Hey, good afternoon. Welcome everyone present physically and virtually via this webcast. Hopefully I can be heard nice and clear, and you can see my presentation. Excited to have everyone here. Second time we do an investor day, the trail has grown quite a bit, just once. As has the company, our revenue and our backlog, and we'll talk about all of that today. I'll be speaking, as well as Al Miranda, our CFO, and we also have with us here, Dr. Steve Mielke, our VP of Engineering, Israel Piergiovanni, our VP of Manufacturing, and Natalie King, VP Finance, which will take part in mostly the Q&A. For those that were here present physically, we did a facility tour, had a light lunch, and now we'll go ahead with this and have Q&A at the end of the presentation.
Okay, 1 second. Okay. Okay, I think yes. Okay, I think it's good. I can see on that one, at least. I'm assuming they can see it whole. You know, a bit of a history of LightPath, and where we've come from. LightPath has been around for a while. We're a 40-year-old company, maybe 41-year-old company. For many, many years, 35 years out of the 40 years, really, we were an optical components company. I mean, to give a perspective to this, these tiny lenses that we see here on the left, were most what LightPath did, and it's claimed the same for many, many years. The company really was a pioneer in the technology of molded optics, and developed that, and as we've seen here, developed even the technology to do that, including the machines and the instrumentation needed.
The hope was, or the plan was that this technology, these molded lenses, will get adopted in very high volumes. To put it into perspective, you know, back in 2000 or so, the volume of lenses was minuscule compared to what we do today, and the price was much higher. The plan of the company was expectation that adoption in volume will drive significant revenue. What was missing in that part was that also drives the cost down and the price down. Lenses, maybe 25 years ago, were selling for $100 a lens, now sell for single or digit dollars. The strategy behind that wasn't working out that well.
Company started pivoting towards infrared optics a bit in 2016, 2017, through the acquisition of ISP Optics, a company that produces individual lenses by grind and polish, pretty conventional technologies. The thought there was that we could adopt the same molding technology used to make lenses in high volume into infrared optics from chalcogenide glass. Back then, it was very, very new, and people were only starting to adopt it. The company back then had two types of BlackDiamond glass, BD6 and BD-2, which are really generic forms of a glass made by other companies like Schott, that calls it IRG 26, or Vitron that calls it IG6. You know, pretty generic.
Fast forward to the year to 2020, except for COVID, which was a big event then, there was also a change in management here, and we've actually started changing direction of the company. Strategically, we understood that we cannot live in the component area. We want to do far more than that. That's not new. Many companies that go through that, and many companies try to do that, but we had some, two other things that were playing in our favor. One was the market. The adoption of optics or photonics in the wider market that was going on over the last 10 years or so, changed a bit the dynamics of the supply chain, or started to change the dynamics of the supply chain.
While we were making components of a vertical supply chain where we would sell the components, someone that would build the system and so on. Now our customers are changing. We started seeing customers that are less experts in optics and more solution integrators altogether. They wanted a complete solution, and that created an opportunity for us to move away from the pure component into more of a solutions company. We were able to do that not only because the opportunity existed, but because of capabilities we had already in here. To begin with, we were an optics company, but we had a lot of internal disciplines of engineering related to building our own instrumentation and technology that was needed. We have here, or had here already, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, things you typically don't find a company like that.
We also had some unique technologies that we understood could be real differentiators when going upstream into sub-assemblies, subsystems, and so on. Primarily, and chief amongst them, was the BlackDiamond technology. There were a handful of companies that were making glass of that type, but they were all sort of making the same generic glasses, and the adoption of them was very, very limited. We came across a portfolio of materials that Naval Research Laboratory developed under the mandate to develop new technologies for the Navy, and were looking to license it. We were lucky to be able to secure an exclusive license for those. Understanding that those technologies, those materials, could drastically change the landscape of infrared imaging. With that, we decided to leverage that to no longer just be a supplier of components and glass, but actually go upstream.
Two things in our favor. One, the market wanted it. They wanted more companies making complete subsystems and so on. Secondly, we could offer subsystems that were better than others out there because of these unique materials that we licensed, because we were leveraging our molding technology to reduce the cost of making lenses and systems. Came most of geopolitics, which in the past used to hurt us every time. Every time the U.S. and China would go into a war, and it used to hurt LightPath badly because LightPath was very, very dependent on China. When five years ago, six years ago, when I joined the company, 55% of our business was in China, manufacturing and sales. Now it's nothing or less than 5%.
Back then, every time tariffs or anything like that would happen, it would have a very negative impact to the company. This time, because of the way we were positioned, all of the geopolitics actually plays in our favor, and obviously everyone is very, very familiar now with the story around germanium and germanium alternative, and our Black Diamond being the germanium alternative. I would love to say that I saw that coming exactly the way it is. There's some elements of luck here as well. Sometimes we get lucky. Okay, are we still going or? Great. We decided to go on that path. We started. You know, it's easier said than done sometimes. We had to take baby steps, and so we started from just doing assembly.
Going from the individual lenses into assemblies, selling them pretty much the same customer base, sometimes a bit more. Saying to the customer, "Instead of buying lenses and designing an assembly, let us design the assembly." Assembly can be something really simple, like two lenses in a barrel like this, or a complex eight-lens telescope, or a much larger one. It's got our feet wet, it got people used to it. Down the road, this was for a couple of years, we were doing just that. People were starting to get used to the idea of LightPath doing more than that, started to get used to the idea of the Black Diamond materials, and were seeing we can actually make assemblies for them that are very cost-effective, very high volume, and so on.
We started dabbling into the more higher value added, which is where we were targeting all along, really, and that is the cameras. Before any acquisitions, we started already with our own first camera, the Mantis, which was a broadband or dual band, depends on what you want to call it, a multispectral, many terms to it. One camera that can see sort of in more than one spectral band. Didn't really exist before that. It's still, you know, making its way into being adopted and so on, but it was more of a statement than it was a massive best seller.
It was more of a statement of like, "Hey, we're now making cameras also, and these cameras can be way better than anything else there, or very different than anything else there, because with our unique BlackDiamond materials, you could make this camera multispectral." Without BlackDiamond, it would be. You'd have to sacrifice quite a bit of specifications or performance and would not be able to do it. That was our first statement of, "Hey, this is what BlackDiamond can do, and if you pay close attention, we are planning to leverage that to go way up and become a system company." From there, we started supplementing with acquisitions, Visimid being the first one, I think. Oh, oh, okay, I forgot this timeline, but that's fine. Visimid being the first one, and that added capabilities in making those cameras.
