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Powering the Future of Drones, Defense, and Air Taxis (ft. Amprius CEO Tom Stepien)
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Powering the Future of Drones, Defense, and Air Taxis
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for Friday, April 24, it's Brew Markets Daily and I'm Ann Berry. Amprius Technologies ticker AMPX Trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap of nearly $3 billion, the battery technology company tripled its revenue last year and is in the thick of an operational evolution as it targets strong growth again in 2026, shifting from a vertically integrated company that owns its manufacturing facilities to partnering with third parties facing complex regulatory requirements, building on its base for powering drones to try to diversify revenue into satellites, robotics and air taxis, and pushing hard to hit profitability. So there's a lot going on and that's why we're thrilled to welcome to the show CEO Tom Stepien to help us cut through the motion to see which of amprius moves really matter. But first, a word from our sponsor, Charles Schwab. Trading at Schwab is powered by Ameritrade unlocking the power of thinkorswim the award winning trading platforms loaded with features that let you dive deeper into the market. You can visualize your trades in a new light on thinkorswim desktop with robust charting and analysis tools all while you uncover new opportunities with up to the minute market news and insights. Think or Swim is available on desktop, web and mobile to meet you where you are so you never miss a thing if you it's built by the trading obsessed to help you trade brilliantly. Learn more@schwab.com trading now we welcome Tom Stepien, CEO of Amprius. I'm so excited to welcome you because your company is a fan favorite. We actually had members of our audience write in saying please will you unpack what's going on at amprius and bonus points if we could get someone from the company to come speak to us. So I thank you in advance for making us look good Tom by joining. So thank you.
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Well gosh, it's great to be here. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be a part of this In Brew markets.
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The story of a Prius Tom is a really fascinating one. So could we start with just a couple of minutes. Getting from you a history lesson on how amprius first came to life, your journey to going public, and then some of the product pivots that you've made in recent years. So it's a bit of a three parter, but it's better to hear it from you than for me to sort of tee it up on the preamble.
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Sure, sure. So the company is 18 years old. We got started in 2008. We had one foot in Stanford and one foot in China. The Stanford is where the technology came from. It's a silicon anode technology and we can dig into that in a little bit. The one foot in China came from our founder, Kang sun, who is a US citizen but grew up in China. That really helped guide some of the fundraising for the first six, seven years as the company was a private and productizing the innovation that came from Stanford. Some of that innovation occurred on both sides of the Pacific, in California, here, where headquarters is in the Bay Area, and also in China. As the company grew, it took about 10 years to finally productize and make batteries to the point where we can actually have repeatable performance. Batteries are not for the faint of heart. It often takes more than a decade to get everything dialed in. We started selling about five years ago. About three and a half years ago, we went public. That allowed us to access a different set of investors. I joined the company about one year ago. I was really attracted to the company for reasons that we'll get into here in this podcast because of the strong technology and what appeared at that time to be an incredibly fast growing and large market. And we're seeing some of that today. We are growing. We have an outsourced manufacturing model. So just like Apple designs their devices in California and they're built elsewhere, we design our cells here in California and they are built by our manufacturing partners around the world. We are now public after three and a half years. Revenue is growing. We grew 3x revenue in 2025 compared to 2024, and we ended 2025 at about $100 million revenue run rate. That is the little bit of history.
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That's. That's a great history. And I will say, Tom, I have in front of me your investor presentation with respect to your 2025 financial results. And this was posted on March 5th of this year. It's up on your website. First of all, congratulations on having one of the more detailed investor presentations. I spent a lot of time digging through these and I was excited by the amount of specificity you had. And there's one particular slide I have up in front of me which breaks down AMPRIUS target end markets and then indicates some of the folks who are OEMs or key market players you work with. So you have here UAVs, so drones in common parlance, you have satellites in space, light EVs, electric vehicles, robotics, and then also air taxis or EVTOLs. I looked at that Tom, and I thought AMPRIUS really is in the mix with like the sexiest applications out there. Right. These are the kinds of technologies everyone's getting very excited about. Can you give us a sense for which of these end markets are perhaps your greatest focus and perhaps is prioritized more than others at this moment in time?
