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Vescent Unlocks the Growth Potential of Quantum Technology with Laser Light
John Himes
February 7, 2024
This is a story of growth, a story of phase changes, a story of transitions.
Vescent Technologies, an innovative laser manufacturer in Golden, Colorado, is more than a linchpin of the local quantum technology ecosystem. In many ways, their story is emblematic of that ecosystem.
To borrow a metaphor from that most ancient of optical technologies—the mirror—we see three parallel reflections telling this same story of progress.
First, Vescent’s business has grown over the past 22 years from three friends in a garage-based laser lab into a key player in the quantum supply chain.
Second, Vescent’s technology itself has undergone a journey from fragile engineering in the lab to the productization and manufacturing of ruggedized, field-deployable devices.
And third, during this same time frame, Colorado itself has grown into the nation’s biggest and most promising quantum tech hub.
“Quantum is hard,” says Dr. Scott Davis, the company’s CEO and cofounder. “Vescent is ready.”
What does Vescent make?
Before we dive into the stories, let’s take a moment to set the stage and understand what we’re dealing with here.
Vescent develops and produces scalable and deployable laser systems. Products include but aren’t limited to:
- Frequency combs, a kind of ruler that measures frequencies of light.
- Continuous wave (CW) lasers, with applications including serving as the “optical tweezers” for cooling atoms and turning them into qubits in neutral atom quantum computers. They’re also commonly used to encode data into those qubits.
- Mode-locked pulse lasers, which are useful for generating entangled photons for quantum networking and groundbreaking research into attosecond physics.
- Control electronics, such as laser servos and temperature controls.
Let’s use traditional computer manufacturing as an analogy. Vescent doesn’t create the base components like TSMC or Intel do, nor are they an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) like Dell, Lenovo, or HP. They sit in the middle and create integrated subsystems, similar to a motherboard or solid-state drive manufacturer.
Vescent doesn’t produce the optical subcomponents—that’s the job, for instance, of photonic integrated circuit developers like Octave Photonics—nor do they build quantum computers, quantum sensors, or atomic clocks.
They design and produce integrated laser systems; they make the building blocks that quantum OEMs rely on to create their own products.
The Vescent Hero’s Journey
Our story starts in 1996 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder, Colorado. This was before the institution had earned the recognition that comes with three Nobel prizes, but it was still the place to be for atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics.
There, Dr. Scott Davis, now CEO of Vescent, was working his butt off on quantum and laser physics. He loved the work, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that all of his efforts were only going to influence a small group of academics who would read his research paper. “How is any of this going to change the world?” he wondered.
Hoping to broaden his reach, he took a job as a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Again, while the research was great and there are certainly perks to being a scientist at a government lab, the institutional politics were frustrating, and he still didn’t feel satisfied with his impact.
That’s when Dr. Davis took the jump to industry.
Returning to Colorado, he signed on as a staff scientist at Meadowlark Optics in 2001. Remember, this was right at the time of the telecom crash, so he couldn’t help but worry about his job security. And at the same time, he felt an itch that’s all too familiar to those with an entrepreneurial bug.
So he started talking to Scott Rommel and Dr. Mike Anderson. The three physicists were excited about the research coming out of the local institutions of the Front Range: JILA, NIST, and University of Colorado (CU) Boulder. Dr. Anderson himself had contributed to the discovery of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a unique quantum state of matter made up of ultracold atoms that would go on to be recognized with a Nobel Prize.
Together, they saw the massive potential impact of commercializing emerging technology. So they decided to quit their jobs and start a company in 2002. They called it Vescent.
Vescent is born
The three founders went all in and began building out a facility in Dr. Davis’s garage in downtown Denver. “It was the coolest laser lab on the block!” says Dr. Davis.
Like all startups, they got scrappy and put in the sweat equity: installing plumbing and electrical, building out a small clean room, fixing salvaged test equipment, and even borrowing a corner of an optical table from Dr. Davis’s PhD advisor, Dr. David Nesbitt at CU Boulder.
At the same time, they knew they needed money, and they didn’t want to go the traditional venture capital route. So they started writing small business innovation research and small business technology transfer (SBIR/STTR) phase I proposals to secure government funding. Eventually, after eight months without pay, they started their first two SBIRs.
Getting that first paycheck of around $500 was an exciting day.
