QiOVA is a French company that designs advanced laser beam delivery systems that unleash the full potential of laser processing. The company's VULQ1 multibeam technology enables new solutions for laser marking and micromachining in the medical, luxe or advanced manufacturing sectors.
In this article, Jose Pozo, EPIC’s CTO, talks to Florent Thibault, Vice President for Global Sales Marketing at QiOVA, a pioneer in the development of programmable laser beam shaping for high power and high energy applications.
Early career
After graduating with an MSc in Optical Sciences from the Institut d'Optique in Paris in 2003, Florent started a Research Doctorate in Optics and Photonics at Paris University XI. This was followed by a PhD at CEA-Leti in Grenoble, where he specialised in new kinds of architectures and materials for high power femtosecond lasers.
After his PhD, Florent opted for a career in industry and in 2007, he started working as R&D Project Manager for Teem Photonics, a French company specialising in the production of ultrashort pulse lasers solutions for a variety of applications, including marking. In 2008, he became Laser Applications Manager and in 2012, New Business Development Manager responsible for accelerating new accounts, which involved regular strategic prospective missions to China, India, USA and Europe.
As he explains, Teem Photonics had been founded in 1998 to introduce new products like waveguide amplifiers and splitters to the telecom market. But after the telecom crash in 2003, the company had to reshape its business and find new markets. For Florent, this meant learning how to listen to customers to understand what they needed and how they could use the technology, which enabled him to develop expertise in laser applications and MarCom (Marketing communications)
Coherent
After 8 years at Teem Photonics, Florent began to look for a new challenge - specifically, an opportunity to manage global business and learn about operational excellence. To this end, in 2015, he became Product Line Manager for the market leader Coherent (formerly Lumera Laser GmbH), a company making ultrafast solid-state lasers for microelectronics, materials processing and medical applications.
Over the next three years he had global responsibility for industrial ultra-short pulse laser product lines targeting the consumer electronics and material processing markets. A satisfaction was the successful introduction of the market-leading HyperRapid NX high power picosecond laser product line.
Working at Coherent was a great learning experience as he worked as part of a team with highly skilled people and had to overcome a wide variety of challenges using an entrepreneurial approach. More importantly, his exposure to the global laser market made him aware of two trends.
The first, was that ultra-short-pulse lasers were becoming a commodity. As he explains: “In the mid-2010s, there was only a handful of femtosecond laser manufacturers in China but, only a couple years later, there were twenty and we began to feel an increasing downward pressure on prices due aggressive pricing policy in this booming market”. The second was a realisation that in future, a large part of the laser value would not be in the laser source itself but in the beam management, i.e., the ability to shape light to specifically address each application characteristics.
QiOVA
Since his days at CEA, Florent always had had it in mind to become an entrepreneur, and by 2018 he felt ready: he had both the required high-level management experience and an idea for the business.
Accordingly, in 2018, he joined QiOVA as a Managing Partner in charge of sales and marketing activities to drive the penetration of the company’s cutting-edge laser beam shaping technology into the industrial market.
Over the past couple years, Florent has used his commercial and technical expertise to build on QiOVA’s pioneering work to shape the VULQ1 product strategy. Current offering includes:
1) VULQ1, a programmable laser beam shaping OEM module powered by QiOVA’s patented Multibeam technology, dedicated to OEM machine builder
2) OEM laser solutions, combining VULQ1 with a laser and the corresponding process, to deliver ready to use marking/micromachining function to end-users
3) BeamForge software suite, which allows the user to rapidly generate optimized beam patterns, without any expertise.
There are two main application fields for VULQ1 today:
- High speed industrial marking powered by QiOVA’s flasgship patented stamp marking process, i.e. the ability to mark 2D barcodes in a single pulse
- Micromachining, which use short or ultra-short-pulse lasers – typically few nanoseconds down to femtosecond range, where VULQ1 enables dynamic parallelization to scale up process throughput by manyfold.
Milestones
QiOVA has put in place a commercial strategy for acquiring customers and the first milestone in this respect was contracting commercial partners to support business development in Asia, most specifically China. The second, was early in 2020 when they signed with their first big customer, a market leader in packaging market, willing to integrate QiOVA’s flexible technology in their production lines for high volume production. The idea is to have only one or two types of parts that can be used in 20 or more products thanks to the capability of rapid digital configuration of the laser beam. In parallel of the technological and commercial development, QiOVA is working on its seed funding round, with an expected closure mid-2021, to further consolidate the company’s assets. Florent will take over leadership of the company on this occasion.
The future
Laser marking: A big growth area because the move to digital manufacturing requires the creation and manipulation of data and this can only come from marking. It creates opportunity because there are challenges for standard solutions as materials are becoming more complex and parts are becoming smaller, down to 1 or 2mm and marking needs to be combined with production, which requires ultra-high-speed systems. Another high demand area for laser marking is for anti-counterfeiting, particularly to prevent the growth of counterfeit drugs that are killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. VULQ1 can contribute delivering on this growing demand.
China: In the short term, Florent sees China as a huge potential market because Chinese industry has caught up with laser manufacturing, industry 4.0 is a strategic yet emerging topic. As digital beam shaping technology is still generally unknown in China, for the next 2-3- years, QiOVA has the potential to become a leader in the market, but a lot of work needs to be done both in educating the market and showing how beam shaping can be profitable.
Surface texturing: This will be a growth application field over the next 2-3 years, and QiOVA are currently working with technical centers in France to overcome the technological challenges to demonstrate the level of accuracy and stability required for 24/7 production. On a longer term, the aim is to develop new laser tools that will combine artificial intelligence with dynamic beam shaping to provide smart micromachining tools for the mass market.
Future applications: Florent is a great believer in cross-innovation, in the value of cooperation, combining skills and forces to develop new high value-added solutions. One area currently under discussion is the possibility of combining laser marking with blockchain technology to create more secure traceability systems. Another potential application is additive manufacturing, for example, using their advanced software control to scale up productivity of micro- 3D object manufacturing.
If you started again, what would you do differently?
“I’d spend less time playing drums in a punk band and more time on the job! (laughs). More seriously, I’d try to be more connected and better maintain this network. When I started out, I had a “do-it-yourself” attitude, but I’ve since realised that you can’t move an ambitious project forward by yourself, or with a small group of people, you need to involve all the project’s stakeholders to make it happen”.
What are your words of wisdom for the next generation of entrepreneurs?
“First, you need to learn how to learn – that is, to stay open minded and connected with a love of continually learning. Take advantage of those serendipitous moments when you meet people by chance, who you’ll probably never see again, to learn about the market and get ideas on how you can improve the technology”.
“Second, you need to be comfortable outside your comfort zone. You can’t learn without listening to your customers, your partners and even your customers’ customers. And they won’t tell you what you want to hear!”.
Written by Jose Pozo, Chief Technology Officer at EPIC (European Photonics Industry Consortium).
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