European photonics group born from the expertise of Optoprim and structured around laser engineering, application laboratories and the production of industrial solutions.
Could you tell us briefly about your background?
My path started fairly conventionally: a science high-school diploma, then a two-year technical degree in Physical Measurements (DUT Mesures physiques) — a very hands-on, experimental training with a strong focus on applied physics. After that degree, I added a professional bachelor’s specialised in technical sales. That’s what led me to Michelin, where I started out as a sales representative. Michelin is a genuine school of selling: you learn rigour, how to manage a territory, customer follow-up, teamwork. That said, I didn’t really see myself in the world of tyres and the automotive industry. I wanted to move back towards an environment closer to my scientific training, while keeping that business dimension.
How did you discover the world of optics and photonics?
While looking for a new position, I came across a small distribution company specialised in optics and lasers: Optoprim. I met its leaders at the time — Jean-Pierre Sevestre, the founder, and his partner Patrice Benoît. This was in 2001, and the company had five or six people at most. They were looking for someone with a dual technical and commercial background. My physics background, combined with the sales experience I’d gained at Michelin, matched what they were looking for. I went through several interviews and joined Optoprim in 2001 as a sales rep, initially with a more mechanically-oriented scope, then increasingly optics-focused. Back then, people didn’t yet spontaneously talk about “photonics”. The common vocabulary was optics, optoelectronics, lasers. The broader notion of photonics took hold gradually, as applications diversified. Among the company’s long-standing suppliers, there was already Thorlabs. Their catalogue fit into a thin booklet at the time.
How did the early years unfold?
Very quickly, I specialised in optical components, particularly specialty optics and filters. At first, I mainly worked with academic customers: laboratories, institutes, engineering schools. Then, gradually, I turned towards industrial customers. With them, the conversation isn’t only about an “off-the-shelf” component. The challenge is to understand their overall system, their mechanical constraints, their cost limits, their performance requirements, and to design custom optics suited to that environment. The idea is to constantly optimise the cost/performance trade-off and reach the quality level that makes sense for the final product. In parallel, I started developing the electronics side, then mechanics and laser safety. I hired one colleague, then others. Everyone I brought in at that time is still in the group, sometimes after coming and going, which says a lot about people’s attachment to the company.
Could you describe the company’s history?
Optoprim was founded in 1994. At the time, Jean-Pierre Sevestre decided to create a distribution company specialised in optics and lasers. In parallel, one of their colleagues was taking over the representation of General Scanning in France, an American company that sold both incomplete systems and components. To avoid awkward situations of competition between machine customers and component customers, the idea was to separate the activities. Jean-Pierre then had the opportunity to create his own structure to take over the component distribution side. That was the birth of Optoprim. At first he worked alone, with two product families: scanners (galvanometers) and CO2 optics in ZnSe. Two or three years later, Patrice Benoît joined him to develop the academic customer base, while Jean-Pierre stayed very focused on industry. This dual culture — scientific and industrial — is part of the company’s DNA. Even before I arrived, Optoprim had already begun to internationalise: a first office had opened in Italy in the late 1990s, with one employee to cover that market.
In what year did the company start developing its own products?
The real turning point was 2003, with the creation of Industrial Laser Systems. At that point, the American parent company GSI Lumonics decided to close its French subsidiary, which had installed a large base of laser machines in France. Manuel Mendes, who was in charge of that entity, then spoke with Jean-Pierre Sevestre. They identified an obvious need for continuity: maintaining service on the existing machines, but also meeting new demands from industrial customers.
From that thinking, Industrial Laser Systems was born, taking over service on the installed base and, very quickly, starting to design new machines. This was Optoprim’s first real shift, moving from the role of component distributor to that of a full-solution provider, combining distribution, production and service. Today, Industrial Laser Systems, based in Seine-et-Marne, has about thirty people and is the group’s production facility for laser machining. Since then, we’ve continued to expand internationally. The guiding thread has stayed the same: start from component expertise, then gradually build a group able to support industrial customers all the way to the process and the complete solution.