Their original idea was to create photonic integrated circuits, optical waveguides, and nonmechanical beam steers, which change a laser’s direction without any moving parts. And while they accumulated 11 patents for these innovations, it was taking a long time to perfect and prepare them for manufacturing.
They had to find a way to fund their research and development (R&D) while also keeping the lights on. They needed to go to market (GTM), and they needed to do it fast.
So they looked at the laser control research happening at NIST under Nobel laureate Dr. Jan Hall, and they ran with it. “We had built these boxes in grad school, and so we turned them into products and started manufacturing them,” explains Dr. Davis. The end result was the D2 product line of analog laser controllers—a product that Vescent still makes today and that has something of a cult following.
They continued to build out their GTM product line while simultaneously pushing the envelope with their own R&D. Eventually, they got the waveguides to work, and they found themselves with the intellectual property for a very valuable piece of technology: electro-optical LIDAR with no moving parts.
Without going into the nitty gritty, here’s why that matters so much. LIDAR is a range-finding instrument with many uses, but the big one is building sensors for self-driving cars. Let’s just say there was a lot of interest.
So in 2016, Vescent spun off the LIDAR division and sold it to Analog Devices. It was the culmination of their work, the big pay day that the founders had worked so tirelessly toward. Dr. Davis went to work for the acquiring company.
The road back
Three years passed. Dr. Davis was making great money and getting a crash course in business and manufacturing at Analog Devices. But he knew something was missing.
“I realized there are three keys to a happy life,” he explains. “First, I need purpose in my work. Second, I want to be surrounded by people I like and respect. I had both of those at Analog Devices, but something was missing. It was the third key: I need to be a little bit afraid. I need that fire in my belly.”
So he went out to lunch with his old friend and cofounder, Scott Rommel, who was also working at the new company. “Look, I know Vescent is basically dying on the vine,” he said. “There’s only about 10 employees and they’re making only around $3M in annual revenue. We have a great gig at Analog, but I want to go back to Vescent and run the company.”
“You’re going walk away from all this money to run a tiny company?” asked Rommel.
“Yes,” replied Dr. Davis.
“Me too,” said Rommel.
And with that, the two founders came back to Vescent in early 2020 with Dr. Davis as CEO and Rommel as COO. They saw that there was tons of excitement about quantum technologies, especially in the local Colorado tech ecosystem, so they decided to focus there.
Developing and manufacturing cutting-edge laser systems for applications like quantum sensing, computing, networking, and timing wasn’t easy. But, with two of the original cofounders back at the helm, Vescent began to grow steadily.
At the time of writing, January 2024, they’ve become a company of around 45 employees and around $11M in revenue. And this is only the beginning. With demand for Vescent’s products skyrocketing during the current quantum boom, Dr. Davis is excited to continue scaling the company.
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Lasers by Vescent: From R&D to field-ready products
Now let’s transition to our second story, the one of innovative technology itself.
“We skate to where the puck is going to be,” explains Dr. Davis. For Vescent, this foresight leads them to making ruggedized, deployable laser systems that enable their customers—present and future—to take quantum technologies out of the lab and into the field.
Lasers are as fundamental to quantum technologies as electronics are to digital computers. Just as the integrated circuit put the silicon in Silicon Valley, photonics are essential to nearly every type of quantum tech. (Superconducting quantum computers are an exception, though they will need optics for quantum networking.)
With global public investment in quantum exceeding $30B in 2022 and International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasting the quantum computing market alone growing to $7.6B by 2027, this is the decade for Vescent to solidify themselves as a key supplier in the quantum value chain.
The problem: fragile, finicky technology
No question about it: engineering quantum tech is hard. And it’s even more difficult to create durable, robust systems that a company can ship to its customers.
This is a huge problem for today’s quantum innovators. A big part of the issue is that the components they use to build their tech are fragile and finicky systems that were designed for use in university and government labs. They only work under specific conditions.
Right now, with most quantum activity confined to those labs, it hasn’t been a problem. But because of Vescent’s forward-looking strategy, they realized they needed to create ruggedized, deployable laser systems for tomorrow’s needs. They needed to work on products that are ready for the field.
“We work closely with quantum developers so we know their pain points,” explains Dr. Davis. “We know where they’re trying to go, and we can take their insanely demanding specs and turn them into systems they can build upon.”