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Yeah, we like those five markets because they really care about energy density. And I can talk a little bit about how we enable that. But specific to your question, today, most of our revenue comes from the unmanned autonomous vehicle markets. The drones, as you say, that's about 75% of our revenue and it's actually heavily weighted toward Europe. The US is catching up on drones and there's a lot of activity recently on that. So that's the largest but certainly not the only thing we're focused on. For satellites, you pay per gram and our energy density allows you to have the same energy we at less mass. So that allows us to have our customers to have less expensive flights in order to get the satellite up to the right level on the first place. Light electric vehicles, you think they care more about the volumetric energy density. So we all know the gas tank for a motorcycle for example, and if you replace that with an electric motorcycle, that space can only be so large. So a energetic battery that is smaller is an ideal choice for the designers of e motorcycles. Robotics and EV tools are early. Certainly with robotics you probably care about the ability to have power to lift something up. If you're a humanoid and you don't want to have to plug in every three hours or so. And air taxis, of course the math doesn't work unless you have a minimum energy density. Right. Because you if you had need more batteries in order to get off the ground, you need the power, you need the energy for the flight time. So all five of those markets care about what is our sweet spot, which is energy density. We're early on a couple of them, robotics and EV tools, but, but we're going on offense in order to get in front of the leaders in that space to make them aware of the choices that they have with our batteries.
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Can we talk about your supply chain Tom, and talk about whether that sort of footprint is or is not an area for competitive advantage for those in your space. And specifically, there is a history at AMPRIS of being vertically integrated, of actually owning your own manufacturing footprint. You've shifted away from that. You terminated your 15 year lease on a Colorado facility paying $20 million essentially as a break fee versus incurring that 110 million over time. What drove that decision? What? Why did you decide to, particularly at a moment when Made in America manufacturing has become a real sort of buzz phrase, why did you walk away from a Colorado facility?
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Yeah, we tweaked our approach a couple years ago and here's the inside baseball and why that happened. We initially went to Colorado because we were a fortunate recipient of a grant from the first bipartisan infrastructure law here in the United States from the Department of Energy. And as we got into that, we realized, oh my gosh, that's really complicated. It's complicated because of finding the right location, making sure that you have the right equipment, and then frankly, running a factory is as difficult as designing these batteries in the first place. So we had the opportunity to exercise that second foot that I talked about in China. And as capacity at some of our contract manufacturing partners decreased, they had ability to make cells for us in a foundry type model. Many of your listeners, I'm sure, are familiar with the fabless model TSMC makes chips for, for Nvidia, et cetera. So that is starting to happen in batteryland. So we went to those contract manufacturers and turns out that the quality is very high, the turnaround time was rapid, and most importantly for us as we were grow, growing, the ability to go from one type of cell with one chemistry that may emphasize power to another one that would instead emphasize energy. Those can be built on different lines and, or built at different contract manufacturing partners. So that's, that gives us incredible flexibility. So ultimately that's what allowed us to make the decision that you referred to. We did sign a lease in Colorado and then we terminated that lease in order to really go faster with contract manufacturing partners. Today we have four in China, three in Korea and one in the United States and more coming. It allows us to mix and match. It allows us to have quick response time. Some of our customers are sensitive to country of manufacture, some are not. So we are able to deliver to our customer requirements by having this beautiful network around the world of different contract manufacturing partners.
