All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. If everyone has their coffee and a pastry in hand, I believe we're ready to begin. On behalf of Luna and its board of directors, I'd like to welcome you to Luna's first Investor Day. Luna first IPO'd in 2006, so this event is nearly 20 years in the making. My name is Allison Woody, and I'm Senior Director of Administration with Luna. If you've ever participated in any of our quarterly earnings calls, I'm that first voice you hear on the call. If you've ever reached out to anyone on our management team, there's a good chance I was your first point of contact. I've been with the company for over 10 years and have served in a variety of roles.
I work closely with our executive team and our board of directors to basically try to keep this train on its tracks and moving forward. It's exciting to work for this growing technology company, and I believe that after today's presentations, you'll understand why. Now, before I turn it over to Luna's President and CEO, Scott Graeff, I just have a few housekeeping items to review. Promise I won't read this word for word, but I must remind you that any statements made today may be forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties and are subject to changes at any time. Actual results may differ materially as a result of a variety of factors.
Many of our discussions today are based on non-GAAP measures and more complete information, including reconciliations to any GAAP financials can be found in the company's SEC filings, which can be found on our website and the SEC website. Here's a look at our agenda for today. Following a company overview and strategic discussion from Scott, you'll learn more about the company's opportunities and approach to growth from Brian Soller, our Chief Technology Officer. You'll hear from our Head of Human Resources, Head of Operations, and Head of Global Sales before a financial overview from Chief Financial Officer, Gene Nestro. We'll wrap up the day with some Q&A with the entire team.
Additionally, for those of you who have joined us in person, we have some product stations set up in the back, and we invite you to stop by and learn more about these applications at the close of events today. Please don't leave before grabbing a lunch. With that, I'll turn it over to Luna's President and CEO, Scott Graeff.
Thank you, Allison, I think she's being a little modest with the amount of work that she does. She is the first person that you end up talking with and many times the second and third person you end up talking to. She does a great job, we're really lucky to have her. Like she said, I am Scott Graeff, President and CEO. I've been with the company a little over 20 years excited that we're here on our first ever Investor Day. 17 years in the making, like Allison said, we're excited. We have our board of directors with us as well.
We have our Chairman, Richard Roedel, Chairman of the Board, Rich, Chairman of our Compensation Committee, Gary Spiegel, Chairman of our Audit Committee, Barry Phelps, Chairperson of our Nominating & Governance Committee, Mary Beth Vitale, as well as Pam Coe and Lee Anderson. We appreciate that. We also have an extended management team here sitting at this table that will certainly be available for questions when we move forward. We have our speakers, and then we have our team right here to be around after this meeting. We look at giving you everything you could possibly want. You know, the theme that you have here, and you see it in this slide, why Luna? Why now? As I thought about how to open this up, it really gets down to why Luna? Why now, right?
Why should you be excited? Why am I excited about Luna? Why have I been here for 20-plus years? I think it really is the disruptive technology that we have. Using fiber optic technology to do things that no one else can do. When we really kind of got back and said, "We're going to be a pure play fiber optic company," and getting rid of things or divesting things that weren't fiber optic related and really going out and doing things that were. Using those proceeds from the sales to acquire more. The disruptive technology. You hear me say, "Enabling the future with fiber." Today, we're going to give you an insider's view of what enabling the future with fiber means. What does it mean? What do we talk about in a boardroom? In the strategy room? When we talk about that, what does it really mean?
What we do for customers, how we do it, and how we do it differently, and how they can't live without us. Why now? Well, why are we here now? Why would we be here now? Why a first investor day today? I think it's important on what we're doing and why it is important going forward. You know, we rang the bell yesterday, and I said, "It seems like we've spent 30-plus years in the first inning of this game, and here it is. We're ready. We're ready." You know, I think of where we're going with this technology, and I think an example, the example I came up with, we've all seen the movie The Graduate, right? You know, Mr.
McGuire takes Ben out by the pool, he has his arm around him, he goes, "You know, one word, plastics." You know, Ben's all confused, like, "What does that mean?" You know, he's like, "Well, that's the future. Plastics is the future," right? I think he gets it. I think if they made that movie today, that one word is fiber, right? One word, fiber. That's what we're here to say, we really believe in that. You know, I mean, think about all the things that we can analogize to where we believe we are. Think of that old rotary phone that was in your mom's kitchen. 4-foot cord, right? You're on the phone, right? Talking to the girlfriend, boyfriend. Mom's around the corner trying to listen. You know, now we don't got a rotary phone in our kitchen.
The phone's in our back pocket, we pull it out. Placing a phone call is probably about the fourth or fifth thing we wanna do with it, right? We get it out, we text, email, take a picture, surf the net, then, "Oh, yeah, by the way, I'll use it for a phone." Right? That's where we're going. The takeaway, you know, this slide, I was careful in presenting, you know, putting this slide together and really thinking about it. This is the slide, you know, you leave here, you got the slides under your arm, the wind blows, they all blow away. This is the one I want you to hold on to. Hold on to this slide 'cause it's the five things we want you to take away, right?
Number one, that we just completed a 5-year plan. 5-year plan that we put together and executed on, right? To be a pure-play fiber optic company. We sat there in 2017 and said, "What we wanna be is in 2022, 5-year plan, what we wanna be in 2022 is a pure-play fiber optic company over $100 million in revenue." Easier said than done. We were sitting on, like, $25 million of revenue. How are we gonna do that, right? We had a whole bunch of things, from bone glue to you name it. We were all over the board, but we said systematically what we're going to do to advance this technology. That's number one. Number two, that we provide mission-critical information. Information that our customers need, or they can't do their job. Think about that.
A pipeline, where we're putting fiber on a pipeline. We're giving them information where there's gonna be a problem on that pipeline, right? That's what we're providing, mission-critical information. That's number two. Number three, is it scalable? You should all ask, "Can we scale this thing?" Everyone should ask that. We ask it. We ask it all the time. Can we scale this thing? You probably hear a whole bunch of presentations with a whole bunch of hockey sticks. Can they scale that on top of can they do the hockey stick, right? Do we have the scalability? I think what we'll show you today in this team, it's gonna come up here, this team that you'll talk to afterwards when you ask questions, that we have the scalability to make this happen. That's number three. Number four, macro trends.
I mean, anyone think that we'll just go back to 3G? Enabling the future with fiber by doing it and providing an enabler for that need for speed, right? Where are we, 5G? We can go back to 3G. It takes two and a half hours to watch a two hour movie. It buffers for 30 minutes. So what? No. Come on. No one's doing that. We're gonna continue to drive forward in that need for speed. We play in that market. Light weighting. Everyone wants to build the Golden Gate Bridge and have it around for 150 years. They just wanna build it lighter and cheaper with less material. They don't wanna eliminate steel. They just wanna use less of it. They don't wanna eliminate concrete. They wanna use less of it, and they wanna introduce composites and aluminum.
How do you find out what's enough? How much is enough? That's what our technology does, right? The Tappan Zee Bridge. I was told it's not called that anymore. We're all over that. We are all over the Tappan Zee Bridge, giving real-time feedback of what's going on in that bridge from a strain and stress perspective, right? That's number four. Number five, at the center of all this, is One Luna. It's a philosophy, right? I first heard it, you know, it was one of those, you know, kind of, okay, One Luna. It's so much more than when we do an acquisition, everyone's gonna get the same PTO. Everyone's gonna have the same vacation. Everyone's gonna, you know, You're gonna have the same email address.
It's that, but it's so much more. Every one of my team members that comes up here will touch on what does One Luna mean. There's no better example of this One Luna than when you hear Jackie Kline talk about his operation slides, how we took silos and made it across the board. It'll become crystal clear when you hear Jackie talk about operations and the others as well. That's the one that really the light bulb went off on me. How do we create One Luna? Why is that so important? Snapshot, it literally seems like a lifetime ago, but 2022, you know, $112 million in revenue, $12 million of EBITDA. Five-year CAGR. Gene will talk about it in his slides. Five-year CAGR, 40, 43%, right?
Obviously, 1,000, you know, thousands of customers, over 700 patents, right? About 360, 370 employees right now. A lot of global locations. How have we transformed ourselves? I think it's important to look at where were you, where are you now, and more importantly, where are we going. Everyone here wants to know, where are we going? Why should I be excited about where you're going? These guys hear me all the time say, "I ripped the rear view mirror off." We're not managing this thing through a rear view mirror. It's all go forward. What do we do go forward? It's important to know where you were, right? Where were we? Small geographic footprint. Nearly no international footprint. It's where we were. Where are you?
Now you can see the presence that we have in Europe with what we have. We've executed on our strategy, right? I put up here big company mentality, big company governance. What does that mean? You know, we just punch above our weight. I didn't make that up. Someone else said that. A couple people have said that. You say, "Wow, I expected..." You know, they get there, and they look at who's on the board, and they go, "Oh, I expected a company this size, you know, $100 million, bunch of buddies of the CEO." Trust me, they're not my buddies. Great folks, you know, it's so much more than that. Read their bios. See what it is. How many companies at this size obviously have Audit, right, and they have Comp, and they have Nom and Gov?
How many have a risk committee? We've had a risk committee for about, I think it's two years now, identifying all the risks associated. The governance side, it just punches above its weight, and then where are we going, right? Where are we going? If drive shareholder value isn't number one on the list than it should be. I mean, you guys hear a lot of these things. If they're not saying drive shareholder value, then they've got a problem. That is always number one on our list. How are we gonna do it? You've heard me say, reoccurring revenue. Reoccurring revenue in many ways, right? SaaS, monitoring, blanket orders. We've announced some of these things. We've talked about these bigger orders, we just wanna repeat them. We wanna continue to do more of those.
You've heard me say we've announced the big names. You've heard me say Lockheed Martin on the F-35. How many other planes? Ask Brian. He's gonna talk about it. What's next? How many other planes are coming behind that, right? Being spec'd into the F-35. You know, Northrop Grumman, we've talked about that. Intuitive Surgical, the laser that goes into their robot that they got FDA approved. Those are blanket orders that we get. Talking about working with our partner Meggitt on the Airbus A320 that we were selected on. Some of it's timing, right? What do we have? You know, you've heard me talk about it. Several of these things that are inside the 20-yard line. I'm not sure if it's the first quarter or the fourth quarter when it does.
It takes time to get these orders in, but it certainly is a lot of big orders. We see that that's a big part of going forward. Solution selling, check the box. We did that in five years ago. We sell equipment, but we wanna be more. We wanna sell, and you'll hear Salvan talk about this when he joined us. Gosh, we sell a lot of one-offs. If I'm gonna grow 20%, I've gotta go sell a hell of a lot more boxes. What if I can sell a customer five or 10 or a dozen? What if I can get blanket orders where I know going into a year I have 10%, 15%, 20% of my revenue in blanket orders? Larry loves that stuff when he has to get it out the door. Stage it out.
Purchasing loves that. Okay. Vision, mission, values, right? When it was brought up to me five years ago, six years ago, when we went through this, it was, okay, we're gonna get in. It's, you know, it's the, it's the, you know, rah, you know, apple pie, motherhood, the whole nine yards. It's so much more than that. To come up with a clear vision of what do we do? You hear me say it all the time, it's why, and why you hear us say it all the time, enabling the future with fiber. You just have to come up with something that everyone rallies around. They have to know what is the vision, what are we doing? Then they come up with a mission. And you have to come up with something that you can say.
It can't be three paragraphs. What's your mission, right? Enhance the safety, security, and connectivity of people by leveraging our expertise in our unique fiber optic technology. You get into values, right? You go, "Oh, well, okay, values." We spend the day in there, in the meeting, and there's 20 of us in there, and we got Post-its everywhere, right? We got Post-its everywhere. I said, "Guys, here's the deal. All of them are great words of what we wanna say our values are, right? Let's pick five, but let's pick five that we're gonna follow religiously, and these are our five, and we're gonna roll them out, and every employee's gonna follow that, right? Let's not say integrity if we plan on lying and cheating, right?" We immediately eliminated that one. No. No. No.
Integrity, enthusiasm. If I'm not enthusiastic, what the hell am I doing here? If I don't believe in this, I know a lot more than you about what's going on inside the company, so if I'm not enthusiastic, I mean, you shouldn't be. You know? Accountability. If we're not gonna hold ourselves accountable, what does it mean? I couldn't come to this meeting without having a banner 20/60/20 for Tyler Hojo. He was holding me to it. Hell, he made me a T-shirt with my face on it, 20/60/20. Book it. You know, I was like, you know, I should have worn it and broke it open. I think accountability, when are we gonna hold ourselves out there and say, "That's what we're gonna do," and you're gonna hear that.
What we're saying from an accountability perspective is we're gonna double our revenues. We're gonna double our revenues in four to five years. We all know what the math means on that. That's 15%-20% growth, right? After five years, we are gonna hold ourselves. We will be 20/60/20. 20% organic growth, 60% gross margin, and 20% pull-through to EBITDA. That's where we're committed to be at five years and going forward. Doubling revenue in four to five years. Gene will talk a little bit more about it. One Luna, it's a philosophy. Like I said, you're gonna hear it from everyone. Every one of my team members is gonna come up here and talk about what One Luna means to them. How have we brought all this together?
It's not by me sitting in Roanoke, maybe even in Blacksburg. If I'm not traveling, I need to be out and about. If I'm not traveling, I'm in Blacksburg. Most of the time, I am traveling out, talking to people, seeing it back on the bench, what can we do? Really bringing everyone together, making sure they feel part of this. That what will drive the performance, the scalability, everything. What do we do, right? We provide something. Someone's gotta have a problem for us to come in and be, "Here's what we provide." What do we do? Why do customers care? The global aging and safety critical infrastructure, bridges, tunnels, dams. You've heard us talk about it. We go out and do some releases.