In fact, that first camera, the Mantis, was developed together with Visimid before we acquired them. The reason for that is actually, besides the fact that we wanted to develop a camera, we also wanted to work with Visimid. Acquisitions are an important tool for us. We've said that before, we'll talk about it some more. We strongly believe that we're able to identify, attract, and integrate acquisitions in a very suitable way to our new business model, our new direction. Integration of an acquisition is sometimes everything. It can kill the best plans ever if culture doesn't work, if the integration doesn't work, if the team doesn't work. Any company we acquired and plan to acquire, we do some work to get to know each other. There have been deals we walked away from because the culture bit just clearly wasn't there.
Visimid was really, Mantis, was really a first attempt to go into cameras, but also get to know the Visimid team. We got along so well, that halfway through the development, it just became natural of like, "Okay, let's just merge the two companies." That was the first acquisition. Down the road from there was G5 and most recently, Amorphous Materials. Going up, slide, I'll just go in a different order, but going into the acquisitions, since I was talking about them, very important to us, very important for them to be highly accretive. We sort of started talking about the story, how we went from components and want to end up in subsystems. We haven't finished that journey yet, by the way. We're, you know, quite along there, but haven't finished it yet.
There are some technologies we could develop in-house, there were some we really needed to bring in. We needed to bring in, really, because sometimes it's just cheaper to acquire in a portfolio of products, a group of engineers, than to develop it from scratch. It's also obviously a different transaction, balance sheet versus income statement and such, but sometimes it's a matter of time also. We realized that we have a very unique window of opportunity because of the geopolitics and situation with Germany. The timeframe in which we can really shine, and we can grab significant market share of that system, subsystem level. Sometimes you need to use acquisitions to do that, and so what we're seeing here is really all of those acquisitions that bought us some specific technologies, which is most of the times, the first thing we aim at.
We are a technology company, after all. Every one of them, for them to be accretive, have also brought with it a existing backlog or with programs that were about to get to be won or be awarded. Sometimes, like in the case of G5, we knew most of those programs are coming. We knew we're able to come in at the right time, at the right place there. We also knew that we are really needed in order to deliver on those programs. G5, we knew it was gonna struggle with the situation with germanium, just like everyone else struggles. We can come in, and we can really enable G5 to deliver on these big programs. Some of them much bigger than what we even thought of, but, you know, definitely something we can enable them to deliver.
Real synergies there. Sometimes, like with Visimid, the NGSRI program, our, you know, probably flagship program in heat-seeking missiles, or in that platform or that range, was very, in part, awarded because of the acquisition. Visimid was a small engineering team that was developing technology, but it's always the technologies it was developing, was mostly handed over to the customer or sold as a customer for production. Lockheed was betting on Visimid for the NGSRI program, but Visimid was not in a place to really be able to take that into the next level.
The acquisition came at the right time, at the right place, even though, again, we didn't plan on it because of NGSRI, but sometimes we get really lucky, and this one happened to be that halfway through the acquisition, the NGSRI program popped up, and it made sense all of that. Of course, the markets, right? Everything we do is, almost everything, probably other than heat-seeking missiles, but almost everything else is dual use. Approaching other markets, security markets, industrial imaging, and so on, is also important for us, and something that we'll continue to do, and sometimes it stands for acquisitions. Going back to the order of slides we had. We talked through this, some major events just during the time. I'm not gonna talk too much about the first few years. It was ugly.
It was a lot of clean up. There was a lot going on. There was theft in China. There was a operation that was really extremely inefficient and not set up the right way. There were too many buildings. There were too many companies. There were too much of a lot of things. Once 2024 came about, or 2023, the Mantis camera, the Visimid acquisition, that was really starting to be the turning point. G5 acquisition, pretty much a year ago from today, happens to be a major one, really, what is really coming now is the number of large programs and orders that we are winning and getting into, because over those four years, we set up the foundation for all of that.
Whether it's G5 winning more business because they can supply cameras when other people cannot supply cameras, or whether it's G5 winning business because they're part of a larger company, and so some people feel more comfortable buying from them than these small, or it's because of technologies that we put together. Visimid's uncooled cameras turned into heat seekers. Our BlackDiamond can actually make something really, really unique there. Amorphous Materials, the company has been around forever, probably as old as I am, to be honest, that has been sort of captivated in doing one specific thing and doing only that. We're able to take them, combine them with our BlackDiamond technology, and achieve something much bigger, so to speak. I mean, physically, bigger in terms of optics and lenses. That's the strategy behind this.
As we went along, we started talking about pillars of growth. It's a concept that introduced sort of maybe three years ago. We started talking about this. It's not really a formal concept in business school or anything like that, but it's something that stuck, and we found it useful to frame things. Very useful to frame things externally, but also internally for the team. We're going through a transition. One day we're making components, we're saying, "You know, hey, guys, in three years' time, we're gonna be a completely different company. You need to explain to people what that's gonna be." To us, we chose to say, "Okay, you know, everything we're doing falls under those three pillars, sort of independent activities that have through them, independent opportunities underneath them." We're very diversified.
We're not betting on one thing alone, because sometimes things fall through, not because of you. For example, here, of those three pillars of growth, two of them were highly successful and really got us to where we are, and the third one didn't. That's okay. That's the whole idea of diversification, and that's why we have multiple different things we're doing. In our example, we said three years ago, so we want to go into more assemblies and cameras. Well, we took that from in 2020, assemblies were maybe half a million dollars a quarter, to now more than $7 million, actually. This is a bit out of date, it's probably much more, more like $10 million. We said we wanna go into government and defense.
We identified that because of the BlackDiamond, because of the alternatives to Germanium, because we realized that's a really big market to infrared optics. You can't be an infrared company if you're doing only 8% of your revenue is in defense. We changed that, and that's part of our move away from China back to the U.S. and Europe, and the direction we're going. That's now defense being government, and defense being more than 70% of our revenue. The first pillar that we identified was new applications. At first, we thought it would be automotive. It was clear very quickly that that wasn't going to happen. We pivoted a bit to oil and gas and utilities, areas that we thought we could really have an impact there in terms of growth of thermal imaging.
Some successes there, mainly in the furnace camera part, some less. Again, that is fine. All of those, when we introduced them three years ago, and we were at about $30 million in revenue, we talked about in three to five years, we wanna get to $100 million-$150 million in revenue. That's happened. I mean, we're on track to achieve that soon, and so that is a bit of old news, and we need a new goal, and we need a new direction on set. Not a completely new direction.
