Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the final day of Needham's annual growth conference. I'm Jeff Hobson, a member of Ryan Koontz's research team covering networking and communications here at Needham. Today, I have the pleasure to introduce Lightwave Logic, and I'm joined today by CEO Yves LeMaitre and CTO Aref Chowdhury, who are going to lead us through a presentation. Feel free to write any questions in the chat, and we can get to them at the end. Welcome, Yves LeMaitre and Aref Chowdhury. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Needham, for inviting us to this great conference. Always a pleasure, and thank you, all of you in attendance. It's a great opportunity for us to kind of give you either an introduction to Lightwave Logic for those of you who are not familiar with the company, but also for those of you who have been following us, look back at our journey a little bit, especially on 2025 and what's coming ahead in 2026. Excited to be here. I'll skip the forward-looking statements. You know that they are important, so please read them carefully. The way I usually introduce the company for people who have not been exposed to it is we found a way at Lightwave Logic to create a flashlight that you can turn on and off more than 100 billion times per second. And you might ask yourself, well, why do you need such a flashlight? Well, that's essentially the way optical networks are built, and communication is transmitted over fiber optics is by turning on and off the lights. And of course, the faster you can do it, the more data, the more bits you can transmit, and the more information, and the faster it goes through the fiber networks. So this is a really, really important function. In the optical language, it's called the modulation because you're essentially modulating the intensity of light on and off. That is what we do. We do it faster than anything else, any other materials on Earth. Nobody comes close to what we do in terms of the ability to turn on and off the light. The reason why we have been able to do this, we've been working on these materials, and people who are following the industry, the scientists, the materials experts, they know that this electro-optic polymer we do, we call it Perkinamine. That's our registered brand for this material, is the fastest electro-optic material. And the way it works, Aref will cover that later, but the way it works essentially is kind of by moving an electron clouds in kind of across the molecules, you're able to create kind of a change in the material properties. We call that the refractive index. And then as you change it, you essentially can make a material go from opaque to transparent and back to opaque and back to transparent and very fast, faster than anything else. With very little energy applied to the material, you can get that speed of electrons, cloud of electrons moving. That's kind of the secret sauce. That's something we do in our facility in Denver, Colorado. We're about 40-50 people. That's where we do all the design, the manufacturing of this electro-optic polymer material that is then being used for what we'll talk about primarily today for AI networking and AI networking hardware and connectivity in particular. We'll cover that in the presentation, but it's just kind of a high level. This is what the company is all about. For those of you who followed the company for many years, the company has been in existence for more than 20 years. It's been working from really the turn of the century to now in building the material that could meet both the requirements of performance and reliability. And when we did that, we really had a lot of years of getting those materials, those materials functioning, operating at the right level. Now we have those materials ready. And last year, we really turned the company from kind of a research phase to a productization and commercialization phase. As part of that, we revamped the management team. I joined as CEO just a bit more than a year ago. I come from this optical industries with a company like Oclaro Lumentum, IPG Photonics. And we have hired people that really are moving the company from that research phase to that product phase. We hired a VP of engineering coming from Coherent, done transceivers and optical engines all of his life, large companies like Coherent and Lumentum, Lance Thompson, based in Denver, driving the engineering activities. Robert Blum joined us recently, also middle of the year from a distinguished semiconductor background from companies like Intel or Applied Materials. And most recently, about two weeks ago, Aref started with us as our new CTO and head of strategy. So I've known and worked with Aref for the last 15 years. We know each other really well. And And I was really excited to convince him to join our company. And I'll let Aref introduce himself. This is the first time, I think, he's participating to such an event for Lightwave Logic. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the introduction, Yves. Really a pleasure to be here. Very excited to be joining the company Lightwave Logic and with all the things. Previously, I was at Nokia. I led their strategy and their CTO for the network infrastructure business. And it happens to be that because we were part of my role is to engage with all the ecosystem, including startups and early companies, I've been engaged with Lightwave Logic for a very long time. So very familiar with the technology and capabilities. So with that, again, thank you for having me here. And Yves, why don't we move on and maybe dig into some of the technology a little bit for everybody. So I probably don't have to show this slide, especially near the end of the week, to anybody here. But the AI infrastructure has various challenges or demands. If I focus on one aspect, connectivity, what does that entail when we say the data center needs connectivity? You need high bandwidth. You want to be able to go as fast as possible speeds. In terms of power, you want the lowest power consumption possible. We all know the challenges that we face with the power requirements of data centers today. You also have integration. Very important. Whatever technology you want to introduce, you want to be able to integrate it with the existing, and since, for example, silicon or silicon photonics, the whole it's really the base operations. You want to be able to be very compatible in the foundry, so that's something that we also bring to the table. One thing that I haven't listed here, but it's always on everyone's mind, is cost. Cost is also a very important attribute. You can't do this thing more expensive for each generation. We bring that to the table as well, so in terms of within the AI or just in general for data centers opportunity, sort of the industry has kind of partitioned it into three segments: scale up, out, and across. Scale up, increasing the speeds just within the rack. Scale out, having the connectivity between racks, and then scale across, moving from one data center to the other. Our polymer technology is relevant to all three of the scale X scenarios, and we have actually customer engagements in all of these areas. And of course, volumes and things of that in the data center are the highest inside, so where do we sit in terms of the ecosystem in this whole AI world? If you put Lightwave Logic at the center, what we're doing is we're supplying the enabling polymer materials as well as the process know-how of how to incorporate this into, for example, the silicon photonic engines that we incorporate with. So we're working with those who are designing and making PICs, the foundries associated with them, who are then in turn giving these engines with our polymers to the optical transceiver suppliers, and then ultimately going into the data centers with the likes of NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Microsoft and Meta. So another way to look at basically in terms of a product design process of where we are, if you look at the left-hand side, we start with the EO or electro-optic polymer material. We then bring that in with those who are making the silicon photonic integrated circuits. We have certain design requirements, not a whole lot of ask, but we sort of specify that ahead of time. We also give some reference designs to customers we're working with, called it as suggestions, but of course, they're free to do any tweaks that they think are necessary. Then in the end, the engine goes into, as I said, into the transceiver or in the future, co-packaged optics. I know that's also a hot area, but then that's getting incorporated into the data center, so that's sort of end-to-end of how, starting from Lightwave Logic all the way to the end customer of the data center. This sort of pictorial is showing kind of a cross-section of the architecture. What we have here in the green is our polymer material. Everything beneath the green and around the metal and everything, this is coming from the silicon photonics. This is the silicon photonics engine, basically. The only thing that we ask when we're working with those who are designing the silicon photonics engine is that they create this slot that we show in there. There's a slot. We'll show some other pictures about that. But that's very important. What we're doing is we spin the polymer on everywhere. So we fill up, including the slot. That's very important. Later on, we're removing polymer from where it may not be needed. But anyway, after that, finally, the purple layer on the right-hand side, that purple layer actually also exists on the left-hand side, is an encapsulation layer. What we're doing is at the end, after what we've done, we have to do some processes of the polymer after we've coated on, but we didn't add this encapsulation layer, which basically protects it from environmental degradation. Things like oxygen, et cetera, are not necessarily liked by the polymer, so now you've sealed it, and now it's ready to go, so that's sort of the process. Here's some cross-section images of how this looks like. As you can see, you see the slot or the trench that's in the silicon. Basically, what we're doing is our polymer, when we spin it on, goes into the trench, and that's where the action is happening. Basically, these two electrodes on the side, you apply electric field, and you're turning the light on and off, so all the action is happening, if you will, in the modulator function in the trench, and so you can see a very small trench is well defined. Here's how the device looks after integrating with the polymer. Sort of in this whole device, you see sort of two tracks that we see coming in. That's where those trenches or the slots are, and we have our polymer spun on it. And then there's a grayish area around. You can see that is the encapsulation layer encapsulating everything sort of as a seal. So once this is done, like I said, then