Here is a fact that sounds like it can't possibly support a company: somewhere out there,
a wire needs its insulation removed, and if you use a blade you might nick the metal underneath, and if
you nick the metal the wire might fail years later inside someone's chest. That is the entire market
Laser Wire Solutions decided to own.
The pitch is deceptively boring. Wire stripping is one of those tasks that sounds trivial
until the wire is thinner than a human hair, coated in enamel, and destined for a cochlear implant or a
neurovascular catheter. Blades bruise. Chemicals contaminate. Heat guns are imprecise. A tuned laser,
it turns out, can vaporize insulation and leave the conductor untouched - cleanly, repeatably, millions
of times over.
That insight belongs to Paul Taylor, a physicist who earned his PhD at Oxford building an
optical atomic clock - trapping a single atom of Ytterbium to serve as a time reference. He then spent
years building laser mastering gear for the CD and DVD industry, and later developing laser cable-marking
systems for aerospace. It was there, marking cables, that he noticed you could also strip them.
In 2011 he left to chase the gap himself. Laser Wire Solutions started as a two-person operation in a
garage in Merthyr Tydfil - which is the kind of origin detail that gets repeated at award ceremonies,
and this company has attended a lot of award ceremonies. It has since grown into one of Wales' fastest-growing
exporters, headquartered at the QED Centre in Treforest.
The reason the story works is that the market is small but the stakes are enormous. When your customer
is an FDA-regulated medical OEM, or a defense prime, or a company launching hardware into orbit, they do
not shop on price. They shop on whether the wire will fail. That is a very good market to be the best in.
“Laser Wire Solutions was founded to exploit the gap in the market for high-end laser stripping
systems for medical device manufacture.”
On the company's founding thesis
