Street Calls of the Week
On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) presented at the Q3 Investor Summit Group Virtual Conference 2025, unveiling its strategic pivot to a pure-play mmWave semiconductor business. While the company emphasized its technological leadership and market opportunities, it also addressed challenges such as cash flow concerns and transitioning from its legacy memory IC business.
Key Takeaways
- Peraso is transitioning to focus solely on mmWave technology, leaving behind its memory IC business.
- The mmWave market is expected to grow significantly, with the defense sector showing a 42% CAGR.
- Financial guidance for Q3 2025 indicates mmWave revenue between $2.8 million and $3.1 million.
- Peraso is the sole supplier in the 60 GHz mmWave market, with a growing number of products and customers.
- Recent financial strategies aim to extend the company’s cash runway beyond Q4 2025.
Financial Results
- 2024 Revenue: $14.5 million, with 90% from memory ICs and $1.5 million from mmWave
- 2025 H1 mmWave Revenue: $3.8 million, exceeding full-year 2024
- Q3 2025 Guidance: $2.8 to $3.1 million in mmWave revenue
- Gross Margins: 60% in memory ICs; targeting 50% for mmWave
- Cash Position: Improved through a warrant exchange, extending runway past Q4 2025
Operational Updates
- Customer Base: Increased from 31 products in Q4 2023 to 59 in Q2 2025
- Market Expansion: Focus on fixed wireless access, military communications, and transportation
- Military Application: Secured a design win for a "friendly fire" avoidance system in the Middle East
Future Outlook
- Market Growth: Chipset market projected to grow from $5 billion in 2024 to over $30 billion by 2033
- Strategic Focus: Sole supplier in the 60 GHz mmWave market, expanding into new areas like autonomous vehicles
- BEAD Program: Anticipated benefits from the $42.45 billion program starting in 2026
Q&A Highlights
- Competitors: Qualcomm exited the market, leaving Peraso as the sole 60 GHz supplier
- Stealth Alternatives: Discussed limitations of fiber cables and other frequency bands
- Customer Examples: Applications in operating room video streaming and autonomous car data download
For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Q3 Investor Summit Group Virtual Conference 2025:
Operator: Dear student, we appreciate your participation in today’s virtual event. Up next, we are pleased to introduce Peraso Inc. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may drop them in the chat box button on the left side of your screen. Please type your question into the box and click "Send" to submit it. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over the session to Ronald Glibbery, CEO at Peraso Inc., who will lead the presentation. Sir, the floor is yours.
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: Good afternoon and welcome to the Peraso Q3 2025 investor presentation. We’ll move on to the first slide. Just a quick snapshot about Peraso. Our focus is on technology called mmWave. We’re a fabless semiconductor company, so we produce chips for a living. We subcontract them, just like the NVIDIA business model, where we use a third party to build our chips, although we design and sell them. We’re a global leader in the development of semiconductor devices for mmWave technology. We’ve been shipping since 2016, and we have products really across the world: North America, Africa, China, and Japan. We put a lot of effort into our intellectual property. We have, in the wireless side of things, over 50 patents issued and pending, and we have nine essential claims patents for the 802.11ay standard. We have secured design wins across a diverse field of applications.
This includes fixed wireless access, tactical communications, transportation, and video. I’ll get into all of those as we proceed through the presentation. Just a quick sidetrack into the technology. We focus on a technology called mmWave, which is the spectrum from 24 to 300 gigahertz. You can see a key aspect of our technology is what we call beamforming, and that’s going to permeate throughout the presentation. It’s kind of a fundamental part of our technology offering. You can see basically that, as opposed to traditional wireless, we form very focused electromagnetic beams. This gives us two primary advantages. One advantage is that, first of all, broadly, these beams are very high data rates and very low latency, which is great for communications. A couple of other advantages are that we can address many users at the same time, so very dense user environments.
Another that’s emerged for us is what we call stealth technology. In other words, in a battlefield environment, it’s very difficult to, A, detect these beams and, B, to jam them. That’s become an important aspect of our technology in the military space. As we proceed throughout the presentation, just keep in mind a key part of our technology is this ability to create these beams in the RF spectrum. In terms of growth, you can see that there’s a couple of charts I want to show here. The first is the overall chipset market in this technology. Today, it’s estimated that this market is about a $5 billion opportunity, growing to over about $30 billion by 2033. This is a 25% compounded annual growth rate. A very important part of the overall communications market.