We try to give some insight as to what we do. Why are we unique in what we do in going out and being critical? Remember I said mission-critical information to our customers. That's very critical. The need for new materials, right? Light weighting. Everything's getting lighter. Cars, automobiles, right? The automobiles that are out there, you know, they want. They're smart cars. We have all these smart cars out there. They tell you how close you are to the car in front of you, whether you're in your lane or not in your lane. When it comes down to the structure itself, it's a dumb structure. You don't know anything about it 'cause you've changed the material. Fiber will tell you what that is. Here's how we kind of manage the business. You've heard me say two market verticals, sensing, comms test.
Comms test, you could think of it as the old telco. It's just not telco anymore. Data co is what it is, right? It's switched from. We've Copper's long gone, and then they've gone to electrical, and they wanna get the electric off the network, right? We wanna put fiber on the network. Why? 'Cause light's faster than electrons. Just is. It wasn't that long ago, it seems not that long ago, 15, 20 years ago, you know, we were out with our products, and you'd hear the CFO at the company we're trying to sell to say, "You know, what we do is fast enough." Those are words you never hear today. It's never fast enough, right? It's about getting the, you know, the optics on the network and us testing it. That's where our products get into.
Brian will talk a little bit about that. Sensing, this is where we use the fiber as the sensor itself. Everyone thinks as the fiber as something that transmits data. Well, it certainly does that, but we use that fiber as the sensor itself. Why? Thinner than a human hair, nearly weightless, and most importantly, non-conductive, so we can put it anywhere, and it doesn't disrupt the system. That's very critical to our customers and Brian, again, will talk about where we're putting it. When you talk about being out on bridges, tunnels, dams, this is where we are with the fiber. Why Luna? Why now? I hope I'm drifting you to why Luna, why now. Why Luna?
You know, I said about the one page I don't want you to lose, so hang on to that one, hang on to the five takeaway slide, but if it's running down, you know, chase after this one. This is the second one, so if it's blowing down the sidewalk, chase this one down. Our investment thesis. Novel technology. The technology that we have, the proprietary measurements that we can do that no one else can do. No one else can do some of these things that we do with fiber. We've been working in it forever. No one can do that. Why can't they get into our space? It ties into the second piece right there.
All the patents that we have, over 700 patents protecting our portfolio to do what no one else can do, and they can't get in and do it. Large customers. We've talked about these large customers. We continue to add these large customers. They just even things out. When we go out and get spec'd in, like I said, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Airbus, right? Intuitive Surgical. You know, those are the things, and we have more coming, but these big, large deals that we get spec'd into, right? You know, leverage. I think you'll see here today with the scalability and what we've done in making some changes. We've spent some money. We've spent some money to make sure that we have that structure in place.
That's what happens when you go from $20 million, $30 million to $130 million, and you're gonna go to $250 million. You have to spend money to make sure the foundation can handle what you're about to put on it. We have done that. Challenge us. The macro trends. I've talked about the macro trends, right? It just is there. It, you know, the need for speed is just not going away. No one's saying, "Let's just go back to the heavy car. Get 10 miles per gallon, make it out of all steel. Let's just go that direction." No one. It's all moving in these. We feel like we're perfectly positioned. Feel like we have a head start. We've been working with it for a long time. Big head start, right? Attractive capital.
This plan that we did, this five-year plan, it was critically important to do that all on the balance sheet. I felt it was establishing credibility. Establishing credibility with the investment community, our employees, everyone. Can we do what we say we're gonna do? Can we execute on a five-year plan? You know, think of it as, it's like the lighthouse that's out on the horizon, and every day, every week, every month, every year, you're guiding to have that light get brighter. You just keep going towards it. Some days it doesn't move as. Some days it feels like you're moving sideways. You just hope it never turns around. You're guiding towards the lighthouse. That's what we did. We used it as our, you know, kind of guiding star. It was our North Star.
When we sat down and did this, I can guarantee you no one on my staff said, "But what if we have a pandemic? What if we can't, you know, what if we have to work from home?" We didn't know it, but we powered through it. We did all this. You know, six acquisitions, three divestitures, growing that CAGR that I talked about, growing when... Gene will talk about it. All with a pandemic. We just kinda stayed on course. We knew what we needed to do, and we needed to do it with our balance sheet. There's no reason. When we bought API in 2015 for $16 million in stock, two years later, sold half of it for $34 in cash. I don't know whether that's smart or lucky. Don't care.
We, I would say smart because we knew what we were doing going into it. We felt that that was the time to go off to the races, really to say we are a pure play fiber optic company. I've been around for a long time. We went to a lot of meetings, a lot of buy-side meetings, and they go, they start off, and they go, "I didn't know who to bring to the meeting." Well, that's not good, right? I don't know who to bring to the meeting. Now I don't think anyone questions on who to bring to the meeting. I know what you guys do, and we're gonna continue to invest in the company. Why now? We just completed a five-year plan. I said it on my earnings call.
Let's come to the meeting, and let me lay it out. You're gonna see our drive towards this recurring revenue. Brian will talk about it. We'll all talk about it in really, you know, kind of from a SaaS perspective, from a monitoring perspective, servicing, blanket orders. You're gonna see us move and have a larger percentage of our revenue over the next several years come from that reoccurring revenue. Not to mention the market's ready. Market's ready. They're now asking for it. You know, the big when you have technology, a lot of times it's technology push, and you just hope that someday you get to market pull. It's kind of the holy grail a little bit when people start asking you for it. Now we're asking for iPhones. I didn't know any better.
I just stood there and, you know, talked to my girlfriend in the kitchen, you know, and mom's listening. I didn't know any better, but now I know better, and I think the market is perfectly ready. You know, where are we chasing? You know, we've all heard folks go out there and, you know, "What's your market?" Defense, $6 trillion. All I need is a sliver, a point, you know, a 0.001%, and I'm good to go. We've all been blown that smoke, right? We said, "Okay, guys, yeah, we're in defense. What is our target market within defense, within aerospace, within automotive? Give me a TAM that I can stand up and stand behind." $175 billion. Great. Now, what's our SAM? What's our serviceable market?
What's the market we really can zero in on? Well, that's $3.5 billion. There was a guy that used to be with us, and he was constantly telling me, "Scott, that's not big enough. We need to bolster that number. Let me go back and do some research and add to that number." I don't need you to add to that number. If my target, what's in the center of that, of that target, if you will, in the center bullseye, is what I guided, $125 million-$130 million, I don't know. I think $3.5 billion's okay. I think I should be able to find $125 million-$130 million of revenue in a $3.5 billion serviceable market. That's where we are. The roadmap, right?
How are we gonna get there? You know, we look at R&D. You know, we feel that that's a real competitive advantage of some of the other folks playing, specifically in the sensing space. Small private companies, access to capital. If you're a $20 million company, $30 million, we've been there, $30 million company, you have this constant conundrum. Should I be profitable? Should I not? We can be profitable. Anyone can be profitable, right? What are you doing? You know, you're $20 million, you're profitable. What you guarantee you're gonna have a hard time getting to is $25 million-$30 million. You're not putting enough back in the business. You're not putting enough into engineers, sales folks, marketing. If you're not doing that, it's not gonna grow at the rate you're growing.
When you're at our level, in a public company, we have access to that, and we will grow, and we should be profitable, and we are. That's called strengthening the core, what we talk about internally. Really strengthening the core of what we do. Then we say, "Strengthen the core and then invest to grow." Invest to grow. That's the example of that that I can give for you guys is Terahertz. You've heard us talk about the Terahertz technology that we had, that we moved from our Ann Arbor location down to Atlanta to make it more efficient, to move from making one per week to making four per week, that we have done. That's an investment that we made in order to grow. Another example is we make a laser. We have a laser in RIO.
Sumesh runs that out in Santa Clara, and you can talk with him after we make the RIO laser. We also have another laser that we outsource. We're in the process of bringing that in-house to vertically integrate that laser. That laser goes into, Brian will correct me, probably eight of our 10 products, nine of our 10 products. I mean, almost every one of our products has that laser. You can imagine, we're not bringing it in-house because we think that's great. We're bringing it in-house to reduce cost and that's why, you know, we'll be able to. Why do we stand behind the margins that we're saying? We believe there's several of those things. Really investing to grow and expand to win. That gets down to this monitoring that we talked about, the recurring revenue.
Really expanding and going all in on the recurring revenue. That's critically important in being in touch with the customer, where you don't just sell them a system or a product, you go out and you stay in touch with them. You know, the 3-5 year plan, clearly the One Luna starts off at the bottom. That is a critical element. Like I said, though, my team will talk a lot about that. Growing this, doubling the revenue. You know, I've said 125-135 years, doubling revenue. I don't know if it's a good thing when I see John writing, doubling revenue, $250 million-$260 million, right? How are you gonna do it? Increase your margins, maintain our margins, sticking to the 60%, and I think a disciplined M&A.
I think you've seen us stick to that discipline, make sure that we are keeping eyes down range. If you stand behind the 20% organic growth, if we really believe internally that we can do 20%, we don't need to be in a hurry to do anything. There's no rush to go out and fall in love with something, you know? If I'm in a four-bedroom, two and a half bath house, and it's me and my spouse and two kids, I'm okay. I love the five or six bedroom, but I don't need it right now. We'll look at things that make sense, but I guarantee you anything we do will be within what we're talking about here. Our strategy will not change. Why do we exist? What is our purpose? Utilize our unique position to enable the future of fiber.
One of these things, what does it mean? It means a lot to these new engineers that we're hiring. All the new generation, when they join a company, wanna know, "How do I make a difference? How do I join someone who cares? What do I do?" I mean, they wanna be part of something. They wanna be part of a movement. You know, people love to join us. We're the preferred employer. When we get these people in, they love it. It's like when we've done M&A. We're the preferred acquirer. People love me, I'm sure, but they love everything about us. They, you know, so that's really, really important to us. It's important to this new generation. You know, some of us older folks are like, "Eh, apple pie." It's not anymore.
Getting these engineers, getting the best and the brightest to come to Atlanta, to come to Blacksburg, to come to Chino, it's important. It's important to them. I'm gonna have the team come up here. You know, you probably have met or heard from Gene, myself, and Brian on calls or out at conferences, things like that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring up and have you hear from our head of operations, from our head of human resources, from our head of sales. I've challenged them. Why Luna? You tell me. You tell them. Tell you guys. Why Luna? It can't be me. They all kind of came back with the answer of, 'cause Scott, but no. They've changed, you know, they... Let them tell their personal story. Ask everyone here afterwards in the Q&A, right?
Ask them: "Why did you choose Luna? Why do you stay at Luna? Why do you believe in Luna? Why are you maxing out the employee stock purchase program?" It's a good question. Let them answer themselves. You know, throughout this, we have kind of a common theme, you'll see everyone kind of end on a quote, right? Something that you say internally. Don't make it up for this presentation. Try to come up with something. We all were involved in everyone's quotes. What have I heard the crazy man say all the time in the staff meetings? It's hire the best and the brightest and get out of their way and let them do what they do. Just let them do what they do, right? That's what we're doing.
You know, I have said it all the time, and I say it to Ev, I say it when we're out there interviewing folks, "Let's just get the best and the brightest." Let's get people that knows what it feels like to break the tape. They know what it feels like to finish first. They know what it, on the highest podium. They know what it feels like to be first prize, to be the winner. I'm not HP from 30 years ago. I can't bring great talent in and train them for three months. I don't have that model, not at my size. We go out, and we hire the best and the brightest, and we get out of their way and let them do what they do. That's what I do.
Speaking of the best and brightest, I will now call up Brian Soller, our Chief Technology Officer, to take it from here.
All right.
Thank you, Brian.
Thanks, Scott. Okay, great. Thank you, Scott. Thanks everybody for coming today. It's fantastic to be here with you to tell our story. First time we've done this. Scott and I have been with the company for a long time. I came to Luna over 20 years ago. What attracted me to Luna was the fascinating technology that we had, and the potential that I saw was just huge. You'll see through the presentation today, we have this theme that runs through. Scott's hit on it quite a bit already. Why Luna and why now? That's a big part of the why Luna story for me. I joined as a developer and worked on the first several of our products. We have those still in the portfolio today, and they're in the back.
I recommend that after we wrap, you take some time to go have a look at those and interact with our team. When I think back to those days, it was, I said the word potential that drew me into Luna. It was really literally all potential. The business unit within Luna that was focused on fiber optics and measurement was pre-revenue. We had a huge hill to climb to build a meaningful business. I'm very proud and happy to say that I've been a part of that team that's built the structure, the team, the strategy, the portfolio, to turn that into a meaningful, global, growing technology business that is singularly focused on enabling the future with fiber. That's, that's the why Luna for me. Why now? I hope the presentation speaks for itself.
Scott already hit on this a little bit. The market for our technology has really shifted, and we've gotten out of early adopters, and we've gotten into the early majority. When you hear the names we use, we use names like Lockheed Martin, Intuitive Surgical, Meggitt, Airbus, et cetera. These are not early adopters, that's really changed over the course of the last even 12 months. I think you see that in the news flow that we put out. We've really gotten this into the mainstream, and we're starting to build some real tailwinds. I'm gonna start with our approach to growth, how we look at growth, how we drive the business, the lens through which we look at everything we do from a strategic perspective. This is very simple: expand, diversify, and innovate. Straightforward. Perhaps overly straightforward.
