GeoVax Labs at Emerging Growth Conference 85: Strategic Vaccine Developments

On Wednesday, 20 August 2025, GeoVax Labs (NASDAQ:GOVX) presented at the Emerging Growth Conference 85, showcasing its ambitious plans in vaccine development. The company highlighted its focus on underserved markets and a robust patent portfolio, while also addressing its financial strategies and collaboration goals. Despite the positive outlook, challenges remain in securing funding and navigating regulatory pathways.

Key Takeaways

• GeoVax aims to raise $30 million annually through equity sales and partnerships.
• The company is developing vaccines for COVID-19, MPOXX, and solid tumor cancers.
• Bitfufu, another presenter, reported strong growth in cloud mining revenue.
• GeoVax plans to generate revenue within three years, leveraging WHO prequalification.
• Bitfufu’s strategy includes vertical integration and horizontal innovation in Bitcoin mining.

GeoVax Labs Update

Business Goals and Focus:

• Developing vaccines for infectious diseases like COVID-19 and MPOXX, and therapies for solid tumor cancers.
• Differentiation through a strong patent portfolio, including a new patent for a multi-antigen COVID-19 vaccine.
• Targeting underserved populations for expedited registration and equitable access.
• Aiming for a derisked approach to value development.

Key Programs:

• GeoMVA (MPOXX vaccine): Addresses a global market opportunity over $11 billion.
• GeoCMO4s1 (Multi-antigen COVID-19 vaccine): Targets 40 million adults in the US and 400 million worldwide with weakened immune systems.
• Gideptin (Solid Tumor Cancer): Focused initially on head and neck cancers.

Capital Development:

• Annual fundraising target of $30 million through equity sales, non-dilutive funding, and collaborations.
• Focus on high net worth individuals, family offices, and federal/non-governmental funding.

Strategic Alignment and Market Positioning:

• Aligning with the new administration’s focus on transparency and diverse vaccine platforms.
• Emphasizing accelerated US manufacturing and equitable access.

Bitfufu Inc Update

Overview:

• Operates as a self-miner and cloud miner, claiming to be one of the largest globally.
• 629,000 registered users on the cloud mining platform.
• Held 1,784 Bitcoin on the balance sheet as of July.

Financial Results:

• Cloud mining revenue increased by over 70% from Q1, with over half from new customers.
• Self-mining revenue declined year-over-year due to the halving event.
• EBITDA reported at $60.7 million.

Strategy and Operations:

• Focus on vertical integration and horizontal innovation.
• Expanding capacity to over a gigawatt by 2026.
• Average electricity cost of 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour for owned data centers.

Future Outlook

GeoVax Labs:

• Plans to accelerate GeoMVA, with a Phase 3 trial slated for the second half of next year.
• Expects revenue generation within three years, including potential WHO prequalification.

Bitfufu Inc:

• Aiming to acquire more data centers to reduce leased capacity.
• Positioning for potential shifts to high-performance computing or AI.

Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for a comprehensive understanding of the conference discussions.

Full transcript - Emerging Growth Conference 85:

Anna, Host: Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from GeoVax Labs, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol g o v x. It’s a clinical stage biotech company developing novel vaccines for many of the world’s most threatening infectious diseases and therapies for solid tumor cancers. Happy to welcome back chairman, president, CEO, David Dodd. Now, David, this is a good time to have, opportunity for an update on Geovac.

So please remind us of your business goals and your focus.

David Dodd, Chairman, President, CEO, GeoVax Labs: Thank you, Anna. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I appreciate everyone’s interest in GFX. So just to remind you, we’re a clinical stage biotech company. We develop infectious disease vaccines against such conditions as COVID nineteen or MPOXX, formerly known as monkeypox. We also have a tech, we also have a clinical program underway or in process, related to solid tumor cancer therapies.

