Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ron Bucchi. I'm Chairman of the Board of Lightwave Logic, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the company's 2025 annual meeting of shareholders. This meeting is also being webcast live, and the webcast will be posted on our website for a period of time after the meeting. Welcome to those shareholders participating by webcast, and also welcome everybody, and thank you for those who are attending here. The meeting will follow an agenda, copies of which have been placed on each chair, as indicates there will be a time for shareholders' questions at the end of the meeting. Before we begin the meeting, I would like to introduce the company's directors and executive officers who are with us today. I encourage you to take a moment and meet with them after the meeting.
As I call your name, directors, please stand up and turn around and introduce yourself. Yves LeMaitre , who is our CEO. Jim Marcelli, who is our CFO, COO, and secretary. Siraj Nour El-Ahmadi , who is our acting VP of engineering. Dr. Craig Ciesla , a member of our audit, compensation, and nominating and corporate governance committee. Laila Partidge , compensation committee chair and a member of the audit and nominating and corporate governance committees. And Tom Connelly, Jr., chair of the nominating and corporate governance committee and a member of the compensation committee. Also attending is Tom Zelibor, the company president. First, we will conduct the annual meeting to consider each of the proposals listed in the notice of the annual meeting of shareholders dated March 28, 2025, and to conduct such other business as may properly come before the meeting.
After the annual meeting is adjourned, Yves LeMaitre will provide a management presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. Jim Marcelli, our Corporate Secretary, will be recording the minutes of this meeting. David Siddal, the duly appointed representative of Broadridge Financial Inc., has been appointed to serve as inspector of election at the annual meeting. Mr. Siddal, will you please stand? He's in the back of the room there. Thank you, David. Mr. Siddal has signed the oath of office, which will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. I will now call on our Corporate Secretary, Jim Marcelli, to establish that we have met the necessary corporate requirements for this meeting. Jim?
Thank you. Good morning. We have proof that notice of this meeting has been duly given and that the notice of the annual meeting of shareholders, proxy statement, and proxy were mailed on or about April 1, 2025, to all shareholders of record at the close of business, March 24, 2025. The affidavit, together with copies of the notice, proxy statement, and proxy, will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. As of March 24th, 2025, the record date for the meeting, there were 126,604,522 shares outstanding. We have 64,185,765 shares present by person or proxy at this meeting, which is over 33⅓% of the outstanding shares and constitutes a quorum permitting the transaction of business. Each share is entitled to the title of the holder for one vote on each matter that may come before the meeting.
A list of registered shareholders entitled to vote is available for the examination by shareholders.
Thank you, Jim. Since a quorum is present, I will now call the meeting to order. The meeting will proceed as provided as in the agenda. The items to be voted upon are: one, to elect two directors to the board of directors to serve until the 2028 annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors have been duly elected or appointed and qualified; two, to ratify the appointment of Stephano Slack LLC to serve as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025; three, to approve Lightwave Logic's 2025 equity incentive plan; and four, to consider and take action upon such other business as may be properly come before the annual meeting or any adjournments thereof. Jim, would you please describe the voting process?
Thank you. We will be voting by proxy ballot on the agenda items described in the proxy statement previously sent to you. If you have already turned in a proxy card and you do not intend to change your vote, it is not necessary for you to vote again. However, for those of you who did not turn in a proxy card or if you wish to change your vote, please get a blank card from Mr. Siddal, our inspector of election, to use for voting today. If you take a ballot, please be sure to print your name and the number of shares you are voting on the ballot. If you have previously sent in a proxy card and you are changing your vote, please note this on your ballot. The ballots must be signed by the shareholder. After you complete the ballot card, please give it to Mr.
Siddal as soon as possible as results of the voting will be announced at the end of the formal portion of the meeting.
The first item of business is the election of two Class II directors to the board of directors to serve until the 2028 annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors have been duly elected, appointed, and qualified. The board of directors is comprised of seven directors and is divided into three classes currently comprised of two Class I directors whose terms expire at the 2027 annual meeting, two Class II directors whose terms expire at the 2025 annual meeting, and three Class III directors whose terms expire at the 2026 annual meeting. The board of directors has nominated two Class II incumbent directors for reelection and recommends a vote for the election of the two Class II incumbent directors. Our corporate secretary will now place the names of those nominees in nomination. Jim?
Thanks. The board of directors has nominated the following Class II directors to serve for a term of three years or until their successors are elected and qualified: Ronald Bucchi and Craig Ciesla . Advance notice must be given to the secretary of a shareholder's intent to nominate other persons as directors of the company. No such notice has been received. Accordingly, the nominations for directors are now closed. The nominee for directors receiving the highest number of votes will be elected to the board of directors. The proxy solicited by management will be voted in favor of the director nominees. I hereby move that Ronald Bucchi and Craig Ciesla be elected Class II directors to serve a term of three years or until their successors are elected and qualified.
The next item of business is the ratification of the appointment of Stephano Slack LLC as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2025. The vote required to ratify the appointment of Stephano Slack LLC to serve as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2025 is the affirmative vote of the holders of the majority of the votes entitled to vote on the matter. The board of directors recommends a vote for approval of this matter.
I hereby move that the appointment of Stephano Slack LLC as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year of 2025 be ratified.
The next item of business is to approve Lightwave Logic's 2025 equity incentive plan. We are asking shareholders to approve the Lightwave Logic 2025 equity incentive plan, which the board adopted on March 28, 2025, upon the recommendation of the compensation committee. The plan is intended to enhance the company's and affiliates' ability to attract, retain, and motivate employees, consultants, and non-employed directors to serve the company and its affiliates and to expend maximum effort to improve the business results and earnings of the company by providing to such persons an opportunity to acquire or increase a direct proprietary interest in the operations and future success of the company. The company believes that equity-based compensation is a critical part of the compensation program. Shareholder approval of the plan will allow us to continue to attract and retain talented employees, consultants, and non-employed directors with equity incentives.
The vote required to approve Lightwave Logic's 2025 equity plan is the affirmative vote of the holders of the majority of the votes entitled to vote on this matter. The board of directors recommends a vote for the approval of the Lightwave Logic Inc's 2025 equity incentive plan.
I hereby move that the Lightwave Logic Inc 2025 Equity Incentive Plan be approved.
There being no other items brought before the shareholders for a vote at this meeting, voting is now complete. All ballots must be turned in to Mr. Siddal at this time. The inspector of elections has tabulated the votes, and Mr. Siddal will now give us the report of the inspector of election. David?
The votes have now been counted, and the preliminary results are as follows. Ron Bucchi and Craig Ciesla have been elected as Class II directors to serve for the term of three years or until their successors are elected and qualified. Stephano Slack LLC has been duly appointed as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2025, and the Lightwave Logic 2025 Equity Incentive Plan has been approved.
