Startups across Europe have spotted a major opportunity: building the next generation of ultrafast lasers, a component that has become a key piece in the manufacturing of high-performance chips.
In June 2026, the European Commission unveiled a package of legislation and strategies to strengthen the continent’s competitiveness and independence in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence ecosystems. The name might sound bureaucratic, but what is happening behind the scenes is far more concrete. And it starts with something that fits in the palm of your hand. One of these startups is even breaking ground on a factory in Lithuania as early as October. 🚀
Sovereignty is not some abstract public policy term for us — it has become the reason funding, partners, and attention are available, says Celia Millon, CEO of RayVen Laser GmBH, based in Germany. The proposed Chips Act 2.0 from the European Union aims to support the entire chip supply chain, including design, materials, and processing equipment like ultrafast lasers. According to Millon, this shift means a significant amount of public resources can reach small startups like hers.
Independent market research estimates the global ultrafast laser market at around 2.4 billion dollars in 2025, growing at roughly 20 percent per year to surpass 10 billion dollars by the early 2030s. The main drivers behind this growth are semiconductor miniaturization and advanced packaging, along with applications in precision manufacturing and the medical field.
What makes a femtosecond laser so special?
To understand the hype around these devices, it helps to take a step back and think about what a femtosecond actually means. We are talking about one quadrillionth of a second — in other words, a span of time so short that light can barely travel the width of a human hair in that period. When a laser fires pulses on this scale, it can interact with materials in an extremely precise way, removing or modifying atomically thin layers without causing thermal damage to the surrounding area.
This seemingly technical detail has enormous implications. Ultrafast laser processing is essential for advanced chip components that enable faster data transfer. A good example is interposers, wiring layers that help connect chiplets stacked in advanced semiconductor packages. These components require tiny laser-drilled holes known as through-glass vias, which are then filled with copper to route electrical signals.
It is like 3D printing technology, but inside glass, explains Nikolajus Gavrilinas, CEO and co-founder of Lithuanian startup Litlit. Other applications include probe cards for printed circuit boards and wafer dicing, showing just how versatile this tool is within the production line.
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Litlit ramps up production in Lithuania
In October, Litlit is opening a new factory in Vilnius, Lithuania, with a goal of manufacturing up to 3,000 femtosecond lasers per year. That volume would place the company at the top of global production capacity. When demand is higher than normal, says Gavrilinas, the big market players look for less mature companies. For young companies like Litlit, it is a huge opportunity.
There is a difference in customer profile here that is worth highlighting. Academic buyers of femtosecond lasers tolerate expensive and complex designs because their focus is research. Industry, on the other hand, needs compact, rugged lasers that require no maintenance and operate reliably in factory environments. It is a completely different game.
In 2014, Gavrilinas and his co-founders patented an approach for generating extremely stable laser pulses at a one-micron wavelength using just a few pieces of optical fiber. Starting from that stable seed pulse, modulating noise becomes straightforward and controllable. The architecture achieves 20 percent electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency, and the pure fundamental wavelength is delivered in a high-energy beam.
Over the past decade, the company turned this idea into a modular and compact technology while also inventing more sustainable production techniques. Moving from complexity to stability is the hallmark of a mature technology, says Gavrilinas, and Litlit’s approach has already reached that stage.
RayVen bets on an underexplored wavelength
Meanwhile, Millon’s RayVen Laser took a different path: ultrafast lasers that operate at a 2-micron wavelength, something that has not been widely commercialized yet. At this wavelength, Millon explains, silicon becomes far more transparent than at traditional wavelengths. Instead of just removing a surface, the beam can be focused and structured inside the silicon itself.
This opens up new manufacturing possibilities for the semiconductor industry, with processes that are more efficient, require fewer steps, or simply were not possible before. Among these processes are backside chip processing, deep surface structuring, and through-silicon vias, which allow layers of 3D chips to communicate with each other. Current technology for these tasks involves a lot of chemicals and water. Doing everything with lasers alone is simpler, more cost-effective, and generates less material waste. ♻️
Today, RayVen is building and qualifying its first two product lines at a low-volume pilot scale, not mass production. Early customers and collaborators include research institutes, university labs, and industrial R&D groups that need a laser source for materials processing experiments. A fresh injection of European Union funding in April helped propel the company deeper into the world of semiconductor processing. Now they are building demonstration systems with two partner universities.
