In 1996, four young scientists and engineers set themselves the goal to develop optical instrumentation designed by scientists for scientists and thus founded the company PicoQuant. Support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, ‘futour’), from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) as well as from the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) enabled PicoQuant to kick start its success story, which has now been running for more than 20 years. Over the years, the company created many highly qualified, long-term jobs in Berlin-Adlershof, the economic and scientific center of Germany's capital city.
‘We at PicoQuant focused from the beginning on offering innovative and high quality products for international customers working as researchers in various scientific fields’, explains Rainer Erdmann, Managing Director and one of the four founders. By staying true to this standard, the company became world leader in the field of time-resolved optical measurements. The product portfolio covers a broad range of instrumentation and applications, encompassing pulsed diode lasers and LEDs, single photon sensitive detectors and time-resolved electronics, fluorescence spectrometers, as well as confocal and super-resolution microscopes.
Encouraging and furthering the scientific knowledge of young researchers is an important topic to PicoQuant. This has led to the company holding annual courses on time-resolved microscopy and spectroscopy as well as the leading international conference on single molecule detection. The conference's excellent line-up of international speakers was especially demonstrated in 2014, when the Nobel laureates Prof. Stefan W. Hell and Prof. W. E. Moerner held keynote lectures on their ground breaking research.
Assuming social responsibility and commitment are a guiding principle at PicoQuant. This year, the company ran a donation campaign to fund a PhD position at the University of Würzburg (Germany) aimed at investigating Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a genetic childern's disease that is not yet curable.
On October 7, 2016, PicoQuant celebrated its jubilee by inviting close cooperation partners, customers from science and industry, representatives of service providers and suppliers, as well as employees and their families to a festive soiree. The evening's highlights included a performance from the company band that was spontaneously formed for this event as well as a video greeting from Nobel laureate W. E. Moerner. In his message, the scientist thanked PicoQuant for the long standing collaboration and congratulated the company for its 20 year anniversary.
PicoQuant thanks both the Innovations-Zentrum Berlin Management GmbH (IZBM) and the WISTA-Management GmbH for the excellent collaboration during the last 20 years and looks ahead optimistically thanks to a solid long-term order situation.