Welcome to Alpha Wolf Capital. I'm Tim, and I want to personally thank you for stopping by. This channel is designed to help small companies, both public and private, gain exposure with potential consumers, investors, even partners. Take for example today's guest, CEO Sam Rubin of LightPath Technologies. LightPath Technologies is a leading provider of next-generation optics and imaging systems for defense and commercial applications. Multi-billion dollar market in defense and commercial applications for infrared imaging systems. They're a provider of high-value optical solutions and imaging systems. They have a proprietary chalcogenide glass solution, which is the only glass that enables use of multi-spectral cameras reducing the size, weight, and cost of systems without using germanium. They have defense contract tailwinds, accelerating pipeline. They have new commercial applications for boiler and furnace optical gas imaging and automotive sectors. With capabilities to manufacture and drive revenue in excess of 300 million in 5 years, but I'll let Sam tell you more about that in just a moment. This is not to be taken as investment advice. I am not a certified financial planner. This is for education and entertainment purposes only. I encourage everyone to do their own due diligence.
Hey everybody, Tim from Alpha Wolf Capital coming at you with an update to an exciting story that I don't think is fully appreciated or understood. LightPath, ticker symbol LPTH, with CEO Sam Rubin in the house. Sam, exciting, I mean already seeing the results, really impressive numbers coming from this new acquisition that you did.
Yeah, definitely. I appreciate that. Good being here again and being on the show, Tim.
Lots of great things happening, right? So the acquisition of G5 has been monumental to us. It's been just over 2 months since we announced it. We've had bookings left, right, and center. G5 team has been bringing in all these large orders that during due diligence before the acquisition, we suspected would be coming. And so, things like the spear program where now Elfi is de facto the company to make the cameras for drone detection on naval vessels. That's a massive program. Every surface vessel, meaning every vessel other than a submarine, is going to have infrared cameras made by G5 for passively detecting drones at sea.
Passive detection is extremely important. You can't turn on your radar because you're basically broadcasting your own location there. So, being able to passively detect what's happening around you is the name of the game today, and G5 has positioned themselves as the leaders there.
Another large order from a defense customer, nearly 5 million dollars, also for long-range cameras for facility protection and such. So, lots and lots of great things happening there, and it's only the beginning. This is a great step in the strategy we outlined 5 years ago and have been executing on. And together with the changes we've done with the Visimid team, with the Lockheed project and all of that, we're a completely different company now to where we were 5 years ago. Thank God, because if these tariffs would have hit 5 years ago where LightPath was, I'm not sure there would be a LightPath.
Thank God it didn't hit because you experienced everything else when you took over LightPath. That could have been the final nail in the coffin, right?
Yeah, that would have been nasty. But now, whole different company, right? And I mean, you can see it. It's just such a different company even in the press releases, the size of the contracts that you're talking about, the types of contracts that they are. There's just no comparison to what this was 5 years ago. I mean, now's the time that's so good for us, right?
So, 5 years ago, the company was very China-focused, okay? More than half of the manufacturing of the company was in China. China was at least a third of the business directly, just sales in China and such. Now, China's less than 5% of our business. We've completely pivoted. Most of our manufacturing is now in the US. We have three manufacturing locations in the US now compared to two abroad. Almost like you were clairvoyant, Sam. It's a little spooky. You know what I mean?
I'm not going to take credit for seeing the future, but I will take credit for outlining a new strategy and sticking to it.
And so, I can't express how much we're now so much better off aligned with this. 60% of our business now is defense, maybe even 70% after this acquisition of G5. More than 60% of our business is US.
This was completely different. Defense was 8% of our business 5 years ago. And this is fully because defense is growing. We've completely realigned the company. We are now US-centric, US-focused, made in the USA. Most of what we do is made in the USA now. Most of our revenue by far is in the USA. Two-thirds of our employees, even more, are US-based now. It's a different company.
Let's highlight the tariff thing real quickly because the first thing, I mean, and I know everybody has their opinions on what's going on with the administration, and I personally feel though that this was something that needed to happen. I don't know that it needed to happen this way, but the way it's happening regardless, I still think it needed to be done. I look at LightPath and immediately I think this is like the perfect storm for LightPath because yeah, China's being very, what do you want to say? Stingy with the materials. Germanium and such. And I just think, okay, well, that's BD6 all over it, right? That's a solution that's not a pipe dream. That's a solution that exists today.
And it's made right here in the USA. The black diamond glass that we, some of it we licensed from Naval Research Laboratory on an exclusive license. Some of it is more of a generic glass, but both of them are made here in the USA. And for once, we could not make enough glass to supply the demand. We've now increased capacity, we'll continue to increase it. We're seeing financial support even from customers in order to increase capacity. That's how needed this is. And regardless of tariffs, the germanium situation started nearly 2 years ago in July 2023. And that's not changing. If you follow export restrictions and all of that, which are that's a different place than tariffs, right? Tariffs is about manufacturing location, is about subsidies, materials and export controls, that's about control of technology. And China's not only letting go on that, they keep adding more and more materials to their different control lists. And so, our bet 3 years ago, 4 years ago now, on black diamond, licensing that extremely extreme expansion of capacity and capabilities, a close to million dollar investment from the government through Defense Logistics Agency Strategic Materials team that they had the ability to sort of understand why this is so important and hedge some bets on it. That all positioned us now in an incredible place. I mean, we are the go-to company for optics that is not made of germanium or has very little germanium in it.