Peeling back the onion a little bit, more specifically in defense, defense contractors are starting to recognize the importance of this technology to be stealth in a battlefield environment. We see this market growing from about $624 million this year to $7.179 billion, which is a 42% CAGR. All markets, very nice growth rate. Certainly, we’re seeing that in terms of our specific growth rate on our business. MMWave, MillimeterWave, is becoming a really critical part of the electronics market. The real key issue here is that, going back to our original business thesis, which is that traditional wireless is getting saturated. There’s so many devices in the world that utilize existing spectrum that the world needs new spectrum to facilitate these key applications moving forward. That’s really kind of our business, our working business thesis that we operate on.
The first broad market that we focus on is called fixed wireless access. This is high-speed access, high-speed internet access wirelessly. We obviously focus on the 60 gigahertz range. Our lead customer in this market was a company called Ubiquiti. Last week, Ubiquiti broke like the $30 billion valuation. A very, very credible market. All of their MillimeterWave products are based on our technology. They have about eight to ten products in the marketplace. You can see from the picture below that at the last Fixed Wireless Conference, all of the products that Ubiquiti was showing, we were quite proud of, were based on Peraso silicon. This is obviously a very, very important customer to us. Basically, we’ve been shipping to them since 2019. Their focus is on a really American rural environment.
The thing about rural is that it’s a good market, but it’s kind of low volume-ish, if you will. It was good for Peraso because we were a young company and it gave us a chance to tweak our technology and then enhance our technology over time. It was a good way for us to really provide the broader market very, very solid product opportunities. Ubiquiti is our lead customer and still today is probably our main customer, if you will. A real change over the last couple of years has been new customers focused on what we call dense urban environments. What this means actually is, let me see if I can move this. This is the ability to actually not just address rural environments, but also high volume urban environments. We call this technology DUNE, for Dense Urban Network Environment.
The idea here is that as opposed to very low volume, low density rural environments, we focus on very high density, high volume urban environments. We’ve actually announced design wins and opportunities in Los Angeles with our partner WeLink. That was just a couple of weeks ago. By the way, with WeLink, we’re also focused on Las Vegas and Phoenix. South Africa is a major deployment and the townships of South Africa. There’s no denser environment in the world than this. We’ve been shipping all this year, and a very important part of our business here has been into South Africa. Even now, we’re winning other rural places or urban places in Africa like Kenya. This has become a very important part of our business and another aspect to our fixed wireless business.
For us, I would say today, fixed wireless is really our kind of anchor application of wireless, but I’ll talk about where we’re seeing growth opportunities after that. An important development that we’ve seen over the last, well, several years, but really now has a final point is what we call the BEAD program. This is a program in the U.S., the United States, that actually is to the tune of $42.45 billion that’s designed to facilitate providing all Americans with high-speed internet. The idea here is that many, many Americans have weak internet, poor internet, or no internet. The idea is for the U.S. government, this was initiated with the Biden administration, but it’s even more aggressively been carried on by the Trump administration.
The idea is that the service providers throughout continental and even Alaska and Hawaii in the States are underscored by the BEAD program from the government of the United States to provide high-speed access to all citizens of those states and using it in a technology-neutral approach. That means it can be fiber, it can be coax or it can be wireless. Obviously, we come in on the wireless side of things. We think this is a very, very important part of the business. By March of 2025, there were over 4,000 BEAD program applications received, and we really expect to start to see the fruit of this in 2026 in our business. Of course, guys like Ubiquiti will be beneficiaries as well, but we think BEAD was an important growth topic in the fixed wireless aspect of our business.
It turns out for the first few years of our company, fixed wireless access was the key application, but we’re really pleased that over the last couple of years, this whole concept of stealth communications has become a very, very important part of our business. The idea here is because of that beamforming that I showed you on prior slides, actually, it’s very difficult, almost impossible to detect on a battlefield. Militaries want to keep their positions confidential. They don’t want to announce their position to the enemy through communications. The enemy normally can really triangulate positions through traditional wireless technology, but with our technology, that’s not possible because of our beamforming capability. The other aspect of our technology is once we are having communications, because the enemy can’t see it, they also can’t jam it.