We're still going our screen systems, cameras. To frame it as to where the growth will come from, we look at the same way as three pillars, we're taking something a bit different now. We're saying, "Okay, for the next few years, if we are to again, separate the business into sort of three blocks and say they are based on the same prevailing technologies, like BlackDiamond, imaging, assemblies, optics that we make, fabrication, coating, and so on." All of our technologies serve all three of those. Those three are somewhat independent of each other and can have, underneath them, independent, large opportunities that could be significant to us. We used to say a significant opportunity would be in the millions.
That's, you know, in the noise a bit, currently, we'd say big opportunities, we call something that could be $10 million or more a year. We have probably, you know, $8 million- 10 million of those right now. With this and the direction we're going, that threshold will grow even higher. Let's talk a bit about what those are, those three pillars of growth. First one on the left is the assemblies business. We've tapped into that a little bit through those fixed focus assemblies, what we see here on the screen, and sort of accumulated in the barrels. That's a very nice market. We're taking a very good portion of that market already because we can do those with BlackDiamond that perform great. We can deliver them. They're made here in the U.S.
We actually can produce them now also in Latvia, we serve them into the European market and in Ukraine, we might be selling even more assemblies right now in Europe than we are here in the short term. Certain there. There's much more than that. There are much more complex assemblies, if you would, where someone would come and say, "I don't want to buy a complete camera system from you. I want to build my own camera for whatever reasons, and I want to buy just the optical assembly." That business of just optical assemblies, that has already players in there, like MKS Ophir, in Israel and such. That's a business that we estimated, both we did a top-down and bottom-up analysis, and we got an independent market research done, right? Yep, Al agreed to spend money on a market research.
The addressable market there for us is between $500 million-$1 billion on that alone. Optics as a whole or infrared imaging as a whole, to remind you, is currently, according to, again, an independent market research, is currently at $10 billion-$11 billion a year. It's a portion of that. Where do those go to? They can go to someone that wants to build his own gimbal, let's say, that goes into a aircraft, and that someone buys a sensor from someone else. We use certain sensors from certain companies that we chose to use their detectors, but there are others, and so different preferences or different uses. This could be a camera that is in space. We don't know how to build space cameras right now. That's not something we could do.
That entire panel, I'll talk about it in a minute, but we can build the telescopes, optical assembly. This could also go to some of our direct competitors. Companies that make their own detector and want to sell a complete camera, like we'll talk about that we're selling complete cameras, but they want to buy the assembly parts, and that's fine. I would sell to anyone, really, so they can make money. That's the first pillar, opportunity of $500 million-$1 billion, studied in different ways. Second pillar is infrared camera systems. To put it simply, think about FLIR. They are now part of Teledyne. You know, the numbers were public up until a few years ago before they got acquired. You can even look them up, but again, market research and such.
This is taking G5 and building on that, taking the rhythm of it and building on that. Standard cameras that can go onto, into pods, again, into gimbals, can go into, like this camera we see here from G5, can be on a border tower, can be on a truck, can be on a stadium or counter UAS. G5 is already, probably has a really good stand in the market on those large fixed ones, but there's a whole market of the smaller, compact ones, of other wavelengths. G5 does only one wavelength, there are other wavelengths to do, multispectral cameras that we're starting to do, and so on. Cameras as standard products. Standard cameras, complete cameras, that has a addressable market between $1 billion-$1.5 billion. Okay.
The third one is a bit harder to explain, but easier to demonstrate, large defense programs. Think about those programs we say today, we have that are $10+ million. NGSRI is an example. Navy Spear is another one that a year ago we announced. All of those are programs where we do some development work paid for by the customer, heavy NREs to it, the real money will be made in production. Those programs, we're not an engineering company. We don't do that for the engineering revenues. That's nice small things, it's really for the production. Those are opportunities like that, like the Apache, like the NGSRI, like the SPEAR, where we build on existing technologies that we have. We're not developing from scratch. We're not a research organization. Not developing a completely new technology, taking something and modifying it.
SPEAR, which last year in the investor meeting we talked about, and now is public information because with the press release also out, is a program in which we took the high-end camera of G5, so a 1,000-millimeter camera, upgraded it to some performance specifications the Navy wanted in a nearly two-year engineering project, and now it's gonna get installed on every naval surface vessel for counter-UAS and detecting low, low-flying cruise missiles. Okay? So that's a program of record. It's a public program. You can go and see it. L3 talks about it. I think it is based on an existing technology. We didn't develop a camera from scratch. So we believe we can do more of those. What is the TAM here? I can't even tell, because the TAM is really more gated by how much can we take of those.
We assume, we did some internal study, and we said, "Okay, you know, at G5, we can do X programs like that before it becomes, like, really a burden and distracts us from other work. In Orlando, we can do 10." We believe this is large enough that it can be as big as those pillars in terms of revenue it would bring us. Again, you can just look at what you know. We have NGSRI, our, you know, programs that we hope and we're rooting for Lockheed to win. If they do, it could be anywhere from $50 million-$100 million a year for one program. These are kind of what we're talking about in that pillar of growth. Now, talking a bit about what we have so far in product portfolio. How are we doing on time?
8 hours, plenty of time. Okay. Okay, what have we developed until now? Now, I'm not talking about the optical components. I'm not talking about, like, the materials. I'm talking more about the subsystems and the base technologies that enable a lot of this. Our Mantis, we talked about that. Specific cameras for applications like gas imaging, like furnace inspection. Of course, the range of G5 cooled long-range detection cameras. CSV Solo, a new camera we're coming out with, which is really a very compact, if you want, heat seeker, but it could be a heat-seeking drone could use it, or because that's sort of a path that some of the drones are going, or for some industrial applications. Sometimes we make some bets, we try, and again, diversification is the key to everything. We have to have a few different things.
We can't depend on one. We try something. Like NGI was actually an attempt at some phase to integrate AI into the camera, that was not that successful. I bring it up, even though I should be hiding things that aren't successful, but just mentality-wise, from a concept, diversification in everything we do is extremely important to it. It's something we drive through the team. Never bet on one thing. Don't bet on one program. Don't bet on one technology. Keep trying. Some things will stick, and sometimes they don't stick. Okay, our BlackDiamond glass. Obviously, our pride and joy and a huge enabler to a lot of what we do. I mentioned there used to be two materials that were more generic.
One of them we discontinued, one of them we still do quite a bit of, BD6. There's really a whole portfolio of materials. To put it into perspective, the next company after us has probably five types of glass that they make. Between LightPath and Amorphous Materials, we have now something that is close to 20. We are by far the largest selection of infrared materials anywhere, period. We're probably now, by far, the largest producer of infrared materials between Amorphous and LightPath. As those of you that were here saw on the tour, we have some very grandiose plans of expansion there, because we have to. We actually have way more orders than we can make glass for right now. What is unique about this glass? Well, first of all, geopolitically, it's an alternative to germanium, right?
