Earnings call transcript: SES AI Corp Q2 2025 misses revenue expectations

SES AI Corp (NASDAQ:SCS) reported its second-quarter earnings for 2025, revealing a revenue shortfall against forecasts, which led to notable stock price movements. The company posted a revenue of $3.5 million, falling short of the expected $4.5 million, marking a 22.22% miss. Despite this, SES AI Corp’s stock saw a 13.22% increase in after-hours trading, closing at $1.31, as investors responded to other positive aspects of the company’s performance and outlook. According to InvestingPro data, the stock currently trades near its Fair Value, with impressive gross profit margins of 74.6% in the last twelve months.

Key Takeaways

• SES AI Corp missed its Q2 2025 revenue forecast by 22.22%.
• The stock rose by 13.22% in after-hours trading despite the revenue miss.
• Strong liquidity position with $229 million and no debt.
• Product innovation continues with the launch of the Deep Space AI agent.
• Strategic acquisition of UC Energy to enter the energy storage market.

Company Performance

SES AI Corp’s performance in Q2 2025 was mixed. The company reported a gross margin of 74% and a significant decrease in cash used in operations, down 51% from the same period last year. The company’s focus on innovation, particularly in the battery domain, and its strategic acquisition of UC Energy, highlight its commitment to long-term growth and market expansion. InvestingPro analysis reveals 12+ additional insights about SES’s financial health and growth prospects, available exclusively to subscribers.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $3.5 million, missing the forecast by 22.22%.
• Gross margin: 74%.
• Cash used in operations: $10.8 million, a 51% decrease year-over-year.
• Liquidity: $229 million with no debt.

Earnings vs. Forecast

SES AI Corp’s Q2 2025 earnings report revealed a significant revenue miss, with actual revenues of $3.5 million compared to the forecasted $4.5 million. This 22.22% shortfall is noteworthy, especially when compared to the company’s historical performance, which has typically aligned more closely with market expectations.

Market Reaction

Despite the revenue miss, SES AI Corp’s stock surged by 13.22% in after-hours trading, closing at $1.31. This increase is likely due to investor optimism surrounding the company’s strong liquidity position and strategic initiatives, such as the acquisition of UC Energy and the launch of the Deep Space AI agent. The stock’s movement contrasts with its 52-week range, where it had previously seen a low of $0.20 and a high of $2.53.

Outlook & Guidance

SES AI Corp maintains a full-year 2025 revenue guidance range of $15 million to $25 million. The company expects revenue growth driven by software and service subscriptions, novel battery materials, and AI-enhanced cell sales. The next version of its Molecular Universe platform is anticipated in September or October, which could further bolster its market position.

Executive Commentary

"Our mission is to accelerate the world’s energy transition through material discovery and battery management," stated Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, highlighting the company’s strategic focus. Jim Neelis, CFO, emphasized financial discipline and growth potential, saying, "We remain financially disciplined with substantial liquidity and no debt positioning us for scalable and long-term growth."

Risks and Challenges

• Revenue volatility: The significant miss in revenue forecasts could indicate challenges in market demand or execution.
• Market competition: The energy storage and AI markets are highly competitive, potentially impacting market share.
• Economic conditions: Broader macroeconomic pressures could affect consumer spending and investment in technology sectors.

Q&A

Analysts raised several questions during the earnings call, focusing on strategic initiatives and market opportunities. Winnie Dong from Deutsche Bank inquired about the rationale behind the UC Energy acquisition, while Derek Soderbergh from Cantor Fitzgerald explored opportunities in the UAM and drone markets. John Roy from Water Tower Research sought insights into enterprise feedback on the Molecular Universe platform and its future features.

Full transcript - SES AI Corp (SES) Q2 2025:

Jayla, Moderator: Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today’s I Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Release and Call. My name is Jayla, and I’ll be your moderator for today. All lines will be muted in the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Kyle Pinkham.

Please proceed.

