Selected as one of the 46 must-see startups by the Garage+ program of Epoch Foundation at the Computex Taipei 2021 Virtual Exhibition, Netherlands-based InPhocal develops laser technology, which it demonstrated during the event.

Digitimes recently talked to InPhocal CTO and co-founder Martijn Boerkamp, who explained the company's technology, its application, and its laser-as-a-serivice business model.

Q: InPhocal's solution is very innovative. Your video showed amazing speed in laser printing on various objects. What inspired you to do this project? When was inPhocal founded?

A: It started a couple of years ago. I was involved in a venture building program of an accelerator. They take technologies from big institutions such as CERN and the European Space Agency. One of the technologies was the laser beam technology. I have a background of optical physics. I am a physicist, working on developing new technologies based on optical applications. One of the things I immediately thought was, if you have something like an optic, you would need to focus. It is the same with magnifying glass. Focus is important, but it is also very limiting. When this technology was presented by CERN, I immediately thought about this can create a long focus if we can take away the need to focus. This gives us a lot of opportunities to work on a lot of applications.

Then, within the program, we started to think of the markets we can reach. There was a couple ones that came to mind. One is laser processing and laser marking. You normally need to mark on a flat surface, otherwise you have to adjust the focus. But we don't need to do that with our product. We saw in a video the marking of a mouse. That is also the reason why we are contacted by Logitech, because our solution does not need to be in focus.

The second thing is the speed we can reach is much higher, and that is because of this long focus. When I calculated the speed, I realized it can actually be as fast as a normal inkjet printer. Inkjets normally are faster, because they can do multiple droplets at one time. Whereas the laser, there is only one laser beam. Now, because of the increasing speed, we can actually go up to 10 times faster and reach the speed of inkjet, which means we can replace inkjets with laser technology. That inspired us to create a cleaner solution, because laser is much cleaner than inkjet. This will bring a lot of benefits.

Q: Tell us about your background and your core team.

A: I studied physics and got my PhD from Australia. I have been working in the Netherlands in various companies. I was involved with startups first in a company called Inkless, which was acquired in 2019, and then moved to HighTechXL (a Netherlands-based accelerator for incubating deep-tech startups) before starting inPhocal in 2019. My team is mixed with different capabilities, including finance, business, and technical expertise. Our CEO is also a physicist, but he has worked on commercial roles for some time. Our CFO has years of experience in finances in startups.

Q: What is your fundraising status?

A: We have received some grants and subsidies, and also had a convertible loan deal with one of our partners, which allows us to do research and development. We are now having a prototype that we can implement at a production line to do pilot tests. We are looking for our next step for investments. We are in due diligence phase with a couple of investment parties.

Q: In your presentation deck, the speed comparison is very impressive. What is the unit of the production line speed (meter/sec)?

A: If you compare normal inkjets with laser, they both can have fast production lines. The laser can still produce meters per second, but the thing is, people are not trying to increase the production line speed. The difference of choice, quite often, is that the inkjets can produce more prints at the same time, compared with laser. If you need large quantities of prints, you go to inkjets. But if you need a small print such as expiration date, very often you can go to laser. But that is not the case with Coca Cola. What they told us was, they switched at one point to laser, but they didn't have to lower the production line speed. But it's the content they could not print. For example, before they had a QR code, they had the expiration date, and now they lost the flexibility because they went to laser. Right now we can apply the same content as inkjets with our technology, but cleaner.

Q: In what way can Taiwanese companies be a partner for InPhocal?

A: That is also one of our reason of coming here in Taiwan to meet with Logitech.

We have the technology that we would like to implement in the production lines. If we want a partner in the area of faster marking, we would like to find companies with either coding or marking capabilities for labeling. This is something companies can already approach us for. And if companies are looking to mark on irregular shapes, which is difficult to do with other technologies, our solution is able to do that because of our longer focus. Actually we have two parallel path, one is for speed marking and on curved surfaces, and on top of that our technology can focus on smaller spots than current technology. For this, we are looking to apply on wafer dicing. Smaller spots create much more precision, which means less chip damages during the cutting processes and thus higher yields. This is something that would take a longer time to develop, but can be one of the solutions for the global chip shortage problem.

We are looking for end users who show interest, and have been in talks with potential investors and partners, to be able to develop this technology. It is also useful to talk to end users and be able to know there is a need for laser technology in this market. Taiwan has a very strong semiconductor industry, and it is one of the benefits being here to talk to them. We got verified by a company which is also in the Netherlands, which is producing wafer dicing equipment, that this technology is able to reduce the spots and increase precision and thus resulting in better yields.

Q: Is ASML already one of your clients?

A: Actually they are one of sort of the partners in this. But ASML does not produce wafer dicing equipment. We are a company that started from the venture building program of HighTechXL in Eindhoven, and ASML is one of the partners of that venture building program. So we also got direct support from ASML.

Q: Can you name some customers that you already have? And please explain your business model.

A: We will soon do pilot tests in Brazil and also in the Netherlands. And we did some tests for Logitech, and we are going to discuss plans for collaborations. And from the Garage+ program, we are also meeting a group of investors.

One of our business models is to license our technology or to lease. Users of inkjets pay monthly fees for ink. But for them to switch to laser is a big investment. We try to give them options of monthly cost, or to lease our system for several years. This business model is called laser-as-a-service (LaaS).

Q: Any plans for expansion or fund-raising this year?

A: Yes we would like to raise funds this year in order to expand our laser-as-a-service, as well as to put together a team of eight focusing on wafer dicing. We now have 15 people, including some students, and a group of advisors. But we have been operating on subsidies, loans and pocket-money expenses. We would like to raise US$2.5 million this year for our seed round.

InPhocal's laser technology
Photo: Company