00:03:32 · Sebastian Johnson, Hugo da Silva
[00:03:32] S0: How does it feel to be done, closed around, must be a relief? [00:03:36] S1: Well it's a big relief as you can imagine, right, you were running all kinds of different balls in the air you know doing fundraising, visiting customers, setting up a team. Obviously we're structuring a team as you grow, there's a higher demand in the market. So we need, you know, smarter people to be around ourselves. We need to hire top engineers, you know, people that understand the application, people who understands the technology. And now fundraising is almost a full time job, but all these other jobs are also expecting someone to help. So basically it's a big relief to not doing fundraising, but the life of a company like ourselves is always in a fundraising mode even if we just closed the round. If there are any investors out there that believes in our technology wants to connect, they're more than happy to entertain a discussion. [00:04:23] S0: Amazing and what's next for you then right you've just closed this round you're now I guess like no longer distracted by this fundraising process, you've got a lot of tailwinds behind, you've got a lot of growth at the moment, where are you going to be spending your time?
00:04:36 · Hugo da Silva
[00:04:36] S1: So one is to develop, so like I said we are selling a new technology, so we are shipping this new technology by the end of the year. So make sure everything is correct, right? So we are in a deep tech, highly precision, not only equipment, but the whole process. So we don't only sell the equipment. So we lay down the entire process to make sure customers are successful doing the entire manufacturing. So we are quite busy making sure that we deliver that among all the other customers that we already deliver. Let's say the first generation of our equipment is the second generation. So make sure they are successful. That's large part of my job. We are also quite busy in, so some of our customers start to push us to different applications or different use cases. Also in AI era, as you can imagine, AI glass is one thing, but there's a lot of things happening on the data center where we see what they call co package optics becoming quite an interesting application for us as well. Our equipment and our technology can pretty much deliver on that as well. And we see as a high potential in this market. So we are now in a way making sure we can deliver everything on the AI smart glasses and preparing ourselves to this next step, which is a large market. It can also help a lot on, you know, reducing dramatically the need of energy in data centers, basically making the connection between chips through light and we can play a role in that sense as well.
00:06:09 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:06:09] S0: And tell me a bit about that because that sounds really exciting. Where's this coming from? What's the size of this opportunity?
00:06:15 · Hugo da Silva
[00:06:15] S1: To be honest, right, I would see in the market everybody is telling us this is huge right, so I would not put numbers into that at this moment, it's too early to tell. But while we do the tricks we do basically on waveguides which is you know we are getting lights from a projector and, you know, mix this light and creating a virtual image or a holographic image with extremely high precision that a human eye can see basically display out of it. So we see that on data center is a similar necessity where they need to translate what's coming out of the chips into a coming from let's say electrical or signals into light to transport the light between one place to the other through fiber optics and there is a connection or interconnection or translation from that physical to light and that's where we can play a role which is basically carrying light in a very precise manner creating like multiple channels one on top of the other and very precise small channels that will carry light through. That's precisely what we do in waveguide. So in a way the technology is very similar. You create a so called micro lenses array that will translate and then you know shoot light from one distance to the other and basically to fiber optics as a final goal. So we are in a way, we are new to that, to be honest, we are investigating, but a lot of our customers actually are already sampling customers into this new market and we decided to also put a little bit of effort on that as well.
00:07:46 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:07:46] S0: And you joined as CEO two years ago. In the last two years, the world has changed so much and the explosion of AI and there's a lot of more deep tech in Europe. How has the business changed to react to the changing world?
00:08:03 · Hugo da Silva
[00:08:03] S1: Well first when I joined right, I think one of the biggest challenge was to structure the company in a different way. At that time we were doing ten-fifteen different applications, There was a lot of balls in the air. I think first step, okay, let's laser focus on one and two applications where our product and our technology really brings the value and makes ourselves unique. That was the first step and basically then create a whole commercial team around. While we are creating commercial team just to let you know, right? So we started, okay, well maybe we should have a team in US and then we realized, you know what, we also need a team in China and now with the way the geopolitical dynamics work is that we know what? We also need a team in Taiwan. And now we realize maybe we even need a team in Korea. So I think every, you know, every month there's... I just came back out of China CIOE and it's unbelievable how things are moving fast in this photonics industry. Right? So, you know, a lot of brands are launching their AI smart glasses. There's all kinds of flavors, all kinds of models, all kinds of technologies. And then with that, like you said, this whole market on CPO it's also moving but you see and there's a lot of dynamics in the market, the geopolitics playing a role. So we are trying to capture all that and make sure we have a team. But more important what I believe is that having local people can really help us move fast. Doing everything from Europe is becoming extremely difficult. So we are setting up a team in different regions so we can really you know learn fast the dynamics of the market.