What motivated you to open a laser applications laboratory in Italy?
This applications lab grew out of a very simple observation about the Italian market: an industrial fabric extremely rich in machine-tool manufacturers, but with little in-house laser expertise. With the arrival of fibre lasers, many manufacturers think: “It’s practical, it’s compact, I plug it in and it works, I’ll integrate it into my machine.” But they don’t necessarily know how to get the best out of it, which parameters to choose, how to adapt the optics, the mechanics, the robotics… On the other side, laser manufacturers communicate about power, wavelength, frequencies, but very little about concrete processes. A link was missing: people able to speak the manufacturer’s language and translate it into an operational laser process. Our Italian colleagues, and Giuseppe D’Amelio in particular, championed this project. At first it was almost a “garage” lab, then it became professional. Today it’s a recognised facility, with around fifteen engineers, seven test cells, lasers ranging from femtosecond to CO2, and high-power diodes up to 22 kW. A manufacturer comes to us saying, for example: “I want to drill glass,” or “I want to strengthen a farm-equipment part,” or “I need to weld this component for a thruster.” We study the need, run tests on their samples, optimise the process parameters, validate the results with them, then sell them a functional solution: the source, the optics, the head, and, if necessary, the complete machine with Industrial Laser Systems.
Have you opened other structures internationally?
We opened a structure in Germany, on a tougher distribution market, because most of the major component or laser manufacturers choose to set up their own subsidiary there directly.
How did you create Gataca Systems?
GATACA Systems is a company specialised in instrumentation around the microscope and super-resolution, and again we created it following the closure of an American entity in France. For the group, it’s an essential building block: on one side, the Italian applications lab very much oriented towards industry and laser processes; on the other, GATACA Systems, strongly focused on life sciences and photonics for biology. Both rely on the same optics and laser culture, but in very different application contexts.
Why and how did you become a shareholder of the company?
In 2009, Patrice Benoît was preparing for retirement. He was a shareholder of the company, which raised the question of restructuring the capital. Together with two long-time colleagues, François Beck and Arnaud Langlois, the three of us were all deeply involved in the company’s development. Jean-Pierre then offered us the chance to take over Patrice’s shares. We were motivated; we saw it as a way to secure the future, to take a long-term view and to commit further. In concrete terms, we set up a deal financed by a bank loan, backed by future dividends: it was our first experience of entering the capital, on a still modest scale. In day-to-day terms, it didn’t immediately change the organisation: Jean-Pierre remained chairman, and the structure stayed very “horizontal,” as is often the case in SMEs. But it gave us greater responsibility in decision-making and, in hindsight, it was a step that clearly set up what came next, in particular the 2022 operation.
How was that operation carried out?
In 2022, several long-standing shareholders wanted to turn the page: Jean-Pierre Sevestre for the Optoprim side, and some founders of GATACA Systems and Industrial Laser Systems (ILS). The alternative was then fairly clear: either sell to a large outside group, or organise a buyout by the team in place. I discussed it with Jean-Pierre and told him that, for my part, I was ready to carry a buyout project if we could do it with the right people. We then identified a core of seven partners: my long-standing colleagues in France, Italian managers, the technical director and co-founder of GATACA Systems… Together, we set up an LBO-type operation, with the support of two investment funds: NCI as the lead shareholder and Re-Sources Capital as co-investor. The preparation process took up much of 2021 and 2022, and we signed on 6 December 2022. At that point, the group had a little over €50M in revenue with around 70 people, and a production share of roughly 15%. Since then, growth has been very strong: we’ve passed €80M, with a projection towards €85M and around 120 employees, and the production share is now approaching 30%, without distribution having declined. This operation had a simple goal: to keep control of the business in Europe, continue developing it, and support the transformation of a historically distribution-based group into a mixed player, strongly oriented towards solutions and processes.
How is the group organised today?
Legally, we have a holding company, Optoprim Group, which acts as a service centre: finance, HR, IT, group marketing, and so on. Under this holding are Optoprim France, Optoprim Italia, Optoprim Deutschland, GATACA Systems and Industrial Laser Systems (ILS). Historically, Optoprim France combined operational activity with holding stakes. Structuring it as a holding clarifies our organisation and supports our external growth.
