Englewood tech company making the internet faster expands lab to scale commercial arm
Cassidy Ritter
3–4 minutes
Englewood-based Lightwave Logic aims to increase the speed and efficiency of getting things done online. It recently expanded its lab by nearly 10,000 square feet to support new commercial activities.
Lightwave Logic developed a platform for electro-optic (EO) polymers to transmit data at higher speeds and with less power. The company said its technology, which is currently used by data centers and those in the datacom and telecom industries, essentially converts data to optical signals rather than electrical ones and allows data centers to route and switch data more efficiently.
“Higher speed and low power are the internet’s Achilles' heel today, and we have the technology to address these issues today,” Michael Lebby, chairman and CEO of Lightwave Logic, told the Denver Business Journal via email.
The company’s expanded facility at 369 Inverness Parkway now sits at approximately 23,500 square feet, giving Lightwave Logic ample space to scale its commercial business offering. This includes supporting its first commercial licensing material supply agreement to provide a customer with “Perkinamine chromophore materials for polymer-based photonic devices and photonic integrated circuits,” Lebby said.
Lebby said he can’t reveal who the customer is but that this agreement is the world’s first market acceptance of electro-optic polymers for commercialization.
“As our first commercial agreement, this material supply license agreement recognizes overall market acceptance and competitive advantage of our technology and validates our business model,” Lebby said.
The expanded facility will also allow the company to grow its ability to produce, test, evaluate and scale its electro-optic polymer materials.
“Our goal as always is to improve and expand our highly patented and proprietary technology platform to customers and deliver the best solutions that will enable their businesses to be more competitive,” Lebby said. “With this facility expansion, we not only are prepared to meet that need but in the process have created a facility that rivals any similar operations, to the point it could be used to test other technologies beyond our own.”
Renovations to the space also allow Lightwave Logic to expand its chemical synthesis production, test production reliability and offer scanning electron microscopy analysis and laser characterization.
The expansion also makes room for 11 new recent hires, including chemists and engineers. Lightwave Logic now has more than 30 employees with additional capacity to host “significantly” more hires as the company grows, Lebby said.
“We believe that we now have the team and the facilities in place to make our EO polymers a ubiquitous solution,” he said. “In fact, when we say ubiquitous, we are thinking just as popular as the polymers in Organic LEDs (OLEDs), which if you look closely are now everywhere in our mobile phones, tablets, laptops and televisions. The materials we can now develop and test are just the starting point.”
Lightwave Logic moved from Longmont into this Englewood space in 2018. This headquarters is home to the company’s in-house materials synthesis, device and package design and testing capabilities.
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