Nanoscribe Brand Guidelines: The Karlsruhe 3D Microprinter Spin-Off, From BICO to LAB14

Four founders and a laser.

Nanoscribe was founded in 2007 as a spin-off of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). German Wikipedia names its founders as Martin Hermatschweiler, Michael Thiel, Georg von Freymann and Martin Wegener, and calls it the institute’s first spin-off; a 2021 announcement from Cellink described them as scientists and doctoral students from KIT. Hermatschweiler still leads the company as chief executive and co-founder, according to a company statement published in December 2025.

Its technology is two-photon polymerisation. German Wikipedia explains the idea: a resin that normally hardens under ultraviolet light is instead exposed to near-infrared light from a femtosecond laser, so that it hardens only where two photons arrive at once, in the tiny focus of the beam. Moving that focus through the resin builds three-dimensional structures at the scale of micrometres and below. Nanoscribe’s machines use the method to print micro-optics, photonic parts and other very small structures, and the company also makes the resins its printers use.

The company moved quickly from laboratory to product. German Wikipedia, citing the trade journal Optik & Photonik, says its first 3D laser lithography system was delivered in June 2008, and that Carl Zeiss took a stake in the company in September of that year. In January 2020 Nanoscribe moved its headquarters into the ZEISS Innovation Hub in front of KIT’s Campus North, at Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen just north of Karlsruhe, the regional newspaper BNN reported. It opened subsidiaries in Shanghai in 2018 and in Boston in 2019.

Photonic Professional and Quantum X.

Nanoscribe’s machines come in two families, the Photonic Professional and the Quantum X. The Photonic Professional GT won a Prism Award for Photonics Innovation, given by SPIE and Photonics Media, in 2014, German Wikipedia records. In 2019 the company introduced the Quantum X, which it presented as the first two-photon grayscale lithography system; the method, which Nanoscribe calls 2GL, varies the laser dose as it scans so that each printed point can change size. The Quantum X won a LASER Innovation Award in 2019, German Wikipedia says.

Later versions followed. In December 2021 Nanoscribe and Cellink, its sister company at the time, presented the Quantum X bio, a printer for biomaterials. In January 2022 came the Quantum X align, which aligns its prints automatically to optical fibres and photonic chips; it was a Prism Award finalist in 2022. Other honours listed by German Wikipedia include a technology-transfer prize from the German Physical Society for 2017–2018, shared with KIT, and a Baden-Württemberg state prize for young companies in 2018.

Its customers began in research and are moving into industry. In a statement published by Manufactur3D in December 2025, Nanoscribe said it sold its 400th system in 2025, across the Photonic Professional and Quantum X platforms, and that one in three systems delivered that year went to industrial customers, with photonics packaging, such as optical couplers on chips and fibres, among the main uses. The company also says that more than a third of its staff work in research and development.

Design and documentation.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

From a bioprinting group to a nanotech group.

Nanoscribe has changed hands twice. On 19 May 2021 the Swedish bioprinting company Cellink announced an agreement to buy all the shares of Nanoscribe Holding GmbH; Cellink was later renamed BICO Group. The fit did not last. On 21 November 2024 BICO announced that it would sell Nanoscribe to LAB14 GmbH, and the sale was completed later that month, VoxelMatters reported on 2 December 2024. BICO’s chief executive, Maria Forss, called Nanoscribe a profitable and stable business, but said its largest potential and customer base lay outside life science, so it was no longer core to BICO’s strategy.

LAB14 describes itself as an international technology group focused on micro- and nanotechnology. Its website lists Nanoscribe beside Heidelberg Instruments, a maker of direct-write lithography systems, and GenISys, a Munich developer of software for micro- and nanofabrication; it says the group brings together companies working in fabrication, patterning, analysis and metrology. Nanoscribe itself says its integration into the group strengthens its position as a supplier of industrial production systems. On LAB14’s own page, Nanoscribe is described as a specialist in additive manufacturing of high-precision structures on the nano-, micro- and mesoscale, with more than 5,500 users and operators at universities and companies around the world. German Wikipedia puts its staff at more than 100 people in May 2025.

The company now describes itself as a medium-sized firm that develops and produces 3D printers and grayscale lithography systems, together with its own printing materials. It markets its methods under its own names, such as 2GL for grayscale printing and A2PL for aligned two-photon lithography, and it presents its range as moving from single research machines towards complete process lines for production.

For a design guide, Nanoscribe shows how a university spin-off can keep its founding technology at the centre of its identity through two changes of owner. Compare Zeiss, which took a stake in the young company and later hosted its headquarters, and Bruker, another instrument maker with roots in Karlsruhe. For this guide we use a violet, a lilac mist and a resin amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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