That’s it. We’re initially working on head and neck So that’s what we’re focused on. We felt we differentiate ourselves or at least we believe we do, through we have a very strong patent portfolio. We just announced, in fact, a new patent being allowed today, a very broad patent in support of our multi antigen next generation COVID nineteen vaccine.

We target populations that are either unserved or underserved because we think that gives us an arena to really differentiate well. And and by doing that, we focus on achieving expedited registration pathways for being able to get to a commercialization, and we work towards business collaborations. And I’d say from an investor standpoint, we believe that the manner in which we run the business, in which we focus on our developments, we we have a derisk approach towards value development. We have the three programs advancing the priority programs. One is a GeoMVA, which is our candidate as a vaccine for MPOXX, a smallpox vaccine, actually is addressing a a global market opportunity that exceeds $11,000,000,000.

So there’s a lot of opportunity there, but that size of it also underscores how important it is and the need for such a product. GeoCMO four s one is our multi antigen vaccine for COVID nineteen. That, again, is addressing even a much larger opportunity, primarily those patients around the world, not only just in The US, who who have weakened immune systems because they may have blood cancers or other medical conditions. They just simply do not respond to what is currently authorized. The mRNA vaccines, the Novavax vaccines.

Over forty million adults fit that category in The US alone, four hundred million people worldwide. And finally, Gideptin is our solid tumor cancer. Again, we’re focused initially on head and neck, but this technology allows us to go after a very broad array of solid tumor cancers. We have milestones coming up throughout the remainder of this year, mostly in support of these three programs, but also our our advanced technology. We’re we’re moving forward to be able for infectious disease vaccines produce product much faster with greater yield and at a lower cost.

So we have a lot of exciting things to go forward with. But I also wanted to to mention, because people have asked us throughout with the new administration, do we align well with what is going on in the new administration out of HHS and others? In fact, we’ve actually mapped out how we align not only with just one particular political party, but across the the board. When you look at the bipartisan focus towards America first, towards ensuring that we have multiple and more diverse platforms for, for vaccine development and also that we have long term safety behind them. So this slide basically is is our response that demonstrates, in our opinion, that we align very well with the current administration as as well as those in regardless of the party that are focused on seeing more diverse, more transparent for development communications regarding the progress towards vaccines and making sure that more is being done as it should be done in The US, and we’re not dependent on foreign entities.

So that’s sort of where we are in terms of our business goals. The milestones address that. The alignment shows where we are. So I’ll I’ll turn it back to you right now for Anna.

Anna, Host: Wonderful. Well, David, did you wanna talk a little bit more about how GeoVax is adjusting to the new Trump administration and the HHS secretary, or have you come are you complete with that?

David Dodd, Chairman, President, CEO, GeoVax Labs: Couple more comments, and thank you for for bringing that up. You know, the the issue of transparency has been one that secretary Kennedy and others have have talked about since even before they were confirmed. And that is something that that we have been very involved with and believe very strongly. And I authored an op ed that was published in in late January, in genetic engineering news about the need for transparency in the in among vaccine leaders, those of us in the industry. Multi antigen vaccines is something that the secretary of HHS has come out publicly in, during, early April in in favor of saying we need more multi anti antigen vaccine approaches rather than the single antigen.

Single antigen are like mRNA and such as Novavax. Our whole technology is built around delivering anti antigen vaccine. So we align very well. And if you look at the other elements that have been espoused about accelerated US manufacturing, making sure that there’s equitable access to vaccines, we think that we align very strongly and well with the, with the the new administration as well as others in congress of of different political ideologies, but still that feel very strongly in this regard. So thank you for bringing that up.

Anna, Host: Great point. Thank you for answering that. Now talk a little bit about your objectives, plans, and strategy related to capital development.

David Dodd, Chairman, President, CEO, GeoVax Labs: Yes. Our our we target on an annual basis, and people are always interested about we’re we’re pre revenue. What that means is we continuously are looking to raise money. On an annual basis, we target approximately 30,000,000. You know, it may be 25,000,000 gets us there or either 20 plus, but we like to target to have more.

