Greetings and welcome to the Lightwave Logic Corporate Update Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Reminder that this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Ryan Coleman with Investor Relations. Thank you, Ryan. You may begin. Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our Corporate Update Call. On today's call, you will hear from Lightwave Logic's Chief Executive Officer, Yves LeMaitre, and its President, Tom Zelibor. Please note that this call is in listen-only mode for the duration of the call and that a replay will be posted to the company's website shortly after the conclusion of this call. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Yves and Tom will each make some introductory remarks and then provide an update on the company's market outlook, go-to-market plans, and strategic priorities. We will then move to a moderated Q&A session. Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including statements and our business outlook, are forward-looking, and as such, this call speaks only as of today, January 9th, 2025. Such statements may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The matters discussed on this call are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and these risks and uncertainties could cause actual operating results to differ materially from those expressed in the call. A more detailed description of the risks our company faced is more fully described by the company under the caption "Risk Factors" included in our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. As always, Lightwave Logic assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. Any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of replay listening or transcript reading. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Yves. Happy New Year. It's great to be here with you today, and thank you for taking the time to listen to this update to the Lightwave Logic strategy. But first, thanks for the many messages of support I have received from the Lightwave Logic investor community since I took on this CEO role. Lightwave Logic is a unique company with committed and passionate followers who want to be listened to and informed. Obviously, while we cannot disclose every single detail of what is happening inside the company, the executive team is committed to providing a regular cadence of communications and updates for the investment community, covering both our commercial and technical progress and plans. I have had the pleasure of navigating the optical industry for the last 25 years. During this last decade, I have been closely following the steady progress of polymer materials. I believe we are now at an inflection point where our promising technology is ready to be turned into products. I took on this new role as I believe that Lightwave Logic is uniquely positioned to become a critical supplier of solutions for the generative AI market. Joining me on the call is Tom Zelibor. With his proven track record of operational transformation and excellence, Tom is the ideal person to help drive the changes we need. Tom, over to you. Thank you. And like Yves, I also want to thank you for the many supportive messages and emails I've received since rejoining the company. I guess I failed retirement once again, but I'm happy to be back in the saddle in Denver with the team and to be supporting Yves in the execution of our strategy. As many of you know, I have served this company in various senior leadership roles over the years, including as former Chairman and CEO. In the short time I've been back in our facilities again, I can already sense that this time is and feels different. As I've reintroduced myself to the team and met with our newest employees, there is a palpable sense of purpose with high energy everywhere. As for my role, I've been asked to run the operational tempo and execution of the company internally, and that is exactly what I intend to do. We have incredible capabilities and unique materials that are critical enablers for a high-speed silicon photonics marketplace and other potential new verticals. As for my other priorities, I will focus on our policies, procedures, and timelines. We will be executing on our plan with reinvigorated goals, objectives, and accountability. We're on a mission, and I look forward to executing it. So Yves, back over to you. Thanks, Tom. So first, maybe for those of you who are not familiar or new to Lightwave Logic, let me remind you briefly of who we are and what we do. We're an American company headquartered near Denver, Colorado. We started as a chemical company and have developed a unique set of materials called electro-optic polymers that have applications in multiple markets. In parallel, we have filed more than 70 patents with the associated know-how and trade secrets in the production of such polymers. Our short-term goal is on leveraging our technology into the AI space, where optics is becoming a larger and larger portion of a $100 billion CapEx. Although we are still pre-revenues, our balance sheet is strong and allows us to continue to invest in R&D and manufacturing to deliver our best-in-class EO polymers. Today, we are introducing our new management team and explain why we decided to make changes to the organization, so I want to briefly touch on the recent leadership transition and the rationale for the change. I mean, the simple answer is we are just entering a new phase of the company. 