How We Brought the 2910 nm Fiber Laser to Market

In 2019, when we founded LumIR Lasers, we had no office of our own. We worked out of Laval University’s facilities, using the lab’s equipment, at near-zero fixed cost. That was not a sign of limited means or ambition. It was a deliberate choice. We wanted to use that time and space to find our first customers before committing to anything else.

That discipline from the start says something about how we built LumIR Lasers: one step at a time, in the right order, without skipping ahead.

The idea of spinning off a company around the research led by professors Réal Vallée and Martin Bernier had been circulating long before the founding team came together. But a scientific idea only becomes a company when several conditions align at the right moment.

For us, the trigger was our partnership with Le Verre Fluoré.

Le Verre Fluoré is the world pioneer in fluoride optical fiber manufacturing, the material that makes our lasers possible. Standard silica fibers used in telecommunications do not transmit efficiently at 2910 nm. To generate and deliver this wavelength at power levels relevant for medical applications, you need a fundamentally different material, with its own thermal and mechanical properties, and a manufacturing expertise that exists nowhere else at this level.

When Le Verre Fluoré agreed to partner with us, it changed the nature of the project entirely. This was no longer a promising lab-bench technology. It was an industrial foundation we could actually build on.

The explanation we always give is simple, because the underlying physics genuinely is.

Molecules vibrate. Light is a wave. When both share the same resonant frequency, the interaction between them is maximized. At 2910 nm, we sit immediately below the water absorption peak near 2940 nm, close enough to share its interaction regime, and our source is tunable up to the peak itself. And biological tissues are largely composed of water.

What that means in practice: when our laser interacts with tissue, the energy is absorbed in an extremely localized, superficial zone. Penetration depth is very shallow, which allows ablation to be concentrated within a tightly controlled heat-affected zone (HAZ), with minimal thermal diffusion into underlying layers. For OEMs developing skin resurfacing systems or precision soft-tissue ablation platforms, that level of control over the HAZ is exactly what they need from a laser source.

But wavelength alone is not enough. What makes our platform valuable is the combination of several parameters rarely found together in a single source.

Our all-fiber architecture has no free-space propagation: no mirrors, no moving parts, no optical alignment to maintain. The laser can sustain mechanical shocks and keep running exactly as before. That is an intrinsic robustness that free-space technologies cannot match, and one of the reasons fiber lasers have broadly displaced solid-state lasers in industrial settings.

On top of that, our laser delivers a single-mode beam quality, the best the physics allows, which simplifies integration into complex optical systems and enables very precise depth-of-field control. That matters for surgical applications. Our technology also allows highly flexible pulse modulation, giving OEMs fine control over how energy is delivered over time.

Wavelength, robustness, beam quality, pulse control: no other source on the market today combines these parameters at these power levels. That is what we mean when we talk about a platform that is hard to replicate.

Going from scientific proof to industrial product is a body of work in itself, often underestimated, rarely visible, but absolutely foundational.

Fluoride fiber is not silica fiber. The tools, methods, and processes developed for the telecom industry simply do not apply. We could not buy off-the-shelf equipment, train technicians on existing documentation, or rely on established reference procedures. We had to build everything from scratch: handling methods, custom tooling, a production pipeline, quality control steps.

Vincent Fortin, our co-founder and CTO, led that work alongside our technical team. Today, that proprietary manufacturing know-how is one of our most durable assets. It cannot be bought, and it cannot be improvised.

What we also learned through this process is a particular way of thinking about scale. When you want to accelerate production, the real question is not how many workstations you can add, but how fast you can grow while keeping things under control. That means building processes that are more repeatable, easier to teach to new hires, and more stable over time. Once you reach that level, you can multiply. But never without continuing to question and improve what you are doing.

In the medical device market, risk is particularly delicate. OEMs building products toward regulatory approval do not adopt a disruptive technology simply because it is promising. They need precedents, evidence, and data.