Last year, we brought in an excess of $25,000,000, and that enabled us to continue to progress and move forward. So that’s our target. We do that through the combination of not only just the sale of equity, but also non dilutive opportunities. We have on the equity side, we have multiple banking relationships and those with high interest and continuing to work with us. We believe that’s because we continue to to deliver on our milestones to progress the company as we hope to.

We also are focused on high net worth, your family office, offices, and individuals. From a non, dilutive type aspect, we continue to focus on working with either federal government funding or non government organizations such as CEPI, Gates Foundation, etcetera. And then finally, we look for collaborative or partnering relationships that could also bring capital in as as we reach agreements on how we might work with others in developing our products in a more accelerated, manner. Bottom line is our philosophy is to raise as much as possible whenever it’s available on reasonable terms. So it’s not that we sit back and say, well, okay.

This is the schedule we’re going on. We’re looking to raise capital virtually every day, but always as we raise it, we look at it. We may have sort of a period of time in which we’re not gonna be raising it because of the agreements we we achieve with, with the investors and all. But, basically, on reasonable terms, to pursue that target of approximately $30,000,000. 30,000,000 will enable us to continue to drive forward with those priority programs and to do that in a in a manner we believe that will enable us to to reach the milestone sooner rather than later.

And so we we work to try to accelerate our past the milestones and catalysts.

Anna, Host: Perfect. And finally, recently, it was announced that Bavaria Nordic, currently the only supplier worldwide for the Impox MVA vaccine, was being acquired for 3,000,000,000 by a private equity firm. So with your focus on ending that existing monopoly, what does this acquisition mean relative to Geovax?

David Dodd, Chairman, President, CEO, GeoVax Labs: It’s a very good question because right now, there is one company worldwide, Bavarian Nordic, a Danish company, that has now recently announced that they’re being acquired by a private equity firm so the entire world, in fact, The United States and all of our colleagues around the world are are totally dependent on this monopoly for the preferred vaccine known as MVA. In their case, it’s MVA hyphen b n for Bavarian Nordic. And and we think that’s a situation that is untenable because, first of all, they don’t have the manufacturing capacity, and monopolies do nothing but seem to go in the wrong direction when it comes to cost and pricing and all. So our geo MVA is now accelerating. We’ve already manufactured our first clinical batch.

It’s been released. It’ll go into the final stage of putting it into the glass vials. In October, it’ll be be completed in November. We’re planning to initiate in the second half, beginning of the second half of next year, a phase three trial, the only trial that we’ve been told that we are required to to move forward with. It’ll be an immuno bridging trial, and we think that’ll go rather quickly.

And that will then lead us to revenue generation. And in the interim, we hope through prequalification, WHO will be able to begin to distribute and and provide product that is is greatly needed around the world sooner than than than later. And we think that at least within three years, we will be generating and transitioning into a revenue producing company. So exciting times ahead of us. We look forward to to updating all of the listeners and the those interested parties over the next several months.

Anna, Host: Wonderful. Well, thank you, David. We are out of time. So we will send you the questions that our viewers have asked to you directly so you can answer. But thank you for this great update.

We appreciate you.

David Dodd, Chairman, President, CEO, GeoVax Labs: Thank you.

Anna, Host: All right, everyone. We’ll be right back. Bitfufu Inc, which trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol FUFU. It’s a world leading Bitcoin miner and mining services innovator who’s committed to empowering the global Bitcoin network through its industry leading cloud mining platform, rapidly scaling infrastructure and innovative mining services. Happy to welcome VP of investor relations, Charlie Brady.

Nice to see you, Charlie. What’s your update today?

Charlie Brady, VP of Investor Relations, Bitfufu Inc: Yeah. Thanks. Great to see you as well. So, this past Friday on the on August 15, we reported our second quarter earnings. So I’m just gonna cover that a little bit and then kinda go into what’s the latest developments after the second quarter.

