The "last nut" of high-end instruments has been put in place by a Beijing-based company.

"Send the technology into space first, then bring the price down to the ground"

In April 2023, China's space station welcomed a special "passenger" — a domestically produced 780nm femtosecond laser. It withstood the impact, vibration and temperature difference during rocket launch, and operated stably in orbit. Based on the same light source, the team of Academician Cheng Heping realized the world's first two-photon microscopic imaging in space flight.

The developer of this laser is not a long-established international optical giant, but a Beijing-based company called Velox Photonics that was founded less than three years ago at that time.

Recently, Beijing Velox Photonics Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Velox Photonics") has completed a new round of financing of tens of millions of yuan, with investors including Guojing Capital, Weichi Capital and other institutions.

The business of this company can be summed up in one sentence: to build a proprietary "heart" for China's high-end scientific research instruments, medical equipment and precision manufacturing equipment — ultrafast lasers.

"One part per quadrillion of a second"

How short is a femtosecond exactly? If you stretch one second to the age of the universe, a femtosecond is only equivalent to 7 minutes in that stretched timeline.

Ultrafast lasers compress energy into such an extremely short instant for release: their peak power is sufficient to process any material, but the energy of a single pulse is so small that there is no time for heat transfer, so the material is even "cool" when the processing is finished, which is called "cold processing" in the industry. If ordinary lasers are equivalent to using a soldering iron to burn out shapes, ultrafast lasers are more like using an extremely fine needle to peel off materials layer by layer.

This "no heat trace left" capability is becoming a rigid demand in four types of scenarios:

· Biomedical imaging. Multi-photon microscopes use femtosecond lasers to observe the activity of living neurons, which is a basic tool for brain science research; coherent Raman imaging can read the chemical composition of samples without staining, and is widely used in drug testing and live cell analysis;

· Precision ophthalmic surgery. Femtosecond laser has a cutting accuracy of micron level for cornea, which is the mainstream route for all-femtosecond myopia correction and cataract surgery. A single energy fluctuation may affect patient safety, so the requirements for light source consistency are extremely strict;

· Micro-nano additive manufacturing. Two-photon polymerization (2PP) pushes the forming accuracy below the diffraction limit, which is the core process of nanoscale 3D printing. The performance of femtosecond laser directly determines the forming accuracy and mass production efficiency;

· Semiconductor precision processing. Stealth dicing of wafers, defect detection, precision machining of glass substrates and TGV (Through Glass Via) drilling all require the fabrication of crack-free microstructures with high aspect ratio on hard and brittle materials. The harder and more brittle the material is, the more irreplaceable the advantages of cold processing become.

The microscope is domestically made, but the light beam inside it is not

In China's ultrafast laser market, imported products account for about 70% of the revenue. Overseas fiber lasers are sold at a price of 400,000 to 800,000 yuan per unit including tax, and high-end solid-state products such as titanium sapphire lasers are 2 to 3 times the price of domestically produced products of the same specification. Returning to the factory for repair often takes several months with high costs, forcing experiments to be suspended while waiting for spare parts. The upstream is also constrained by imports: the unit price of imported seed sources is 100,000 to 150,000 yuan, and compression gratings are only supplied by two companies in the United States and Germany, with a price of 50,000 yuan per piece.

According to the *2026 China Laser Industry Development Report* released by the Chinese Optical Society, by the end of 2025, there are more than 12,000 surviving laser enterprises in China, of which only more than 50 are engaged in ultrafast lasers, and most of them are concentrated in traditional manufacturing scenarios such as cutting and marking; high-standard special bands for biology, medicine, precision processing and other fields have long been blank.

"Confining light into optical fibers": a route verified by space missions

The market gap will not be filled just by adding one more follower. Velox Photonics' breakthrough idea was not to make cheaper "domestic substitutes" from the very beginning, but to replace the entire implementation method of ultrafast lasers.

Traditional solid-state lasers are built with mirrors, crystals and free-space optical paths, which may require re-calibration after transportation or temperature changes; fiber lasers confine light in optical fibers for transmission and amplification, featuring compact structure, no need for water cooling, and natural anti-disturbance capability. The two routes are not mutually exclusive: solid-state lasers are still irreplaceable in terms of single pulse energy and wavelength tuning; while in biomedical, medical equipment and industrial scenarios requiring continuous operation, stability, miniaturization and low maintenance are the rigid demands, where fiber lasers have more advantages. Velox Photonics has gone all-in on the fiber laser route since its establishment, targeting exactly the pain points of these scenarios.

Even with a clear path, it is still a road full of thorns. Exclusive biomedical wavelengths such as 930nm cannot be output directly, and can only be generated step by step through frequency conversion; the theoretical solution is publicly available in the industry, but to ensure that the conversion efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio do not drift in long-term mass production relies on years of process trial and error and technical accumulation.

The cost structure has also been completely re-deconstructed. The most expensive parts in an ultrafast laser are not the shell and circuits, but the core modules such as seed sources and amplifiers. In the past, domestic manufacturers could not get these parts or could only import them at high prices. Velox Photonics is one of the few domestic companies that independently develops and produces these underlying core modules, which can reduce the cost of the complete machine by 30% to 40%. The company has also launched flexible energy-transmission optical cables, providing an integrated "light source - coupling - transmission" solution.

