Chinese femtosecond laser company completes Pre-A round of financing

Recently, Qingdao Free Trade Laser Technology Co., Ltd. successfully completed the Pre-A round of financing. This financing is led by Shandong Letong Science and Technology Industry Finance New Energy Industry Development Fund Center (Limited Partnership).

This financing will focus on attracting professional talents, including optical engineering experts, algorithm engineers, etc., in order to accelerate the company's femtosecond laser technology innovation and product iteration speed, and provide customers with better quality solutions.

According to Chen Changjun of the G60 Laser Alliance in the Yangtze River Delta, Qingdao Free Trade Laser Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2018, specializing in the research and development, production, application, and sales of femtosecond lasers and their core components. Its main products include fiber femtosecond laser seed sources, erbium-doped series fiber femtosecond lasers, ytterbium doped series fiber femtosecond lasers, etc.

Qingdao Free Trade Laser is breaking through this bottleneck. Founder Dr. Cao Xiangdong studied under Professor Go mind P. AGRAWAL from the University of Rochester and Professor Colin McKinstrie from Bell Laboratories in the United States. He has served as a senior technology executive at companies such as Siemens and North American Telecommunications. One of the core technologies he developed for femtosecond lasers, "Ultra High Precision Dispersion Management Technology," was selected as one of the "Global Six New Innovative Technologies" by OSA (Optical Society of America) in 2012.

Cao Xiangdong, who returned to China to start his own business, led a team to develop the world's first handheld femtosecond laser seed source and China's first all fiber femtosecond laser, giving free trade lasers a strong technological color. Seed sources are like the 'spark' of femtosecond lasers, they are the core of femtosecond lasers, "said Bing Zhaorong. Many research institutions such as the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and the University of Defense Technology have purchased seed source products for free trade lasers, and even one of the three major optical centers in the United States, the Rochester Optical Center, has purchased them.

In addition to the laser "seed source", Qingdao Free Trade Laser has also mastered the core technology of femtosecond laser "heart" - optical chip, possessing a complete set of independent core technologies such as optical chip, algorithm, control module, control software, etc. The localization rate of devices is over 95%, and it is expected to achieve 100% localization within 2 years.

However, the core technology of most domestic manufacturers adopts foreign technology paths, which greatly hinders their technological and product upgrades. For example, most domestic manufacturers use imported chips from BATOP, a German company, for their optical chips. These manufacturers also adopt passive mode locking technology from abroad in their technological path, and the fully automatic mode locking technology independently developed by Free Trade Laser breaks down the passive mode locking technology barriers in the industry. Bing Zhaorong believes that compared with previous technological paths, fully automatic mode locking technology is more stable and can continuously and stably obtain high-energy, high peak rate femtosecond level pulses.

At present, Free Trade Laser has mastered five femtosecond core technologies: ultra-high precision dispersion management technology, fully automatic mode locking technology, nonlinear amplification technology, all fiber integration technology, and modular integration packaging technology. It has 33 related core invention patents (13 under review) and 14 utility model patents (9 under review), forming a systematic patent protection pool.

Layout of femtosecond laser product line
At present, Free Trade Laser specializes in the research and development, production, and sales of femtosecond fiber lasers and their core components, as well as ultrafast laser application equipment. Bing Zhaorong introduced that the femtosecond PCB/FPC processors developed by the company have entered the core supplier factories of Huawei and Apple in bulk. Later, the deformed models can gradually enter the fields of LED, heart stent, battery film processing, 9H tempered glass screen and other new material processing.

The femtosecond beauty device developed and produced by the company has entered the clinical validation stage through small-scale verification, and is expected to be launched on the market in mid-2022. Preliminary breakthroughs have been made in the application of space interstellar satellite data transmission, femtosecond laser lithotripsy, femtosecond laser detection technology, terahertz detection, aerospace and other fields, and relevant industry cooperation is being sought.

In 2019, Qingdao Free Trade Laser had an annual revenue of 26.6 million yuan. According to Yun Zhaorong's introduction, according to last year's sales plan, it was originally expected that the annual revenue in 2020 would exceed 70 million yuan. However, the epidemic in the first half of the year has affected orders, and the revenue this year is about 20 million yuan.

In order to raise research and development funds and establish an industrial research institute, Qingdao Free Trade Laser plans to raise 60 million yuan this year, of which 16 million yuan will be used for femtosecond laser research and development, pilot testing, and market promotion; 14 million yuan for the certification, subsequent clinical trials, and market promotion of third level medical devices for femtosecond beauty and skin disease treatment equipment; 20 million yuan will be used for the construction of an industrial research institute.

This fundraising will expand 24 million shares, with new shareholders holding 10.7% of the expanded shares. The total valuation of the company is 560 million yuan. At present, founder Dr. Cao Xiangdong holds 33% of the shares, Qingdao Free Trade Development Company holds 20% of the shares, and Qingdao Zhihui Port Investment and Qingdao Ruigu Management Consulting are executive and core employee shareholding platforms, holding 23.43% and 23.32% of the shares, respectively. Bing Zhaorong also revealed that the company has plans to go public on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. Currently, major domestic laser companies such as Anyang and Huari are not listed, while the listed company Ruike Laser's revenue exceeded 2 billion yuan in 2019.

Source: Yangtze River Delta Laser Alliance