Thank you, David. This concludes the annual meeting. The annual meeting of shareholders is adjourned. Yves LeMaitre, our CEO, will now provide you with a brief management presentation. The management presentation will remain posted on our website for a period of time after the meeting. Yves?
Thank you, Ron. Good morning to you all. Thank you for joining. It's nice to see some of our longtime shareholders and finally get the opportunity to meet them in person. I also want to thank the people who are attending through the webcast. This is, I guess, our third time corporate update call since the beginning of the year. We did one in January, one in March, and this is a great opportunity, of course, with the ASM to give you an update about the company. It's really a pleasure to be here and tell you about our story. As you know, when you have a technological revolution such as AI, you have a lot of companies who are trying to attach themselves to that market.
In our case, we believe that we indeed are going to play a key role in the evolution of AI networks, not just them, but also the optical communication markets at large. The picture I have here shows a representative AI factory built by NVIDIA. What you see here are racks and racks of equipment that are built using their GPUs, interconnected by switches with banks of memories. All of that is really a completely new architecture. It is really the third revolution for optical communication. The first one was when the optical networks were built using fiber optics. The second one was the advent of the internet and the cloud. This is the third revolution.
If you look at the key challenges that this industry is facing, and maybe I should have worn a laser jacket for this presentation, but I do not think I operate in the same league as Jensen, but actually, really, homework for you. After this, go on YouTube and look at Jensen Huang and NVIDIA keynote presentation at the GTC event. You do not have to listen to the first part. It is a lot about software, but when it gets to hardware, about middleware as well, you will hear how he explains so well the importance of optics and the role that silicon photonics will play in the future. If you listen to what he says, there are really four main challenges they are facing. Challenge number one is bandwidth.
All these connections between all these processors, they need to happen at the fastest possible rate with the lowest possible latency. That is where you have to use a technology like ours to bring the current state of technology, which is 100 Gbps, so 100 billion bits per second to 200, 400, and then ultimately a terabit. To do that, you're going to need new technology, new materials. We really believe that Lightwave Logic has one of these unique materials to be able to do that and solve the bandwidth problem. The second problem is connectivity. When you look at how these racks are being built, you realize that every GPU you're going to have is going to be connected to every other GPU. That happens through going through a series of switches across the racks, across the rows, and then across the building.
Those buildings, by the way, can reach the scale of a football stadium, just to give you a sense. When you do that, you're going to have to go through multiple connections using optics, using these 200 Gbps, 400 Gbps optics. The rule of thumb is that for every GPU, you need about six optical transceivers to reach the other side. These data centers are made up of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of GPUs. You do the multiplication and you realize the amount of optics that is required. Because of our ability to produce in high volume, because of the simple, very efficient nature of the materials we use, we believe we can not only meet the connectivity requirement, but also bring it at a high scale and at a very cost-competitive point.
The third and probably the most important challenge today is power. Energy is the most precious commodity today in building these large AI factories, AI clusters. Power is driven, number one, of course, by the GPUs themselves. The latest GPUs that are being deployed, the Blackwell, I can't remember the exact number. I think it's like 1,700 kW for a rack. You're talking about a huge number of energy required to process all the information inside such a data center or AI cluster. You're talking 100 MW. The largest one is a gigawatt. You're thinking about like a small city equivalent of power consumption built into this. Every saving on the power will help. We provide that in two ways with our electro-optic polymer. The first one is we can drive the performance of the modulator using very low voltage.
We talked about this Vπ parameter in some of our past presentations. Essentially, the voltage you need to activate the modulator, it's less than one volt. If you look at the other big advantage we have is because of the linear nature of our modulation technique, we can really bring a very clean and pure signal across the infrastructure, which means that when it reaches a signal, it reaches the other end. The work required by the processor to then decode the information and turn it back into electrons is far less than with other technologies. Not only are we saving on the optical part of the path, but we're also saving on the electronics part of the path by eliminating or reducing the need for digital signal processors. The final piece, which is more and more critical, is the need for integration.
You can see the amount of electronic, mechanical, fiber components, optical components that are included in such a data center or AI cluster. You need to have a roadmap that allows for these components to be tightly packed together, integrated together, built together, leveraging a lot of the technologies and investment that happen in the semiconductor industry. In order to do that, you need to have a technology that is CMOS compatible or silicon foundry compatible. We believe that not only are polymers capable of doing that, but they also lend themselves very well to advanced packaging technologies for putting optics and electronics chips together. This is an example more practical about where we are playing.
It is also an important example to explain that our technology is not only solving the problems that the AI cluster or hyperscalers are facing today, but will also help us fix their problem tomorrow. The application number one here that I wanted to illustrate is what we call scale-out. Scale-out meaning connecting all these different racks across the data center. You see that when you do that, you need to interconnect the different racks made of switches to each other. Typically, you're going to go through two, three, four, or five of them, depending on how big your data center is or your AI cluster. When you do that, you use that using transceivers. I'm sure you guys have heard about these transceivers in the past. You hear about these 1.6 terabits per second transceivers, which are state-of-the-art, using 8 times 200 Gbps.
They are migrating to 3.2 Tbps , so doubling in capacity, and they're going to be using 400 Gbps per lane. Those are the traditional transceivers. It's a number one market for us. It's a market that is high volume today and drives significant volume in the industry. It does not stop there. You have the scale-out from the GPU rack to the switch. That's a new application. That is the one that, if you listen to Jensen Huang's presentation, he's talking about, because that part of the connectivity is moving from traditional transceivers to what is called CPO or co-packaged optics. When that happens, optics gets closer to the electronics, and that's kind of the next phase of our technology evolution. The third and final phase is what we call scale-up, which is connecting the different processors within the rack.
This is done by copper today, and at some point in the future, it will move to optical connections. You will use photons to transmit from electronics chip to electronics chip over very small distances. This tells you that not only our technology is relevant for today, but we are putting all the actions in place to make sure that our technology stays relevant as this evolution of the data center and the AI clusters is happening. Next slide. Let's give you a sense of where we are in terms of market, market size, and what we can address with our technology. This is an estimate for 2028 from a very reputable firm. I strongly recommend their work. It's a company called Light Counting.
They've been following this market for more than 15 years, and they have the best data in terms of the number of products of different types. The way I look at this is we have three target markets, and I'll start with the first one, which is AI, the one we talked the most about. It's 2028. That market for a combination of transceivers and CPO is estimated to be in the range of $10 billion. That is made mostly of 1.6 Tbps and 3.2 Tbps transceivers or CPO operating at 200 Gbps per lane or more. If you translate that into what is relevant for Lightwave Logic, this means that it's probably about 160 million individual modulators embedded into the silicon chip. The market doesn't stop there.
