We are short shares of Meta Materials, a $1 billion market cap company whose business is comprised of a whole lot of nothing: no real revenue, no promising technologies, undeveloped products, no track record of achievement. The company is a collection of disjointed and failed laboratory experiments designed, in our opinion, to fuel a stock promotion scheme. From the archived records of Meta’s websites, public information concerning its finances and research activity, and the securities filings of recent years, a clear picture emerges: Meta has habitually made outlandish and misleading claims about the feasibility, development, and commercial potential of various technologies only to repeatedly move the goalposts or retrospectively alter its claims, often just quietly dropping entire projects they had previously touted as pivotal.

Founded in 2011, Meta first claimed it was developing transparent thin films (TTFs) for three end markets: solar cells, LED lighting, and laser protection. In the solar business, Meta started by pretending it could double solar cell efficiency, proceeded to deceptively use stock photos to depict products “in the final stage of development,” and then took investment funding from Lockheed Martin through a segment it later disclosed had already ceased activity at the time. Lockheed’s “investment” was booked as deferred revenue and conveniently accounted for 70% of Meta’s revenues between 2017-2020. Meta’s solar efforts are still portrayed on its website as “early stage” nearly ten years – and zero results – after they began, while the LED lighting business mysteriously disappeared in 2020. Like solar, there’s little evidence that a material business or notable technology ever existed.

Meanwhile, the laser protection segment does exist, but just barely. After six years supposedly developing laser glare protected (LGP) airplane windshields, Meta quietly scrapped the project in 2017, replacing it with less ambitious LGP glasses. These have been an abject failure, selling less than 100 units and $60,000 revenue in 4 years and proving Meta can’t scale production of even the simplest of films. Then there’s Meta’s “wireless sensing” segment, which stems from its questionable C$4.7 million acquisition of a UK-based medtech firm with zero revenues and negligible assets that was owned by Meta’s CEO and was promoting fake products, partly by misrepresenting the results of rudimentary biology experiments. Finally, Meta’s “lithography” segment is comprised of “NanoWeb,” a TTF technology it acquired in 2016 that remains in the same stage of development as in 2014. Multiple competing technologies have been commercialized in the interim while Meta has gone in reverse, terminating the licensure of a key patent, watching NanoWeb’s inventors resign, and acquiring another penny stock which it claims will synergize with NanoWeb, but which NanoWeb’s inventors told us is a distraction. Meta’s actions suggest management has no interest in commercializing NanoWeb and wouldn’t know how to if they tried.

Meta rose to billion-dollar status after agreeing to a reverse merger with defunct penny stock Torchlight Energy in December of 2020. The day it signed the deal, it appointed a CFO recently involved in an undisclosed paid promotion. In the ensuing 6 months, Torchlight’s stock twice rose exponentially in tandem with seemingly orchestrated social media promotion into perfectly timed equity offerings. The first saved Meta from insolvency. The second raised $133 million at a $5 billion valuation in just two days that coincided with a retail-frenzy-driven melt-up in its stock price. Meta then exploited the timing and quirky accounting of the reverse merger to disclose the unseemly details of the raise as opaquely as possible. Disappearing segments, misleading product claims, fake medical devices, research funding for subsidiaries that don’t exist, and circumstances so questionable around a penny stock reverse merger that it’s now the subject of an SEC Enforcement subpoena. It’s poetic that an optics company can be entirely made up of smoke and mirrors.

Read our full report here.