Kyle Pinkham, Host, SCS AI: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our conference call covering our second quarter twenty twenty five results. Joining me today are Qi Chiaohu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer and Jim Neelis, Chief Financial Officer. We issued our shareholder letter just after four p. M. This afternoon to provide the business update as well as our financial results.

You’ll find a press release with a link to our shareholder letter in today’s conference call webcast in the Investor Relations section of our website at scs.ai. Before we get started, this is a reminder that the discussion today may contain forward looking information or forward looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Such statements involve certain risks, assumptions and uncertainties, which may cause our actual or future results and performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in these statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from our current expectations include, but are not limited to, those detailed in the latest earnings release and in our SEC filings.

This afternoon, we will review our business as well as the results for the quarter. With that, I’ll pass it over to Qi Qian.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Thanks, Kyle, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. We had another strong quarter with significant progress achieved on key product revenue development and profitability milestones. And recently in third quarter, we continued that momentum to grow our profitability and revenue through an acquisition agreement that leverages our strength in molecular universe battery materials discovery and safety monitoring capabilities with an established player in the energy storage space. In the first quarter, since the public release of Molecular Universe, I’m pleased to see that we now have more than 30 companies that have begun trial testing the enterprise level and many more in the pipeline. Our mission is to accelerate the world’s energy transition through material discovery and battery management.

We are excited to see Molecular Universe helping human scientists to be more creative and develop new products much faster. Since our launch of All In Our AI a year ago, we have been progressing through four stages. The first is chatbot. We achieved this milestone with the original launch of Molecular Universe Zero. Molecular Universe is a powerful LLM specifically trained on the world’s most comprehensive battery domain expertise combined with the world’s largest and most accurate battery relevant molecule property databases, computed through our recent advancement in GPU accelerated large scale computation chemistry algorithm.

The second is AI agent. We achieved this milestone with last month’s introduction of Deep Space in molecular universe 0.5, an agentic capability that can conduct senior scientist level battery research. These states can reduce product development time from years to just tens of minutes. The ROI on this capability for battery development teams is tremendous. The third is physical AI.

This is where we are right now. Physical AI is the integration of molecular universe with physical systems including drones, humanoid robotics, EV, UAM, and the largest of all energy storage systems or ESS. We are on track with EV B sample development with our EV OEM customers and growing revenue from our AI enhanced lithium ion and lithium metal cells for drones and UAM. And our recent agreement to acquire Uzi Energy launches us into ESS physical AI by providing the opportunity to integrate UZ’s ESS hardware with Molecular Universe material discovery platform, LFP and sodium ion for ESS, and PRECISE battery health monitoring system. The fourth is revenue machine.

The world’s energy transition ultimately needs real physical products with software and hardware integrated. We expect exciting revenue growth to come from five areas of focus. These include, a, software and service. This will come from our molecular universe tool platform subscriptions and development projects from cell and materials makers. B, materials.

We are producing and selling novel electrolytes and other battery materials discovered through Molecular Universe. C, sales. We’re producing and selling AI enhanced lithium metal and high silicon lithium ion cells using electrolytes discovered through molecular universe for drones, UAM and humanoid robotics. And d, EV development service. This is the original project that deployed the molecular universe with b sample development with leading EV OEMs for lithium metal cells.

And last but certainly not least, ESS. We’ll be producing and selling ESS hardware and software solutions that deploy safe and long cycle life materials and precise health monitoring from Molecular Universe. This is where we expect to not only grow UC Energy’s core business, but also leverage that integration with Molecular Universe. To implement this platform strategy, we already have the world’s best material discovery team. We have been busy recruiting more top talent and looking for inorganic acquisition opportunities such as the one with Uzi Energy that accelerate and extend this strategy.

The reason that so many people are excited about our molecular universe platform and want to join us is that they see SCS AI uniquely has all the ingredients required to build the best AI platform for energy transition. Some large battery companies don’t dedicate enough resources to train AI models such as cleaning and organizing data, developing large scale computation algorithms, and purchasing computing power. And other large pure AI companies simply don’t have access to high quality battery data. People that join FCS AI will have unparalleled access to high quality battery data that are not available anywhere else, ranging from single molecule to formulations to cell levels, both through actual experiments and high accuracy simulation. And they will be able to sell products that are not just safer and demonstrate better performance than their competition, but improve much faster.