You still have the traditional data center market that has existed for a long time and continues to strive. That market is roughly a $7 billion time. That is about 18 million units here of high-speed transceivers at 100 Gbps plus per lane. That is another 70 million modulators potentially that is being used for that market. Finally, the one that we do not talk much about, but again, is still a vibrant market, is the telecom market, the whole network infrastructure to interconnect data centers and also to cope with the growth of traffic between our major cities. That market is about a $7 billion time. Those products are actually far less units, but they also sell at a much higher price because they have to carry optical signals over much longer distances. It is about 2 million units of this coherent DWDM type of transceivers.
It is about another 4 million modulators. If you look at all of that, we believe that based on the value of the modulator integrated into the chip, that translates for Lightwave Logic into a serviceable market in 2028, somewhere between $1 billion and $2.5 billion. That is the market that we can serve by supplying our modulator materials to people who build the chips that will then integrate these modulators. It can be a single modulator, it can be four modulators, eight modulators, or whatever numbers they decide to include on their chips. I would like to add before we move on how we are going to measure our progress against that is that there are potential additional markets that I will not mention here.
We are very focused on the optical communication market and very focused on AI, but I don't want our investor to forget that we also have other potential markets down the road. Quantum computing has a need for technology like ours, aerospace and defense, as well as some consumer electronics applications that require manipulation of light. If we focus on this 2028 market, which is really our objective, what are the critical milestones that we have to reach as Lightwave Logic? The first one is to get multiple major design wins with the companies who build those chips or build those transceivers. That is our number one priority, and I'll cover that next on where we are on that front. The second is to make sure that our technology is winning against alternatives. We should not forget that this is a super competitive market.
There are many companies and many technologies who are trying to capture this and many different architectural approaches. Our goal, of course, is to get a majority share at this transition from 200 Gbps to 400 Gbps. Of course, we have to continue to work on our technology to make sure that we continue to address the needs that will come. It is such a vibrant market with such an investment, it is sometimes difficult to know what is coming next. Our own customers do not quite know themselves because they are looking at many different technology alternatives. We are constantly talking to them to make sure that we do not miss a step and that our polymers stay relevant in future architectures as well. Next slide.
I've shown that slide before, and the reason I wanted to bring it back is we pivoted our market position from last year to this year to really focusing on the biggest opportunity and the shortest time to market for us, which was materials and licensing of our technology. We have been working on that, and a lot of investors and shareholders have asked me about our progress there, and I wanted to give you kind of a status report, starting with what happened at OFC. OFC is this big show, Optical Fiber Conference, happens every year around March, and it was always kind of a good way to check where we were in terms of our progress. We had more than 20 meetings at the show.
I think what was really interesting for me is that the number one topic discussed at the show was how are we going to migrate to 400 Gbps per lane. That, of course, triggered a lot of interest for us because we are one of the options that people can look at and one of the very few options that are potentially there. We got a lot of traction, and I'll cover that next, with both tier one silicon photonics design houses as well as new players. There are also kind of new companies, new startups that are starting to appear in that space. You have both established and new potential customers. A key learning point was also how much of that investment is happening in Asia. By Asia, I really mean a combination of Singapore, Malaysia, mainland China, and Taiwan.
It is very clear that the signal that was sent by NVIDIA when they worked with TSMC on the next generation products kind of woke up the semiconductor world that optics was something they really had to take seriously. They started to do that, and they start to invest. You see companies and areas that were more focused on electronics and semiconductor technologies before that are shifting their attention to optics because they know they cannot just do one. They are going to have to have access to both as those technologies are converging and being integrated. The result of that also is that a few years ago, when you were talking silicon photonics foundries, you only had a few options, and the companies that were interested in that market were kind of few.
Now, because of this, all the bigger players in the semiconductor foundry world are now spending money, attention, and internal investment on how they're going to integrate silicon photonics with the rest of their semiconductor business, both at the wafer fabrication unit level, the fabs, but also at the advanced packaging that they use. This actually gives us access to potentially more tools and more options in terms of technology implementation and fab implementation. Now, this is a design win cycle. I had a lot of questions since I took the job on how we're progressing in terms of customers. Are we getting deals?
I saw that before getting to the specifics of where we are in terms of customers, it's important to educate you about, some of you know it already, but some don't, about what is the process to get your technology selected and win a customer. I would say that it really starts by technology selection phase. When the first time we meet customers, we usually, after one or two meetings, we're going to sign an NDA so that we can openly share information with them. Really, our goal at that point is to tell them and demonstrate to them that we have superior performance compared to alternatives, that we also have now achieved a level of stability and reliability in terms of our materials, that our materials are stable and they're going to work and operate for a long time.
This has been a key question for polymers, and especially for electro-optic polymers. We think we have made some significant breakthrough over the last two years about that. I think Siraj will touch on that during his presentation. This is a question that often comes to me when we do these first meetings. Also, we have to show that not only do we have superior performance and reliability, but we're also very good in all of the other important aspects of deploying this technology: size, power, cost, ability to scale. That's kind of step one. We call that the technology selection. If we pass that stage, usually we enter, and that period can last from three to six months, and there's no hard rule. Different customers do it differently. Some do it faster. Some are very ask for a lot of information.
It takes them a longer time. The second phase is a product design. Then our customers work with us and say, "Okay, you've convinced me that your technology is the best. How do I use it now?" That is where we supply them what we call a process design kit, which is essentially kind of a little guidebook or user manual of how to use polymers and how to integrate it into their silicon photonics chip. It covers a lot of the details of how to embed our structure, how to protect our structure. We also help them in their modulator design. They are going to have an idea about how to design the modulator. We have learned a lot through the years about how to do this, how to do this efficiently, the best size, the best aspect ratio, the best position of the RF drivers.
We do that with them. We also, at that point, start thinking about how, which foundry are we going to use, the other specific constraints that they have or that we have that need to be taken into account in selecting the foundry. Of course, we also say and work together on how we're going to make sure that the combined product of our polymer onto their chip is going to be highly reliable. That is a phase that also typically takes three to six months, again, depending on the customer's know-how rules. We really launch the program. We start building prototypes. We get wafers from foundries. We process them. We test them, and we try to qualify them. This is the phase we call phase three, where we go from a prototype to a final product.
That phase, typically, you're going to have an alpha product, which is kind of the first product you're going to try. You might have a beta product where you feel this is kind of the final product, and then you're going to have your final product. You can have multiple iterations depending on how successful you are, depending on how difficult it is. Also, during that phase, that's where you do the final qualification of your product to make sure that that product indeed is reliable enough to be deployed in the data center or in the AI factories.
