US family laser company takes its story to Capitol Hill

A laser sight small enough to mount on a rifle just got its moment on Capitol Hill, and the story behind how it got there says a lot about how the Pentagon is trying to fix a problem that has quietly killed off some of America’s most promising defense technology for years. B.E. Meyers & Co., a defense photonics manufacturer based in Redmond, Washington, announced it was invited to present the results of its Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies award, known as APFIT, to congressional and Department of War stakeholders at the Cannon House Office Building on July 21, 2026.

The company used that federal funding to speed up production of its Squad Aiming Laser Ultra High Power, or SAL-UHP, a multi-function laser sight built to work across a range of different weapons and platforms, support that the company said drove significant increases in manufacturing throughput and helped secure the device’s adoption by U.S. Special Operations Command.

APFIT exists to solve a specific problem defense insiders call the valley of death, the gap where a promising military technology finishes development, proves itself in testing, and then stalls out because there is no clear budget or contracting path to actually buy it at scale. Congress created the program through the fiscal year 2022 defense policy bill specifically to hand out procurement funding, typically ranging from $10 million to $50 million per project, to companies whose technology has already finished development and stands ready for real-world use rather than funding more research. The program has grown substantially since its first year, when its budget started at $100 million, expanding to roughly $300 million annually within a couple of years and eventually crossing a combined total of more than $2 billion awarded to over 100 small businesses, according to remarks Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum delivered at the same July 21 event where B.E. Meyers presented its results, comments reported by DefenseScoop.

“This program has created over $2 billion in awards that have been provided to over 100 small businesses. That’s an incredible achievement, and we should all celebrate that,” McCollum said.

The company’s SAL-UHP is a variant of its DAGIR-V1 Multi-Platform Advanced Laser System, a device that combines a near-infrared illuminator, which lights up a target for night-vision equipment without producing light visible to the naked eye, with both infrared and visible aiming lasers packed into a single compact, ruggedized unit designed to survive harsh field conditions. USSOCOM had already tested, validated, and formally adopted the DAGIR-V1 under the military designation LA-30, assigning it the National Stock Number 5855-01-724-3043 that lets military logistics systems track and order the device by a standardized code, but getting from that validation to full-scale production still required the kind of accelerated funding APFIT specifically provides. The underlying contract covering SAL-UHP procurement, part of a broader Special Operations Command program called Miniature Aiming Systems Laser, carries a maximum potential value of $49.9 million with a minimum guaranteed order of $500,000, and B.E. Meyers has said the APFIT support it received helped push manufacturing capacity up fast enough to keep pace with that demand.

At the Capitol Hill event, B.E. Meyers sent a genuinely multigenerational delegation to make its case. Senior Business Development Manager Chris Austin, a U.S. Army veteran, presented alongside company CEO Matthew Meyers, who represents the second generation of the family that owns the business, and the two were joined by Jack Meyers, a member of the family’s third generation, who assisted with the presentation. That kind of family continuity is not incidental to the company’s pitch, since B.E. Meyers has built its reputation as a veteran-operated manufacturer specifically serving the military, law enforcement, and aerospace markets with laser aiming and illumination technology, positioning itself as exactly the kind of nontraditional defense supplier APFIT was designed to elevate rather than one of the handful of massive prime contractors that have historically dominated Pentagon procurement.

The underlying technology inside SAL-UHP relies on a specific advancement in laser hardware that the company calls MINIRVA, a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser array that improves beam clarity and function across a wider range of weapons platforms during nighttime operations than older laser diode designs could reliably support. That technical improvement matters because night-fighting capability has become one of the clearest and most consistently maintained advantages American and allied special operations forces hold over many potential adversaries, and the Department of War has continued treating advanced laser aiming and illumination systems as a priority precisely because they extend that advantage rather than simply replacing older equipment with something marginally better.

USSOCOM has already built on the SAL-UHP’s success by separately adopting a related device called the DAGIR-V2 under a program called the Miniature Aiming Laser Ultra High Power, a version that adds a dedicated button letting operators instantly switch to the visible laser without cycling through other modes first, showing how a single successful APFIT-backed product can branch into additional variants and contracts once the military validates the underlying design.

What the Capitol Hill presentation ultimately demonstrated was not a single dramatic breakthrough but the accumulated value of steady, incremental government support arriving at exactly the moment a small manufacturer needed it most to avoid stalling out. B.E. Meyers had already built a working, USSOCOM-validated laser sight before APFIT funding arrived, and the program’s contribution was narrower but no less consequential: helping the company scale up manufacturing fast enough to actually deliver that proven technology to the troops who needed it rather than letting production bottlenecks slow adoption for years.