Aeluma Q4 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

On Wednesday, Aeluma (NASDAQ: ALMU ) discussed fourth-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

5 million, primarily from government contracts. 2 million for the full year, with increased operating expenses due to higher headcount. Aeluma is focusing on commercializing its high-speed photodetectors and quantum dot lasers for the AI Datacom market, leveraging non-dilutive government funding. The company has secured a letter of intent for up to $30 million from the Department of Commerce CHIPS R&D Office to accelerate photonics development.

Aeluma expanded its team, appointed key leadership figures, and increased its employee count from 14 to over 30, planning further recruitment to support strategic priorities. The company's strategic focus is on the AI Datacom market, with significant customer interest and ongoing negotiations for commercial non-recurring engineering (NRE) agreements. Aeluma closed the quarter with $56 million in cash and no debt, having issued shares under its ATM facility to strengthen its balance sheet. The company plans capital expenditures of $10 to $12 million in fiscal 2027 to expand manufacturing capabilities, focusing on epitaxy wafer production and MOCVD reactors.

Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aeluma's Q4 fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.

Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded at this time. I would like to turn the call over to Moira Conlon, Investor Relations for Aeluma. Please go ahead. Moira Conlon, Investor Relations Good afternoon, and welcome to Aeluma's fourth quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call.

I'm here today with founder and CEO Dr. Jonathan Klamkin and CFO Christopher Stewart. Today's discussions and responses to questions may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the earnings press release issued today, along with the reports filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

These reports, along with today's earnings release and fourth quarter presentation that we will reference during this conference call, can be found under the Investors section of our website. Aeluma assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call. Throughout the discussion, the company will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, including EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in our earnings press release and SEC filings.

Now I'll turn the call over to Aeluma's CEO, Jonathan Klamkin. Jonathan Klamkin, President and CEO Thank you, Moira, and thank you all for joining today's call. We are delighted to share a recap of our fiscal 2026 and to provide an outlook on Aeluma's path to commercialization. The AI Datacom market opportunity has continued to become a priority for us.

8 trillion in 2030 according to Dell'Oro Group, of which approximately 10% to 15% is for photonics. As illustrated in slide 4, we explicitly built our technology platform for this scale. Our proprietary heterogeneous integration with large-diameter non—indium phosphide substrates combines high-performance materials with mass-market microelectronics manufacturing.

To capitalize on the AI opportunity in fiscal 2026, we prioritized resources to accelerate development and commercialization of our high-speed photodetectors and quantum dot lasers, which are applicable across a broad range of data center connectivity including slow-and-wide short-reach interconnects, fast-and-narrow interconnects, pluggable transceivers, near-packaged optics (NPO), and co-packaged optics (CPO). Many traditional photonics components for data centers depend on indium phosphide substrates, which have become a bottleneck for suppliers and their customers.

Aeluma’s technologies are manufactured with non—indium phosphide substrates that may range in size from 150 millimeter, or 6 inch, to 200 millimeter and up to 300 millimeter. Aeluma’s photodetector and laser technologies have undergone significant foundational development thanks in part to non-dilutive government funding. We have always been selective in bidding on government contracts that are synergistic with our commercial ambitions. An example is a Navy program that commenced in fiscal 2024 to develop high-speed photodetectors for short-reach links, a technology that is highly relevant to slow-and-wide data center interconnects for scale-up AI workloads.

This Navy program has transitioned successfully into a second phase to focus on higher-speed operation and transceiver integration. We have also made considerable progress with customers evaluating our differentiated photonics platform, which eliminates the need for indium phosphide substrates, supports high-volume manufacturing, and provides a path to CMOS wafer-scale integration and packaging. These engagements have helped shape the development of our Lynx S series photodetectors, which target data rates from a few gigabits per second to 64 gigabits per second.

Based on customer discussions and market forecasts, we believe these applications represent a substantial volume opportunity as deployments scale in 2028 through 2030 to support fast-and-narrow 200 gigabits per second per lane and future 400 gigabits per second per lane for scale-out interconnects. We are developing our Lynx F series photodetectors. This represents another significant potential opportunity in the growing AI Datacom market. S.

