Seer at Canaccord Genuity’s Conference: Proteomics Expansion

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Seer Inc. (NASDAQ:SEER) participated in Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference, where CEO Omid Farixaad provided insights into the company’s advancements in proteomics. While Seer is making significant strides with its Protograph product suite, addressing past strategic missteps remains a focus. Farixaad expressed optimism about the company’s financial health and growth prospects.

Key Takeaways

• Seer’s Protograph product suite aims to revolutionize proteomic analysis, allowing for large-scale studies.
• The company has invested heavily in software and data analysis to overcome bottlenecks in proteomic workflows.
• Seer is adjusting its commercial strategy to include service options, addressing initial missteps.
• Financially, Seer is stable with a strong cash position and is implementing a stock buyback program.
• The company plans to continue innovating, with a focus on expanding the reach of its proteomic technologies.

Product and Technology Updates

Seer offers the Protograph product suite, designed for deep, unbiased proteomic analysis. Key updates include:

• Protograph XT, capable of processing 40 samples in 8 hours, reducing mass spectrometry time by 150%.
• Protograph one with the SP 200 instrument for high-throughput analysis, enabling studies with up to 20,000 samples.
• Significant improvements in workflow efficiency, reducing processing time from 8 hours to 4.5 hours for 80 samples.
• Investments in software to manage large-scale data, aiming for studies with up to 600,000 samples.
• Seer holds over 250 patents in the proteomics space, emphasizing its innovative edge.

Commercial Strategy and Market Dynamics

Seer is evolving its commercial strategy to better serve the market:

• Introduction of the SEER Technology Access Center (STAC) to provide service options.
• Strategic Instrument Placement (SIP) program to drive adoption and generate data for publications.
• Shift in revenue composition, with consumables expected to account for 65% of revenue in the near-to-mid term.
• Focus on academic and government sectors, with biopharma showing potential despite capital expenditure constraints.

Financial Outlook and Runway

Seer maintains a strong financial position, with $260 million in cash and no debt. Key financial highlights include:

• Running the business with a burn rate in the low $40 million range, providing a runway of six to seven years without growth.
• A $25 million stock buyback program, with $20 million already executed, representing 13% of the float.
• Projected revenue growth of 25% for the current year, with guidance of $17 to $18 million.
• Continued investment in innovation, with a focus on future growth opportunities.

Conclusion

For a detailed exploration of Seer’s strategic initiatives and financial outlook, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Growth Conference, I’m Kyle Mixon. I cover life sciences and for Canaccord. Lisa welcome you to this fireside chat with SEER. SEER offers the Proteograph product suite for deep unbiased proteomic analysis. In ours, with the company we have Omid Farixaad, CEO.

Thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate it. So, yeah, so CERA’s been public since 2020. We were talking about it almost five years. Maybe just provide, you know, an overview of of the company and its strategy and, you know, product that it offers.

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Yeah. And Carl, first of all, thank you for, having us here. We really appreciate it. We enjoy your conference a lot. So SEER’s mission is to enable access to the proteomic content and at depth scale speed cost that was previously unimaginable.

Now the the proteome is very different than the genome in terms of its complexity and the level of information it provides. We all have 20,000 genes and then as those genes make RNA and then the RNA becomes proteins layers of complexity goes up considerably. So 20,000 genes make about 200,000 transcripts or RNA. Those 20,000 transcripts make million plus, multi millions of proteins that, importantly, those variants of proteins can have completely different functions. That body of information in terms of how the proteome operates has it hasn’t been possible to access it, and we started SEER with the idea to do that.

We went public actually, as Kyle said, in in December 2020. At the 2022, we did a broad commercial release of our product, which is called the Protograph product suite. It’s a combination of an instrument, consumable kits, and a software for analysis. Since the launch of the Protograph product suite, we’ve now done two new assay updates. The first version of the product that we launched could run 16 samples in a span of eight hours, and then those 16 samples would go into mass spec.

The the subsequent product that we launched, Protograph XT, you could down do 40 samples, in in about eight hours, and then that would go into the mass spec, but it actually reduced the the amount of time on the mass spec by about a 150%. And then most recently at the ASMS conference, June, we launched our high throughput product, the Protograph one with a new instrument, the SP 200 instrument. And now you’re at the point where you can do large population scale proteomics something completely unimaginable just three years ago. And we also announced, since the beginning of the year now, two that is publicly announced, others that are forthcoming, large scale proteomic. In q one, we announced a 10,000, sample study with a corporate customer.