We do use this internally as a touchstone as we develop our plans and we think about how we grow, and we've used it over the years going from a pre-revenue company to where we've gotten today, and we're gonna use it in the next three to five years to double again the size of the company. Pretty straightforward. Expand. Find new customers, right? That's easy. That's the easiest of easy. Really what that means is form beachheads within customers and expand within the value chain, right? A lot of the examples that we talk about follow that pattern. We get into R&D, and then we move to higher volume applications in other areas of the value chain, production, for instance. That's really important. Diversify. Take products that we've already developed and move them into adjacencies.
Find adjacent applications for products we already have. A great example of that would be the 6200 analyzer that we have in the back here today that we worked with Lockheed Martin. On the expansion side of the equation, we went from selling a few hundred thousand a year to nearly $10 million a year by finding a new application within that one customer. On the diversify side of the equation, we're taking that exact same product today into data centers. We're testing latency within data centers. It's the only product on the market that can do what needs to be done for that application. We're diversifying. How do you expand and diversify? You have to innovate.
We have a team of people that are constantly looking at where and how we invest in our products, our people, our tools, our solutions to get from where we are today to where we wanna go from a growth perspective. That's how we look at growth, and we use that internally as a touchstone for our thought process. Scott already hit on this, I'll be brief, but we do talk about our business in terms of sensing and communications tests. If you follow the story, you know that. If you're new to the story, you will hear us talk about these two market verticals. They're not markets or industries per se.
These are really better describe how our customers are clustered, and that informs our go-to-market strategy, how we build our teams, and how we go to market to these very different end uses. On the sensing side, we're measuring or monitoring a material or a structure using fiber optics or Terahertz waves. On the comms test side, we make test equipment for the people that build the backbone or the plumbing of the internet, if you will. The main takeaway from this that I wanna leave you with is everything we do is built on a platform. Whether it's in sensing or comms test, we have built a platform of precision measurement optical technology that is the best in the world, and we are the best in the world at what we do. We generate light, we control light, and we measure light.
We don't do things that are fundamentally different in these different areas. It's all built on the same scalable platform. Little bit more detail so we can kind of understand more about the things we're talking about as we go through the presentation. On the top we have our sensing vertical in orange, and on the bottom we have communications test in blue. What is in sensing? Well, A, this is where we use fiber as a sensor. Fiber was developed as a tool for communications, and it was developed, and it's used, it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's used to send data from point A to point B because it can do it at a very high bandwidth, and it can go very long distances. We don't do that necessarily.
We enable that in our communications test, but in sensing we use the same fiber, the exact same fiber that's used for communications, we use to build physical sensors. I'll talk more about that in a minute. Also, within our sensing category, we have our Terahertz products. These are a little bit different. They're built on our proprietary optical technology, but we use it to create Terahertz waves. Terahertz waves are used to measure through or sense through opaque materials. Those are the two things, A and B, that comprise our sensing vertical within comms test. Test equipment, as I mentioned, for developers within communications, defense, et cetera. We also are vertically integrated, and Scott hit on this as well, in all of the key components that we use to build our systems in A, B, and C.
D is where we have a model. We sell those as OEM modules, lasers, components to customers in a variety of applications from military, medical, quantum computing, et cetera. Those are the basics. This is the same story, just using a picture. This is what our products look like and how we categorize them, how we talk about them. You can see in sensing, we have products that range from our ODiSI to our Hyperion. We have those here today. Our distributed acoustic temperature systems and our Terahertz. In blue, the test and measurement. You can see our analyzers there. Underlying all of this, both in sensing and in comms test, are the lasers and modules we use and that we're vertically integrated in to build this instrumentation. That's a very unique position to be in as a company.
It creates a competitive advantage for us. It creates efficiencies for us. It lowers our cost. We categorize those as comms test, and as I said, some of our biggest customers are for our lasers and modules. We announced a $14 million deal with Intuitive Surgical late last year, and that would come from that category. I'm gonna talk through now our opportunities and our approach to growing in these two areas separately. Start with sensing, and I'll start with an analogy. In blue, you see what is a cartoon really depiction of the traditional approach to sense. What is sensing to begin with? Well, you're using a sensor to measure something physical in the world. A foil strain gauge, thermocouple, accelerometer.
You all have an accelerometer in, on the table or in your pocket, in your phone. They're typically wired to a data acquisition unit, with an electrical cable. This approach is economical, and it's fine if the number of sensing points or the number of sensors, if you will, is relatively small. In the tens, maybe 20, 50, in that area. What it doesn't do is it doesn't scale well when you need many, many more sensors, one. Two, when you need to develop sensing techniques over things that are very large, like a border or even a bridge. it's fine.
There's a lot of this in the world, great companies that make this and use this approach, we use a different approach, that's what we're here to talk about today, where we use optical fiber as the sensor itself. Right away from the picture, you can see we can take one optical fiber that is essentially weightless, it's about the you know, thickness of a human hair, and we can multiplex literally thousands and thousands of sensing points in one optical fiber. We can deploy those broadly over very long ranges, up to 100 km per one fiber link to really change the game. There's not really an apples-to-apples transition in the market from, "Oh, we're gonna use conventional technology. Now we're gonna use fiber technology." That is happening. Fiber is starting to replace. You talk about why now?
Same thing happened to communications over the last 50 years. Fiber is replacing the incumbent technologies, but it really also opens up a world of applications that standard techniques just really can't get to. We use this, again, cartoon form, but we use the picture of the human body with the nerve system. This is what you can't do with traditional technology or incumbent electrical technology. You think of the human body and the nerve network in the brain. You stub your big toe, you know you stubbed your big toe, right? Because your big toe hurts. This is what fiber technology enables for materials and structures. You can build the nerve network of a material or a structure, and you can now really enable the age of ubiquitous smart materials.
When looking at the customer groups, we have people that use our systems for measurement, and we have people that use our systems for monitoring. Really the main point here is that these are two very different things. If you're an aerospace engineer designing a new part or a new element of an aircraft and you're using composite material, you need to measure how the composite material is gonna work and how long it's gonna last, and that's very serious business. That's an inside measurement technology or approach that uses our equipment. You can embed fiber in materials and structures. That's another thing you can't do with the standard electrical approach. Those are measurement applications. Terahertz applications are measurement applications. In monitoring, that business is a little bit different, and again, this informs our go-to-market strategy.
Monitoring is where you're actually 24/7 in the field monitoring the health, usage, and security of an asset. That's a really totally different approach. Again, when we talk about strategy and growth, we go after those two things a little bit differently. When you start to look at the use cases then for our customers and how we've built this business to where it is today, I put together this map because I think it talks to and maybe clarifies why we have the products we have and what they do. If you are an automotive or an aircraft manufacturer, your needs for our technology are gonna be much different if you're an asset owner at the bridge or if you're wanting to monitor the health and usage of a long pipeline. It's just gonna be very different.
Along the bottom we have range. That range can go from 1 meter to 100 kilometers. Along the vertical side, we have the number of sensing points in that range. Again, if you're doing a part for an automobile, which we do a lot of with all of the automotive manufacturers, they design a new part, they 3D print the part, they embed our fiber in the part, and then they run it on the track to test it before it goes to production. We have systems that enable that, where we have 1,000 points per meter. You don't need that if you were looking at a pipeline or a long border. In that case, you have 100 kilometers, and you might have one point every meter or so, or 10 meters.
I want to make it clear here, Luna is the only company that has modalities that cross all of these boxes. There's no other company that can do this from short to long. That's a competitive advantage. We're a company of a certain size and scale. That's a huge competitive advantage. If you're doing a billion-dollar installation of a energy cable, for instance, we talked about in a press release recently, we're partnering with Dominion Energy to monitor the cabling that comes off of a new wind farm. If you're putting a billion-dollar asset in the ground, you're gonna wanna work with a company that's achieved a certain level of scale, and we've done that. That's important. There's also a lot of crossover on that map, and that's another big competitive advantage. We can take multiple products where others can't.
We can service the customer with our DAS system, our DTS system, our ODiSI, and our Hyperion, and nobody else can do that. Let's look a little bit at how we segment the markets, where we're growing, why we're growing. Calling back to one of my first comments, a huge world of opportunity for this technology. Really, once you start thinking about it can really seem to be limitless. I'm here to tell you that's a good thing, but it can also create some complexity in building a business and managing a product portfolio. We try to break down in sensing into these three categories: infrastructure, energy, and industrial. I'll use infrastructure as an example. These tend to be long linear assets, bridges, tunnels, dams, roads, borders, pipelines.
They all have the same basic set of requirements. We don't do custom products for each one of these end uses. We have commonality of need here. We do one product that may be slightly tuned, based on what the customer need is. For the most part, we can build off of similar platforms and grow out into these different applications. Same thing for energy, same thing for industrial. I won't read the growth drivers, and there are many more than this, but I'll hit on just a few. The global demand for energy in the next 10 years is expected to grow 50% over the next 20 years. A lot of that being green energy, which is where we're getting a really strong foothold.
light weighting and green initiatives, smart engineering, so to speak, the use of new materials and, completely turned automotive and aerospace kind of on its head. New airplanes are now being built of almost entirely composite materials, and you need new ways to measure those materials to make sure that they're gonna work properly. The global demand for smarter infrastructure, you know, this is relatively new, I would say. We live in a world where for the majority of our lives, buildings and bridges just didn't fall down. We've gotten to a point now where we have the majority of our infrastructure over 50 years old, and that's globally. Things age, and they need, they need to be measured and monitored for safety reasons. That's, that's been a strong driver as well.
A lot of really good secular tailwinds in this space producing the growth that we've seen. Taking a look at some of the numbers with a little more detail, again, I'm not gonna read through all of these. I think the takeaway here is when you look at our SAM, our served market, we have plenty of room to grow into that served market, plenty of opportunity to double the business, right? When you break it down in terms of the individual elements in each one of these areas, you see either really strong total, robust total market sizes and/or really strong growth in a lot of them. We align our activities to make sure we're tapping in to where we're seeing the most growth. You hear us talk about an infrastructure. We talk about bridges. We have six systems on the Mario Cuomo Bridge.
Some of you maybe came over that this morning or travel on that frequently. We are on that bridge, hundreds of sensors on that bridge monitoring that 24 by 7. You know, within energy, we've talked recently a lot about power cable monitoring, where we're partnering with large companies to help monitor the power cable that, you know, is for instance, taking energy or electricity off of a wind farm. We're monitoring the temperature. We can monitor the depth of burial to make sure it's buried, but not too far. If it's buried too deeply, it'll get hot and you'll take down a cable. Each one of those is a $10 million fix. It's really critical to have a system that's watching 24 by 7.
In our industrial segment, you hear us talk, I think, a lot about our partnership and growth within automotive EV manufacturing. We talked about that expansion strategy. We started in R&D, working with R&D engineers to help them figure out how to make a better battery. Once we did that grew into deployment on all the production lines within our biggest customer. That's happened only over the last year. Produced a lot of growth and will continue to do so. What we don't talk that much about, and what you might not have as much insight on, are the hundreds and hundreds of opportunities in each one of these areas that are building behind those major wins. That's really what drives the growth.
Our ability and closeness with customers in each one of these categories and our insight into what they're doing today and where they're going to go. That's why we're so excited about this business. I think it's disingenuous maybe to try to summarize a detailed strategy in one slide. This is literally a 100-page document that we've developed internally. Rather than do that, I thought I'd just hit on a few of the main points within sensing. You know, I mentioned the hundreds of opportunities we're working on. We have a lot of insight into what our customers need. A big part of the strategy is developing the tools and features those customers need. You can go from selling maybe one or two to selling tens to selling hundreds per year.
In the scope of the plan we're talking about today, that's a very big part of it, and that goes for product innovation and people innovation. You know, making sure we have the right people. We just hired a business development executive for mining applications, and he started about six months ago. We saw the opportunity. We could really grow in mining, but we didn't have the domain expertise internally, right? That's part of the plan as well, making sure we're having the domain experts we need. You know, developing partnerships. We have at least a half dozen partnerships that are in development now that you'll hear about as we get to the point where we can talk about them, that will really help us accelerate our growth.
Of course, Scott mentioned this already, but focusing on those opportunities where we can have a trailing tail of revenue. We do a installation that produces revenue when we do the installation, but then every year produces a recurring service revenue associated with it. Those are the big parts of the plan. Switching now to the co-communications test vertical. Little bit different here. I kind of already hit on this. We make test equipment, but we also sell the modules that we use to make the test equipment. It really kind of focuses on communications market on the left side, and it focuses on a wide variety of applications on the right. Anybody that needs photonic capability or enabling photonic capability that comes from Luna, and that goes from quantum computing to LiDAR systems to medical robotics.
The competition dynamic here is a little bit different. In sensing, the competition tends to be, we're competing against folks that aren't aware of the technology, so we have to educate and evangelize the market, or we're competing against incumbent technologies, designers and engineers that are struggling with, "Well, how do I take this and make it go from where it's today to where I need it to be?" A lot of it is education. On this side of the equation, we have very clear, large, highly capable companies we compete with, Keysight, VIAVI, EXFO. Where does Luna come in? Why do we win here? The map on the screen describes what's happening with photonic connectivity over the last, I guess, 40 years. I mentioned why people use fiber optics to begin with.
It can go a very long distance at very high speed, right? What's happened is that has moved down to smaller and smaller and smaller things. Fiber optics is no longer really applicable when you get down to the wafer level or silicon photonics, so to speak. Optical connectivity is being built into things that are very small. Again, it's being built there because it can continually produce at higher and higher speeds, even for those things that are small. This is where Luna plays.