the device is ready to go for operation. In terms of where we are with the company, in terms of protecting our intellectual property, we have a very strong patent portfolio of over 80 patents both in the U.S. and a number of jurisdictions outside the U.S. And really, the portfolio has been developed. We have patent coverage on the material system, very important, starting from the chemistry and properties of the material, from device structure, how to fabricate, how to integrate it in the fab, and last but not least, packaging. Really, if you ask where's the strength of our portfolio, call it first among equals where we have a little bit more coverage, definitely on the materials as well as the integration aspect. Very important. If you really want to manufacture this at scale, you need to be able to integrate it, especially inside a silicon fab. And so really, but again, we have coverage sort of as you go all the way from the chemistry all the way to the device, packaged device. So just as a note, before we get into, I know Yves will go into the TAM, you have a number of competing technologies in the area. You have the incumbents of just silicon photonics, indium phosphide. You have thin film lithium niobate, of course, which is gaining a lot of attention. I think really where we stand is compared to the others, whether it's legacy that's sort of running out of gas or even lithium niobate, with, granted, great properties, and I'm very familiar with the material myself, having worked with it, but it also has a number of challenges in terms of how many generations you may be able to do, so that's something to think about, but really, what the polymers provide is the runway of multi-generation, ease of integration, and again, speed, low power consumption, cost. The big question always has been around reliability. Can you sort of survive in these conditions? That's always been a question, and really, the big breakthrough was in the middle of 2025 when the company did put out a press release about the GR-468 basically doing the 85 degrees temperature with the 85% damp heat. That test was passed. And that really was the game changer of, hey, this material now is not just a lab experiment. This really has legs to operate in the commercial market potentially. And so that's what we're right now after sort of crossing the last hurdles, if you will. But with that, Yves, let you continue. Thank you, Aref. Let me see if I can move to the market. I think we've covered that slide before, but it's kind of important for especially potentially new investors to understand the size of this opportunity. I mean, we are talking about a market that basically is approaching $30 billion in 2028 in terms of the transceiver/CPO addressable market. So significant market. The modulator portion of that, kind of which is really the part that is accessible to us, that's what we sell, that's what we service, what we call it the SAM, is going to be expected to be somewhere between $1-$2.5 billion market. So you can see that the size of the market for a company like us, and I'm just going to put that in perspective of what we spend today. Today, our burn rate in 2025 is probably about $20 million, right? That includes CapEx and OpEx combined. So if you look at that and if you look at the size of the potential revenue opportunity and the fact that we don't need to make a major investment in terms of scaling our production infrastructure, you can see the potential for really creating a very attractive business model for the company. And I'll get back on that later. And that's just for, call it this AI networking optical connectivity market. Now, don't forget that the company down the road has potential additional markets that are not included in this TAM. And we are talking about quantum computing. We're talking about aerospace and defense and consumer electronics. Now, our entire focus right now is really on AI networking just because of the pressure of the market to deliver a solution faster and the size of the opportunity. But we are starting to see kind of these other markets. And I had alluded to that earlier that we would start doing this in 2026. And just I'm not going to spend a lot of time, but I wanted to highlight just an announcement we made earlier about our first foray into quantum applications, right? I mean, the quantum market has the potential to be even potentially bigger than this AI connectivity market. Obviously, the time difference is probably several years behind, obviously. But it's really important that we put in place already the infrastructure and the partnerships to be able to leverage this for our electro-optic polymer. Because the challenges that are faced by AI networking, a lot of similar challenges are faced by the quantum photonics world, and especially for the quantum processors. We basically entered a partnership with Elevate Quantum, which is building essentially a new infrastructure partially funded by the U.S. government and by the state of Colorado to really build a quantum ecosystem and quantum hub around Denver. It's very exciting for us because it also leverages a lot of the same challenges you see in scaling with semiconductors, the type of manufacturing infrastructure and processing of chips that's going to be required for quantum actually mirrors a lot of what's happening into AI. But anyway, I just wanted to mention it because I think it's kind of an exciting new development for the