Cibus (CBUS) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Date
March 17, 2026, 4:30 p.m. ET
Call Participants
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Chief Executive Officer — Peter R. Beetham
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Chief Scientific Officer — Gregory F. Gocal
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Chief Financial Officer — Carlo Broos
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Full Conference Call Transcript
Peter R. Beetham: Thanks, Carlo, and good afternoon, everyone. By any measure, 2025 was a landmark year for Cibus, Inc., not because of any single headline, but because of a convergence of key themes that are shaping the trajectory of the gene editing industry. Technology leadership, commercialization progress, scale, and regulatory momentum all arriving at the same time. We have seven rice customers representing over $200 million in potential annual royalty opportunity. We received our first customer payment from our sustainable ingredients program. We were selected by the UK government as a technology partner for its farming innovation program.
And in a watershed moment, the EU finally reached political agreement on new genomic techniques legislation, something we have been helping to shape for many years. Gene editing is no longer an experiment. We believe it is the future of innovation in farming, food, and agriculture, and Cibus, Inc. has been positioned ahead of this innovation curve for a long time. We have shifted to a commercially driven company with a powerful technology engine.
What makes this current moment particularly exciting is the intersection of our technology readiness and a change in how we believe seed companies are thinking about gene editing. For years, speed and scale were obstacles. Seed companies were interested, but the technology was not predictable enough to fit into their breeding programs. Our advancements in creating a more streamlined business with time-bound, predictable trait development have changed that equation. We can take a customer's elite germplasm, make a specific edit, and return it to them within 12 to 15 months. Because of that progress, we are beginning to see something important.
These companies do not necessarily just want access to a trait; they want to get more deeply integrated with our technologies. This is a natural evolution of what we mean when we say that Cibus, Inc. can be an extension of our customers’ breeding programs. We receive their elite genetics, we make the edits, and we return improved material on a predictable schedule that allows for commercial planning and coordination that better align to their seed improvement and market growth strategies.
Increasingly, the conversations we are having with potential customers are about ongoing genomic editing relationships, not just one trait in one crop, but the possibility of a broader engagement throughout their entire portfolio, where Cibus, Inc. can serve as a gene editing engine for their plant breeding capabilities.
This is highlighting opportunities beyond traditional trait licensing, particularly in high-growth markets like India, Asia, and Latin America, where we see potential for what I have described as outsourced gene editing, with partners accessing our editing capabilities on an ongoing basis. As we explore these potential relationships, we are maintaining our core licensing and royalty frameworks surrounding the edits we make. The edits are the product. Cibus, Inc. edits the genome in elite genetics, and those edits are connected to royalty. Regardless of whether a partner comes to us for a single trait or for a comprehensive editing program, the value we create resides in the edits themselves, and we retain that value through our intellectual property and licensing structure. That is how we intend to build a durable, recurring cash flow that drives long-term shareholder value. So whether we are talking about trait licensing, editing services, or some combination thereof, the roads lead to the same payoff: an annual stream of royalties on the edits Cibus, Inc. makes.
Now turning to our RISE program, which remains the foundation for near-term revenue generation and the clearest example of our core trait business model I just described. Remember, our seven RISE customers across the United States and Latin America represent an incredible $200 million in potential annual royalty opportunity through our herbicide-tolerant traits. Importantly, we remain on track for initial market entry in Latin America in 2027, followed by the potential U.S. expansion in 2028 and entry into India and Asia closer to 2030. Perhaps the most significant development was with Interox.
In January, we executed a nonbinding LOI establishing a framework for commercialization of herbicides on rice across key Latin American markets, starting with Ecuador and Colombia in 2027 and expanding into Peru, Central America, and the Caribbean. We have transferred some edited material back to interrupted registration work. We have recently received an import permit so we can return their elite rice genetics with two herbicide-tolerant traits, and we expect to advance negotiations towards a definitive commercial agreement late in 2026.
In addition, over the past year, we have demonstrated important progress in RISE, particularly in Latin America. Remember, this is a market that historically lacked access to advanced weed management solutions, and the demand for what we are offering is strong. Our partnership with SEAT, or FLAIR, which works with the Latin American Funds for Irrigated Rice and participates in the hybrid rice consortium for Latin America, gives us access to rice farmers across the region through a partner that has launched varieties in 17 countries.
As we have previously mentioned, we also have signed agreements with Semiano and Semias del Hula, two important Colombian rice seed companies, and completed delivery of rice lines with our HT3 trait to an existing U.S. customer. Beyond the current partners that include our long-term herbicide partner, RTDC, we are pursuing initial access to the Brazilian market, one of the most significant rice geographies in Latin America, and potentially Argentina as well, representing substantial additional acreage opportunities.
In India, we continue to work with AgBiar and RTDC to build seed company relationships where rice cultivation is approximately 120 million acres. Greg recently traveled to India and met with a number of leading seed companies and even the former Minister of Agriculture. The demand there is significant. In some areas, farmers are growing two rice crops in a year, and India’s regulatory acceptance of gene editing, demonstrated by the recent first planting of gene-edited rice in the country, positions India as a leading future market. We are initially targeting commercial launch in India around 2030, and we will keep you updated as we progress. On the development side, we are also expanding our trait portfolio in rice.
Following successful 2024 field trial results for stacked gene-edited herbicide-tolerant traits, in March 2025, we expanded our efforts to include additional trait stacking to broaden weed management for crop protection.
