Lausanne: BeamExpress gets €1.3M first-round funding

Funding round completed

Swiss company BeamExpress SA, which specialises in long-wavelength Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) technology, has announced a first-round investment of $1.3M from French early-stage venture capital company I-Source.

Working with the EPFL, the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne, BeamExpress designs and manufactures high-speed long-wavelength lasers, with extremely low power consumption for next generation high-speed computing and communication applications.

According to Jean-Claude Charlier, CEO of the company, long-wavelength VCSELs are ideally positioned to displace existing edge emitting laser. Because of the high drive currents of existing edge-emitting lasers, heat dissipation is becoming a limiting factor for the next generation of high-bandwidth lasers.

VCSEL technology, on the other hand, is characterised by extremely low heat. So far, short-wavelength 850 nanometre VCSELs have been widely adopted by all optical components manufacturers. But, says BeamExpress, the market is changing with the rapid adoption of silicon photonics, which now require light sources emitting in the long-wavelength range (1200 nanometres up to 1600 nanometres).

“The secret of our VCSEL high performance lies in our localised wafer fusion technology, which makes possible the use of InP- and GaAs-based materials giving high power, single mode laser beam with narrow line width,” says Professor Eli Kapon, co-founder and Chief Scientist of BeamExpress and Director of the Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures at the EPFL.

Nicolas Landrin, a Partner with I-Source, said, “The mass adoption of broadband access combined with the explosion of Web 2.0 applications, video streaming and peer-to-peer traffic has caused the Internet to grow at an unprecedented rate over the last few years. Bottlenecks have appeared in various parts on the networks and especially within the data centers for server-to-server communications. Beam Express’s products come at a perfect timing to enable the design of a new generation of optical components, which will make possible unprecedented levels of high integration. This will bring a 10-fold reduction in cost and power consumption. We are proud to support such a high-calibre company and team, which is a shining example of EPFL’s capability to transform world-class technology into business.”