LASR

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss nLIGHT's Q1 2026 earnings results. I'm John Marchetti, nLIGHT's VP of Corporate Development and the Head of Investor Relations. With me on the call today are Scott Keeney, nLIGHT's Chairman and CEO, and Joseph Corso, nLIGHT's CFO. Today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements, including financial projections and plans for our business, some of which are beyond our control, including the risks and uncertainties described from time to time in our SEC filings. Our results may differ materially from those projected on today's call, and we undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement except as required by law. During the call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures.

We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings release and in our earnings presentation, both of which can be found on the investor relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to nLIGHT's Chairman and CEO, Scott Keeney.

Thank you, John. Q1 represented an exceptional quarter for nLIGHT, with total revenue, gross margin, and adjusted EBITDA comfortably beating our expectations. Q1 revenue of $80 million grew 55% year-over-year and was driven by aerospace and defense revenue of $55 million, which grew 69% year-over-year. I am particularly pleased with the continued expansion of our products gross margin and record adjusted EBITDA in the quarter. Product gross margins were a record 44% and increased from 33% in the same quarter a year ago. Our adjusted EBITDA was a record $14 million in the quarter. The expansion in our gross margins and the record adjusted EBITDA demonstrate the leverage that is inherent in our model and reinforces our commitment to growing the business profitably.

I would like to focus my prepared remarks today on important developments within our directed energy market, which continues to be the most strategic and highest growth opportunity for nLIGHT. Directed energy remains a key priority for the U.S. and allied governments, driven by the need for highly scalable, low cost per shot solutions to counter a rapidly evolving threat environment. Our focus remains on supporting customers across a broad range of power levels and mission profiles, and we are increasingly engaged not only as a laser supplier, but also as a system-level partner. Importantly, we are seeing growing customer demand for solutions that emphasize the three keys to success in directed energy, power scaling, high brightness, and atmospheric correction. Areas where we believe our two-decade investment in laser technology provides a meaningful competitive advantage and where we have consistently delivered for our customers.

Today, we officially launched our HADES portfolio of scalable beam combined high energy lasers and effectors with integrated atmospheric correction. Production-ready HADES is designed around nLIGHT's vertically integrated laser technology stack, encompassing semiconductor laser diodes, fiber amplifiers, beam combination, and atmospheric correction. The platform architecture enables system growth to hundreds of kilowatts while maintaining pristine beam quality through advanced atmospheric correction, providing defense customers with a common modular foundation that scales from near-term operational deployments to higher power systems capable of addressing increasingly sophisticated and demanding threats. Each system can be integrated with existing beam directors, sensors, and battle management architectures, enabling rapid deployment across a broad range of military platforms and battlefield environments. One example of this power scaling is the work we are doing on the production of the 1 megawatt CBC high energy laser as part of HELSI-2.

We remain on track for this program, importantly, this laser is based on the same architecture that we use across all our HADES portfolio of CBC lasers, demonstrating the scalability of the platform to deliver solutions that address a wide range of mission scenarios from counter UAS through counter cruise missile and more. We also continue to make progress on the US Navy's HELCAP program, where we're combining the 300 kilowatt CBC laser that we delivered under the HELSI program with an nLIGHT advanced beam control system that incorporates our proprietary adaptive optics for atmospheric correction. This work will help accelerate the development and deployment of future multi-hundred kilowatt systems over the coming years.

Looking ahead, we remain encouraged by the pipeline of directed energy opportunities, including follow-on production content, upgrades to existing platforms, and new prototype programs that should position us for continued growth over the next several years. Importantly, we have seen the U.S. government follow up on these program successes with increases to budgets associated with directed energy. There's currently nearly $400 million in each of the 2027 and 2028 budgeted for directed energy prototypes and procurement. The overall annual budget for directed energy laser weapons increases to approximately $1 billion in each of the two fiscal years with the inclusion of high power multi-hundred kilowatt directed energy prototypes that are expected to be funded through the science and technology portion of the budget.

