Aeluma, Inc. (ALMU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on Aeluma's earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. Joining me today are Jonathan Klamkin, our founder and chief executive officer, and Christopher Stewart, our chief financial officer. During today's remarks and in our answers to your questions, we may make forward-looking statements. Those statements carry a range of risks and uncertainties, and because of them, actual results might end up differing materially from what those statements suggest. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in the earnings press release we issued today, as well as in the reports we have filed with the U.S. SEC. Both those reports and today's earnings release are available in the Investor section of our website. Aeluma undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call. As part of our discussion, the company will reference non-GAAP financial measures, including EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA. You'll find a reconciliation of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the earnings press release and in our SEC filings. At this point, I'll hand the call over to Aeluma's CEO Jonathan Klamkin.

Thanks, Alex, and I appreciate everyone being on the call today. First off, I want to pass along some eye-opening figures I came across not long ago at the PIC Summit in Sunnyvale — a gathering tied to the SPIE Photonics West Conference that Aeluma took part in. Someone from Celestial AI, the photonics firm Marvell picked up not long ago, said the leading four hyperscalers put over $300 billion into data center CapEx during 2025, and that figure should go beyond $1 trillion by 2029. That's a big market opportunity right now and looking ahead over the coming years. It's also a chance for fresh technology and new products to enter the market. You've got to have stronger performance, you've got to handle bigger volumes, and expense is hugely important. When you look at each of those criteria, the Aeluma platform wins. Sure, data centers represent a very significant market for Aeluma, but among three primary near-term target markets, they're only one, with the remaining two being mobile and defense. Our level of activity across each of those three has reached an all-time peak. As OEMs in mobile and consumer electronics arrange their supply chains to incorporate short-wave infrared, or SWIR, sensors, we're watching our vision turn into reality. For a very long time, SWIR sensors have been around, primarily serving defense, aerospace, and industrial markets in fields such as imaging and machine vision. Indium Gallium Arsenide—InGaAs for short—is among the primary semiconductor materials Aeluma works with, and its performance outshines all alternatives, which is why it became the benchmark for SWIR. The problem? The InGaAs technology that's already on the market comes with a steep cost and offers no path to scaling up. If only there were a cheaper version of InGaAs. That's something I've heard people say for decades. Were that true, you'd find InGaAs sensors in every phone, tablet, PC, and other consumer device out there. The mobile sector is getting ready to adopt SWIR, and it's common knowledge that the manufacturing platform Aeluma provides gives you the scale that mass markets require; throughout the second quarter, we continued to fulfill our commitments while keeping a tight focus on advancing toward commercialization. Our discussions with major clients have progressed beyond mere curiosity and assessment—they're now focused on cost structures and forward planning. During this crucial phase, I'm delighted to announce that Bouch Nassar is joining Aeluma as the new Senior Vice President of Business Development and Product. In his prior experience, Bouch occupied important positions at JDS Uniphase Lumentum, supervising sales, product marketing, and management for high-speed receiver product lines. This is an outstanding fit for Aeluma and our scalable detector technology. Bouch carries with him thirty years of expertise in semiconductor photonics, covering optical networking in data centers, sensing, and quantum. Beyond JDS Uniphase, now Lumentum, Bouch took on leadership roles at SCD USA, among the biggest suppliers of infrared sensors, and at Princeton Lightwave, where he brought commercial laser, quantum sensor, and biomedical detector products to market. Bouch is exactly the right person for Aeluma at this point, as we field more and more requests for quotation and have started accepting sales orders. Those first orders don't amount to much in dollar terms, but they represent a key milestone on the path to wider market adoption. Bouch has proven he can take technology to product, drive market adoption, and grow revenue. He is going to accelerate how we bring our products to market, and that effort is built on the significant customer momentum we have generated up to this point. In addition to adding Bouch to the team, we recruited experienced leaders and deep technical know-how in supply chain and engineering; those additional key hires have strengthened our ties with manufacturing partners as we expand operations with foundries. As we complete process qualification for our target markets, chips are producing yields and meeting performance expectations. We will continue adding to the team and will also evaluate strategic chances to accelerate our growth. Earlier, we shared news of a win with NASA aimed at increasing investment in our platform for quantum photonics. Additionally, we secured further contract money to embed quantum dot lasers straight onto the AIM Photonics 300 mm silicon photonics platform. Across AI, data centers, sensing, and quantum within the photonics sector, this capability might fundamentally reshape things. Beyond that, we've lately gotten multiple award notifications covering later-stage R&D work and transition possibilities, which strengthens belief in Aeluma's technology and our projections for more contracts during this year. During January, our group was quite busy at the SPIE Photonics West technical conference and exhibition. A talk was delivered highlighting our scalable semiconductor platform designed for quantum. To add some context, Aeluma operates as a technology company rather than a system integrator. Even so, we think the opportunity sitting in front of our platform outstrips what the big quantum system players have managed to build. When you stack us against options like lithium niobate or barium titanate, the heterogeneous integration approach Aeluma uses on silicon could well be the route that finally gets quantum photonic systems to scale. Traffic at our exhibition booth stayed heavy as well. We sat down for meaningful conversations with customers and partners already working with us, and we also walked a lot of fresh prospects through Aeluma's technology, spanning several important markets. Notable visitors stopped by to check out Aeluma. People are talking about us, and that momentum keeps building. Folks from the mobile space, the data center space, the defense space, and the quantum space, among other areas, all came by. In November, we gained admission into the Midwest Microelectronics Consortium, also known as MMEC, marking one more move on our part to strengthen our footprint across defense and commercial sectors. Within the Department of Defense's Microelectronics Commons, this organization serves as a vital center dedicated to moving essential technologies out of the laboratory and into production on American soil. The themes of that hub line up squarely with what Aeluma does, spanning AI hardware, electronic warfare, quantum, and infrared sensing. To put it plainly, MMEC widens our scope of influence and confirms once more the part we play in securing America's long-term semiconductor leadership. Recognition from outside the company carried on as well, as Aeluma earned a 2025 LEAP Award for innovation in advanced materials. That honor shone a light on our wafer-scale SWIR photodetector platform and underscores the edge we hold by pairing top-tier materials with manufacturing that scales. What matters here is that this outside confirmation boosts how much people trust us and how applicable we are in a range of fast-growing sectors. Meanwhile, we keep reinforcing the core of what we do — our patent count grew to 35, covering both granted and pending filings. Our approach is to search everywhere for ways to plant our flag in the markets we're targeting. Taken together, some clear patterns emerge: momentum is building, our visibility is rising, and that visibility is converting into genuine opportunities. Now is the time to capitalize on our progress and the growing market ahead of us, and to pursue strategic possibilities that accelerate our path to commercialization. Going forward through fiscal 2026, our attention stays sharply on commercialization and on creating value over the long term; at this point I'll hand things over to Chris Stewart, our CFO, to walk through the financials.

