WaveFront Is Ahead of the Wave

New Mexico Business Journal, June, 2001 by John D. German Iii

Two high school pals, with the help of investors, Have created a spectacular growth business

"Thou Shalt Not Whine" reads a placard on Tim Turner's office wall.

LATELY TURNER AND HIS COMPANY WAVEFRONT SCIENCES haven't had much to whine about. The company's sales were $2 million last year and could jump to $6 million this year, Turner says. WaveFront's 35-person work force is growing. And the company is a member of New Mexico's guns-blazing startup gang, enjoying triple-digit growth for three years running.

Employees are busy filling orders of WaveFront's latest product, an eye-exam system that provides doctors with extremely accurate maps of the distortions on a patient's retina. The system could assist ophthalmologists when they perform laser-assisted corrective surgery, making possible patient vision that's better than 20/20.

But even as his business rides a wave of demand propelled by the burgeoning laser eye surgery market, Turner isn't taking the company's success for granted.

"My big indicator is that we're still in business," he says. "In a startup situation, that's a key point. But I think we're on the threshold of something."

Indeed.

Just six years ago Turner, WaveFront's president, and his business partner Dr. Dan Neal, WaveFront VP and technical director, were fellow Eldorado High School alumni turned in-laws. (Turner married Neal's sister.) Neal was an optical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. Tim was an electrical engineer with a master's degree in business. The two had dreamed of going into business, had cautiously tested the waters with a number of inventions, but had never taken the plunge.

At Sandia Neal used a device called a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, really an array of tiny lenses. These "lenslet arrays" dissect and reflect light much like the diamond on an engagement ring, which if put under a flashlight beam might broadcast brilliant points of light all around a dark room.

Rather than refocusing light in all directions as a diamond would, however, lenslets bend laser light in a more orderly way, onto a detector capable of measuring minuscule distances between focal points of light refracted through each lens, thus gleaning information embedded in the light.

In Neal's case, he needed to measure the properties of gases inside Sandia's large, high powered lasers by comparing the patterns of a beam of laser light before and after it passed through the gases. Neal's novel idea was to use wavefront sensing not to measure the optical properties of what was in between things, such as the gases in the laser cavity, but to measure the optical properties of things themselves.

"Light that reflects off an object carries with it an imprint of that object," Turner says. "If you can measure light, you can measure things that affect light."

Neal the engineer tried to convince Turner the businessman of the genius of the idea, demonstrating the technique with arrays of small glass lenses glued together. Then, following advances in micro-optics manufacturing in the mid 1990s, Neal saw the possibility of creating lenslet arrays very precisely and inexpensively. Using the same batch fabrication techniques used to make microchips, literally hundreds of lenses each no bigger than the diameter of a human hair could be put on a thumbnail sized chip.

"I said, 'Now I see how we can make this, but who cares?"' recalls Turner. "Who's going to open his wallet for this? The technology doesn't matter. We've got to solve some body's problem."

Wallets were about to open.

"We began to see a market in measuring laser quality," says Turner. The two worked nights and weekends to develop a business plan and win investment funding to develop their first product, a laser beam analyzer they called the Complete Light Analysis System[TM] (CLAS[TM]), including a micro-lens array and proprietary image-processing software. They envisioned researchers using the CLAS[TM] to characterize laser beams and optical components in laboratory settings, factories using it for production-line process control, and laser manufacturers using it for quality checks.

Neal took entrepreneurial leave from Sandia, part of a program to encourage researchers to take federally funded technological developments to the marketplace. In spring 1996 they presented their business plan at Technology Ventures Corporation's (TVC) Equity Capital Symposium and received a $10,000 grant to get serious.

"Getting your business plan in front of the right people is difficult," says Turner. "There is no better way [than the TVC symposium] of putting ideas in front of 100 or more investors."

Soon after the symposium WaveFront received its first venture capital investment of $640,000 from the Sensor Technology Development Fund out of Colorado. By September the company had shipped it first order.

Subsequent CLAS[TM] systems using pulsed and infrared light sources expanded the system's usefulness to characterizing mirrors, lenses, digital sensors, and fiber-optic components used for Internet and telecommunications systems.