We continue to believe that our differentiated CBC high power laser technology, combined with our advanced atmospheric correction capabilities and our U.S.-based manufacturing, positions us favorably to win meaningful new awards in the coming months and years. The growing pipeline of opportunities in our directed energy markets was a primary driver behind our decision to raise additional capital through a follow-on equity offering during the quarter. We raised over $190 million after fees and expenses, which combined with our existing cash, leaves us with approximately $330 million on our balance sheet. We intend to use a portion of these proceeds to build out and equip our new 50,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Longmont, Colorado, invest ahead of our demand and supply chain, and increase staffing to help accelerate new directed energy product development. In summary, our strategy remains consistent.

Leverage our vertically integrated technology platform, execute with discipline on existing programs, and invest to accelerate and support long-term growth and value creation. We believe this approach positions nLIGHT well, not only for the remainder of 2026, but for the multi-year opportunities ahead. Let me now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our Q1 financial results.

Thank you, Scott. We had a very strong Q1. We delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of product revenue growth and exceptional operational execution enabled us to generate record products gross margins in the quarter. Continued operating expense discipline enabled much of the incremental gross margin to fall through to adjusted EBITDA, which was also a quarterly record. At the same time, our continued focus on working capital management and targeted CapEx enabled us to generate positive operating cash flow for the third consecutive quarter. We significantly strengthened our balance sheet through a well-received equity offering in February, and we remain on healthy financial footing to pursue the growth opportunities we have in front of us. Turning to the numbers.

Total revenue in the Q1 was $80.2 million, an increase of 55% compared to $51.7 million in the Q1 of 2025 and down 1% compared to the Q4 of 2025. Aerospace and Defense revenue was $51.1 million in the quarter, up 69% year-over-year. A&D growth was driven by record A&D products revenue, which grew 98% year-over-year and 10% sequentially. Development revenue of $22 million grew 38% year-over-year as we continued to execute on multiple directed energy and laser sensing programs. The quarter-over-quarter decline of 16% was primarily due to the successful delivery of our 50 kW DE M-SHORAD high energy laser effector in the Q4 of 2025, partially offset by continued increases associated with our work on HELCAP.

Q1 revenue from our commercial markets, which include industrial and microfabrication, was ahead of our expectations at $25 million, an increase of 32% year-over-year. Revenue from our microfabrication markets was slightly better than our expectations at $13 million. Revenue of $12 million from our industrial markets benefited from increased demand for our additive manufacturing products and an increase in sales associated with last time buys for our cutting and welding products. As we announced last quarter, we are exiting our legacy cutting and welding markets, and we do not expect to generate material revenue from these markets after the Q2. Total gross margin in the Q1 was 33.1% compared to 26.7% in the Q1 of 2025 and 30.7% last quarter.

On a non-GAAP basis, excluding the costs associated with stock-based compensation, total gross margin in the Q1 was 34.4%, up from 27.8% in the same period last year and 31.6% last quarter. Products gross margin in the first quarter was a record 43.6% compared to 33.5% in the Q1 of 2025 and 37.3% last quarter. Q1 products gross margin was positively impacted by favorable customer and product mix, driven by record product revenue from our A&D markets and an overall increase in volume. Non-GAAP product gross margin in the first quarter was 44.6% compared to 35.1% in the first quarter of 2025 and 38.6% last quarter.

Development gross margin was 5.1% compared to 11.5% in the same quarter a year ago and 16.8% last quarter. The variability in development gross margin is primarily the result of contract mix and the timing of program deliverables in any given quarter. Non-GAAP development gross margin in the quarter was 7.2% compared to 11.5% in the same period a year ago and 16.8% last quarter. GAAP operating expenses were $27.2 million in the first quarter compared to $23.4 million in the Q1 of 2025 and $30.4 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year increase in GAAP operating expenses is primarily due to higher stock-based compensation.

Non-GAAP operating expenses were $17.1 million in the quarter, down from $17.8 million in the Q1 of 2025 and down from $18.4 million last quarter. We expect non-GAAP OpEx to remain in the $17 million-$19 million range for the balance of the year. The company achieved positive GAAP net income in the first quarter of $645,000 or $0.01 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $8.1 million or $0.16 per share in the same quarter a year ago, and a loss of $4.9 million or $0.10 per share in the Q4 of 2025.

