Aeluma (NASDAQ:ALMU) Founder and CEO Jonathan Klamkin said the company is seeking to bring high-performance compound semiconductor materials into large-scale microelectronics manufacturing, positioning its technology for applications in sensing, communications, defense, aerospace, quantum and artificial intelligence data infrastructure.
Speaking at a company presentation alongside Chief Financial Officer Christopher Stewart, Klamkin said Aeluma’s vision is to “build the world’s highest performance semiconductor chips with scalable manufacturing.” He said the company’s core innovation is manufacturing materials such as gallium arsenide, indium phosphide-related compounds and indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs, on larger substrates, including silicon wafers up to 300 millimeters.
“This is about taking the best-in-class compound semiconductor materials, but manufacturing them at scale the same way mainstream microelectronics are built,” Klamkin said.
Company Cites Capital-Light Manufacturing Model
Klamkin said Aeluma’s intellectual property includes 36 issued and pending patents, along with process recipes and trade secrets maintained in-house. He said the company uses a capital-light manufacturing strategy that primarily relies on outsourced manufacturing, including materials, foundry and packaging partners, while retaining some proprietary steps internally.
The company operates facilities in Goleta, California, including an R&D and manufacturing site and separate executive office and meeting space. Klamkin said Aeluma produces compound semiconductor wafers in-house and operates testing and validation labs for chips returned from fabrication partners. He also said the company has an ISO 9001 quality management system.
Aeluma has announced relationships with Tower Semiconductor for front-end fabrication and Sumitomo Chemical Advanced Technologies for scaling substrate manufacturing, according to Klamkin.
On financial and operational metrics, Klamkin said Aeluma reported $4.7 million in recurring R&D revenue for fiscal 2025, largely from government customers. He characterized that funding as non-dilutive support for development and customer traction, but said it is not the revenue stream the company ultimately aims to grow. He also said Aeluma had no debt or overhang and reported $37.8 million in cash as of its March quarter.
Klamkin said Aeluma had 12 employees as of June 30, 2025, and has since grown to 27 employees across engineering, operations and manufacturing, general and administrative functions, and business development.
Target Markets Include Consumer Sensing and AI Data Centers
Klamkin highlighted mobile and consumer electronics as a key opportunity for Aeluma’s shortwave infrared, or SWIR, technology. He said current smartphone facial recognition systems generally use near-infrared sensing, while SWIR could offer lower solar interference, night vision capabilities, higher eye-safety limits and longer-range imaging.
He said InGaAs enables the transition to SWIR, but traditional InGaAs manufacturing does not scale well because it relies on indium phosphide substrates. For consumer markets, Klamkin said the required production volumes would create a significant bottleneck using conventional three-inch or four-inch indium phosphide wafers.
Klamkin also pointed to AI data communications as a major market. He said investments by the top four hyperscalers — Microsoft, AWS, Google and Meta — exceed $300 billion in 2025 and could approach $700 billion in 2026, with more than $1 trillion projected in 2029 based on projects already in place. He said about 15% of that investment is related to photonics.
Demand for optical networking components is rising as data center operators seek to connect GPUs, CPUs and other compute elements at high speeds and low latency, Klamkin said. He said traditional pluggable optics are seeing demand outpace supply, while newer approaches such as near-package optics and co-packaged optics are attracting investment.
Klamkin said Aeluma’s high-speed photodiodes could serve the receive side of optical links used in data center transceivers. He also said shortages of indium phosphide substrates and fab capacity are affecting the supply chain, with some major substrate suppliers sold out for as long as five years.
Products Span Sensors, Photodiodes and Lasers
Klamkin outlined several product areas under development or commercialization, including:
- Base wafers for customers that want to use Aeluma’s materials in markets where Aeluma does not plan to be vertically integrated.
- Large-area InGaAs photodiodes for sensing applications and power monitors.
- High-speed photodiodes and arrays for data center transceiver interconnects.
- InGaAs imaging photodiode arrays for shortwave infrared cameras, including defense applications.
- Quantum dot lasers for sensing and communications applications.
- III-V materials for quantum nonlinear photonics.
He said the company is focused on defense, mobile consumer electronics and AI data communications, while also seeing broader applicability in aerospace, robotics, automotive sensing, quantum networking and surveillance.
Q&A Addresses Drop-In Replacement and Scaling
During a question-and-answer session, Klamkin said Aeluma’s technology can generally serve as a drop-in replacement when customers are already using InGaAs or indium phosphide-based devices, because the key difference is the underlying substrate. If customers are using a different technology, such as silicon detectors in near-infrared mobile applications, he said adoption would require more reconfiguration but could add functionality.
Asked how quickly Aeluma can scale, Klamkin said the company can scale “as quick as our fab partners can.” He said some partner capital investment may be required over time, but near-term partner capacity is significant.
Klamkin also addressed protection of Aeluma’s manufacturing know-how. He said the company does not currently give full recipes to contractors and uses a fragmented supply chain so no single partner has full visibility into the process. He said patents, consignment approaches and the difficulty of reverse engineering the technology add layers of protection.
“We’re very mindful of sort of protecting the technology,” Klamkin said.
About Aeluma (NASDAQ:ALMU)
Aeluma, Inc develops optoelectronic and electronic devices in the United States. The company manufactures semiconductor materials and chips using compound semiconductors on diameter substrates that are used to manufacture mass market microelectronics. It offers its devices for use in mobile, automotive, AI, defence and aerospace, communication, AR/VR, and HPC applications, as well as laser emitters, transistors for integrated circuits, quantum photonic circuits, and solar cells applications. Aeluma, Inc was formerly known as Parc Investments, Inc and changed its name to Aeluma, Inc June 2021.