We have a very unique technology we've developed that is enabling when you look at that box for things like data centers, fiber links on aircraft, chip-to-chip communications. We work with every company that's doing silicon photonics, so photonics in silicon, every single one. I keep looking for one that we haven't worked with, and I can't find one. We are enabling measurement technology, and we are becoming almost a industry standard, if you will. This breaks down similarly to sensing. We focus on communications. This is fairly standard, kind of straightforward defense. That's where fiber optic links are being used for military aircraft, for instance. I mentioned for our OEM portfolio, medical becoming a large portion of the revenues there, OCT imaging, guided robotics, and emerging applications in quantum technology.
The drivers behind this space, again, there are many, silicon photonics, I already mentioned. 5G deployments, we talk about that because we don't have a 5G tester, that drives so much traffic into the core network, the core network is comprised of devices that we enable via measurement, a lot of really strong drivers here as well. As I said, for our OEM products, that goes for between space, medical applications, LiDAR, et cetera. A lot of strong drivers in this market. Same picture here. On the optical device test side, we have. This is where we work with Lumentum and II-VI of the world, sell them test equipment, they can make and produce their components. We also sell to hyperscalers and tech companies. They all buy our equipment.
That's Facebook, Apple, Google because they're all developing their own optical technology, and they use our equipment to do so. Fiber network test, our biggest customer in that segment is Northrop Grumman, and that evolved through our partnership with Lockheed Martin. We are our 6200 analyzer is in the back. I recommend you go take a look at it. We are sole-sourced into the support infrastructure for that aircraft, and that's just one aircraft. We're working on about six more, just military aircraft. We'll have our next announcement to make on that this year, our second aircraft there. As I said to begin with, in that diversify plan, we are diversifying into data center test. We're looking mostly at latency measurements for financial data centers.
There's a requirement in a financial data center that all the links be the same length to about an inch. Nobody else has equipment that can do that other than Luna. That's a nice application. Then we've hit on a lot of the photonic systems applications that we have between medical imaging, defense, high-energy lasers. Sensing companies buy our equipment, and LiDAR is a emerging growth area for us. From a strategic perspective here, you know, really continuing to establish Luna as the standard of test so that when, you know, kind of the Kleenex analogy, "Hey, grab me a Kleenex." What we're hearing when we're in the field in labs, "Hey, let somebody get the Luna." As product people, where we think, "Well, it's not a Luna.
It's a blah, blah." To our customers, they're like, "No, no, get the Luna." Really continuing to double down to make sure that we're established as the standard of test. Grow out of R&D. I said we work with every silicon photonic manufacturer or developer or research department. We do. We need to ride that wave, expand within that market so that we're in production test. We're not there today, but we will be. You know, make sure that we do all the blocking and tackling needed on those OEM accounts to have them continue to grow. Our biggest customer three years ago, $0. Two years ago, $7 million. Last year, $14 million. That's a really important part of our growth story as well.
What I'll leave you with today here as I wrap up, again, calling back to the why Luna, why now question. We have healthy markets, large, with a lot of growth, secular growth in those markets. We're not fighting an uphill battle. We have very highly differentiated technology with a strong moat, not just our IP. We have a lot of IP in form of patents and know-how, but that vertical integration and the key elements to replicate that would be extremely expensive and take a very long time. That's a key. Then this growing base of large customers, and we've talked about, and Scott's talked about Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, Intel, the big hyperscalers.
These are key megat customers and partners really, are gonna be a large part of how we double the size of the company over the next 4-5 years. With that, we have multiple shots on goal. We're, you know, we don't have all of our eggs in one basket, we can achieve the plan even if things don't necessarily go the way we expect them to go in one or two of the other areas. I think from here on, what you'll learn is that we are making the investments in being able to scale our people, right? Our production, our sales teams to hit the growth. We're all wrapping up with a little, pithy quote, if you will.
The way I looked at this was, so we're a technology There are a lot of technology companies, right? Technology is the heart of what we do, the fuel that propels. Really, it's our application of that expand, diversify, and innovate that I think has allowed us to get here and will allow us to get to where we're gonna go.
Great. Thank you, Brian. I think many of you have met Brian out at investor conferences when I'm out and he's out with me. I think all of you who have met him, you know.
Jim Kennedy at Marathon Capital know that we wouldn't be here without Brian Soller. You know, interesting story, you know, I last year, Marathon Capital had their little conference and I had a conflict. I had to be on the West Coast, I said, "Jim, is it okay if I send Brian?" He's like, "Yeah, no, that'd be fine." I send Brian, I was like, you know, "Hey, Jim, how did it go?" He's like, "Hey, what's Brian's availability next year?" I was like, "So..." critical piece in us going forward. I mean, Brian is really an important part of that. It really is the team itself too.
When you look at the human capital side of this, you know, it's never easy to manage money, but it's easy to overlook what it takes to run a business, and it really is the human capital side of this thing. We don't hire anyone that's in an unemployment line. We just don't. We have to go out and find people that we convince them to leave a job and come join Luna. You gotta come to Blacksburg, or you gotta come to Atlanta, or you gotta come to Chino, right? It's not L.A., it's Chino, right? You've gotta come there and be productive, and I think that's the critical part of it. You know, I'll bring up our next guest, you know, Eva Hartmann is our head of HR.
Buying into that culture, she's been here for I think just about seven months. I've known her for 30 years, but she's been here for seven months, so she's a real Why Luna, and I think she evaluated that recently. This human capital, very, very important on retention and attracting smart folks. With that, Eva.
Thank you, Scott. All right. Thank you for the introduction, Scott, good morning, everyone. I'm Eva Hartmann, Senior Vice President of Human Resources. I'm thrilled to be speaking with you this morning as part of Luna's Investor Day. Why Luna? Why now? As Scott said, I have been here just seven months today. I have very recently evaluated Luna for myself, I chose to join Luna's vision, mission, and growth story. Specifically, why did I choose Luna, you might ask. Well, what I saw was an aligned leadership team focused on growth and aware of what it took to get to the next level as One Luna.
I saw a company in a very interesting time in its history, really an inflection point in its history, making the right decisions, choices around talent, tools, products, processes to move forward. I saw a high-growth technology company with products that enable so many industries and clients and trends that I'd been reading about that I literally felt like I was joining the future. Finally, for myself, I saw an opportunity to support and impact the growth of this wonderful company and to create a human capital infrastructure that would enable Luna to add 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 employees. That really excited me. Moving ahead, why do I continue to be excited about Luna? Why do I continue to be excited about Luna? All right.
The slides are gonna work.
Exactly. All right. What we look like today, Luna is a global technology company. It looks very different than it did just a few years ago, as you've heard. We are moving to the next phase of growth and scale and we're being very intentional about what we do, our processes, our technologies, our people, to get us there. We're very future-minded, looking towards the future and being intentional in those efforts. Our One Luna operating philosophy and culture is critical to our growth, whether it is organic growth or acquisitive growth. As we bring employees in, we align them with our vision for the future. We have in place, and we continue to build on our solid HR infrastructure, human resources infrastructure of programs, processes, tools, in order to be able to help the business grow and scale.
Finally, we're bringing in top global talent to build and sustain innovation and top-line growth. Luna has a human capital goal, and that goal is to deliver a competitive advantage through our people that will sustain and drive Luna's profitable growth over the next 3-5 years. You may ask, "How will we achieve that goal?" It is through a very intentional and well-defined human capital strategy. This human capital strategy consists of four-five different components, different elements, and I'll go through each of those in the upcoming slides so you get a different sense of each and how each of them will enable Luna's growth and profitability. The first one, first and foremost, is that we are championing Luna's One Luna operating philosophy and culture. What does that mean?
That means that employees across the globe, across the globe feel included, engaged in our vision, and they share a common employee experience. We're continuing to build on and celebrate our employer value proposition. That means why do people work for Luna? We're getting into the investigation. We're researching, we're understanding what drives people to stay at Luna for 20 years and what brings new employees in. Very exciting for us. We're recognizing employee excellence, achievement, and innovation. One example that I'm thrilled to share with you today, and I'm looking at our VP of Engineering, and I'm looking at Brian Soller as well, is that we are going to be launching a Luna Engineering Fellows program to celebrate technical excellence and contribution to our industry. Very exciting. Stay tuned for more. We're also championing the Luna values.
We're weaving the Luna values into things like performance management and leadership development so that everyone is aligned with our vision and our culture. We're empowering employees with our focus on wellness, diversity, and ESG. A recent example from about a month ago was our global celebration of Earth Day. Very exciting to see all of our offices around the world be engaged in an Earth Day celebration. Finally, our employee stock purchase program is a wonderful opportunity for all of our employees to become shareholders of Luna. As we roll that out globally with our acquired companies, we're very excited the reaction that we're going to get from employees, who are willing and very excited about being shareholders in our growth.
Our second element of our human capital strategy is leading succession planning and leadership development globally, and that's really about building a strong bench to take Luna forward. We're driving succession planning processes globally, starting at the leadership team levels and then moving out to the different offices and looking at some of our critical skill sets, our core skill sets that we need to take Luna forward. With those successor candidates that we identify, we're creating individual development plans so that we can actively plan and facilitate their growth within the company. We're building One Luna alignment to drive growth. We recently had a very fun leadership team summit, and we're continuing to take those learnings, and those, and cascade the vision, mission, and the values that we discussed to our employees across the company.
Our third-- the third element of our strategy, which is related to building a bench, is really acquiring the right talent to grow Luna. Who are we getting on the bus, so to speak? The way we're attracting top talent globally to Luna is we have a global approach to recruiting, and we also have a global approach to workforce planning. We're building a candidate pool of both internal and external dream team candidates that can be successor candidates to the roles that we identify during succession planning. We're leveraging relationships with local universities and professors so that we can attract the top talent right out of schools.
We continue to champion ongoing engagement and recruitment and retention efforts through the use of getting a little bit smarter about our data that we collect in 90-day reviews or exit interviews, and getting a little more proactive in terms of looking at doing stay interviews with some of our key talent to understand better their level of engagement and also continue to hone and refine our employer value proposition. We've talked a lot today about organic growth and acquisitive growth, and the fourth element of our strategy is to manage the HR integration of our acquisitions in order to maximize the potential of people and expertise gained through acquisition, and also key is to realize the accretive value from our acquisitions.
We and the HR team have an HR M&A playbook that we use to help guide us in terms of evaluating and leading the integration of people, process, technology, and talent. We're providing merger and acquisition support as an HR team, both in the due diligence processes and in the integration processes, and looking at things such as leadership and culture, benefits and compensation, talent management, performance management, policies and procedures to facilitate the process and the integration of the new entity into Luna. Finally, all of this is done in the context of creating HR operational excellence, so essentially creating a foundation or an infrastructure through which human resources can help the business grow and scale and profitable growth and sustain shareholder and increase shareholder value. What does this look like?
Examples are we're leveraging our global HRIS, Human Resources Information Systems functionality, in order to allow employees to innovate and collaborate and engage together. We're driving employee development. We're creating compensation structures and career ladders so that employees have a sense of not only where they are today but where they might aspire to go within the next several years at Luna. We're also launching a performance management process, One Luna global performance management process that evaluates not only what employees do, their goals, but also how they do it, the Luna values, continuing to hone in and drive the Luna values across the organization. Of course, in human resources, managing compliance and risk is always a part of the equation, and we continue to incorporate best practices from across the globe, from across our entities around policies and procedures as part of the One Luna reality.
You might ask, what does success look like? How do we know that we're successful in these efforts? The success metrics that we have our eyes on are around engagement and retention, making sure that we're keeping our great employees and we're keeping attrition low. Employer value proposition, survey feedback, collecting data from our employees in many different channels, as I mentioned, 90-day interviews, exit interviews when those happen, and little pulse interviews and questions along the way to our employees to further hone and refine our value proposition. Opportunities for growth and development, whether it is the career ladders that I talked about or leadership training or critical skills training, we're continuing to look at what are the opportunities to grow and build our employees so that we, as Luna, continue to grow and build as well.
Employee recognition programs, as mentioned, whether it's in engineering or sales, or just a program that provides a regular pat on the back to our employees for good work. This is something that we feel drives our culture of engagement and productivity, and high-performance culture. Finally, not to be underestimated or understated, is everything that we do is in the context of increasing shareholder value for all of us as shareholders. All right. I will end my session, but my section with my quote, I love my job. I hope you all can tell. Again, been here seven months and really hit the ground running and really enjoying what I do.
I love my job, and that is to realize potential, both at the individual level and at the company level, so that Luna can continue to grow and scale, and hit high performance and increase shareholder value. My goal as an HR leader, and I think about HR in the context of it really being a function that provides a competitive advantage, enables a competitive advantage for an organization through its people. I believe my team and I are doing just that. Thank you. Thank you.
Great. You know, I think you really cannot underestimate what the human capital side really means to this whole equation. At the end of the day, we can have great technology. We do. If you don't have the people to do this, it really won't work. That's why I do encourage you after this, talk to Eva, talk to this team that we brought with us here, you'll continue to hear from these folks that have broken the tape. Clearly, they have finished first and been winners in their career, and we're fortunate to bring them on. We'll bring someone next up here. Jack Koenig is someone that has a wealth of knowledge. Went into retirement. Retired. You know, TE Connectivity, big company. Has been in operations for 40 years. Retired. I'm done.
You'll find out his story, why were we able to pull him out of retirement to help run this, to help bring folks along. Larry Vicari is a better person since we brought on Larry, and the training and being able to leverage off of this wealth of knowledge. I'll bring Jack Koenig up here, who runs our operations, and have him talk about really, you know, look at One Luna. Jackie.
Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Brian and Eva. Welcome, everybody. Again, as Scott said, my name is Jackie Kline. I'm the Senior VP of Operations. I did retire in 2019 after 38 years with AMP and TE Connectivity. 11 of those years was overseas. I was responsible for the operations in the transportation division overseas. We had 10 plants, five countries, and we were doing about $2.5 billion of turnover every year. It was always something exciting going on during that time. When I retired in 2019, it was right before the pandemic.