With ATLENSYS, we assert an industrial reality: a multi-expertise European group, able to act from component to system, with applications laboratories and production capabilities. This structuring reinforces the group’s coherence and marks a clear evolution: from a mainly distribution-focused player to an integrated industrial group.
What are your main markets and types of applications today, on the industrial and scientific sides?
Our strength is diversification. On the industrial side, we are present in aerospace, defence, automotive, energy, agricultural equipment, microelectronics… We build, for example, glass-cutting machines for major industrial players, laser-welding systems for thrusters, installations for large defence groups, or laser cladding solutions for agricultural parts to extend their service life.
In these sectors, our contacts are mechanical engineers, process managers, industrial directors. They don’t need us to talk about transverse modes or Gaussian profiles; they want to know whether their part will be more robust, whether their cycle time will be compatible with production, and what the return on investment will be. Our role is precisely to bridge the physics of the beam and these industrial realities.
On the scientific side, through Optoprim and Gataca, we are very present in academic laboratories and imaging platforms, particularly in France and Italy. We supply components, complete systems, and we co-develop solutions with research teams. Gataca Systems, in particular, is well recognised in the advanced microscopy and life-sciences community.
What innovation areas are you working on today?
Our added value lies in everything surrounding the laser beam: beam-shaping optics, motion mechanics, robotics, control, sensors, and so on. The laser process is the art of combining all these elements to get the right result on the material. In concrete terms, we regularly file patents on these themes. One recent development concerns an optical head designed to perform a brazing operation that was previously done by hand. The challenge is not only optical: you have to account for the robot’s axes, repeatability, mechanical tolerances, thermal conditions. There’s a whole “design intelligence” upfront, which consists of specifying as precisely as needed. When I was purely on the component side, I often saw optical drawings with extremely tight tolerances… that made costs explode without being justified by the application. It’s exactly the same in mechanics: asking for nanometre-level movement with a multi-axis robot makes no sense. Our role is to explain these limits and to propose realistic, robust and economically viable solutions.
How do you see the photonics market evolving?
The market remains broadly very buoyant. Over twenty-five years, I’ve seen several waves come and go: the telecoms boom, its crash, the rise of biophotonics, and now the emergence of quantum. Nobody can say today whether quantum will be the “new telecoms” or whether, as with fibre, a large part of the value chain will move to Asia. What is certain, on the other hand, is that new applications of lasers and photonics are discovered almost every week. Take manual laser welding, for example: just two or three years ago it barely existed; today it’s booming, with all the training and safety challenges that entails. We’re also seeing strong consolidation, with very large American or Asian players buying up European companies. Without falling into protectionism, I think it’s important that certain technologies stay in Europe, or even in France. At our scale, we try to play the role of a European consolidator, able to support or take over technology companies to prevent them from moving too quickly to non-European groups.
Are you able to recruit the profiles you need? Does the training on offer seem suited to your needs?
That’s probably one of our major challenges. The profile we need most is the mechanical or mechatronics engineer with sufficient understanding of optics and lasers. This kind of profile is rare. The top engineering schools train excellent engineers, but optics is often barely present there or covered in a fairly general way.
These profiles generally head towards large industrial groups. Our structuring as a European industrial group — integrating laser process engineering, applications laboratories and machine production — now allows us to offer attractive technical and managerial career paths. Several employees have thus moved into technical or general management positions, showing that there is a real opportunity for impact and progression within the group. We are actively working to strengthen our employer brand in order to attract our key talent.
How have you adapted to the growth of the teams?
Over the last two years, we’ve seen growth of 20 to 30% per year. We doubled Industrial Laser Systems’ revenue in two years, which inevitably means growing the teams, structuring, and helping everyone develop. The hardest part for me, in the transition from sales rep to CEO of a group of around 120 people, is managing to step back: measuring how far we’ve come, not being focused solely on what’s left to do, and above all not forgetting to highlight the work of the teams.
