Thank you, Dave, and thanks everyone for your patience. Sorry for the delay.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us today to conduct an update with the investors and review the financial results for Aurora Spine for the first quarter fiscal year 2026 that ended March 31st, 2026. With us on the call representing the company today are Trent Northcutt, President and CEO of Aurora Spine, Matthew Goldstone, Chief Commercial Officer, and Chad Clouse, Chief Financial Officer of Aurora Spine.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made during the course of this call may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. These statements reflect current expectations concerning future events and results.

Words such as expect, intend, believe, may, will, should, could, anticipate, and similar expressions are words that are used to identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean a statement is not forward-looking. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual performance or achievements to be materially different from those projected.

For full discussion of these risks, uncertainties, and factors, you are encouraged to read Aurora Spine's documents on file with SEDAR, including those set forth in periodic reports filed under the Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors section. Aurora Spine does not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

On this call, management may refer to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and adjusted EPS, which are not measures of financial performance under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. Management believes that these non-GAAP figures, in addition to other GAAP measures, provide meaningful supplemental information regarding the company's operational performance.

Investors should recognize that these non-GAAP figures might not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies. These measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for or superior to, any measure of performance prepared in accordance with GAAP.

A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC Regulation G can be found in the company's earnings release. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Mr.

Trent Northcutt, President and CEO of Aurora Spine. Trent, please proceed.

Thanks, Adam. I'd like to welcome everyone to this call to update everyone about Aurora Spine.

To lay out the agenda for today's call, I plan on updating everyone on the company's operations and then hand the call over to Matt Goldstone, our Chief Commercialization Officer, to review our sales initiatives. After Matt makes his remarks, I will pass the call to Chad Clouse, our Chief Financial Officer, who will then briefly review the company's financials.

Afterwards, we will have some brief concluding remarks and then open the call to answer any questions you may have. My remarks will be brief as we've only been a few weeks since our last conference call.

The first quarter results showed some positive despite a slower than anticipated start to the fiscal year. Some of the sluggishness early in the quarter were weather-related, which was relevant as we booked higher sales the quarter progressed.

March was particularly strong, and so without any other sales from the high-margin Aero, it was refreshing to see our core products carry the load as we obviously not only have loyal customer base, but also making their way into more interventionalists' and surgeons' hands. We obviously have more work to do, especially on the spine surgeon side, which has been a bit tepid, but is expected to pick up in the back half of the new year.

Sales representatives that specialize in spine side of the business recently joined Aurora. It is very timely as we have re-released our Apollo plate, which has helped us selling our DEXA-branded products, including the DEXA-C for cervical and DEXA-L for the lumbar procedures.

We have high hopes for DEXA-L as subsidence occurs more frequently in the lumbar section of the spine due to heavier loads that are put into proportion of the spine. In addition, the CDC estimates that almost half of the US population over 50 years of age will have low bone mass.

This equates to millions of patients that need an implant that matches their bone density when having spine surgery. While we are on the topic of DEXA, it is important to note that subsequent to the end of the first quarter, we announced the issuance of a fourth US patent related to our proprietary DEXA technology platform.

The recent issued patent, titled "Bone Density Scan Result Matched Orthopedic Implants and Methods of Use," further strengthens the Aurora Spine intellectual property portfolio surrounding patient-specific bone density matched implants selected for use. The patented technology describes methods of obtaining the patient's bone density information, including the DEXA T-score or bone density measurement, selecting an implant having bone density levels matched to the patient's native bone at the implantation site, and implanting the selected device.

By giving surgeons an implant option designed around bone density, Aurora is advancing a more personalized and intelligent approach to spine surgery. Through the issuance of this patent, Aurora's competitive position will improve and support the continued development of the next-generation DEXA technology-based implants across the company's spinal implant portfolio.

We believe the DEXA products will be a key growth catalyst in 2026, especially that our Apollo plate is now in stock and we have fulfilled orders to our current DEXA products. We have begun to ramp up marketing efforts on the platform and expect it to build momentum through the year.

The SiLO platform, which is primarily dominated by the TFX, continues to be a major contributor to our revenues. While sales of SiLO in Q1 are in line with the same quarter a year ago, we are focused on introducing a couple of product extensions to the franchise that will be able to offer more variety of SI joint products for pain interventionalists.

The first product that we expect to be ready to go to market over the summer is a product for SI joint and will be administered by using a lateral oblique approach, which is a different approach than TFX uses. The lateral oblique approach is the number two type of approach currently used in the SI joint pain.

The feedback we receive from our sales team has been giving us the popularity of the lateral oblique approach that demand is for such of a product would be a worthwhile to add to our existing SiLO franchise. We are excited about the release of this product as we are planning for it to be Aurora's first product with a disposable kit.