company, but it's not defocusing our team. We are entirely working as a group to really continue to penetrate the customer and the customer penetration to really make this business model a reality. Today, we are still in an early revenue stage for the company. But our business model is pretty exciting because it's built up of a combination of material sales, the stuff we manufacture, the chemicals we manufacture in Denver, combined with what Aref was mentioning around our reference design, our PDK, our process design kit IP, and all the tools we give our customers so they can make good use of the materials. This combined business model will enable us to generate gross margin at scale that will be higher than 60%. You're talking probably in terms of margin profile closer to a specialty materials company than it is to a semiconductor company. But it significantly flows through you get. So again, when you apply that to a revenue that applies to a serviceable market of a billion plus, it really becomes very interesting and hopefully can create a lot of shareholder value in the long term. Now, as I said, this has been a long journey for the company, the stage one, which lasted more than 20 years of technology and materials development around IP patents and, of course, the different designs of polymers, including polymers capable of withstanding high temperature, which was really a significant challenge. We have moved last year. I want to look back and thank the team. Actually, at Lightwave Logic, it's been an incredible year for the company. We said we would turn from kind of a research company to a product company. And we've been able to achieve major success there with big customers, a lot of traction in the market, a lot of progress. Certainly, we would not have done it without the team. And as part of that, as I said, we have scaled the team. Now, we are also continuing, of course, on that path. And I'll spend a few minutes later to explain where we are. But we're also preparing the next stage of the company. We cannot wait. The success in that market requires to have a production infrastructure that is ready and capable of scaling. So in 2026, we are spending quite a bit of effort building up our. And continue to extend in terms of the quality and the process control for chemical production in Denver. And we're also, as I said, starting to seed some of the new markets, just like the announcement I was mentioning about quantum earlier. So it's very much in line with what we have said last year. We're kind of on track for that. And again, a really exciting 2026 ahead of us. In terms of the customer, I put this slide almost a year ago now in front of everybody. I think we're really pleased about the fact that we were able to achieve to get three customers at stage three of these design win cycles. I mean, we had said three to five, but I'm really happy we got three because we focused on two of the biggest companies in the world are working with us on these programs. That was something that was really needed, not just for us, not just for our investor base to demonstrate our progress, but overall to the industry to validate the progress that we are making from turning this promising technology into a real business. Getting the traction with two Fortune Global 500 companies and get them to move to that stage three was such a major breakthrough for the company. Now, with that comes a lot of responsibilities, comes a lot of technical pressure. We've learned a lot through this process. It was a fantastic year for understanding what it takes just not to be delivering the materials, but delivering the materials that can really be turned into products. One of the big efforts we have put in the second half of this year of 2025 was around expanding our portfolio of semiconductor foundries that could manufacture these silicon photonics chips. You quickly realize when you work with different customers that each of them can have different preferences about the foundry that they want to work with, and I think that's something that maybe we kind of underestimated a little bit is the time and effort required to enable those foundries. I think we have made significant breakthrough in the second half, and especially in the fourth quarter of this year. So hopefully that will accelerate the transition of some of the 15 customers we have in stage one and two to go to the stage three. But delighted about this. As I said before, the cycle from end to end is typically around 18-24 months. So if you apply that to our progress, you will start to see commercial revenue for us in 2027. 2026, we will try to continue to give you visibility about our progress through reporting on the customer traction, reporting on number of customers, number of design wins. And also, I think I will expand a little bit in probably my next investor presentations around the progress we are making with different foundries. Because I think that's also a very important aspect that you need to understand to see and measure our progress. Of course, we continue to also drive progress on the technical side and implementation. But those are really the key KPIs that you should measure regarding the company over the next year. So in summary, and before we jump into kind of the Q&A session, I think it's really important to look back at where we are and where the company is coming from. Obviously, we have probably the best market that we can dream of with the