Lightwave Logic, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the LightWave Logic Q2 2026 Financial Results and Business Update Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Nick Teves of Investor Relations. Thank you, Nick. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for LightWave Logic's second quarter financial results and business update call. I'm joined on today's call by LightWave Logic's president and chief executive officer, Yves LeMaitre, and LightWave Logic's chief financial officer, Fred Graffam. Please note that this call is in listen-only mode for the duration of the call and that a replay will be posted to the company's website shortly after the call concludes. Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including statements and our business outlook, are forward-looking, and as such, this call speaks only as of today, August 11, 2026. Such statements may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The matters discussed on this call are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and these risks and uncertainties could cause actual operating results to differ materially from those expressed in the call. A more detailed description of the risks our company faces is more fully described by the company under the caption risk factors included in our most recent form 10-K and 10-Q. As always, LightWave Logic assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. Lastly, you are cautioned that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time replay listening or transcript reading. With that, I'll turn the call over to Yves.

Hey, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. The second quarter of 2026 represented another step forward in our transition from technology development to commercialization. As you'll hear today, we expanded to five Stage 3 customers and made excellent progress with our multiple foundry engagements, with the first wafers expected to be delivered this month. But let me start with a bigger picture. AI is being adopted and scaled at an incredible rate. And when something grows this fast, bottlenecks show up everywhere. The industry talks about the availability of compute, the memory wall, interconnect bandwidth, power delivery, and cooling. We can debate which one is the biggest constraint at any particular point in time. The more important point is that they are all real, they are all connected, and each one has to be addressed if AI infrastructure is going to keep scaling. For LightWave Logic, the part of the problem we are focused on is the interconnect. Putting more processors into an AI cluster only helps if those processors can move enormous amounts of data between each other quickly and efficiently. In simple terms, the network has to keep up with the compute. Today, it simply doesn't. As clusters become larger and denser, copper reaches its practical limits over longer distances, and power consumption becomes a bigger part of the networking problem. That is why optical networking, and silicon photonics in particular, is going through quickly. We are seeing it in actual foundry results, not just in industry forecasts. In their latest calls, global foundries said its communication infrastructure and data center business grew more than 60% year-over-year, driven in part by optical networking, and that it expects its silicon photonics revenue to more than double in 2026. Tower Semiconductor reported that its silicon photonics revenue grew by more than 270% year-over-year and said it is targeting a $1 billion annualized run rate in the fourth quarter. Those are significant numbers, and they show how quickly silicon photonics is moving into the mainstream of AI infrastructure. This is a part of the AI infrastructure problem that LightWave Logic is working to fix. Whether the application is scale-up, scale-out, or scale-across, the industry needs more bandwidth, less power, and smaller devices that can be easily integrated with silicon and manufactured at scale, or perkinamine electro-optic polymers. are designed to make silicon photonics faster and more power efficient with a much smaller footprint. Just as important, they are designed to fit into the foundry and packaging infrastructure the industry already uses. We are not asking the market to build completely new manufacturing systems around us. We are working to make the silicon photonics platform better. Let me now turn to our silicon photonics foundry work with our partners. So I'm pleased to report that we are making good progress. We currently have three dedicated foundry runs underway. We expect to receive two sets of wafers from those programs during this month of August. The third foundry is expected to deliver its wafers in the fourth quarter. We are also preparing a dedicated run with a source foundry and working towards a tape-out later this year. Taken together, these four programs give us several parallel paths for advancing our technology and supporting our customers. As we discussed on our first quarter call, several of the silicon photonics foundries are under pressure because they are dealing with a combination of very strong customer demand, process development for novel materials, and the need to catch up on capacity investments. Those pressures have not disappeared. In fact, the growth recently reported publicly by some of the leading players shows just how quickly demand for silicon photonics is increasing. Despite this pressure, two foundries are on track to ship wafers to Lightwave Logic this month. Receiving the wafers is an important milestone, but it's not the end of the process. Once the wafers arrive, our team begins the backend work. That includes depositing the polymer, encapsulating it, preparing the devices for testing, and then completing the characterization work. We will work closely with our customers throughout that process to confirm that the devices meet their performance requirements and to understand any changes that may be needed. The foundries are learning from these runs as well. The objective is not simply to show that they can process high bandwidth slot modulators. We are working with them to fine tune the process, improve yield and device performance, and make the overall manufacturing flow more efficient and repeatable. That work is essential if we want to move from individual prototype runs to qualification and ultimately generate revenues with volume manufacturing. Our active foundry ecosystem now includes Global Foundry, Tower Semiconductor, Siltera, and a fourth partner that remains unnamed. We believe having several foundry options is important for our customers and for the long-term scalability of our platform. We will continue strengthening these relationships while also looking for opportunities to add new foundry partners in the future. Now let me move to customers. We continue to see strong interest from companies looking for better ways to meet the speed, power, and size requirements of AI networks. Interest is important, but what matters to us is moving this discussion into real programs with real engineering work behind them. This quarter, a new unnamed Fortune Global 500 customer moved into stage 3 of our design win process. With the addition of this new customer, it brings our total number of stage 3 programs to 5. This new customer program is initially focused on scalar cross transceivers using coherent modulation. While a lot of the AI discussion has focused on scale-up and scale-out, scale-across is making a strong comeback as a critical part of next-generation AI factories. The practical limits of building ever larger data centers are forcing operators to connect multiple campuses located a few miles to tens of miles apart into one virtual data center. This requires extensive use of ultra-high-speed optical links, dense wavelength division multiplexing, and coherent modulation. Stage 3 is where the work becomes much more concrete. We are no longer talking only about requirements or running an initial evaluation. We are working with our customers' engineering resources on prototypes, foundry runs, device processing, and testing. For all of our Stage 3 programs, the job now is to meet the technical milestones required for qualification and eventually Stage 4. The next milestones include the delivery, back-end processing, and testing of chips as mentioned earlier. We expect the fourth quarter to be very busy for our customer-facing technical staff and engineering team. In parallel, we are working to turn these technical programs into commercial agreements covering material supply, licensing, and engineering work with volume production as a longer-term goal. One such material supply and licensing agreement is already in place, and we are actively negotiating a new agreement with another customer whose program is the most advanced on the path to productization with the goal of beginning volume production in the second half of 2027. I want to be clear about the process. These programs take time. Foundry schedules, design changes, packaging, and system testing can all affect the pace. We are pleased with the progress, but we are not going to get ahead of the data of all the customers. Our focus is on doing the work, meeting the next milestone, and earning the right to move each program forward. At this point, I would like to welcome Fred Grafam, our new Chief Financial Officer. Fred brings the type of financial acumen and operational experience we felt we needed to bring LightWave Logic to the next level. I'm very happy to have him on the team. Fred will take you through our second quarter results and the main financial items for the period. Fred, welcome to LightWave Logic and over to you.