It's not a 1-to-1 replacement to germanium. Nothing ever is. In the world of optics, you can design your systems now without germanium or without gallium by using BlackDiamond. Optics accounts for 25% of the germanium the U.S. needs. It's a public market research actually, done for the U.S. Congress some years ago. It's public information. 25% of the however many tons the U.S. needs are for optics. We solved that problem for the optics part. We don't solve it for the other 75%. Germanium is very, very critical in solar cells, okay? If you don't have germanium for solar cells, for satellites, the size of the solar cells would be 3x as bigger, as much as they are today.
It is much more important to direct the germanium there, where you don't have an alternative, than to optics, where we provide the alternative. That has always been part of our pitch to the government. That's something DLA, Defense Logistics Agency, understood very, very well, and why they've been financing part of this and so on, to, you know, free up germanium to places where you don't have, right now, an alternative for. Besides alternative to germanium, it's made here in the U.S. Germanium, gallium, those are crystals. They are grown by taking raw materials, the feeder, and growing it to a crystal, and you get a pure metal out of it, which then you can dope a little bit and turn it into optics. Ours is a glass. A glass is not grown as a crystal, glass is melted.
That means we can scale it much better in terms of production. You've seen here. That means we can also change the properties of it, and that's why we have maybe 20 types of them, where germanium, we have just one. Germanium properties are whatever germanium is. You cannot change them. Germanium transmits midwave and long wave. It cannot transmit short wave infrared. No matter what you'll do to it will not transmit this. Silicon can transmit short wave and midwave. No matter what you're gonna do, it's not gonna transmit long wave. Those materials that we use until now, think selenide, think sulfide, germanium, silicon, all limited by whatever properties they have, their own crystalline material. Glass, on the other hand, or synthetic glass, if you would, is a chemistry, that you can change it.
I can add a little bit of that, a bit more selenium, a bit less gallium, or whatever materials are in there. We actually don't use gallium. I can get a different composition. I can fine-tune it. That is what Naval Research Laboratory did for years. That's what the guys in Texas, Amorphous Materials, also know how to do very, very well. Amorphous, other than Naval Research Laboratories, Amorphous Materials was probably the only group in the U.S. that can come up with new compositions of glass or has been coming up with new compositions of glass. The acquisition of Amorphous was also a bit different that way. It's like, okay, we have an exclusive within RL. Let's also get whoever else, you know, might be playing in this lucrative subject.
You know, lots of properties, lots of things we can play with, and so with them, we can get to some really unique advantages, which I'll explain in a second or give some demonstration. Just to summarize those, you know, we reduce supply chain risk. We have a lot of advantages on properties because they are chemistry and not crystal. They're manufactured in-house. You've seen them here. We acquired Amorphous Materials for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons we acquired Amorphous Materials was because we like to jokingly say, or I joke about it, I'm not sure everyone else finds it funny, we were one hurricane away from losing capacity. I mean, we're in Orlando. Everything we do in the company, pretty much, we do in more than one location, except glass. Glass was done only here in Orlando.
It actually, the company did have a time where it shut down because of a hurricane and the flooding, and that impacted the glass manufacturing. We couldn't do that, so having another location out in Texas that makes glass is a backup, as well as many, many other things that affect those changes. Other advantages that it has, glass can be molded. You can melt it and reshape it. Crystal cannot be. Crystal, once it's grown the way it is, the only way to make a lens from it is to remove material until you polish it into the shape you want. Glass can be molded, and seen here on the tool, LightPath is known for molding. We keep extending the technology more and more.
For the very large cameras, it makes less of a difference there. For the small ones, if you're talking about the lens assembly, the small ones, like we see here in the image. All of those lenses in this picture are mold, which means we can make 4 million a year of them with the molding machines that we have. If we needed to make 4 million germanium lenses a year, we would need to have this entire room, entire building filled with diamond turning and polishing machines. It's a scalable technology. You can do that. You know, there's coatings we developed to it, a lot of qualification, we talked about that, and so on. Advantages, since I'm a technologist or a failed engineer, as I say, sometimes, I like to talk about the technology.
What are the advantages of BlackDiamond? Replacing Germanium, everyone gets clear. There's much, much more to it than that. You look at the gimbal, like you see here, a payload, and you see multiple windows in different colors. Why? One of them is a laser, and that needs its own window. All of the three, the three large ones are the cameras. Why do you need multiple cameras? You need them because they're looking at different wavelengths. One is a visible camera, maybe a black and white, maybe a color camera. Another one is probably a shortwave infrared camera, because that can see through fog, through haze, sometimes through clouds very well. The third one is a thermal camera, because it can see in very long distance and probably a midwave camera.
What if you could combine them into one camera that does all three? You would save tremendous space and weight, not to mention the cost, but also power consumption, right? All these drones, the power is consumed. You want as much power for the motors as you want for, as you can, for distance and time up front. The government, different branches of the government with different data and so on, have been working at developing sensors that can image multiple wavebands at the same time. These are programs you can go and you can find some public information about them. Some are not public, but there's enough there that you can find it. What wasn't available was the material, the glass. As I mentioned earlier, germanium transmits midwave and longwave. It cannot transmit shortwave. Silicon can transmit shortwave and midwave.
It cannot transmit visible nor long wave, nor near infrared, which is what colloquially is called night vision. These materials, because they're kerosene, because they're not a crystal, and they're fine-tuned, that is why NOL developed 20 materials like that, because they give you lots of different properties that they carefully fine-tuned to be able to see what we are showing here on the left. One system that can actually image maybe all wavelengths through it. You could, that's the Mantis. If you recall back, we talked about the Mantis, the camera that does two waveframes. That's why it's so important. That's why BlackDiamond can make it happen. You couldn't do that without those materials. It also comes into play in reducing the overall size and weight of systems.
In visible light applications, like cameras that we're used to, you know, like the big Sony E-mount and so on, these big lenses and so on, there's 300 and something types of glass that can be used to make those cameras. You can choose the most perfect glass for the most, for your application. In the infrared, there were maybe 10 materials until recently. The Germanium, the Silicon, the selenide, the sulfide, and then maybe five chalcogenide glasses that were made by Schott, Vitron, and LightPath. Now we're adding 20. We're adding much more variables for engineers to play with. What do engineers like to do? They like to design stuff.
