Earnings call transcript: MaxCyte Q4 2025 misses earnings, revenue forecasts

MaxCyte Inc. (MXCT) reported its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings on March 24, revealing a miss on both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue forecasts. The company posted an EPS of -$0.09, falling short of the expected -$0.08, marking a negative surprise of 12.5%. Revenue also disappointed, coming in at $7.3 million against a forecast of $9.36 million, a difference of -22.01%. Following the earnings announcement, the stock saw a decline of 1.32% in aftermarket trading, closing at $0.747.

MaxCyte’s overall performance in 2025 showed a decline, with total revenue for the year at $33 million, down from $38.6 million in 2024. The fourth quarter alone saw a 16% drop in total revenue compared to the same period last year. The company’s core revenue also decreased significantly, highlighting ongoing challenges in its key business segments.

MaxCyte’s Q4 2025 earnings showed a negative surprise with EPS at -$0.09, compared to a forecast of -$0.08. Revenue was also below expectations, coming in at $7.3 million against a projected $9.36 million. These misses highlight ongoing financial pressures and market challenges.

Following the earnings release, MaxCyte’s stock fell by 1.32% in aftermarket trading, closing at $0.747. The stock is trading near its 52-week low, with shares down roughly 76% over the past year and 51% year-to-date. Despite this steep decline, InvestingPro analysis suggests the stock is currently undervalued, with a Fair Value estimate above current trading levels—placing it among potentially attractive opportunities on the most undervalued stocks list. The market cap has contracted to just $80 million, indicating investor concerns about the company’s financial health and growth prospects.

Looking ahead, MaxCyte anticipates revenue contributions from its newly launched ExPERT DTx platform, which has already seen early traction. The company expects meaningful revenue from this product in the second half of 2026 and beyond. The cash position remains robust, with an expected cash balance of at least $136 million by the end of 2026. Notably, 3 analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward for the upcoming period, according to InvestingPro data, suggesting growing confidence despite near-term headwinds. For deeper insights, MaxCyte is one of 1,400+ US equities covered by comprehensive Pro Research Reports, which transform complex financial data into actionable intelligence.

CEO Maher Masoud emphasized the strategic importance of the ExPERT DTx launch, stating, "Our new platform is set to drive significant growth and expand our customer base." Incoming CFO Parmeet Ahuja, with extensive experience in finance leadership, is expected to help steer the company through its financial challenges.

During the earnings call, analysts focused on the company’s revenue shortfall and the impact of customer reorganizations on future earnings. Questions also addressed the expected timeline for revenue growth from new product launches and strategies for managing operating expenses.

Operator: Please note, this conference is being recorded. Now we’ll turn the call over to Erik Abdo with Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Erik Abdo, Director of Investor Relations, MaxCyte: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for participating in today’s conference call. Joining me on the call from MaxCyte, we have Maher Masoud, President and Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Swirsky, Chief Financial Officer, and Sean Menarguez, Senior Director of Business Development. Earlier today, MaxCyte released financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. A copy of the press release is available on the company’s website. Before we begin, I need to read the following statement. Statements or comments made during this call may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors, which are discussed in detail in our SEC filings.

Except as required by applicable law, the company has no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will turn the call over to Maher.

Maher Masoud, President and Chief Executive Officer, MaxCyte: Thank you, Erik. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining MaxCyte’s fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. 2025 presented a challenging operating environment, but it was also a year of meaningful progress for MaxCyte. We continued to sign new strategic platform licenses, SPLs, as we call them, and support customers in advancing drugs through the clinic. We acquired SeQure Dx and successfully integrated the business into MaxCyte. We made meaningful changes to right-size spending and strategically improve our operations. Most recently, we launched a new product into ExPERT DTx that will allow us to work with developers earlier in research and development discovery. Let me start by reviewing our financial results.

Consistent with the preliminary financials we announced in January, MaxCyte reported $33 million of total revenue for the full year, which included $29.6 million of core revenue and $3.4 million of strategic platform license program-layer revenue. We grew our instrument install base to 857, up from 760 at the end of 2024. Doug will discuss fourth quarter and full year performance in greater detail, but MaxCyte’s results were within the range of expectations that we had updated you with in August. As previously discussed, the business was impacted by program consolidation and rationalization across some of our SPL customers, which included a 15% decline in purchases and leases from our largest customer, reorganizing manufacturing and managing inventory.

Now, let me give you a little more detail on the launch of our new ExPERT DTx, which I mentioned earlier, and I’m very excited to discuss. Even as we faced headwinds in 2025, our focus remained on innovation and leading the market with groundbreaking platforms. In February, we announced the launch of the ExPERT DTx, a modular 96-well electroporation platform designed for research and drug discovery applications. We are very excited about what this product represents for MaxCyte. The DTx enables labs to transfect primary cells and cell lines across up to 96 samples in a single 3-minute run with consistent well-to-well performance that effectively eliminates transfection as an experimental variable.

It is one of the most cost-effective 96-well electroporation solutions on the market with detachable 8-well strips that can be processed with unique parameters, giving researchers the flexibility to test different cell and cargo combinations in parallel while reducing waste. This software is also differentiated. DTx Designer allows users to design experiments remotely and upload workflows when the system is available, maximizing instrument pipeline. That is a real practical advantage for labs running multiple back-to-back experiments. What makes the DTx strategically important is its full compatibility with the rest of the ExPERT platform. A researcher can optimize a process on the DTx in discovery and transfer it directly to MaxCyte’s larger scale to electroporation instruments, the FCX or GTx, for scale-up into cGMP compliant manufacturing without re-optimization.

That is a powerful value proposition, which allows us to engage with customers at the very earliest stage of their workflow and provide a seamless path from discovery through to the clinic and commercialization, all on a single platform, which is an epitome of a therapeutic platform. We built this product around our customers’ needs, and we believe it will be added to both instrument and processing assembly, PAs, revenue in 2026 and beyond, as well as allow us to grow our SPL customers. We have built years of electroporation know-how and expertise into the DTx, and I am confident we launched a product that will allow researchers to seamlessly progress from discovery to the clinic onto our GMP ExPERT platform. Turning to our guidance.

As we enter 2026, the challenges that impacted growth in 2025 will have an impact on the first half of 2026. For our 2026 guidance, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $30 million-$32 million, consisting of $25 million-$27 million of core revenue and $5 million of SPL program-layer revenue. Given the timing of purchases and leases, we expect Q1 to be our lightest quarter for core revenue with a back half weighted year. Including our guidance is the impact of a recent notice received from an SPL customer terminating their license for reasons unrelated to our platform’s performance, along with approximately $4 million in core revenue headwind from select SPL customers, which began to impact our revenue in the second half of 2025, which I will provide further detail on.

We continue to believe that the headwinds facing our business are a result of the conservation of capital by biotechs in the cell therapy space, rationalization of customer programs in ex vivo cell therapy, and inventory management at our largest customer, which we expect to stabilize in the second half of 2026 and grow from that new base. There has been no fundamental change in the demand for our technology and the differentiation of our technology competitively. While these short-term headwinds influenced our revenues last year and the first half of this year, we are more excited than ever of our SPL programs and the business model, which is seeing multiple programs progressing deep into the clinic and much closer potential commercialization.

As I mentioned, embedded within the core revenue guidance, we expect revenue from SPL customers, including our lar