How Dream Photonics Is Helping To Transform Advanced Tech Manufacturing In B.C.

Pushing the economy forward: A UBC spin-off company is tackling a critical manufacturing bottleneck, helping companies scale and commercialize advanced technologies

Like many start-up companies, it started with a dream. “My motivation was to create local employment,” said UBC engineering professor Dr. Lukas Chrostowski. He saw that highly skilled tech workers were leaving B.C. for job opportunities elsewhere. “I wanted students to be able to stay and work in Canada.”

Dr. Chrostowski has spent decades researching optics, lasers and photonics—the science and technology of using light to transmit information. He saw an opportunity to harness photonics to solve some of the challenges facing next-generation technologies. If data could move faster, more efficiently and use less energy, it could power quantum technologies and large-scale communications systems, make data centres more environmentally sustainable and more.

Dr. Chrostowski teamed up with Dr. Sudip Shekhar, a colleague in UBC’s department of electrical and computer engineering who is an expert in electronics, photonics and lasers. They focused on a simple question: What problem could their research solve for industry? “If you start combining technologies,” wondered Dr. Chrostowski, “if you could make chips that combine lasers and electronics together, what could you do with it?”

What they came up with is a custom hardware solution that tackles one of the of the biggest challenges of the semiconductor era. Their UBC spin-off company, Dream Photonics, solves a decades-old problem for the photonics industry. In doing so, it’s helping to anchor a Canadian supply chain for advanced tech manufacturing and to keep skilled talent in B.C.

Solving a problem of manufacturing at scale
Advanced technology, which powers everything from artificial intelligence to imaging sensors, communications and defence applications, relies on fast-moving data via electricity to connect chips. But making those connections at scale requires a more sophisticated system.

“Moving data with electricity through copper wires creates too much heat, uses too much power and limits scaling,” Dr. Chrostowski explained. “That’s why the industry is turning to optics. Light is faster, cooler, and far more energy-efficient.”

The problem? Connecting chips with light is extremely difficult.

“Manufacturing is still largely artisanal,” he said. “It relies on precise mechanical alignment of parts, often taking up to 10 minutes per step, mostly waiting for glue to dry. This approach does not scale when you need to make millions of connections.”

Dr. Chrostowski and Dr. Shekhar talked to nearly 200 companies to understand their challenges, and industry consistently pointed to the same pain point in production lines. “For 20 years people have talked about using optics for communications between chips,” he said. “But data movement is the big bottleneck for today’s computing systems.”

So Dream Photonics, which began operations in 2020 with Dr. Chrostowski as CEO and Dr. Sudip Shekhar as CSO, set out to develop a faster manufacturing process. Instead of forcing perfect light alignment manually — which is responsible for up to 80 per cent of total manufacturing costs — their solution is to more precisely direct light using specialized micro lenses. These lenses can be customized and quickly 3D printed, allowing the process to scale to millions of connections.

“For five years, we’ve worked with leading photonics companies to develop and validate this technology,” he said. “Now we are ready to scale from prototyping to manufacturing. The wider goal is to make it easier for other companies and innovators to go from a concept of a photonic electronic product to being able to design and manufacture it in high volume.”

The technology could help to make AI data centres more energy-efficient, create secure communication links for finance and defence, enable autonomous systems and improve LiDAR (light detection and ranging) for applications like self-driving cars that use remote sensing to measure variable distances.

Supporting industry research and development
UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (UBC Blusson QMI) provided Dr. Chrostowski and Dr. Shekhar a place to test their ideas, collaborate with students and faculty, and connect with industry. It offered them the research infrastructure and expertise they needed to move the idea from the lab toward commercialization.

Private companies and government partners regularly collaborate with UBC Blusson QMI, which provides the R&D infrastructure that industry wouldn’t otherwise be able to access, as well as the expertise of researchers, staff and technicians.

“Over the last decade, our Institute has experienced a major transformation,” said UBC Blusson QMI Scientific Director Marcel Franz. “Our world-leading research now supports a local quantum ecosystem that brings together academia and the private sector to foster technological innovation.”

UBC Blusson QMI researchers have filed 60 patents with potential applications in several sectors important to the B.C. and Canadian economies, including clean energy, health care, mining, quantum computing and more. Commercializing innovative technology helps Canada stay competitive globally and keep intellectual property (IP) in Canada. Dream Photonics’ IP now includes three applications and two provisional company-owned patent families, and four licensed patents from UBC.

Realizing the dream: scaling up business in BC
Initially operating out of a UBC lab, Dream Photonics is now ready to scale up manufacturing. The company has been profitable since 2021, earning $1.6 million in revenue in 2025. In September 2026, Dream Photonics won the $110,000 Innovate BC first place prize at the 2026 New Ventures BC competition.

Innovation UBC, which offers entrepreneurial support for researchers looking to transform their research into successful spin-off companies, helped Dr. Chrostowski and Dr. Shekhar with the tech transfer and IP commercialization to launch the company.  PacificCan funding of $1.1 million has now enabled them to purchase infrastructure to move into their own facility this fall, where they can 3D print lenses for clients. Their product will allow clients to reduce a manufacturing process that would have previously taken about 80 minutes down to about 35 seconds.

Currently, Dream Photonics has over a dozen employees, most of whom are UBC graduates. As the company grows, Chrostowski points to an emerging ecosystem of photonics companies and the potential for B.C. to become a hub for advanced technology.

“We have a generational opportunity to build a strong photonics-electronics ecosystem,” he said. “This can create jobs, tax revenue, investment and broader economic benefits. I’d love to see thousands of people employed in photonics, electronics and quantum.”

Solving a manufacturing bottleneck is just the beginning.