When they design a zoom lens, like this is an example of a paper published with the Army, I believe, Army Night Vision Lab, of a zoom lens, an attempt to make a zoom lens that would do both midwave and long wave simultaneously, okay. Systems that already are starting to exist, with existing materials, would require 21 individual lens, okay. Huge weight, cost, and a lot of optical loss, because every time the light goes in and out of the lens, you lose a fine bit of light, even though the coatings help. With our materials, because they add so many variables and capabilities, you can take this down to 12 elements. It's hidden down here, but it says 12 elements.
You gain a significant weight advantage, you gain higher throughput of light, you gain a cheaper system, I mean, and the weight translates again to longer range for the drone of the plane. These are some of the examples. People keep asking, "Well, why do you need 20 materials? I mean, isn't one enough to replace germanium?" This isn't about replacing germanium only. Replacing germanium is a way in that created the need for everyone to take a look at what's out there and what can I do. Once they look at it and see what it is, they realize, oh, my God, I can do much more with these materials than I could do with germanium. Okay.
One area I want to talk about specifically is, you know, a next frontier, so to speak, I think from Captain Picard's words, large diameter optics and specifically for space applications. We were making glass in 5 inches diameter. We could slump it, a process that would allow us to get sometimes to 7 inches in diameter length. That was okay for like the camera we see here, what's called the mid-range camera or G5, where the front lens is about 140 millimeters in diameter, I think. We could probably make the lens for this. We couldn't make it for the large cameras of G5, which is really where the big revenue is, or most of it, and we definitely couldn't do it for the space applications, which are a very fast-growing area.
In space, to do multispectral imaging, because materials like Black Diamond did this before, you use mirrors. You use some very, very large mirrors to build a telescope that can image in both shortwave, and midwave, and long wave, and visible. What you see here, this satellite, you know, the reason they were the size of a bus is they had, like, think of a classic telescope with a Newton, not Newtonian, a reflective telescope with massive mirrors, off-axis and on-axis. Think about the, what's the Hubble, but the James Webb Telescope. What was it? It's a massive mirror. Just they had to unfold them, there's so many of them. With Black Diamond, you can do it in a refractive way instead of reflect.
For the geeks among us, that means you pass the light through the lens instead of reflecting it in order to shape it, but you need large diameter. These are the longer away you are from what you want to image, the larger the optic needs to be. Basic geometrical optics. You need to get to at least 10 inches in diameter, sometimes as much as 15 inches. We couldn't do that with our technology. Amorphous can do. The acquisition of Amorphous Materials enables us to make up to 17 inches in diameter, adds a second manufacturing location, adds to our technical capabilities big time, or more importantly, takes away from competitors' technical capabilities to develop others, and gives us another set of materials that they developed. This acquisition is significant in many ways.
I get asked, "What's the size of the market? What is it?" Pretty easy way to calculate. Public information, SDA, Space Development Agency, last month, I think, or two months ago, awarded four companies to build 72 missile tracking satellites. Infrared satellites, by far, there's no other way on that. Three and a half billion. $48 million per satellite. Rule of thumb is, the entire optical payload with the sensor and with all of that, is about one third of the value. Okay? Of that, there is a telescope, optical telescope. Again, we're not gonna go and do one third of a $48 million. We are not gonna do $16 million per satellite. We're not there yet, maybe one time down the road.
We are gonna do a very big chunk of that $16 million, which is the optical telescope, that again, is enabled by our materials. A pretty significant capability for us that, you know, I think will play very nicely. Counter-UAS, we talked a bit about it. I just have to keep emphasizing because it's like every major order we announce, like the $9-point-something million, only a week or 2 ago, the $20 before the thing, most of them are heavy on the counter-UAS. It's a very, very fast-growing market for us. It's an incredible market, and cameras from G5 fit perfectly in. Every one of those systems that you see, a laser system here, a remote weapon system, or just a detection system, all of them pretty much are using those same cameras, those same technology. That's very fast-growing for us.
G5 is the best in class by far. I mean, you can go and we have some information published. You can go and you can see the, what's called the DRI, the detection, recognition, identification ranges. We published them on our website material. You can take a look at, for example, last week, FLIR announced a new 1,000 millimeter lens or 1,000 millimeter camera for similar applications, and you can see their DRI, what their detection, recognition, identification ranges are compared to the G5. I'm not gonna, you know, spell it out for you, but it's easy to find, and the numbers are staggering at how much better we are.
To put it into perspective, for those of you that know the D.C. metro area, if we were to put our 1,000 millimeter camera on a pole in Washington, D.C., we would detect a tiny drone like this, like this DJI, flying over Silver Springs or Bethesda. That's the kind of range we're talking. A bit about commercial applications, really quick. Not a huge part of our revenue now, but always is there, because pretty much everything we do or most things we do or do on you. Cameras can be used for same cameras that can be used for detecting a drone, can be used for detecting someone at sea, for example, or things like that. Some security applications, some pure industrial applications. We talked about gas imaging. Up and down, in Europe, it's up.
In the U.S., it's a bit down with the current administration, I'm not sure about that one. If we look at furnace cameras, something we've talked a bit about in the past, our Mantis camera offers the ability to image inside a furnace running at thousands of degrees, 2,000 degrees Celsius in this case. This is what a power plant furnace would look like, and you have the burners, and you heat up the water, and the pipes goes there, and the ash goes down. That's about as much as I understand of that. You want to all the time monitor what's going on.
Ash can build up on the pipes like you see here at the top, or it could clog in the burner, or it could fall down in one big heap and cause a massive dent down here that can impact your performance. The worst of everything, a water pipe can burst and start leaking, and you wouldn't know it without the engine inside. Every single furnace like this, whether it's a power plant, a paper mill, a steel mill, or thing, has multiple of those. In this case, three cameras. Those are kind of the images you see in there. We sell those for $20,000-$30,000 a piece. Yeah, that's one, you know, example of a nice application that we're really enjoying and managed to be condenser. Okay, talking quickly about the program.
I do not have any news about NGSRI. Anyone was asking. I will only be sharing whatever Lockheed shares publicly. We're at a very critical point of the program right now. We have to be extremely sensitive, both in terms of competition and ethics. We're under very strict directions there. Everyone knows the potential there for us is per missile, $5,000-$10,000, and the volume of missiles could be up to 10,000 missiles a year at full rate production. You can do your own homework and estimates at how many missiles the Army is gonna want, when, and how. That's roughly the numbers we share. The SPEAR program, the Shipboard Panoramic Electro-Optic Infrared, is the full name of it, is a program in which we install on every Navy surface vessel, at least two ultra-long-range cameras, sometimes four.
