FOAK tales

So this is where we talk about first of a kind financing or folk, and it's where so many promising climate technologies go to die. This problem is actually exactly what I focus on at Trellis. Climate. We're trying to help more technology companies ramp up their commercialization efforts and do that in a way that will make them successful at their first of a kind endeavors. This week we're sharing an episode from another latitude media podcast called Catalyst that tackles this challenge head on.

Host Shale Khan sits down with Mario Fernandez, who runs Breakthrough Energy's first-of-a-kind financing program. Also, by the way, conveniently called Catalyst. Mario has seen hundreds of these projects. and he's figured out what separates the ones that make it from the ones that don't. He breaks down the brutal step-by-step reality, pilot to demo to first commercial project. And all the financing puzzles, customer contracts, and technical hurdles you have to solve along the way.

It's exactly the kind of tactical behind the scenes conversation that we live for on the Green Blueprint. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode, but for now, here's Shale and Mario.

And there is no one size fits all solution, as we know. But there are a bunch of things that are common amongst many companies and challenges that companies face when they're trying to build their first of a kind. And I do think that we are starting to collectively, as an industry, as a as a market in climate tech, we're starting to get smarter a little bit.

About what are those key characteristics that projects need to have? How should companies be thinking about constructing their teams and the timing around first of a kind? And then of course. what's the nature of the commercial contracts that they should have in place? How should they be thinking about financing, etc.? These things are still pretty bespoke, but are starting to come a little bit more into focus than they have in the past. And that

Is in part thanks to folks like Mario Fernandez, who's our guest today. Mario leads Breakthrough Energy Catalyst. So I'm sure many of you know Breakthrough Energy. It's a broader platform that includes Break your energy ventures, which is a venture firm. It includes policy advocacy and a variety of other things. But Catalyst is specifically their first of a kind financing program. And they've done a bunch now of First of a kind financing for a variety of reasons.

We talk about some of them in the conversation with with Mario here. Uh, but what he started to see is common patterns amongst the companies that they're looking at, the ones that are successful, the ones that are not. And Listen, I think this remains today the real valley of death.

There aren't really any other values of death at this point in my mind. The capital stack for climate tech companies is is actually pretty strong, even in light of the market having shifted a fair bit. The hardest part is still. And there are good reasons for that. But lots of companies are figuring it out. And so it is worthwhile to figure out what's working.

what should the next generation of companies be thinking about? And how can we figure out a playbook to standardize processes, financing structures, and so on?

So that it's less of a murky question mark when you're heading into the abyss and you're starting to go into your pilot and prove out your technology and so on. You know you're gonna have a first of your kind in the future. How do you do it? So It's worthwhile to walk through some of that. Mario published a piece recently w through Breakthrough Energy Catalyst um laying out what he views as twelve keys.

to first of a kind projects. We talked through a bunch of those keys sort of in the context of the individual components of a first of a kind project here. It's really this is a tactical conversation. Like what are the things that you should do here? But it's so cross-cutting and it is such an issue for so many companies that I think it is worth a listen whether you are building a first of a kind or not. Anyway, here's Mario.

You know, the sort of like quintessential challenge I think in the development of new technologies in in the climate world. And there's like so much to unpack around it. But I want to start with This, which is um, how would you describe why it's hard? Of course it's hard. Why is it? to figure out how to finance a first of a kind thing.

To tackle this. Um, the challenge is the fact that this companies reach a point where the technology has been proven. but it has not been de risk in the eyes of large scale infrastructure capital, right? Whether that is infrafunds or project finance banks, right? So you need to Find a way to get these technologies over that, over the from the proven stage to the de-risk stage.

And that's where the expertise that Catalyst has, the infrastructure, energy infrastructure, investing, development, and construction expertise, coupled with the flexible capital. that's where, you know, we can play a role.

To be at the point where you are quote unquote proven. And then where is the like how does an infrastructure look at that same thing and see it as unfinanceable at that point?

fifteen year track record that have never lost money on any project they've invested in, right? It's a huge contrast obviously with the VC world, where you can lose on nine and make it up in the one, the tenth one. Um, so uh the biggest thing here is the fact that there is such a rigid criteria for infrastructure investors to invest in, right? You have to have a long term track record for the technology. You have to have hours of operation. You have to have a really solid EPC

scheme to build it. Um you have to have it long term contracted. Um and you have to be able to not only invest in a small one off project, but you have to be able to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. from that font um into that technology.