A laser system’s journey from R&D to manufacturing
Just as the company itself underwent a transformation from a small lab in Dr. Davis’s garage to a major player in the quantum value chain, Vescent’s technology goes through its own similar journey.
It starts in the lab with research and development. They hire the smartest scientists and engineers they can find, then they give them the latitude to explore, create, and take risks.
“Lifelong learning is a key part of our company culture,” says Dr. Kurt Vogel, Vescent’s VP of Technology. That’s how they continue to push the envelope, design next-generation innovations, and develop tons of new intellectual property.
Once the tech is ready to be manufactured into a product, however, the processes become much more tightly controlled. Technicians must closely follow well-defined procedures within the company’s cleanroom, and any changes need to be documented in a formalized engineering change order. Every product also goes through rigorous quality control to ensure it’s up to Vescent’s customers’ exacting specifications.
They’re also scaling up. Right now, the company is developing capabilities to transition from manufacturing one frequency comb a week up to four.
Ultimately, this journey represents the bridging of pure science and the wheels of industry in the overall cycle of technology. That overlap region—the transition from Nobel Prize–winning research to empowering disruption—is exactly where Vescent’s strengths lie.
They’re leaning into that as they take innovations born in the lab and transform them into products that can withstand harsh conditions like the vibration, temperature, and humidity that their tech will need to endure outside the lab.
Growing and collaborating in the Colorado quantum ecosystem
When Vescent went into business in 2002, quantum technology was barely a whisper outside of academic circles.
JILA scientists, including Vescent cofounder Dr. Anderson’s post doctoral advisor Eric Cornell, had been awarded a Nobel Prize the year before for their discovery of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), but it would still be five years before Infleqtion (then called ColdQuanta) would go into business in Boulder, creating quantum technologies based on BEC.
They eventually expanded into neutral atom quantum computing and became one of the biggest players in the industry.
Remember, precision laser systems are a key ingredient for creating BEC, neutral atoms, and many other types of quantum technologies.
In many ways, Colorado’s quantum ecosystem grew up around Vescent. In turn, the company’s hardware enabled that growth. The virtuous circle continued as scientific progress unlocked new possibilities, creating more demand for Vescent’s products.
Today, the Front Range is home to a rich array of quantum tech companies, from the immediately practical, such as quantum sensing to detect methane leaks, to the highly ambitious.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the next paradigm in information technology—a change as big as the introduction of the computer itself—is currently underway in Colorado.
One thing all these innovators have in common is that they need lasers.
Drawing the connections
When asked to survey the current landscape, the first place Dr. Davis points is CU. The quality of the education, research, and resulting talent, he says, is on par with acclaimed institutions like MIT and Stanford.
NIST is another great resource, for both pure and applied science. “They’re tremendous in quantum,” says Dr. Davis, “especially when it comes to tech transfer and deployment.”
It’s also hard to overstate the importance of JILA. Our story began with Dr. Davis working at JILA as a grad student, and both the talent and discoveries coming out of their labs have continued to fuel Vescent’s growth. Dr. Jan Hall, a JILA scientist, won the 2005 Nobel Prize for his work on optical frequency combs, a technology that’s a staple of Vescent’s product line. Dr. Vogel, Vescent’s VP of Technology, was also Dr. Hall’s last grad student.
On the industry side of things, Vescent enjoys collaborating with the Colorado Photonics Industry Association and its other member organizations. For instance, they often work with Octave Photonics on projects like developing portable atomic clocks. “I learn something every time we talk. We love working with Octave and helping each other grow,” says Dr. Davis.
Additionally, Vescent is a member of Elevate Quantum, the regional tech hub designation from the US Department of Commerce. Organizations like this help to unify the local community and facilitate collaborative efforts that will be key to ensuring Colorado remains at the forefront of quantum technology research and development.
“The transistor was invented in New Jersey at Bell Labs, and that’s where computing began,” concludes Dr. Davis. “But that’s not where Silicon Valley is. California stole it from New Jersey. Now we are at the ‘invention of the transistor phase’ in quantum, and everyone in the world is trying to steal it from Colorado. It’s up to us to not let that happen.”
About the Colorado Tech Spotlight
The Colorado Tech Spotlight highlights local innovations and the stories behind them. The series explores how the Colorado tech ecosystem creates an environment that promotes technological progress.
It is produced by Dynamic Tech Media and written by John Himes.
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