U.S. has some hundreds of vessels. You find the numbers publicly. I'm not gonna go into those, but we expect it to be up to $20 million a year. We are right now, this month, actually, shipping first units for that. I'm expecting the LRIP. LRIP stands for Low Rate Initial Production, coming any day. The border patrol, well, we went into this knowing that G5 went into this acquisition, knowing G5 provides Elbit of America, the cameras. Elbit is one of three players there. We are now providing the cameras to at least two players. We might be providing to three players, for example. The number of towers went up significantly. They were talking about 300 towers, now it's like 1,200 towers, adding towers along the northern border because apparently Canadians want to infiltrate as well.
I would make a joke about hockey and thing, but I don't want to. Lots of other programs. I'm not going to go into all of them. We don't have enough time, but just some looking ahead. This is you? Okay.
No, you've got slide after this.
Okay, I can rest a bit.
You can take a swig. What you really want to know is what's gonna happen next, I think, right? Backlog at the end of December, $97 million. Little spoiler alert, it's $103 million as of yesterday afternoon, so we're tracking pretty well against our overall revenue goals there. We looked at the backlog a little bit. It's 85% of the backlog is defense, surveillance, security, and public safety. I call out those four things because, as Sam said, our products are dual use, so some of them are not really purely defense. Public safety, for example, is not purely defense, but it's the same system. This could be used for public safety, or it could be used for defense. 30% of the backlog is commercial.
Caution you, commercial orders tend to be shorter in duration, three months, six months. The backlog doesn't reflect like defense would. Defense tends to be long term, 12 and even 18 months of orders that you don't normally get that from the commercial side. I don't think the revenue split will be 85% defense and 15% commercial. The interesting part here, though, is 70% of that backlog is scheduled to be shipped in the calendar year 2026. That'll give you an idea of why we're up to what we're up to these days.
Anyway. Okay. Some of the near-term pipeline opportunities, I'll emphasize opportunities. I'm not saying we necessarily want those, or it gives you a sort of where we're dabbling about and what we're playing with. Counter-UAS, I mentioned a few times. Just to mention three programs, an example, the FIFA World Cup, very big one, actually started awarding some. Every stadium has to be protected for counter-UAS. This is now being well over the FIFA, where we know of NFL teams that are looking at our systems and testing them for drone detection and such. Again, we don't shoot down the drone, right? It's more of a knowing that it's there and being able to take different actions. A optical system or eyes on the target are a must for any drone detection system.
There are many other technologies there. There's radar, computer, there is acoustic detection, as well. There will always, in every system, be at least one camera there. You have to have a visual. All these other things can never get you guaranteed to know that, you know, that's a drone and not a bird or a plane or a thing. We've seen images where it looks even in the visible camera as a drone, and you realize it's actually a plane just way further out. You need a lot of those technologies working together, integrated. There's a lot of software behind that. Department of Homeland Security, DHS, has a few programs. One is for border patrol, one is along the border.
I guess that ties in to everyone knows now about the lasers that was used to or tried there, and some are internal inside the U.S. You have the Defense of National Capital Region, it's another one, and you have the Air Force SUADS System, SUADS, which I talked about. Three different systems there. We are the camera of choice in every one of them. They're being deployed already around every Air Force base, at least in Europe, and later, maybe most of that. Other things, we have additional seeker opportunities. I would say that to some degree, VisiBeAT has turned into a sort of heat-seeking expert, if you would, or the NGSRI has driven quite a bit of interest and quite a bit going on there that we have quite something there. Space programs, we talked about.
Optical assemblies for FPV drones, we do a lot of it. I mean, we just do a tremendous amount of those assemblies, like we saw in the image, those tiny one lens, two lens assembly. We produce them now also in Riga, because they produce them to some country nearby, we know it, in very large volumes. The different programs here, Drone Dominant or whatever name it is, pretty much all of them have this in some type of. We are not playing on the full camera side in that. That is more driven by the sensor companies like FLIR, EOS, and such, but we are providing the optical assemblies for most of them. Then we have existing missile programs. Some of them have been going on for years. Like White Thunderbolt has publicly talked about making optics that go into the A9 side window.
You might have seen images of it here. We're very proud of it. It's been ongoing for many, many years. Those are scaling up. Every missile program we're in, existing program, is pretty much tripling in size and production throughput. We're enjoying that too. New products? New products. Yep. What's coming up in the pipeline? Just to give some taste there. Obviously, on G5 side, quite a bit, the redesign of the cameras by end of the autumn. We plan to have all the cameras using Black Diamond instead of germanium. Performance is the same or improved, you wouldn't even be able to know it's a different camera design when you look at it. Even when you take it apart, to be honest, you wouldn't probably know that. It's the same size, identical size, weight, interface, nothing changes in that.
Optical performance is at least the same. In some cases, it's even a bit better. We're redesigning the 1,000-millimeter camera. With the BlackDiamond, we actually might be able to push it to be a 1,030 millimeter. Sounds small, but it's actually every bit counts there. That's a very big effort inside the company. On the optics side, we continue to expand offering by adding more and more of those fixed focus assemblies. They work with detectors such as Teledyne FLIR's Ozone, EOS Tenem, and so on. Sometimes we provide them to customers that buy from them, the detector, and assemble it. Sometimes we provide them to the camera, company that makes the detectors. For example, Seek Thermal is one of those companies out in Santa Barbara.
We provide them pretty much with all their optics that goes into their cameras, and it's being talked about publicly. Driving the TRL level, technology readiness level, for more of the NOM compositions. That's now with effort by Steve Mielke and the team in Amorphous. It's helping a lot there. All the time, more and more design wins for BlackDiamond in defense programs. For the Amorphous materials that we acquired, I mentioned Amorphous had a portfolio of eight materials, some of their own. Amorphous never offered them as optics, only as raw material for others to make the lenses parts. Of course, we can immediately offer lenses if anyone wants, but more importantly, is between the 14 coating chambers that we have in Riga, in G5, in New Hampshire, and here in Orlando, we can also are developing coatings for all those materials.
We'll be able to offer much more of that. Amorphous' revenue was probably about $3 million a year, $2 million-$3 million a year, give or take, only of selling the material. We'll expand on that because we can offer much more now. Good?
Yeah. Great, you can. Oh, you do? All right, I got it. All right, our approach to M&A, and Sam actually said a lot of this already, so it's a little bit of a repeat. Obviously, it's accretive. We do not want to buy a fixer-upper. We want something that we can, you know, plug and play into our organization. Obviously, technology, product. We're looking for something in a fast-growing market segment. Culture, we're looking for strong cultural fit. I'll come back to that. Growth. So far, we've identified companies that are pre-late stage. Visimid, G5, and dare I say, Amorphous, and we've had $3 million. A year from now, I'm hoping we'll tell you something completely different there. Not so easy to find.
