Representatives of the six winning startups at the 2024 Luminate Finals, complete with the customary oversized checks. [Image: Luminate NY]
Luminate NY—a business accelerator program focused on optics, photonics and imaging startups—has named the winners in its Round Seven competition. Taking top honors as “Company of the Year” was Niclabs, an early-stage firm focused on novel approaches to compact photonic/electronic integration on semiconductor chips.
As the winner of this year’s competition, Niclabs will rake in US$1 million in funding from the state of New York, through the state’s Finger Lakes Forward Upstate Revitalization Initiative. The program also will sprinkle an additional US$1 million on five other companies honored at the 2024 Luminate Finals on 26 September. To receive the funding, all of the companies honored must commit to establishing operations in the region surrounding Rochester, NY, for a minimum of the next 18 months.
Supporting photonics startups
Now administered by the Rochester-based technology incubator NextCorps, Luminate NY launched in 2017, and since then has annually tapped 10 promising startup companies at the beginning of each year. The companies so selected after the application process each receive an initial investment of US$100,000, and come to Rochester for a six-month, intensive boot camp aimed at bringing their ideas closer to commercialization. The course includes more than 200 hours of instruction as well as other resources, according to Luminate.
At the end of the process, the participants demonstrate the fruits of their efforts in a pitch session in which they attempt to sell their ideas to industry and venture-capital judges. The winners in the process walk away with a slug of additional funding to take the next step on the path to a commercial product.
A glimpse at the photonics zeitgeist
Having completed its seventh round, Luminate now has 70 companies in its portfolio, into which it has invested a total of US$18.6 million. And the finalists in the competition each year offer a revealing glimpse at what’s hot or top-of-mind in the optics and photonics community.
Niclabs cofounders Anggi Utami (left) and Andri Mahendra at the Luminate Finals. Niclab was tapped for the “Company of the Year” award, which includes US$1 million in funding. [Image: Luminate NY]
For example, the big winner, Niclabs, is a “fabless” semiconductor firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Indonesia (and, now, Rochester) that is focused on integrated photonic and electronic circuits, for markets including “artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, autonomous vehicle, space, and semiconductor applications,” according to a Luminate press release. The company’s products, Luminate says, combine power supply, signal processing, sensing and electronic control systems into a compact, chip-scale solution with “unparalleled accuracy, up to 1,000 more channels, and at 3x the cost efficiency.”
Interestingly, Niclabs, in contrast to some other startups supported by Luminate, has reportedly already gained some traction in the industry, garnering sizable orders from existing semiconductor foundries and several government contracts. According to its founder and CEO Andri Mahendra, the company plans to use the new US$1 million in Luminate funding to scale up and drive manufacturing and development of its products, taking advantage of the Rochester-located facilities of AIM Photonics, as well as other vendors such as GlobalFoundries.
From personalized medicine to road safety
Five other companies were chosen for additional funding at the 2024 Luminate Finals. The US$500,000 “Outstanding Graduate Award” went to iLoF, a UK- and Portugal-based startup building a platform that would combine AI and massive optical data to achieve “a rich phenotypic signature” that the firm hopes will empower personalized medicine and drug discovery.
Two companies tied for Luminate’s “Distinguished Graduate Award”; each of these firms will receive a grant of US$200,000. One, AI Optics, is a New York, NY–based player building a handheld imaging technology, souped up with artificial intelligence, to provide “a new standard of care for disease screening.” The other, Voxel Sensors, based in Brussels, Belgium, is targeting the wearables and extended-reality (XR) marketplace with a “single-photon active event CMOS sensor” to enable better eye tracking and “spatial awareness capabilities” for XR and industrial applications.
Rounding out the list, the US$100,000 “Honorable Achievement” award went to Photosynthetic, a Netherlands-based startup developing “volumetric micro-lithography,” a precision 3D-printing approach that the company says can produce complex geometries at “mass-production speeds, while maintaining sub-micron feature sizes.” And a US$10,000 “Audience Choice” prize, voted by attendees at the Luminate Finals event, was awarded to Safer Street Solutions, which is building “smart signs” and a data-collection platform to combat distracted driving and other unsafe behavior on the road.
Luminate is now accepting applications for its Round Eight competition, with an application deadline of 10 January 2025. The startups selected for the round will report for boot camp the following April.