What helped us early on was targeting a wavelength close to the state of the art in existing technologies. For a medical OEM, that is a decisive factor: it allows them to pursue a 510(k) clearance pathway by demonstrating substantial equivalence to already-approved devices, rather than navigating an entirely new regulatory route. Lower regulatory risk, shorter time to market. That is a concrete argument in the integration decision.

But the real lever was finding the right customer profiles first. Not just any innovator: someone who genuinely understands the technical value of what we bring, and who also has the authority and resources to launch a real project inside their organization. That intersection is rare. When you find it, everything accelerates.

Once that first customer earned its approvals and started making noise in the market, conversations with the next customers changed in nature. There was a precedent. The technology had proven itself in a real-world context. And that proof-based de-risking is, in the medical space, infinitely more effective than any commercial argument.

Our very first customers, incidentally, were university research labs. One laser at a time. Not a scalable business model, but exactly the right starting point for a new technology: people who understand what they are buying, know why it matters, and give you direct, precise feedback.

We are a photonics company. Not a medical device company, even though medical is our primary market today. Our customers are OEMs, device manufacturers who integrate our laser source as a component into their own systems.

The analogy that captures it best is “LumIR Inside,” in the same spirit as Intel Inside. Our technology operates at the core of our customers’ platforms. It is often invisible to the end user, but it is what determines the device’s performance, its capabilities, and its differentiation in the market.

This positioning also gives us a flexibility we would not have if we were building complete medical devices ourselves. We can work with partners already established in their markets, benefit from their regulatory and commercial expertise, and keep our energy focused on what we do better than anyone else: the laser source itself.

Early on, like most scientific teams, we saw potential applications everywhere. Mid-IR laser technology interacts with a wide range of molecules, across medical, industrial, defense, sensing, and scientific applications. The potential is real in all of these.

But over time, our first significant traction came from dermatology. Those early successes led us to a strategic choice: stop chasing everything at once, and become genuinely strong where we had already demonstrated clear product-market fit.

Today, our core business is dermatology and aesthetic medicine, what the industry knows as skin resurfacing and aesthetic laser systems. It is the largest segment in the medical laser market, with high customer volume and strong recurring demand. We are growing faster in this segment than we can currently service, which is precisely why we are advancing in a structured way before moving into new territories.

Surgery is our next major axis. The beam quality, energy deposition control, and localized absorption of our laser open highly relevant applications in more invasive contexts, in operating room environments. It is a field where we expect to have, in the coming years, an impact that goes beyond technical performance.

Beyond medical, we are closely watching opportunities in defense, a sector with strong public investment momentum that is looking for wavelength ranges we can reach where other technologies cannot. And over a longer horizon, many industrial materials have absorption bands our platform could address.

Our approach has not changed: capture market share where we have proven ourselves, then expand in a structured, sequential way.

What makes us most proud at LumIR Lasers today is not what most people would expect.

It is not a technical milestone, a signed contract, or a regulatory clearance. It is the team. We have built a company grounded in trust and high standards, with people who are rigorous, curious, and deeply committed. People who built their own methods from scratch in a field where those methods did not exist.

In a deep-tech environment where everything has to be created, that culture of high standards and mutual trust is as important as any technical advantage.

We are convinced that mid-IR laser technology is still early in its revolution. The molecular interaction properties it enables remain largely untapped. Academic research in this area is growing rapidly worldwide. Sources are becoming more powerful, more compact, more accessible.

Our long-term ambition is straightforward: when professionals think mid-IR fiber laser, we want them to think LumIR Lasers. Not just as a technical reference, but as the company that opened this path and kept pushing it forward.

We have validated our business model internationally, structured our manufacturing operations, and strengthened our team. The 2910 nm wavelength remains at the core of our trajectory. It represents our scientific heritage, our competitive barrier, and our primary growth lever for the years ahead.

This is one step in a longer story. We keep moving.