We will share more updates on all of this in the coming months. Now here’s Jeanne Ellis for financial updates.

Jim Neelis, Chief Financial Officer, SCS AI: Thank you. I will discuss our financial performance for the 2025 and provide some context on how we’re deploying our capital to support ICS’ long term growth and the platform strategy Qichao mentioned earlier. Revenue for the second quarter was 3,500,000.0 with a 74% gross margin. Our Q2 revenue was primarily driven by contracts with our automotive OEM customers to develop AI enhanced lithium metal and lithium ion battery materials for EV applications. As noted in our preannouncement, we affirmed our full year 2025 revenue guidance of 15,000,000 to 25,000,000.

We utilized 10,800,000.0 in cash for operations in the second quarter, which was a 51% decrease from q two twenty twenty four and a 53% decrease from q one twenty twenty five. We have been emphasizing our operational discipline for the past few quarters and the significant reduction in cash usage in operations is a result of executing our plan to deploy capital effectively while growing our top line. We concluded the quarter with a strong liquidity position of 229,000,000 with no debt. We also announced a agreement to acquire UC Energy. I’m very excited about this strategic move to provide us the foothold in the fast growing global ESS market and propel us forward as we expedite the implementation of intelligent energy storage solutions to address the escalating power needs of the AI error.

We have a tremendous opportunity to grow the UC Energy business from approximately $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 in projected revenue for the full year 2025 to exponentially larger growth in the coming year together with the market share gains in the 300,000,000,000 global ESS market. We’ll continue to allocate our capital to focus on our AI platform enhancements and growth to support our global commercial readiness through 2025 and beyond through organic growth and acquisitions. We have also allocated capital to share repurchases. While we didn’t complete any repurchases during the second quarter, in the third quarter, we have repurchased and canceled 871,754 shares for a total investment of $1,100,000 or roughly $1.27 per share. In summary, we remain financially disciplined with substantial liquidity and no debt positioning us for scalable and long term growth.

We appreciate your continued support and confidence in SDS AI. Thank you. Now I will turn the call back to the operator.

Jayla, Moderator: We will now begin our question and answer session. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, it is star followed by one Our Our first question comes from Winnie Dong with the company Deutsche Bank. Winnie, your line is now open.

Winnie Dong, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: I was wondering if you can tell us a bit more about UV Energy, the the genesis of that of that purchase, and then how you plan to leverage that business on a go forward basis? And then secondly, I think you mentioned that you are on the lookout for more M and A opportunities. I was wondering if you can elaborate a bit on more on that. You know, what kind of other companies are looking for? What does

Jim Neelis, Chief Financial Officer, SCS AI: the pipeline look like right now? Thank you.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Yeah. We on U Z, they were actually one of the earliest companies in ESS. Ten years ago, they used to take LFP cells for EV applications and then supply them for ESS applications. And so the rationale for Uzi is really so for ESS, we talked about entering ESS end of last year, and then this is a really exciting market for us in addition to EV. And then they have good hardware capability, and they take sales and then it and then integrate them into these ESS containers.

And then ESS actually is now the number one used for molecular universe, the LP and the sodium chemistries. So now that by integrating with Uzi, now we have material development for LP’s sodium from molecular universe, and then we have the hardware integration, and then we also get data. So one thing that makes Molecular Universe much more powerful than any other tools out there in the industry is access to high quality real world battery data that no other AI model in this field has. So now you have the new materials chemistry and then the hardware integration from from Uzi, and then and then now the actual data. And then we can also, add our avatar, like, universe on top of that to really ensure safety.

So that integration, really makes sense to us.

Winnie Dong, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Thank you. And then just on the on the second question on other opportunities other m and a opportunities?