You also, at that time, start working on making sure that your manufacturing yields, your process yields are high so you know that when you get it into production, not only will you be able to deliver the volume, but you also deliver the product at the right cost point. That is phase three. That lasts from 12 months-18 months. Again, no hard rules, but that is kind of a general feeling of how long it lasts. Finally, when all that is done, you have been selected, the customer is selling its end product to the end user, and then the volume starts to run. That is where you, when revenue starts kicking in. That is where you start supporting the customer on any process or yield issues that might still happen. You participate with them in new generation of products or variants of these products.
They might want a flavor that goes a little bit longer in distance or a little bit shorter or with a different format. We work a lot on that, and we support them. Of course, you continue to work with them to prepare for next generation products. That is where we are. Now, that is a typical cycle of a design win. Overall, again, there is no hard rule, but 18 months to two years is what it takes from beginning to getting to that production stage, from stage one to stage four. Next slide. Where are we today? Actually, before I go on the specifics, I want to make sure you also understand that I am always asked that question, "Why do not you disclose more about your customers?
Are you hiding something? I want you to understand that our customers are extremely sensitive about disclosing who they work with. There are good reasons for this. They compete with each other. They do not want to give any information to their competition about the type of modulator they are using for this product or that product. It can be ours, by the way. Same for our competition. If you look at our competition and how much they disclose about who their customers are, they do not because they cannot. The customers do not want that. That is something I really want you to understand because it is always a touchy point, but it is the reality of how this business operates. Now, sometimes there is a mutual advantage in disclosing the relationship. That is something we did with Polariton.
Polariton is a really exciting startup based in Europe, and they are trying to bring plasmonics, which is kind of the next generation of technologies from traditional electronics, to a reality. They felt that it was in their interest. There was mutual interest to disclose our relationship because they felt like we gave them a lot of credibility by showing that they had access to the best, most better performing material in the world for electro-optics performance. For us, it was interesting to show that our technology was also not limited to silicon photonics or silicon's organic hybrid, but we had a path to the next generation of this THz, terabits per second transmission. That's an exception. It's not the rule. Where are we today? Today, we have about 20 customers in the pipeline that we are trying to bring to stage one and stage two.
It is a lot of work to do this. There are a lot of technical meetings that need to happen, a lot of resources. That is why we are excited to have hired Robert Blum as our new SVP of Sales and Marketing. He is going to help me and help Atikem with being kind of carrying the flag here in dealing with many of these customers and make sure we have quality interaction with them. In addition to these 20 customers, 10 of them are currently in stage one or stage two. Okay. It means that we are engaged in heavy technical discussions with them on the topics I was mentioning before, the performance of the device or reliability of the device, the ability to integrate, the qualification, the reliability. We have one customer in stage three. We already published it. It is Polariton.
We are targeting to have three to five customers in stage three by the end of 2025. This is very critical for us in order to meet then the opportunity that will happen to bring volume production in late 2027, early 2028. That is really where we are in terms of our volume ramp. Very encouraging customer engagement and customer response to our changing go-to-market strategy, but still a lot of work in front of us, but exciting work and good progress. With that, I will now let Siraj tell you a lot about our technologies and some of the progress we have made. Siraj?
Thank you, Yves. Good morning, everyone. I think Yves has done a good job positioning our technology and our product within the DataCamp AI ecosystem. I'll just try to give you a little bit more color. Here on the right is, as Yves said, our technology can be used as interconnect between racks, between switches. Now with the just vast amount of data that AI has to process, they need now to interconnect their GPUs at very high bandwidth, high speed. The best way to do that that we know of is optically, not electrically, in terms of the speed, which is very important. If you think about these large language models, they have 7, 8 billion parameters. Thinking about doing matrix multiplication, that big. They really need to move to this flat architecture.
This is just a cluster of eight GPUs, and you can see how many interconnections between each of them. For them to make the decision, the data needs to move back and forth between these processors at amazing speed. Just to give you an idea, when you do a Google search, let's say it's going to take X amount of transactions of computation. When you do a ChatGPT search, it takes 10X. It burns 10X more power, and there is 10X more data that's being transferred back and forth between these servers and these processors. As you can see, if you want a flat network without a switch, because the switch adds latency, you can see it's a network effect. The connection grows as n squared. If you have 10 nodes, you're going to need 100 of those connections. Now, those connections are moving to optics.
Each connection would need two transceivers, and each one of that transceiver would have four of our devices in. It is really mind-boggling. It is a true revolution. There is an inflection point in the industry that we have not seen that is about to happen. As Jensen said, the only way they can do this is optically. There is no other way. Now, revolution has been happening. Optics has been extremely successful, especially in DataCamp. The reason is silicon photonics. Silicon is a very mature technology. There have been trillions of dollars invested. We understand it very well. The industry figured out how to make silicon work optically as a transmission medium, as a switching medium. Because of silicon, you have scale. You do a wafer level. Cost is very well understood. The yield is very high.
That is how the industry was able to keep the price down and be able to build this vast network. Unfortunately, silicon also, there are laws of physics, and it hits a wall. There is a performance wall that just you cannot make it run much faster than it already is. This is exactly like Yves said, 100 Gb per lane today is basically the standard. We need to move to 400 Gb per lane. This is really the challenge. All other technologies just do not meet the cost points that we need. It just would not work. Silicon has been great, but it hit the wall. Therefore, there is opportunity for new materials, and there is a need for it to be able to maintain this revolution. This is where we come in.
We believe our material is the key differentiator for two reasons. One, next. Just go through it, please. One is it's got the performance in terms of the speed and the power because power consumption, some of the new data centers, I'm sure you guys read, they're looking at building a nuclear plant next to them because of the amount of power that's needed. The speed is another one. The third one that I like is because it's inherently compatible with CMOS. We do not reject CMOS. We can use it. We can work with it, and we can augment where it falls short. The CMOS and semiconductor technology is very good at large-scale integration. You can put more devices, more performance in one chip, and you get that. Now, it's falling short on the performance, and we're just laser-focused on that.
It says everything else, you guys know how to do it. You fell short on speed and power, and we're going to help you with that. Over the years, Lightwave Logic has built the institutional knowledge about how we can design these organic materials that has the performance. This factor here, the electro-optic coefficient, determines both the speed at which you can run these interconnect at as well as how much power to activate those modulators. We've been doing a very good job designing these materials with the highest performance, and this is public data that's been published. The other part of it is really reliability, which is, okay, for a long time, at least in academia, we know organic could have very high performance, but can they last? Can they be reliable?
When you're in these applications, you're selling billions of photons per second, and you're doing it for 5, 10 years. You can imagine the stress you put this material, and it needs to be reliable. We've been always very good at synthesizing these materials with the highest performance. The other key was really how do you make them reliable? I would say that was the breakthrough that we did over the last year, six months, where now not only can we make high performance, we don't need to compromise on the solution space. We can make the performance, and we can make it reliable. We did it two ways, the type of material, the chromophore that we synthesize, as well as how we protect them.