On a non-GAAP basis, net income for the Q1 was $11.8 million or $0.20 per diluted share compared to a non-GAAP net loss of $1.9 million or $0.04 per share in the Q1 of 2025 and a non-GAAP net income of $7.8 million or $0.14 per diluted share last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was a record $13.9 million compared to $116,000 in the same quarter last year and $10.7 million in the Q4 of 2025. We ended the Q1 with total cash equivalents, restricted cash, and investments of $332.9 million, which includes approximately $191 million of net proceeds from our February follow-on offering.

While revenue growth remains the primary objective for nLIGHT, we also want to manage working capital so that over time we can grow profitability and cash flow faster than revenue. In the Q1, our cash flow conversion days were 97, compared to 125 days during the Q1 of 2025. We generated $9.7 million in cash from operations during the quarter. Turning to guidance. Based on the information available today, we expect revenue for the Q2 of 2026 to be in the range of $75 million to $81 million. The midpoint of $78 million includes approximately $58 million of product revenue and $20 million of development revenue. We expect sequential growth from our A&D markets in the Q2.

Overall gross margin in the Q2 is expected to be in the range of 29%-33%, with product gross margin in the range of 37%-41%, and development gross margin of approximately 8%. As we've mentioned previously, as a vertically integrated manufacturing business, gross margin is largely dependent on production volumes and absorption of fixed manufacturing costs. Finally, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the Q2 of 2026 to be in the range of $8 million to $12 million. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Peter Arment with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good afternoon, Scott, Joseph, and John. Nice results. Hey, Scott, I was wondering if you could maybe You touched upon the funding environment, and you called out a few things around the directed energy. You know, just how should we think about kind of the timing of all that and how you're kind of expecting it? I know there's, you know, timing around all this can be lumpy, but what's your thoughts on that? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for the question. You know, as we noted, the budget provides some insights into the importance of directed energy. You know, the data that we're showing is the president's budget. You know, it'll take time to work its way through Congress. I do think that there is signal there, as we noted. Notably, we're seeing, you know, increases particularly from OSD in the core directed energy from the principal director and various programs that are going on there. I think that we do have insights into the priorities that Emil Michael has put forward that further reinforce this. As you know, you know, the budget process takes time to work its way through Congress, and we hope to have, you know, more insights in the coming quarters there.

Certainly, you can read the comments from Secretary Hegseth and others with respect to directed energy.

Got it. Just as a quick follow-up, the product there or the Hades scalable kind of high-energy lasers family of that you launched, I guess, into today and probably, can you talk a little bit about, you know, just kind of the positioning there versus kind of some of your other products, just, you know, how you're thinking of that? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for asking that. It, something that, you know, we've been working on and very excited about, this product family. It's our platform for scaling to higher power. We're, we're starting, with the, you know, greater than 50 kilowatt class, but it will continue to scale, and that's one of the key benefits to coherent beam combining. It also provides for, a brighter beam, laser beam that can be focused, you know, more effectively. Finally, it provides for, the ability to correct for the atmosphere. All three of those features, we believe, are very important.

It also is in a form factor that is smaller than other products and, you know, we have integrated into the Stryker, as we've talked about, and can be integrated in other platforms. It's an exciting announcement, and we will be making further announcements as we continue to, you know, migrate that product family.

Appreciate the color. I'll jump back in the queue. Thanks.

Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Louie DiPalma with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. As a follow-up to the question on Hades, can the Hades platform be integrated into aircraft? As there was a defense contractor in Israel that recently discussed the incorporation of high-energy lasers into aircraft and helicopters. It would seem to be a large addressable market. You mentioned how Hades can be incorporated into the Stryker and other platforms. I was wondering if you could provide some potential color on those other platforms. Thanks. Scott.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the platforms that we've talked about in more detail are, you know, the Army, the Stryker. By the way, that's just one platform. Would ultimately be the right platforms to be determined, I think it's a challenging platform to integrate. It's a very small space. Certainly the US Navy has a number of opportunities for integration. The small size of Hades is important for those. As you noted, it becomes even more important as you look at, you know, airborne applications. One of the topics that, you know, we've talked a bit about is our leadership with respect to SWaP, size, weight, and power.