You really have to spend a lot of time upfront, in, you know, pre-due diligence, just to get to know them before. Definitely looking for companies that fit that profile, and vertical integration. Anything that helps us in our strategy of, vertical integration. Why I wanna jump back to culture is because, culture eats strategy for lunch. I can make that up, you guys know that. Culture is very, very important in terms of the post-merger integration process, so that what we buy fits, right? We don't have that hurdle. We have every other hurdle in integration, but not that one. Pathway to profitability. This is now just a summary of everything Sam said up till now, right? We're in a multi-billion dollar, infrared, imaging market. BlackDiamond is a differentiator.
It's an alternative to germanium, of course, it's also technologically superior, right? In a bunch of different ways. Strategically or directionally, we're a solutions provider, that doesn't change. We have $90 million... Sorry for that. $103 million as of today in backlog, it is predominantly government. New commercial applications Sam went through. We didn't talk a lot about this. I did have some side conversations with a few of you about efficiency within the design team, taking design to manufacturing and manufacturing itself. Having this level of backlog, we have to be very efficient on the back end, but ultimately our pathway to profitability comes from revenue growth, but it's not like we're not doing the blocking and tackling to get things right as well. We do both of that.
We're sizing the company, the production, the New Product Introduction, NPI, for capabilities to try in excess of $300 million in five years.
Sam mentioned 150 is just no longer a challenge.
Five years ago, he said 100 and more, even three years ago, I said $150 million. Sam believes in being ambitious, so we are literally building an organization to do that. All right. We talked a little bit about the facilities. Sam did mention that the one place where we didn't have backup was Glasson in Orlando. Well, the acquisition solves that problem, but certainly within the next three to six months, we'll have sufficient redundancies in both areas. These are great locations, by the way. You know, if you're in the defense and commercial business, these are great footprints for manufacturing and being sort of the right place at the right time for engineers and competency in the markets that we play in. Well, everybody always wants to know about cash, right?
Because we're small companies, how much cash are you guys gonna need? I'm not gonna give you an exact answer. We had $73 and a half million cash on hand as of 12/31. We also paid off a $5.4 million note as part of the G5 acquisition. That was done before December 31st as well. For fiscal year 2026, we obviously just already did the AMI acquisition. We have the G5 earn-out that actually is more than three days from now. We started the CapEx expansion for those of you here physically, started, saw some of the work that's being done, certainly not all. Most of that will be here and in Texas. For the fiscal year, we'll be operating cash positive at the operating level. Fiscal 2027, G5 earn-out.
These are major cash events, we call it. G5 earn-out 2, continue with the CapEx expansion, you know, more related to growth and capability. If you imagine that chart to the right, well, we definitely have our work cut out for us, we'll finish fiscal year 2027 well-positioned on cash. $65 million raise does put us in a different position, we'll have dry powder for acquisitions, even, you know, if you allow me.
Yes, yeah, it's true.
It's not just me, there's the team announce.
We'll be positioned pretty well even then, right? We're in a good spot.
Question I do get asked often is where we are in terms of shares and dilution. The common shares are $55 million out there. That's the basis for the EPS. You saw that in the filing in December. we just come up with the all-in comment. If you convert the Series G, and pick preferred, which is for the G5 acquisition, there's no other warrants outstanding, so that's great, those are gone. G5 and NS, and just your general stock incentives for directors on, and our ESOP program and everything else, we're fully diluted, about $73 million.
That opens it up for questions. We're taking virtual questions also or just here?
Yeah, just here.
Okay.
Hit me.
Hi, Austin Moore, Canaccord. I cover a lot of satellite companies on the electro-optical and infrared side, Maxar, BlackSky, Mynaric, et cetera. I was just wondering where you think your products would be strategically positioned in the telescope sector. I know, like, Raytheon is at the very high end, and then there's, like, DRS that's becoming involved as well. I guess just based on, like, 17-inch diameter versus some of the other really very high-resolution, exquisite telescopes, where your products.
Yeah, I'd say from a supply point of view of stars, there's some players like L3Harris, for example, that have extensive design capabilities in-house. They're not.
What design and production? They would probably want us to make the optics, but maybe not the full telescopes. There are some of the newer players that, you know, as new entrants tend to be, they're focusing on their strengths and not trying to do everything themselves. In those cases, we could be supplying the, a fully assembled telescope for that. In terms of size and such, it's very dependent on functionality and distance of the satellite. Lower orbit or geosynchronous, such can be very different ones. The SDA have been talking about what they call a neighborhood satellite. I guess the, sort of in the sense of satellites that are so specific to an area, they almost like cover a neighborhood or a very small portion.
Historically, because the satellites were so expensive, launch was so expensive, everything, you would have 1, 2, 3 mega satellites sitting in geosynchronous, imaging the entire half of the planet they can see. With lower orbit, with constellations, there's talks about hundreds of satellites, thousands of them, almost disposable like. One degree, on one hand, short lifespan of 2 years. On the other hand, launch is already becoming so readily available. There's programs talking about having an inventory of satellites ready to launch at 24-hour notice, so that they can launch and cover specific areas when they need it. I'm not sure if that answers the question in full, but that's how I see it.
Yeah. I would assume the replacement cycle there on LEO and VLEO is obviously very favorable to your operation.
Yeah, 2 years, crunches, pretty much. The commercial go much faster, and we work with quite a few of the commercial ones. The planning of SDA and those guys are, you know, crunches every time.
Maybe a question for both of you on M&A. You had a slide there and talked a little bit about it. I guess the first thing is, excuse me, about where, you know, So the ones you've done so far, which obviously have been successful, other than Amorphous, which seems like it can be very successful, but it's been companies you've known very well and even worked with. I would also imagine another avenue to identifying these companies is through defense primes, who, you know, might see a Visimid is doing some great work, but isn't big enough.
Yeah.
Do you see that as another avenue to find these companies? Ultimately, what's the appetite for doing something in the next year of any, of any real size, like G5?
The first part, appetite, definitely so. We're actually seeing it all sometimes the other way around. We're seeing a small company, we love the potential, and we validate with a defense prime that they are really going to be a major part of it, or the defense prime is thinking of them for a specific program or so on. Kind of similar to Visimid, in a way, you know, Visimid, we didn't come across them because of NGSRI like that. In Amorph, Lockheed made it very clear during the due diligence when we contacted them, that they would be thrilled by that, and it worked out very well, right?