Navy. As the AI Datacom market accelerates and demand grows over the next several years, we have prioritized our resources on the commercialization of our high-speed photodetectors to capture this opportunity. Another example is funding from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and from NASA to advance our MOCVD quantum dot laser technology. Today our Datacom customers are evaluating our non—indium phosphide quantum dot lasers for high-temperature operation, reliability, and isolator-free packaging.

Our Quasar family of quantum dot lasers, currently under development, aims to address the demand for high-power lasers in scale-up and scale-out networks. We believe we are uniquely positioned as the first company to offer quantum dot lasers using MOCVD, an industry standard for high-throughput production. MOCVD, for example, is used exclusively for large-volume VCSEL manufacturing for facial recognition in mobile phones. Given the scale of investment and projects already underway for data center buildouts, we are more commercially focused than ever before.

We stated that fiscal 2026 would establish the foundation for transitioning to commercialization. We delivered on this objective by expanding our team, establishing manufacturing supply chain partners, bolstering cash, and focusing on our go-to-market strategy. At June 30, 2025, Aeluma had 14 employees. As of today, we have more than 30 employees, and we plan to recruit additional talent to execute our strategic priorities.

In June, we announced the appointment of Dr. Brendan Moran as VP of Engineering, whose distinguished career at Lumileds included leading product strategy and development for mobile photonics components that generated $300 million in annual revenue, eight consecutive design-ins for a high-profile mobile customer, and shipping of billions of photonics chips. Brendan is driving Aeluma's product development and commercialization efforts with an emphasis on photodetectors and lasers for AI Datacom. Along with Dr.

Willy Rakmati, Aeluma's VP of Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem, and myself, Brendan is helping advance our engagements with customers and define technology and product development roadmaps. We believe our product-focused strategy will benefit our business and our shareholders. We also recently appointed Jason Taylor as Senior Director of Program and Project Management. Jason has nearly three decades of experience in program management at Intel, Kyocera, Lumileds, and other organizations.

Jason is leading program management across Aeluma and is building out a program management system to ensure timely execution of priority programs, including high-speed photodetectors and quantum dot lasers for AI Datacom. Such a system is key to delivering on our strategic priorities. I'm also proud to welcome Dr. Primet Parikh as a Strategic Advisor.

, a pioneer in gallium nitride power semiconductors that Primet co-founded and led from inception through its public company listing and acquisition by Renesas. He also held leadership positions at Nitrous and Cree. Primet's expertise spans several areas important to Aeluma, including high-performance semiconductors, AI data centers, manufacturing, IP strategy, and partnerships. He provides a strategic and operational perspective to Aeluma as we position the company for commercial growth.

We are again adding more office and meeting space to support our growing team. And while we continue to be stewards of capital, the time for making investments in growth is now. Moving through fiscal 2027 and beyond, we will be even more selective with government funding and more commercially focused. This may mean sacrificing near-term government contract revenue to focus resources toward achieving commercial revenue and growth opportunities, which is what matters in generating long-term shareholder value.

In previous communications, we shared our intention to move away from early-stage government funding and instead focus on opportunities that accelerate manufacturing and commercialization. Consistent with that strategy, on July 29th we announced a letter of intent with the Department of Commerce CHIPS R&D Office for up to $30 million to accelerate development and commercialization of our scalable photonics for AI and advanced computing. This is not for a specific Department of Defense or NASA or Department of Energy or other agency-driven application with technical metrics established by the government agency.

For the Department of Commerce program, we proposed Aeluma's own vision: that is, to build the world's highest-performance photonics with scalable manufacturing, leveraging domestic capabilities and advanced intellectual property to overcome supply chain constraints and to meet the demand for critically important AI and advanced compute infrastructure investments. These themes have been central to Aeluma’s strategy since our founding. The CHIPS initiative is aimed at supporting semiconductor innovation across integrated photonics, compute architectures, advanced packaging, substrates, materials, and memory for the AI and advanced compute supply chain.

This strategic government investment could accelerate our development and commercialization efforts. On scaling, I'm happy to announce that we recently executed an important agreement with Sumitomo Chemical Advanced Technologies to strengthen our relationship, increase wafer production capacity leveraging existing MOCVD tools that we can run our processes on, and provide a path for further increasing capacity in the future. We have been engaged with Sumitomo Chemical Advanced Technologies for several years, and this new agreement will support commercialization efforts and will complement Aeluma's in-house capability.

