Interview with Aldas Juronis
INTERVIEW
Interview with Aldas Juronis
CEO of EKSPLA, a Lithuanian company developing and commercializing femtosecond, picosecond and nanosecond lasers.
https:// doi. org / 10.1051 / photon / 202613714
Can you tell us about your background? My background is in electronics. I graduated in that field many years ago and spent most of my career in business development and sales management across very different industries, none of them related to photonics. Ekspla is actually my first experience in this sector.
How did you come to lead Ekspla? I joined the company about seven years ago as OEM Program Manager. After a few years, I became Head of Production, and later I was appointed as CEO. This evolution came naturally from my background in business development. When I joined, I quickly realized that Ekspla was a very unique company with truly distinctive products and technologies. The main challenge was to better monetize those innovations, to translate the impressive technical achievements of our engineers into sustainable business growth. Ekspla had already reached a solid level of maturity, but to move forward we needed to prepare for the next strategic step.
How did Ekspla begin? The company was founded in 1992 by eleven engineers, just a couple of years after Lithuania regained its independence. Before 1990, there were no private companies in the country, since everything was state-owned. Those engineers realized that they had something very special: deep expertise in picosecond laser technology. At that time, picosecond lasers were still cutting-edge, and very few groups worldwide could design reliable systems. These engineers were already building such lasers for research institutions. When Lithuania’ s economy opened, they decided to stay together and create a company, even though they had no business training at all. It was a difficult time. They knew how to build lasers, trusted in themselves, technology and most importantly – each other. I am sure that was the main reason that helped Ekspla to overcome tough economical environment conditions – focusing on cutting edge technologies and strong innovation culture.
What are the reasons why Lithuania managed to develop such strong laser expertise so early on? Laser technology turned out to be one of the rare advanced fields where Lithuania could excel. The roots of this expertise go even deeper. The first laser in Lithuania was built in 1966, just six years after the invention of the laser itself, by scientists at Vilnius University. They were working on semiconductors and realized that a laser would be the perfect tool for characterizing materials. As importing lasers was impossible under Soviet rule, they built one themselves. Later, young researchers went to Moscow to study photonics and brought their knowledge back home, laying the foundations for a strong scientific community.
How would you describe Lithuania’ s photonics landscape today? Today, Lithuania is widely recognized as a photonics country. Whenever I travel abroad, whether to the United States, Japan, Korea or elsewhere, people in our field immediately associate Lithuania with photonics. For a nation of fewer than three million people, we have more than sixty companies active in this area. It is not just laser manufacturers. There are optics producers, coating specialists, machine builders and system integrators.
We even like to joke that Lithuania has the world’ s highest density of coating machines per capita. There is now a complete ecosystem, an entire infrastructure for photonics, from design to production and applications. What we lack, on the other hand, are local end-users. Only a few universities or industries in Lithuania use ultrashort-pulse lasers or advanced photonic systems. But this limitation has also made us more open and flexible. It pushed us to collaborate internationally and to build partnerships with research institutes and industrial customers all around the world. This global mindset is one of our strongest competitive advantages today.
Can you describe the early days of Ekspla? The beginning was really tough. At that time, the founders had no money to purchase advanced equipment, not even basic metrology tools. They had to improvise everything. For example, they built their first optical tables using empty coffee cans as supports. We still have some unique photographs showing those early setups. Buying a proper optical table was simply unaffordable in Lithuania at that time. Interestingly, the very first market for Ekspla was not local but Japan. Even before the company was formally established, during the Laser World of Photonics exhibition in Munich, the founders met a Japanese businessman who believed their technology was truly unique and could be of interest to Japanese researchers. As a result, the first laser produced by Ekspla was shipped to Japan. The first sale took place in 1993, when they sold a single picosecond laser. The income from that single sale was enough
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