Alpha Teknova (NASDAQ:TKNO) reported third-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
Alpha Teknova reported record revenue growth of 22% for the third quarter of 2026, driven by custom product sales to life-science tools, diagnostics, and biopharma customers.
The company is experiencing strong growth in custom product orders, particularly from biopharma customers, attributed to a 70% increase in biotech funding over the past year.
Two new product launches, BuildTech and Filtek, showed early success with significant customer engagement and orders, bolstering future growth prospects.
Gross margins improved by 400 basis points year-over-year, driven by higher revenues and efficient scaling without significant expense increases.
Alpha Teknova completed a $46 million equity capital raise, enhancing balance sheet flexibility for potential acquisitions and strategic investments.
The company raised its 2026 revenue guidance to $46-48 million, implying 16% growth, supported by strong demand trends in custom products and improved biotech funding.
Management remains focused on disciplined M&A strategies, targeting tuck-in acquisitions that leverage existing infrastructure and expand product offerings.
Alpha Teknova expects to achieve positive adjusted EBITDA at an annualized revenue of $52 to $57 million, with significant reductions in free cash outflow anticipated for the full year.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Hello and welcome to Alpha Teknova’s third quarter 2026 financial results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Jennifer Henry, Senior Vice President of Marketing.
You may begin.
Jennifer Henry (Senior Vice President of Marketing)
Thank you, Operator. Welcome to Alpha Teknova’s third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me on today’s call are Stephen Gunstream, Alpha Teknova’s President and Chief Executive Officer, and Matt Lowell, Alpha Teknova’s Chief Financial Officer, who will make prepared remarks and then take your questions. As a reminder, the forward-looking statements that we make during this call, including those regarding business goals and expectations for the financial performance of the Company, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual events or results to differ. Additional information concerning these risk factors is included in the press release the Company issued earlier today, and they are more fully described in the Company’s various filings with the SEC.
Today’s comments reflect the Company’s current views, which could change as a result of new information, future events, or other factors, and the Company does not obligate or commit itself to update its forward-looking statements except as required by law. The Company’s management believes that in addition to GAAP results, non-GAAP financial measures can provide meaningful insight when evaluating the Company’s financial performance and the effectiveness of its business strategies. We will therefore use non-GAAP financial measures of certain of our results during this call. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in the press release that we issued this afternoon, which is posted to Alpha Teknova’s website and at www.sec.gov/edgar.
Non-GAAP financial measures should always be considered only as a supplement to, and not as a substitute for or as superior to, financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation may differ from similarly named non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. Please also be advised that the Company has posted a supplemental slide deck to accompany today’s prepared remarks. It can be accessed on the Investor Relations section of Alpha Teknova’s website and on today’s webcast.
And now I will turn the call over to Stephen.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon and thank you everyone for joining us for our third quarter 2026 earnings call. As you saw in the press release, we delivered our second consecutive quarter of record revenue with 22% top-line growth compared to the same period last year. In addition to exceeding 20% growth for the first time in over four years, we are particularly encouraged that the growth came from sales of custom products to life-science tools and diagnostics customers, and notably to biopharma customers.
We believe the recent acceleration of revenue growth from sales to biopharma customers is an early indication that we’re benefiting from the increase in biotech funding that we’ve observed over the previous four quarters. Given this backdrop, we feel confident as we head into 2027. I’d like to start by providing more color about our revenue growth. First, as I mentioned, our above-market revenue growth is from sales of custom products. Catalog products, which were about 60% of revenue in 2025, have grown in the mid single digits year to date, while sales to large pharma have grown in the mid teens. Total catalog growth was offset by headwinds from products sold into other biopharma end markets like cell and gene therapy and contract manufacturing.
We attribute that to the limited share of recent financings going toward early-stage programs at discovery work, but we expect that to change eventually if funding continues to increase. That said, this quarter we saw a significant uptick in custom product purchases from biopharma customers, much of which were for programs already in clinical trials. The growth was broad-based across multiple accounts and therapeutic modalities, combined with our direct conversations with customers regarding planned purchases in 2027.
The data lead us to believe that this revenue growth is tied to the recent increase in biotech funding, which multiple sources report is up approximately 70% on a trailing 12-month basis. We also saw continued robust revenue growth from sales of custom products to tools and diagnostics customers like in the first half of 2026, with notable demand from liquid biopsy and sequencing-related applications such as spatial biology. Internally, the organization is performing well: year to date, the number of custom ordered line items increased by approximately 30% and we’ve expanded our customer base by nearly 10%. Even with that growth, we’ve demonstrated our ability to scale without a significant increase in expenses.