Got home, my kids were just graduating from college, and we were really looking forward to doing different things, but you couldn't go anywhere or do anything, which didn't turn out to be my first year of retirement, what I thought it was going to be. My wife was very happy 'cause every week, a couple times, I'd go to the grocery store, and I'd push her grocery cart. After about a year at that, I couldn't stand that cart. Couldn't stand looking at that cart. I got a phone call from Gene Nestro. He's our CFO, and I worked with Gene about 15 years ago. We had a great experience, Gene and I, in turning around a global operation division.
He said, "Jack, you gotta come down here." "Oh, Gene, I'm retired now." "No, you gotta come down here." He started telling me a little about the technology and the story about the company. I thought, "Okay, I'm interested." I drove down from Pennsylvania, I went down, I met the likes of Larry and David. The excitement of these guys based on the product and the technology, you just heard Scott, you just heard Brian, how exciting they are to talk about their products and technology. Well, after listening to them, I said, "I'm into it." Next thing you know, the next week I was employed, but I did do one thing. I retired that grocery cart.
Here I am. A little bit, I shared a little bit about my background. Let's get started. The why Luna, why now that Scott challenged us, I'm gonna say why Luna now. I'm gonna save the why. Excuse me, why Luna. Then the why now I'm gonna do at the end. Why Luna? You just listened to Scott, you listened to Brian. How can you not? That's why I'm excited about the prospects, the company, the mega trends, and I'm a builder. I like to build things. It just seems like the right place for me to be now. There's one other thing, you know, when you have success or achievement, you have excitement with it. I was missing that. I wasn't ready to hang up my spurs and stuff.
Now I have this excitement again. I have all this stuff and this building coming again. I tell you what, I have purpose, and I'm alive, and I have a great group of people to work with. Anyhow, that's why Luna. I'll answer the why now later. Operational goals. You know, to me, they're simple. For Luna, scalability. You talked about all this growth. If we can't scale in the short term quickly and in the long term, we won't be able to hit those goals. That's a key operational goal. Standardization. We talked about all the different acquisitions they did. In order for everybody to go in the same direction, you gotta begin to standardize, and I'll talk on that a little bit later. The last one is near and dear to my heart, continuous improvement.
Coming out of the company I came out of, continuous improvement was something you budget for every year. It was in your budget, and if you didn't hit it, that's a beating you didn't wanna take. You had to every year come up with a different way to continuously improve your process, your people, your throughput, all those different things. I think Luna, even though it's not highly mechanized, there is still a lot of opportunity, especially with growth, a lot of opportunities to get continuous improvement. I'll touch on that again here in just a second. This slide is a little bit about where they were five years ago. Whole lot of different companies. You had HR was vertical, finance was vertical, engineering was vertical, operations kind of stayed within each one of the companies.
We're now moving and we're well underway of taking those companies and merging those five, six different groups into competencies. I'll talk about that. I think it's on the next slide. We wanna leverage those competencies for value. You know, when you acquire something, if you don't leverage it right away, you lose the opportunity to provide more value for the company, which is more value for the shareholders. You have to get on that right away. You cannot drag that out. We're at a point now, in our inflection point in operations, that we're at the point, "Okay, I'm ready. Bring that volume on. We can get it out the door." That's where it was five years ago and where we work today. How do we do that?
We have four key, I call operational tactics that we need to meet the strategic plan and the growth that they're expecting we're gonna get with that plan. One is scalability. I think that's self-explanatory. Continuous improvement has to be equally important. Quality and the One Luna, because I gotta get that standardization to the point where I can leverage value out of it. Everybody does their own purchasing in all the different places. I gotta put them all together in one place and leverage that with our vendors, things like that. Scott didn't say it in his beginning, but he likes to tell the story. When we first put it in materials into a competency, we found out we had 15 FedEx accounts, and now we have one, and we're leveraging FedEx to get better pricing.
Our purchases through our distributors and stuff, instead of each location working with local stuff, we're leveraging it for regional and global distributors. Just a few weeks ago, we got something to save half a million dollars. I mean, these are big things that you couldn't do if you didn't have standardized processes and procedures and competencies to leverage. I really love this graphic. There's two graphics in particular I really like in this slide. This is one of them. This is Luna in the past. You see all those different boxes? They were small companies, you know, anywhere from 10 to maybe $25 million, and they had their own cultures. They've been around a while.
They broke out, like I said earlier, they broke out the engineering, they broke out the finance and all that, but operations was run independently. This is what we did. In North America, this is fully finished. We'll have the European things rolled up by the end of this quarter. We've created five competencies. You have the purchasing competency, and they have their KPIs they must meet. You have the materials and logistics where we're leveraging. You have quality manufacturing and continuous improvement. There's a little note under manufacturing, first shift operation. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. There's where we're gonna get the scalability, but there's where we're really gonna drive the standardization to drive the value out of the operation arena. This last slide is, there's gonna be more M&A activities.
I don't know how many or how fast right now, but we ought to take those opportunities and roll them up into these competencies, the operating piece, immediately. The company that I worked for when we did M&A, from the moment you signed the paper, in 30 days, you had to have this done. They gave us 30 days. Trust me, I made every mistake you can imagine in doing it in 30 days. You can easily do it, I think, in three to six months. We can roll it up, roll it up, and leverage that value, and that's a part of operations we must be able to do quickly and do well. Continuous improvement. These are just some of the things that you see on the slides behind me, but you take the footprint optimization.
Scott touched on that briefly earlier when he talked about moving Ann Arbor down to Atlanta. When it was in Ann Arbor, we were producing one unit a week with 10 direct laborers. We're now down in Atlanta, and this quarter we'll produce three per week, and next quarter we will hit the four per week capacity. Here's the best part, 10 direct laborers. It's how we set up and platformed it and the changes thanks to people like David in here, our leader in engineering, the way they platformed it, the sub-assemblies, we were able to get the throughput up with no additional labor. That's the kind of stuff that lights me up, those kinds of things, and there's more of that coming.
We have opportunities for footprint optimization both in Europe and on the West Coast. 3D printing, that's just a simple one. When I was in Asia, we put 3D printing, 38 units we put in those 10 plants. They all, the payback was less than one year. Several of them was less than six months. You think, "Oh, where do you get that at?" One of the things that we build, there's a lot of test fixtures, quality fixtures, small little mechanical fixtures, and we go out to these machine shops, and they charge us an arm and a leg. We don't make them by the millions. If you have a 3D printer, I can make exactly what I need. I don't have to carry. For some people in here, they'll love this.
I don't have to carry a lot of inventory with those things. You know, that's one of the things. Bar coding is another one. We do a lot of manual stuff where things go from step to step to step. I want bar coding throughout. I know that we don't have to write anything down. It's gonna be quick. We get to the point when we do our inventories, you can trust what's in the data files and not have to do all the counting of those small pieces. There's so many things you can do with bar coding. What it does, it adds value to the point as you continue to grow, I don't need more labor. This isn't an industry where I came from, you put another machine or two in there, and you can leave three people go.
Here's, you've got to leverage the people you have, and throughput is the key. Quality. Luna has good quality products. As you grow and get bigger rapidly, statistically, I know some stuff's gonna go out the door. We call them escapes, and you don't want any of those escapes. One of the things that I saw when I came here, how do we tighten that up so we don't have the opportunity for those escapes? The three things we hear is ISO 2015. For those of you that might not know, there was a significant change in 2008 to 2015. In 2008, it was basically your quality in manufacturing.
In 2015, it's about the quality of your leadership and how they engage in order to get things done to what you say you're going to do. Very, very different, all the way up to the CEO. We went through some training, a round of that, another round of training. We have internal audits coming in June, external audits in October. Our expectation, we will hit that, and all of the North America operations will fall under 2015 ISO 9000. Looking forward to that. That's a big accomplishment for us. The other thing is installing quality rigors. In this presentation, you see maybe some technical terms. Quality rigors are necessary in development all the way through to make sure you don't get it out the door.
When David was working on his new product introduction, I got with him and said, "Hey, David, we need to install some of these rigors through the design process, the manufacturing process, how we look at all that." He said, "Great." Now we actually have that in there, and the engineers are now forced to look at those rigors, and we'll hold them accountable accordingly. The last one, which is near and dear to my heart, Scott teases me about this sometimes, but I think that any employee on a manufacturing floor that sees something that's not right should be empowered to stop it and shut it down. I'm a big believer in that. I come from an industry where your stamping die is going 2,000 a minute, and it's 15 to 50 microinches of gold.
In 20 minutes, you can throw a lot of garbage out. That's always in the back of my head. There are times that people will keep making something or see something, and they're afraid to bring it up. No, no, you're not afraid. I'm very proud for those people to bring it up and say, "Jackie, we think this is a problem. We need to look at it, shut it down." That's one of my key points when we talk about quality. The last one, I kinda touched on this a couple times, the One Luna. The One Luna is the standardization we talked about by moving all of those individual companies and cultures into five sustainable competencies within operation. Consolidating the footprint will improve your pull-through. Like we did, I'll give you a quick example.
You had Atlanta at one number, you took Ann Arbor down there. What if I told you in the same basically fixed cost, I'm gonna increase the revenue 3x to 4 x? That's exciting stuff. That's where we can get value that can go through the company and into the shareholders' hands. The other part, and I'm gonna leave on this one, this is one of my favorite ones. Leverage the expertise. When we started having all these groups work together, we had a couple locations that we had some trouble with, we had some issues with. Well, when they all got together, we found out that Chino could do some things to correct some stuff in Ann Arbor. We incorporated one of their modules. Never had an issue again. Now we have them doing another, a second one, and a third one.
We found out that within ourselves, we have expertise that we could move around and leverage. The engineers love to work on those kinds of things. That's again, exciting to me and a product of when you standardize and optimize. This is the slide that I think is my favorite next to the other one I alluded to earlier. This is where it tells you our four tactics, how well aligned are they to the strategic goals? You see scalability occurs across the top. That has to be key. You see One Luna, and that's the standardization that'll help us leverage value within the company continuously. Your continuous improvement hit head-on for your margins and your growth lines. Of course, quality comes across on every one. In M&A, it will eventually be quality standardization will be adopted in that.
This is a slide that I think lines up really good. I'm working this with my people all the time. Hey guys, this is how we're gonna help the company. This is how we're gonna engage the company. This has to be our focus. What does a successful operation look like? 60% or better gross margin. If you go to ship to schedule above 98% and returns less than 1%, they say if you hit those two, those are world-class figures. We're close on a couple of them, but we're gonna get there. Revenue matching booking. People always say, "Well, why do you say revenue matching bookings?" Revenues go up, okay, that's one thing, but revenue goes down, you better have your planning under control so you don't put a lot of cash on the shelf.
I said that for you fellows over there. Of course, safety. You wanna be able to come to work and be safe. We don't want no recordables at all in our factories. The continuous shareholder value creation, I use the word continuously because it's serious. You don't do that in one year. You gotta constantly keep doing that. I'm gonna tell you a quick little story. I'm gonna make it really fast. When I was in Japan, I spent seven years there. I was there, and we were... They had many process plants, like a molding plant, a stamping plant, a plating plant, and they were moving that down to one vertically integrated plant. The company hired a couple specialists from Toyota that were experts in their TPS, Toyota Production System.
In the first year we were there, he made everybody in the plant, this is about 500 people, put a little thing each day they come into work, you had to write here an improvement, something that you can improve. After the first month or two, it was kinda easy. It got a little harder to come up with things, and the people used to swap back and forth to give their idea to this one, this one. It got towards the end, and finally I said to him, I said, "Why are we doing this so long?
Why aren't we jumping in right away?" He says, "In order to take people that 20 and 30 years, and now make them change their philosophy in how to do things, they have to first learn to think about it every day they come in here." He goes, "Every day they come in here, they have to think about that continuous improvement. Now when we get this going, now's the time we start." I never forgot that. It was a painful thing, but he changed the culture in that plant, and it took him a year to do that. Anyhow, that was an important piece I thought I'd share with you. My phrase, you can do anything if you plan for it and execute it. Well, we have the plan. Scott talked about it, Brian talked about it, Evan talked about it.
I definitely believe we have a solid plan, and now it's our turn, and especially in operations, to execute on it. My last piece is, I said, "Why Luna? Why now?" We have a plan, we have a hell of a team, and we are ready and poised to execute on it. Thank you.
You know, I give him grief 'cause I think he's waited 40 years to go out into the factory floor and scream, "Shut it down!" That's the grief I give him. I think, you know, Jackie was good in teaching me. I, you know, didn't think about it, but the difference between a buyer and a purchasing agent. A buyer is what Luna had in its younger years. You give them a credit card and they go out and they buy the parts. You need them, you buy them, that's what they do. Purchasing agent, the way we've moved and Larry and Jackie, what they've done is have, we now have purchasing agents. Those are strategically thinking people that are buying things and getting just in time and picking things over time.
That's an important part. Our next speaker here, Salvan Farooqui. I hired Salvan about seven years ago, I believe, he was part of our five-year plan. Remember earlier I mentioned he came and said, you know, he loved the technology, came and he joined and he blew his funnel out the, you know, his quote out the first year. He came to me and said, "You know, Scott, we've gotta come up with a way to get this product out on the manufacturing lines. We've gotta be able to sell three, four of these to a customer, a half a dozen, a dozen, we will not be able to do this growth. We just can't do it.
I can't sell 100 units, the next year I have to sell 120 to different customers. Maybe I have some repeats. I have to be able to sell multiple." Really, he was critical in putting together this plan that we then executed on. At this time, you know, Salvan Farooqui, Head of Sales.
