€8m · Debt · Deeptech · Vilnius, Lithuania
LITILIT, a Vilnius maker of femtosecond lasers, secured an €8m loan from Lithuania's national development bank ILTE to develop FEMODA, a modular high-power laser system for industrial production.
ILTE publicly disclosed the financing on 28 April 2026 and said the loan had been granted the previous autumn through its Perspektyva programme. The total development project is valued at €10m, with LITILIT contributing €2m from its own resources.
Moving femtosecond lasers beyond specialist installations
Femtosecond lasers remove material with pulses so brief that little heat reaches the surrounding area. That precision supports work in semiconductors, electronics, display manufacturing, batteries and ophthalmology, but conventional high-power systems can require water cooling, large optical assemblies and tightly controlled conditions.
FEMODA is intended to package the electronics, optics and cooling into an industrial unit with replaceable modules. Reporting on the project says the planned system is designed to deliver up to 1,000 watts across 10 to 20 independent channels, allowing one source to serve several points on a production line. Commercialisation is planned for the second half of 2029.
The commercial proposition is therefore not simply more laser power. LITILIT is trying to reduce the integration and maintenance burden that keeps ultrafast lasers in specialist settings. A modular architecture could let a factory replace a component rather than an entire system, but that advantage still depends on proving reliability across years of development and in repeatable industrial use.
Debt backs a long engineering programme
The structure matters. An €8m development-bank loan lets LITILIT fund a multi-year research and commercialisation programme without issuing new equity for this project, while leaving the company with repayment obligations. The disclosed sources do not specify pricing, maturity or other loan terms, so the financing cannot be compared directly with an equity round.
ILTE framed the investment as support for research-intensive Lithuanian companies moving high-value technology towards global markets. For LITILIT, the execution test is unusually concrete: deliver the FEMODA engineering milestones, turn the system into a product customers can integrate, and build the manufacturing capacity to supply it.
That production work is already a separate, visible undertaking. In June, LITILIT announced plans for a roughly 4,000-square-metre Vilnius factory with CNC machining, robotic assembly and testing. The company said production would begin in 2027, initially targeting about 1,000 lasers a year before scaling towards 3,000. Those are plans rather than current output, but they show how FEMODA fits into a broader attempt to make femtosecond systems repeatable at volume.
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