Peraso at IAccess Alpha: Wireless Tech and Defense Growth

On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) presented at the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Fall Conference 2025, highlighting its strategic focus on high-speed wireless communications via 60 GHz technology. The company showcased growth opportunities in defense and transportation markets, while acknowledging challenges in achieving target gross margins.

Key Takeaways

• Peraso aims to maintain its leadership in the 60 GHz market, supported by over 50 patents.
• The company is expanding its customer base, with significant growth in defense applications.
• Revenue for the first half of 2025 was $6.1 million, with a notable increase in millimeter wave revenue.
• Peraso anticipates a positive impact from the U.S. government’s BEAD program in 2026.
• The company faces challenges in meeting its 50% gross margin target.

Financial Results

Peraso reported $14.6 million in revenue for 2024, with millimeter wave revenue at $1.5 million. For the first half of 2025, total revenue reached $6.1 million, with millimeter wave revenue increasing to $3.8 million. The company has set a Q3 revenue guidance of $2.8 to $3.1 million and aims for a 50% gross margin. The Q2 gross margin was 48%, which was satisfactory given the current revenue levels.

Operational Updates

Peraso’s key markets include:

• Fixed Wireless Access: Expansion into dense urban environments with new design wins.
• Tactical Communications (Defense): A major design win with a Middle East military contractor; volume product shipments began in June.
• Transportation: Providing high-speed internet for trains, buses, and autonomous cars.
• Professional Video Delivery: Applications in VR, headsets, and medical industry.

The customer pipeline has grown from 7 in production in Q4 2023 to 14 in Q2 2025, with SKUs increasing from 31 to 59 in the same period.

Future Outlook

Peraso sees significant growth potential in fixed wireless access, defense, transportation, and video markets. The company plans to continue focusing on reducing the size and power consumption of its tactical defense systems. However, challenges include achieving the target gross margin and meeting specific defense application requirements.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, Peraso discussed the use of beamforming technology for drone applications, emphasizing its stealth and target accuracy. Trials for tactical defense systems are ongoing, with full-scale production targeted for Q3 2026. The company remains committed to the integrity of its strategic review process.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Fall Conference 2025:

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: Thank you very much. Good afternoon and welcome to the Peraso Q3 2025 investor presentation. Jumping to a quick summary, Peraso is a fabless semiconductor company focused on high-speed wireless communications. We were incorporated in 2008 and went public on NASDAQ in December of 2021. There are four main markets we focus on, including fixed wireless access, tactical communications, transportation, and video. We’ve actually shipped over 2 million devices since 2016 and have become the dominant player in our market, which is 60 GHz. We have a strong patent portfolio. We’ve issued or obtained over 50 patents, so very strong intellectual property, and we have nine essential claims in what we call the 802.11ay standard. We’ve secured and are expanding our design wins across diverse market applications, including fixed wireless access, defense, transportation, and advanced video delivery.

Now, to get a little technical, millimeter wave is a very high-frequency band, typically from the 24 GHz to the 300 GHz spectrum. The really key advantages of millimeter wave is that it can carry more data and has very low latency. Something I’d like to talk about is what we call beamforming. This is really what provides our key advantages. You can see in this diagram the kind of the pictures of our beamforming capability. There are probably two major advantages that the beamforming can provide to our customer base. It can support many users at the same time, so it’s ideal for fixed wireless access. Also, it’s very hard to detect. In a battlefield environment, i.e., for military applications, it’s really turned out to be a very important technology for the company. We were focused on the 24 to 71 GHz spectrum.

Specifically, what I’m going to talk today about is our 60 GHz technology, which is in the 57 to 71 GHz spectrum. Millimeter wave is forecast to be one of the most important highest growth opportunities in communications. Here, we’re showing a couple of snapshots on the market opportunity. The first is the overall market growth from $5 billion this year to about $30 billion in 2033. This represents a growth rate of 25% compounded annually. Taking back in a little bit, we look at the defense aspect of our growth. The second chart underscores the opportunity for millimeter wave in military applications. This goes back to our stalwarts of our technology. In defense, the growth rate on this marketplace is projected to be 42% compounded annually. Very high growth rate opportunities for us. Peraso, from a technology perspective, is a leader and a key player in this marketplace.

Participating in very high growth opportunities in the marketplace. Our initial opportunity is in an area called fixed wireless access. Our lead customer in this space is a company called Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti is a leader in this and an equipment supplier of this marketplace. Now, the tier of a $30 billion valuation. Very, very important first customer for the company. As you can see from the picture at the bottom of the slide, Ubiquiti actually has eight products based on our chip. Basically, this is at a recent trade show. You can see that most of the display, in fact, just about all of the entire display was based on silicon from Peraso. The thing about Ubiquiti is that they are dealing into what we call the rural market. Basically, they’ve been doing this since about 2020.