Hello everyone, good morning. Glad to be here. Thank you for joining us. As Scott mentioned, my name is Salvan Farooqui. I am the Head of Global Sales and Marketing. I'm here to talk about how sales and marketing is going to continuously drive growth for Luna Innovations. Before I go into that, I thought I'd take a few minutes and go over my personal experience of how I ended up here. After graduating from engineering school as an electrical and computer engineer, I had some ideas of and trying to understand how the customer buying system works. How can we sell the product? How does this all happen? I mean, you know, engineering schools train you for design engineering and be able to be innovative.
I thought it'd be great to just learn this craft and see, and professors do a very good job of selling you who you are. That's the biggest value add in the university, that the position you would, you know, that you could do. After graduating, I was fortunate enough to got hired by Hewlett-Packard. They hired the best out there and the brightest and train them, and you go out there after, you know, a couple of years of training program and get fielded. What the professors failed or decided not to tell me, that when you go into sales, you should be able to handle quota, target, and grow the company. That was the part that was just very exciting to me and was new to me.
I'm like: "Oh, okay, so I not only just sell, but I have to also grow." I said, "Okay, that's fine. If this does not all work out, we will go ahead and figure out to do something else." It has worked out. 30 years later, I'm still here, answerable to everybody. You know, what the numbers are and how things are going, and all that kind of good stuff. Two years into my job at Luna, things were okay, but they were not great. My heart was kind in it and not quite kind in it, but then something drastically changed. Scott brought a performance-based vision to drive sales, growth, revenue, and all of that, and that happened in 2017. I am a shareholder. I value my career and where I'm going.
One dollar a share hovering around there in 2017, that was not the right thing to do, and that was not the right thing for me to be part of this. He laid out the vision, the whole company laid out the vision, and the executive team was formed. We all got excited. We said, we are going to take this company. It was about 2017, we were around $20 million. I was committed. I had the vision and goal. I had come back. I had come to Luna from a huge giant ship. Now I'm in a canoe. I see all the seven, eight players. We're all gonna canoe together in this thing, paddle together.
Everybody better be paddling together, because if one person is not paddling it right, you know, this canoe is not gonna go anywhere. It's a great story. Luna grew, and we are honored and proud and took some risk and all of that. Here we are over, you know, a $100 million company five years later, we are ready to go ahead and keep moving forward into newly chartered territories. It comes with risk. It comes with excitement, and we have a plan in place. Like Scott said, like, you know, Brian and Jackie and we all are committed to delivering 15%-20% growth. 4-5 years, we want to double the size of the company.
The same way I had my eye on the ball for $100 million, now my eye is on the ball for a quarter of a billion dollar, and even, you know, bigger than that. We are gonna go through this process. I'm going to explain to how we are going to get there and what is in it for all of us. We talk about why Luna. We have come a long ways as we integrated those five or six M&As. Luna is a firm believer of world-class tools. We have Salesforce. We take pride in it.
We have integrated all the companies that we have acquired into one CRM system, so we can assess of what is going on in the organization, how the sales are coming along, how the funnels are building, how are we moving forward. This is a very critical part of Luna's getting sophisticated, getting mature, moving forward to get to the next level. Some philosopher once said that you are young at any time if you're planning for future, regardless of where are you in the process, you know? We are there. We believe all the, you know, foundations have been in place, will consistently align as we move forward. If and when a acquisition of some sort of acquisition takes place, we are ready to go ahead and incorporate and move forward.
As we have developed this recipe of success in the last five years, what is expected? As I mentioned, our expectations is that annually we're gonna grow 15%-20%, and we are going to provide total solution as One Luna. We are a powerful house, what we were and where we are at. You guys have heard of how we have come a long ways, and I have talked a little bit about it. Now when we look at our structure of the sales organization, and I would like to touch that a little bit and review that. Typical model in any test and measurement company is based on product sales. You have a goodies of equipment.
You take those products, you meet with R&D engineers, you talk to the customers, you drive those sales. It is very critical part because that's how you grow. When Brian and Scott were talking about Lockheed Martin, or they were talking about Intuitive Surgical, the biggest takeaway which came out of that product sales, where I personally managed Lockheed Martin for us to get into sustainment for F-35, is as a smaller company, being a size at that time, $70 million, for companies like Intuitive Surgical and Lockheed Martin to be able to trust not only in the technology, but to understand that this company is serious, they have the right product, they have fundamentals for finance, for growth. Everything is there to move forward.
F-35 is a 40, 50 year program. You know, we, most of us would not be here and retired and gone, they would still be buying our OBR 6200 moving forward. Larry does a great job of building it and David Blaker, who's our VP of Engineering, has done an outstanding job of making that all happen from engineering perspective. As we get into F-25 and other programs out of this, we are set up for that growth. With the acquisition of OptaSense and LIOS Sensing, that brought us a project-based business which would have servicing, software upgrades, more contracts, and longer-term relationships. That is a different skill set. Systems sales, I mean, I came from semiconductor industry with selling big testers. Those are strategic long-term.
You're dealing with $2, 3 million worth of, worth of projects. There are a lot of, you know, product management, engineering, everything is involved. You're working through it. We clearly established that we need two organizations and we would do cross-selling. If a university wants a DAS or wants a DTS system, sure, we'd be more than happy to sell it through product sales organization. But if they're doing a security big infrastructure protection, we needed an organization which could actually strategically drive the sale and make that happen and provide the necessary growth for us, which we definitely have in place.
This also gave us an opportunity where from product sales, if we have people who wants to grow their careers and go into project-based selling and more strategic sales part of it, that provides a growth path for them to grow. How do we get there? I can share a personal experience with you guys. A few years ago, my nephew came to me and he said, "Uncle, I have a huge desire. As I get into high school, I have a huge desire to go and be part of Ivy League school. I just really wanna do that." I said, "Well, that's great to have that plan. But these four years, now the clock is gonna start.
Without you being successful in these four years..." That's how I relate to why we are here today as an investors day. Why didn't we do it previously? We have demonstrated a solid plan, just like what my nephew did before he went to Harvard. That four years committed, driving, working hard, paying attention to each and every course. Be focused, long nights, work hard, and when you get there with calculated risks, with a lot of hard work, you'll continue to drive and take the next step. Luna is here, ready to go ahead and do that. Eva talked about the people aspect of it, and not everyone likes changes. We are consistently acquiring the company. There is a change. Some people are gonna stay, some people are gonna be part of that vision, some would do something else.
I just calm myself down when somebody, you know, leaves and I go, "Okay, this is an opportunity to look at it. Should we upgrade the position? Where do we go? Whom do we hire?" We consistently drive and look for people who can come in and help us move this vision along. We will continue to focus. Like as Scott said, we need to, we need to grow and for us to do that, we need to focus on our key accounts, whether it is Google, whether it is ISI or any of the accounts, Apple. We just go and provide the solutions that we have, which we do because our basket of products are much, much bigger than what it used to be.
Brian briefly touched upon business development. We talked about transportation. We hired a mining guy recently. As we identify these markets of where the key things, where we really need to grow, we would add those market development folks that can take us to the next level. How I see Luna is, and I think a lot of people have that kind of a vision, that you need to have an omnipresence. What that means is when you think of fiber, you should think of Luna, and Luna should be invited to the party. For us to be invited to that party, to be considered, we need to be more present, and we should have bigger value-added reps, you know, bigger distribution channel. We can't be there everywhere, so we are consistently adding.
A lot of our bigger sales in the pro project management of the side, we do use a VAR network where somebody's working with the in Saudi Arabia, working with the rail system or protecting the border in Jordan or whatever. They give out those contracts and then those VARs actually reach out to us and vice versa to provide the solution that is necessary to move forward. We have a good history of doing that. We have a plan to move forward, so we are committed to that, and we are going to get there, and we are driving to make that happen. With that comes another part of what success looks like. Again, I have a story to share.
When Scott calls me Friday morning and says, "How are you doing?" It is not about my mental or physical health at that time. I do know it is about, you know, you know. He talks about 20/60/20, about the T-shirt. Sometimes I feel like I should wear a T-shirt which should say, "Ask me how I'm doing." Everybody wants to know where the numbers are. How are the numbers looking? What the sales are looking? How far ahead are you from what Sumesh is gonna ship and what Larry is gonna ship and what Jackie's gonna do? Every time I talk to Jackie just tells me, "If you bring it in, I will go ahead and ship it out." I'm like, "Thank you, Jackie.
That's all, that's all I can ask for it. Anyway, in just reviewing this, we will just consistently have the right sales talent. We would enthusiastically drive our bottom line. We will deliver the numbers that we have committed to. We hold ourselves responsible, accountable to make all of this happen with help of all the good people and good talent that we have. Everybody has a, has a, you know, a quote. My job and my team's job is to drive the top line and provide the needed growth because, again, I'm a shareholder and I would like to give every shareholder their value for their money. Thank you for your time.
Let the record show I care about Salvan's health and well-being. On that Friday morning, I really care about the numbers, too. It's not just Friday morning, but I think it's every morning, so. Anyway, again, keeping with this theme, again, bringing the experience, Luna needed to bring some folks that have been there, done that. The been there, done that folks. We just needed it. We can bring the young folks. We just don't have the training that HP has. You know, the next person here came about four years ago. We just needed to make a change in the financial leadership.
Gene Nestro, again, as Jackie mentioned, comes out of that world, so they understood what it feels like to get to an organization that has it set up correctly, you know? We did that four years ago. I'll welcome Gene Nestro, our Chief Financial Officer. Last but not least, right?
Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Scott. Welcome, everybody, to our first Investor Day. I think we saved the best for last, too. It's really hard following all these great presentations. Why Luna for me? I spent the bulk of my 30-plus years in finance working for large, international, multibillion-dollar corporations in a wide variety of roles, from corporate accounting to M&A to operations. I wanted to take all that knowledge and apply it to a fast-growing company and help them achieve their goals. What first attracted me to Luna was the fiber optic sensing. The reason it attracted my attention is one of my prior roles was controller of a sensing business unit of one of these companies. We did not have fiber optic sensing. I needed to research what is fiber optic sensing.
As I was researching it, I immediately thought of hundreds of uses for this technology and realized how disruptive it could be to some of the current technologies that were in use. When I met Scott, Brian, and the board, and I saw their passion for the company, it really made for an easy decision. Now, two international acquisitions later, the sale of Luna Labs and Luna becoming a pure play fiber optic company, I know I made the right decision. When I first started in December of 2019, I sat down with Scott and we reviewed the current five-year plan. The plan we're just finishing now, by the way. That plan had us increasing to $100 million in revenue, becoming an international company and a pure play fiber company. Pretty aspirational at that time.
As Scott and I got to talking, we realized we needed to make sure we laid the foundation on people, systems, and providers that could guide us through this path. One of the first things we did in 2020 was implement an employee stock purchase plan so that all of our employees could become shareholders of Luna and share in our success. We laid out a strategy for IT where we were going to focus on modern, cloud-based, simple to operate, easily to scale systems. We headed right into that feet first and implemented NetSuite, going from four ERPs to one cloud-based system. We also accelerated our adoption of Salesforce, and we moved our HR, time reporting, and payroll to ADP in the cloud. That wasn't all we did in 2020.
We also started working on the OptaSense acquisition, which culminated in our acquiring OptaSense in December of 2020. By the way, we did all this while dealing with the impacts of a global pandemic. We no sooner acquired OptaSense, and were still in the process of carving it out from its parent and integrating it into Luna, when we also started working on the sale of Luna Labs and the acquisition of LIOS. Amazingly, both of those transactions completed within a week of each other in 2022. We spent the rest of 2022 carving out LIOS and integrating that, as well as carving Luna Labs out from Luna, providing transition services to that buyer until they could stand up their own systems. Pretty amazing what we did.
The reason I bring this up is to show you all the things that we did, and while we were doing this, with the global pandemic, we still produced strong financial results. I think that's a testament to our people, our company, and our leadership that proves that we can multitask on many topics and many projects while still producing results. While Luna was transforming from primarily a U.S.-based company that sold product into an international company that now has project-based accounting, finance needed to transform along with it. In that regard, we upgraded our talent on the corporate accounting side. We added resources for financial planning and analysis, Sarbanes-Oxley and operations finance, and we're continuing to build out our EMEA finance team. When we look at our acquisitions, we like to think of it as three phases: acquire, integrate, and operate.
We are in the operate phase right now, which we call One Luna. As you heard every of the other presenters talk about their organizations going into One Luna, finance is no different. We are diligently working on taking individual processes from our acquisitions and moving to a One Luna global process. It's critical for us to do this because we need to continue to improve our forecasting, working capital management, and treasury operations so that we can generate the cash that we need for our future growth. You heard me say we produced strong results. One of those areas is in revenue. As you can see, we've had a 43% CAGR over the past five years, more than doubling revenue. You've just heard presentations from Salvan and Brian on our markets and our sales plan to continue this trend.
What's really important on this slide is this team has doubled revenue in the past, and we can double it again. It's not just revenue for revenue's sake. We also need to focus on profitability. Proud to say our adjusted EBITDA has grown 75% over the last five years, from roughly $1 million to our forecasted amount of $14 million-$18 million this year. That was while we were continuing to make investments into the company. We will need to continue to make them to grow, but we always do so trying to match as closely as we can our expenses to our revenue, recognizing that sometimes the expense has to come first.
We use these strong results along with our cash generation and our balance sheet to fund the various acquisitions we talked about, Micron Optics, General Photonics, OptaSense, and then LIOS Sensing, as well as our organic growth, all while maintaining a clean equity structure. We have no preferred stock and no warrants. It's not just investments that we made for acquisitions. We also invested in our operational assets. We've added to our executive and leadership team, those of us that presented and some of us that are here in the audience with us. We've also added key people in engineering, sales, and operations to support our growth. We also worked on our footprint. We recently completed a large capacity increase in our Atlanta facility that culminated with us moving our Terahertz production from Ann Arbor into Atlanta.