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Let's talk a bit about how you are increasingly building out your NDAA sort of compliance supply chain and just to break through the acronyms a bit. NDAA stands for the National Defense Authorization Act. And Tom, I just wanted to read something I got from the AMPRIUS website describing it. Quote, every year Congress passes a wide ranging measure to fund and set policies for the American military. The annual National Defense Authorization Act. This is no light reading. The fiscal 2026 version of the NDAA is 3,100 pages. The table of contents alone is 43 pages. And you have a link right there. So I just read from your website that clicks through to that PDF. So I did go and I couldn't help myself. I went and poked around and I couldn't help but think I have a background in manufacturing myself. Tom, I couldn't help but think the rationale for diversifying your supply chain in the way that you've just articulated was to create agility and speed at the same time. You're adding relationships and manufacturing depth in an area with a level of complexity that is kind of extraordinary when you've got a 43 page long content table of content. So how do you reconcile those two, speed and agility versus just the need for compliance here?
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Yeah, a good insight, Ann, and I can't believe you read it. Good for you. If any listeners can't get to sleep tonight, go ahead and download that.
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Yes.
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So the NDAA which was re upped the week before Christmas really breaks down to two requirements and one date. The requirement is that the cells. Here is a cell. This is a pouch cell, a little bit larger than you might find in your iPhone. Here's a cylindrical cell. Think of this as going into a flashlight or a camping headlamp or something like that. The first requirement is that these cells are assembled out in an NDAA compliant country. Right. They're concerned about foreign entities of control. So NDAA compliant countries include South Korea, where there is a very robust battery manufacturing ecosystem, Malaysia, certainly the us Those are authorized countries, many, many countries in Europe, of course, all of our NATO countries. The second requirement is that the internals of these cells are also supplied from NDA compliant countries. So the anode, the cathode, the electrolyte and the separator are the four main components of batteries like this. And, and it's important to have that traceability to where do those originate from, who is the supplier of those? And then for existing Department of War programs, all of that has to be in place for certain types of customers. If you are selling to the Dow by January 2028, so about a year and a half plus or minus from now. That does add complexity, as you say, Ann, to our contract manufacturing because we just not have to choose, okay, where is it made? But we have to ensure that the contents apply for some of our customers. Not all customers have those concerns, but certainly those that are selling drones to the Department of War had those requirements. Fortunately, we knew this was coming. We got South Korea up and running about a year ago is when we announced our first South Korean contract manufacturing partner. They started delivering cells in September, so about three, four months later. And again, that speed and agility, we could not have done that if we had our own captive manufacturing. But because we're able to identify and work with a CM in South Korea, they were able to be very responsive and in three, four months started delivering NDA compliance sales to custom.
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South Korean manufacturing has had a tough time in recent months. You know, Korea is particularly dependent on energy imports from the Middle east in order to fuel their manufacturing activities. Have you seen disruption in your supply chain and with your South Korean partners? Given what's been going on with the conflict with Iran?
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We haven't really seen disruption or challenges due to that issue. And what we all read about what's interesting though is that the three big battery manufacturers in in South Korea, so Samsung, sdi, LG and SK on all have had to redo the relationships they have in the Midwest of the US with automotive manufacturing. So they are, and this is really because the EV winter as it's called, EVs had slowed down here in the US because of a number of reasons. One of them being the removal of the $7,500 tax credit. And that has thrown a wrench in the gear of the expansion plans for each of those three large companies. So they are revising their estimates. Some of the co owned fabrication facilities in the Midwest are being separated and that probably more than the current energy concerns is what at least is affecting the battery companies that we talk to and are aware of, ideally some of the energy issues because as you say, and they are dependent on external resources, ideally that does not affect them. Hopefully we'll get this figured out here in short order. But what is larger is, oh my gosh, the EV market has really fallen off and most of the batteries, lithium ion batteries, have been historically serving that. A lot of those pivots are being made to stationary and some are interested in this very, very nice growing defense market that Ambri's serves in finance.