In q two at the ASMS, we announced a 20,000 sample study, with the Korea University. 20,000 sample on a mass spec to do deep proteomic at the depth of about 10,000 proteins is just something that was previously impossible to even think about. Before SEER, the largest deep proteomic study done in a mass spec was 48 samples. The deepest proteomic study done in the mass spec was right here from Broad Institute that was 4,500 proteins. And now we have multiple customers that are doing thousands, and now we’re getting into the realm of tens of thousands.

I had predicted last September at the Morgan Stanley conference that twenty twenty five will be the year where we’ll see population scale proteomic on a mass spec become a reality, and we’ve seen that. So let me predict now on Carl’s conference that I think the first 100,000 sample study on mass spec will become a reality in 2026. So that is really the velocity by which access is is being enabled today.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Alright. Interesting. So you’re basically you’re thinking like a UK biobank size or maybe even bigger than that actually type of a, you know, sample project would be, you know, performance using mass spec. That’s something that we have we haven’t really seen, like, you know, population mass spec in the past. Right?

So what, I guess, you know, to this point, what’s been the bottleneck and the challenges that, you know, prevented that from being like a reality? Then like, know, why is is the pretty good product suite enabling enabling this and just, you know, stream like unlocking what mass spec can really offer in the world?

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Yeah. Kyle, mean, I think there is a lot of similarities between the genomic space and the proteomic space and and and some of the barriers that got broken down that enabled access to the to the genome and now enabling access to the proteome. There’s some similarities, but there’s also some differences. So I I would say similarities are just like the genome and access to the genome enabled entire creation of entirely new end markets that didn’t exist before that. Companies like Grail that we just finished or Natera or Garden exist only because access to the genome became a reality.

My prediction is that as we get access to the proteome, that entire end markets new end markets may be created, existing end markets will significantly expand. That is not the same as interrogating a set of known proteins. That is not what I mean by access. The analogy to that would be like the microarray or Affymetrix, for example, that we interrogate the same thing. That is not where GRAIL would not have existed if it was because of the Affy technology.

GRAIL existed because of content generation in the genome or Garden or Natera for that matter. That is the content that’s gonna become available. Okay. So that’s similarity, between the genome and the proteomic thing exist. There’s a difference, though.

In the case of the genome, improvements in the detector is what allowed access to the genome to become possible. Became faster and faster, cost dropped, and so that’s where the innovation came. Now, the detector in the proteomic space to do unbiased proteomic or discovery proteomics is the mass spec. And the challenge is while the mass spec is the gold standard and the mass specs have gotten so much better and they continue to get better, my prediction is that that velocity of improvement in mass spec is very consistent for years to come. But the mass spec could never scale, and that’s where the proteograph comes in.

The complexity of the proteome isn’t just about protein structure. It’s also about protein quantity and the dynamic range. The challenges of the proteome required workflows that fed into the mass spec. Those workflows were not scalable. Dynamic range was broad, so you would have to immediately deplete abundant proteins.

You would have to do serial fractionation. All of those is why the deepest study ever published before SEER from Broad was only 16 samples. SEER took that bottleneck away and made it possible to do no upstream workflow and take a sample in automated way, get it to the mass spec, and that time is shrinking. So for example, in our first two iteration of our workflow, the workflow was eight hours. In the one that we just released in June, you run 80 samples on four and a half hours.

And so my next and by the way, the interesting point is that as we made it possible to access the proteome, the next bottleneck that we actually created for the scientific community was the data. The data analysis became a massive bottleneck, and we made a very large investment. In fact, there was a period of time where about a third of my organization was software and data people. We then innovated in terms of our data analysis suite. The product of analysis suite made it possible to do large scale data analysis, large content.

