Brian McKelligon: So I think I got all those. And if I don’t, Kyle, let me know. So the 2.0 isn’t going to slowdown placements. Those are field upgrades. I think they’re just going to make those installs even more powerful in terms of their pull-through. It is those upgrades that was a contributor to the reagent acceleration that we saw in the second half. And we do think, as we course the year, we do think quarter-over-quarter; we’ll see that reagent number continue to climb. The services business is growing. For your question, solely because of the nature of the partnerships that we’re securing, they’re much later staged; they’re of much higher value. And the 70%-plus bump you saw in that portion of our business is probably the strongest indicator that one can see it externally of the type of projects that we’re taking on, of being later-stage higher value projects that really give us a lot of confidence that we will realize our clinical strategy of securing additional clinical trial assays and companion diagnostic deals, and we will achieve our goal of having CDx products in the queue contributing a significant portion of our revenue in the near future.
So that’s sort of the commentary, I think on everything, I think I got everything you asked about, Kyle.
Kyle Mikson: Yes, just on China. Also, if you have any sense on the back half of the year. Thanks.
Brian McKelligon: Yes. Look, I think consistent with many of our peers, we’re going to assume that the first half is still pretty challenging and if there is recovery, it’s going to be incremental in second half. It’s just not something you count on. And as we look at our aim of achieving operating cash flow break-even, we’ve got to do that within the context of a revenue goal that takes advantage of our diversified portfolio, from cert lab services to reagents and instruments. But it’s not so aspirational that we put that, that profitability goal at risk. So we’re trying to be very balanced in having a top-line goal and a margin goal that doesn’t require significant changes in the current business environment.
Kyle Mikson: Okay. That was great, Brian. Thanks so much. Just a quick one on MaxFuse algorithm with Enable, definitely differentiated from a clinical perspective. I heard Garry Nolan talking about that. Could you just maybe walk through that a bit more just double click on the clinical side of that and then —
Brian McKelligon: No, no, no, I — yes, sorry, go ahead.
Kyle Mikson: Yes, go ahead.
Brian McKelligon: Go ahead, sorry.
Kyle Mikson: Just wondering if that’s like the first of many kind of like unique, one off software solutions for the ecosystem that you kind of roll out with your other partners too, like just in addition to Enable use by other partners, right, so just curious about that.
Brian McKelligon: We do, look, the way I look at that, with my sort of simple brain, if you play with ChatGPT or some of those image creators, I think you have at least a qualitative sense of the kind of power that these sorts of approaches can bring. I would largely say, Kyle, in the near-term, this is really a tool for your discovery researchers, and effectively, as I noted on the call, what it allows you to do, it allows you to take single cell RNA-seq data, and leveraging the MaxFuse algorithm and the PhenoCycler-Fusion high-plex protein data. You informatically make that non-spatial data spatial by using the MaxFuse algorithm. So this allows our customers not to do a multiomic study one at a time, but rather leveraging the large data sets that exist for single cell, whether it’s internally or with third parties, to leverage that data set and your Akoya’s PhenoCycler-Fusion data to make it spatial.
I would encourage everybody to go read the two nature papers that Dr. Nolan has done on this. It really is quite astounding, and they validated it to a pretty deep extent. So I do think this is many of additional approaches to come, and we’ll continue to look at partners like Enable or others as vehicles to implement these in a user friendly manner, knowing that a skilled informatician can do GitHub type approaches regardless.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Tejas Savant from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Tejas Savant: Hey, guys. Hey, good evening. How are you?
Brian McKelligon: Hi, Tejas, we’re good.
Tejas Savant: Brian, just to kick things off over here, placements came in a little bit light in the fourth quarter, even on a sequential basis, I think in the third quarter you’d done almost, I think it was in the high 60s, if I remember right. Can you just walk us through sort of that dynamic? Was it entirely driven by macro and some of those elongated purchase decision cycles that you called out in China as well, or was there any shift in the competitive landscape here? Specifically I mean the one that we’ve been getting questions on is Lunaphore. So, just curious as to, any, if you could parse out that dynamic and the sequential step down in placements.
Brian McKelligon: Yes, Tejas, thank you for the question. It’s certainly the former that’s driving it. I mean, what we saw Tejas in Q3 and Q4 was quarters were becoming increasingly backloaded in month three. So that’s largely — that is the largest dynamic, the largest driver there. I think the visibility of Lunaphore and the questions I think is largely a result of them sort of being integrated with Bio-Techne and having a lot more visibility and marketing power. And we’ll see how that competitive dynamic shakes out over the coming quarters because I think they’re really just getting going.
Tejas Savant: Got it. Fair enough. And then in terms of just the academic budget environment, last couple of weeks we’ve had a few inbounds and just cracks over in Europe and horizon and some questions around the continuing resolution here in the U.S. as well. You guys are obviously over-indexed there like a lot of your spatial peers. So just curious as to what you’re baking into the guide and what you’re hearing from your academic customers at the moment.
