iSpecimen Inc. (NASDAQ:ISPC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Eric Langlois: Yeah. Thanks, Tracy and hello everyone. Yeah, I think, I agree with Tracy’s last statement. What we’re really seeing is the reaction to this has been just an increased deliberate nature on the customer’s end. So it’s not just on the compliance and the vendor profile forms and all those things that the customers are making us jump through now. But I think they’re just being more deliberate on their, spend. So they’re taking more time to evaluate the projects, to reprioritize in which areas of research that they’re going into, they’re reevaluating all of their third-party partnerships and those, sort of things. So I think it has more to do with speed of decision-making than it does necessarily with the drying up of spending.

And we’re certainly seeing that in Q1. We have significant increase in the top of the funnel both in terms of opportunities and quotes. We’re just not yet seeing the pull-through on purchase orders, but we typically expect that to happen in March. So, I think it’s just — the customers are being a lot more deliberate and they’re just being a lot more careful about where they put their research dollars. And we just have to make sure that we’re involved in enough conversations across the Board that we’ve developed enough of a pipeline that we’re in the right conversations that we can land the projects that fit well with us. But I think what really dovetails into this is the work we’re doing on the supplier front, whereas you might see more deliberate nature on the customer side.

We’re seeing more — a larger willingness on the supplier side to get more involved to monetize and commercialize their operations and their specimens. So, some of the projects that maybe we were unable to do in the past, we’re trying to be able to do now and those are all revenue opportunities because anything that was a no before that we can turn into a yes now, allows us to actually cover more ground for the customers and get more velocity through the funnel. So, I think those are the things we’re seeing. I do think the SVB situation is something to monitor out in the Bay Area where we do have a heavy concentration of customers. But we have not heard anything directly from customers yet that there’s been a major effect. But certainly capital funds and everything else in the Bay Area that’s something for us to keep an eye on and we certainly will.

Matt Hewitt: That’s all. Great color. Thank you so much.

Operator: The next question comes from Allen Klee with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Allen Klee: Good morning. So, for your new programs of monetizing Data and Marketplace-as-a-Service can you talk a little bit about explaining a little bit, what you’re going to be doing what the opportunity is, and what you’re hearing from the customers of what they’re looking for and why they might be excited by these? Thank you.

Tracy Curley: Yes, I’m going to do a brief answer and I’m going to turn this over to Ben because this is really a technology question. Our Marketplace-as-a-Service is something that is not imminent in 2023. But we will be doing a pilot at the end of 2023 for Data-as-a-Service, which we’re really excited about. We have some build-out that we’re working on right now to our platform to be able to achieve what we need to for our customers in that area. And so I’ll turn it over to Ben to talk a little bit more about what that entails and the timing amount. Ben?