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about how that growth of the market and your share gains within it, Tom, are translating into your financial and ultimately your stock price performances. Again. I just want to reiterate looking at your investor presentation from March, the blue chip customers you list and I just want to shine a light on this again. You've got SpaceX on there, Tesla on there, Joby on there, Archer on there. It really is the kind of who's who when you then go and take a look at the share prices of these businesses and if the rising tide lifts or ships. I want to talk about amp share price. I've got your chart up in front of me and over the last 12 months your stock price up over 800% as of today and in a look at your 2025 results, full year revenue up triple threefold to $73 million. So there's no sort of dispute around the level of top line growth that you're experiencing. The guidance there for 2026 revenue was of at least 70%. The question I think the market has is the top line growth is very exciting. Your end market exposure is very exciting. But what is the path now to profitability?
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Yeah. So a couple things first, thank you. You complimented us earlier Ann on the deck. I gotta give a shout out to our CFO Ricardo Rodriguez, who I think has brought transparency in this specific deck and to the market in general. I think he's done just a marvelous Job of communicating what we do, what we do. Well, we have a lot of stuff to work on, but he gets a shout out. And then one other thing to mention before I answer the question. Some of the customers we show on slide 4 of the Investor deck aren't customers today. Those are key market players. So some are, some are not. Just, just to be super clear, we, we like being clear. So to your question, we have been for the last eight or ten quarters prior to a year ago, so call it two years, starting three years ago, we were single digit million as we were getting our first generation system out there. First generation batteries, silicon anodes, but they were made in a boutique way. They had a design very similar to the Stanford design that was productized, that worked, it worked well. But you know what? We couldn't get the economies of scale that we wanted. So we had a battery technology, we had a growing battery business, but we did not see a way to have a positive gross margin, which makes it really tough to have any positive earnings. About three years ago we introduced PSI Core, which is our second generation system battery. And of course like any new generation system, it's better, stronger and in our case was made on standard manufacturing equipment. So no boutique equipment. We can walk into a contract manufacturing partner in South Korea and in the morning they may be making graphite cells and in the afternoon they may on the same equipment make our silicon anode based cells. Just with a recipe change that allowed us to have the economies that we were looking for. And we started to see that in 2025. In the second quarter of 2025, we reported our first gross margin, positive gross margin as a company. Beautiful. And then it continued to grow, right? It was 9% if I remember correctly in Q2 and finished up around 15%. I'm staring at the slide 25% in Q4. So that growth helped us get to on an adjusted earnings basis, adjusted EBITDA basis positive for the first time as a company. So that is part of the guidance that we set for calendar 2026, which is okay. We believe we can continue to grow at around 73% I think is the actual growth rate that we will do in 2026 relative to 2025. And we also believe that we'll be able to have on an adjusted EBITDA basis greater than $4 million of earnings to share with our shareholders.
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When I take a look at this, Tom, how should we think about your cash needs? So your cash balance again this is as disclosed in March was just over $90 million for the end of 2025. How are you feeling about your capital structure at the moment?
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Yeah, so we are fully funded to realize our strategy as we go forward. As we continue to grow, there may be opportunities to raise additional funds. We tend to get a lot of calls from other battery companies that could be additive to the Amprius story. We're a very inquisitive group. We're also a very careful group. So depending on what actions we might take going forward, we may need additional funds. But for now the cash we have gives us enough of a cushion to execute to the plan as we've described it in that investor deck.
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Where would you like to be three years from now, Tom, in terms of your revenue composition? You said 70ish percent right now of your revenues. UAV Nokia is a big client and partner of yours. If we were to look into our crystal ball, what kind of revenue mix would you be excited by in terms of end market served?