explosion of AI networking and the fact that people are desperate to find a solution to be able to scale to 400G per lane, so 400 gigabits per second per lane, and also have a solution that is really compatible with the CMOS world. I mean, that's a message I want to emphasize is the roadmap of this industry now is driven by the semiconductor world. It used to be that photonics was living its own world next to electronics. It's not the case anymore. Those solutions need to be fully compatible, integratable with the largest silicon foundries in the world, the packaging and bonding and testing technology that they use and their partners. This is something that is completely new. And the winning photonic materials of tomorrow are the materials that will be able to address these challenges. It's not about performance anymore. It is about performance, integration, power, all of them combined. It's really a tough ask, but I think we are uniquely positioned with our technology. And unlike some of our competition using traditional crystal-based material like indium phosphide or thin film lithium niobate, I think we have a much stronger position to match and meet the roadmap of tomorrow. I think we talked about the technology itself. I think what I think Aref mentioned is really important. I think because of the success we're having in the market and the added traction of polymer, I think it is really important that we continue to protect our portfolio through patents and IP, but also through know-how and trade secrets. And we have kind of unique ways of manufacturing these polymers and protecting them. I think that's something that we continue to put a big emphasis on. We are not affected really much by the geopolitical situation. The raw materials we use are available pretty much everywhere in the world. We are manufactured in the U.S. We don't have a lot of dependency on rare earth materials. Actually, we don't have any. So it's kind of a nice advantage we have over competition. So we are not impacted by all this discussion at the geopolitical level. I think you've seen that we have significantly upgraded and enhanced our leadership team, especially around technical and sales and marketing, which was very important for us. Finally, last but not least, some of you have probably read that we did a public offering, CMPO, at the end of December. That comes on top of a good cash position 2024. We entered the year with more than $70 million in cash. So multiple years of runway was really important for us to do that, to secure, number one, our ability to continue to invest, make sure that our customers and strategic partners felt comfortable with our cash position. We have no debt and finally also bring kind of a new set of investors into the company. So very happy about the way 2025 worked out. A lot of work ahead of us. All exciting for 2026. Again, I want to really thank the investors for their support and thank the Lightwave Logic team for their incredible work last year. With that, Jeff, maybe we can open it up for Q&A. Thank you, Yves. Please feel free to put any questions in the chat and we can get to them. Otherwise, I can start with one. With CPO now dominating a lot of conversations, does anything change with your product when it comes to addressing a CPO solution versus the traditional? Aref, you want to take that one? Sure. So one of the big differences between the, call it the traditional, putting it in a transceiver, any technology under the CPO is the thermal environment. The CPO is very, very different. In fact, if you look at all the technologies right now, there are challenges in getting it into a CPO. And I won't get into all of that. But it's a very different temperature environment. The temperature itself that CPO is using is not an issue for our polymers. Our polymers, up to 185 degrees, we have no problem. If you go over 185 in a process, that's another story. But typically, for the environment for CPO, this temperature is not an issue for us. One has to look at, again, reliability under higher temperature operations. But that goes with any of the technologies. Just to add, maybe, Jeff, I think it's really important for investors, right? Although I don't want to play the hype for CPO because I believe indeed this is the way the industry is going, and it's actually great for us because it drives the type of materials and technologies that will be compatible with CPO, which is, again, typically semiconductor, CMOS, silicon photonics compatible, so it's great for us, but the reality of the numbers, though, when you look at the business, is that for the next couple of years, and especially when you talk about scale-out, you will find that the bulk of the business is still done in, as Aref was showing in one of his slides, at the transceiver level, and so it was really important for us. It was really important when we selected our customers last year of having customers in both camps. We announced early November, one of our global Fortune 500 customers is using our polymer for a transceiver application, actually starting at eight times 200, so 1.6 terabits per second. It's really important for us because that's going to, number one, bring the product to market faster. We create an opportunity for faster revenue and immediate revenue at higher scale if we are successful with them. That is really an important one. The second was, so that addresses kind of bringing the product faster to market, work