And I think that's where, you know, a lot of these new technologies don't make the cut, right? Um so what we try to do uh in our work is how do we shepherd this technology? from the point where again they came out of a lab and they've done a pilot. And out of that pilot comes a lot of data and comes the fact that the original scientific thesis has been proven. XYZ reaction happened and you could make it, you know, viable. But he still has a long way to go deep.

the way we propose to do this is, you know, that company has to follow a path towards that they're risking. And that path in our uh experience is you go from a pilot To a 5 to 20x demonstration project, and then you go to another 10, 10, 20 times uh first of kind project. Because along the way you learned how to design it, how to engineer it, how to build it, how to operate it, how to get the cost down in a way that when you go to build your first of a kind project.

you're able to show the investor that with through that journey that you went through. uh and with the right commercial constructor on it, which is super important too, we should dive into that. Um, the risk of the project actually not working is very low.

and the probability that the project would work, but that that team, that company can actually Build the second, third, fourth, fifth project, and therefore that investor can invest the hundreds of millions of dollars that they want to invest is significantly.

There's the technology, what needs to be proven or de-risked on the technology? There's the commercial construct. What is your off take? What does your customer look like? How is that contracted and so on? There are the economics. What do the returns look like and what do the margins need to be and so on? And then there's the financing, structure, sources, et cetera. So I kind of want to talk through each of those.

You you talked about one thing that I think is important and I often see companies not fully understanding, which is the what the scale up steps should look like. So I want to spend another minute on that because this is the question of what does the the tech de-risking need to look like at the point that you're going to go try to raise any kind of off-balance sheet financing for a project. So you said pilot, demo, first of a kind.

The distinction between the pilot and the demo, as I understand it, is there's a scale difference. The demo is bigger, but it's mostly that the demo is end-to-end representative. Right. So like you're running the full system, you're producing the product you're ultimately gonna produce. Whereas the pilot, maybe you are demonstrating the reactor performance or something like that, but you're not running the full end-to-end system. Is that right? And and also on the demo.

I mean you mentioned another thing that people want to see, which is runtime, like how much runtime?

you know, what is the product that's gonna come out of it? And is that product to spec'd? So a lot of the demos, what they go to do is to prove out the specs inside the, you know, factory or the production processes in the end customers, right? Um and then when you look at it where a lot of companies, you know

don't necessarily uh follow this steps, what happens is they don't have an end-to-in system. And I think that's super important, right? What we know is at the end of the day, the investors that come in at the series C, Series D, you know, most of the time funding or partially funding um first of a kind projects, they really wanna see six months or more of performance.

Uh because things degrade if you continuously operate something in a way that you didn't do it on the pilot, things degrade in a way that you really have to learn from that and figure out how you're going to engineer your first of a kind to make sure the performance is there.

And that's why that six month um track record is so important and the end to end. We've seen demos that I call half ass demos, which is just proving a particular piece of the technology But how that technology, that piece of technology, that component integrates with the rest of the system and how you go from the feedstock all the way to the end customer product is super important and it's so hard to get right the first time because it's never been done before.

Um, so that's what I would say that that you know, six months or more end to end is fundamental and the scale is all. Right? Because sometimes the pilot people do a pilot and when you do a demo, the demo is not large enough. And then when to jump off to first of a kind is such a large jump that investors get very scared that that jump has too many risks associated.

What we're going to build is basically 12 or 20 of these things lined up in parallel. But if the unit thing is the same size as the ultimate unit thing, what you're building is a modular version of the thing, it's viewed as less rich. And I guess my question for you is, do you see that as being is that an optical thing or is it a real thing? Is there actually lower risk if it's modular or? Is it just what will convince infrastructure investors?

and you approve your unit and now you're adding numbers to it. Integration is not an easy thing. So it's not a Panacea for all your problems. But it does require it does alleviate a lot of this execution risk around just large scale pro Um, I've been involved in my lifetime on putting together cogeneration projects where, you know, you're using a G turbine that has been deployed thousands of times and still a lot of things went wrong in building this mega project. So

Again, building a billion dollar project versus a hundred or two hundred million dollar project does have real risks associated with it that you know we need to think about. Now, many people in your audience are gonna say, well, modularity doesn't work for everyone.