Apart from the planned $2 million annual increase in sales and marketing spend, operating expenses are flat year to date and our gross margins expanded by about 400 basis points. We believe our costs will only increase modestly as the business continues to scale, which reflects the value of our previous investments in facilities, IT systems, and manufacturing infrastructure. We’re also encouraged by the early traction of our two new launches: BuildTech, our AI-powered custom configurator, and Filtek, our new dispensing system. Since we introduced the new version of BuildTech in June, customers from more than 100 organizations have submitted more than 140 quote requests covering nearly 180 custom products. We’re also seeing repeat use, with more than 40% of October requests coming from returning customers. Just as important is the quality of that demand.
Nearly every request is a unique formulation and about a third are for RUO+ or GMP-grade products, the higher-quality tiers customers typically need as programs move toward clinical and commercial manufacturing. Therefore, we believe BuildTech is helping us capture custom demand earlier and positions us to grow with programs as they scale. On the manufacturing side, we introduced our Filtek dispensing system in September to meet the evolving needs of bioprocessing for emerging therapies. This unique system allows us to tailor our production of single-use bags to fit our customers’ bioprocessing environments, including by combining a variety of bag sizes and aseptic connectors into a single lot and reducing the minimum order requirements, all with the same industry-leading turnaround times.
Furthermore, by integrating more deeply into our customers’ workflows, we believe they will be incentivized to remain a customer as they advance their therapies towards commercialization. This new capability is hitting the mark. We have already received many orders quoted through Filtek, with more than 60% of them for GMP-grade products, reinforcing Filtek’s fit for scale-up into clinical and commercial manufacturing. I also want to touch on M&A. We remain focused on tuck-in acquisition opportunities that would allow us to leverage our facilities, systems, and manufacturing infrastructures. Alongside those characteristics, we’re also looking for opportunities through which we could expand into manufacturing additional reagents such as proteins. Any attractive target would need to help us grow our addressable market and further differentiate our business while leveraging the commercial channel we have built.
At the same time, we’re confident in our organic strategy and are in a good position to be disciplined when it comes to considering valuations and integration risks. In closing, as we look toward the end of 2026, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made on our growth strategy. Our customer pipeline is strong, the investments we made to scale are in place and working, and we are delivering operationally. I will now hand the call to Matt to walk through the financials.
Matthew Lowell (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks, Stephen, and good afternoon, everyone. As Stephen explained, total revenue was up 22% for the third quarter of 2026 compared to the same quarter prior year. This was, again, the highest quarterly revenue the company has achieved in its history. We are very pleased with our progress on key profitability measures and cash usage as well. Overall, we delivered excellent financial results for the third quarter 2026. By way of reminder, we target our Lab Essentials products at the Research Use Only, or RUO, market, and they include both catalog and custom products. Lab Essentials revenue was $9.0 million in the third quarter 2026, up 9% compared to $8.3 million in the third quarter 2025. The increase in Lab Essentials revenue was attributable to an increased number of customers and, to a slightly lesser extent, higher average revenue per customer.
We make our Clinical Solutions products according to good manufacturing practices, or GMP, quality standards, and our customers use them primarily as components or inputs in the development and manufacture of diagnostic and therapeutic products. Clinical Solutions revenue was $3.2 million in the third quarter 2026, an 86% increase from $1.7 million in the third quarter 2025. The increase in Clinical Solutions revenue was attributable to a higher average revenue per customer and, to a lesser extent, an increased number of customers.
We expect revenue per customer to increase over time as a subset of these customers ramp up their purchase volumes as they move through clinical trial phases and ultimately to commercialization. However, this metric can be affected by the addition of newer Clinical Solutions, or GMP catalog, customers who typically order less. Just as a reminder, due to the larger average order size in Clinical Solutions compared to Lab Essentials, there can be more quarter-to-quarter revenue lumpiness in this category.
Gross profit for the third quarter 2026 was $4.8 million compared to $3.2 million in the third quarter 2025. Gross margin was 38.0% in the third quarter 2026, up from 30.7% in the third quarter 2025. The increase in gross profit percentage was primarily driven by higher revenue and, to a lesser extent, lower fixed cost absorption into cost of goods sold from changes in finished goods inventory levels, partially offset by higher variable manufacturing costs.