The initial focus of this effort is on high-speed photodetectors for AI Datacom. For future scaling, we are procuring multiple AIXTRON G10 MOCVD systems. These types of tools are already in use by major tier-1 photonics component manufacturers for lasers and other photonics components for AI Datacom. Aeluma recently configured these tools to implement our proprietary non—indium phosphide substrate processes, and we are planning for installation.

While our precise strategy is confidential, we have communicated our multi-pronged approach to leverage different non—indium phosphide substrate types and sizes to pair technology with market demand in the most economical and strategic way. As we shared on our Q3 earnings call, we work with several supply chain partners. These include both compound semiconductor fabs and silicon fabs whose capabilities range from 150 millimeter fabrication to 200 millimeter and some up to 300 millimeter. For many of our target markets, 150 millimeter wafers, either gallium arsenide or silicon, are appropriate.

Aeluma's use of non—indium phosphide substrates at this size and partnership with volume microelectronics foundries provides a path to scale and meet demand while overcoming supply chain constraints and winning on cost. Aeluma produces starting wafers in-house but also works with partners such as Sumitomo Chemical Advanced Technologies for scaling, and we have recently strengthened this relationship with a new agreement. Following epitaxy wafer production, our proprietary wafers are sent to foundries and other supply chain partners and then returned to Aeluma for test and validation.

Like other photonics IDMs, or integrated device manufacturers, Aeluma has developed several key compound semiconductor technologies to address different uses and functions such as wavelength specifications and market applications, as illustrated in slide 5. While our technology platform is broadly applicable, our current commercialization focus is AI Datacom. Referring to slide 6, we are leveraging our large-diameter substrate platform to commercialize our Lynx high-speed photodetectors and our Quasar quantum dot laser technologies. Lynx is designed to address both scale-up and scale-out AI interconnects.

Aeluma's non—indium phosphide platform is attractive to customers who need to overcome supply chain constraints and enable scaling with a roadmap for wafer-scale integration with CMOS, which is key for the slow-and-wide scale-up AI interconnects and to cover the playing field. The Lynx B series photodetectors are aimed at fast-and-narrow 224 and then 448 Gbps scale-out AI interconnects. Our MOCVD quantum dot technology is driving Quasar product development.

Current laser technology for AI interconnects is based on indium phosphide and, as we have continually messaged, indium phosphide substrates are in short supply, are small, expensive, and fragile, and the indium phosphide manufacturing doesn't scale to large volumes. Investment in 6 inch indium phosphide is being made, but this will take time to qualify, and costs of 6 inch indium phosphide substrates are increasing. Also, indications are that 6 inch indium phosphide is not sufficient for the AI infrastructure buildout.

Our Lynx effort is focused on 6 inch gallium arsenide manufacturing initially, but will also leverage larger-diameter silicon manufacturing in the future to enable further scaling and direct integration with silicon photonics. Our MOCVD approach is key to supporting this roadmap. Looking forward to fiscal 2027 and beyond, our enthusiasm continues to grow. The AI Datacom opportunity is driving our near-term, product-focused commercialization efforts.

In addition to prospective capital from the CHIPS program that is under definitive agreement negotiations, we are negotiating several multimillion-dollar NRE agreements with commercial customers. NRE programs with top-tier manufacturers are an effective way to accelerate qualification and commercialization. We are ramping activities with our supply chain partners, expanding MOCVD manufacturing capabilities, and will continue to build out our team to support commercialization. It is highly motivating to see Aeluma's vision come to life as we execute our go-to-market strategy and the demand for high-performance photonics grows at unprecedented rates.

Now I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Chris Stewart, to discuss the financials. Chris Stewart, CFO Thanks, Jonathan. Over the last year, the opportunity for Aeluma, particularly in the AI data center interconnect market, has really come into focus. Consensus projections for the size of the opportunity continue to increase dramatically.

We hear from customers and partners that our technology is well positioned to support an industry that is currently struggling to scale up to meet the demand. This year we made significant progress towards commercialization, and I am confident in our team's ability to execute our strategy and capitalize on the opportunity. Now I will review our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 financial results. 5 million for the year, near the high end of the range we provided on our Q3 call.

7 million we reported for fiscal 2025. 22 per share. 23 per share, in fiscal 2025.