Stepping back, in just over a year, we have built a rice program that spans three continents and targets the world’s most important rice-growing region. That trajectory happened because our technologies deliver something seed companies have never had before: time-bound, predictable trait development in their elite germplasm. That is worth emphasizing, as it is a central component to the value proposition that Cibus, Inc. is delivering to customers. Another great example of how this trait portfolio model works in practice is through our collaboration with the John Inner Center on nutrient use sufficiency. That partnership is a funded program where we are applying our technologies to their breakthrough trait with potential to apply this across our entire crop portfolio. Different structure, same endpoint: elite germplasm, Cibus, Inc. technologies, Cibus, Inc. edits, Cibus, Inc. royalties.
Now, regulatory. As part of this perfect storm of progress, we have seen very positive developments occur in the regulation of gene editing in significant jurisdictions around the world. At Cibus, Inc., we have been patient because we understood that the global regulatory framework would determine how fast this industry scales. In December, the EU reached political agreements on new genomic techniques legislation. This was a watershed moment. Europe represents approximately 100 million acres of greenfield opportunity because GMO technologies have been restricted for decades. The European Parliament plenary session is expected in late April. This is the next big milestone we are watching very closely.
This comes on the heels of the UK precision bred organisms framework going live last November. We submitted our first PBO filings in January, and in February, we were selected for a DEFRA-funded consortium applying our RTDS technologies to light leaf spot resistance in oilseed rape. Being chosen by a national government as a technology partner is a powerful independent validation. Across the Americas, the momentum continues. California authorized gene-edited rice for planting for the first time, Ecuador confirmed our traits are equivalent to those developed using conventional breeding, and USDA APHIS has now given us 17 positive determinations. Just last week, Peru also confirmed gene-edited products will be considered similar to conventional rice varieties.
This regulatory harmonization is accelerating commercial conversations globally. With that great news, I will pass the call over to Greg to discuss our opportunity pipeline, traits, and programs. Greg?
Gregory F. Gocal: Thank you, Peter. I will keep my remarks focused on the key technical milestones that support both our priority programs and our broader opportunity pipeline. What I would add from the lab side is some perspective on the scientific results that helped drive our progress. In rice, in 2025, we realized an order of magnitude improvement in our editing efficiency. That translates to regenerated edited plants. We have optimized the reagents, cell culture conditions, the delivery mechanics, and the regeneration process, and we continue to push those boundaries with our strategic use of AI and machine learning toward identifying the right targets faster, predicting precise edit outcomes with greater confidence, and feeding those learnings back into each successive campaign.
Combined with our semi-automated workflows and robotic assistance, the trait machine process is becoming faster, more scalable, and more efficient. That is what is enabling us to take on the kind of broader relationships Peter described, with the throughput and the consistency to serve as our partners’ ongoing editing capability.
Turning to our opportunity pipeline, I wanted to highlight our significant 2025 technical progress across programs that are all available for partnership and represent meaningful future value. Starting with our canola traits, our second-generation herbicide-tolerant trait, HT2, delivered positive field trial results in North America last year, confirming both acceptable herbicide resistance and similar yield to the unedited parent. It is important to remember that HT2 validates the path for developing not only for that particular chemistry, but for any chemistry in this family, and is a trait that can be stacked with other herbicide systems.
For sclerotinia resistance, bioassays for plants bearing two of our modes of action continue to demonstrate enhanced resistance, and our collaboration with BioGraphica, using their AI platform, has identified several new potential gene editing targets. Our RTDS platform gives us the precision to go after multiple modes of action for the same disease. That is something conventional approaches simply cannot do at our speed. It is important to note that both HT2 and sclerotinia resistance have multi-crop, multi-geography potential.
In the UK, we completed our second year of field trials for pod shatter reduction in winter oilseed rape, showing encouraging performance in several customers’ germplasm. With the PBO legislation now in effect, our gene-edited material can now be grown like conventional germplasm, and we have submitted our first PBO filing. The DEFRA-funded Light Leaf Spot Consortium is a tremendous validation for our technologies’ abilities to target resistance to another key disease in winter oilseed rape, with 12 industry and academic partners and Cibus, Inc. selected as the gene editing technology partner.
What makes this technically exciting is that we are applying our RTDS platform to develop durable disease resistance, a more complex challenge than herbicide tolerance, and one that demonstrates the increasing sophistication of what our gene editing system can deliver.
On nutrient use, we continue our funded collaboration with the John Ennis Center on a breakthrough trait that has the potential to create significant commercial opportunities across our entire crop portfolio. This addresses the global fertilizer efficiency challenge, where only about one-third of the fertilizer applied in the field is typically available to be absorbed by plants. This is a complex biological system that requires targeted, specific edits—exactly the kind of problem our platform was designed to solve.
On the wheat platform, we previously disclosed in 2024 successfully regenerated plants from single cells in a wheat cultivar. Single-cell regeneration is the gateway to applying our full RTDS editing capability in a new crop. Once we can do that, the entire trait development process for that crop opens up. That, in turn, spurs opportunities for further partner-funded development in one of the world's most cultivated crops, and as the European regulatory landscape becomes clearer, we are seeing increased interest. Similarly, in soybean, in early 2025, the company achieved sufficiently high editing rates enabling expanded development of its soybean platform in conjunction with partner-funded and/or supported programs. The key message I want to leave you with is this: our RTDS platform is performing across multiple crops and increasingly complex traits. Every one of these pipeline programs is available for partnership, and together, they represent significant optionality for the business. Our technical foundation, combined with growing regulatory evolution, positions us well to advance high-value traits through partnerships while maintaining focused execution on high-priority revenue drivers. I will now hand the call over to Carlo for the financial update. Carlo?
Carlo Broos: Thank you, Greg. Looking at our financials for the fourth quarter, our cash and cash equivalents as of 12/31/2025 were $9.9 million. In January 2026, we raised $22.3 million in gross proceeds from our public offering. This capital raise meaningfully extends our runway and supports continued advancement