From a Microsphere to a Microscope — The Story Behind Dverga

There are some projects where it is possible to draw a clear line between the beginning and the end. You receive a specification, you design something, you build it, and eventually you deliver it.

My experience at LIG Nanowise was nothing like that.

It began with an idea.

An idea developed by the founder of the company during his work at the University of Manchester, based on a fascinating optical phenomenon involving microspheres. The principle was intriguing: under the right conditions, a microsphere could interact with the near field of a sample and provide access to optical information beyond the conventional diffraction limit. The possibility of seeing structures at a scale that conventional optical microscopy could not normally resolve suggested something much bigger than a scientific experiment.

The decision was made to create a company around the idea and find out whether this unusual piece of physics could become a real technology and, eventually, a real product.

That company was LIG Nanowise.

I joined at the beginning of that journey. At the time, there was no established product, no mature technology and no well-defined development path. There was an idea, a scientific principle and a long list of questions about how to make it work outside the laboratory.

I could not have known then that I would spend the next ten years working on that same fundamental idea, continuously developing it, understanding it more deeply, and eventually helping turn it into a complete microscope.

The journey started with something very small. A microsphere. The first challenge was to understand how that tiny optical element could become something useful. The properties of the microsphere were at the heart of the technology, but exploiting those properties in a controlled and repeatable way was far from straightforward. Its interaction with the sample depended on conditions that were very different from those of conventional microscopy. The working distance was extremely small. Positioning was critical. Illumination, alignment and the relationship between the microsphere and the sample all became part of the problem. This was where my work on the SMAL lens began.

I developed the lens from the ground up, but what followed was not a conventional product-development project with a defined beginning, middle and end. The lens remained a work in progress throughout my years at LIG Nanowise. As we learned more about the microsphere technology, the lens evolved with it. Designs were tested, results were analysed, limitations were uncovered and improvements were made. Some solutions opened new possibilities while creating new engineering problems somewhere else.

For almost ten years, I kept coming back to the same fundamental challenge: how could we take the extraordinary characteristics of the microsphere and make them usable, controllable and repeatable as an optical technology?

The answer was never a single breakthrough. It was the accumulation of countless iterations and small improvements, each one building on what we had learned before.

Over time, the SMAL lens became the practical expression of that microsphere technology. It made it possible to exploit the unusual optical behaviour of the microsphere and to observe structures beyond the conventional diffraction limit, including features below 100 nanometres.

But as the lens developed, another problem became increasingly obvious. A technology with such unusual optical characteristics could not simply be placed inside an ordinary microscope and expected to deliver its full potential. The microscope itself had to change.

The first Nanoro M began to take shape from the very beginning of LIG Nanowise, alongside the early development of the SMAL lens. This is an important part of the story because the two developments were never truly separate. As I worked on the lens, we discovered what the microscope needed to do in order to exploit it. As we worked with the microscope, we discovered new things about the lens and about the practical conditions required to use it effectively. The two projects continually influenced one another. The microscope had to be built around the technology rather than the technology being adapted to a conventional microscope.

The extremely short working distance of the SMAL lens meant that positioning became critical. The illumination had to be controlled carefully. The microsphere had to be brought into the correct relationship with the sample. Mechanical stability and precision became part of the optical problem. In other words, the physics of the microsphere began to dictate the architecture of the instrument. That was one of the most interesting aspects of the work.

A decision that appeared to be purely optical could suddenly become a mechanical problem. A mechanical solution could affect the optical performance. A manufacturing limitation could force a redesign. Something that worked beautifully as an experiment could prove much more complicated when it had to become part of a complete instrument. The boundaries between disciplines began to disappear.

Optics was no longer isolated from mechanics. Mechanics was no longer isolated from manufacturing. Electronics, software, illumination and motion control all became part of the same problem. And I found myself increasingly working in the space between them.

Nanoro M was the first generation of the instrument and, like every first-generation technology, it taught us a great deal. There is a particular kind of knowledge that only comes from building and using a real system.

On paper, a design can appear elegant. In a laboratory experiment, it can appear successful. But once all the components have to work together, new realities emerge.

We began to understand where the first-generation architecture was imposing compromises. Some limitations came from the optical design. Others came from mechanical integration, alignment, operation or the practical requirements of turning the technology into a usable instrument.

