Compliant substrates offer significant promise as a new approach for strain management in semiconductors. The primary application is to produce device-quality highly mismatched materials on dissimilar substrates. Various implementations and processes for achieving substrate compliancy have been proposed and demonstrated. These include the use of twist-, glass-, and metal-bonds, and the use of engineered templates realized with laterally oxidized Al-containing alloys. A recent focus in our work has been on the growth of GaN on a novel and easily removable substrate - lithium gallate - for regrowth on a bonded GaN template.