Operating expenses for the third quarter 2026 were $8.0 million compared to $7.2 million in the third quarter 2025. The increase in 2026 was primarily driven by investments in our sales and marketing capabilities, including higher headcount, coupled with slightly increased general and administrative expenses, partially offset by lower stock-based compensation expense. At the end of the third quarter 2026, we had 163 total associates compared to 161 a year earlier.
Net loss for the third quarter 2026 was $3.5 million, or negative $0.06 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $4.3 million, or negative $0.08 per diluted share, for the third quarter 2025. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, was negative $1.0 million for the third quarter 2026 compared to negative $1.6 million for the third quarter 2025. On to cash flow and balance sheet highlights. Capital expenditures were $0.1 million in the third quarter 2026 compared to $0.4 million in the third quarter 2025. Free cash outflow, a non-GAAP measure that we define as cash used in operating activities less purchases of property, plant, and equipment, was $1.4 million for the third quarter 2026 compared to $2.4 million in the third quarter 2025. This decrease compared to prior year was primarily due to lower cash used in operating activities.
Turning to the balance sheet, as of September 30, 2026 we had $16.6 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments, and $13.2 million in total borrowings. In mid-October the company completed an equity capital raise of $46 million with net proceeds of approximately $43 million. As we made clear during that process, we believe that we did not need additional capital to become cash-flow positive. The reason we pursued this capital raise was to give the company balance sheet flexibility, including a healthier net cash balance, a stronger negotiating position for potential tuck-in acquisitions, and a larger float of the company’s stock to attract a deeper shareholder base of institutional investors. This transaction was successful in meeting those objectives and we intend to continue to execute on our growth strategy for 2026.
Outlook. Turning to our guidance, we are increasing our 2026 total revenue guidance to $46 to $48 million. At the midpoint, this implies approximately 16% revenue growth compared to 2025 as our underlying end markets continue to recover. We have seen ongoing strength in orders for our custom products from life science tools and diagnostics customers, driven by our exposure to the liquid biopsy, spatial biology, and genetic sequencing markets, among others.
And more recently, in the third quarter, we saw an uptick in biopharma custom product revenue, including from cell and gene therapy customers. Biotech funding was strong again in the third quarter, marking four straight quarters of significant year-over-year increases. We believe we began to see the positive impact of this trend in the third quarter in the form of higher sales of custom products to biopharma customers. Revenue from the sale of catalog products continued to grow in the third quarter and sits at a healthy mid-single-digits growth rate year to date, driven by large pharma customers, but still below our long-term targets. We will be providing revenue guidance for 2027 when we report full-year 2026 results, as we have always done.
As we have indicated before, due to the high percentage of fixed costs associated with our operations, we estimate that each additional dollar of revenue drops through at a marginal cash rate of approximately 70%, with some variability quarter to quarter in reported results due to fixed cost absorption as finished goods inventory levels change. Gross margin improved significantly in the third quarter 2026 year over year and was in line with our expectations.
We continue to expect gross margin to land in the mid- to upper-30s percentage range for the full year 2026. The company posted operating expenses of $8.0 million in the third quarter 2026, reflecting our scaled investment in sales and marketing, which we expect to be approximately $2 million for the full year 2026. Our belief is that these investments will pay off as soon as the end of 2026, but more likely in 2027. We forecast that operating expenses will be at least $8 million in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Taking account of this spending level, we expect to become adjusted EBITDA positive in the range of $52 to $57 million in annualized revenue. If our end markets are stronger in 2027 and our stepped-up commercial investments bear fruit as anticipated, then we should report a positive adjusted EBITDA quarter before the end of 2027. As I noted earlier, the company achieved a significant reduction in free cash outflow during the third quarter 2026 compared to the same quarter in the prior year, and we expect that figure to be similar in the fourth quarter.
We continue to anticipate free cash outflow of less than $8 million for the full year 2026, and with that I will turn the call back to Stephen.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks, Matt. Overall, we were very pleased with the third quarter 2026 and the progress we made against our strategic priorities. We believe the outlook for our end markets remains positive, and we are committed to executing on our strategy to help our customers accelerate the introduction of novel therapies, diagnostics, and other products that improve human health. We will now take your questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone, then wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Matt LaRue with William Blair. Your line is open.