What that means is that, again, providing high-speed internet to kind of low-density applications and marketplace. Ubiquiti has made a terrific business out of that achievement as a $30 billion valuation. They were our lead customer. Obviously, we’re very proud to have them as a lead customer. The thing about the rural market is that it’s a bit of a lower volume market, but it was a terrific opportunity for us to actually really start to work on all of the kinks of our technology. Over the years, we’ve had an opportunity to really, throughout our engagement, improve and perfect our core product offering. That’s how we really got started in fixed wireless access. Again, to underscore, fixed wireless access is the ability to provide customers with very high speed and low latency in internet access.

What we found over the last couple of years is that our technology is actually able to, because of this beamforming capability that I talked about earlier, move into more what we call dense urban environments. The enabler of this is this beamforming technology that I talked about earlier. We’ve announced some very, very important design wins around the world. Actually, just last week, we announced our relationship with a company called WeLink. They’ve announced a major deployment in Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, on the press release what you find is not just Los Angeles, but it’s also Las Vegas and Phoenix as well. In America, we’re seeing this move from this Ubiquiti kind of based opportunities in the rural environment, moving towards more urban environments in America like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. We call this technology DUNE, or Dense Urban Network Environment.

The idea here is to use our beamforming technology to actually reach many users simultaneously. If you look at a market like South Africa, for example, and you can look at the picture that we’re showing on this slide, it’s an extremely high-density environment. Again, our beamforming technology allows us to really address this market, which traditional wireless technology cannot because it just doesn’t have the beamforming capability. Beamforming is an important part of our technology process moving forward. I am moving now to slide eight. Before I move on to slide eight, this is slide eight. Basically, a very important development over the last year or two has been the announcement of what we call the BEAD program by the U.S. government. This is providing all Americans with high-speed internet. It’s a $42.45 billion program.

The idea here is to provide whatever technology is necessary to give the American public high-speed telecommunications. The important development here is that even though there are many ways to do this, the NTIA leadership has said, look, we just want people to have high-speed internet. This is $42 billion. What this means is that the $42 billion goes to service providers across all 50 states. Basically, on a case-by-case basis, use whatever means necessary to get your customers high-speed internet. Of course, you know that’s exactly what we provide. We’re optimistic, certainly as we move into 2026, that this will help our business. We haven’t really handicapped, I think, specifically what that looks like. Certainly, it’s going to help our business. We show this as a very, very positive development in our marketplace, particularly in the continental U.S. This has been confirmed.

This was actually started by the Biden administration. It’s actually been even more widespread with the Trump administration. We’re really thrilled to be taking part of the BEAD process. We look forward to having this help our business in 2026 and moving forward. A new market opportunity for Peraso that’s emerged over the last couple of years is the idea of tactical communications. This is basically defense. The idea here is that, again, going back to my first slide, the second slide where I talked about beamforming, one of the most important aspects of beamforming is that it’s almost impossible to detect on a battlefield, in a battlefield environment. It’s almost not only is it difficult to detect, it’s almost impossible to jam as well. This is becoming a very important aspect of military communications.

The beauty of our technology is in the 60 GHz, it can be used really anywhere around the world. We’re finding that we’re now talking to many customers about mission-critical applications. The good news is that this is not just talk. We actually now have a major design win that we announced in April with a Middle East military contractor. The idea here is that, again, this is the number one criteria by this military organization was the fact that this technology could not be detected in the battlefield. We see the military applications as a key aspect beyond fixed wireless in terms of our growth. Usually, people, when we tell them about military applications, they say, oh, this takes years and years. In this case, the opportunity is actually a safety mechanism to really reduce casualties on the battlefield. It’s not just casualties of soldiers, by the way.

It could be casualties of anybody who’s on the battlefield, like medical personnel, journalists, and so on. The good news is that we announced this collaboration in April. We actually started shipping our first volume products in June. The military in the Middle East is even testing as we speak today. This was a very important, so in general, military is an important application for us. Very specifically, this opportunity is an opportunity that we see not just in the Middle East, but really going global for all Western militaries in terms of the opportunity to provide this safety mechanism for military personnel. Moving on to slide 10, transportation is an important opportunity for us. The idea here is that basically, in a train or a bus or a plane, we provide real-time high-performance internet access.