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Yes. I think we’re open to new opportunities and because March Universe really empowers so many areas, not just at the material side, the material discovery side, but but also material production and then also, different, applications, drones, ESS. So we’re looking at, a few other opportunities.

Jim Neelis, Chief Financial Officer, SCS AI: Great. Thank you.

Jayla, Moderator: Our next question comes from Derek Soderbergh with the company Cantor Fitzgerald. Derek, your line is now open.

Derek Soderbergh, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Keith, Jing, good to see you guys and hear from you. Just I wanted to get an update on the UAM and drone opportunity. It feels like that opportunity is sort of the nearest, you know, for you guys to potentially get your lithium metal technology out there. What sort of needs to happen on the supply chain to ensure that that ramp happens smoothly and sort of the plan still to ramp, you know, the UAM or drone opportunities sort of next year? Is that still the the timeline?

And then I’ve got a follow-up.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Yeah. And, actually, our revenue from drones and, UAM, has increased this year. And then a lot of the customers, especially in The US, wanna move away from their current supply chain. And then we are in the process of updating and also certifying our career line so that it will be compliant to that request. But, yeah, that revenue is increasing.

Derek Soderbergh, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: And what what kind of capacity, you know, revenue capacity do you think you guys have, you know, sort of for the drones and UAMs at this point?

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: We said so in terms of capacity, we’re now working so our current career line and also country manufacturing partners, we can get to pretty high capacity. And then that capacity is much higher than the the current orders we have.

Derek Soderbergh, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Got it. So it doesn’t sound like that’s a huge issue there. Got it. And then just as my follow-up on the software piece, 30 companies trial testing. I know it’s only been a few months now.

But what do you think it’s going to take to get one of those companies to sort of move to a joint development tier? Is it just a matter of time testing the platform? Is it sort of identifying a certain amount of cost savings with the R and D process? What do you think it’s going to take to get one of those companies to to join development here? Thanks.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Yeah. This is a really interesting area, and then it’s it’s so new because the use of AI, it it’s just not that widely used in the battery industry as it is in other industries. So I think we are really close to a few large ones, and I think the key is really seeing that this is not just a platform, but actually, it can deliver a solution that’s much better than the best human scientists can. So right now, some of the largest battery companies are giving challenge to molecular universe and then see if it can solve problems that the smartest human scientists cannot. And then once we can demonstrate that, then I think that’s game over, and then it will be the start of a wide adoption of like universe.

It needs to solve a problem that’s harder and it cannot be solved by the best human scientist.

Derek Soderbergh, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Perfect. Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Jayla, Moderator: Our next question comes from John Roy with the company Water Tower Research. John, your line is now open.

John Roy, Analyst, Water Tower Research: Great. I wanted to continue on the molecular universe. What is the overall general feedback from the enterprises that are currently using it? Are they wanting a lot more features? What’s the what are they doing with it mostly?

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Yeah. So in terms of a tool platform is already more accurate and more powerful than any other tools out there. And then a lot of the the companies, instead of asking for more features, they want more accurate results. And then and the and the one test they’re doing is actually given a really hard task that human scientists cannot solve. So if you use my universe as a scientific curiosity chatbot, then it already outperforms anything else out there.

But then if it’s so now the the task is, can it solve a problem that, human scientists cannot solve? Like, a a problem that intrigued the human scientists and then, for a long time, and then the team has not been able to solve. So that’s what we’re trying to do next.

John Roy, Analyst, Water Tower Research: Great. And do you have any expectations when the next release might be coming and what some of those features might be? I mean, are you putting in costs? Sorry. I haven’t gotten into the tool that much.

And manufacturability issues into the system yet? Yes.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: So we expect the next version to be sometime in September, October time time frame, and then that will include more more accurate cell level data. So then the prediction will be even more accurate.

John Roy, Analyst, Water Tower Research: Great. Thanks so much.

Qi Qian, Founder and CEO, SCS AI: Thank you.

Jayla, Moderator: There are no more questions registered in queue. I’d like to pass the conference back over to our hosting team for closing remarks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.