Adisyn (ASX:AI1) Just Got Its US Patent And The Market Still Needs To Price In The New Vertical

Adisyn (ASX:AI1) this morning announced that the USPTO has allowed US Patent No. 18/692,223 covering its core graphene coating technology. The market will read it as a semiconductor story, and fair enough, that is where the company has spent most of its airtime. But in our view, the more interesting part has nothing to do with chip interconnects. It has to do with what this patent quietly locks up for defence and military assets, and what that vertical might be worth to a big Defence company in an M&A scenario. Let’s dive in!

What the patent actually covers

Strip away the chemistry and you are left with three things worth caring about:
1. A method. Adisyn has a low-temperature process for depositing graphene directly onto metal surfaces using molecular precursors and atomic layer deposition (ALD). No 1,000°C chemical vapour deposition. No catalytic metals leaving residue behind.
2. The product. The graphene-coated metal that comes out the other end — covalently bonded, defect density at or below 10¹² defects/cm², coverage above 90%.
3. Devices that contain it. Anything built using the coated metal — from semiconductor interconnects to OLEDs to “advanced composite materials”.
That third bucket is where it gets interesting. The patent is written broadly enough that it captures end-products, not just the manufacturing recipe. That is the difference between a process patent (easy to design around) and a product-and-method patent, which is much harder to work around.

Everyone is talking about chips. Let’s talk about tanks and planes and ships

The semiconductor interconnect (connecting individual transistors on a chip) story is the one that has driven AI1’s re-rating this year. Copper is hitting a wall at advanced nodes, and graphene is one of the few materials with the conductivity profile to replace it. Pitt Street Research has a 29-cent price target on AI1 built largely off this thesis, and the stock has done its job getting there!

But buried at the bottom of today’s announcement is a single line that, in our view, is worth more than the rest of the release combined:
“Advanced composite materials, including applications relevant to Adisyn’s radar signature reduction program via 2D Radar Absorbers Ltd.”
This is the bit retail investors should be circling with a red pen. Because what Adisyn is describing, i.e. covalently bonded, low-defect, low-temperature graphene coatings on metal, with no catalytic residue, is essentially a purpose-built input for the next generation of stealth materials. And this is a big deal!

The radar absorbing materials problem nobody has cracked, yet

Radar absorbing materials, or RAM, are what make stealth platforms stealthy. F-35s, B-21s, the Virginia-class submarines, advanced UAVs all rely on coatings and composite skins designed to absorb incoming radar energy rather than bounce it back.

The current generation of RAM has three well-known problems:
• It is fragile. Most stealth coatings need constant maintenance. The F-35’s coating bill is part of why its operating cost per flight hour of around US$40,000 is what it is.
• It is narrowband. Coatings tuned for X-band may underperform against L-band or S-band threat radars, which is exactly where militaries, like China’s and Russia’s, have been pushing their counter-stealth investment.
• It adds weight and complexity. Multi-layer paint stacks, ferrite tiles, magnetic absorbers, none of it is light and none of it is cheap.

Graphene, in theory, addresses all three. It is mechanically extraordinary, broadband by nature when layered correctly, and a thin film weighs almost nothing. The problem has always been getting high-quality graphene to actually stick to a metal surface at scale, at low temperature, without the contamination issues that high-temperature chemical vapour deposition (CVD) leaves behind. That is precisely the problem Adisyn’s patent claims to solve.

You can see why this would be of interest to people who build aircraft, drones, ships and tanks for a living.

The market for military applications is bigger than the semiconductor one

To put it in simple terms, the Military applications market is huge.
• Drones and UAVs. This is the obvious one. The drone war in Ukraine has shown what every defence ministry already suspected, i.e. that autonomous platforms are the future of attritable airpower, and reducing their radar cross-section is now a procurement priority, not a research project. A graphene coating that can be applied to a Group 3 or Group 4 UAV airframe at low temperature, without compromising structural materials, would be game-changing.
• Manned aircraft. Sixth-generation fighter programs (NGAD in the US, GCAP in the UK/Japan/Italy, FCAS in France/Germany/Spain) all have stealth at the core of the requirement. Coating durability is a known weak point. A graphene-based coating that holds up better than current-gen RAM is something every major defence company has been looking for.
• Naval assets. Surface ships are increasingly designed around Radar Cross-Section (RCS) reduction. The US Constellation-class frigate, the UK’s Type 26, China’s Type 055 are all spending design budget on signature management. Hull coatings that survive saltwater and don’t need constant re-application would be a serious upgrade.
• Armoured vehicles. Less obvious, but real. The Russian T-14 Armata was marketed (with varying degrees of credibility) as having stealth features. The next-gen US Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program has signature reduction in its requirements set. If you can spray a tank with something that meaningfully drops its radar return, you have a customer.
• Submarines. These are less about radar detection and more about non-acoustic detection, but graphene coatings have separately demonstrated electromagnetic and thermal signature properties that matter underwater too.

