As Luminate concludes its ninth cohort, Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer Sujatha Ramanujan, PhD, is transitioning into a new role as CEO of the newly awarded U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) STELLAR Engine in the Rochester and Finger Lakes Region of New York. We sat down with Sujatha to discuss her move to the University of Rochester, the future of both programs, and what lies ahead for our regional optics, photonics, imaging, and laser (OPI+L) ecosystem. Q: You’ve been the driving force behind the Luminate and its growth into the world’s largest OPI accelerator. Why is now the right time for this transition? Sujatha Ramanujan: This move is fundamentally motivated by evolution. NextCorps built Luminate into a premier global accelerator that’s bringing the best emerging technologies that leverage OPI to the Rochester and Finger Lakes region. But to sustain that momentum long-term, we need a directed strategy that goes beyond the initial startup phase. By establishing the NSF STELLAR Engine and working to become the nation’s leader in laser innovation, we are giving the entire regional ecosystem more gravity. While the initiative is led by the University of Rochester, RIT and MCC are also involved, as well as many

Gekko Photonics Awarded $1 Million “Company of the Year” Investment; More Than $2 Million Awarded to Propel Next-Generation Optics, Photonics, and Laser Breakthroughs Applications Now Open for Round 10 of World’s Premier Deep-Tech Accelerator through January 11, 2027 via Governor Kathy Hochul Rochester, NY, Sept. 30, 2026—Governor Kathy Hochul today announced Gekko Photonics as the $1 million “Company of the Year” winner in Round Nine of the Luminate NY optics, photonics, and imaging (OPI) accelerator competition. The Wroclaw, Poland-based company secured the top investment at the Luminate NY Finals 2026, held live in Rochester, NY, during Optica’s Frontiers in Optics + Laser Science conference and streamed globally. Gekko Photonics will leverage the $1 million follow-on investment—funded by New York State through the Finger Lakes Forward Upstate Revitalization Initiative—to accelerate its expansion into the region. The startup plans to build a local operation to manufacture its photonic systems and support industrial customers through installation, integration, service, and ongoing technical support. “The successful Luminate NY competition is ensuring that New York State continues to lead the nation on cutting-edge technological ideas and research,” Governor Hochul said. “The imaginative winners of the competition’s ninth round represent some of the world’s most innovative businesses,

Via the Rochester Business Journal Childbirth is one of the most common and highest-stakes events in healthcare, yet one of its most important assessments still depends largely on what a clinician can feel with two fingers during a vaginal exam. These exams help guide decisions about admission, discharge, labor progression, interventions, and escalation of care, but the findings can vary between clinicians and leave little objective documentation that can be reviewed, compared, or tracked over time. For patients, repeated vaginal exams can also be painful, invasive, and stressful during an already vulnerable experience. For hospitals and care teams, uncertainty can contribute to repeated exams, workflow inefficiencies, infection risk, and avoidable high costs. Solving these critical challenges became both a personal and professional mission for Ciconia Medical‘s founder and CEO Roni Cantor-Balan. “As a mother of three and a biomedical engineer with lasers and optics expertise of nearly 20 years, I saw firsthand how consequential labor assessment can be and how limited the current tools are,” Cantor-Balan said. “As I spoke with hospitals, clinicians, and women, it became clear that this is not only a comfort issue. It is a measurement problem, a clinical risk problem, and a financial burden problem.”

Via the Rochester Business Journal The most powerful, life-saving medicines in the world today are grown inside high-tech tanks filled with living cells. Yet, despite the sophistication of modern biopharma, the scientists and operators running these multi-million-dollar bioreactors are essentially flying blind. While basic metrics like temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen can be measured continuously, the molecules that actually determine whether a batch of medicine succeeds or fails — the proteins — are buried in a critical blind spot. Crucial data regarding antibody levels, stress signals, and cell impurities are currently checked using slow, offline laboratory tests. By the time results come back hours or days later, the bioreactor has already drifted, meaning failed batches are diagnosed in retrospect rather than prevented mid-run. This missing data layer creates a massive bottleneck for U.S. biomanufacturing, causing misallocated factory time, delayed development timelines, and failed runs that cost millions of dollars. Rather than allowing scientists to remain passive observers of their biological systems, Phlotonics, Inc. has created a solution. The local company is building molecular biosensor instruments that sit alongside bioreactors, giving manufacturers continuous, multiplexed visibility into the exact proteins powering every batch. Guided by the core conviction that “you can’t industrialize