Thanks, Jonathan. Turning now to the financial results for our fiscal second quarter of 2026: revenue came in at $1.3 million, versus $1.6 million during the same quarter a year earlier, fiscal 2025, and $1.4 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2026. Government R&D contracts represented the main revenue driver this quarter. As we've noted before, revenue can fluctuate from one quarter to the next depending on when program milestones are met. It's worth emphasizing how strategic these programs are. Development contracts with the government supply non-dilutive funding for our R&D investments and act as continuous technical validation of our platform from prospective government customers. Looking ahead, we'll keep going after strategic government programs capable of meaningfully speeding up commercialization opportunities. On a GAAP basis, net loss for the quarter totaled $1.9 million, or $0.11 per basic and diluted share, against a net loss of $2.9 million, or $0.24 per share, in the prior year period, and a net loss of $1.5 million, or $0.09 per share, in the immediately preceding quarter. The smaller net loss year over year stemmed mainly from a non-recurring $3 million charge tied to a change in the fair value of derivative liabilities that we booked in the quarter ended December 31st, 2024; that was partly offset by increased salaries, stock-based compensation, and employee-related costs from adding headcount to strategically grow our business and scale operations. The quarter-over-quarter rise in net loss came from greater R&D-related expense, partly offset by reduced SG&A expense. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was $917,000, against a gain of $647,000 in the same period a year ago and a loss of $450,000 in the first quarter of this year. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, including $38.6 million in cash and cash equivalents, up $425,000 from the close of the September quarter, largely because we received $690,000 from the exercise of warrants issued as part of our March 2025 NASDAQ uplisting and financing. In connection with that warrant exercise, we issued 124,415 shares of common stock. At present, we carry no long-term debt, and we plan to keep operating in a disciplined, capital-efficient way while making sure Aeluma is properly positioned to execute our strategic plans and seize the opportunities to create shareholder value. Last week, we took a proactive step by filing a post-effective amendment with the SEC to consolidate several existing S1 registration statements currently on file. No new shares were registered as part of this filing. This consolidation simply streamlines our reporting requirements and lowers administrative costs going forward. Moving to guidance for the full fiscal year of 2026, we still expect revenue in the range of $4 to 6 million. Our execution is tracking according to the plans discussed on our last two quarterly calls. We've strengthened our organization with key additions across our go-to-market and operations teams. We are ramping fab runs and continuing to increase our manufacturing readiness. Like Jonathan said, more and more pricing requests keep coming our way, and we've started accepting the first sales orders for shipments of product. Revenue tied to those orders should be modest over the near term, but we see this as a significant milestone, and it gives us one more sign that the market is interested in what our technology can do; so with that, I'll hand things back to Jonathan to make his closing comments, and after that we'll take your questions.