Once we make them, what kind of conditioning, what kind of protection we can add to it to make them really robust. That is a big thing. Next, please. If you look, like I said, the industry understands. I mean, it was quite amazing to me at OFC when we were meeting with the customer. In previous years, we pretty much have to go and ask them to please give us some time, sit down with us. We want to tell you what we have. They were coming to us this year. It is like the industry is rooting for us to be successful. I have never seen that. All my career being developing technology, and I have been taking it and pushing it and trying to convince people, "Give me some time. Listen, I think you are going to be interested." The whole industry now realized that existing technology is not viable.
They need something new. The people telling them, "Please just show us today that we want you to be successful." That is quite, at least for me and my experience, that is quite unique. I have not seen that. Truly, the industry is rooting for our success. If you look at our biggest competitor today, which is lithium niobate, now lithium niobate has been since the 1960s what enabled the whole optical revolution. In fact, one of our ex-board members, you know, Dr. Fredly Hamburger, invented that then. He was the first one to commercialize it. It has some issues in terms of performance. If you look at, remember I said the electro-optic coefficient r33 determines the speed and determines the loss or the performance. You can see they are at about 31 picometer per volt.
We're over 200, so almost 7X better performance. It's also a solid crystal. The integration, like Yves said, this transceiver, it's not have one modulator. We'll have four or eight. Just being a single crystal, integrating it with a silicon photonic or any other technology is very painful because you got to take each one of these, and then you have to wire bind them to the chip. Whenever you wire bind, there is a wire which includes parasitics, which diminishes the performance. There is also the cost because these are grown in a 3, maybe 6-inch wafer. Silicon photonic is a 8 -inch and 12-inch. There is also a difficult, it's a new technology, thin film, so there is a yield issue. It's just expensive, and it's very difficult to do at large scale. By contrast, we have the performance, and it's totally compatible with silicon.
Basically, you design your silicon photonic, you get the wafer, and then we can process it. We spin coat our polymer. We put our secret sauce on top to make it reliable, and then off you go. It still looks and feels just like any silicon photonic technology, as opposed to making this very difficult heterogeneous hybrid integration between lithium niobate and silicon. This is really what makes us extremely attractive. Now, there is a lot of work. I mean, we have to, we're able to do it at the chip level. Now we're working to be able to do it at the wafer scale level because that's the only way you're going to get the scale, and with the scale, you bring the cost down, and you bring the yield up. Next slide, please. Like I said, the reliability is extremely important.
They do not want these links to go down, and they need to run 24/7. Right now, data centers, they look for five years. In my world, Telecom, they wanted 10 years. We are designing everything for 10 years. Just to give you an idea, if you have these polymers, there is some polymer is plastic, and they can become liquid at some time. When the temperature raises, they become liquid. That is called glass transition temperature. If you design a material with an 85°C glass transition temperature, and you run it, operating it at 65°C , which is typically in a data center, there is a lot of heat. Now they are cooling it because these GPUs generate a lot of heat. They are using even liquid cooling, but it is not going to be cold. If you have that such material, your lifetime is about nine and a half hours.
That's it. Then it will start degrading. Now, on the other hand, if our material has a TG about, actually, it's more, we're like more 180°C . If you're operating it at 85, which is the GPUs will fail before our thin film because nobody's running that high. Even at that extreme, this is called industrial temperature. Let's say they want to use our antennas, our transceiver in a 5G antenna, which is out there in the Arizona desert. You might get to the 85°. You can see even at that, which at one, if your TG is 150° , you get a 1.5-year lifetime. We're here. This is our material. Our chromophore are well designed to withstand these temperatures and to be inherently more stable, more reliable. We did not stop at that. We actually developed new processes.
I want to thank the team that are here. Done really a good job, came up with new materials, new structure. There was a lot of iteration. We were able to show that with the starting with a good stock of material and then adding another layer of protection, if you wish, we actually can pass the most egregious reliability standard. Next slide, please. We keep talking about why CMOS is important, and I hope we conveyed that. The flow is really simple. You would design your silicon photonics anyway, the way you see fit. We get the wafer. We do a spin coat on material on the wafer. We protect it with our secret sauce. We pull it, which is basically we apply some voltage to improve the performance. Then you're done. After that, you can dice it. You have a wafer level.
You dice it. You take the modulators. In fact, the beauty of CMOS, again, is you get everything. You get both the transmitter, all the channels, and all the receiver in one chip. With one chip, you have both the transmit receive. You add a laser to it. You add some electronic, and you're done. All this is going into this is the typical transceiver. Next slide, please. Okay. Right. What happened to my slide? Okay. There is a new so what I want to convey to you is we passed the threshold. I think there is a true inflection point at the industry. Industry does recognize there is a need for a new technology. They're very hesitant to design in and qualify new technologies. They're very expensive and very long endeavor, like Yves said.
Companies are very reluctant to switch to a new technology that's not going to carry them for several generations because you just cannot afford. You're going to switch to a new technology, learn it, qualify it, and then as the speed keeps moving, we're at 400 Gb today, interconnection moving to 800 Gb, 1.6 Tb, and next is 3.2 Tb. The industry would like to switch. If they're going to make that switch, they want to make it to a technology that's going to carry them for more than one generation. We can tell you right now, the lithium niobate, the thin film lithium niobate, which is our biggest competitor, will not have that bandwidth. It's good for 400 Gb. It's good for 800 Gb. Big question mark if it's going to get to 1.6 Tb. Definitely not, it's going to get to 3.2 Tb. We have that opportunity.
There's been some measurement actually done with our product that shows the bandwidth can be up to 1 THz. That's 1,000 gigahertz. Just to give you an idea, today what we need is about 120-140 gigahertz. That's what the industry needs today. Our material can go to 1 THz. That gives you how much runway we have with our material in terms of next generation optical interconnect. Now, obviously, other things need to happen, but we have enough performance bandwidth to be able to carry the industry for a few generations. The key things is how do you make it reliable? I think that was something that was a breakthrough last, say, four, six quarters for us. We're very happy with that.
We actually run some, there is a test that Telcordia does, which is called damp heat, which you run the device at 85°C , and you put it at 85° humidity. It's really, think of, I don't know. I don't think even Louisiana gets that humid, but really harsh environment. The data so far that we have, it looks pretty good. It's pretty stable. It's not affected. We can have, so just to summarize, I think we're not pursuing any breakthrough innovation at this time. I think we are where we need to be. It's engineering. No, I don't want to diminish that work. There is still a lot of work that's left that we need to do, but it's work. We have critical mass in terms of institutional knowledge, in terms of the team.
We are working with very smart customers, which is we did not have that opportunity in the past because when you engage the smart customer, that's when the rubber meets the road, right? That's when some questions that maybe you did not think of start coming up. We are in that cycle that's making us much more smarter. We know more, and we are in that process of iterating. That's basically we are in a good place. There is still a lot of engineering work that's required, but I do not see, I think it's work that we can do. We do not need some breakthrough that you cannot plan for. All right. That's all I'll say at this time. Thank you. Mr. Tom.