So this is our disclaimer page. I won’t go through this, obviously, but typical safe harbor provisions here. So just quickly to start to give you an overview of, you know, what Bitfufu is. We’re we’re a self miner and a cloud miner. We’re one of the largest cloud miners by the largest cloud miner in the world, one of the largest self mining companies in the world.

As you can see here, 629,000, Richard users, on our cloud mining platform. And from a mining, capacity standpoint, as the July, 38.6 exahash, 752 megawatts, and, we held 1,784 bitcoin on our balance sheet. We’re, you know, spread across the globe on five different continents. You can see the the clusters are of we have data centers, on on these five contents here. With the 752 megawatts, we control, from an ownership standpoint, 164 megawatts of that.

The rest is leased capacity. And what the company has really started to embark on, over the past year or so is to acquire more data centers on an ownership basis and reduce the percentage of leased. And we think that that gives us, a little more operational leverage to lower our cost base. We actually have seen our cost base decline as we’ve acquired more sites, and upgrade some of the facilities that we’ve acquired with newer and more efficient mining machines. And it also allows us to position ourselves down the road, if we want to pivot into, HPC or AI on the data center side.

Obviously, you have to own those data centers to be able to do that. So that’s also something that we’re evaluating down the road. But right now, we need to acquire the data centers, and we’ve already started doing that over the past year. Just quickly on the second quarter, it was a pretty good quarter for us. You can see in terms of the cloud mining revenue, we really saw a high lift on that.

We saw substantial increase, year over year, but we even from the first quarter, we we saw maybe a 70 plus percent increase in revenues of cloud mining. And we, it’s interesting that over half of the cloud mining revenue in the second quarter came from new customers. So we really saw an influx of new customers, and I think that really points to demand. As Bitcoin continues to to improve in price, demand for cloud mining is starting to increase. The majority of our cloud mining revenues are institutional revenues.

And what we’re also seeing now from an institutional side and the corporate side, see a lot of companies talking about doing a Bitcoin strategy. We’re finding companies coming to us asking about using cloud mining, as a corporate treasury strategy. So rather than buying Bitcoin off an exchange, to use cloud mining to acquire that Bitcoin as a treasury strategy. And we think it’s early days on that, but that has potentially, some pretty good, some pretty good lift to it. You can see in terms of the, the number of sites we have and then how much, hash rate we have, June was 36.2.

But as of our July, monthly operation update, that had increased to 38.6. And likewise, on the hosting capacity, at the end of the second quarter, had 728 megawatts globally, and that had increased to 752 megawatts by the July. We also obviously saw an increase in that, number of registered users on the cloud mining platform. The self mining revenue, year over year, not surprising. I think, you know, all the miners have gone through this.

We did see a year over year decline really due to the halving that we saw in, in April, which happens every four years. We have been upgrading some of our mining fleet, So from a cost standpoint, our cost of mind, has improved from the first quarter. And, as we continue to upgrade that fleet with more s series, s 21 XP miners, they will, we’ll probably see that cost basis continue to to decline a little bit more. And, again, the more sites that we can go and acquire, that helps us to also bring down that cost basis. We did have some mining equipment sales in the quarter, about $5,000,000.

These are, resales to, mostly existing customers of Bitfufu because we have access to miners through our relationship with Bitmain. We have a strategic framework we have with them for two years. We can acquire up to 80,000 s 21 series miners. And so that access puts us really at the front of the line for those miners and to help facilitate customers who want to acquire miners for their own use. We do sell some of those miners to, existing customers.

Just, quickly on the EBITDA results here, pretty strong results here, $60,700,000, versus 8.3 year over year. Obviously, the EBITDA numbers, you know, for all the mining companies, there are unrealized fair fair market gains and losses on the mark to market on the on the Bitcoin held on the balance sheet, basically. But even backing out the fair mark unrealized fair market gains, we saw a pretty strong EBITDA improvement here. And, again, that points to the fact that we did see a strong lift in the cloud mining revenue, and we did see a lower cost basis on the self mining revenue. And that second quarter really just continued kind of what we’ve been seeing for the past four years since the company’s been founded.

