xLight scores $150M US Commerce LOI to build world's most powerful free-electron lasers for next-gen chip lithography

level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. We have our next guest in the reream waiting room, Nicholas Kellis from Xite. He's the CEO and the CTO. pulling double duty. Some people work 996.

Working two jobs at the same company. Is that right?

That is correct.

How explain that to me. What What does your day look like? What do you do? What are you building? But also, uh, walk me through the life of a CEO and a CTO all in the same one body.

All right. So, a lot to unpack there. Uh, so I'll I'll first start with what we're building.

Yes.

Uh, and in order to do that, uh, let me start with some context. So I think it's valuable to step back and you know first recognize like semiconductors are an essential part of modern society. Um they're critical to our economic and national infrastructure you know in terms of AI you know HPC data quantum and they span all the way to you know virtually everything that's under the Christmas tree this year is going to have semiconductors integrated. So they truly are you know probably our our most you know important commodity to this nation. And so what [clears throat] Exite is doing is we're building the world's most powerful lasers to transform the manufacturing of those semiconductors.

So we make them better, we make them faster, we make them cheaper, and we make them require less energy to produce.

Mhm.

So that's what we're doing at Xite.

Yeah.

Um, as far as my role, Yeah. Uh, it's like I think anybody in a startup, it it is wearing a bunch of hats. I actually get credit for a couple hats. Um, but, uh, most people don't. Uh so yeah, we've been you know focused on building out the technology and now of course with this LOI which we're getting a lot of u you know press around um that's really ramping up our efforts to build our prototype and advanced to our first commercial products.

How did you meet Pat Gellzinger? We had him on the show a couple months ago, a couple weeks ago and it was amazing. Huge fan, but I would love to know about your relationship and how it's developed.

Yeah. So so met Pat through XLite. Um so he was you know I'm sure as he described to you out looking trying to figure out what his next thing was going to be um exploring the world of venture capital happened to come to playground but was already aware of Xite and you know what we're doing with light and its applications orthography you know that is something that is near and dear to Pat Pat is a technical person at heart he believes very strongly and the need for this type of you know capability to drive the innovation that's going to bring you know leading edge semiconductor manufacturing back to the us. So he he kind of sought us out um to some extent and then from there it just became uh you know an incredible relationship. Um Pat has had a profound impact on the company. Um from you know just adding that kind of gravitas and cache and recognition of what we're doing through to being you know he's taken on the uh undesirable role of trying to make me a better CEO. Uh so he's and he does everything in between. So, uh I am eternally grateful to him and I can't uh give him a high enough regard.

And can you can you take me through the the the the US Department of Commerce announcement, the deal? Um and I I mean I I I want to know like how the deal came together, but how I should think about it from the perspective of uh is it more of like a venture capital style investment or like a contract to deliver specific things? Walk me through uh exactly what your relationship with the Department of Commerce will be over the next few years. Sure. Um and hopefully it extends beyond a few years. Yeah. Um first and foremost, I want to recognize that, you know, this administration um really did approach this with an incredible urgency

and creativity.

And I'll just kind of give a sidelight that I really believe that it's going has to be an essential part of our industrial policy going forward.

We cannot continue to believe that the status quo is going to keep us competitive.

Um so I'm really grateful for that. But I have to emphasize that that urgency and that ability to move quickly was premised on lots of incredibly, you know, diligent work that has done by the Department of Commerce. We've been engaged with them for over two years.

Uh so there's over two years of tech diligence of commercial diligence of financial dig diligence that they were able to leverage. So they moved quickly, they have the sense of urgency, they're acting creatively, but they it's really rationally founded. Mhm.

So what does getting to the first commercial product look like, you know, uh more tangibly?

So it it definitely goes through our prototype. Um so one of the key things that XLite is doing is we're leveraging very mature technologies that have been developed in the national labs over decades.

Um and so we take these mature technologies that have been, you know, operating in light sources for science and we're commercializing them for semiconductor manufacturing. So we have the advantage of their mature and proven. We've you know taken the opportunity to apply some unique IP and how we bring that system together and how we apply it [clears throat] for semiconductor manufacturing. And so we're now in the process of building our first prototype and this is not a you know proof of concept prototype. This is a basically kind of you know for lack of a better term a show me the money prototype. The the semiconductor industry wants to see that you know you connect this to a scanner you expose wafers it works as it should. Mhm.

So that's that's the starting point and then you know along that path we're continuing to work very closely with our customers. Our customers are the fabs and building that you know value proposition so that the you know as soon as we have that first prototype done we're already going to be building our first commercial system.

Yeah. How how much of uh your business is like capital intensive actually just you know dollars out the door facilities equipment versus human capital intensive like over the next few years how do you expect to balance the different costs in the business?

Yeah. So it's a you have to be kind of calibrated when you talk about capital. So I came from quantum computing before this uh and you know spent a long time building these types of facilities. So compared to quantum fusion, it's not capital intensive. Uh but compared to you know SAS or something like that, it's very capital intensive.

Um so it's you know to build the facilities in the you know few hundreds of millions of dollars.

Um

and just you know kind of getting back to my previous response because we're leveraging mature technologies. It's you know it we are able to you know kind of stand on the shoulders of a lot of work that's already been done. So from a personnel perspective we're quite lean. Um but from you know a capital expenditure it's it's all going in you know for the most part into hardware into infrastructure to build these facilities out.

Yeah.

Uh that is amazing. Congratulations. I want to ring the gong.

We have to we have to

congratulations.

Very very cool. Uh yeah congrats again to the whole team uh on on the grant and uh yeah we're we're excited to follow the journey.

We will talk to you soon.

The loop.

Have a good rest of your day. Good morning.

You too. Thanks.

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