Preach

"CBP continues to deploy multi-sensor capabilities on the border to increase detection and mitigation effectiveness"

$UMAC 🥂

Another year around the sun. Met some incredible people on here - much love to you all. 🥂🫦🔥

Anduril is using Lattice to spot a wildfire, and $LPTH just had a patent issued for exactly that problem. US 12,720,175 is an uncooled infrared imager that reads two infrared bands at once, so it can tell a real flame from hot machinery while still showing you everything around it. Detecting heat is easy, knowing what the heat is isn't. Anduril is already a greater than 10% customer of LightPath's. Uncooled means cheap and high volume, which is wildfire, furnaces and gas leaks rather than missiles. Same glass, same company, none of it defence money.

$LPTH It's all coming together. Patience and conviction.

$LPTH lnkd.in/p/eadgSzsH

I spy with my little eye $LPTH in the top left corner (for those who care).

The OD Defense Super Cycle Stack People keep asking what I'm following, so here it is in one place. The thread running through all of it is the same, which is that the US defense super cycle is being held back by supply chain constraints in critical materials and minerals, and the companies that remove those constraints are where I think the value sits. $LPTH melts its own germanium free infrared glass in the US, and just won a Department of War prototype to qualify it as the replacement for germanium in defence optics. $UMAC makes NDAA compliant drone components, the motors, flight controllers and cameras that US drone makers can no longer source from China. $MTM.AX uses flash joule heating to recover gallium, germanium and other critical metals from e waste and industrial waste in Texas, with a 10 year Indium offtake, a DLA Phase II award and a Nasdaq uplist targeted. $ECT.AX holds the Rice licence for flash joule heating of MXenes, the materials behind radar absorbing and EM shielding coatings, with a conditional defence use sub licence now in place. $ION.AX recovers rare earth oxides from magnet and e waste scrap, right where the January 2027 magnet sourcing rules are about to hit. I'll be digging deeper into each one over the coming weeks. Any questions or thoughts let me know in the comments.

$LPTH 🫦👀

This is the PrSM that actually matters for $LPTH Increment 1 flies on GPS with no seeker at all, while Increment 2 adds a multi mode seeker with imaging infrared to hit moving ships, and it just went into production at Lockheed with a $1.2B contract. Line that up with what Sam said on the last call. @lightpathtech camera systems are designed into or being evaluated in seven platforms, three of them with Lockheed, and he was clear that covers precision munitions as well as interceptors. PrSM Inc 2 is a Lockheed precision munition with an infrared seeker, going into production right as the US has run its PrSM stock down in Iran and Lockheed is quadrupling capacity. My read is it's very likely one of the three 🫦

It can't get more obvious right ... $LPTH

For those following me down the $ECT.AX rabbit hole. Almost everything on a modern battlefield puts out an electronic signal, and almost everything is trying not to show up on radar. The usual fix is metal shielding, which is heavy, and weight is the one thing a drone or a missile can't spare. MXenes are what everyone is betting on instead, because an 8 micron coating blocks 99.9999% of everything from phone frequencies up to radar, and films just a couple of microns thick hold their own against copper foil. The problem has never been demand, it's that nobody can make the stuff economically, since the standard route etches the powder in hydrofluoric acid for 12 to 24 hours and leaves a disordered jumble on the surface of every flake. This piece is about the way around it. Gogotsi, who co invented MXenes at Drexel in 2011, says the field now knows how to make clean flakes terminated with a single element like chlorine, and Rice's flash Joule heating produces chlorine-terminated MXenes in under 30 seconds. Published work has the route above 90% purity and up to roughly 74% cheaper than conventional etching. That's the process @ectltd is commercialising, and last week it signed defence use rights with MXene Inc, the company Gogotsi cofounded. $ECTHF

This is why your focus, as an investor, should be on identifying the companies which will benefit from the ramp up in production. The US needs to agressively pump money into the ecosystem to match the level of output. $LPTH $UMAC are my 2 obvious picks. And then move down the supply chain, and start looking into companies like $ION.AX and $MTM.AX and even $ECT.AX So many opportunities, just need to apply logic and have some patience.

As if the Germanium prices aren’t high enough, now AI will add new demand gf.com/news-and-events/news/…

$LPTH just won a funded Department of War agreement to develop BlackDiamond as the replacement for germanium, and to quote @skrubin "The Department of War is funding the maturation of an alternative to germanium for its own IR systems, and BlackDiamond was selected to do that work. That is a direct statement of government support for a germanium-alternative material in defense programs and it comes from the customer that will field these systems." That last part is everything. This isn't a grant or a research handout, it's the end customer paying to qualify the material it's then going to buy in its own systems. Which changes how this company sells. Normally you spend years working up through the primes one at a time, starting from scratch in every meeting, but the customer those primes all sell to has now picked your material and put money behind it. @lightpathtech doesn't need to convince Lockheed that BlackDiamond works, as the Pentagon already said it does. And it was competitively awarded, which matters more than it sounds, as a competitive prototype that gets delivered successfully can move straight to production with no further competition. The hard part is already done. There's a whole government program now, called CLEAR, built to find domestic alternatives to germanium for infrared. You are not bullish enough on $LPTH 🫦