INTERVIEW to sustain all eleven founders for six months and to reinvest in the company’ s production. It gives you an idea of how modest the living conditions were in Lithuania at that time. One laser sale was enough to pay salaries and finance further innovation. From there, the company gradually expanded into other markets— first in Germany and across Europe, then later in the United States and other regions. Today, Ekspla operates worldwide wherever ultrashort-pulse lasers are needed. Technologically, we remain focused on pulsed and ultrashort-pulse lasers, from nanosecond down to femtosecond systems. Over the years, the product portfolio has grown steadily. The company that started with eleven founders now counts more than 150 employees. Interestingly, five of those original founders are still working with us today, in various roles, not necessarily in management. They are excellent specialists who remain passionate about what they do.
It must have taken a lot of determination to keep the team together. Yes, those were hard times, and it is really exceptional that the founders managed to stay united. Even when there are only two founders, it is common to see them split after a few years because of different visions on how to use profits or develop the company. But these eleven engineers stayed together and grew the company. What united them then, and still unites all of us today, is the passion for innovation. Innovation is what drives Ekspla forward and keeps the company evolving.
The best proof of this commitment to innovation lies in the international recognition our products have received. Two of them have won the“ Photonics Oscar”- PRISM Award, which is quite rare. The first was in 2010 for a DPSS-pumped OPO system integrated into a single housing. At that time, this was a real breakthrough. Traditionally, researchers had a separate pumping laser and an OPO system in another box. DPSS technology itself was still quite new, as most OPOs were pumped by flashlamp systems. Our engineers decided to take the next step: to use a diode-pumped laser source and integrate it directly with the OPO, in one compact and robust enclosure. This made the system far more user-friendly and earned Ekspla the PRISM Award in the Scientific Laser category. We received our second PRISM Award in 2024 for our industrial femtosecond laser FemtoLux. Of course, we were not the first company to develop an industrial femtosecond laser but we knew that launching just another system would not be enough. The key innovation was dry cooling. For moderate and high-power lasers, efficient cooling is always a challenge. Traditional water chillers require frequent maintenance and are often the weakest point of a laser system. We decided to rethink this entirely by adapting a cooling technology from the defense sector. Instead of circulating water, we use a refrigerant that flows directly through cooling plates. This makes the laser maintenance-free, eliminates leakage risks and ensures robust, reliable operation. In addition, it enables a smaller footprint, ~ 50 % greater energy efficiency compared with water-cooled systems. In comparative tests, direct refrigerant systems consumed half the power of liquid chillers under identical conditions. Compressor lifetime typically exceeds that of a pump by a factor of three to five. And, with a mean time between failures of > 90,000 h, the system can operate continuously for more than a decade without downtime.
What are your most recent innovations? I would say the gigahertz burst operation, offering the most flexible regime available: from two up to nearly a thousand pulses per burst, with adjustable pulse duration from the same laser source. Our patented active fiber loop design enables the same laser to operate in femtosecond, picosecond or nanosecond regimes while keeping the same optical path and pointing stability.
How does Ekspla stand out in such a competitive market? Competition is global and intense. Our strength lies in deep scientific expertise, flexibility and reliability. We are small enough to listen closely to our
How do you maintain that pioneering spirit? From the very beginning, the company has been built around the idea of constant innovation. When Ekspla started, picosecond and mode-locked laser technologies were already remarkable, but our founders never stopped looking for new ways to improve and differentiate. We have always sought to adapt existing technologies and to bring new ones to market with a distinctive edge.
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