The key here is that, again, going back to our beamforming technology, the beams are dynamic. Not only are the beams narrow, but they’re also dynamic and they move in real time. These applications are quite ideal for our technology in terms of providing high-speed internet to all modes of transportation. There’s even now we’re speaking to some customers in the space of autonomous cars. It turns out in autonomous cars, for example, they spend the entire day collecting data. When they go back to their recharging site, they have to upload and download data extremely fast. Our technology is quite ideal for that application. Transportation is becoming an important opportunity for Peraso. Another opportunity for Peraso is professional video delivery. This historically has been a VR application.

We still have some customers on VR, but now we’re seeing generally in headset applications where people actually have a camera on their headset, and they want that information to be downloaded very quickly. There’s only one way to do that, especially in a congested environment, and that’s using our technology. Another broad area of application for us is in the medical industry. You can see in this picture, the idea here is that we’re actually in an operating room. This is actually a customer of ours whereby they’re doing arthroscopic surgery, need real-time video information going back to the monitors, and using our technology to facilitate that. These are two more application areas that we think are very important as we move forward with our business. Now, I’m going to skip to slide 12.

We think what’s really important is what we call pipeline, really having a look at what our future business looks like. You can see the company is in significant growth mode. In Q4 2023, we had 11 or 7 customers in production. Now, we have 14 customers in production as of Q2 2025, and we’re growing that pipeline significantly. Basically, you can see originally, we had companies like Ubiquiti, Raglan, Pakion Networks, and we moved to companies like 8Devices, Zenwell, and Jagroive. One thing that I would say that I think is really important for investors to really understand is that in the unlicensed fixed wireless space, we’ve become the dominant player significantly. A lot of people have tried and failed. We had a lot of competition. As time goes by, we’ll find ourselves more and more unique in that regard.

I don’t really dwell on it here, but this is an extremely difficult technology to execute on. We’ve had a lot of battle scars. Again, early relationships with companies like Ubiquiti have made it very important for us to tweak and fine-tune our technology to make it what it is today. It puts us in a position now in the 60 GHz space where we’ve become the dominant supplier. I think what you’ll see over the coming quarters is more and more customer engagements as we continuously convert people to our technology. We think the pipeline is a very important metric in terms of trying to assess what our business looks like moving forward. We’re very thrilled with the opportunities that we’re seeing present themselves. I always like this next slide because this slide is actually showing some of the customers and some of the products in the marketplace.

Right now, we’ve got actually what we refer to as 59 separate SKUs or different types of devices in the marketplace. You can go to all these websites and you can look up these products. We’ve been shipping in the order of 59 separate products. This is growing again. You’ll see more and more of these products hit the marketplace. Basically, in my opinion, the proof is in the pudding. We can talk all day long about potential. What you’re seeing on this slide is customers who have actually executed and put products in the marketplace. You can go buy them. You can put your hands on them. You can test them. We’ve got a real business on our hands. Again, from a pipeline perspective, even over the course of Q4 2023, over the course of six months, our funnel has gone from 70 customers to 83 customers.

Most importantly, the SKUs in production have gone from 31 up to 59, almost double the SKUs in production. We’re very, very proud of that metric. We think Peraso is a company that investors should have a look at in terms of just what are the real growth opportunities for our business. As I move on to the summary, we are the premier supplier of what we call 60 GHz semiconductor devices. There’s an extremely significant barrier to competition. I can’t stress that point enough in terms of what our barrier to competition is. It’s taken us several years. Over the last five or six years, we had several competitors who have kind of fallen by the wayside. It will be very, very difficult for any new players to come onto the marketplace. We’re shipping into high-growth markets like fixed wireless, like military, like transportation, like video.

We have over 100 distinct customer engagement opportunities in the pipeline. Our original business thesis actually was that wireless spectrum is getting saturated and driving the need for millimeter wave spectrum. You can basically see this with things like our opportunities in fixed wireless where traditional wireless technology cannot hold up to the demands of high-density environments. We feel that our original thesis, now mind you, it’s been over a decade, but we feel that’s a very, very important thesis that’s coming true in our marketplace. We feel that Peraso is a terrific investment. We’ve got a lot on the marketplace and significant growth opportunities. Just looking at this slide, our revenue in 2024 was $14.6 million. Our revenue to date is, but the millimeter wave revenue was only $1.5 million.

