In a photonics lab, the most expensive part isn't the chip that manipulates light. It's the fiddly, manual process of gluing a tiny lens or aligning a hair-thin fiber to get the light on and off the chip in the first place. Lightspring, a startup from Besançon, France, thinks it can turn that packaging bottleneck into a programmable manufacturing step, using a 3D printer that writes optical connections directly onto the chip surface.
The Single-Step Wedge
Lightspring's bet is on a fabrication technique called two-photon polymerization (2PP). It's a form of 3D lithography that uses a focused laser to cure a light-sensitive resin into solid, microscopic structures. The company's platform is designed to use this method to print microlenses, waveguides, and beam-shaping structures directly onto a finished photonic integrated circuit (PIC) [Lightspring, retrieved 2024]. The goal is to replace a multi-step, alignment-heavy assembly process with a single, automated writing step. For chipmakers, the promise is a drastic cut in the packaging costs that can account for roughly half of a photonic chip's total price tag [Tech.eu, September 2026].
From Lab Bench to Assembly Line
The company is emerging from a rich research environment, building on scientific work associated with the FEMTO-ST Institute in Besançon [AIPressroom, Unknown]. Its three co-founders,CEO Grégoire Bonnat, CTO Adrià Grabulosa, and Scientific Director Daniel Brunner,are now tasked with moving the technology from the laboratory to industrial production. Their recently closed €3.1 million seed round, led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital with participation from Concept Ventures and others, is the fuel for that transition [Tech.eu, September 2026]. The capital, which brings total financing to over €3.5 million including public grants, will fund team growth and the critical work of process qualification with industrial partners [Tech.eu, September 2026].
The initial target is companies designing and manufacturing PICs for applications like optical communications, LiDAR, and quantum computing. Lightspring's platform is pitched as agnostic, meant to work across different foundry recipes and chip materials [Lightspring, retrieved 2024]. The commercial path involves co-design programs where Lightspring's technology is integrated into a partner's specific chip packaging workflow from prototype to volume production.
The Incumbent's Inertia
The obvious counter-bet is that the industry's existing methods,a combination of precision pick-and-place machines, skilled technicians, and epoxy,are too entrenched, or that the cost and speed of Lightspring's 2PP process won't scale to beat them. The startup isn't trying to make the photonic chip itself faster or more efficient; it's attacking the interface layer, a problem many chip designers have historically outsourced or tolerated as a cost of doing business. Success requires convincing engineers to redesign their packaging approach around a new, additive manufacturing step.
Its most direct competition likely comes from integrated device manufacturers like Effect Photonics, which control their own full-stack design and packaging processes. For Lightspring to win, its programmable platform must prove not just technically superior in the lab, but demonstrably cheaper and more reliable on an assembly line. The next twelve months will be about turning those co-design programs into validated production recipes.
On the back of an envelope, the unit economics case is straightforward. If packaging is half the cost of a €1,000 PIC module, and Lightspring's process can cut that portion by 30 percent through automation and yield improvement, it saves €150 per module. For a manufacturer shipping 10,000 modules a year, that's €1.5 million in saved cost, a figure that should make a licensing or service fee easy to justify. The company to beat isn't another startup; it's the incumbent workflow of microscopes, adhesives, and manual labor that has defined photonic packaging for decades.
Sources
- [Lightspring, retrieved 2024] Lightspring | Photonic Integration & 3D Optical Interconnects | https://www.light-spring.com/
- [Tech.eu, September 2026] Lightspring raises €3.5M to tackle photonic chip manufacturing bottleneck | https://www.tech.eu/2026/09/22/lightspring-raises-eur35m-to-tackle-photonic-chip-manufacturing-bottleneck
- [AIPressroom, Unknown] Lightspring: 3M Photonic Packaging | https://aipressroom.com/lightspring-3m-photonic-packaging/
- [FW.media, Unknown] Lightspring raises €3.1 million to tackle photonic chips weakest link | https://www.fw.media/lightspring-raises-e3-1-million-to-tackle-photonic-chips-weakest-link/570