And you want ideally six months of operating data on that thing. I will say one thing that I find to be this is the challenge with these companies, right? Which you'll appreciate. They're living off of uh successive venture capital rounds, right? That's where their, that's where their funding's coming in from to date at the point when they're doing their first of a kind.

Every time they raise a venture capital round, uh, you know, it buys them, let's call it two years of runway. They have to start fundraising six months before they run out of capital or more. So it really buys them 12 to 15 months to make enough progress. that they can hit key milestones and go raise the successive round at a higher price. Right. And so they have this dynamic where, okay, we need to build this demo, but

We need to, we have long lead items, we have design, we have all the things that you have for bigger projects that take time, permitting and all that and construction. And then you're telling me I need six months of operation before I can go finance the next thing. And actually I just don't have that kind of runway. And so you're operating these parallel tracks where you have to, and I think actually you pointed this out in the 12 keys, you these are not sequential activities.

You need to be developing your first of a kind project well before your demo is operating and certainly before your demo has six months of operational data because you don't have time basically to wait around. In ideal world, you probably would wait around, right? But you just can't live off of that. version of a sequential capital formation.

The decision to go on that pilot demo first of a kind journey, I think is the first fundamental decision that companies make. And and this is where we've seen a lot of companies fail because They take way too long to get into that conviction that they need to deploy their own technology. Right.

Two years ago, one of the things we heard a lot was, you know, from CEOs, my board is asking me to go license this technology. They don't want to spend the CapEx. They feel that someone else should spend the CapEx if I could just sell the license. And what we found looking at over 300 projects, 350 projects in the past couple of years, is the fact that the companies that actually deploy their own technology and follow that path are the ones that get to success.

There are companies that have spent two or three years in the licensing route where at the end, the majority of times, nobody really wants to take a risk on building something that has never been built before. Um so your question on capital is how fast do you convince yourself, your board, and do you build a team to drive towards that path and to say, look, it's on us to be able to build.

Assuming it's gonna work, then I want to be in a position that the second I know it works, I can pull the trigger on my next thing rather than starting to plan my next thing. Um but you you actually gave a good segue to the next topic beyond tech, which is the commercial construct. So obviously there's various different versions of like the customer structure and and so on. Talk me through how you as an infrastructure investor, how you think about the differences between

Okay, you have a customer who's gonna buy your product versus gonna buy your system and own and operate it versus the other ways that you can engage with customers. And are there you already described one thing, which is don't license before you build. Build first if you're gonna license a license later. But beyond that. What are you looking for in in the commercial construct?

Uh many times though, people think they're gonna make money off the demo, right? When and that my in our experience we found that's not the case. The case is that most in most cases the demo is a very large R and D. Exercise said money losing, unprofitable RD exercise on every aspect, including the commercial aspect of how are you really going to market.

So most of the time demos don't really get off the long term off take contracts because no customer really wants to take that risk. Um and the company doesn't really feel comfortable signing up to something to delivering something that they don't really know, they've never really built or produced before.

Your incentives are misaligned a little bit because what you really need from an existential company perspective from the demo is to prove the technology and optimize it. What the customer needs is to get their products as they expected to get it. And you create that misalignment in a way that actually makes the demo less productive for you.

is producing it, right? So the specs need to be there. And I think that's a great demonstration of that. Now when you go to first of a kind, there is that always that balance of companies want to be able to show commercial progress, right? And they wanna be able to announce that you know, somebody's buying you know a lot of volume of their product off of them where

you run into issues is how you contract, how do you contract that off take, right? Um and and to your question, let's talk a little bit more about structure. So one is we find that many times Off takes are priced in a way before engineering, you know, feld one, feld two engineering have been done and is based on

Optimistic CapEx assumptions. Now, when the companies go through the engineering process and they actually get to a feed, they find out that CapEx is twice as much. Unfortunately, they've already signed an off-tech agreement based on half the CapEx. And that's when they get into trouble because they there's no way they can go back to the customer and say, Hey, can we double the price? Right. So w we do we have seen that a lot.

And what we encourage is you have to prize and structure your off take very flexibly. Otherwise, you're gonna get into trouble because by design the process of engineering the the the plant um is just not as mature as your offtake.