Jacob (Analyst)
Hi. Thank you, this is Jacob on for Matt. Thanks for taking the questions, guys. So first I just wanted to probe more into the comments around the business seeing uplift from the improving funding trends in the quarter. Can you quantify or maybe just expand on how broad that was across customers, indications, and order sizes, and how you distinguish funding-driven demand from normal quarterly timing, and what early indications give you confidence this is now a durable trend for the business?
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. First I would say, Jacob, that it is early. Right. We call it an early indicator. It is very encouraging, though, because it is broad-based across all the modalities we serve—not just cell and gene therapy, but also some of the others, monoclonal antibodies and oligonucleotide therapeutics across the board. So excited about that. And we’ve also seen the related specialty CDMOs pick up as well. So those are all very encouraging signs. What we haven’t seen is the early stage come back, which is I think why you heard me talk a little bit about the catalog business. So the later stage stuff seems to be the revenue flowing through now. And that’s not that surprising because we’ve had a lot of conversations with our later-stage therapeutic companies, and many of them actually did receive funding earlier this year and now they’re putting it to work. So we’re encouraged. It’s still a little early.
We’d like to see another couple quarters, but it’s pretty broad-based and we’re excited about where we sit now.
Jacob (Analyst)
Okay, good to hear. And maybe jumping off that, Clinical Solutions revenue here was up 86% in the quarter, which I appreciate is off a small base and also that this business is inherently lumpy. But sales have increased sequentially in each quarter this year, and 4Q is typically a nice quarter for this business. And you’re seeing improvements in kind of the later-stage environment. But just beyond 4Q, just wondering how we should think about growth contributions from this business into 2027 and beyond, particularly as you expect to be supporting at least one commercial therapy by the end of next year.
Matthew Lowell (Chief Financial Officer)
I’ll go ahead and take that one. And I think you’re right, those observations, Jacob, about the lumpiness and the sequential increases throughout this year. As we think about Q4, I do think we’re going to continue to see strength in GMP because of these trends that we’re now seeing, and the Lab Essentials not at that level of growth, but it does create a nice setup for 2027. As you mentioned, one of the things is some of our customers moving through phases in clinical trials, and that is something that we’re expecting to see more of in 2027 along with this continued, we hope, impact of the biotech funding increases. I would just say longer term, as we’ve said, we do expect Clinical Solutions to be a bigger growth driver of this business, just given those trends that we just mentioned. The Lab Essentials is a nice business and certainly has a strong foundation and is growing very nicely in its own right.
But to get to the 20% to 25% sustainable level that we’ve been talking about on a longer-term basis, we would expect the Clinical Solutions to be more of that growth engine. So things are playing out more or less as we expected. And as Stephen said, we’re encouraged by the uptick, particularly on the biopharma side here in this last quarter.
Jacob (Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hewitt with Craig-Hallum. The line is open.
Matt Hewitt (Analyst)
Good afternoon. Congratulations on the strong quarter. Maybe just kind of tagging on to the clinical solutions. It was a nice quarter. It sounds like you’re going to see that continue here into the fourth quarter. I don’t know if you have the ability to break this out, but how much of that is larger pharma versus smaller pharma? Do you kind of dial into it further? I guess what I’m trying to get at is do you anticipate maybe another bump in that segment once the earlier-stage pharma and biotech companies’ funding really starts to flow next year?
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks, Matt. Yeah, I would say, first of all, the clinical solutions—got to remember it’s not all biotech or pharma. There’s a piece in there that is diagnostics as well. So we expect that to continue, and that’s been a really nice growth driver, as you mentioned, for the course of 2026, and we expect that to continue into 2027. What I mentioned here, the biotech funding—most of this stuff that we’re talking about coming back is sort of this small- to mid-sized biotech company, less so the large pharma. The large pharma is doing quite well in the catalog business, whereas the small- to mid-sized biotech space is not on the catalog. And we attribute the catalog to more discovery-type R&D work. So if the funding continues, I do believe that that’ll migrate back, and we’ll see some of the discovery catalogs then pick up for small- to mid-sized biotech companies.