It’s not just low probability of detection, it’s also low probability of jamming as well. Another key kind of interesting aspect to our technology is because we use unlicensed bands, militaries are kind of free to go to most countries in the world without interfering with their licensed spectrum. Basically, we’re engaged with several military contractors. The most exciting part of this business for us is that we actually have a key design win that we announced in April of 2025 with a military contract in the Middle East. It turns out this application is still confidential, but basically, the key idea on this is that it actually is a safety mechanism to avoid what we refer to as friendly fire in the military environment. This application turns out to be a very useful application using our technology. Our application is very in-depth to our technology.
Actually, it’s so urgent that this technology gets deployed that we actually started shipping our volume products just by June of 2025. It turns out that actually, you can imagine that this technology is basically saving lives. It’s really not an offensive weapon. It’s more of a defensive device that actually helps soldiers avoid this whole concept of what we call blue on blue or friendly fire casualties. I think the most important part of this is that, you know, today we’re focused on the Middle East, but the technology can be really applied on a global basis. Obviously, with friendly nations, but the volume opportunity here kind of rivals our fixed wireless business, if you will. All driven by the fact that we operate in a stealthy environment. We think the whole military opportunity can be at least as big as our fixed wireless opportunity.
By the way, the other aspect of this is, you know, kind of more recent and actually not even on this slide is the fact that we are now testing our same concepts on drone applications. Not only, you know, controlling drones through, again, through stealthy communications, but also using our friendly fire application in a drone application so drones do not fire upon their own soldiers or equipment on the field. MillimeterWave is just a terrific technology for the military, and we see that as a major part of our business moving forward. A couple of other markets worth mentioning: transportation. You can see in the picture, we’ve got buses, trains, planes. The idea here is in real time, providing, you know, passengers on these devices with real-time high-speed internet.
Actually, maybe something I didn’t mention when I talked about our beamforming is that not only are the beams stealthy, but they actually move in real time. Of course, all of these devices are moving, but, you know, the idea is that, you know, the beams track these moving devices and provide passengers with very high speed, very low latency internet communications in real time. Finally, another market that we actually are seeing some nice traction in is what we call professional video delivery. For example, VR. It doesn’t necessarily have to be just VR. It can be, you know, for example, the Ray-Ban sunglasses or VR or any headset that requires high-speed data communication. Excuse me, data communication can be applied using our technology. The problem with conventional wireless is it just doesn’t have the data rates and it just doesn’t have the latency to meet these stringent applications.
As a matter of fact, for example, one of the pictures we have in this slide is in an operating environment. We actually have a customer in Los Angeles who’s using our chips in an operating room environment. The idea here is, as the surgeon is doing surgery, the real-time images and video come up with low latency, of course, because you certainly don’t want any kind of latency in those types of applications. We’re seeing some nice traction there as well. I’d summarize that the main applications we’re focused on are fixed wireless access, military tactical communications, transportation, and professional video delivery. I really like this slide because it really shows our growth. If you look at where we were in Q4 of 2023, we had seven customers in production, and now we have, I can’t actually see it.
I don’t want to speak out of turn, but we have more customers in production. Basically, the idea here is this is just a sense of where we’re trying to provide our investors with what is our growth. I think what’s really important is that we spent a lot of money on developing a very unique, a very essential technology, but the market for it in and of itself is not stagnant. It’s actually growing significantly. Fixed wireless is growing, military is growing, and so on. You can see that in our pipeline. Our customer engagement is growing significantly. Really importantly, our customers in production. The proof is in the pudding. We talk the talk in terms of market opportunities, but we’re seeing that in really our customer engagement. The next slide I think is actually very interesting as well. These are products in the field.