And and and my prediction, by the way, is that, you know, we’ll continue to innovate in this space. But as as Kyle said, we are now very close to approaching a complete impedance match of genome. Meaning, as you do a 500, 600,000 UKBB genomic study, you could do a 600,000 proteomic study in an unbiased way. And the discovery power of that unbiased proteomic is not even comparable to what happens when you look at a targeted approach looking at proteins.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah. Just to clarify, you’re you’re basically saying like, you can you can buy a bank like, you know, they’re they’re kind of investing in the target side right now with the OLINK doing doing OLINK with all the samples. They would, you know, eventually, be interested in doing like an unbiased view of all those samples

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: as well. Calm, and by the way I I think targeted platforms, I listened to, Alimar this morning here, Alimar, Olink, Soma, Quanterix. These are all great products, and they’ve had their time in various different period over over the last two decades. And targeted approaches will be absolutely important as they are today in genomic. They’ll be important in proteomic.

But content discovery where we today are at the very, very tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding proteomic content, Discovering that massive content is where biological insight, new biomarkers, new drug targets, new, new diagnostics are gonna emerge from. Now in the land of the blind, the one eye man is king, when you could not scale unbiased proteomic to do a UKBB study, you were forced to do targeted approaches. Untargeted approaches at scale are just becoming a reality today. So and by the way, keep in mind, there’s exactly 52 papers published on SEER, only 52 papers. And the fact that on the back of 52 papers, customers are now starting tens of thousands of sample study tells you their pent up appetite to do this because UKBB study came after 500 papers were published on OLINK.

So I do think that a lot of these organizations, these biobanks will begin to interrogate the proteome in an unbiased way. As you begin to understand those content, you can put those content on targeted panels for interrogation, test development, and others. This is not to say that on targeted approaches are not suitable for test development. They can also expand all the way from discovery to clinical application. In fact, at CER, we’ve done ISO certification, getting our platform ready for a clinical utility.

But you don’t wanna force the system if the biomarkers you discover can fit in a targeted panel, and that is the most cost effective way of doing it, then that’s exactly what you should do. In fact, we spun out a company called Prognomic from SEER in in August 2020 before we went public. The CEO of of of that company is in this room in the back, Philip Ma. Prognomic’s mission was to be, to look at unbiased proteomic in large scale, also look at other ohms as well, and to be able to develop a clinical test. Now they ran at the time the largest, but no more because now there’s other customers doing larger studies than them.

But at the time the largest D1bisphrodiomic study, they developed biomarkers for early detection of lung. They’re on the cusp of launching their LDT in about a month or so from now. And that LDT that exists only because SEER existed just like Natera exists only because Illumina existed. That LDT for early detection of lung has the best performance across all the publicly available data for early detection of lung.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Alright. Great. Really interesting, especially about Prognomic. But just like going back to the research side, I mean, do you, do you think there’s been a lot of mass spec updates over the years? ASMS is always has been really, you know, big announcements each every couple years it’s been I think 2025 was a was a good good one as well with, like, new products and stuff.

So how much is the the work and the, you know, the the new product launches, the releases that companies like Thermo and and Siax and Bruker are doing? How much does that kind of help you and enable Proteograph to really, like, you know, be you know, have that kind of a use case and be really, like, truly appreciated?

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Yeah. So mass specs are getting better and better. So let’s put that in context. In in 2020, when we filed our s one and before we went public, at the time, the Bruker instrument was a really, really good instrument at the time. And you could get to three or 400 proteins on that instrument.

Subsequently, the Astral came, and that became really the the the best instrument. And with the Astral, you can get to about 750 proteins in plasma. Now that arm raise in proteomic and the mass spec will continue. And over that five year span that I just mentioned going from about three three fifty to about seven fifty, There were serial improvement that it went from three fifty to four fifty to five fifty then to seven fifty. Value proposition of SEER, which is if you pair SEER’s platform proteograph with that mass spec has remained the same.

So if you take the Astral, and the Astral gives you about seven fifty proteins in plasma. If you put the proteograph in front of an Astral, now you get to about 7,000 proteins. The Astral next generation just got announced at the ASMS. Astral can now do 900 proteins. Put seer in front of it, you’re now close to 10,000 proteins.

If we go back five years ago when the you know, when let’s say the Orbitra four eighty was was the was the the great mass spec. On its own, it did maybe three, four hundred proteins. With the protograph, it would get to 2,500 proteins. So the answer is, Carl, as the technologies are improving, the the baseline is improving, but the full improvement in terms of what the proteograph adds to that has remained the same. So they have not narrowed that gap, and I don’t expect that gap to narrow.