We've increased our modules capability in our Chino facility. As we speak, we're working on increasing our laser capacity in Santa Clara. We've invested in our systems, as I mentioned. You've heard parts of our strategy for the next five years. Here it is. We're gonna double revenue in 4-5 years by growing 15%-20%. We're gonna maintain our margin at 60% and move our adjusted EBITDA to 20% of revenue. Those three things add up to increased shareholder value. I do wanna take just one moment to talk about our philosophy on operating expenses. Our plan every year when Scott and I sit down and review the budget is to make sure operating expenses grow at a lesser percentage than our revenue. If you do that consistently year-on-year, your adjusted operating income will increase.
I'd like to take this time now to reiterate and reaffirm our 2023 guidance as we mentioned on our last earnings call. That is full year revenue of $125 million-$130 million, full year adjusted EBITDA of $14 million-$18 million, and top line revenue for Q2 of $29 million-$31 million. While I'm excited about Luna's growth, I'm equally excited about our positive impact that Luna has on all our stakeholders and the world in general. Luna makes the world a better and safer place by monitoring the health of critical assets, bridges, mines, and dams, as well as facilitating green technologies by helping EV battery manufacturers manufacture better batteries and also assist in getting clean energy from where it's generated to where it's needed.
Thank you, Gene. Hopefully, you know, that was the last presenter here. Hopefully, we've done a good job of telling you why Luna, why now. I think everyone hit on the why Luna. If you don't get that, then I'd happy to catch up with you afterwards or catch up with our team. Why now? I think that's the most obvious why now, we go through this. I'll go back and really end with the first slide I started with, right? This is a slide I said, "Look, if there's one slide that you remember, try to hang on to this slide." Then I realized that I've said all that, and we actually didn't hand anything out. Anyway, in your computer, make sure you keep this one.
The five things, right? What we've done. We executed on a strategy. It was an aggressive strategy when we set this up. We executed on it. That's number one. You can't argue that we set out a strategy and executed on it, no doubt. $100 million in 2022, pure-play fiber optic company. I can tell you the divesting of Luna Labs was probably the most difficult deal that I've ever done in my career. Finding someone that could qualify for the SBIR type of loan or grants that they get from the government was very, very difficult. We ended up doing that deal last year with private equity. The mission-critical information, number two, right? Everything that we sell to our customers is mission-critical. They need our equipment.
They cannot do what they do without our equipment. We do unique things that no one else can do. No one else can do them. I mean, think of the names that we're spec'd into. I don't know any other $100 million companies that are spec'd into the F-35. Sole sourced. No one wants sole source. No one. We don't want sole source. I don't want Jackie to say, "There's only one laser that works in our system." We gotta have multiple sources that we can find these things. We know why. We just went through it with this pandemic. We've gotta have multiple sources. We are sole sourced in the F-35. No one else can do what we do. Mission-critical. Scalable, I think we've proven that. I think what we laid out here today shows you that we are ready.
What you heard Jackie lay out and how we brought all these silos together and have competencies now. Yeah, I was leaving the big fire for him with the 15 FedEx accounts, like, cause I couldn't believe it when I heard it, that we had 15 different FedEx accounts, 11 UPS. Who the hell does that? Someone who you know, and we came in, now we have one of each, right? Four, the macro trends. Happy to debate anyone who thinks we're going backwards, that they think, you know, that 5G is enough. Let's just stop. It's fast enough. Stop. We're not doing that. Come on. No one can argue that. Again, this One Luna philosophy. In the center of it all, One Luna philosophy. It's critical. It's critical.
That's why you heard everyone mention it, why we all come together and act as one company, so we can share the knowledge across companies, so we can be efficient, scalable. With that, we'll open it up for questions. What I'm gonna have is all the presenters here that presented today, I'm gonna have them come up here and sit on these really, really comfortable stools. And we're gonna open it up for questions. What we have is we have some folks with some microphones. They'll come around and bring the microphone to you. You can ask your question. If you're online, type it in. We have someone monitoring that on the computer, and they will read your question. With that, we'll open it up for questions. Alex? Hold on.
She's bringing you the microphone here.
Thanks. Alex Henderson, Needham. I was hoping you could address the structure of the company in terms of how much of its business is going to be generated from what I would describe as turns business, i.e., stuff that just comes in across the trans in any given year, and what the growth rate of that turns business might look like, major contracts that are already signed, and what the growth of those as they ramp, looks like over the next several years. You've talked about, using your football analogy, the red zone deals.
Mm-hmm.
You know, how many are there? How many do you need to close to get to the 15% growth, the 20% growth or more? What's beyond the red zone into that, you know, the next, 20, 30 yards.
Right
T hat would add to future pipeline?
Yeah. Well, I will... There's a lot and I'm not very smart, so I'll forget your questions. Just, you know, the way we look at, you know, the sensing and the comms test business, a third of our revenue comes from comms test, right? A third of our revenue, if you just used $150 million just for ease of math, $50 of that would come from comms test. Half of that $50 is equipment, and half of it is modules. You see that business on the comms test side. We see that growing around 15. That's closer to the 15%, 15%-17% on the comms test side. On the sensing side, the other 2/3 comes from that market vertical.
In our analogy, that would make up $100 million. Of that $100 million, half of it is solution-based, project-based, where we're out installing on a bridge, a tunnel, a dam, and half of it is selling equipment. $50 is selling equipment. That kind of breaks out those two market verticals. You've heard us talk about the reference of the big projects. We've said it publicly. We would like to be, in this 3-5 years, 20% of our revenue, we'd like to be at a point where 20% of our revenue comes from these blanket orders that we have out there. We talk about Lockheed Martin, which now is Northrop Grumman, on the F-35. Plenty of other planes. I don't think Brian rattled on the different planes, and I didn't catch that if he did.
The different planes that we have queued up, I'll let Brian talk a little bit about that. You know, when I talk to those folks and they talked about, it's really about 10 per month for the foreseeable future. I said, "Well, what's foreseeable future?" They said, "We don't talk about anything that's not 10 years." If you look at that product, and this is the 6200, 10 of those per year for the next 10 years. That's roughly in a ballpark, $7 million a year for the next 10 years. That's one. Intuitive Surgical. We know they placed the $14 million order on us. It's spec'd in to their ion laser or their ion system, right?
Right.
The flexible lumen that goes into a natural orifice, percutaneous biopsy or some kind of test. They're using our laser to guide that fiber. $14 million, 18 months. 18-21, somewhere in that range of this, the expansion. You can look at that and say, "Okay, well what is that? eight or nine a year." If you take eight, nine, and then we talk about when things get cooking with Meggitt, and we get onto the Airbus A320 that they've awarded. If we start working with them, we move forward on that. That's critical. Then I have said, when I say red zone, the analogy when I say things, these deals like Intuitive, like Lockheed Martin, and I say, "These deals are in the red zone," that is we've been selected.
My definition, if you will, maybe I should be clearer about it. My definition of red zone is we've gone through the process. There's no more a jump ball. These are things that are in. We've been selected. When can we get it across? That's why I said, I don't know if it's the, you know, the first quarter or fourth quarter. When will it get across? I'd love to give you a little bit more clarity on that. We talked about the EV battery manufacturing that we're working with, where we use the Terahertz system to measure uniquely, not just thickness, but density. That's the criticality of what we do and no one else can do. We do it in real time. We do it on the manufacturing line.
When they're making this material and they're rolling it out, that ultimately will be the jelly rolls that go inside the battery that end up being the core in these EVs is critical. That's one that maybe that's in the 10-yard line. You know, we'll see what comes out of that. That is. When we can announce it, we will announce it. Sometimes we can use their name, sometimes we can't. We will talk about those. We have three or four others in that red zone now, that how it takes time to get in there. Why does it take time? It takes time because they're asking us for things many times we can't do right now.
They take our specs, we're at the show, we do something, then they say, "Can you do this, or can you do it in this environment?" Today? No. David Blaker gets involved, we get everyone involved, they say, "I think we can get there." That's why it takes as long as it takes to get in there. You're talking about being spec'd in with world leaders in these things. How many then have crossed the 50-yard line? You know, there's probably a couple, you know, half a dozen, I'd say, that we're talking to, you know, that... That stays in, you know, Brian kind of manages that. At that corp dev, biz dev, he's kind of managing, you know, those blue sheet kind of potentials. I'll let Brian jump in.
I'm sure I missed something else you were asking, but covered some. I don't know what. Is there one that I missed or? Probably. Let Brian, why don't you, maybe you thought of it.
I think, yeah, I think the way we look at it plan for the future in terms of growth is about. There are a lot of moving parts, Alex, to your question. Roughly speaking, about half of the growth comes from that kind of secular turns business, and half of it comes from the addition of, you know, some of these larger new customers. That's rough math today over the last couple years. Going forward, you know, leaning more towards the base business growth, maybe that's 10%-15%. As we get bigger, a new customer comes on. If we're $200 million, a $10 million customer doesn't represent 10% of the business anymore. We lean a little bit more on the, so the overall secular growth, then we get that 20%, 20%+ is our goal.
That gets us from mid-teens to 20, bringing on those larger stair step type accounts.
Yeah, we do see the sensing business growing, you know, maybe 20%-25% over the next several years versus the communications test, which we think is more in the 15%-20%. Hi, Chuck.
Charles Murphy.
Yep.
Liberty Park. First, wanted to congratulate the team for the last five years, and I think, if you deliver what you think you can over the next five years, we'll all be very happy as shareholders. My question was about kind of the sales organization structure. Brian, you kinda laid out the different end markets and opportunities. Salvan, you talked about the organization being structured with, I think it was products-
Products
Systems.
Yeah.
How does that overlay to the different end markets? Are products mostly datacom and systems are mostly sensing or how should we think about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think we spend a lot of time looking and setting up the sales structure. He put a slide in there, but we look a lot at that. Brian, you wanna talk about it and then Salvan, you...
I, yeah.
You guys want.
There were a couple slides where, for each for sensing, there was sort of the measurement versus monitor. In Comms test, there was instruments versus OEM. The solution sales that Salvan talked about in his slide is, you can think of that's really pretty much just for the... Oh, am I not on? That's just for the monitoring business. That's the team that goes to the field that Salvan works with, looking for larger projects, the Dominions of the world, outside monitoring, 24 by 7, totally different sales cycle, different skill sets required, different domain knowledge required. They can sell the whole bag, though, right? It's not just one or two of the products.
The other team, which does more of the product sales, that team covers all of Comms test And that's the majority of the revenue, but also sells the sensing products, but on a more transactional level. into our.
Is it kind of like an inside versus outside sales?
No, they're all outside salespeople, but it has more to do with. We have an ODiSI product in the back. If that ODiSI is gonna go live on a bridge and monitor crack growth, which we're doing now more and more, especially in Europe, that's the field solutions team. But if that's gonna be sold to Ford for the development of a new automotive part, that's a totally different sales cycle, different customer buying pattern. The customer informs how we organize, and a different person would go sell into that R&D application at Ford or General Motors or Volkswagen, et cetera, et cetera. Does that answer the question? Salvan, do you have anything to add to that?
No, I think you covered it well. You're good.
Thank you. I'm good.
Tyler? Oh. All right. I wasn't looking up. Oh, Jim.
Thanks, Scott.
Jim.
Question for you on Airbus? Where does that opportunity stand at this point? What is the retrofit opportunity? What do you need to do there? What is the timing there? Separately, when do we reach a point where the composite manufacturers will start to embed your fiber in the end product?
Right. Well, I'll let Brian handle some of that. As it relates to Airbus, you know, we've met with them. The Paris Air Show is coming up next month or in July. Airbus is so focused on this 75 per month. They're at 55, and they just are just so narrowly focused on getting to 75. I think they see the window of opportunity with Boeing or in this space, and they're so focused on that. Like I said, they went through a formal RFP process, chose Meggitt along with our solution, so we've been selected. They said they're not gonna run another process. We are the solution.
It's just, I think executives at Airbus, and this is what they told us when we met with them, six months ago, was, "Unless it adds to me getting to 75 per month, you know, I just am tapping the brakes on some things." They, they realize the advantage of it. Our pitch now is why it will help them. We believe it will help to get to quantity 75. You know, continue to work with them. I just don't have a good timeline on it. I, you know, I continue to work, we continue to work with Meggitt, develop, get that product even more. They've added fire detection to that on top of you know, the heat detection and fire suppression now, making it even more challenging.
We're continuing to work on that, so we are ready to go with Airbus. I don't have a great timing on that. Brian, you wanna?
Yeah. I think unfortunately, we don't have a good handle from the Airbus execs through our work with Meggitt on timing. We did before COVID, and what happened between then and now is they've rearranged their roadmap. We work with them all the time, and they've very clearly told us that, "We're going to do this, but we're still trying to work in when it's gonna enter into service." It's still at least a couple years out. In terms of the primary versus secondary market, the model, I believe, the primary market, is very, very clear because it addresses production of the system, so you can kinda count the planes, and at 75 a month, you can figure that out.
The secondary market is modeled out to be about 1.5 x that at a higher margin.
What does it require to get into that secondary market?
I think it requires the market to accept the retrofit to get to... For instance, the part of the plane that we would go into allows longer range flight, right? You could take a plane that can really only do maybe a 6-hour jump. You could extend that to 10 or 12. I don't wanna be on a single-aisle plane for 10 or 12 hours, but that's what they're doing. The market has to accept that. That's the way Meggitt has modeled it out, so they have a lot of experience in that.