Matt Hewitt (Analyst)
Got it. And then since you noted it in your prepared remarks regarding M&A, and it sounds like you’re going to be pretty diligent in what you’re looking for and price that you’d pay. But do you have kind of a target list? I’m just trying to think if this is something a little more near term, or is this as an opportunity presents itself? Thank you.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a target list for a long time, so it’s a question of whether or not they fit, valuations make sense, and we can execute on them. And to your point, we’re very disciplined around this. We work really hard to put ourselves in a position here where we think we have a lot of strength. We’re going to reach profitability in a relatively short period, and we’ve really built an infrastructure that can absorb quite a bit and scale really well.
And so looking at it from that lens, I think there’s a number of targets that fit in there. But of course, many of these are smaller organizations and will take some time to build the right relationships with and make sure the valuation makes sense. And so we’re working on that. But it really has to be the right fit for us.
Matt Hewitt (Analyst)
Understood. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Anna Snukowski with KeyBank. Your line is open.
Anna Snukowski (Analyst)
Hi, thanks for taking my question. This is Anna on for Paul Knight. Kind of jumping off of Matt’s question on M&A strategy and maybe what you’re going to do with the 40 million of cash proceeds. But do you think you could just expand upon other adjacent areas in your business you’d be interested in pursuing? I think you mentioned proteins in your prepared remarks, so maybe you could expand upon that. And then I have one follow-up. Thank you.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. So again, important to say that obviously we’re confident in our organic business. I think you look at the sort of way we migrate out from here, the lower-risk things are businesses similar to ourselves that we could bring on. We can apply the processes, the systems we put on, maybe even bring them in-house and run it through our manufacturing. As you know, we would drop a lot of profitability to the bottom line. The next step out is really these other modalities or things we’d like to manufacture. I do think proteins is one, and that is a broad category, whether it’s enzymes, which could be very useful on the tools/diagnostic side, or antibodies or cytokines or growth factors—all those are things that we like to consider.
We’re a great manufacturing company, and we’ve set up the processes here that can do a lot of different things. And we have the space to bring on a lot of new capabilities. So those are all in play. I think one of the pieces here that we’re not going to do is we’re not going to acquire a business that needs a lot of cash to run it and keep it going. So this is really around driving some cost synergies and some leverage of all the infrastructure we put in place.
Anna Snukowski (Analyst)
Great, thank you. And then just as a follow-up on the biotech funding side, it’s great you’re seeing some of those benefits hit the custom side. And within your biopharma customers, are there any areas remaining where spending is still soft? I think you mentioned catalog products for small and mid-sized customers, but maybe any other areas or what would need to turn for those customers to return to spend?
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I think you hit it already, which is, you know, on the discovery side, some of these cell and gene therapy companies are not doing much there or are actually going down. If they have later-stage therapies, they seem to be able to raise capital and deploy it. And I think there are a number that are in a position right now where they’re waiting for approvals or waiting for their next phase that then they can go raise money. I think to really change that, it’s probably more sustained biotech funding and an opening up of capital markets to some more risky upfront investments in new targets, and so that we just haven’t seen yet to date.
And like I said, the large pharma side on that discovery side is doing quite well. But these small- to mid-sized biotechs are not.
Anna Snukowski (Analyst)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Stanton with Jefferies. Your line is open.
Matt Stanton (Analyst at Jefferies)
Thanks, guys. Just to go back to the diagnostic customer demand, I think you spiked out sequencing, spatial, liquid biopsy. Love it. Just a little more flavor there. How much of that is new customers versus existing customers ramping, and then how do we think about the durability for that demand into ’27 and any potential for that to also accelerate as we look out to next year? Thanks.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks, Matt. Yeah. On new versus existing on the diagnostic side—it’s really tools and diagnostic side, I should say—the majority of these that are having a material impact are existing. They’ve been with us for quite some time, and we do see them scaling up. Now some of this may be for some of the AI data generation stuff, but there’s a portion of this which is true, that liquid biopsy side, where if their products are successful in the market, we’d expect a significant scale-up there over the coming years.
And so, yeah, we’re excited about it. I don’t think—it’s not like these new logos are coming in and they’re driving significant growth right away. Our business really works like these are sort of two-year, three-year things that have been in process for some time. And so we’re excited to see them kind of come to fruition right now.