And the question is why is that? Because they saw the fundamentally different problem that’s that SEER solves. What SEER does is it quantitatively compresses the dynamic range and allows for the proteome, which is complex, to go as a bite sized unit into the mass spec. As the mass specs are getting more and more sensitive, they’ll pick up more of that content. But that solution is a SEER unique solution.

By the way, since then, there’s been some copycats that have come. None of them perform nearly as well as SEER does. But but I actually I think if you live in an island by yourself, maybe maybe you were wrong. But the fact that there’s a bunch of folks trying to copy what SIR does I think is actually an additional validation of what SIR what SIR offers. I mean we have 250 plus patents in this space.

But, so anyway, so I I do think Kyle the mass spec improvements are an absolute important part of this.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. And in terms of looking installed base and, you know, it’s been your products have been like, you know, available for three years.

Where are they where are they being placed right now? Where are they being used? And if you could just talk about, you know, what happened over the past few years with your your stack program when you had like more of a service going on? Like how how did that kind of help, you know, you know drive either, you know, ultimately placements or utilization things like that?

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Yeah. So thank you, Carl. I want to try to make the answer brief because it’s really complicated, but I think it goes through harder than matter, which is when we launched SEER, we said we are not a service business. We want to be a tools provider to our customer. We don’t wanna compete with our customer, which is why we spun up Prognomic as a diagnostic company.

We didn’t wanna be in their in their business. We wanted to provide tools and be a trusted partner. Thing is, we were inventing a market that didn’t exist. What do I mean by that? Mass spec market for decades has been a CapEx market.

You save your money. You clock down half a million bucks or a million bucks. You buy an instrument, but then you don’t have a consumable component that goes with that. SEER came and said, here’s an instrument. Now every time you run a sample, you have to spend hundreds of dollars per sample.

That customer was not used to that. The genomic customer is, because of, you know, decades of alumina or fifteen years of alumina, but the proteomic guy was not. So now we’re a new instrument with exactly no publication from any customer and saying clunk down a bunch of money and do this, and we’re not gonna you know, we’re not in a service business. That was a mistake, I think, in hindsight in terms of commercialization strategy because the customer doesn’t know what they’re getting yet. And you’re asking them to write a CapEx check and then to write a consumable.

When we did two things, one was the stack, as Carl mentioned, the SEER Technology Access Center, and the second one was our, was our, strategic instrument placement program, SIP program, which was our loaner program. They were very important. So what this stack did was this stack said, okay, you can send your samples to SEER. We will run the sample for you and give you data. Essentially, like a service business.

And the SIP program says, okay, you don’t know if this is gonna be a good thing for you. We’ll loan it to you, but you have to buy consumable upfront to take the loaner, and then and then the loaner would then convert after, you know, x number of months into a sale. The stack ended up being a really excellent asset for us because there was a significant number of stack, conversions into instrument placements, and stack lowered the barrier to entry to get the proteograph done. And stack was also a good source of customer getting data and publishing papers. So it’s been tremendously helpful to us.

It’s been a challenging year. Last year was very hard on us, but, but the headwind is still there, but the tailwind is getting stronger for us. So for example, in the first quarter, q one of this year, we placed as many instrument as we did all of last year, and and q two was about the same. Now in q two, a significant number of those were largely SIPs, But we’re now seeing customers adopting the technology and doing at scale studies. My expectation is that in the near to midterm, and by that, I mean, maybe the next three years or so, Stack will be about 25% of our revenue.

And then I think longer term, it would probably drop to about maybe 10 to 20% of our revenue from from 25% of our revenue. You know, at scale, my expectation is that well, today, if I look at today, you know, instrument is about sorry. Consumables is about 65%. Stack is about 25%, and the instrument, because we do a lot of loaners initially, is about 10 to 15% of revenue. And that shift is gonna shift more toward consumable, and then a little bit of stack will go toward the instrument.

My hope is that as the customers get comfortable with the value proposition of the the protograph and what this unbiased proteomic means for them, that they’ll begin to utilize the service providers that are working with us like like Evotec or Discovery Life Sciences these are two big ones of ours, but Panum and others are now coming online at at scale. So if the customer wants service we rather if they work with a CRO who owns our instrument buys our kits, we but don’t want to be in the service business long term.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Got it. So it sounds so it sounds like there was like a almost like a bolus of placements after like that that converted from the stack program for example. So it was almost like a rel like a inflated quarter and one q and two q is that fair?

