We actually believe that clinically speaking, we have very strong biases about what a knee replacement should be like. And our goal is to try and drive the science there to prove it. Now, I’m not saying we’re right, but I think that it’s imperative that technology companies in medicine actually try and figure out what the best way to treat a patient is and don’t just sort of keep doing the status quo. And I think that’s part of what frustrates people about Monogram is that we are biased — now certainly, our tools, somebody can take our tool and do a mechanical knee because that’s what they want to do. But we will be researching. We will be trying to change how people think about knee replacements and we will be trying to help answer the question of what is the best target, because ultimately, why we’re doing this is not just to make a tool that cuts bone, but we want to have a tool that actually helps drive patient outcomes.
So, does that mean that somebody is going to try and kill us? Sure. But I do believe that if the mission is there and genuine and strong enough, can somebody squash it? Sure. But we’re highly motivated to try and do this for the right reasons, and we’ll see what happens. And hopefully, that prevails because I do think that these companies that we’re competing against, I think they do care about patients. I just think it’s sometimes being so large, it can be difficult. But I do think that, that exists in the orthopedic space, where I do believe there’s a lot of people with integrity, where that’s what they want. And I think that a company that cares about that, I do believe that it actually does resonate. So, that helps how we’re thinking about it.
Kamran Shamaei: I just wanted to add, Ben, if I may?
Benjamin Sexson: Yes, of course, go for it.
Kamran Shamaei: So, I want to talk on the behalf of the engineering team, which is right now pretty much other than a couple of people, most of the company. We are very lean. I can tell you and Denis, my witness, we worked around the clock. We worked every night, and we wake up at 7 A.M. back to work. And that’s not the thing that we do one day or two day, that’s basically for life ever since we joined Monogram. We don’t work like this out of fear. We work like that because we love what we’re doing and we love what we are developing. And — the example I always give a person from — the example I always give is Alexander the Great, when he started, the person — kings were laughing at me and see who wrote the history, right? I just limit to that.
Benjamin Sexson: That was good. No, it’s deep. We’re getting sentimental on this video. Yes. So, here’s just another question for Mark. How do you plan to raise money in the coming months before you go to market, right? So, this is an interesting question. As many of you know, we’re crowdfunded. We’ve been crowdfunded all along. I do think there have been opportunities for our crowdfunded investors to get out at accretive prices. Now, I certainly would have hoped that it would have been higher for longer and whoever wanted to get out and make money, could have. Whoever invested in our crowdfunding and is still with us, unfortunately, you’re here for the long time, the long haul. Sometimes there’s an expression like you started to make money, but now you’re here for the tech.
Now, it’s become a long-term opportunity, right, with the prices where they are. When we have gone out to institutional investors, they really have wanted to see things that we couldn’t actually answer. So, we didn’t know how many patients the FDA was going to require for a clinical trial because we hadn’t submitted a clinical trial protocol. And we hadn’t submitted a clinical trial protocol because the FDA hadn’t definitively — and they still haven’t told us whether we need to do a clinical trial. So, why would we submit a clinical trial protocol to them if we don’t need to do a clinical trial and bias the whole discussion, right? So, there are some things that have taken time that have been difficult for us to fund raise around, right? Because if you don’t know what the budget is to do something, it’s hard to get it funded.
But now a lot of these things are getting derisked, right? So, we talked about the discussion we’re having with the FDA in April. That’s going to be a massively derisking thing where we now have clear answers for all of that. We’re planning to submit our 510(k). That is a huge milestone. That has been a massive, massive amount of work. There are — hopefully, we’re going to get a clinical trial approved outside of the U.S. That’s a very significant milestone. So, now I think we’re getting in an improved position where we can tell the story and hopefully, we can find investors that believe in the opportunity just as much as we do and resonate with the mission of the company, which is to try and improve patient outcomes, that’s really why we’re here.
We have, and I’m just going to float this, there has been some discussion of should we even look at going back to — one of the things that’s really interesting, and it’s been a problem for us, but it’s a problem that I love and hate. So, one of the problems we have right now is our stock doesn’t have a lot of volume, and that’s because we don’t have a very large float. And the reason we don’t have a very large float is because a lot of our investors, in fact, the majority of our investors, — and I haven’t pulled this like as of the kind of recent price action. But a lot of our investors invested because they actually want Monogram to succeed, because they care about the technology, and they were really just almost like a GoFundMe. They weren’t concerned about the returns on the stock.