Matt Stanton (Analyst at Jefferies)
Thanks. And then maybe just on Filtek and Build Tech, you know, we’ve got a bunch of helpful stats there. All sounds really encouraging, you know, considering early days. Maybe just talk about how much those are kind of additional channels and helping that way versus kind of true incremental revenue drivers as we think about ’27 as well for both Filtek and Build Tech. Thanks.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I put them in two separate categories here. The Build Tech side really streamlines this upfront custom order design specifications we need to collect—very interactive agent/chat that we have online that gets us exactly what we need, but also really streamlines the questions for the customer. And we see this really as a funnel increase. Right. So we’re giving quotes within 24 to 48 hours of these requests, and we’re seeing a pretty high volume of those going through.
So those are translating to revenue. It’s typically a quarter or two after we get those. So, you know, I think we’re going to start migrating most of our customers that have new quote requests or new custom product requests to go through that channel. They’ve really enjoyed it, and it really helps us get them into the system quickly. So, you know, from a material perspective, it’s—you know, there are obviously some replacements from before, but I think what we’re seeing is actually a lot of newer customers that we hadn’t been quoting custom before. So we’re seeing a nice build there that will, you know, obviously go over time and drive additional sales.
Build Tech is a little bit different in that, you know, this is something that our customers have been asking us for for the last two or three years. And in many cases, actually some of our later-stage therapeutic customers are saying, please put this in place. Can you come up with a way to do this, which is, you know, getting things down to a single lock where they can combine different batch sizes and different connectors so it fits seamlessly within their manufacturing system.
And from one side, right, we’re able to get in earlier with lower minimum orders, but also it’s super sticky because then we’re matched directly to their manufacturing scale for these later-stage customers. Obviously, it lets us expand more within them. And so, you know, from a revenue standpoint there, I mean, you know, there could be additional drive that we would get—additional revenue that we’ll get—but it’s probably going to be, you know, a couple years out as these earlier ones get onto the Filtek system and then scale through clinical trials.
Matt Stanton (Analyst at Jefferies)
Super. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mac Etalk with Stevens. Your line is open.
Mac Etalk (Analyst at Stephens)
Hey, good afternoon and thank you for taking our questions. Maybe just to follow up on some of those earlier questions, on the new capital raise, does the additions to your balance sheet really change your investment plan anytime in the near future? Are you guided to at least 8 million of opex per quarter? You know, you’ve been pretty diligent about reinvesting for growth, so I just was curious if we should expect a step up in commercial spend as we head into 2027.
If so, does that impact your timing around achieving the first positive adjusted EBITDA quarter? Thanks.
Matthew Lowell (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, thanks for the question, Mac. We, obviously, we’re very happy to have this additional capital and the strengthening of the balance sheet. I would say it doesn’t in and of itself really change the way that we think about the business and where to invest. Where we’re going to do that, we do that anyway, and we’ve had some flexibility to do that before this capital raise. That said, you know, the commercial investment is an important one for us, and we are, you know, really happy again with what we’ve been seeing so far this year.
Not necessarily seeing a direct impact of that, but the metrics we track in support of that effort are looking good. And right about now is when we’re starting to have these discussions about do we want to change that investment and, you know, to leave it or to increase it, and if so, where. What’s working, what’s not—those kind of things. So, and even if we do make a decision to increase, which we’ll certainly report out on the next call, it wouldn’t be of a huge magnitude greater than what we’ve already done. It would be more incremental. But nevertheless, having the additional capital on the balance sheet is really a great thing for the business. For other new things that might come up that are larger, obviously M&A activity will be one of those things. But any other organic investment opportunity that we think could make sense would be something we think about.
But in the moment, you know, we’re just continuing to run the business the same way as before the capital raise, and it just puts us in a stronger position now as we face other kinds of investment decisions down the road. Yeah, sure. I’ll just start with the last part there since I did mention that. So we’re still targeting mid to high 30s percentage for gross margin for the full year of 2026. And we came in, you know, a little bit high on that in this particular quarter. In other words, Q4 should look similar, in the mid to high, again, 30s for the quarter as well, I imagine.
And the drivers are—there’s a lot of things going on, but I think the main things are the growth, right, and leveraging the fixed cost. That 70% is still very much in play here. The other thing that we have that affects our gross margin and what we report is change in our finished goods inventory levels. And I mentioned this in the remarks as well, and we started talking a little bit more about this because of the way that labor and overhead costs are absorbed—or, I guess, moved between the balance sheet and the income statement depending on how finished goods are moving quarter to quarter or quarter over quarter—that can also influence the margin.