2025 and 2026 will be defining years for Lightwave Logic, and we felt we needed to make sure that we did everything in our power to seize this unique opportunity created by AI and right in front of us, and I want to take a minute to thank Michael Lebby for his contribution over the last nine years. It's fair to say that Michael really helped put polymers on the map. He helped develop or patented Perkinamine compounds, and he was a tireless evangelist educating the market on the need and value of electro-optic polymers. However, we must evolve. The existing AI and data center infrastructure struggle to keep pace with the AI demands. It's necessitating technology upgrades. Optical products and photonics-based technology are becoming barriers to scale-up systems. As a result, the market is willing to accept and implement disruptive solutions to overcome these challenges. That is where we play. It was ultimately the board assessment that change was needed to catalyze this process and to fast-track our efforts towards market adoption. When you're a company like Lightwave Logic with such unique and disruptive materials, timing can be everything. Throughout my career, I've seen many promising and interesting materials companies struggling to find the right application or the right market. At Lightwave Logic, we are extremely fortunate. First, we are not one of those technology companies looking for an application. As I'll detail a bit later, the demand for bandwidth and higher-speed optical communication is relentless. That's great news for us. Our electro-optic polymers are unmatched when it comes to the potential of delivering ultra-high-speed modulators, and our roadmap extends far beyond the current solutions deployed today for 100 gigabits per second per lane. Since I joined the board of directors in August, and even more since I took on the CEO role, I've met with CEO, CTO, and product leaders of some of the most significant players in the optical communication industry, and will continue to do so over the next few months. My key takeaway is that the lack of a scalable modulator technology reaching to 400 gigabits per second per lane and beyond is a serious problem for the industry, forcing customers to adopt suboptimal optical solutions or rely on inefficient, power-hungry, complex electronic signal processors to compensate for the limitation of existing laser and modulator technologies, but more importantly, the market we are serving is exploding with growth rates typically seen only once per generation. The AI GPU clusters that are the foundation of the AI wave are relying on faster and faster optical connections between individual processors to create supercomputers. The latency and bandwidth of each of the millions of connections required to build such clusters are major bottlenecks in the ability to scale the deployment and respond to our insatiable demand for GenAI applications. EO polymers are disruptive technologies that can help scale up AI clusters much faster. After more than a decade of developing this unique technology and proprietary materials and recognizing the opportunity of the evolving marketplace and demand for innovative solutions, this is a time for the company to advance into the second stage of its course. This, we believe, is achievable by leveraging our technology and relationship in building a business by introducing polymer-based products and solutions into the AI network infrastructure, data centers, and optical networks at large. Our immediate priority is advancing Lightwave Logic's value proposition by accelerating the global adoption of polymer modulators and the integration of such polymers into silicon photonics engines or photonic integrated circuits or PICs. Near-term focus, 2025 and 2026, will be on enabling customers and the broader industry ecosystem to use the superior performance and energy-efficient attributes of EO polymers. In addition, let me also highlight what we are doing internally in the background to prepare Lightwave Logic for the following phase of growth, when we will scale up production of materials and transition our chemistry lab into a world-class polymer production line. We're also investigating new applications for our materials outside of the pure optical fiber communications market. For example, quantum computing, photonics processor, and free space optics communications applications are vertical markets we are currently exploring. As I said, we are being opportunistic. We are moving with agility in the direction of growth. Let's zoom in on the AI market opportunity right in front of us. This picture from a recent NVIDIA public presentation shows what an AI factory looks like: racks and racks of GPUs and memory banks interconnected through switches by copper and optical cables. A few years ago, at a different company, I had similar slides showing the inside of a mega data center and all the servers interconnected by Ethernet switches. At the time, we thought this was a revolution like we had never seen before in optics. I was lucky to be part of it, supplying some of the key lasers to enable that architecture. Now, this looks small compared to what is required for AI backend and frontend networks. We are talking about a world where every GPU is connected to every other GPU at the highest possible bit rate. The rule of thumb is that the number of connections required is 10x what was required in a traditional data center. And what about power? It becomes extremely difficult to manage. A server rack that used to consume something like 60 kilowatts is now projected to exceed 120 kilowatts this year. Multiply this by the number of racks you see in the picture, and you understand the impact of power consumption of every single component used in that architecture. The market for optical transceivers is already approaching $10 billion per year, with a CAGR in excess of 25% over the next three years for the highest speed rate. More than 20 million high-speed transceivers, meaning 400G, 800G, and above, were deployed in 2024. And that number will approach 100 million in four to five years. The market is moving fast, and the investment is significant and real. The challenge is scaling. We need faster connections. We need higher density, and we need low power. This is where polymers come into play. There is a relentless need for more bandwidth per optical lane. And it started at 10 gigabits per second per lane. Because modulators were too slow, we had to co-package four modulators to reach for 40 gigabits or 10 modulators to reach 100 gigabits. That trend has continued throughout the last 15 years. Modulator speed went to 25 gigabits, then 50 gigabits, then 100 gigabits, and every time, we needed to put several modulators together to get more bandwidth out of a transceiver. The industry also tried other ways, other techniques to increase bandwidth. We started using new modulation formats like PAM4 or coherent, but the challenge remained the same: get a faster modulator to enable 200 gigabits per second per lane, 400 gigabits per second per lane, and even one terabit per second per lane in the future, and do it without requiring a significant increase in energy requirements. Additional technologies are running out of steam, and the industry has been looking