By Lisa Thompson
NASDAQ: POET
READ THE FULL POET RESEARCH REPORT
It has been a heck of a ride since early April when we did our last update. The stock was at $6.11 then, and hit an intraday high of $20.81 before settling to its current price. It now has $825 million in the bank after its recent capital raises. POET’s (NASDAQ: POET) biggest potential customer has shifted to Lumilens, with its big hyperscaler connections, which swooped in with a $50 million order and a warrant arrangement to keep product flowing in the future. As we saw with the $290 million in customer prepayments at Tower Semiconductor, if you actually want to secure an allocation of product in this industry, you need to lock it up, because not everyone will get their orders filled. Because of this, POET is not looking for new customers, just new employees who can fulfill the current demand.
As for Lumilens, it is a venture-backed startup building next-generation silicon photonics and optical interconnects designed specifically to scale AI data centers and GPU clusters. It was founded in 2024 and is backed by Mayfield and Spark Capital. Despite its age, it is far along its sales and production path. Its founders are highly experienced in the industry and have built and sold major players. The CEO and founder is a highly successful serial tech entrepreneur who previously founded Contrail Systems and Volterra, which were bought by Juniper Networks and F5 Networks. The co-founder is a hardware engineer from major networking giants like Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Aruba. The product strategist has experience at Fujitsu, Cisco, and Lumentum. This company has hyperscalers as customers, and we believe POET is providing product to one of them through Lumilens.
As exciting as data centers are, the company may be even more important to the AI server market, where there is also a huge demand. There is so much interest in Blazar that the company may not even need more high-speed transceiver customers.
Post its $400 million raise with MMCAP, the company has $825 million in cash. It is using some of it to buy manufacturing equipment, tools, and testing equipment, as well as to hire the needed staff. It loaned $30 million to a company with technology it is interested in for working capital. It also used $3 million to invest in Lessengers’ last funding round. Some of the cash is to be used for acquisitions to support its strategy of providing differentiated products to the high-speed transceiver and light source markets.
The company reports that it is making steady progress this quarter in ramping production to the volumes that will be needed in 2027. While it remains on track to ship optical engines to multiple customers this year, expected revenues this quarter will likely be pushed out by a few to several weeks. Shipments will begin in the second half of 2026 to customers previously disclosed as well as to undisclosed new customers.
POET has placed orders with equipment suppliers to expand its wafer production capacity by 10X and is evaluating alternatives for increasing its optical engine assembly and test capacity to meet the volume requirements for 2027 and 2028. Assembly and test operations are currently being done at two Malaysian contract manufacturers. At least one of those current partners and other contract manufacturers in Malaysia has expressed a strong interest in investing in the equipment that will be needed for POET’s expansion.
Management’s extreme focus on manufacturing readiness is exemplified by its recent hiring of Sandeep Kumar, previously SVP of Silicon Labs, as Chief Operating Officer. His mission is to bring the disciplines of semiconductor manufacturing to the assembly and test processes at the Malaysian contract manufacturers. He is in the process of recruiting a senior team experienced with new product introduction, manufacturing, and quality assurance.
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