KMLabs

KMLabs, formally Kapteyn-Murnane Laboratories, is one of the oldest lab-to-market stories in the Boulder photonics corridor. Founded in 1994 by JILA physicists Henry Kapteyn and Margaret Murnane, the company spun out of a research group that had designed and demonstrated the first 10-femtosecond Ti:sapphire lasers, then commercialized them because traditional laser companies were not building at the fundamental limits of pulse duration.

The product line traces the frontier of ultrafast science: cryogenically cooled Ti:sapphire amplifiers with record average powers in the early 2000s, then, by 2009, the first commercial high harmonic generation sources producing coherent extreme ultraviolet beams, now sold as the XUUS line for spectroscopy, imaging, and materials metrology. A 2015 Series A led by Intel Capital, alongside the Colorado Impact Fund and Kairos Ventures, was motivated in part by EUV metrology needs for next-generation chip lithography and funded a 21,000 square foot Boulder facility with clean room manufacturing.

Why it matters to the Valley: decades before the quantum funding wave, KMLabs proved the Boulder playbook of turning JILA-grade laser physics into shipped instruments, and its co-founders still run the Kapteyn-Murnane group at JILA training the next generation.