at new material structures that could break that modulation barrier. This table was prepared by the CTO group at Coherent and is an excellent snapshot of the various technology options being contemplated for ultra-high-speed modulators. Polymer is the only material that has the potential to deliver 500 gigahertz of bandwidth while requiring a drive voltage of less than one volt. You'll notice on the slide that polymers are mentioned in conjunction with plasmonics, which is a new technology allowing electrons to travel much faster than on traditional electrical media. For the first time, optical modulators based on polymer will deliver such high bandwidth that high-speed RF electrical connections will not be able to keep up, and we will need to bring new technology to the market. Next, I would like to spend a bit of time on our go-to-market strategy and commercialization plans. We have received a lot of questions regarding our product readiness, adoption by customer, and deal status. I realize that we needed first to clarify where Lightwave Logic fits into the data center and AI ecosystems of companies. There are many different configurations of AI clusters, but let me describe the most typical application for polymer materials when used to create high-speed optical interconnects. Today, hyperscalers or AI customers, they primarily buy optics in the form of optical transceiver modules, which each generation provides the next step in speed from 400G and 800G today to 1.6 terabits and 3.2 terabits tomorrow. Inside this transceiver module, you will find various electronic components such as drivers, controllers, and digital signal processors. But you also find the key optical component in the form of an optical engine. This optical engine, typically built on a silicon photonics platform, is in charge of transmitting and receiving the optical signal over the fiber. This silicon photonic engine, sometimes referred to as a PIC or photonic integrated circuit, incorporates all of the key optical functions needed to create high-speed links. It is such a critical component that most of the multi-billion-dollar companies active in the AI hardware space, companies like Broadcom, Intel, Cisco, NVIDIA, and Marvell, are making major investments in designing such silicon photonics engines. There are a number of well-started startups as well vying for a share of that market. The challenge of silicon photonics is that it is based on CMOS material, essentially silicon, and requires the addition of other materials to perform certain functions. For instance, the laser can be made of indium phosphide or a receiver made out of germanium. The modulator remains one of the toughest challenges to silicon photonics, and designers are exploring all kinds of options and materials to scale to 200 gigabits per second and 400 gigabits per second per lane. We believe that Lightwave Logic is uniquely positioned to supply silicon photonic engine companies with the right material for the modulators of tomorrow. To be clear, at Lightwave Logic, we do not design or manufacture complete silicon photonic engines. We partner with customers so they can integrate our polymers into their full PIC. Our job at Lightwave Logic is to convince those customers to adopt our polymer platform and support them with our expertise, our tools, and our resources so they can easily integrate our polymers into their PIC design and production. Another critical point to understand is that polymer modulators are not standalone products. They only exist when combined and integrated with this other optical function in a piece of silicon photonics. This means that the foundries producing these PICs need to be ready and equipped with all the necessary toolkits and processes to be able to integrate polymers. The good news is that, unlike other materials such as thin-film lithium niobate or BTO, polymers are relatively simple to add to an existing CMOS fab. However, it still requires specific steps in the backend process to be implemented in the foundry. This is why we announced a partnership with AMF last year. It was aimed at proving the ability of large semiconductor foundries to be able to implement all the required processes to integrate polymer on CMOS. Each of our potential customers has its own strategy when it comes to foundry selection. I'm sure you have seen recently how the landscape is changing with major players such as TSMC, Tower, and GlobalFoundries doubling down their investment in silicon photonics. This is our second commercial objective at Lightwave Logic. To accelerate the broader adoption of our technology, we need to make sure that polymer can be used in multiple foundries. This is an area where I intend to increase the number and depth of our interactions. Our goal is that when a customer is designing a new silicon photonic engine using polymers, he has access to multiple semiconductor foundries for production. In summary, the commercial targets for Lightwave Logic are: one, silicon photonics engine suppliers to integrate Lightwave Logic polymer modulators onto their PIC. Two, silicon photonic foundries to enable a wide choice of manufacturing options compatible with our material platform. As you've heard today, we believe the disruptive performance benefits of our materials can enable the fast and energy-efficient scaling of AI backend and data center frontend networks. We will prioritize relationships with silicon photonics engine customers and foundries for making our polymers a solution of choice for high-speed modulators. Also, in order to maximize Lightwave Logic's chances of success to accelerate our transition to a revenue-generating company, we are making adjustments to our internal operations and engineering activities. Tom will now highlight some of our key priorities for 2025. My primary focus is going to be on executing an operational transformation, which will require a comprehensive review of the company business activities. In leading that work, I'll be identifying areas for business improvement to support our commercial objectives, managing costs so we can make the necessary operational shifts to position the company, deliver value, and achieve our goals for long-term success. There's a lot of work to be done. We're going to be improving the technology, creating proof points, and obtaining solutions to solve industry's future