Via the Rochester Business Journal When consumers picture the future of wearable technology, they often imagine sleek augmented reality glasses that look no different than standard prescription eyewear. Yet behind that seamless vision lies a massive manufacturing roadblock. Today’s smart devices require dozens of microscopic lenses, electronic sensors, and mechanical mounts, all of which must be individually molded, aligned, glued, and assembled by hand or custom machinery. For manufacturers, this multi-step assembly process is slow, expensive, and creates endless opportunities for defects. Traditional techniques like glass casting or diamond turning were developed decades ago for simple, standalone lenses. Trying to cram modern electronic features into a wafer-thin smart lens using old factory rules has pushed conventional manufacturing to its physical limits. Rethinking how optics are made Manifest Technologies was founded to eliminate this assembly roadblock. Spun out of the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022, the startup was built on groundbreaking research led by co-founder and CEO Camila Uzcategui, PhD, alongside Chief Technology Officer Johnny Hergert, PhD, and Chief Scientist Robert R. McLeod, PhD. Rather than trying to solve the challenge by acting as just another 3D printing vendor, Manifest has invented an advanced manufacturing platform called Parallax Volumetric Additive

Via the Rochester Business Journal In the race to build revolutionary quantum computers, ultra-precise sensors, and secure communication networks, most of the spotlight shines on the microchips themselves. Yet behind the scenes, tech companies face a major hardware hurdle that has little to do with computing chips and everything to do with light: lasers. To manipulate quantum systems, engineers rely on highly specialized lasers to control microscopic particles. Most often, this requires bulky, expensive specialty laser instruments that take up entire optical tables and need constant manual alignment. In short, quantum companies are being asked to build future commercial industries using laser technology originally designed for individual laboratory experiments. From Stanford research to a microchip breakthrough Brightlight Photonics was founded to eliminate this hardware bottleneck. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the startup’s roots trace back to Stanford University, where co-founder and CEO Joshua Yang, PhD, was building quantum systems using synthetic diamond and silicon carbide. While the quantum hardware itself was shrinking down to the size of a fingernail, the Titanium:sapphire (Ti:sapphire) lasers driving Yang’s experiments remained massive tabletop systems. Widely regarded across optical physics as the gold standard for high-performance lasers, these systems offer broad color tuning, extreme power, and

Via the Rochester Business Journal Across chemical manufacturing and process industries, critical production decisions are still guided by delayed laboratory data. In sectors such as specialty chemicals, fertilizers, food ingredients, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, samples are pulled from the line, sent for analysis, and returned hours or even days later. By then, a batch may have drifted off spec and the window to intervene has already closed. This is not a small operational inconvenience. The inability to accurately and continuously measure what is happening inside industrial processes costs manufacturers across the globe trillions of dollars each year in inconsistent quality, inefficient use of materials, and unplanned downtime. Gekko Photonics was created to change that by bringing advanced photonic measurement tools directly into the production environment. Turning spectroscopy into an industrial tool Headquartered in Wrocław, Poland, Gekko Photonics builds smart photonic systems that allow factories to “see” the chemical composition of their production processes in real time. Its platform is built on Raman spectroscopy, a powerful analytical technique used to identify chemical composition without destroying samples. While widely used in research, Raman has historically been too complex and costly for routine industrial deployment. That’s where Gekko comes in. “What was previously thought

Via the Rochester Business Journal Big tech firms increasingly agree that smart glasses will be the go-to device for consumers to interact with AI. Yet, putting these devices on millions of users relies on fixing a massive engineering riddle: How do you turn a transparent glass lens into a digital display screen without ruining its clarity? Right now, trying to force eyewear to pull double duty introduces three major visual flaws: the screen sickness users feel when trying to focus; an awkward “eye-glow” that leaks the screen’s image to onlookers, posing security risks; and lenses that look dim instead of perfectly clear. Current market alternatives rely entirely on older diffractive or reflective optics. These traditional methods force developers to accept severe hardware constraints, sacrificing battery life and brightness while creating manufacturing bottlenecks that prevent mass production. A new branch of display physics Fortunately, an emerging deep-tech spin-out from the University of Southampton has developed an industry-first innovation with the capability to turn everyday lenses into bright, fully transparent digital windows. Led by University of Oxford graduate Dr. Peter GR Smith, Smith Displays‘ patented wavemixing technology introduces an entirely new branch of display physics specifically for augmented reality (AR) developers. Instead

Via the Rochester Business Journal For deep-tech hardware startups, commercialization often requires an agile willingness to follow a technology wherever the market demands. Modendo Inc. was originally founded and incubated in Boulder, Colorado, to develop hair-thin fiber-optic microscopes designed to look deep inside delicate brain tissue for neuroscience research. However, when semiconductor manufacturers approached the team with the need to inspect microscopic, tightly confined spaces inside advanced electronics, the startup discovered a massive, unserved market. To make the transition from bioscience to semiconductors, Modendo recognized its team could benefit from the concentrated knowledge of a large, established optics ecosystem. After searching for support, Modendo applied to Luminate NY in Rochester. As the world’s largest accelerator for startups working on technology enabled by optics, photonics, and imaging (OPI), it gave Modendo immediate access to specialized commercialization resources, plus an initial $100,000 investment. “Luminate stood out because it offers the exact type of optical hardware expertise we need for our development roadmap,” says Antonio Miguel Caravaca Aguirre, PhD, CEO of Modendo. “The program brings together mentors, investors, and operators who all speak the language of advanced optical physics, which is rare. For us, gaining access to that collective knowledge is just as