"This is not a competition of integration capabilities, but a reconstruction of the cost structure from the bottom up," Guojing Capital commented.

A string of "national first units" and "the only domestic supplier in China"

Technical parameters can be matched, but landing records cannot be falsified. Up to now, Velox Photonics has achieved the following milestones:

· The first domestically developed femtosecond laser that operates stably in orbit, and the first ultrafast laser enterprise that has passed the space launch-level test;

· The only domestic supplier of 930nm femtosecond lasers, directly supporting brain science and neuroscience research;

· The first domestically approved in-vivo two-photon microscopic imaging system on the Chinese market, with its core light source being the 780nm femtosecond laser produced by Velox Photonics;

· The only domestic supplier of picosecond light sources for coherent Raman imaging, whose products have been mass applied in drug testing and live cell analysis.

For customers, the value of these records is very concrete: the continuous cycle of scientific research experiments counted by months and the service life of medical equipment counted by years are all built on the long-term stability of the light source.

More importantly, the reliability of Velox Photonics has crossed the industrial threshold. AI computing power is driving the large-scale commercial application of Co-packaged Optics (CPO), and two-photon polymerization is the key process for in-situ printing of microlenses. Once the production line stops, the loss will be huge. Its high-power 780nm femtosecond laser, matched with mainstream domestic equipment, operates at full load 7×24 hours on the CPO packaging production lines of leading enterprises, with no fault, no maintenance required and no performance attenuation throughout the whole process.

The most demanding buyers have become repeat customers

Looking at the customer list of Velox Photonics, you can see "half of China's scientific research community": top universities including Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University Health Science Center, as well as scientific research institutes such as the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, and Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology. Winning the trust of these most demanding users is in itself proof of excellent performance and stability.

Of course, the commercial performance of the enterprise also relies on industrial customers with large demand and high repurchase rate. At present, the company has carried out in-depth cooperation with a number of multi-photon and Raman imaging equipment manufacturers, two-photon polymerization 3D printing equipment enterprises and semiconductor equipment manufacturers, entering the stage of bulk procurement or joint development. Although the import and verification cycle for such customers is long, once they enter the supply chain, they can stably contribute sustainable revenue.

The source of the technical accumulation can be traced back to the miniaturized two-photon microscope project under the national major scientific research instrument development special project. The core technical team of Velox Photonics undertook the light source development work of this project in the early stage, and has continued to deeply cultivate the development of ultrafast fiber light sources for biomedical imaging needs for more than ten years.

Founder Liu Yizhou is a typical "academic entrepreneur": he obtained his master's degree from Peking University and doctorate from the University of Hamburg in Germany, and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for joint training during his doctoral period, and later did postdoctoral research at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany. He has published more than 20 SCI papers and served as a reviewer for many international optical journals, but he did not focus too much on the p<0.05 threshold, but paid more attention to turning the indicators verified in the laboratory into products that can be delivered in batches and do not drift for a long time.

Around this goal, the company has gathered a group of skilled technicians who have been engaged in optics research and development for decades, covering micro-optical design, fiber device preparation and mass production quality management. The mass production consistency of hard technology cannot be achieved by a single design breakthrough, but is being precipitated in cross-cycle process intuition and quality discipline.

The most solid confidence of hard technology: make profit first, then raise financing

In terms of market strategy, Velox Photonics takes biomedical imaging as its basic market to establish a standard product system and brand reputation; then cuts into the core supply chain with the help of medical device certification of domestic ophthalmic equipment manufacturers to promote industrial autonomy and controllability; at the same time, it expands high-energy products for industrial precision processing to participate in the new generation of information technology industry wave.

Financial data confirms this path. In 2025, the company's revenue exceeded 20 million yuan, with a year-on-year growth of over 70% and achieved profitability. Its extremely high technical moat and scarcity keep its gross profit margin firmly in the first echelon of the industry.

Industrial demand provides sustained momentum for growth. In 2025, the size of China's ultrafast laser market is about 8 billion yuan, which is expected to increase to about 17 billion yuan by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.7%. Stealth dicing and defect detection of wafers are in the window period of domestic substitution; the driving force of TGV is more direct — glass substrates are becoming the next generation base for advanced packaging, and a single large-size panel needs to process more than 50,000 vias. China's TGV process laser equipment market is expected to increase from about 1.28 billion yuan in 2025 to over 5 billion yuan in 2030.

The high power, high stability and maintenance-free features required by these scenarios are exactly the strengths of Velox Photonics. Moving from scientific research laboratories to production lines never tests the peak parameters, but the ability to operate stably for thousands of hours on the same equipment.

Light is not the whole of scientific research, but it is the key to many cutting-edge researches and technological applications. In the past 30 years, the best light sources in Chinese laboratories have always borne foreign brand names.

Velox Photonics wants to change this situation — after all, a laser that can withstand rocket launch has no reason not to support a brighter domestic future.