You can actually Google all of these products. We had in Q4 of 2023, we had 31 products in the marketplace. Today we have 59, or at least as of Q2. We have even more today, but as of Q2 2025, we have 59. These are real products that customers have invested in, they engineered, and they brought to production. These are real products you can get your hands on, you can buy them. It’s not theoretical. These are real products that are in the marketplace and that are being sold by our customers. We’re very, very proud of the idea that even over the last six to nine months, we’ve almost doubled the number of products that are in the field and in the marketplace. To summarize, in terms of the investment opportunity, our focus is on 60 gigahertz.
I would say we’ve become not only the premier supplier, but really moving towards the only supplier. We had several competitors five years ago. I can go through them case by case, but basically they’ve all gone by the wayside. The reason is because we’ve executed. This is a very difficult technology with what we call a very deep and wide mode. It is very difficult to compete with us. We beat out our competition on a case-by-case basis systematically over the last five years. We have over 100 distinct customer engagements. Our customers love us. I can’t really name names, but one of our most privileged customers called our technology bulletproof. It made me so proud because basically this is a really tough customer. They said, you know what? Your stuff just works. There’s no product we’ve ever shipped before that works as well as your product.
We are really proud of the fact that we’ve made so much progress in our customer engagement. To reiterate our original business thesis, the idea was that wireless technology will become scarce. There is going to be a need for new technologies to facilitate new spectrum, and that’s what we do for a living. I think on that note, I’ll wrap it up and hand some financial analysis over to our CFO, James Sullivan.
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: Thanks, Ron. Just quickly, when you look at our 2024 revenue, it’s about $14.5 million. The key metric here is about 90% of that was from our legacy memory integrated circuit business. We had announced the end-of-life for that product over two years ago. We believe we’ve completed end-of-life shipments in Q1 2025, although I hesitate to never say never. We still have some inventory. Maybe somebody comes back. We could sell some more. Really, the key transition was that, effective with the second quarter of 2025, we’re a pure play mmWave company. There are a couple of metrics I’d just like to highlight. On the mmWave revenue, you could see all of last year, we did $1.5 million in revenue. We were hit very hard, like most of the industry, by the post-COVID inventory correction. We had customers stop buying, including our largest customers.
Like a lot of smaller semiconductor companies, we have heavy concentration of customers, which I think, as Ron displayed with the pipeline and customers, products in the market, we’ve made great progress on reducing that concentration. The key metric is we did $1.5 million all of last year. We did $1.6 million, so we beat it in the first quarter of 2025, then grew that 40% in the second quarter. We’ve already done $3.8 million of mmWave revenue on that side. We’ve guided $2.8 to $3.1 million for the third quarter. We see the trajectory there. A couple of other metrics, the legacy memory products had high gross margins, high 60%. They’re very niche specialty products, high pricing. Our target, future target on mmWave is approximately a 50% gross margin. We came pretty close in the second quarter, which we were pleased with.
The mmWave products, going to, in some cases, consumer device or towards consumer applications, it can be, with some of the older customers, tougher to get those margins in the 60s. We are targeting at least a 50%. Now with some more consistent volumes and visibility, we feel very comfortable with our ability to achieve that. Really the key point is that when you look at total revenue from Q1 to Q2 of 2025, revenue gross margins decreased because of the transition of memory, no memory in Q2 2025. Likewise, with the reduction in revenue and lower gross margin, you’ll also see the increase in our net loss and cash burn in the second quarter. Those were drivers of that trend. Obviously, we see a ramp in mmWave that we look to keep going. We have some of the best visibility we’ve had on our backlog, certainly in recent quarters.
From a cash perspective, we’ve disclosed that we have cash into the fourth quarter of 2025. We recently closed a warrant exchange here last week to bring in some additional cash. Obviously, we want to extend that runway. We haven’t made, we’ll make an announcement, give an update on that on our earnings call here in the coming weeks after we report Q3. Obviously, doing what we can to improve our balance sheet. I think the next slide is just our non-GAAP reconciliation. I think that pretty much wraps it up. I think Ron did the summary already. We are now a pure play mmWave company.