We have leading performance in that area. It provides a very good foundation for airborne platforms also. Obviously, you'd engineer the product to be different in those platforms, we do have leadership with respect to SWaP also.

Thanks. There also, there seems to have been progress with the Army, the 30 kW enduring high energy laser program. Is there the opportunity for you to serve as a supplier for that program or other programs that are, like, below the 70 kW threshold that, you know, you've established with HADES? And related to this, how do you view, like, competition, if there is competition between, like, the 70 kW and above class versus the class of lasers below 70 kW?

That's a very good question. The short answer is yes, we are excited about the work that we're doing with partners in the lower power space, like the 30 kW, where we provide key components that go into that. It is indeed different from Hades. It doesn't require the same level of sophistication with respect to the coherently combined sources for higher power. We are partnered with others to provide those components at the lower power level. As the requirements go up to higher power, that's where Hades comes in, and I think we're uniquely positioned there to provide not only the higher power, but also the higher beam quality and the atmospheric correction for those threats that require, you know, a more sophisticated laser source.

Great. Thanks for the color. Thanks, Scott, Joseph, and John.

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Siegmann with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, Scott, Joseph, and John. Thanks for taking my question. The sales and margins were fantastic. It sounds like within products, both sensing and directed energy were increasing. Just hoping you could give a sense on kind of which horse was leading the pack in the quarter. Thinking about how margins demonstrated 500 basis points of upside relative to your own high end of your guidance range for products. Should we think of that as just being the operating leverage of the higher sales, or how much was it that maybe mix contributing it? Thank you.

Yeah. Great. Thanks for the question, John. We had a good quarter across the board. All of our products fared well during the quarter from directed energy to laser sensing. Even if you look at the end markets, our industrial and microfabrication markets performed well. As you think about the upside relative to the guidance, about half of it was just volume related, just leveraging overhead and selling more through the factory and keeping the factory more occupied. The other half was a combination of slightly higher margin. There can be a pretty big mix within any given quarter. This quarter, we saw very nice mix as we continued to control the cost. I think, again, it was a good quarter that we were firing on all cylinders.

Thank you. Maybe I'll flip one on Hades too, which has to be one of the best franchise names in defense right now. You've talked a lot about how coherent is differentiated and scalable for high. You introduced the 30 and the 10 kW systems and talked about having proprietary beam quality that wouldn't be coherent. Maybe can you talk a little bit about what's differentiated in that class power and what is your company's right to win in those areas? Thank you.

Good, Jonathan. Thanks for the question. Just to replay, there's only two ways to combine lasers to preserve, you know, a very bright, coherent laser source, spectral beam combining and coherent beam combining. We have a very strong position that as you go up in power, coherent beam combining is the best way to scale to higher power to provide a brighter source to also then more effectively allow for atmospheric correction. For lower power, we do provide spectral beam combined sources. Again, we work with other partners to provide components and combined laser sources there. We don't integrate it into the full what was known as typically the effector with the beam director in that space. Again, as I mentioned, leading SWaP size, weight, and power. We have high reliability.

We have lasers that are serviceable. There's a whole host of differentiation that we have that's a result of 25 years of building lasers for a broad range of industrial and defense applications that allows us to serve that market well. We don't integrate as far forward in the lower power space. Does that help, Jonathan, answer your question?

Thank you. I think I misunderstood the website. I thought the 10 were new products. Appreciate the clarification.

Good.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Palm with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Going back to segment results, you know, what drove, I think most of the upside was actually on, in the industrial segment. Can you just maybe talk about, you know, what surprised you? I think, Joe, you talked about some last time buys, presumably maybe that continues in the Q2. What are we now expecting for the full year relative to that $25 million to $30 million number you gave last quarter?

Yeah, thanks, Greg. The industrial, upside in industrial was a little bit better than we expected around producing revenue and taking orders for last time buys in our cutting and welding business. The, the brighter upside spot really was additive manufacturing. We had a nice quarter in additive manufacturing, we're seeing that business continue to show better growth than we had anticipated going into the quarter and into the, you know, balance of the year. As you know, it's difficult to predict. We don't guide for a full year basis because we don't have the amount of visibility that we, you know, do in the defense business.