Thanks, Siraj. First of all, it's great to see some of my old friends in the audience here.
They dragged me off a trout stream and said, "I got to come do this operationally." I am a little bit irritated, but I am really glad I am back. You have heard now from Yves that we have a really good customer pipeline, and the interest is really accelerating. You heard from Siraj that we have materials that are really capable and are going to be able to exceed the competition. What they asked me to do is come back and look at us operationally. Can we scale? Okay. How do you transition from an R&D mindset to a commercial mindset? These are cultural issues with people. There are also issues for processes and equipment and things like that. When I came back, I started looking at what is it going to take to turn it into a commercial operation.
These are the key focus areas in my mind and in the company's mind on what we need to improve in order to be able to become a viable commercial entity. We are adding a lot of rigor, but how do you scale up materials? How do you process? Can you partner? Can you help your partners in that process? You have heard reliability several times. That is the first question that comes out of their mouths when you are engaging with these customers that we are talking with. Do we have the expertise for high-speed electrical optic devices? Do we have the business processes and the people in place in order to respond to the demand that is growing? I hope that makes sense. Next slide. I am going to go through these in a real high level, just kind of tell you.
When you look at reliability and materials and scale-up and all that, Siraj just mentioned that we're accelerating Telcordia testing at 85°C and 85° humidity. That is probably one of the most rigorous things you need to pass. We're doing extremely well. We hope to be able to announce something in the future on how those tests ended up. We're also exposing the materials to very high-intense light at high optical power. We're checking the photosensitivity of all our materials. One of the things that's really important, we have our own devices and things like that that we have done internally, but we need to be able to deploy an infrastructure that allows us to take devices from other companies or other foundries and incorporate them into our processes so that we can show the reliability there.
We've already started that and doing extremely well. Scale-up. This is big, right? We have great chemists and engineers in this company. If we want to scale up and be able to provide high volume of materials, having scientists under a hood with beakers is going to be a challenge, right? We've just purchased a flow processing machine where once we learn how to use it, it is a way where you put in the formulas and the materials and everything, and then it automatically does it for you. The other thing that is important is we know that there are next generations of materials that we're going to have to be able to produce. They may have different capabilities, whether it's higher temperatures, higher speeds, whatever, for future applications.
A photochemistry processor is something on that particular machine that will help us get there. We also are currently, even though we've locked down a material that we are working with current potential customers with, we need to be looking at next generation. Why? There are going to be requirements for co-package optics, which have different parameters they need. As Yves already mentioned, quantum computing, aerospace, and consumer electronics. We are moving along there. The next one, I feel this is one of our really good areas where we add value. There are no patents on it and things like that, but it's our know-how, right? How do you take these unique materials and integrate them and process them on devices? If you look at it, we are really doing a lot of collaboration now with plasmonics. All right. You all know that's polyurethane.
We are also initiating new programs with some of these potential customers so that we can co-design polymer-based silicon photonic devices. This is something that we have had to scale up in the organization. I talked about the integration and processing. Siraj mentioned BEOL. We do have these process design kits for us to be able to integrate our materials. What are those backend things? It is like etching and encapsulation and other things like that so that we can do it internally, but we also need to be able to scale up and look at opportunities for how we export that at the foundry level. We want to continue to assist the customer to help model these very high-speed terabit-type devices.
If you go to the next slide, one of the biggest things we really had to take a look at, if you're going to be a business, are you acting like a business? Are your processes and procedures compatible with the business expectations our big customers are going to want? We're reviewing all our policies and procedures and then really adding a lot more rigor to the technology and commercialization process. People, we are optimizing all the time. As you know, we just announced the VP of Sales and Marketing, but there's a lot going on on the technology front and also looking for what are the skill sets that we need in order to be able to continue the ramp. As Yves said, Asia is big. We're establishing sales and distribution channels actually in Asia. The final thing is our facility.
We're putting infrastructure in wherever we need to be able to be a commercial entity that is able to scale. We have state-of-the-art testing. We're one of the few companies in the country that has the capability to test at the 110 GHz level. We're stress testing ourselves for an anticipation of the things that have already been mentioned as we move forward. That's all that stuff, and I'd like to turn it to Yves for the closing slide.
Thanks, Tom. Before we open the floor for questions and answers, I wanted also to give you an update on our business model and our financials. I mean, I think we just filed our 10-Q for the quarter of March 2025. You know that our cash position at the end of March was approximately $25 million, no debt.
In addition, those of you who followed the company for a long time also know that we have two financial instruments in place that can give us access to another $62 million of liquidity if we need to. An ATM with ROTH Capital and a share purchase agreement with Lincoln Park Capital. We are in a strong position on the balance sheet. I think the other thing that I want to mention is that we have pivoted our business model to these materials and IP royalty licensing, and we did it for a couple of reasons. Number one, it can create a very attractive blended gross margin when you get to volume production. The second, it also does not really stretch your organization in terms of operational expenses and capital expenditure. From both an OpEx and CapEx, we are in good shape.
The company has invested for many years. More than $100 million have been spent bringing the company to this stage. The infrastructure we have in place to support this business model will not require significant scale-up in OpEx and CapEx over the next few years. Our business model is a mix of selling materials, as you heard about today. We are manufacturing, building this polymer in-house. We then can kind of turn that into a business of selling materials. The most exciting part for us is the fact that we can get licensing or royalty fees. Our goal is to share the risk and share of the rewards of our technology when it is brought in high volume to market.
Which means that if our customers are successful and bring a lot of modulators to the market, we will get a significant return in terms of all the flowback of royalties that will come to us. That is really important for a company our size because, as you've said, when we made that decision to be a materials and licensing company, we had to make sure that the end markets were big enough for us to create a sizable enough revenue opportunity to then translate that into profit through higher-than-average gross margin. The model we have now is about 60%+ gross margin. That's kind of a typical semiconductor type of business.
If you combine that with our strong balance sheet, if you combine that with the market we're operating in, which I sized earlier, which has some of the highest growth rate in technology today and predicted over the next five years, if you combine that with our very strong differentiated materials protected by strong IP and more than 70 patents today, you've seen the change we are making in the organization in terms of our talent, our executive team, the various building the parts of the organization that Tom was talking about. All of that, I think we hope is going to create a very attractive opportunity and will create a successful company over the next few years. With that, I want to thank you all for attending this, and we will let Ryan drive the question-and-answer sessions.
Any questions from anybody in the room? I can bring this handheld to them.
Yves, I have quite a few if you do not mention, but I think I am the only one who traveled all the way over from Europe.
Thank you for coming all the way.
