Over the past few years inPhocal developed a unique laser marking technology which is based on a groundbreaking optical concept that originated at the CERN institute in Switzerland. The Brabant region offers regional grants which allowed inPhocal to bootstrap initial market research and technical development and when inPhocal went through the nine-months HighTechXL Venture Building Program, the potential to apply this technology for laser marking became clear as day. The market research showed that the optical technology could eliminate ink from production lines by offering a fast, non-erasable printing technology. When the word got out it soon attracted some of the top players in the industry. All of these companies tried to erase ink for many years but failed to do so because the current laser technology simply wasn’t fast enough. But that’s where inPhocal stepped in: Filling the gap between conventional laser marking technology and inkjet, the unique inPhocal systems do exactly what the industry has been asking for all of this time.
InPhocal closed an investment round, that included investment partners the BOM and DeepTechXL, in the summer of 2022 and largely expanded their team in the time after that. This made sure the team could bring in the right people on all levels, not just in tech, but also commercial. What’s the use of developing systems if you can’t sell them, right? With months of hard work the inPhocal technology could finally be shown in action, with two paid pilot tests in Italy and Belgium. Both were the accumulation of successful lab tests that needed to be shown in a real-life test at production lines, and have led to the planning of the next steps.
Together with the developments that were made possible by the large EIC grant, inPhocal can now start producing laser marking systems and has an expected roll-out of their systems in the beginning of 2024. All of these systems have the inPhocal philosophy of ‘light without limits’ nested in them, which will surely lead to many more nice things to come.