You're up against the fact that it's inherently going to be the most expensive one you ever build, right? Hopefully. But in all likelihood that's true. And so What I feel like a lot, I agree with you that I've seen this play out, but I don't exactly know how to avoid it because I feel like a lot of companies, what they're where they're pricing at that front end, is they're like, Maximum willingness to pay from the customer. You know, and so they could go to the customer and say, Hey, like

This is a first of a kind, you have to appreciate it, could be more expensive. So let's do this price, but we'll build in flexibility. It might be 2x that price if my CapEx comes in at 2X. And I just don't know if they're gonna succeed at getting the off take. So I guess how do you how do you think about Building in that flexibility, which seems incredibly valuable to the company building a first of a kind, but but still actually getting the customer.

Say, hey, we're gonna make X. Let's agree that this project will make X return for the company and we'll price the off take based on that return based on the final feed number. So we have seen or we've seen color structure. Where the company says to the customer, let's create a base price that we can agree on. And after that, we'll share the upside on where the price actually is.

um, based on, you know, some kind of market index and less share the upside in in certain ways that incentivizes you to still buy the product, right? And obviously that base price has to be, you know, for a minimum return of the capital. Um so there are we have, you know, implemented uh various commercial structures that, you know,

Again, this is commercial innovation that you can use to be able to do that. But as you say, there is a limit. And I think where you can safeguard yourself against blowing the capex in a way that the customer walks away from that contract or you're just not able to deliver the plant. is by making sure that you learned a lot during the demo in a way you can put parameters around the capex. So the capex is not necessarily fully unknown. There is a track record of you having built it.

And you can put parameters around what the final capex numbers, capex and opex numbers are gonna come up.

the off taker, the customer, they know they're signing up for a first of a kind thing. Maybe they're willing to do it because they wanna spur development of this technology. It's good for their goals, et cetera, or they want access to the next bunch of projects, but they know that this is

more expensive and higher risk and so on. And so in their mind, ideally, they want to sign the shortest term contract that they can to allow you to build the project. You want the longest term contract you can get from them for certainty. And so there's a There's some middle ground there. I don't know where it sits. So how do you think about how how long the offtake needs to last?

Right. They see that demand supply uh imbalance and they want access to future products. So that's the reason why many people sign those long term agreements. Um in a space like cement, where cement is such a spot based uh commodity, um by the way, so is jet fuel, but again, jet fuel airlines can take a a longer term view, but in cement

where it's so short term, it'd be really hard to get anybody to sign more than a five year agreement, right? However, Again, you with the right pricing um and the right motivated customer, you are able to show that, hey, without this, I'm not going to be able to raise the capital that I'm going to need for the plan. Right. And I think that you know, you don't necessarily have to go twenty years.

Um and and yes, I would argue that you know, investors will give some credit to the merchant piece, but you also can't do one or two year off takes. Uh it's just not healthy.

uh or sells plant, I should say, whatever the product is, that's a balance sheet purchase by a customer rather than offtake. That's attractive, obviously, in the context of like you don't need a 20-year offtake. You have a customer who's just going to take it off your hand. How do you think about the trade-offs there and how much of that do you see in first?

how are you going to get that construction financing, which is the biggest thing, right? Um there's different ways of doing it. Again, b you're you're you know, you can base that on the fact that you have a hundred percent certainty that if you perform the planned well. You can put the planned onto the cost. Um however where there is great lines or where that is in question, that's when you what's the background.

Right. So a lot of w we've seen a couple of cases is people actually signed a long term off take agreement and that off take agreement has the the the buyout option. Right. So you still cover as a uh company building the plant, you're still cover from the perspective that if the customer doesn't buy it, um, you know, you could still have some sort of offtake.

But at the same time they have a ba buyout right, which at some point if it it's gonna be an economical decision for the customer to say, look, I can just buy the plan and rip uh up the off take agreement.