The first thing is you are talking about the future. When do you expect that we can have some kind of financial forecast? I think it should be there because your auditors, they have to address the going concern issue. There has to be some information available.
Yeah. Of course, we have our internal financial forecast that we have not shared publicly. Some of the reasons that we are gradually disclosing more and more about our business model and financial model, like you saw in my last slide, is we are getting more and more comfortable about our ability to build a business and get the customer traction.
I think over the next few quarters, we'll continue to update the investor base with more information as this customer engagement will transition to what I call the stage three or stage four design wins and production units. Expect to see us continue to kind of update you. I decided to share more details on the customer engagement and where they were and the number of them and our target of three to five for the end of the year so you can start thinking about the impact that will have on our business model. As this firms up through the year, we will share more information about our financial forecast and the long-term business model.
Okay. Thank you. The other one I have is the current share price.
I'm only a financial guy, so I cannot comment on any technical things, but the current share price. It was for a long time under $1, which brings some concern, especially to the retail shareholder base, that we could end up in all kinds of things like NASDAQ issues, reverse splits, whatever we can think of. I think the board of directors is aware of this. Do you have any measures in place to prevent this from happening?
No. We only control our own destiny in the way of our execution, make sure that we portray ourselves in the best possible light, not just to the investor base, to the industry. We believe that the share price will evolve as a result of our success in the market and meeting some of the milestones that we have described.
We are at the mercy of also macro trends, and some of the issues we have had driving the stock below a dollar were some other issues, but some of them were also created by a macro environment. Obviously, we are very aware of this, very sensitive to this, and we are working very hard to make sure that we demonstrate sufficient success, that we rebuild some of the confidence as well in Lightwave Logic.
You know that you have some kind of background of preparing companies, and then there will be a buyout or a takeover or whatever. Keeping that in mind, do you foresee any liquidity event for this year?
Obviously, we would not be able to disclose it anyway. Just talking in general terms, we are extremely focused on execution, right?
Our investor base, and maybe you're one of them, they have been waiting for a long time to see this transition from a technology research company to a real product and commercial business-driven company, right? That is the entire focus of the team. We believe we have a fantastic opportunity in front of us. We also believe we still have a lot of work to do. Our primary focus is not to look for deals or any transaction. Our focus is on execution of our plan and creating success with customers.
Okay. Thanks. You have made it clear that there is a lot of interest in the material. As such, do you have any concerns of the patents that have been filed and might be infringed by others? Is there a possibility at all?
We have been paying extreme attention to our IP portfolio.
Obviously, this is a key area of differentiation for the company, not just at the materials level, but also of all the other processes we have in how, as we mentioned, to integrate the materials into silicon photonics and some of the know-how and trade secrets we have. We are looking at this holistically about what we need to patent, what we need to keep as trade secrets because we actually do not even want to patent them for keeping the recipe secrets to ourselves and not be available to other companies. Of course, how we are positioning versus alternative technology as well as potential competition. We have a pretty thorough process of doing that, and we actually spent quite a bit of time talking about it.
Okay. Thank you.
Anyone else in room?
We talked about royalties, licensing fees, and tech transfer. Could you kind of put that in when those things happen in stage one through four? I mean, when do you decide what the royalty is going to be? When do you get the licensing agreements, etc.?
Thanks. That's a very good question, actually. If you go back to our chart, we were describing stage one, stage two, stage three. Typically, stage two and stage three is when you really enter a commercial negotiation discussion, right? It can happen in multiple stages. Sometimes there's an initial negotiation about the development phase of the product, followed by some general guidelines about what the pricing, the royalties would be when it gets to volume.
Usually, when you get closer to production, you have a reality check of what is the market price and the price negotiation with your customer about what they can afford because you want to maximize the value, of course, that you keep for the recognition of the work you've done on materials, but you also want your customers to be very successful in the market bringing their product, right? That typically happens starting stage two and typically is formalized in stage three. When you get to stage four, typically, it's more like a typical commercial negotiation that happens based on volume. Maybe there's a discount applied to it. Again, we are not there yet, but I hope we'll be there.
Thank you. Just sort of a follow-up to that point. Of the three to five that would be in stage three by the end of this year, given what you said about the sensitivity around disclosure and NDAs, I mean, it sounds like we've got a long time to wait for public news unless there's some insistence that these design wins are actually revealed. Can you give us an understanding of those three to five, what your target would be for what we actually hear about?
I can't really give you specifics, obviously. That's why we put that number out there. We believe that there's additional if you add to Polariton, which again, we have already published, there's going to be two to four additional customers that will happen between now and the end of the year. We'll reach stage three. We will update you on that metrics because we have to give some indication of progress.
If there's more, we can say, and we are allowed by our customers to say more. Of course, we will. I'm just trying to set the expectation that this is unlikely because our customers are extremely secretive about especially that transition from 200 to 400. When NVIDIA announced that they were using micro-ring resonators for their 200G, it was a big shock to the industry. Nobody knew. You have to feel like all the other companies who are in the space do not disclose this. NVIDIA did it for a particular reason, so they made it public. Most of the other companies, you do not know what they use as a modulator technology, right? I'm just trying to kind of give as much information as we can at this stage, show progress, give you a metrics to measure us against.
Obviously, I can't commit to anything regarding what we'll be able to say about specific customers. As our Chairman reminds me, we always ask, of course, because we would like to tell you more about it, but we have to respect their decision, obviously.
I guess I'm looking for also some reassurance that there's some financial creativity at play in your negotiations. In the scenario you mentioned, for instance, if we don't hear about something publicly and the stock is trading around $1 a share, the idea of you raising money at $1 a share is not overly appealing, potentially. Some of these partners that you would be working with, I mean, it seems like there would be some creativity around what kind of contribution they make towards funding the additional development.
I understand your question.
I think we are looking at all options. Financial creativity is not a term that CFOs typically like to hear too much. I think we'll try to stay well within the boundaries of what is permissible, of course. Joking aside, this is something that we talk about with some of our large customers. Again, our focus is we believe that the market is exciting enough. We believe that if we show enough progress in our customer traction and the adoption of polymer, we do not need to be creative. The market and the market will recognize this, and will give us the proper valuation that we deserve. Thank you. My last question for me is, when you talk about the 400G being sort of the target, a lot of the revenue volume over the next couple of years appears to be 800G.
I mean, is that something that the company expects to realize some of that, whether it's two lanes at 400 Gb or four lanes at? Actually, I'm sorry. I'll correct you a little bit. There are two ways to look at this, and sometimes people confuse the two, so it's not always easy to understand. You have the actual bandwidth supplied by the transceivers. 800 Gb is the majority of the sale today. It's migrating to 1.6 Tb over the next two to three years, and then 3.2 Tb after that. That's the whole transceiver bandwidth. Inside that transceiver, you're going to have a number of modulators, typically eight or four, that will operate each of them at 100 Gb today, going to 200 Gb today, then 400 Gb today.
