Every skin laser on the market floods 100% of the surface to reach the 5% that is actually hair. Fovea photographs the skin, finds each follicle, and fires a 200 µm spot only there — near-painless, full power on every skin tone, no operator judgement.
Simulated. Moles, scars and tattoos are excluded automatically.
One design choice — flood the surface, hope the hair absorbs more than the skin — produces every complaint patients and clinics have about laser hair removal.
Roughly 2,000 W across the whole surface, to reach follicles covering about a twentieth of it. The pain isn't incidental — it is what heating healthy skin feels like.
Melanin competes for the photons. Lower the power and nothing happens; raise it and the patient burns. Fitzpatrick IV–VI is the fastest-growing patient group and the worst served.
Laser hair removal is the most litigated cutaneous laser procedure, and about 71% of claims involve non-physician operators. Clinics carry the liability and the training cost.
These were the innovations it announced. Read together, they describe an industry improving everything except the thing that matters.
If the only way to make your laser bearable is to chill the skin first, the problem was never the temperature. We removed the need for a cooler entirely.
The handpiece images the skin through a sapphire window, marks every target, and steers a focused micro-spot to each one individually. The skin in between is never irradiated.
Two LED sources light the field at different wavelengths. One reads the surface, the other penetrates below it. The software compares both frames to place each follicle root.
Detection maps each follicle and excludes what must not be hit: moles, scars, tattoos, pigmented lesions.
Galvanometric mirrors steer a 200 µm spot onto each marked root with its own computed dose — a full 6 cm² field in under a second.
Contact is confirmed, unsafe shots are refused, and every firing is logged. The result is a per-shot treatment record — the first in this category.
The nerve receptors that register heat and pain sit in the surface layers of the skin. There are very few of them around a follicle root. Because energy is delivered only to the root, those receptors are hardly stimulated at all. In a 40-subject study at an independent surgical clinic, pain scored at half the level of conventional devices — with no cooling hardware fitted to our device at all.
Melanin absorption is only a problem if you are putting light into skin you don't intend to treat. We aren't. That removes the trade-off structurally instead of managing it with wavelength tricks and chilled gel — and it lets us raise power rather than lower it, because there is no surface to protect.
The first-generation platform, sold as Cybelle V2 by Mavilab — the company this founding team started in 2012 — went through certification, into clinics, and onto distributor order books. The physics is not a research question for us.
Medical CE under 93/42/EEC, ISO 13485 production, plus LVD, EMC and laser-safety testing at an accredited laboratory. All passed.
Cybelle V2 · Mavilab Yazılım Medikal Lazer A.Ş.A dermatological laser specialist heard about the device, volunteered to test it, treated real skin, took biopsies and examined them histologically. The finding: permanent epilation.
Dr. Şerafettin Şaraçoğlu · Elit PoliklinikA 40-subject pain and efficacy study at an independent surgical and medical centre scored our device at half the pain of conventional systems. Those systems use cryogen or contact cooling. Ours had none.
HLC Estetik Cerrahi ve Tıp Merkezi · 40 subjects$5M in contracts closed at Dubai Derma, a €4.5M minimum guarantee for 180 units over three years, and more than twenty distribution offers from over ten countries.
2018–2019Thousands of follicle images across Fitzpatrick I–VI, collected from working clinics and university dermatology departments. You can only assemble this by having already shipped a follicle-detecting laser.
Detection accuracy above 99% in university testingPeer-reviewed work on optical follicle localisation, developed with a university engineering department and presented internationally.
Optical hair-region localisation for guided laser hair removal
In January 2024 the FDA cleared a handheld device whose algorithm automatically targets individual hairs. It reached consumers that December. The approach we patented in 2012 is now regulator-validated and commercially proven — at home.
Image-guided follicle targeting is no longer novel to a reviewer. For our 510(k) that converts the riskiest part of the submission into a known quantity.
The professional segment is roughly three-quarters of the market, and no incumbent ships camera-guided selective firing. Robotic entrants automate a flood-fire head; that changes who holds the handpiece, not what gets fired.
In 2015 we spent years hand-tuning image processing to find follicles. That is now a solved machine-learning problem — and our labelled dataset turns from a sunk cost into a training asset.
On the intellectual property, plainly. Our 2012/2015 family was granted in the US and EP. After the previous company was wound down, maintenance status is under verification and we are pursuing revival and assignment to Fovea Laser. We do not present those patents as the moat. The moat is the labelled Fitzpatrick I–VI dataset, the calibration and optical know-how, and new filings covering AI detection and per-follicle adaptive dosimetry.
Clinics pay little upfront. We keep ownership and meter each session through a connected module — hardware we already designed and shipped in Gen-1. It was always the intended model; we never got to run it.
A working clinic covers a month of the device with two days of treatment revenue.
| Bill of materials, at volume | ≈ $15K / unit |
|---|---|
| Our fee per session | $20–30 |
| Share of the clinic's ticket | 5–8% |
| Revenue per placed device, per year | ≈ $40K |
| Gross margin after service | 70%+ |
| Cryogen and gel consumables removed | ≈ $20K / yr |
And we unlock revenue clinics cannot book today: the Fitzpatrick IV–VI patients they turn away, and the tanned skin that shuts conventional devices down every summer.
We met in 2005 as full-scholarship science students at Bilkent University and founded the company in 2012. Eight years later a corporate investor executed a capital increase that diluted the founders to 10%, and the product was shelved. The patents were left to lapse. We are doing it again, in a US company, with clean terms.
Took the first-generation device from a sketch to a certified product in clinics. Since then, founder of three more hardware companies — energy harvesting, anti-icing coatings, line robotics — selling to Vattenfall, ENEL, EDP and NB Power. Alumnus of Berkeley SkyDeck, HAX/SOSV and Alchemist.
Physicist. Designed the optical architecture, the laser chain and the camera–galvo calibration that made per-follicle firing possible on real hardware. PhD in physics; studied alongside Mustafa at Bilkent from 2005. Full-time again since incorporation.
The founder's forearm. Dermatology-supervised biopsy grid, taken to prove efficacy. The scars are still visible.
“When investors asked us to prove the device actually destroyed the follicle, I didn't send them a chart. I asked a dermatologist to take the biopsies out of my own arm.”
We watched the industry adopt our 2012 idea without us. Now we are building the version only we know how to build.
Eighteen months of runway to a Gen-2 prototype with clinical pilot data on real patients, submission-ready. Founder-owned and self-funded to date — no outside investment, no notes, nobody else on the cap table.
Rebuild follicle detection on a modern vision stack against our existing dataset. Re-source and integrate the Gen-2 head. Open clinical pilots across Fitzpatrick I–VI.
The optical bill of materials is already known and validated, so there is no exploratory hardware spend. Our engineering bench and suppliers are in Türkiye. Both founders on minimal salaries.
Design freeze with pilot data is the trigger for a $4–6M Series A that carries the 510(k) through clearance and funds the US launch.
mustafa@fovealaser.com · data room available on request