We are in the midst of lining up doctors to use the product upon launch and believe this will act as a good catalyst back half of 2026. That concludes my formal comments, and I will now turn the conversation over to Matt Goldstone, Aurora Spine Chief Commercialization Officer.

Matt, please proceed.

Thank you, Trent. We continue to be in the midst of growing our sales team to improve our national coverage.

We are excited about all of our new hires. They are rapidly getting up to speed and contributing to Aurora's success.

While we are adding more sales people, we had to backfill underperforming regions from Q4 of 2025 and Q1 of 2026. The first quarter of the year started a bit slower than usual due to the weather-related issues in the northern part of the country.

In addition, we had to work through some pricing pressures in the market. Putting these temporary issues aside, the team is focused on developing the spinal surgeon market specifically with DEXA-C, Aurora's proprietary plate Apollo, and the alpha launch of DEXA-L.

To give an update on where we currently are, we currently have 14 sales people as of today, and we're excited about the additions to the team. We've added 5 new sales people recently and are on schedule to meet our goal of increasing the sales force by 50% this year.

We continue to forge forward with our new products and integrating them into the team. The clinical success of our SI joint portfolio and our lumbar fusion products continues to drive Aurora forward.

We have a great opportunity ahead of us as many of our product platforms and products for this market are working into emerging markets that are rapidly growing. While we have more work to do, we are excited about our future and have the right products available to deliver the best outcomes for patients.

That concludes my formal comments. Now I will turn the conversation to Chad Clouse, Aurora Spine's CFO, for some comments on financials.

Thank you, Matt. Total revenues for the first quarter of 2026 were $4.44 million, an increase of 0.4% when compared to $4.42 million in the same quarter one year ago, primarily due to increased sales in ZIP lumbar implants and Aurora biologics.

Gross profit margin was again stronger and came in at 62.6% in the first quarter, a nice improvement of 460 basis points from 58% for the first quarter of 2025. Gross profit margin was primarily higher due to the company recording more direct sales of products as compared to sales of third-party products through distributors.

Gross margin continues to be at a strong level and believe this level sustainable as we sell more proprietary products and utilize our direct sales channels. Total operating expenses were $2.98 million in the first quarter of 2026, which is slightly up compared to $2.88 million in the first quarter of 2025, showing continued tight expense controls.

EBITDAC, a non-GAAP figure, was approximately $170 $107,000 for the first quarter of 2026 compared to a negative $20,000 in the same quarter a year ago. Improvements to EBITDAC levels for the first quarter were due to higher gross margin and tighter expense controls.

Net loss was $203,000 for the first quarter of 2026 compared to a net loss of $360,000 for the first quarter a year ago. Basic and diluted net income per share was $0.00 per share for the first quarter of '26 and $0.00 per share for the first quarter of 2025.

Moving to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter and year with nearly $800,000 in cash. Accounts receivables were significantly lower relative to prior quarters, ending the first quarter just under $3 million, down from $3.3 million at the end of the fourth quarter and $4.2 million at the end of third quarter last year.

Lower receivables has helped our cash flows, and we were able to lower payables in the last two quarters, putting the company on better footing. We believe the capital structure is sufficient to meet our budgetary needs for the remainder of the year.

That concludes my comments, and I will turn it back to Trent.

Thanks, Chad. To summarize, the team at Aurora are highly focused and driven to build this company with the lineup of proprietary products we've developed in the past few years.

We are well positioned to take advantage of the emergencies of the minimally invasive procedures for the spine health and for many new proprietary products. We are very pleased about our product offering and believe that they'll have meaningful years to come.

We are excited for what lies ahead for Aurora and continue to expand and tweak our internal sales team. As we continue to expand our territory coverage in the US, we are in the midst of reworking the sales team and optimizing our efforts.

We expect the second quarter revenues levels to be in line or slightly lower than we have reported a year ago. That said, we believe that we're on the right track to enhance the company's revenue growth rate through new products and offering and including two new product extensions that will be launched later this year.

We are very excited about the company's future opportunities and the product lines that we have brought to the market. We will continue to build the sales team efforts and educate the marketplace of our products and the value they bring to patients.

We are very excited about the future for Aurora Spine for 2026 and beyond. With that said, operator, we are ready for any questions.

Good morning, guys. Tom Fedichin?]

. I wanted to ask about forward-looking guidance.

I know you'd mentioned that the next quarter will be slower as you take a step backwards and reorganize the sales team. What's it going to take to increase sales 15% to 20% year-over-year?