The Amorph is the 8% of their revenue or so goes to one very large defense prime, the defense prime was ecstatic by the fact that we picked them up as their partner for our family now. Definitely see that as a possibility. We try to keep in touch with the defense prime, to make it clear that, you know, that it's something we're open to discussing when they have that. Not always know who are the right people to talk to there, we try to do that. In terms of appetite, the answer would be very different here. I have an appetite all the time, the team, you know, is very, very stretched, like, size, pretty much. We're on track to continue at a very breakneck speed.
We have a lot of different things we need to execute on. Even though the size of our bench has increased, you know, three years ago, through an acquisition, it was the two of us. We did the entire due diligence and everything, and pretty much, or with Natalie actually doing most of it. Now, you know, we have a bigger bench, and we have width acquisitions, came more people, very, very talented people, and we recruit more seniors, so we can do a bit more. The Amorph one moved very, very quickly. I mean, it was like less than two months from concept, from contacting them to closing the acquisition. I think the team needs to signal to me when they are ready, but we definitely have the opportunity to sign.
We have an interesting pipeline, and the nice thing about having cash in the bank and about showing that you've done three successful acquisitions, is people start calling you.
You know anybody rich in L.A.?
In terms of capacity expansion, you're talking pretty aggressively. When we think about CapEx for that, is it pretty linear, or are there any sort of long lead time, big step function, capacity that has to be added, or is this a pretty linear process?
The next 12 months-18 months will probably be a bit heavier because we need to catch up on some CapEx that we were sort of not doing when we were tight on cash and couldn't do them. We're launching some, you know, very significant product lines, and after that, it's pretty linear. Thank you. It is the, again, the higher value items as we go, the better we go up the food chain, the less CapEx intensity it is, right? We're starting to benefit from that. I mean, the old LightPath would need very significant CapEx as a % of revenue compared to what we need now.
Jason?
Yeah, just, you've mentioned sort of this 3-5-year window. Is that just based on kind of other competitors that will catch up from a product standpoint, or just given the number of programs?
Oh, yeah, it's just paranoia.
Yeah.
It's based on the assumption that no one is sitting back and just letting us, you know, eat their cake and take their lunch. People are working on other alternatives to germanium. U.S. government and other governments are working on getting production of germanium. It also reminds, it's, you know, we've shown our materials are also a lot more than just alternative to germanium. It's more the, we have a golden opportunity right now to be a bit more aggressive and capture more significant market shares.
Mark Jeffries with Piper Sandler. I was just curious about the implication of the cost structure as you decontent G5. You know, is this a place where there's immediate cost benefit, or will you have to scale it to those new products with Black Diamond?
It will cost to on redesign G5, okay. Let me put it this way. When germanium was $1,000 a kilo, we were struggling to be competitive with it, with Black Diamond. When germanium was $1,000 a kilo because China was subsidizing it heavily to drive all other players out of the market. When germanium went up to $2,000 a kilo, which happened after the first announcement of China, Black Diamond became competitive easily. Germanium is now at $6,800 a kilo, and we're not planning to change the pricing of the cameras or G5 when we make them with Black Diamond, so we'll benefit from that. Any other questions? Yeah, Richard, please.
kind of looking at the technology and product development, I guess more of a technology question here. The Amorphous Materials acquisition gave you bigger geometries. You know, BlackDiamond is a different material composition, and then you talked about coatings. Is there any other major elements to, you know, today's differentiation or where you may be going? Are there other angles of differentiation you can add in the future?
Yes, I'm not sure, you know, that's a point of sharing them too much. You know, it ties into the three to five year. We never rest and say, "This is what we have, and that is it." You know, the things we can develop and do now with Amorphous, with people like, you know, Steve Mielke here, and capabilities of the different teams that will keep creating differentiators. I don't want to share too much about what they are because it's a public broadcast. I don't know who is everyone listening. We're investing some of our money in the R part of R&D to continue to develop differentiators. That's all, yeah.
Just a quick follow-up on two of these angles here. Obviously, Amorphous gives you the bigger diameter lenses, up to 17 inches. Is there a need and interest in going much bigger than that?
I'm not familiar with any need right now.
You said you have 20 material systems in the Black Diamond portfolio, or maybe not just in Black Diamond, but in total. Like, how many more could there need? What are some ways that you might have something new?
Some of the types of materials we might look at doing down the road. For example, the BlackDiamond, which I mentioned, cover long wave, midwave, short wave. Some of them cover the near infrared. None of them cover the visible. We've been focusing on infrared, not because we want to do just infrared, but because when we decided to do the shift, it was clear that the visible was much more crowded in terms of technology and established technology, where infrared was changing, and it was an opportunity for us to enter. Our technologies of making the materials, whether they are an amorphous type of material or other types of glass, or fabricating from them and building systems, could apply to visible light, apply to ultraviolet light, apply to all trends. You know, we could see ourselves going down that path.
Yeah, please.
Obviously, there's a lot of opportunity right now on the military side with, like, the Drone Dominant program and the initiative to procure 2 million drones in the next two to three years. How does, on the commercial side, the ban, the FCC ban on Chinese drones open up the opportunity for LightPath, and how might you think about optics for commercial drones in the U.S. and your revenue mix?
I think the jury is still out a bit in how exactly the FCC ban is gonna roll out. It, on one hand, it was, for those that don't know, the FCC ban was supposed to be the DJI ban, called colloquially. And it turns out when they published it, the FCC is banning any new drones or critical drone components from any country outside the U.S. In fine print, unless DOD or DOW now and Department of Homeland Security provide an exemption to those companies. I don't know yet what the level of that exemption is gonna be, how it's gonna play out in the cameras. I do know that there are companies looking at doing final assembly of cameras here in the U.S.
Not necessarily building the entire camera, but doing final assembly, and in that case, they will need our thermal imaging assembly. Those same fixed focus, small assemblies that we were showing, we provide a lot of them to drone companies. We were not looking at providing them. We were not thinking that would be necessarily an opportunity for the U.S. part that much, because we thought the cameras would be coming from Taiwan, where they produce those lenses, similar lenses in volume. That it looks like they will need to be assembled here, it is very likely that those assemblies we're gonna need to produce here, and Israel Piergiovanni, our VP manufacturing, is tasked with scaling up that production here in Orlando. There's a good opportunity there. We're probably not gonna go into the complete camera part for the smaller drones.
That is driven and dominated by whoever makes the sensor, so we're less positioned to be able to have a dominant position there, so to speak. The larger drones, where it's a payload and more than just a tiny camera, there we can start providing with our newer compact cameras and zooms and so on. Okay. Richard, please say.
Quick question for Al. You mentioned being operating cash flow positive in fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027. Do those include or exclude the G5 amounts?
Exclude. Exclude, that would be finance or investment. Just at the operating, right?
Okay. All right, thank you. This concludes today's webcast. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.