But as you said, the customer's not typically on a first of a kind, customer's not going to bear that that construction risk or cost. And so what you end up having to do is you build it on balance sheet and then it passes some acceptance test and the customer takes over. Again, that sounds great, but now you you're bearing all that construction cost and that on a first of a kind that's a meaningful size.

that creates a cash hole for you. And that's also a difficult cash hole to fill. Like there's no construction finance is a thing if you're building a utility scale solar project, but if you're building a first of a kind thing. There's also not really, we've been talking about like financing the long term operation. There's also not really a construction financing solution. So you end up having to do that on balance sheet and that's a lot of cash. You have to do all the procurement, you know,

18 months in advance or whatever it is. Um, and so the you know, if you have the capital on your balance sheet to do that, it's attractive again, because you know, you get to just transfer it. But If you don't, which most folks don't, um it it ends up being harder than you think it's going to be to just sell the first thing rather than trying to find.

um, you know, first of a kind, it's a big unknown. And what we've seen, unfortunately, in some of these off tech agreements, is very, you know. I would say stringent parameters around the volumes that the plan that the off-tech needs to deliver and the dates under which they have to deliver. Right. And that creates a huge problem where you know if you're build if you spend all this money on balance sheet building the plant and you

get to that drop that date and you're not commissioned or you're not hitting the performance target and the customer can just walk away, it creates a huge issue. It puts your company under, right? So one of the things we really try to do is

How do we create flexibility around the terms around, you know, when you're gonna when you're gonna deliver the plant, what performance you're gonna get, what type of commissioning runway are you going to get during that time for you to allow to work out the kinks of your first of a coming plan? Um so again, people focus a lot on price, but the terms are just as important.

What should I be targeting in terms of pick your metric, IRR, payback, et cetera? What what is what is gonna be good enough to attract some kind of external project level capital to the to a first of a kind.

couple of things. One is very high certainty that the plant is going to finish construction and commissioning. Um and two, they really have to take a point of view around the downside. As I said, infrastructure investors do not like to lose money. So how do how is that downside protected? So what you have to do is start putting together all of the risks around the contracts, right? Is your feet stock the same length as your stock?

Right? Did you procure the right PPA? Are you ha are you exposed to PPA risk? In a lot of the long uh long duration energy storage plays, that arbitrage. uh you know, o on negative price power might only be for a couple and and the utility of the area, I might only be willing to offer it three years because they know there's a new transmission line coming in, right? So how are you exposed there on the PPA side? Um

on the feed sty on the off take again, you know, what are the obligations that you have under the off take and are the o is the obligation to pay for that off take really solid? And how is a customer Viewed what's the credit profile, the customer, right? So as you start adding up all the different factors, whether it's feedstock, whether it's PPA, whether it's off take.

um construction and who exactly is going to operate it, you start creating a picture of do you get to a good enough return um that is safeguarded on the downside where the infrastructure investor one could see that it's enough of a return, but two, what we've seen is most of those infrastructure investors really play for the platform, right?

I'm putting X hundred million dollars in the first project. What I really wanna do is put a billion dollars into your next two or three projects. And a lot of them are getting options for those projects, but because what they really they they don't wanna do

a one and out project. They don't want to do a hundred, two hundred million dollar investment. What they really want to do is see that company through that platform formation, the way it was done for solar, for wind, where we've seen this platform place. really sell at multiples to, you know, large scale infrastructure investors or pension funds in a way that was very profitable for the developers of the company.

Um so again, the answer is very nuanced and is not necessarily a hard set number. It has to be IR positive for sure and you have to really test out whether, you know, that um protection against loss, against principal loss is there. But after that it becomes, you know, how much can the project deliver? But can you actually deliver on a platform where the investor could see higher returns?

Right, let alone this kind of technologies. So the Capex blowout that we see a lot of times is, you know, again, is you go through the process, fell one is a plus and minus fifty percent sort of uh number and as you go through it, there's a lot of things that the company didn't realize they needed in order to build the plant. Um, so one is again,

lack of knowledge around what it takes to build the plant. Hence the demo is a a mitigant, a large mitigant for that. But you still have to go through the process.

Um one of the things that we see on on one of the projects that uh we committed to that that was cancelled was you know, the balance of plant, the integration of four systems where the price was very well known in those four dif different systems, but the integration and the actual, you know, uh commodities, the the steel and the cement that went into integrating those four components just was not sized correctly because nobody had ever done before.

So balance of plan integration, as I said, around the modularity is still a is still an issue, it's still you have to be careful on. Uh but you know, the main thing is no one has ever built this before. And a lot of the inputs are just not known until they just start going through engineering and you start realizing things that are needed in order to build out that.

W what should you be thinking about in terms of the capital stack on the project? What is realistic? Is it is there a world where you can get debt on a folk project? Does it basically never happen unless it's like government debt? I mean You know, what what do you what do you target?