And in this case, in Q3 we had a little bit of benefit because we did have some increase in finished goods inventory in Q3 compared to Q2. So it did absorb or pull out some of the costs from the P&L and put it on the balance sheet. That can, you know, change quarter to quarter, and it’s sometimes difficult to predict where quarter-end inventories are going to land each time, but that is another factor. And in the case of this last Q3, it was a positive.
And then, you know, there are other things too on the edges that influence the margin, because there are some timing issues around other costs in manufacturing. We may be ordering some supplies this month that we’re not the next quarter—we’re buying a six-month supply—these kinds of things, as well as mix. You know, depending on the customers that we’re selling to in that quarter or the types of products, those can also deviate off this general average of 70%.
So that’s a little bit of the breakdown of the gross margin story. But, you know, over longer periods these things do tend to smooth out, and we should expect pretty nice increases in the gross margin over time here, as we’re already seeing.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Max Masucci with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is open.
Max Masucci (Analyst)
Hey, congrats on a nice stretch here. So first one, lab essentials. The growth has been around 10% in the first nine months this year. It’s a touch above the high single-digit run rate. So it just would be great to hear what’s driving the recent strength there—anything under the hood that has been contributing.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, Max, I mean I think it’s a lot of stuff we’ve been talking about. I mean we have a piece of the catalog, which is a majority of that lab essentials business, is mid single digit year to date—we said that in the remarks—which tells you the custom side is up quite a bit because it’s a much smaller percentage of the overall lab essentials business. And so on the custom side it is some of these more genomic-related applications that are driving that growth, some OEM work that we’re doing for those, and then just general growth in the tools space that we do a lot of custom products for, that segment of customers.
There may be a little bit in this quarter that is from the biopharma side that are custom that do not need GMP yet. But I would say largely this is tools, diagnostics, custom products.
Max Masucci (Analyst)
Okay, got it. Is it fair—just trying to understand—can we directly link Build tech to the Q3 custom ordering growth acceleration, or is that more of a smaller growth contributor at this point?
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I wouldn’t directly link those two. Build tech is driving funnel generation that’s probably going to pay off in the next couple quarters and is building over time. This we do see as these later-stage small- and mid-sized biotech companies moving forward with the products that they have in clinical trials. And like I said, it’s not one therapy, it’s not one modality. It is pretty broad across that segment.
Max Masucci (Analyst)
Got it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brendan Smith with TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Brendan Smith (Analyst)
Great, thanks for taking the questions, guys, and congrats on the quarter here. Appreciate all the color on the biotech funding and spending environment. I think you flagged 70% year-over-year improvements—pretty staggering. I know you’ve spoken in previous quarters about that kind of four-quarter lag from funding to spending, and I know we’ve talked a lot about this in Q&A here, but I guess how should we think about how much of that recovery that you guys are expecting ultimately is now baked into Q4 and updated FY26 assumptions?
And maybe how much more could we see as we take a look at that exit ramp on the year and into our FY27 numbers? Because I’m just trying to understand if there’s anything else you guys are watching for across your end markets that would be needed to sustain that beyond Q4—maybe some of that early-stage spending you mentioned—or just anything else to flag there would be great. Thanks, guys.
Stephen Gunstream (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, thanks, Brendan. I think that we’re expecting to see a continuation of this in Q4—addressing that part of your question with the impact of the biotech funding on the custom products to biopharma customers, as we’ve talked about how that’s moving. And in general, Q4 looking good at this point, I would say. As we head into 2027, of course, we’re certainly encouraged by what we’ve seen here. It is early in this recovery phase. We are expecting it to continue again based upon the continued uptick in biotech funding that we’ve seen, and that should provide a nice opportunity for us in 2027. The other aspect that could come into play for 2027 that is also largely biotech-related but also diagnostic are these, again, late-stage clinical customers that are moving through phases, and we expect, as we’ve noted before, at least one of those customers to become commercial phase by next year.
And there are others that won’t necessarily be commercial phase but are yet still moving forward, which also has an impact in custom products and GMP products specifically. So, yeah, I guess the short answer is yes, we’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing here in the biotech funding and how it’s showing up in our results, expecting that to continue here in the fourth quarter and also as we look ahead to ’27, along with some other factors that are helping us.
Brendan Smith (Analyst)
Got it. That’s great. Thanks, guys.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m showing no further questions in the queue. That concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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