That was a slow year for the technology, mostly because it was a hangover from kind of a COVID over inventory. This was just like a broad, you know, issue in the semiconductor marketplace that we got hit with that. This year, the revenue to date is $6.1 million for the company. Our specific millimeter wave revenue in the first six months has actually increased to $3.8 million. We see that growing. Our revenue in Q2 was $2.2 million. On our last earnings call, we increased our guidance for Q3 to $2.8 to $3.1 million. We feel we’re on track to do that. Whereas 2024 was a slow year for us just because of the inventory correction, we think 2025 is a much better year for millimeter wave revenue. Again, you’re starting to see the fruits of those efforts. I will pass on that.

From my perspective, that pretty much brings us to the conclusion of the presentation. OK, so I’ve got several questions. Operator, so we just proceed to answer the questions?

Operator: Yes, that’s right.

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: OK. Can you expand on the opportunities in drone applications and how beamforming technology differentiates Peraso in our market? Very good question. The idea, right off the bat, it’s the same thesis, which is that on drone applications, it sells. It’s actually, there’s two main advantages. One advantage is that you cannot detect the drone. I think a lot of people are starting to use, actually, what we’ve seen in the battlefield is people are actually using like fiber to control the drone. We’re more or less, you can view us as kind of wireless fiber. It’s very directed. For drones, actually controlling the drones from using a millimeter wave beam is a very stealthy way to operate a drone in the marketplace. That’s one way we’re using beamforming in the drone marketplace.

The other way is actually, again, the safety mechanism that we’re using on the ground with the infantry soldiers can be applied to drone applications as well. As a matter of fact, that’s actually in process and being tested right now, again, in the Middle East. The idea there is now you have a drone. That drone, when it’s addressing a target, it needs to make damn sure that you’re targeting someone who is on the other is an enemy target and not on your same side. We have really two opportunities for drones. One is basically the idea of controlling the drone with a stealth technology. The other is actually applying the safety mechanism to drones so that the drones do not shoot their own soldiers on the ground. Those are the two applications. Second question, you delivered initial production for a tactical defense system.

What is the time frame of scaling to larger contracts? Good question. We’re going through trials the rest of this year. Over the course of September, October, and November are trials. We really expect, two key things we’re doing on our side in terms of the initial production. We have to shrink the system so that it can go on a soldier’s gun or helmet. You can imagine the battlefield, we need everything. Everything is obviously battery operated. We need to get the power consumption down. Right now, the timeline for, I would say full-scale large production is Q3 2026. That’s the timeline we’re on based on basically revising our boards to make sure that they can meet the form-fitting partition requirements, the battery light, and also the testing in the preliminary battlefield environment. Q3 2026 is the timeline we’re targeting on that.

As far as the strategic review process and how investors should interpret the recent MobileCloud proposal, all I can say on that front is all I can share is what’s public. Basically, to be quite frank, what’s public is what we know as well. I don’t have a lot to share on that front except to say that we obviously feel that the process, the integrity of the process needs to be, our position in general is that the integrity of the process needs to be maintained from a fiduciary responsibility. We intend to do exactly that. That’s my comment on that. Obviously, from a public perspective, everything that’s in the public domain is fundamentally our position at the moment. GAAP gross margin declined from 248%. The normalized margin that we feel, sorry?

Jim, Unidentified, Peraso: No, Ron, I was just going to hop in and take that.

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: Yeah, oh, great.

Jim, Unidentified, Peraso: You know, OK, sounds good.

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: Yeah, the decline was really driven by the drop-off in memory integrated circuit revenue. As we had previously announced, we end-of-life the memory products. Q1 2025 was the completion of the end of life. Albeit that said, we still have some left if someone comes knocking. Those products traditionally garnered margins in the high 60% range. The millimeter wave products are a lower margin given the applications, et cetera. We’re targeting kind of a, you know, a gross margin there of approximately 50%. We were quite pleased with the 48%. It’s obviously hard to achieve your margin profiles with these revenue levels. Now that we’ve got some consistency and visibility to our backlog, as we commented on our last earnings call, we see a path to hit that 50% target. Thanks for jumping in, Jim.

Jim, Unidentified, Peraso: Sure.

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: I wasn’t sure what the process was, but thank you. I would have passed it over as well. From our perspective, that’s kind of a wrap if there’s no other questions. I see we’re just four minutes under our timeline. Is that it for today’s speaker, moderator?

Operator: Yep. Are you ready to wrap the call?

Ron, Unidentified, Peraso: Yes, thank you very much. I would like to thank everyone on the call today for paying attention. Hopefully, the Peraso story is interesting to you. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you very much, everybody. This does conclude Peraso Inc.’s presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company. Thank you.

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