When I talk about us winning majority share as a target for 400 Gbps, I'm talking about the lane of each modulator. Those modulators would typically be used in 1.6 Tbps transceivers or 3.2 Tbps transceivers. The market we are targeting is a market that is ramping, and we ramp between 2027 and 2028 in volume. Those are the 20 million units I was mentioning in my TAM slide. Those are 1.6T and 3.2T terabits per second transceivers. They will use 200 and 400 Gb and probably a mix of both. That is the 20 million units. That is the biggest market that is accessible for us. If you look at the time it takes us to go through all these design win processes so we can catch a light wave of next generation. Sorry, it's a bit complicated.
I googled transceivers, optical transceivers, and you get all these pages, and you see transceivers 200G that range in price from $3,000 a piece to $8,000 a piece. I really can't—I don't understand it. I just wondered if you could shed some light on that, kind of what's in those things that cause it to be so expensive. I mean, we're talking about 20 million units. They can't cost $7,000 a piece.
Actually, on that front, I can talk about it because actually, in that video from Jensen Huang I was mentioning, he's actually talking about the price of those transceivers. In his case, the transceiver he's talking about are 1.6 terabit transceivers that are operating over relatively short distances, a few hundred meters. Those are selling at $1,000 a piece, okay?
There has been a rule in the industry for relatively short distance that the price is less than $1 per gigabit per second. Of course, there is price pressure on that over time. Those are for the short reach. Again, when you saw my slide about the racks and how close they are to each other, you do not need to go very far. If you look at the same type of speed, if you need to carry this from New York to Denver, you are going to spend several thousand dollars for the same transceiver. You have to take all the elements into equation. It is typically the speed and then the distance that they can go to.
A good average for a transceiver, think about it as kind of a dollar per gigabit, is kind of a typical price if you look at the different flavors, different variants, or short reach, yeah.
So 1.6 Tb would be $1,600?
Yeah. To start. Of course, there is price pressure. There is a long debate in the industry whether it is going to go to $0.50 or even per gigabit. It is really hard to predict. We know it is going to be price competitive. That is why we think that our material, because of its such inherent low-cost structure, is going to be highly—it is going to be a good incentive for our customers as well.
If you compare that to the bulky and the price of lithium niobate in particular, or the price of indium phosphide, our material is essentially virtually like an order of magnitude lower in cost.
Thank you.
Anybody else?
When we first started coming to these meetings, Lightwave was the only company, I think, that even entertained polymers. Everybody else had pretty much given up on polymers. Now, I noted on your slide that there are half a dozen good companies who are investigating polymers. Could you elaborate on whether we have any—just within the polymer framework, do we have any serious competition that's closing up on us, or where do we stand relative to just polymer competition, not lithium niobate or anything else?
Yeah. So I can't remember the slide you're referring to, and maybe our slide is maybe a bit misleading.
We do not have a lot of direct competitors on electro-optic polymers, okay? There are a few companies, one of them in Washington State and then maybe another in Japan. We believe they are at an earlier stage than we are, but we do not know the details, obviously. When I mentioned the interest in polymer, it is the interest of large companies to see if they can partner with us to get access to the material. I have kind of a dual reaction to competition on the polymer side. On the one hand, actually, it helps us because it brings credibility to the material and brings options. On the other hand, of course, you do not want competition, right? I think right now, honestly, what is important for us is just to continue to demonstrate our progress in the reliability, performance, and ability to integrate.
It's our execution and our ability to meet the expectation of the customer that will determine our success. We are not thinking too much about competition, honestly. Our main competition, who I described in the slide from Siraj, it is thin-film lithium niobate because they have a stage of maturity in lithium niobate that is considered more advanced than we are.
I'm going to ask one or two from the webcast, and thank you to the people who submitted these online. Going back to the pipeline slide, the 20+ in the pipeline, could you talk a little bit about how serious the engagements are that are just pipeline customers right now? Are these just having conversations, open communication, and then maybe talk a little bit about how they move into stage one and two?
That's a good question.
Number one, we obviously have limited resources to deal with all these requests. We try to prioritize our customers based on the likelihood to bring them to stage one or stage two quickly. All of them have a valid reason to look at us because all of them are trying to deal with the challenge of the industry to move modulator to higher speed. Our process is to engage with them, have first conversations, see if they are interested in us, and of course, if they are a good fit for our technology, then typically we move through an NDA stage and then a couple of technical meetings to validate the level of interest, and we progress through the stage one, stage two, and hopefully stage three.
Maybe one other one. The Q1 10-Q appeared to show that the company did not issue many more shares in Q1.
Could you talk a little bit about your comfort level with your financial position and the ability to sort of bridge the next few quarters until hopefully more commercial agreement?
Yeah. I can take it. Jim, you want to take it? So, yeah, I mean, we are constantly monitoring our cash based, again, on our spend projection for the year. As you know, when we made our repositioning from being a device and full PIC and materials company to a materials and licensing-only company, that helped us reduce some of our potential expenditure, both in terms of OpEx and CapEx, right? We are trying to maintain, of course, sufficient liquidity to keep everyone comfortable, including our auditors, and we are constantly monitoring this and make decisions to raise cash when we need to. All right.
Sorry, brother. We filed a $100 million shelf registration last year.
It went effective on August the 5th, all right? We have $60 million of instruments available to us when we need it. We have an additional over $30 million available for an opportune time if somebody wants to make the proper investment in us. Between that and the $25 million we have in cash, we have no debt. We do not have any convertibles. We do not have a bunch of warrant-type overhangs. We are financially very stable, and we have a very clean balance sheet. We are just waiting to make—when we make the proper announcements, I think the market will reward us, and we can raise the additional cash as needed. Anyway.
Thanks, Jim.
As a retail investor, I find that, because I do my own investing, there's not—for instance, to find out news about Lightwave, you've got to go to your website and go to your newscast or whatever. A lot of companies you can find, if something happens, it shows up, and it doesn't with Lightwave. It seems like Lightwave is very seldom do you see anything that the retail investor can see without going to actually your website.
Thanks for the suggestion. I was not necessarily very well aware of this, but we'll look at it, and we'll see if we can improve the visibility to general shareholders. Thanks for the suggestion.
I mean, it would be nice to see occasional stuff. I know you're not going to put out a lot of news, but you do do things that the investor has an interest in.
Thanks. I understand.
All right. If there's no other questions in the room, I'll turn it over to Yves for any closing remarks.
No. I just want to thank all of you who took the time to come and meet us in person, those of you listening on the webcast. Again, a special thanks to the team at Lightwave Logic here. A few of them are here, and this would not happen without your hard work. Thank you very much.