needs. With our hallmark of excellence and reliability, we will get our technology into the hands of potential tier-one and foundry partners. Those discussions are currently ongoing. Our teams will be expected to identify new applications for our technology outside of the optical networks too. The good news is many of these companies are already calling us, which is a welcome change from our previous engagements. As you might imagine, these discussions take time. We are in various stages with our materials and technology. We are making constant improvements, but we have stressed to the technology team that it is important to lock down on one primary material to provide data, prove its efficacy, reliability, and quality to potential customers, and that's exactly what we are currently doing. I want to stress that to scale to manufacturing levels for devices internally for any potential customer or partner would take years and a large capital expense. That is why our current strategy is to produce prototype devices to get in the hands of our partners for qualification. Because of that, we are being flexible and collaborative. Partnerships will be critical, but what those partnerships look like or how they are structured may be different than what has been communicated previously. We are looking to open our technology and materials to partners in ways that will be acceptable both from a confidentiality perspective and conducive to building strategic partners or partnerships as part of our go-to-market strategy. In closing, I can't stress enough how happy I am to be back with the company at this critical time for the photonics industry. We are looking at unprecedented accelerating demand over the next several years as the investment spend to address AI, quantum computing, even though that is years down the road, and data com requirements increase. There are so many positives our shareholders should take away with them. First, we possess an innovative electro-optic polymer technology that is positioned as a key enabler of these changes. Two, we have a robust patent portfolio that is well protected with numerous additional patents pending. Third, we have an experienced leadership team with highly relevant experience. And finally, we have a strong balance sheet to fund our future growth. I want to reiterate our commitment to establishing a regular cadence of transparent communications and updates with the investment community. Our goal is to update investors on our progress more frequently as we go forward. At this time, I'll turn it back over to Ryan, who will moderate our Q&A session. Thank you, Tom. When we announced this call, we invited investors to submit their questions ahead of time. We'd like to thank those of you who took the time to do so. While the number of individual questions received was more than we could adequately address in this format, we've attempted to address many in our remarks already and selected the ones that were most frequently asked for the purposes of this discussion. Our first question, why was the CEO replaced? Was it due to performance, strategic realignment, or personal reasons? And given the CEO change, will there be any significant changes in focus or priorities? Yeah. So I think I've already said at the beginning, we are entering a new stage for this company, and we felt as a board that we needed an expanded and new leadership team. Our technology is mature enough now, and the ecosystem is ready for us to transition to a more aggressive and open approach, in particular related to go-to-market. As I said, our goal is enabling polymers into this new AI world of connectivity. We are less focused on our closed in-house solution. We are more open to external partnerships. We simply needed to move faster to capture these opportunities. Regarding our priorities, number one, a refreshed and aggressive go-to-market approach, winning customers and convincing foundries to implement our polymer processes, while at the same time continuing to get our materials, processes, tools available to the global industry to accelerate the adoption of polymers. And our second question, pending deals came up in the past, but it always seemed that they were postponed. What went wrong and what can be changed for the better? So number one, I should highlight that our customers have concerns regarding what we can disclose, and some confidentiality requirements we have preclude us from disclosing everything regarding who is using our technology or contemplating to use our technology. We announced a customer in 2024, as you know. We are continuing to engage with customers, and we will provide as much clarity and as many updates as we reasonably can while preserving potential customer confidentiality. Now, what's important to understand is that beyond the transceiver manufacturers, which were really our main target in recent years, with this new go-to-market approach, we are opening up to a new potential customer universe. We need a bit of time to validate our new commercial strategy and provide you feedback on our success in penetrating the silicon photonics engine market. But my first meetings with tier-one customers give me confidence that polymer is seen as a critical building block for future AI solutions. And our third question, why has the commercialization process been slower than expected, and what is its current status, including technical or other obstacles? Well, what we are doing at Lightwave Logic is hard stuff. We are bringing new materials, and that's not a simple upgrade of an existing solution. We have higher barriers of acceptance to overcome, and we have been working diligently for the last decade at eliminating these barriers one after the other. We are shifting now our strategy to accelerate the production, again, by relying less on in-house work and relying more on finding the right partners in the industry. This is why we need to have the right tools and processes in place for these customers to easily adopt and integrate our technology into their own solutions, and our fourth question is: Is the technology ready for commercialization? Are there any technical problems that our partners or customers are waiting for Lightwave Logic to resolve before that can start, such as stability, integration, or scaling up? As I mentioned earlier in my other comments, we're in various stages with our