Excelitas Brand Guidelines: A 2010 PerkinElmer Carve-Out, Qioptiq & a Pittsburgh Head Office

PerkinElmer’s lighting and sensor unit, relaunched.

Excelitas is a young name built from older businesses. It was formed in 2010, when PerkinElmer sold its Illumination and Detection Solutions business to an affiliate of the New York private equity firm Veritas Capital. Vision Systems Design reported on 30 November 2010 that the sale had been completed and that the business had been relaunched as Excelitas Technologies Corporation, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, with David Nislick as chief executive. Nislick said at the launch that the company expected stronger support for innovation and growth under its new owner, and the magazine noted that information on Excelitas would appear in the coming months at a new website of its own.

The new company started with about 3,000 employees and manufacturing in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, the magazine said; MedCity News put the number of plants at 14. Its first portfolio covered specialty lighting and sensors for other equipment makers, including xenon-based lighting, thermal infrared detectors, low-light-level detectors and precision time standards. These went into medical, analytical, clinical diagnostic, industrial, safety and security, and aerospace and defence markets, Vision Systems Design reported.

The name itself was new. PerkinElmer kept its own name and, MedCity News reported, said the sale would free resources for human and environmental health markets, while the lighting and sensor business went its own way under private owners and a brand created for the occasion.

Optics by acquisition.

Excelitas grew by buying other photonics companies. Its largest early step came in 2013, when it acquired Qioptiq and Lumen Dynamics, optics.org reported. German Wikipedia describes Qioptiq as an optoelectronics company founded in 2005, with a holding company in Luxembourg and development and production mainly in Germany and Britain. After those deals, optics.org said, Excelitas had about 6,000 employees across North America, Europe and Asia.

Ownership changed again in December 2017, when Excelitas was itself acquired by the New York private equity firm AEA Investors, optics.org reported. In July 2018 the same publication reported that Excelitas had completed its purchase of Research Electro-Optics (REO) of Boulder, Colorado, a maker of precision optical components, thin-film coatings and helium-neon lasers, which would continue its operations in Boulder. Nislick said the company planned to grow REO with further investment, “as we have done with the former Qioptiq facilities in Europe and Asia.”

Lighting came next. In September 2023 Excelitas signed an agreement with the German Heraeus group to buy the Heraeus Noblelight business, with about 850 employees in Germany, Britain, the United States, China and Japan, Wiley Industry News reported. Noblelight develops and makes specialty light sources from ultraviolet to infrared for uses such as analytical instruments, industrial curing and electronics manufacturing. Excelitas says the purchase closed on 1 January 2024.

Its range now spans cameras, illumination and optics. In November 2026 the company presented X-Cite fluorescence illumination and PCO scientific cameras, including the pco.edge range, for microscopy and life-science research, and described its business as sensing, detection, imaging, optics and specialty illumination. The same announcement presented the X-Cite XYLIS II as an LED light source meant to replace arc lamps in fluorescence microscopes, and the pco.edge 9.4 bi as a camera for microscopy and physical-science work. It listed the markets it serves as including semiconductor equipment and data-centre connectivity, industrial automation, diagnostic healthcare, aerospace and defence.

Light, made into products.

Photonics companies sell things most people never see. Their lasers sit inside machine tools, their transceivers inside data-centre racks, and their detectors inside instruments, telescopes and physics experiments. So the way they present themselves leans on a small set of images that make light visible: a laser beam crossing a dark optical table, the glowing end of a fibre, a row of pluggable transceiver modules lined up for a switch, or a photomultiplier tube and a sensor chip photographed under studio light against black.

The catalogue matters as much as the advertisement. Many makers of optics and components publish long product catalogues of lenses, mirrors, mounts, filters, tubes and diodes, each part with a drawing, a part number and a page of specifications. That catalogue habit gives much of the sector a shared look: clean technical photography, plenty of white or black space, careful diagrams and an engineering sans or a restrained serif, with colour used sparingly, often for a single accent.

The trade shows are where the industry gathers in person. Photonics West, LASER World of PHOTONICS and OFC, the optical fibre communication conference, are among the events where companies show new lasers, modules and detectors, and their stands and press releases often borrow the same visual language of beams, fibres and glowing chips. Company histories also lean on science: makers of detectors and light sources often point to the research projects and observatories that have used their parts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, what it has bought or sold and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Pending deals are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

A Pittsburgh head office and a smaller defence arm.

Excelitas has also sold parts of what it bought. On 3 February 2025 Teledyne Technologies announced that it had completed the acquisition of select aerospace and defence electronics businesses from Excelitas: the optical systems business known under the Qioptiq brand in North Wales, which makes optics for head-up and helmet-mounted displays and night-vision systems, and a US advanced electronic systems business. Those units now operate as Teledyne Qioptiq. German Wikipedia says the German Qioptiq company was renamed Excelitas Deutschland GmbH in August 2025, and describes it as a supplier of optical and opto-electronic systems for medicine, semiconductor technology, industry and research. That German business thus remained part of Excelitas and now carries its name.

The head office has moved as well. On 9 January 2024 Pennsylvania’s governor announced that Excelitas would relocate its headquarters from Waltham to Pittsburgh’s Strip District, with at least 250 jobs expected over four years, the Pittsburgh public radio station WESA reported. The station noted that chief executive Ron Keating had taken charge the previous autumn, and said the company counted about 8,000 employees in 33 locations worldwide. WESA described its work as photonics: equipment that uses light in applications ranging from thermal cameras to the sensing that helps autonomous vehicles monitor their surroundings, used in defence, advanced manufacturing and medicine. Excelitas’s own announcements from November 2026 describe it as headquartered in Pittsburgh.

The company now sells under its own name while keeping some product names it acquired or built, such as PCO cameras and X-Cite illumination.

For a design guide, Excelitas shows how a company formed from a corporate sale can gather many acquired businesses under one new name. Compare Coherent, a laser name that has also changed hands, and Hamamatsu Photonics. For this guide we use a deep violet, a photon teal and a xenon white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Excelitas’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.