I I think that is that is one thing that that we've seen done. Um some of the company putting top co equity do wanna take a bet on the project level. Uh and therefore they put money into that. Um, as far as debt goes, we haven't seen it. We've seen people be able to raise debt at the corporate level via via venture debt or via corporate debt. Now, those are very low levers. Right. They're not the 80, 95% that you know you will get in solar, you will get very low levels.

Again, our contention is that if you structure your project and the construct, uh you know, the contract contractual structure of your project correctly you should be able to put some sort of debt, very low level of leverages on it because as I said, you have hopefully protected downside. And if you do have an infrastructure investor coming in to your project,

And so then I think often they they say, Okay, well maybe if I can't if they're like inherently there's no way to sufficiently truly protect the downside here, maybe I can juice the upside. And so then a lot of what they're thinking about is, okay. I will invest this is this will be equity more than it'll be debt, but I'll invest equity at the project level, but I'll get a kicker, which is like warrants in or options for the the Topco equity. Is that a viable?

scalable strategy in your mind. It requires basically an infrastructure investor that has almost like a venture capital mindset, which is where I think that's been challenging.

The other thing is that that project investor has to be able to enjoy the fact that doing the first demo or the first of a kind is going to create a tremendous amount of value at the top. Right. And it will increase the valuation of Topco because without it, the company will die.

and and ensure that they're fully de-risked, right? Look at the TOPCO and the company and the CEO and say this people, this group of people will deliver not only on the project, but they have sufficient pipeline and of projects and they can deliver on

And I think that combination is exactly what this the what the world needs. Um we've seen it in practice. Uh Infinium is a great example of a company, you know, when we started Talking to Infinium a year and a half ago, he had the idea for a of first of a kind project.

you know, did they had they really size the Capex to convert that Brownfield plant into what they needed to, right? So all that work that went in, you know, it got you know, the what was achieved is a structure where Brookfield could take a look at this and really see a path to again. a construction project that could deliver some return, but the ability for Infinium to deliver on on future projects, and that's where they committed, you know, over a billion dollars to the platform.

So we've seen it done in practice and we've seen that there are investors out there willing to do that. But I do think, again, back to the point. I do think in this missing middle, right, in the valley of death and the missing middle of the capital stack that it that is talked about, that you could find a profit and and you should be able to find a profit.

You just have to be able to, you know, do it out of a new asset class that's not either or, but rather a blending, a combination of it. But most importantly You know, and my our contention is that capital is an issue, but the biggest issue is the skill set that is required to be able to help the company see risk and really assess the risk of that b construction operation of the first of a country.

Um, it's really hard to get this done. You know, Rondo is a great example where, you know, a year and a half ago um, you know, we told we spoke to Rondo and they had, you know, more than a dozen projects around the world that they wanted to execute on. Uh, but there wasn't uh you know, there wasn't a specific clarity around what is the commercial product that they really wanted to put out there, right? They were

customers that wanted to buy the machine, there were customers that wanted them to build the machine and then, you know, there would buy from them. There are customers who just wanted the product, the steam in this case. And what we really focus on with Rondo is Where is it that you can deliver um, you know, this, uh, your first of a kind projects, uh, in this case, uh three projects that we funded.

And what is the best structure that is going to get customers to really buy off on it? And what we found is and working with and in partnership with them, we created a new commercial model where we called it Steam as a service. Right. Um and with that we were able to say, look. Rondo, you take care of the capex of attaching, you know, your battery to an industrial process, whether it is for utilities or whether it is for beverage uh manufacturing or food manufacturing.

And you the offer is I will deliver steam, you know, on a monthly basis at this price. And the risk of charging that machine um would be borne by the company. So one is you simplified what Rondo needed to do and the type of risks they needed to take. You switch

And it's really hard for them to take it on new technologies, right? So, how do you simplify? So, innovation with Rondo is how do we simplify?

the commercial offering in a way that, you know, was more palatable to the customer. And along the way what was so great is it with our joint venture that we have with the European Commission And the European Investment Bank, we were able to create a a much larger funding package for Rondo to be able to fund these machines with a combination of a catalyst funding plus European investment bank venture.

Um so for us, you know, this is the kind of partnerships that work where we're creating that commercial innovation where we're helping companies transform themselves in a way that can help them, you know, control their own destiny, but really prove out that the And that's what we do.

Mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquan. Theme song by Sean Marquon. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.