ANALYSIS AND OPINION STARTUP SUCCESS
The road from research to business: challenges and triumphs
Following the recent publication of an article on ultrafast semiconductor disk lasers in Biomedical Optics Express, Dr Florian Emaury, CEO of MicPulse and a semi-finalist in last year’s SPIE StartUp Challenge, discusses his entrepreneurial journey in commercialising research-grade semiconductor lasers and forming a profitable business
C
oming from a physics background, setting up a business comes with its
fair share of challenges, but I’ve also found it to be an exciting process. Compared to working in a more closed research environment, numerous issues come unexpected and must be taken into account. Researchers all too often forget that you cannot sell a ‘technology’, but rather a solution to a problem. Discovering the benefits that a technology invented in a university laboratory could bring to potential customers has been exciting. A major part of this evaluation involves countless discussions with experts in the targeted application field, reviews of numerous papers and case studies, but also thorough market research to identify existing products and recognise competitors. This makes the commercialisation of a university technology a real challenge but one with many interesting aspects.
Advancing the ultrafast world with semiconductor lasers MicPulse aims to commercialise ultrafast semiconductor disk lasers (also known as VECSEL, or MIXSEL) to provide affordable ultrafast laser sources to research and industrial applications. Thanks to the bandgap engineering capabilities of semiconductors,
we can design an ultrafast laser for any central wavelength in the 900-1,100nm range, providing an adapted source for each customer. Our main target is the
field of bio-imaging, which requires a wavelength-defined ultrafast laser to drive the multiphoton processes used in in-vivo imaging. Currently- used sources are expensive (>$80k), thus leading to an overall microscope system price (>$0.5m) only affordable by shared facilities or by a few well-funded research groups.
This is dramatically limiting the dissemination of these systems to more users or other medical applications. In our recent article in Biomedical Optics Express1 we demonstrated, for the first time, the full potential of these lasers for in-vivo multiphoton imaging in real and useful research applications (in-vivo experiments with drosophila or in the brain of living mice with structural and functional imagining). We also performed a thorough comparison with a standard Ti:Sapphire laser,
showing that equivalent image quality can be achieved with our significantly less complex lasers. These experiments were performed with the research group of Professor Fritjof Helmchen2
(University
of Zürich, Switzerland), a pioneer in multiphoton imaging for neuroscience. Figure 2 shows an example of the type of high quality image that can be obtained with our semiconductor disk lasers, demonstrating that a simple, compact ultrafast laser is a competitive and attractive source for such imaging. More generally, our vision is
to develop an easy-to-use and affordable ultrafast laser that can open up new applications. While the whole ultrafast industry has experienced around an 8 to 10 per cent price reduction every year over the last decade – driven in particular by micro-machining
Figure 1: MicPulse’s vision is to bring an air-cooled and maintenance-free laser system to the market that will allow customers to drive non-linear processes at any wavelength in the range 900-1,100nm in an easy and affordable way
32 Electro Optics December 2017/January 2018 @electrooptics |
www.electrooptics.com
Dr Florian Emaury / MicPulse
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