I think that's what we've all invested in the story for. I know the facet is not being rolled out at the moment due to some changes, but what's it going to take to get those numbers up?

We're going to have to find the right people who fit into the right areas as far as regional sales directors in those markets. We do a good job of qualifying people that have experience or that they have history in the particular market, like either interventional or in spine.

Then it comes down to: can they execute on that plan in those areas? During the interview process, we were really diligent.

We don't hire quick. We interview very slow.

We go through a process with people in our sales organization that they have to go through a series of interviews. When you get down to it, when they get hired, the rubber needs to hit the road.

People have to perform on what they've estimated themselves. What is it going to take?

It's going to take some few more regions that are going to be added online, which Matt Goldstone has done. He's added recently three new individuals into the sales market in areas that were previously either vacated because of lack of performance or in areas that we actually didn't have anyone participating in the sales drives in those locations, such as regional coverage or new distribution opportunities.

I'll let Matt touch on that to go over more on how we can get to the 20% plus growth.

Thank you, Trent. I agree with all of your points, and I really think it is a amount of people carrying the water together.

In the past, as we have hired people, a lot of it has been to optimize the regions that we were currently focusing on. As we have expanded across new territory, that opportunity will drive new revenue.

As we're able to put more people into these markets, that will ultimately be able to press the number up to the expected amount.

When I look at the company year-over-year and I look at being relatively flat, it begs the question as to the adoption of doctors. As you bring on more physicians who use your products, is the longevity there?

Are the doctors continuing to use your product year after year? Is there an issue with stickiness, or is it just that it's a slow process to ramp doctors up and if they just don't convert so quickly?

I think there's a lot of shiny objects that come out that might distract physicians on a momentary basis, but I think the continued clinical success of the Aurora portfolio is sticky. We have phenomenal outcomes with our SI joint patients.

We have phenomenal outcomes with our lumbar fusion patients. I continually hear back from physicians how impressed they are with how well their patients are doing.

That into itself, I think, drives the continued success. I think it really does come down to the manpower and the consistency of coverage.

Go ahead, Tom. Go ahead.

The

one of things that we see through the interventional side of the market the interventional doctors are still pioneering this space, right? This particular space of the fusion minimally invasive procedures being performed by interventionalists is still brand-new.

It's not like they've been at this for 20 years now. It's only been going on for a few years.

Many of the interventional doctors will start out with a handful of cases and then they'll follow those cases to see how they perform. They're still dealing with the dynamics of that marketplace with the ortho and the neuro community where they're trying to balance that referral base, that just play nice in the sandbox approach to medicine.

It's a dynamic that is still being developed, and it's an exciting market because it's growing and expanding, but it's growing and expanding at a rate that is slower than saying ortho and neuro how that got expanded into spinal procedures, but expanding from the standpoint that these new doctors are now offering this procedure option to their patients without having to go have a big surgery at the hospital.

I gotcha. What are the growth drivers that are going to get you to the 15% to 20%?

I ask you because I think I, like many investors, was looking at the facet thinking that was the growth driver for this year, knowing that that is not being marketed at the moment and maybe you can give us an update on when you think that will get marketed again. What will be, other than just having new sales people, where do you see the growth coming from for the balance of the year?

I think the product

The good news is Go ahead. Sorry.

Go ahead, Matt.

I was just going to point out that our spinal portfolio is maturing. We've had DEXA-C out for a couple years now, but the launch of DEXA-L at the end of last year, we are well into our alpha launch and we'll be going into a limited launch later this year.

Our DEXA portfolio will be driving a lot of growth, and getting Apollo back onto the market really allows us to have a procedural solution for an ACDF, which makes the sell and the opportunity in the OR a lot stronger. Otherwise, we were losing dollars and a lot of times you didn't need two people in the room to do one case.

Now we're able to really offer a full procedure option.

That's good. You were going to say there, Trent?

Yeah. What I was going to say was the SiLO X product, which is lateral oblique, gives us another shot on goal, which we did not have before.

The market had changed from just a pure lateral approach to allograft, which was a posterior approach, but the coding reimbursement was that headwind that we had talked about. You remember when we had to deal with that.

The oblique approach, which was just putting a couple screws in lateral oblique approach, was a procedure that became more and more familiar with some interventional doctors and even ortho doctors who didn't want to put in three lateral screws. They just wanted to do a smaller incision versus the old approach.

That was the two that really were driving the SI joint market, which was a posterior approach like SiLO TFX. Instead of us just fighting the system, we said, "Well, we can get an approval on that.

We'll just make our own lateral oblique system. That way, if there's an objection to using a posterior approach, or they're just not familiar with going posterior, then we have another opportunity to present to them."

