Our story
Adaptive optics has been possible for decades and practical for almost none of them. These are the steps from a university laboratory to a product our customers put in their own instruments.
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2016
Where it started
The work began as “Optofluidic Adaptive Optics”, a German Research Foundation project at the Gisela and Erwin Sick Laboratory for Micro-optics at IMTEK, the University of Freiburg’s Department of Microsystems Engineering. Three years on one question: whether a piece of optics that reshapes itself could replace the bulky, costly mirrors adaptive optics had always needed. By 2018 the first prototypes worked, the papers were published and the patents filed — and other laboratories began asking where they could get one.
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2019
A grant to build a company
After the research grant, the team convinced an expert jury and left with EXIST Forschungstransfer — a German federal grant that helps academic teams commercialize their inventions. The grant pays for the distance between a prototype that works once, on one bench, and a device somebody else can build again next month. Most university optics ends there. Ours started there.
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2020
Phaseform GmbH is founded
The company was founded on 10 July 2020. Earlier that year, the case for the whole enterprise had been made in miniature: a fluorescence microscope with full adaptive optics and no folded beam path inside it — and what was left was small enough to be called the smallest adaptive-optics microscope ever built.
The foundingThe smallest AO microscopeCorrecting the whole field
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2021
From prototype to product
Our first product reached a customer — not a demonstrator with a technician attached, but a product with our own driving electronics, a manual and a specification to meet. Recognition followed in roughly the order the company was growing — the Freiburger Innovationspreis at home, the CyberOne Hightech Award Baden-Württemberg, the European EPoSS Start-up Award, and a place among the finalists of the SPIE Startup Challenge at Photonics West in San Francisco. Four juries in a single year, each one a little further from Freiburg than the last.
Freiburger InnovationspreisEPoSS Start-up AwardSPIE Startup ChallengeEXIST Phase II
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2022
First round, first customers
€1.1 million in our first financing round, from private investors and MBG Baden-Württemberg, the state’s SME investment company — enough to stop building devices one at a time. Most of it went somewhere unphotogenic: fixtures, processes, test benches, the apparatus that turns a good result into a repeatable one. By the end of the year the first batch had left Freiburg for laboratories — the first evidence that this was a company and not a very well-funded experiment.
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2023
It travels without us
That year the technology started working in rooms we had never entered — groups in Austria and Germany published multi-photon and pulse-shaping results we had no hand in. Japan and South Korea became the first territories outside Europe with a distribution partner of their own. And the DPP Digital Model put a real, measured Deformable Phase Plate inside an optical designer’s own Zemax file, without anyone having to order one first.
The Digital ModelMulti-photon microscopyOur first distributor
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2024
Europe backs DeltaSTAR
Over €6M from the European Innovation Council’s Accelerator program, one of the most competitive instruments in European deep tech. The project — “Deformable Phase Plates for Adaptive Optics Applied to Ophthalmology and Microscopy” — runs to 2026 with a plain mandate: improve the product, bring the cost down, and scale it. The other half of the year’s work appeared in print: conjugate adaptive optics on a commercial microscope, and correction across the whole field of view rather than at a single point.
The EIC Accelerator awardConjugate AO for commercial microscopesFull-field correctionFunded by the European Union — grant agreement 101189116 (CORDIS) ↗
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2025
Making it repeatable
The first full year of DeltaSTAR went into the least visible work and the most decisive: making the same thing, the same way, every time. Production moved off our own bench onto industrial lines, with assembly, inspection and calibration built around it. Meanwhile the technology kept appearing where it never had before — to our knowledge the first adaptive optics in a confocal Raman microscope. And we launched Phinden, which reads aberrations out of the frames a microscope is already taking and corrects them.
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Late 2025
A system, not just a part
Until then everything we made was a component — something a laboratory or an OEM instrument builder designed into an optical path of their own. PHI is the whole instrument: Deformable Phase Plate, fast focusing optics and control software in one housing that clamps onto the camera port of a microscope already in the room. It was shown publicly for the first time at the Focus on Microscopy conference in Taipei, where the question was no longer whether people could buy the part, but whether they could buy the instrument. It went on to be named one of three finalists for the Photonics Frontiers Award in biophotonics — the first jury to look at a product rather than a technology.
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Early 2026
Straight onto the objective
Two things changed at Photonics West 2026: a larger version of the Delta 7 arrived — wide enough that a microscope objective mounts straight onto it, so the correction sits at the right size in the right place. The second change was invisible: our control software mastered the device’s own peculiarities well enough to produce the shape you ask for without anyone measuring the result.
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Mid-2026
Seven partners, three continents
Seven partners now sell, demonstrate and support our modules in their own language and time zone — two in North America, two in China, one each in Japan and South Korea, and one covering the UK and Ireland. What they carry changed as well: Axiom, our partner in the United States and Canada, now lists the Delta 7 as a complete adaptive-optics kit — modulator, wavefront sensor and control software — ordered as one item by people who would otherwise have had to specify three.
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Late 2026
Off the microscope
The first Deformable Phase Plates were optimized for microscopy. Since then they have gone far beyond it — most recently to write glowing patterns into a film that erases itself within minutes. And this year we are entering a new field of application: machine vision, with an instrument whose optics the inspection software can adjust on the fly instead of having to work around them.
Laser writing in materialsVISION StuttgartMachine visionFrontier applications
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Next
Standard equipment
Adaptive optics is still a specialist’s instrument, chosen by people who already know they need it. Phaseform was founded on the conviction that it does not have to stay that way: that wavefront correction can become standard equipment — designed into an instrument the way a lens is designed in, from high-end microscopes to everyday consumer applications. Everything we do is a step toward that future — which, we are convinced, will be sharp.
The next chapter
Follow the news, or tell us what you are building and we will tell you whether refractive adaptive optics belongs in it.