You can see here we’ve every year, the company’s had an increase in revenues, increase in EBITDA. The company’s been profitable, on a net income basis every single year it’s been in existence, which, you know, I think you look at a lot of miners out there, and that’s not gonna be the case. And you can see on the right side here how we compare and stack up against, revenue and a, net income basis, some of our peer the peer groups out there in the mining space, the public miners. We’re certainly, you know, the top tier of that. Just to really quickly on our strategy here, vertical integration and horizontal innovation.

So we have the self mining business where we’re mining for our own account. We have mining rigs. We, host them at various data centers around the globe. You can see that we have a 164 megawatts of secured capacity. That’s the Owen centers I talked about.

And our average kilowatt electricity cost there is on average, 4 and a cents a kilowatt hour. So very competitive. We are looking to expand our capacity out to adding over a gigawatt of capacity by the 2026. So, there’s more upside still there to come on the self mining side as well. On the mining services side, that includes our cloud mining business, which again was in the in the second quarter was 80% of our revenue.

So it’s kinda moved from anywhere from 60 to 80% depending on the quarter where we are in the year, but this second quarter was pretty strong because of that demand. And, again, more interested use of signing up for that site. We also did introduce a few months ago our own mining pool, Bitfufu pool, and that, the amount of users on that has grown to 20 eggs of hash, as of July. So, from basically zero a few months ago to 20 eggs of hash a few months, That’s you know, we’re benefiting from that using our own pool. Obviously, our cloud mining customers are benefiting from having that Bitfufu pool as well.

And the, the rates on that pool are extremely competitive, probably some of the best you’ll find out there. We also have our own operating system that allows our customers and ourselves to to tweak the machines to really monetize them as best possible and optimize the mining, of those machines, depending on temperature and and electricity costs. So we’ve we’ve rolled that out not only to existing customers, but in new customers coming into the, into the, hosting side where they have their own machines and they want to host at our sites. They now have access to our own operating system. And, again, we’re, you know, on a horizontal side, it really is a one stop mining service platform.

So anything you wanna do with Bitcoin mining, whether it is having your own machine hosted, cloud mining, purchasing a mining rig, leasing a mining rig, We using an operating system, using the pool. It really is a full service soup to nuts service that we’re now providing. We’ve integrated all into one stop. And I think that that’s been a, you know, part of the growth that we’ve seen as well as that as that brand becomes more recognized and people realize it’s a one stop shop. We are seeing, pretty good increase in interest in in some of those other services that we provide beyond just the, the cloud mining business.

And I’ll just stop there, and, this is obviously my contact information, our CFO’s contact information. But let me just stop there. If there are any questions they would like to ask, I’m happy to take them, or feel free to reach out. My email is obviously, on the back of the deck.

Anna, Host: Yeah. Charlie, you can close with this question from Morgan. Where do you see the most growth? Is it from individual or institutional investors?

Charlie Brady, VP of Investor Relations, Bitfufu Inc: We’ve really seen a pickup in institutional investors. Again, majority of our cloud mining revenue is institutional. So that’s high net worth, family offices, hedge funds, some small, you know, private corporations. And really on the private corporations side, we’ve seen a pickup in there. Again, as I mentioned, the treasury strategy piece of it, that’s really starting to get a lot of interest in folks.

And cloud mining is is is, I think, you know, given that we’re the number one provider in the world, leading brand on that, it’s really we’re really attracting, the companies that wanna get involved in that are are, you know, gravitating towards Bitfufu to do that.

Anna, Host: Wonderful. Well, Charlie, thank you so much for your update, and we look forward to seeing you again real soon. Appreciate your time today.

Charlie Brady, VP of Investor Relations, Bitfufu Inc: Great. Thanks very much.

Anna, Host: All right, everyone. We’ll be right

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