out whatever little kinks remains to be dealt with to bring the product from where it is now to in high volume, and bring the revenue as fast as possible for the company. The second large Fortune 500, Global 500 company we announced is focusing on CPO and at 400G. So they are stretching the roadmap. They're stretching the performance requirements. They're stretching the temperature requirements like Aref is saying. Actually, we are doing some special, I think we said that in our press release, we are doing some kind of custom tweaking of the material to meet kind of their unique requirements. So hopefully, we are positioned to get both the existing markets, if you want, of even some 200 gig, because I think we can bring significant cost and power and size reduction there and linearity for modules like LPO, but also address the 400G market. So it's a two-pronged approach we have. Got it. Here's another. AI is driving requirements on speed and power that creates problems, but also is pushing innovation. Are you seeing any more engagement from potential customers or, in general, more of a willingness to explore alternative ways to solve these problems with maybe your products? Clearly, the intensity has increased significantly in 2025. I would say forget polymers. Intensity in solving that problem existed before. For us, as soon as we announced that we had reached that level of reliability where people felt comfortable that they could use our products, it completely changed, of course, the intensity of the relationship between those customers and Lightwave Logic, the ecosystem and Lightwave Logic. That is one piece. The other piece that I really want always to highlight is there was really a turning point in the industry when last year at GTC, Jensen Huang kind of highlighted and really brought to the public attention the significant investment that NVIDIA was doing in silicon photonics and for CPO application in particular. That was really like a shockwave through the industry. And then pretty much every semiconductor company, including the one that were maybe a little bit behind, started to put a huge investment in trying to catch up and have their technology ready to be part of that silicon photonics ecosystem. And that completely changed the dynamics inside the semiconductor industry as well as in the photonics industry. And then the whole innovation engine is incredible. I mean, we are not, as I said, we are not the only solution that people are pursuing. People are pursuing every single opportunity they have to try to build such a solution. What the advantage we have are the advantages that Aref mentioned at the beginning. I think we can provide it at a much lower power with a roadmap to go to much higher speed, smaller size, and full integration into silicon. That is really the point I keep hammering. Perfect, and I have one more for you. For the capital allocation, you mentioned on the slide right there, with more cash raised, how does the investment strategy look like with the cash on hand? Is the bulk of the R&D investment already done, and then that shifts the investments to elsewhere. Kind of take us through what you're looking, how you're looking to utilize that cash. Yeah, thanks. That's a good question. So I think I mentioned earlier that we are in kind of a burn rate of approximately $20 million. We'll publish our results later, but just to kind of give you kind of a rough estimate of what we spend in 2025, we are on track to probably spend in the range of $25 million-$28 million this year. So we are increasing our investment in a few critical areas. One is turning our material production line to be ready for volume production in 2027 and 2028. So that's kind of an investment we have to make. It's a combination of some CapEx, but also operators and infrastructure on the manufacturing side. So that's kind of a big effort for the companies this year. Of course, we maintain the same level of investment into the material development, thinking about new generation, thinking about new markets. But it's really shifting a little bit from pure material development to now production infrastructure on the polymer side. On what we call the back end of line, the process side, that's also an area where we are making also a lot of investment because as we are engaging more and more foundries and more and more customers, yeah, we need to provide better support from an application engineering technical support. But we also need to make sure that as we bring new foundries as part of the ecosystem, we typically have to make fairly significant investment with them to make sure that their tools, their processes are working. And then finally, that magical process of polymer deposition and protection encapsulation is something that we continue to tweak and optimize to make it faster, cheaper, better, higher volume, lower cycle time. And also these technologies continue to evolve. The wafer size keeps growing from 200 millimeters to 300 millimeters. So we have to make sure that our technology kind of keeps up with that. So you can see we have still a lot of technical and process development and equipment development activities we do. But yeah, all exciting, actually. Perfect. That is all the questions we have on our side, but I want to thank Yves and Aref again from Lightwave Logic, and thank you all for tuning in. I hope you all have a great weekend. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you.