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: No no, Kyle. I don’t think so. I actually think the velocity of instrument placement I think what we’re now seeing is probably appropriate for the year. In other words, I don’t expect, there to be a slowdown. I I don’t know.

I don’t expect it to be a pickup. I mean, it’s it’s the macro picture is challenging, especially for CapEx, but the tailwind is getting stronger. So what’s driving what’s what’s gonna drive this year, and we guided at 17 to 18,000,000 this year, and and we reiterated that in in the on our call last last week, which which had midpoints about 25% increase to last year, but that isn’t because the headwind is getting easier. I think that I think with the tariffs and the NIH budget and the the MFN of the drug pricing, all of those things, I think it’s hard for our customers. But we’re in small revenue numbers right now, so it doesn’t take a lot to push you up.

And the data that the customers are getting is really important to them, and it’s helping us kind of move up despite the headwinds.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah. So given the macro outlook for US academic and then for biopharma I guess, how is the picture setting up for like for like next year for example? Because you have nice momentum almost like inflecting and like you said like a 100,000 sample study maybe done on mass spec and using the radiograph as well. Yeah.

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Yeah Kyle, I think the money to be made isn’t on biobanks Meaning, biobanks are excellent validation in terms of your value proposition. I think the bread and butter of making money is the customer that runs, let’s say, high one hundreds, low 1,000 sample number. And you gotta get into a run rate business where you have a lot of these customers that are coming. And those customers are academic government and biopharma customers. If I look at 2024 and I think 2025, it’s shaping to be about the same.

Academic and government were roughly about 30% of our revenue last year. It’ll be about in that range this year. And their government was about 18% academic, about 12%. I think that will probably shift if I look at this year 2025. We’re probably in that same 30 ish percent range, but it’s heavily academic less government this year.

And then and then the biopharma is kinda consistent, but, but but very CapEx constrained and very conservative. What we need is a run rate business where the guy with his grants, the academic guy, has the money to buy his samples. Academics are being very cautious. I mean, government is very cautious in terms of their spend. Biopharma is great because once they’re once they see the value proposition, it’s a nice run rate business.

If I look at some of our very stable customers, they’re the large pharmas who’ve been our customer who buy on regular basis but but challenging.

Kyle Mixon, Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah. Got it. So, as you think of one financial question that I wanna kind of possibly end with. So, a lot of, you know, good things going on finally with, you know, with the business. It’s been years of sort of investment in this.

How given now like you’re sort of again, I feel like like inflecting a bit. I feel like the features is pretty bright. What is your, you know, cash runway and burn outlook looking like at this point given maybe you have to invest more to drive that growth and sort of like, you know, the ROI is gonna be positive. So you’ve got to get those investments now maybe. How are you thinking about that kind of, path?

Let’s say. Yep. Yeah.

Omid Farixaad, CEO, SEER: Look. We’re we’re, we have about 260,000,000 of cash cash equivalent investments and and no debt. We run the business super tight. Burn the c o pi b low 40s 40 to 40 5 and probably on the low end of that. And then if there was no growth at all then you know we have six seven years of burn But I but I do expect growth.

So my expectation is that, we don’t need to raise capital in the future. In fact, if anything, I feel very bullish about where we are, and I think that there is a massive disconnect, between Sears value proposition, our stock price today, that we are doing a stock buyback. In fact, we had an authorization of 25,000,000 stock buyback. We bought back about 20,000,000 of that. That’s about 13% of the float.

And and buying back stock because I feel that I have enough cash, and and I don’t think we’re ever gonna need to raise more. Now to win in this space, you always have to be pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of innovation. And so we are constantly investing in innovation, and our latest product launch, which we did in June, reflects that. And we make highly concentrated bets in innovation, so I don’t have a a gazillion thing going on to see what sticks. We make very significant investments in certain aspects of our, what we think is the next big thing.

And and I we are making very significant investment in what I can consider to be the next big thing. And hopefully, in a not too distant future, we can talk about that. Okay. But my but my expectation, Carl, is that access to the proteome in an unbiased way, is here to stay.

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