Year Founded
  • 2013
Website
https://lightoptech.com
Value Proposition
  • Optical instruments to improve non-invasive imaging in the manufacturing and medical fields
Awards & Mentions
  • $225,000 Phase I SBIR Grant from the NIH in 2019
  • Finalist in the 2018 Luminate Accelerator for Optics, Photonics, and Imaging Startups
  • $65,000 in CEIS Matching Funds
  • $750,000 Phase II SBIR Grant from the NSF in 2015
  • $10,000 Phase II SBIR Grant Supplement in 2015
  • $225,000 Phase I STTR Grant from the NSF in 2014
  • Finalist in the Optics, Photonics, and Imaging category of the 2014 Digital Rochester GREAT Awards
  • $50,000 National Science Foundation I-Corps National Teams grant in 2012
  • First place in 2012 Mark Ain Business Model Competition

Non-Invasive Optical Imaging Instruments

LighTopTech Corp. – founded by Cristina Canavesi ’12MS, ’14PhD, ’15S (MBA) and Jannick Rolland – is a women-owned business based in Rochester, NY. LighTopTech aims to build innovative optical instruments to bring to market disruptive technologies for noninvasive imaging in medical and industrial fields, with technology based on Gabor-doman optical coherence microscopy, or GD-OCM.

In 2012, LighTopTech won the Mark Ain Business Model Competition and, later, was a finalist in the Optics, Photonics and Imaging Award category of the 2014 Digital Rochester Greater Rochester Excellence and Achievements in Technology (GREAT) Awards. They were awarded a $225,000 STTR Phase I Grant from the National Science Foundation in December 2014 and an additional $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Grant from the NSF in 2015.

Since its founding, LighTopTech has continued to grow and its co-founders are celebrated members of the optics field. With applications in both the industrial medical disciplines, their proprietary biomimetic microscope design with liquid lens technology allows users to inspect a sample of tissue or material without cutting and/or destroying it.

LighTopTech Corp. was a member of UR’s Student Incubator until 2016, when they joined the business incubator at High Tech Rochester (now NextCorps). They were finalists in the the 2018 Cohort of the Luminate Accelerator, the world’s largest business accelerator for optics, photonics, and imaging (OPI) startups.