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Yeah, I think in the next several years we will be better balanced between drones and some of the other four segments that we show that we talked about earlier in this in this podcast with light electric vehicles and robotics we think will be growing off a very small base. So within those segments I still think we will be drone dominant, but the other ones will grow. So a little bit better balance than we are today. Again, drones are about 75% of our revenue. Our battery revenue goes into drones. So I think that'll be better balance number one. I think within drones I think we'll see a better balance between defense and non defense. We all are aware of the amazing asymmetries that drones give us. We've seen that in these unfortunate conflicts that are occurring in the world. But that same asymmetry is showing up for drones that are used in public safety. There's about 1800 U.S. police departments, emergency departments that have drones tied into their 911 systems. So when you get a call you have pre positioned drones that are able to go to the site and understand okay is it a real fire? And then they'll dispatch the right type of equipment, is it an emergency? And they have drones that are delivering defibrillators to people that have had an incident. There's drones that are trying to quickly get to a house where the child is lost. And there's heartwarming stories about finding children within two minutes long before the police department can get there all enabled by again these asymmetries that drones offer. So I think we'll see a better balance between Nokia as a commercial example and defense. Right. Some of our defense customers. So better balance there. And then the final balance I think that we'll see is between the US and the rest of the world. The US today is only about 25% of the batteries that we ship. The US is playing catch up on drones, the drone dominance program. There's some recent news about some of the planned additions to the defense budget for next year that emphasizes drones. So I think we'll see a better balance between the US and Europe, where most of our revenue for drones goes today.
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And then in terms of EVTOLs or sort of air taxis, we had the CEO of Archer Aviation actually join us here on this show. And Joby comes up frequently. I feel as though every time I read about the first commercial launch of that technology, it's actually in somewhere like the United Arab Emirates. There has been an executive order here in the United States to try to accelerate US adoption of that technology. Do you think that it's actually in practice going to happen? Do you think we're going to see air taxis take off, pun intended, in the United States with some speed in the next 18 months to two years?
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So I was at one of those, one of our EV toll companies, one of our air taxi companies that are testing our sales today, just, just Friday last week. And I, I have some friends there and I asked them that very question. One of those companies you mentioned, I think it's Archer is the official air taxi of the LA Olympics.
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That's right, yeah.
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That's right, yeah. Which is what, two years here from opening ceremonies? So there's a, there's a marker in the ground. I think one of the other ones you mentioned is they claim ahead on the FAA certification process and they're actually flying with pilots, test pilots, not with people yet. And I think they're getting more traction in Dubai up until this recent conflict, which probably throws a wrench in their gears. So in the next 18 months, you know, I believe it will happen. It could be that this, the rollout is a bit longer. I think the vision is amazing that you can have a pickup, whether it's Lyft or Uber, from your smartphone, from your office, go to the teleport, jump into the air taxi land in San Francisco. It's an hour drive from where I am in the East Bay to there. So I would love this. And then get, get an Uber or Lyft on the other side. So I love the vision. I think that it's all possible. I spent a couple hours walking around and I left a believer. I don't know if I want to be the first one on the airplane, but I certainly want to be an early adopter.
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Well, it's a big year for Amprius, Tom. Again, a big growth target at the top line, that path to profitability. And I know you're ear are coming out very quickly around May 7, so please come back. We'd love to get the update as we roll through the year to see how everything's going for you and we appreciate you joining us. That's Tom Stepien, AMPRIUS CEO. Well, great speaking with Tom. We love these kinds of companies that are on the cutting edge but where investors aren't quite sure yet how to figure out their financials relative to the overall opportunity. So we're going to keep on tracking this one and of course, lots going on in that target market of EVTOls. In fact, we're watching that end market so closely that our Brew Markets will be on the ground Monday at one of Joby Aviation's first public air taxi demonstrations right here in New York City. We'll bring you firsthand footage of takeoff and landing, plus a closer look from the tarmac. That's it for today's Brew Markets Daily.
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Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Anne Barry and produced by John Croteau, Tarkab Delatif, Avani Laroya and Emily Miliron. Our Technical director is Uchenawa Ogu, Brittany Dotako is our audio engineer, booking by A.B. silver and the President of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery. If you have any feedback or a company you'd like us to COVID leave a comment or send an email to brewmarketshoworningbrew.com have a great weekend.
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We'll see you back here on Monday. Same time, same place.
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