The global radar absorbing materials market, depending on whose research you read, sits somewhere between US$1 billion and US$4.6 billion today, growing at 6–12% per year through the early 2030s. Stealth coatings specifically are tracked at around US$130–155m annually, but those numbers are arguably understated, because they exclude the embedded composite layer of the market, which is captured under broader forecasts.

Either way, we believe this is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, and Adisyn is now sitting on US-jurisdiction patent protection for a technology that addresses one of the unresolved engineering problems within it.

Why the price target needs a rethink

Pitt Street Research’s 29 cent price target for AI1 is built largely on the semiconductor interconnect thesis (and a bit on the legacy datacenter business). That target has now been reached with the stock trading around 29-30 cents on 7 May 2026.

The question is, where to next? The new, coatings, leg to the story needs to be incorporated into the Adisyn investment case. This patent, and specifically what it does for Adisyn’s 2D Radar Absorbers subsidiary, is that new leg.

So, how do you value a technology that really has no peers (yet) and no stock market-listed comparable?

What is the defence vertical worth to the likes of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?

This is where retail investors usually stop reading because the math gets fuzzy. Bear with us, because there are a few elements that make this potential valuation less “back-of-the-envelop” than it looks.

Anchor 1: Comparable acquisitions in advanced materials.
Defence companies have historically paid up for niche materials Intellectual Property (IP) that plugs a real gap. Recent examples include 3M’s defence and protective materials unit that was sold to a private equity buyer for around US$1 billion in 2025. Raytheon (now RTX) has a long history of bolting on small materials science businesses for $100–500m each when the IP is tightly held. Lockheed Martin acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne for US$4.4bn. Although it’s a different category, it is illustrative of the willingness to pay for hard-to-replicate capabilities.

Anchor 2: The strategic premium for stealth-relevant IP.
Western defence companies are in a position right now where China is closing the stealth-counterstealth gap faster than Western militaries are comfortable with. Anything that gives them a meaningful coating performance advantage that is durable, does broadband absorption, and has a lower maintenance burden, is worth a premium that is not strictly tied to near-term revenue. Strategic IP in defence routinely transacts at 8–15x peak revenue, sometimes higher when it locks up a key input the buyer cannot replicate internally.

Anchor 3: The size of the addressable market.
Even on conservative assumptions, say Adisyn’s technology captures 5–10% of the global RAM coating opportunity over a decade, applied at the coating-layer level rather than the full composite, that implies US$50–250m in annual revenue at maturity, on a market that is itself still expanding.

Bottom line: What could Adisyn be worth if the stars align?

Put those anchors together and a credible acquisition value for the defence-only vertical of Adisyn’s IP, assuming it gets through demonstration, validation and signs at least one defence contract, could potentially sit in the US$300m (A$400m) to US$800m (A$1.1bn) range.
At the upper end of this pretty wide range, if a defence company concluded that owning this technology outright was strategically necessary (a not-unreasonable view given the geopolitics), you could see numbers above US$1bn (A$1.4bn).

For a company with a current market cap of around A$330m, that is the kind of upside that makes microcaps interesting, in our view.
Even an acquisition price at the lower end of the range, say A$400m, would translate to roughly A$0.34 per AI1 share at the current share count of almost 1.2bn shares (fully diluted). Add that to the current share price, and it does not require the semiconductor story to do anything beyond what is already in the Pitt Street Research price target. You’d be looking at a target of around 63 cents per share.

Keep in mind, these are just scenarios and a lot still needs to happen before Adisyn may be in a position to monetise its graphene coating technology. So, be mindful of that when considering an investment in AI1.

What to look out for from here

We’re not putting this in the “buy now, ten-bagger by Christmas” bucket. There are real risks. The 2D Radar Absorbers program is early-stage. There is no signed defence contract anddefence procurement cycles are long. The gap between “interesting IP” and “platform integration” is where many small-cap stories have died.
But the catalysts to watch are clearly visible:
• Any disclosure of partner or customer engagement on the radar signature reduction side,
• Performance data from the 2D Radar Absorbers vertical — RCS reduction numbers, durability testing, operating temperature range,
• Patent extensions into other jurisdictions (Europe, allied Indo-Pacific markets), which would broaden the M&A buyer pool,
• Any commentary from a defence company, or even a research collaboration, that validates the technology pathway.

Today’s USPTO allowance is the kind of milestone that, in our experience, doesn’t move the share price much on day one, but quietly changes the conversation about what the company is worth in twelve months. It hands Adisyn enforceable IP in the largest defence procurement market in the world, across both the manufacturing process and the end-product. That is a much stronger position than it was in yesterday.

The Pitt Street Research 29-cent target captures the chip story. We believe, the defence story is sitting on top of that, largely unpriced at the moment. For investors who got in early, this is the optionality you don’t pay for. For investors looking at AI1 today, the question is whether the second leg of the re-rating is still ahead of you. In our view, it is.

Disclosure: Stocks Down Under/Pitt Street Research directors own shares in Adisyn.