Interview with Rainer Erdmann,
INTERVIEW
Interview with Rainer Erdmann,
Co-founder and CEO of PicoQuant
https:// doi. org / 10.1051 / photon / 202513116
Can you describe your scientific background? It goes back more than 36 years. I grew up in East Germany and studied physics at Humboldt University in Berlin. While I was working on my diploma thesis, the reunification happened, which completely changed academic life as well as everything else. At first, I intended to work after my studies in biomechanics supporting professional athletes. But due to the political changes, I eventually switched to the Academy of Sciences, where I began working on single-photon counting techniques and related fluorescence topics in DNA sequencing, which were still very new at the time. My professor was highly enthusiastic and managed to attract a few students to this topic despite the usual competition between universities and research institutes.
How did you create PicoQuant? For almost five years, I had to survive under extremely difficult financial conditions out of passion for the subject. I worked without a contract, relying on short-term mini-grants from a non-profit association. Later, I joined a company that aimed to develop time-resolved fluorescence products, but it had barely any sales and eventually couldn’ t pay salaries for several months. Everything took place on the Adlershof campus, and we collaborated with strong groups in Heidelberg, Göttingen and key PIs in the US( e. g. Joe Lakowicz, Dick Keller, W. E. Moerner – later a Nobel laureate) and gained a lot of experience and knowledge about the needs of these labs but stability was very hard to achieve. However, we believed in our ideas the whole time, and finally I founded our own company together with three former colleagues in August 1996. We wanted to make complex instrumentation more accessible to researchers. That was the beginning of PicoQuant.
What were your objectives and motivations when creating the company? Our first major R & D contract developing a UV microscopic detection system came in December of that year with the University of Jena. Our very first serial product was a picosecond pulsed compact laser at 670 nm. Within half a year, we were selling these units, which helped immediately many researchers substituting their large dye or TiSa lasers. We had our first profitable fiscal year in 1997. In mid of 1997, we received our first BMBF start-up grant supporting the professional development of a wider spectrum of pulsed diode, including wavelengths around 405nm. Later, we also developed our own time-correlated single photon counting electronics, which simplified together with the diode laser experiments that previously required large, complex setups. By 1999, we had a complete set of components enabling turnkey experiments. This was the basis to expand our portfolio also to complete fluorescence systems. In 1999 we installed our first time-resolved fluorescence spectrometer at the Université Catholique de Louvain( Leuven, Belgium). In late 2002, we installed our MicroTime 200- a single molecule sensitive confocal microscope at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing. Around 2005, we began collaborating closely with Stefan Hell, providing customized depletion lasers that contributed to his STED microscopy. That collaboration eventually brought us close to the Nobel Prize story of 2014, where I was even invited to the Nobel ceremony.
How has the company grown over the years? We started with four people in 1996. Today, we are about 120. On average, we have grown by four employees per year— steady, organic growth, not a sudden expansion. We never relied on external venture capital. Growth has always been financed by our own profits. That makes us very different from startups that expand too fast and then collapse.
How did PicoQuant expand from lasers to photon counting and systems? We have always described our products as generic tools. Our picosecond lasers can be used in many areas: life sciences, material sciences, quantum, communications, lidar, biomedical imaging, and more. Likewise, our timing electronics became a reference worldwide. A majority of labs doing TCSPC now use our products and almost every synchrotron benefits from our precise timing electronics monitoring 24 / 7 important beam parameters. Our HydraHarp 400, for example, was the first scientific device that used USB 3.0 for high data throughput. Then we expanded into systems, mainly focused on life sciences and fluorescence applications. Today, the system-related products generate the largest part of PicoQuant ´ s turnover. But every system includes lasers and timing electronics which allows us a nice vertical integration and to customize our systems to the special needs of the research labs. We have about 30 PhDs, not only working in R & D with many dedicated to application support, sales,
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