At the same time, the SMAL lens itself continued to evolve. This is what made the development so interesting: there was never a moment when one project simply finished and the next one began. The lens was improving while the microscope was being developed. The microscope was revealing new challenges while the lens was being improved. Each informed the other.

After several years, I had accumulated not only a much deeper understanding of the SMAL technology, but also a very detailed understanding of Nanoro M — what worked, what could be improved and, importantly, what was limiting the technology from reaching its full potential. Eventually, it became clear that incremental improvements were no longer enough. The next step required a new architecture. That was the beginning of Nanoro Generation.

The idea was not simply to produce a newer version of Nanoro M. The objective was to rethink the microscope using everything we had learned from the first generation.

The years spent developing the SMAL lens had changed our understanding of the technology. The years spent developing Nanoro M had shown us the practical limitations of the original instrument. Bringing those two experiences together created an opportunity to design something fundamentally more advanced.

I took on the development of this second generation with the aim of removing the drawbacks we had identified in Nanoro M and building a system that could make much better use of the characteristics of the SMAL lens. This meant going back to the architecture of the instrument and asking much more fundamental questions:

How should the optical system be arranged?

How should the lens be positioned?

How should the illumination interact with the microsphere?

How could alignment be made more precise and more reliable?

How should the mechanical system be designed around those requirements?

And, perhaps most importantly, how could all of this be brought together into something that behaved not as a collection of sophisticated components, but as one coherent instrument?

By this stage, I was no longer approaching the problem simply as an optical engineer.

The technology had forced me to become a systems engineer, whether or not that was the title attached to my role.

I needed to understand the optics deeply enough to make the right decisions, but also the mechanics, manufacturing constraints, suppliers, electronics, software and practical requirements of the final product. I needed to understand not only whether something could be designed, but whether it could actually be built, integrated, aligned, tested and eventually used.

That was a very different level of responsibility. And it was the experience that ultimately led me into Product Development Management. Looking back at those ten years, what stands out to me is not one particular design or one particular title. It is the continuity of the journey.

I joined a company that was being created around a scientific idea from the University of Manchester. I worked on the technology that would become the SMAL lens and spent almost a decade continuously developing and improving it. At the same time, I was involved in the development of the first Nanoro microscope from the earliest stages of the company.

Then, after years of working with both the lens and the first-generation microscope, I took the development into a new phase with Nanoro Generation — a new architecture designed from the experience accumulated through the previous generation and intended to overcome its limitations. The story was never really about a lens.

And it was never really about a microscope. It was about learning how to turn an unconventional scientific principle into a technology, and then learning how to build a product around that technology.

Every stage changed my understanding of the previous one. The microsphere taught us about the physics. The SMAL lens taught us how to engineer that physics. Nanoro M taught us what happened when that technology became a complete instrument. Nanoro Generation allowed us to take everything we had learned and rethink the system. And somewhere along the way, my own role evolved with the technology.

I began as an optical engineer. I became increasingly involved in system-level development, multidisciplinary engineering and technical decision-making. Eventually, I became responsible for product development. The progression was not a career plan.

It was a consequence of the problems that needed to be solved.

This is perhaps the most important part of what I bring to Dverga today. When I describe my experience as optical engineering, multidisciplinary development, product development, startup development or technical leadership, these are not separate competencies collected together on a CV. They were built through the same journey.

I learned what it means to develop an optical technology by spending years developing the SMAL lens. I learned what it means to engineer a system by building a microscope around that technology.

I learned what multidisciplinary development really means by having to make optics, mechanics, illumination, electronics, software and manufacturing work together.

I learned product development by taking that technology through successive generations.

And I learned what it means to build technology in a startup by experiencing that transformation from the very beginning of the company. That is why Dverga exists.

I have always been interested in the space between an idea and its realisation — the place where scientific concepts encounter engineering constraints, where prototypes encounter manufacturing, and where technology has to become a product. My experience at LIG Nanowise gave me the opportunity to spend almost ten years in that space.

It started with a microsphere. It became a lens. The lens became the heart of a microscope. The first microscope revealed its limitations. Those limitations led to a new generation. And through that entire evolution, I was there — learning, designing, improving, solving problems and progressively taking responsibility for the whole system.

That journey is the foundation of Dverga.

**Because sometimes the most valuable expertise is not knowing how to solve one particular problem. It is having lived through the journey of discovering what the next problem will be.**