On the embedding, Jim, you know, we are working in the R&D shops of a lot of the automotive companies. An example, the best example I give is we embed the fiber into the part that connects the seat to the frame of the car. While that part is being made on a 3D printer, our fiber goes into it. You have that part that connects the seat to the frame. When you have that fender bender, you know, in the old days with a steel bumper, it dents it, you know, change it, don't change it, doesn't matter, fix it. Now with everything embedded, sometimes those fender benders don't show any marks or have anything, but our fiber will tell you, is there integrity issues going on with that part?
The next accident you have, is the seat gonna fly off the frame? I'll let any of these guys talk about where are we with future, you know, embedding the fiber. That's an example that I saw.
Correct me if I'm wrong down here, team, I think we have two models with fiber built into the composite. There's a UAV and a rotorcraft. Is that right? You'll see the rotorcraft example in the back here after our Q&A. We're doing it. The answer is we're already doing that. On the automotive side, you know, I wouldn't bake that in. When we envision doubling over this timeframe in the 3-5-year plan, that is not a requirement. It would be wonderful to do it, and it'd be great upside. We're having conversations.
It's not currently a requirement, but it's a desire of automotive manufacturers and the teams we're working with to figure out the economics of getting fiber built into every car for operation. You wouldn't be operating live with our system in the car necessarily, but the, you know, the repair depot and the service depot would have our system. You'd roll the car in, you plug it in, and you'd get a, you know, a go, no-go health check.
Was there a question? Yeah. Paul.
Yeah. Thank you. Paul Essi from William K. Woodruff & Company. A couple questions. One, in your corporate growth here, what key positions are you looking to fill that you need to fill both in sales and engineering? Secondly, what would you like to get in an acquisition? Where would you fill in a hole that you either reinforce it or fill in something that you don't have?
Yeah. you know, I think when and I think of from the acquisition perspective, I look at the sensing side of it. You know, we've certainly talked about all the smaller kind of companies that are out there that but might have something novel. They might have a form factor. I guess selfishly, I wanna be the only game in town. I mean, I someone mentioned up here, I think mentioned Kleenex or Q-Tip or whatever you wanna fill in the blank, you know, BlackBerry before they, you know, crashed and burned. It was theirs to lose, so maybe I shouldn't use BlackBerry, right?
Not a good example. We don't wanna be BlackBerry.
Plus, it's being recorded, so I'm gonna get, like, death threats from BlackBerry. No, but I wanna be the only game in town. I don't want the little annoyances when I'm bidding on a project. I want them to go, "Well, Luna's on these five dams." If I'm putting it on a dam, why would I not choose Luna? I've got five testimonials. They'll tell you what the ROI is. They'll tell you all the good stuff. Why would you choose someone smaller than me because you save a couple bucks or whatever it may be? Why would you not choose the best in standard? HP built a business out of being HP, going in and saying, "Hey, I'm HP." Right? That's what we wanna do. Yeah, I mean, I want, I wanna, I wanna bring this together.
I want others to come together with me. I think we're stronger together, and that's my pitch out there on the acquisition side. You know, many of the deals that we do are not because a banker's pitching me why I should love something. No offense. I call the CEO and I say, "Hey, we ought to be together. We're in the same business. We have the same struggles. We ought to at least catch up for lunch or dinner." Then dinner turns into, you know, a second date. Next thing you know, you're engaged, and then you're, you know, happily ever after, right? You know, now as far as the pieces, constantly adding pieces. I can tell you it's engineering. How, how can I get it out?
You know, how can I get more product off the roadmap, right? Product roadmap, how do I get more off? Get more engineers. Certainly need more marketing, right? We have our head of marketing here today. We have our head of product marketing here today. Certainly catch up with them afterwards. They'll tell you I need five bodies probably, right? I tell them they can have one. No, we move on, and we just gotta spread it. There's a lot of things, manufacturing, what we've added, what Larry's added from that. Finance, can't forget finance 'cause, you know, the revenue generated, so there's always people that you need to add. Gene talked about having some more solidifying our place in Europe.
Good news is when you buy something out of a bigger company, like we did LIOS from NKT, like we did OptaSense from QinetiQ, good news is we get, you know, kind of a pure play. Bad news is a lot of that infrastructure's left behind at the parent, so you've gotta kinda build that. We've been in the process of building that. I think we continue to add that. Always need more sales guys, right? When I do the, you know, "How are, how are you feeling today," Salvan conversation, he's always pitching me that he needs more sales. We're in the process. It's just a balancing act.
Any specialized area in sales that you're targeting?
We had mentioned. Specifically Brian Soller had talked about mining, so we are focusing on mining, dams and transportation. These are the three key areas right now that we are focusing. In terms of our large orders, we are working with F-22 to take our OBR 6200 and move that over to the new platform.
Yeah. And it is. They talked about the mining. It's getting mining people that can talk mining, if you will. You know, and I've always said, anyone who tells you know, "I'm literally not in automotive, but don't worry, in six months I'm gonna be in automotive," they're just full of . It's still a boys club out there, and you've gotta work that and work it and work it and work it to get into them. We've been working that and it's tough. It's tough to get into these, into these shops. You do need more sale, and you need people that can talk that talk. They just... You know, it's that specific. You have a question online looks like, hmm.
We do have a few questions online. Do you have any specific plans to reduce inventory this year?
Of course. Look, we talked about it on our call. We, I think we finished Q1, $40 million in inventory, right? $32 million in accounts receivable. That's I mean, in my mind, I look at $72 million of cash sitting on my balance sheet. You know, the inventory crept up because it had to. I mean, I think that's a sign that we've shown you we've had to go out and spend some money on inventory. We just had to. If we see the second half of this year looking like it's going to be these bigger orders, the EV battery manufacturers, things like that, we just have to get that inventory. Now, we do believe in Q2 that we'll pull down and that's the plan.
Jackie, you can talk a little bit about that, but, you know, we will be harvesting
Yes.
You know.
We have, in my opinion, there's three levers. Two of the levers are already fully engaged to draw that down. The third lever is shipments. The items that help it go up are things that are in the products that are gonna increase in their demand over the next two quarters, number one. Number two, when you go from, like, a $13 million to a $20 million increase in a quarter, you gotta really ramp up. What I would say we have to do better at is being able to ramp up, but quickly be able to shut that off when it goes back down. We didn't do that as fast as we could've, but we have things in place now to do that.
Inventory will be down second quarter, third quarter, but we got one hell of a hockey stick in fourth quarter. At some point, we're gonna have to start ratcheting that back up. Those will be discussions later. For right now, we ramped it up to hit the bigger numbers. We hit the bigger numbers. We didn't ramp it down fast enough. That's the part we gotta control much better going forward.
Okay. Was there some kind of follow-up there?
Yeah, another from online. Do you award stock below the executive level, how do you think about that in general?
We do have. You know, we talked about our employee stock purchase program, and we are constantly trying to use the equity as an incentive. We believe that it is a huge advantage for all of our employees to be shareholders. The answer is yes. There is, our equity is approved by at the board meetings, I do have in my back pocket a number of shares every quarter that I can give out except for Dwayne and Director Portee. These guys have enough. Or these guys get enough. They don't, probably don't think they have enough. Out to the people in line. You know, Larry and these other folks know if someone needs something, we have it ready to go.
Yeah, we do a lot of equity grants. It just doesn't show up in any kind of Form 4 and like that. Yes, we are constantly making people, for performance reasons and going beyond the call of duty, giving out shares to your team members that help get things done on your team. Is that fair, David?
Yeah.
Tyler?
Thanks. Somebody mentioned, like, software and SaaS in their presentation. I'm just curious, like, where you are in the journey of ramping that.
Sure.
Because I mean, that has huge implications.
It does.
On where you could take the margins.
Yeah. Brian? Yeah.
Yeah. Hey, Tyler. We're in early innings, I would say. We're developing the tools required to be able to deliver that to the customer. They're all in development, prototyping. Some are in the field. We've delivered several systems now that are being used in the field that have the Edge system already built in and the connectivity to the cloud through 5G. They're sort of pilot systems. Yeah. We view that as a. When we look at recurring revenue, and I mentioned this in my portion, there are a couple different types or flavors, if you will. We already have a kind of a service element to that recurring revenue.
We do a, say, a $1 million project, right, in the project business, and we'll have about $100,000 a year for, say, 3-5 years. That just is, that's warranty, that's service, that's, you know, call center, person on site, that sort of thing. We do believe that there's a big opportunity to add to that software as a product really, right? To say, excuse me, "Let us help you understand what your installation is doing." I use the example of a power cable. Today, for the most part, our systems are used to tell when there's a problem, right? Then you can fix the problem.
We can bake the analytics into the software to be predictive, to say, "Hey, you don't have a problem yet, but you're getting close to having a problem," and save a lot of time and money in changing the way things are running. That's where we're going. That's where we wanna go. That's inside the aperture of this plan, but it's not kind of in this year.
What sort of pricing or, like, what sort of economics would you get for, like, the power cabling aspect of what you just laid out?
I think still TBD a little bit, but something akin to 10%, 15% maybe of the installation to cover all of those service as a package, right? We're looking at kinda tiering it, basic, you know, must-have, really must-have, if you will, kinda mission critical. What's the language we use? Business response, Business critical.
Yeah. Business response, business critical.
Okay. Business response, business critical. The economics, I think, again, still testing the waters, if you will, what the market will take, 'cause it's not, it's not a model that's widely deployed in our customer groups, but we're thinking along those lines in terms of economics.
Okay, great. Just one last one from me. Just on the OBR, I think you mentioned that there's a new application within the data center.
Yes.
Is that being pulled? Is there a pull for that now?
Yes.
Okay. Can you talk, can you give us a little bit of incremental details about, you know, what the scope is, what the opportunity set looks like?
Yeah, sure. The application for that product is, in financial data centers in particular. As I mentioned, there's a requirement now that these links all be, have, latency measurements made so that they're the same length. If, you know, you're running a proprietary trading algorithm and you're inside the data center, if you're closer to the switch, you know, those algorithms are all built off arbitrage, and you can't get... You can't jump ahead essentially by having a shorter link or node-to-node timing. The market's struggling with how to make all those measurements, so we've been working with some of the major players in that space, for several years with our larger equipment, and they're rolling it around in a cart. That just doesn't work. It doesn't scale very well.
We've just launched, I'd say in the last six months, the capability to hit those lengths with the handheld product, right? We're in the I would say a couple million dollars a year range right now and looking at how we can scale it from there.
When you think of test and.
Mm.
Teams in general, right?
Yeah.
You know, everybody's looking at like a Keysight, the obvious thing like, well, you know, why wouldn't you be impacted by the same thing?
Mm-hmm.
Is that a big reason, or is there other stuff that you consider?
Is what a big reason? The new
Yeah, just like the new application.
Yeah. I think it has to do with where we're aligned inside those customers. I wouldn't say we don't see the same things. We certainly see them. We're aligned with areas where those businesses are still investing, and they're not being hurt by the current kind of inventory correction sort of situation. You know, we don't sell our systems to Ciena, at scale for production of these transceivers. That's what's causing the issue. We sell our systems to Ciena so they can develop the next generation fully optical network that runs at terabit speed, and they haven't stopped those investments.
I think we have one more question. We're gonna try to be respectful of ending it at noon. You guys can get out of here, grab your lunch and get out of here. Feel free to linger. We're gonna stay, but. You can stay or not. We do wanna hard stop this. One more question, right?
We have time for one more question.
Oh, I thought you had one online. One more question.
No, we do.
Jim?
Brian, you mentioned adjacencies. Can you talk a little bit about beyond EV batteries, the Terahertz opportunity, what you're seeing, where it is?
Go ahead.
Yeah, sure. So the EV battery opportunity is, as we've discussed, a main driver right now, and it was really what drove us to build in that 4x capacity. Right behind it, we're working with the world's largest adhesive manufacturer for multilayer measurements and different types of higher end... They're an adhesive manufacturer, but they're using it. They also make things for display technology and other types of photonic technology. We're working in that area. We have a frame agreement in development with one of the world's largest tire manufacturers for measuring the inner radial. That's another production manufacturing application. We're working with several medical device companies on multilayer measurements of medical devices, medical tubing in particular.
We're working on spreading out, expanding if you will, inside EVs. We have today one large customer, and we have, Sal, then half a dozen in development, that will get to you know, some level relative to the one large one. We have opportunities to spread inside EV. We're looking at four or five other really good strong growth areas, adjacent to EV. I'll add just one more. We have a handheld version of this product that we take to defense manufacturers for measuring paint thickness coating, for instance. It's used today in the field, in the paint shop to measure the thickness of the anti-reflective coating on the F-35 and the F-22. We're looking to take that and do what we did with our 6200 product and push that into sustainment.
Rather than selling, you know, half a million a year to those paint shops, those will be deployed in the field, and we'll, you know, 10x that. We've got a lot of opportunity there that we're working, and it all ties back to, you know, developments we've had in engineering recently and then the production move to Atlanta.
Great. Thanks. We'll end there. Again, like I said, we're gonna stick around, and we can be around. We want you to, you know, grab lunch, things like that. When I was out at the LD Micro conference that Jim's well aware of, you know, Chris Leahy, the guy who runs it, asked, "How do you define success?" You know, the big softball that comes at the end of the conference when everyone's asked every question imaginable. I said how I define success is I won't qualify for this conference next year. I don't know whether you liked it or not. The goal here was to have Luna stop being the best-kept secret. Hopefully we did a fair job, and helped you guys in what we're doing.
It was our first ever, so, we look forward to more of them. Appreciate it. Thank you.