I think relative to what we said, during our last earnings call, things have gotten better, and so we're starting to, you know, chip away at that hole that we talked about. There's still a lot of work that we need to do as we go through the year to really close that.

Yep. Okay. Then Scott, going back to, you know, some of the budget items, and I wanna go back to some of the comments on the last call as well, talking about, you know, a number of new, you know, prototypes that you're going after, different power levels. You know, can you give us maybe an update on, you know, I know timing's tough, but when would you expect, or when should we hear to expect more on some of those programs that you alluded to last quarter?

Well, I'd like to predict how Congress will work this year, but I've got enough experience to know that there are error bars around that. The budget numbers that we provided were the president's budget requests. That'll work its way through the appropriations process in the coming quarters. We should have, you know, more insights this fall. That can be delayed. I think, more specifically, you know, there are opportunities for specific programs in the current budget that we certainly will announce when we're able to do so. The higher level budgets, though, it will take time for that process to work itself out.

Okay. Just to be clear, the prototypes that you alluded to last quarter, was that not current fiscal year budget, or was that for 2027?

That was for 2027. That was.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. All right. Thanks for the call.

You bet.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Your next question comes from the line of Troy Jensen with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, gentlemen. Congrats on the stellar numbers here. Maybe just a, I guess, question for anybody. I'm just curious if there's any capacity constraints. What I'm getting to is $81 million revenues in December, $80 million in March. The high end of the guide here is $81 for June. What needs to happen for you guys to break through that level?

Short answer, Troy, is we are not capacity constrained today. We've really done a great job of improving both the capacity on the lasers that we're building as well as the efficiency with which we are building those lasers. We talked about what we were adding in Longmont. Today, capacity really is not an issue. What we need to continue to break through that $80 million threshold is demand signals from our customers, U.S. government, et cetera, which we're starting to get. We've got no concerns at all today on capacity.

Gotcha. New wins will be easy to kind of fulfill as they come in. Okay. Just, Joseph, for you too, just on, like, gross margin guidance. I mean, you guys kind of started the conference call here with, you know, highlighting 44% product gross margins, and it just seems like it should stay around this level. What's really gonna get it down to kind of the lower end of those, you know, kind of the guidance range? Or do you think it starts to creep higher here for?

Yeah, I think there's the primary factor of our margin is really volume, both the volume that we are putting through the factory and what we are selling through to the customer in any given quarter. Beyond that, it's really just the mix of the products as we go through the quarter, right? On average, as we've gotten out of China, as we've narrowed our focus, particularly with the last-time buys with customers in cutting and welding, the overall product margins or the BOM margins on the products that we are selling are becoming less variable, there is still some variability as we go quarter to quarter. That will also have an impact.

Again, we're not talking about huge numbers here, Troy, so, you know, the margins can swing a couple of 100 basis points, and there's really not all that much to read into it. We're happy that we've been able to, you know, get to a point today where we've, you know, consistently at 40% or above products gross margins.

Great. Okay. I'd like to sell last one here for Scott. If I remember correctly, I think the delivery date for the 1 megawatt laser was sometime in 2026. Just correct me if I'm wrong and what was the highest power you guys have shown to date and just kind of thoughts on kind of hitting the deadline there?

Thanks, Troy. It's referring to the HELSI-2 program that is targeting a megawatt-class laser. In HELSI, we exceeded over 300 kilowatts in that program. That led to the award for HELSI-2. You know, we're tracking to that program. However, it's not a delivery of a product, it's a demonstration of that technology. You know, as soon as we're able to provide more insights into that, we'll certainly do so. I am comfortable saying that we're on track, there's progress. We're learning a lot from what it takes to scale to much higher power levels. You know, things are on track and going well.

Great. Great. Well, keep up the good work, gentlemen.

Thanks, Troy.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to John Marchetti for closing remarks.

Thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon and for your continued interest in nLIGHT. We will be participating in several investor conferences over the next several weeks. We look forward to speaking with you during those events and throughout the remainder of the quarter. Have a great afternoon.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.