over to Craig.

Thank you, Carlo, and good afternoon, everyone. This is my first earnings call as CEO, and I want to start with why I'm here. Cibus has built something rare over 25 years. I joined the Cibus board because the technology and the people are world-class, and I accepted the job of CEO because I believe we can generate revenue at scale. That is my mission. I studied biochemistry and molecular biology at UC San Diego in the city where our labs are today, and I've spent more than 30 years building technology companies and managing investments. For the last 17 of those years, I've managed organic and regenerative farmland on behalf of investors, where we drove higher returns on assets through the implementation of technology and smarter farming practices. We now have over $400 million of pristine cropland in Washington State, California, and Oregon.

I know firsthand the pressures that growers are under. Fertilizer costs more than it used to, and every grower I know is looking for a way to get more out of what they can afford. That is who Cibus serves. A grower works with what is in front of them: equipment, water, chemistry, better practices in the field. The seed is at the top of that list. It is the first decision of the season and the one you cannot take back, and it sets the ceiling that everything else is working towards. Seed innovation has been remarkable in corn and soybeans. For most other crops, it has been far slower because breeding takes years and is unpredictable. Every crop in the world is the product of plant breeding, and at Cibus, we make that part fast and precise. Cibus is a technology company.

We have an IP-protected platform that lets us make precise improvements to seeds and do it in a fraction of the time conventional breeding takes. Think of the genome as information, and think of our platform as the way we turn that information into better outcomes for farmers quickly and precisely. That speed is what our partners pay for. It lowers their development costs and puts their products in the market sooner. What we have built is an iterative and scalable platform. The work we do and the tools and the know-how behind it carry from one program to the next. When we develop a trait in one crop, we are not starting from scratch the next time. We are building on what we already know, and each program costs less than the last one did. For our partners, that advantage compounds, too.

It can put them a generation or two ahead of their competition within a decade. This capability is what informs our path ahead. Because the platform is scalable, it allows us to be nimble as we assess market and customer needs. That is the most important idea I want to leave with you today because it is how I want you to understand Cibus going forward. The same platform, the same foundational work, creates value across our business in three ways. The first is the revenue we are generating today through platform programs where we make edits for partners and share in the value created. Our Sustainable Ingredients work is the clearest example, and while it is still in the scaling phase, it drove a 35% increase in our revenue year to date. The second is our trait royalty business.

This is what we are pursuing with rice, for example, where we earn a royalty on every acre planted with our traits. It begins to scale with our commercial launches starting in Latin America, and it compounds over time as adoption grows. The third is deepening those same partnerships over time. What we offer a partner is a pipeline of traits, higher yields, resistance to disease, better quality crops for their own customers. Not one edit in one crop, but a steady supply of improvements across their portfolio. As those relationships mature, we become an extension of their breeding program, and the trust we earn in the first two tiers is what makes that reachable for us. This framework for how we think about and operate our business provides us with the optionality and allows us to match the right model to each market opportunity.

In row crops, where a small number of large seed companies dominate, the rational approach is to license our traits to that industry and earn royalties on every acre planted. We become a technology partner that accelerates their pipeline. For partners who are set up to work with us directly, we contract for platform access. As those relationships mature and partners open up their product development roadmaps to Cibus, that partnership deepens. That is what the scalability of our platform gives us, the flexibility to leverage a singular project into a broader opportunity set that may cover an entire crop or ingredient strategy in a time-bound, predictable, and resource-efficient manner. Again, I joined the Cibus board nine months ago, so I came in knowing the company. Over the past two months as CEO, my conviction has grown.

I've spent most of my time with our teams, and what I found is traits and programs built up over 25 years across many crops, much of it closer to product than most people would expect. Peter will take you through where those stand. I am reviewing every program, every expense, and every opportunity with a simple lens. What drives near-term revenue, what strengthens the balance sheet, and what unlocks the value we have already built? We will run this company with capital discipline. We are prioritizing resource allocation and increasing our investment in technology and AI to make our team more productive. Before I hand it over, I want to thank Peter for welcoming me to the team and for the capabilities he continues to add to it as President and Chief Operating Officer.

Peter is a co-founder of this company, and he has led it through multiple phases of growth. My plan builds directly on the foundation that he and many other members of the team created. With that, let me hand it to Peter to walk through our commercial progress. Peter? Thanks, Craig, and good afternoon, everyone.

It is great to have Craig step in to lead Cibus as our new CEO. We are really fortunate here to have a farming industry leader, a scientist, and a financier to lead Cibus to the next level. I want to spend my time building on what Craig said by showing you how his vision supports our near-term commercial interests this quarter, and how those approaches can translate to the amazing opportunities ahead of us as we work to deepen our industry partnerships. If I distill the quarter into one idea, it is that the conversations we described earlier this year are converting into commercial steps. Seed companies are coming to us not for a single edit in a single crop, but for an ongoing relationship where Cibus functions as an editing engine across their breeding programs. What does that mean in practice?

We are delivering value for customers in ways that weren't possible before. A seed company brings us its own elite variety. We edit it and return it improved in that same variety. We have now done that repeatedly and across crops. We previously improved 10 customers' canola and winter oilseed rape lines with six returns. We transferred our herbicide tolerance traits into elite rice germplasm. We delivered three improved rice lines to a U.S. customer, and we edited rice material and delivered it back to our first Latin American customer, Interoc. Every one of those represents the building blocks of value, and our goal is to confirm the 12-month turnaround of edits for all crops, just as we have done in canola. Let me go deeper into our two priority near-term programs, Sustainable Ingredients and rice. In Craig's framing, these are the first two tiers.

Sustainable Ingredients is generating platform program revenue today, and rice is a trait royalty business that scales when our customer launches in the field. Starting with Sustainable Ingredients, which continues to generate R&D revenue, this program includes gene-engineered yeast to produce oils that consumer product companies need. For instance, take fragrance ingredients, the molecules that give a product its scent. These are made in a fermenter rather than pumped from petroleum or extracted from harvested plants. This program is generating revenue, and it is a proof point for the platform model. We received our first customer payment from this program in the fourth quarter of 2025. It is now in a commercial ramp-up phase with our consumer products partner. Revenue steps up when four things happen in order. First, our partner confirms the ingredient performs in their product. Second, we produce it at full commercial scale.