Québec City laser maker Femtum opened a new factory and headquarters on Oct. 1, giving the university spinout roughly six times its previous floor space to build tools for chipmakers, according to BetaKit.
The facility, in the city’s Metropolitan Technology Park, includes cleanrooms, laboratories and offices. BetaKit reported that construction cost about $2.1 million. Co-founder and chief technology officer Simon Duval said the company can now go “from idea to prototype, and from prototype to a laser delivered to a customer, under one roof.”
Femtum employs about 40 people, has seven positions open and plans to pass 50 employees by 2027, BetaKit reported. The company grew out of Université Laval and spent four years at the Quantino incubator, housed at the National Optics Institute, before moving out.
The company makes laser cleaning and trimming systems used on silicon photonics chips, which move data using light instead of electricity. Femtum says its customers include advanced semiconductor manufacturers in Asia and the United States, and that its tools fit into existing equipment from major chipmakers.
The expansion follows a Series A round announced March 12. According to the company’s news release, Femtum raised US$16 million, led by BDC Capital with a US$6-million investment. Co-investors named in the release include Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Cathay Venture, i4 Capital, Boreal Ventures, Quantacet, Hamamatsu Ventures and Eureka. BetaKit also reported a federal repayable contribution of nearly $2 million. (BetaKit described the Series A in Canadian dollars while the company release states U.S. dollars, so readers should treat the exact figure with care.)
CEO Louis-Rafaël Robichaud said in the release that the funding would let Femtum “rapidly deploy our unique short-pulsed fiber laser platform and significantly expand manufacturing capacity.” The company says the funds will go toward international expansion, wider adoption among semiconductor leaders and production for high-volume manufacturing.
The Canadian stakes are larger than one startup’s real estate. Silicon photonics and co-packaged optics are being adopted to move data faster and with less power inside AI data centres, according to Femtum’s own description of its market. Canada has plenty of debate about where AI computing capacity gets built, as in Alberta, where towns are weighing data centre proposals. It has far fewer companies making equipment for the chip supply chain behind that capacity. Femtum is one of them, and it is building in Québec rather than abroad.
The company’s backers also show how Canadian public and private capital are lining up behind it. BDC Capital is the investment arm of a federal Crown corporation, and Fonds de solidarité FTQ is a Québec labour-sponsored fund, alongside a Japanese strategic investor in Hamamatsu Ventures.
Several questions remain open. Femtum has not publicly named its customers, and the release says only that its tools are validated by Tier-1 customers. Nor has it disclosed revenue or how many lasers the new plant can build in a year. A plan to grow from about 40 employees to more than 50 by 2027 also points to a specialized, high-value operation more than a mass employer.
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Sources: BetaKit (Oct. 1, 2026); Femtum Series A news release via Newswire.ca (March 12, 2026).