Millon says she has seen demand rising on multiple fronts: growing customer interest, increasing attention to this wavelength at scientific conferences, and new manufacturing needs emerging in integrated photonic circuit fabrication and co-packaged optics.
More data, more lasers
Not everyone is quite as optimistic, and it is worth hearing both sides. Eric Mottay, co-founder of ultrafast laser giant Amplitude Laser in Bordeaux and now an independent consultant, doubts that Europe’s tech sovereignty campaign alone will have much influence on local femtosecond laser companies. Microprocessing is an important domain overall, but it brings together many niche applications that fall outside the scope of the big players, he says.
The telecommunications and data transmission industries, however, have a clear market case for femtosecond lasers. And emerging companies need to demonstrate the ability to produce very high volumes. Mottay sees good potential for European Union companies to innovate in this space.
One of those companies is Swiss-based Menhir Photonics. Its focus is on miniaturized, precision femtosecond lasers at a 1.5-micron wavelength. Our laser works like a metronome that synchronizes telecommunications systems, explains Benjamin Rudin, CTO of Menhir. Precise synchronization between cell towers, for example, becomes increasingly important with the high data bandwidth of 6G systems.
This technology is also valuable in quantum technologies, precision microwave generation, and high-speed optical switching inside AI data centers. We have been approached by companies doing things that were never on our radar, says Rudin. He cites as an example their work with a company that supplies data center transceivers for secure data transmission.
Right now, according to Rudin, no other company manufactures ultrafast lasers with the same combination of specifications as Menhir. Gain-switched laser diodes can serve a similar function in the telecom world, but they have worse noise performance and less bandwidth. Compared to traditional academic markets that use ultrafast lasers for quantum physics research, the datacom and telecom worlds demand maturity, reliability, and low prices. The idea has always been to miniaturize our lasers and fully automate production to serve this market, he says.
Miniaturization: the next challenge for ultracompact lasers
If you ask any manufacturing engineer what they want most from laser equipment, the answer will almost always include the word compact. Traditional systems are large, expensive, and require tightly controlled operating conditions, which limits adoption on production lines where floor space is at a premium. The current race among European startups is precisely about solving this problem — delivering technical performance in a much more practical format for industrial use at scale.
Driven by growing demand for digital infrastructure, Menhir Photonics opened a state-of-the-art production facility in Zurich last August. The site is developing fully automated assembly machines to produce laser modules measuring just a few square centimeters. The plan is to complete the first prototype by the end of 2026, achieve full automation by the end of 2027, and produce tens of thousands of compact units per year by 2028. This sovereignty topic is becoming important. We are realizing how much we depend on China, says Rudin. 😄
So, is it sovereignty or the market?
Carlos Lee, director of the European Photonics Industry Consortium (EPIC), also prefers to tread carefully and points out that the word sovereignty can act as a kind of smokescreen. Even if Europe manages to establish its own semiconductor fabs, it still needs to buy manufacturing equipment from outside the continent, and the laser source is just a small part of the whole picture.
Either you are 100 percent independent, or you are not. If you do not even have the screwdrivers to assemble the machine, you are not independent, Lee challenges. Still, even if the European Union Chips Act and its successor do not lead the continent to greater independence, if they help the industry, they are already worth it. As Lee puts it: It is the market, not sovereignty, that is the real engine behind all of this.
At the end of the day, this combination of public incentives, growing demand, and technological maturity is creating a rare window for European ultrafast laser startups. Whether driven by the sovereignty narrative or by pure market forces, Europe is building an ecosystem right now that could become a global benchmark in this technology. And for a continent that lost ground in the chip race, this represents a real chance to rebalance the playing field in at least one important corner of the board. 🎯