We see limited competition in the marketplace and are very excited about the opportunity for the growth in 60 gigahertz, i.e., the unlicensed spectrum that folks can use without paying the expensive license and that is much cheaper to deploy than fiber in work scenarios, remote areas, et cetera, where it’s not practical or cost-effective to lay fiber. With that said, we’re down to about seven minutes. I’ll flip it over to questions. I think I addressed one of the first ones here about the cash burn increase, which I think was referring to the second quarter, i.e., with the drop-off in memory revenues, having a short-term impact that, frankly, we need to, number one, manage our expenses and, two, grow mmWave to offset that. The next question, Ron, is who are our main competitors in the stealth realm and how does our mmWave technology stack up against those parties?
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: Yeah, I think I spoke to it in the presentation, but I’ll reiterate. Probably our main competitor over the years was Qualcomm. I’m not here to say that we beat Qualcomm, but Qualcomm has moved on from this marketplace. They had some real deficiencies with the product. As opposed to spending the money to re-spin their product, they just left the market to us. Qualcomm was the main competitor. We had two or three other competitors that have fallen by the wayside as well. I would say, it’s not even I would say, like I can say unequivocally, both in the stealth mode and the 60 gigahertz mode, we are really the sole supplier right now. We win every time there’s a 60 gigahertz opportunity, we win that opportunity.
We are engaged with some very large companies right now on some, not just fixed wireless applications, but for example, even on the video side of things. When someone needs 60 gigahertz, they come to Peraso. There’s no one else I can speak to that’s really in any form of competition.
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: Ron, maybe just to further clarify that and specifically asking about stealth, what would be the alternative technologies to mmWave and the advantages we see in mmWave?
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: I mean, believe it or not, one of the opportunities is drones. Controlling drones, again, would be stealth. I’m not sure if everybody realizes, one of the ways that the military is actually controlling drones stealthy is using, they actually connect the drone to a fiber cable. It’s just quite amazing. They have these spools of like 20 kilometer cables. That’s one technology we compete with. Obviously, for obvious reasons, cables can get caught on trees. There are all kinds of problems with running the cable. Basically, from a competitive perspective, mmWave is really quite unique in the stealth capability, certainly from a wireless perspective. I guess I could say, maybe a point to make is there are other frequency bands, like, let’s say, 26, 27 gigahertz. The problem with those at some level is that those are more licensed bands.
The problem is if you start controlling drones with those frequencies, they would interfere with traditional commercial frequencies. You can run into interference issues. Certainly, you’re stopping other people’s spectrums, so they’re not happy with that. There are problems with, technically, other mmWave technologies can address this market, but there are some kind of ancillary problems you run into by using those other frequency bands.
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: I think one other quick question here, Ron, and I think you touched on one of them in the tactical, but a brief example of a current customer and how, where they’re leveraging Peraso’s mmWave technology.
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: On tactical?
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: No, not necessarily on tactical. Perhaps, I know you touched on the tactical example, maybe another example.
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: I talked about the operating room. I talked about, oh, here’s one that I didn’t mention in the presentation. It’s quite interesting. Autonomous cars. It turns out that autonomous cars drive around all day and they get terabytes of information, I mean, on our video cameras. They go back and get charged, and they don’t want to be at the charger for more than two hours. They’re looking for a technology to download all of that information to a server in less than two hours. It turns out if you do the math, you need very high data rates. I’m talking 10 to 20 gigabits per second. There’s one way to solve that problem, and that’s using mmWave technology. That’s an application we’re working on right now, a great example where the high data rates are absolutely essential to facilitate that application.
Obviously, autonomous cars is a new and growing opportunity. It’s quite interesting because we’re starting to see these applications where you just need those extremely high data rates. I think autonomous cars is another great application that we’re addressing with mmWave technology.
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: Thanks, Ron. I think we’re just up here at the limit, so I will flip it back over to the operator. Operator?
Operator: All right. Thank you, Jim and Ron, for the presentation. Thank you to everyone also joining here today, and you have a great rest of the day.
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: Thank you. Thank you for participating.
James Sullivan, CFO, Peraso Inc.: Thank you, everyone.
Ronald Glibbery, CEO, Peraso Inc.: Bye-bye.
Operator: That concludes Peraso Inc.’s presentation. You may now disconnect. For details on upcoming presentations, please refer to the conference agenda. Thank you for your participation, and we look forward to welcoming you to the next session.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.