Appreciate that, Chris. So, to wrap things up, what we saw this quarter confirmed that Aeluma is building real traction and momentum. Our strategic priorities keep getting executed, our technical foundation keeps getting stronger, our go-to-market plan is speeding up, and our operations keep growing so we can scale. As the year goes on, our focus stays razor sharp on turning that momentum into customer programs and making the shift into commercialization. I'd like to thank our amazing team for everything they put in and for how dedicated they are, and I'd like to thank each of you for the support and enthusiasm you never hold back. Operator, the call is now open for questions.

Hello, Tyler Anderson here, filling in for Richard Shannon. I'm curious — which end markets are generating those sales orders for you?

Tyler, I appreciate the question. When it comes to sales or engagements, we aren't providing details about particular customers or products right now. That modest burst of price increases along with the first sales orders marks a significant milestone, though the value of those orders is fairly limited — definitely progress toward widespread market adoption. Still, we think our strategy of starting with mobile, AI, and defense has given us what amounts to the proper mix of early adopters, small-volume early adopters, and disruptive high-volume possibilities. And securing a handful of modest orders first is a solid route to landing bigger ones. That is precisely what we're seeing happen at this moment.

Fantastic, that's wonderful to hear. And you brought up quantum photonics. I was simply curious — is this essentially about receiving photons, or operations, routing, or sending them?

For the near term, what we're engaged in is mainly generating photons. There's considerable interest in collaborating with Aeluma to build out a whole platform capable of everything from generating photons, routing photons, processing, and detecting photons using our single photon detector technology. However, for the near term, we've been performing somewhat foundational efforts to create a platform that integrates these highly nonlinear materials onto large diameter substrates. We've accomplished that on small substrates. We've accomplished that on 200-millimeter substrates; and we're now working with a few partners to scale that up to 300-millimeter substrates.

And now, as a final item, building further on what we just discussed. Are we talking about pairs, or is it single photons?

Mostly pairs.

Understood. Thanks for that. I appreciate it.

Hi, Jonathan. Chris, Dylan — thanks for fielding my question. I really do appreciate it. Congrats as well on the momentum you keep building. Maybe to start, building off what Tyler asked earlier regarding sales orders — I realize you may not be offering commentary on end markets, but could we frame it somehow in terms of how many customers are actually involved on that front, in terms of scale? And then what exactly are those orders for? You described them as small, so my assumption is samples. But do you view these as programs capable of scaling into volume eventually, or would additional detail on those sales be useful? Thanks.

The pricing uptick is arriving from a wide range of markets. We've already referenced our main markets. So it's arriving from multiple areas among mobile, AI data centers, defense, and quantum. That said, we aren't raising revenue guidance for this year right now. Still, we view these as a highly significant milestone, since as additional requests arrive, more tend to follow. Beyond the business-to-business marketing efforts we conduct, people are discovering our technology and what we're developing, and they're reaching out with requests. So we do anticipate growth in this area over time and will probably provide updates during upcoming quarterly calls. What I can say right now, though, is that our approach of concentrating on defense, mobile, AI data centers, and longer-term quantum opportunities appears to be paying off at this point.

Yes, absolutely. I really appreciate that additional detail. So then, as a second point, perhaps taking a broader view — you mentioned SWIR along with mobile, and the supply chain sort of getting ready to bring that in. Could you perhaps discuss where we'd catch that generation in relation to builds? And might we potentially witness that within this year, or possibly get some signal of a route toward that uptake in the following year, regarding SWIR on the mobile side? Thanks.

Thank you, David. Right now I'm unable to say anything about timeline. However, SWIR, as I noted during my prepared comments, has existed for many decades in uses such as defense, night vision, industrial uses, machine vision. And the InGaAs technology that Aeluma created is the finest SWIR technology, given its performance. It merely fails to scale when produced in the sort of standard manner. If that weren't the case, it would find its way into consumer electronics. There are numerous advantages for consumer uses. Short-wave infrared delivers reduced solar interference, enhanced eye safety; and what I am able to state is that the mobile sector is preparing to embrace SWIR for products of future generations; and thus what we observe occurring is a shift from interest in our technology, with the industry readying the supply chain for that market. Beyond that, right now I can't say anything regarding timeline.