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Brightlight Photonics, Inc.

Investment areas

  • Computing
  • Materials
  • Autonomous Systems / Robotics
Founders & Leadership
Josh Yang
Daniil Lukin
Alex Place
Headquarters
Cambridge, MA

Tiny lasers for huge breakthroughs.

The Tough Tech problem we are solving

The field of photonics has been advancing at light-speed, transforming technologies like quantum computing, sensing, and medical diagnostics. However, many of these innovations rely on bulky and expensive laser systems, limiting their potential for miniaturization and scalability. The titanium-doped sapphire (Ti:Sapphire) laser is one such system, and offers best-in-class performance to power applications ranging from optical atomic clocks to sub-cellular tissue imaging. Until now, the cumbersome form factor and steep cost of Ti:Sapphire lasers have prevented them from being built into scalable products – and have likewise hindered the transfer of critical quantum technologies from lab to market.

About our solution

We are taking the incredible performance of tabletop Ti:Sapphire laser systems, and putting it all on a tiny chip. Our CMOS-compatible and wafer-scale process creates these lasers and amplifiers by patterning microscale waveguides into doped sapphire material. This results in a 1000x reduction in both cost and volume, transitioning Ti:Sapphire systems from necessary components in expensive laboratory prototypes to mass-producible products with unprecedented capabilities.