LITILIT opens Vilnius plant targeting 3,000 femtosecond lasers a year

A 4,000-square-metre factory has opened in Vilnius, in the Sirin Park Gariūnai site, and its founders want it to make 3,000 femtosecond lasers a year at peak. LITILIT, the Lithuanian firm behind it, has put €6 million (approximately $6,740,400) into the building and the lines that will fill it. Its co-founder and CEO, Nikolajus Gavrilinas, says the timing is right, because demand is coming from Europe, North America and Asia at once.

These lasers are scarce for a simple reason. They emit very short light pulses that can cut delicate materials, such as computer chips, and in surgery they can remove tissue without scorching what surrounds it. That process, known as cold ablation, is what makes them valuable. Yet the machines have been built largely by hand, in complex and non-standard ways, and that has capped the market. Around 9,600 units were made worldwide last year, according to the company's figures.

LITILIT's answer is a simplified modular design combined with heavy robotic automation. The compact lasers reach roughly 20 percent electrical-to-optical efficiency and are half the size of standard industry models, which the company says could allow them to fit into assembly lines. The technology dates back to 2014 and rests on key international patents, including advances developed with Lithuania's Center for Physical Sciences and Technology (FTMC). The plant is designed to run with a lean team of 150 employees, because most of the work is automated.

For a manufacturer of chips, data-center equipment or medical devices, what changes is the supply of a component that was hard to buy in volume. LITILIT targets 1,000 lasers in its first year, then up to 3,000 a year, and says it will serve customers on all three continents. Its lower costs and shorter lead times are claimed, not quantified: the company has not published prices. The next step is replication. Gavrilinas said that “the Vilnius plant is only the first stop”, and that the model will be copied in other countries with international partners, without a timetable.

The figures are the company's own, and the output targets have yet to be reached on a running line. The global ultrafast laser market was valued at $2.86 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $5.83 billion, a forecast that also comes without a date. Those numbers are the frame for the plant's ambition, and the Vilnius factory will show within a few years whether automation can deliver the volumes its founders are aiming for.