When that product gets released to what we hear in the second half of the year, that's going to be a growth driver for the company, because those are really the two fastest-growing segments in the SI joint fusion market. The other part of our development of SiLO is to continue to expand the portfolio, which is what we've done, which we've been talking about for a couple years now, that we would always stay ahead of it, and that's what we've done.

Could you give us an update on the facet, where we stand with that?

Yeah. The good news is I have no bad news.

That's really where we are with it. It's with the FDA.

There may not even have to be a change. It's just a matter of a conversation.

I'm very optimistic about the conversation that we had. We have two very high-end FDA consultants that work for us, and the conversation has been pleasant, hasn't been difficult, and we're making progress.

I don't have a crystal ball in front of me, but the good news is I have no bad news. We are in the discussion with the FDA, and it might just be something as simple as getting some additional testing, biomechanical testing.

We're hopeful that that could be the result that we need then to continue to bring the product back into the market.

The facet is,

for the record, still FDA approved. It has not been pulled from the market.

It is FDA approved. We are just working with the FDA on some questions that they have that we are answering and addressing.

Okay. The TFX, there's a legal issue with the I guess the company or group that you licensed it from, that you were working through, that you didn't think was going to be an issue.

How is that going? Is that kind of come to a resolution, or is it look any closer to a resolution?

It's closer to a resolution. We make progress on it.

I don't want to say weekly, but we make progress on it monthly. Ultimately, I think it'll get resolved.

Okay. Fair enough.

I think that's pretty much it other than really just asking, as we look forward, I know you say you're taking a step back, if there's anything that we should be looking for, any metric that we should be asking you, what would that be? What should an investor be focused on as we go into Q2, Q3, even Q4?

We had to make some changes with some of our sales people. Some people made their own changes and helped make the decision easier for us.

We've just added some new sales people. Some of them had spine experience.

We touched on that during the recording that we wanted to add more sales people that could be focused and have a spine experience background. One of the individuals that we added actually came from a very successful lateral SI joint management.

He had management experience in SI joint. He's now part of the team, and he's now in an area that we didn't have any coverage in actually since we started the company.

It's in the northwest part of the country, and we're very pleased with that one. That's a good addition, adding these people that are going to be focused on either cultivating a new area where there's opportunity because there's already some existing business, but now they can really expand on it because there's customers there just haven't been called on because we've been flying people in to cover those cases from across the country.

Now having a person in that area, a local if you will, I think will make a big difference for us in those sales cycles. I don't know if Matt wants to touch on that further.

Awesome.

Yeah. I would just add that all of the five sales people that have been added to the team over the last quarter are stratified over the last three months, just say, and it takes about that three-month window to start seeing the contribution, they're getting their feet underneath them, getting their facilities organized, getting engaged with the physicians that they want to target.

We are starting to see contributions from them already, and I expect to see that ramp up substantially over the next three to four months.

Okay. With the new sales directors on board and trained up and with the prospects of growth ahead, the one thing that's missing I think would be going to different events, whether it be Planet MicroCap or whether it be Small Cap Discoveries events.

Do you see yourself going on the road and selling the story, Trent? You did a great job at Planet MicroCap in Vegas.

I don't know if anybody that wasn't impressed. I think there's one thing that I could suggest would suggest is that maybe to get on the road and sell the story.

I think you would probably attract a lot more people to the stock.

I'm completely on board with that. I did close out the year sorry, not close out the year.

We did have and be two things that we've done recently. We participated at the Roth Conference up in up here in Southern California just north of us.

Then we also most recently joined the met the new president of the Toronto Exchange, the the TSX, and then the TMX team, which is the the Toronto marketing exchange team. We are making changes to the way that we put out our press releases.

We're working directly with the TMX on that. We think that that's going to help get some, get us in more areas that we just weren't penetrating.

Like we just weren't getting out there; the messaging wasn't carrying. Then the MicroCap Conference today I have, a handful of one-on-one case presentations, and I want to be able to get out to get the story to resonate.

There is a resonating story here, and there is a growth strategy and a growth story that is is underway.

Perfect. Guys, thank you for your time.

That's all pretty much just the questions I've got. Appreciate you taking the opportunity and to have this call and wish you the very best as we go forward into Q2 and beyond.

Thank you, Tom. Tom, we really appreciate you staying with us and carrying the story yourself.

Thank you for being a big believer in Aurora.

No worries. Thanks, guys.

Have a great

Want to thank everyone for joining us for today's call. We are very pleased with the way that we are positioning ourselves in Aurora for 2026.

If you have any questions, please schedule any more meetings with Adam Lowensteiner at Lytham Partners. We would be happy to address your calls.

Thank you, and I will conclude the call.