Ideal Power Inc (NASDAQ:IPWR) CEO Dan Brdar joined Proactive to talk through the company’s recent milestones, including engagements with major automotive manufacturers.
Brdar also expressed optimism about the company's trajectory, noting its strategic positioning in the macro trends of EV adoption and renewable energy.
Proactive: The company is out with its financial numbers today for the last quarter. Tell me a little bit about what you saw in this last quarter, especially some of these partnerships you've announced.
Daniel Brdar: One of the things that we announced is that we're now engaged with our third global automotive manufacturer looking to incorporate our technology into their next generation of EVs, electric vehicles. We've already named Stellantis. We have another top ten global automaker that we're working with. And now we've got a third automaker that's in our program here. So, we've got the opportunity here over the longer term to have some huge volumes with these automakers as we move along through their design process.
Maybe you can just remind everyone about your technology and how it fits seamlessly into some of these cars that are being made.
Our technology is a semiconductor that has really low losses, and it's made in silicon versus some of the exotic materials that are out there in the semiconductor world. So, it really helps the automakers address two of their key issues, which are the electric vehicles' cost being high and the range of those vehicles being limited. Our technology improves the efficiency and does it in a low-cost material, so it really helps them with both of their key challenges.
This is why you see these big automakers engaging with us, using our semiconductor technology in the drivetrain of the vehicles for circuit protection, where the power converter takes the energy from the battery and drives the motor, and a few other cases where we can bring them improved performance at a lower cost point.
You mentioned the car companies that you're already working with. How important is it that you're agnostic and can work with all of these ones? You're not sort of stuck with one particular carmaker. You have the opportunity to really use this technology in a number of different places.
It really is helpful that we are not constrained because the first big automaker you work with, you learn a lot about how they evaluate technology, what kind of testing data they want, how they think about technology adoption. So, when you go to the next one, your messaging is more refined. You're bringing the data they're looking for, and you're doing testing under the conditions that matter to them. So, we really get a lot of leverage out of that Stellantis relationship. So, each one that we can approach, each additional OEM or tier one supplier, we're just a lot more credible when we go in there.
You also made an announcement recently about working at RYOSHO USA. Tell me a little bit about this one and how significant this is.
It's a small company here in the US. You can't reach the global semiconductor market easily. There's this huge infrastructure that the industry has already built for sales and distributors of parts. We announced previously that we had a relationship with Richardson Electronics, a publicly traded firm that specializes in high-tech sales for things like semiconductors. And RYOSHO was the next one that we added. They also, like Richardson, have great technical sales teams. They're great at demand creation. They focus on the semiconductor marketplace and have particular strength in Asia. Their geographic focus complements our other distributor to give us access to customers that we probably couldn't reach effectively on our own.
It seems like the company's has a really strong position in place right now. Are you comfortable with where you're at and where you're headed for the rest of this year and beyond?
It's an exciting year for us, and we're getting engagement with these really big companies. We've got a really innovative technology that's well-protected from an IP standpoint. We've got the fabrication capability now with two global fabs that we work with. We've got this macro trend in terms of EV adoption, renewable energy adoption, and the EV charging infrastructure that really creates the demand for our technology. So, we're pretty excited about where we are.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style