materials and technology, and as you might imagine, we're constantly making improvements, but it's always important if you're trying to prove the efficacy and reliability and quality to potential customers that you need to lock down to one material, and that's exactly what we're doing. Now, having said that, we are in active discussions with multiple parties who continue to express their interest in our electro-optic polymers, and the good news is many of them are calling us, like I mentioned before, and welcome the changes from previous engagements. As you might imagine, with any disruptive technology, the due diligence and qualification process with these potential partners and customers can be arduous. We are being responsive to their questions, and we're approaching it with a very collaborative mindset, excuse me, and this takes time. We're confident in our path and plans to accelerate commercialization, and at the same time, we are incorporating processes, equipment, and plans to scale our materials to commercial levels, and notice I said materials. As you may recall, I mentioned something about devices earlier, only focusing on prototypes there. The fifth question is: Is the PIC 200 and 400 gig ready, and why do we still lack transparency around it? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's an area where maybe we have not provided the right level of clarity, and there is maybe some confusion in people's minds, so my first statement is we are not doing full PICs. We are working with silicon photonics design houses to integrate all polymers into their own PICs with other functions that they develop in-house. Right? As we are doing that, of course, we need to supply the right building blocks to those customers. And of course, as a result, we are working on both 200G and 400G bit per lane in order to build these 1.6 and 3.2 terabit transceivers. And we are putting all the pieces together: materials readiness, stability of the device, qualification, process validation, especially the back-end process, which is critical for all types of structures, the documentation, the testing tools, and the infrastructure of the company. Our next question: Where does Lightwave Logic currently stand in the market? Is it still the potential industry leader when it comes to speed, size, and energy savings? As of today, there's no comparable technology for delivering multi-hundred gigahertz optical bandwidth on modulators besides polymer. Right? It's not only the best in speed, but also in size and energy. Our customers or potential customers appreciate that we are also fairly compatible with most silicon fabs. The implementation can be widely adopted. Again, I think we mentioned that earlier, both Tom and I. We are receiving inbound inquiries. We are talking to tier-one customers. I think we are confident that there is a reason for this continuous interaction. It is the potential disruption that polymer can bring to the ecosystem. Looking ahead to 2025 and 2026, what is the current outlook for the company? Are contracts in place to generate revenue? What is the status of potential tier-one partnerships today? Today, we are entirely focused on design wins. By design wins, I mean having silicon photonics players incorporate all polymer modulators into their chips with the goal to expand this partnership over the next two years. 25 and 26, as I said, are turning points and critical years for the company. We only expect limited revenue in 2025, primarily driven by engineering and prototype engagements. Next question, do you continue to believe that strategic partnerships are an integral part of Lightwave Logic's success? I think that's a very simple answer, and the answer is absolutely. Strategic partners are not only integral to our success, but they are also our critical component for our go-forward strategy on commercialization. Our strategy to go forward is to be opportunistic and commercially minded in our approach for growth, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that we are all experiencing a moment of great change being fueled by generative AI. We intend to stay well-positioned for serving this potential customer base, which also may involve moving more towards licensing and supplier agreements rather than operating as a materials and product company. And our final question, what milestones and key timelines can investors expect? What are management's immediate priorities, and do you expect to honor existing commitments? That's a great one. I don't think we're prepared yet because Yves and I have just started literally about three weeks ago to give definitive timelines. But transparency is now going to be a core value of ours, and we're committed to making it easier for investors to track our progress. We'll be communicating on a more frequent basis to keep you abreast of our progress. We also want to execute a comprehensive review, as I mentioned earlier, of all of our business activities with the goal of identifying areas for improvement and facilitating a more agile commercial-ready enterprise. We'll also be focused on advancing current discussions with tier-one partners and foundries and identifying new ones. And we'll be hyper-focused on investigating new applications for our technologies outside traditional optical networks. We'll continue to improve the technology and establish additional proof points with potential customers and partners. And finally, we're committed to establishing a regular cadence of transparent communications and updates with the investment community. Thank you, Tom. And thanks again to everybody who sent questions ahead of time. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Yves for any closing remarks. Well, thanks, Ryan. We are glad to be able to provide this corporate update for you today. We remain entirely focused on creating value for all stakeholders by capitalizing on our high-growth opportunities across the AI and data center networking sector, expediting our commercialization for our proprietary electro-optic materials, and opening new markets and applications for advanced polymer-based solutions. We intend to continue engaging with the investment community, providing updates and hosting calls to keep you apprised of our progress. Thank you, everyone, for your support and for joining today. Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.