On a recent trading day, the STAR Market opened and one stock jumped 488% right out of the gate. Its issue price was 186.88 yuan, and during the session it surged as high as 1,300 yuan. Winning a single lot of 500 shares meant a paper profit of more than 550,000 yuan at the peak. This is the most profitable new stock on the A-share market so far this year. Its name is Preci Laser. By comparison, Unitree, the most discussed STAR Market name over the same period, had an issue price of 150.8 yuan. Most people know nothing about this company, and this is yet another story of a scientist successfully founding a hard-tech business.
A post-85s PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences led a group of PhDs into entrepreneurship, broke the monopoly of foreign giants, and cracked the "bottleneck" dilemma. They not only built domestic high-end lasers and became the leading "light source" in China's quantum technology field, but also exported in reverse to top European and American research institutions such as Harvard University, Caltech, and ETH Zurich.
More importantly, Preci Laser pioneered a new technology route different from traditional foreign lasers, broke past technical limitations, and achieved full independent controllability from underlying core components to the entire laser system. In 2020, after only two years of existence, Preci Laser won an excellence award in the electronic information industry finals of the China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition. Looking back on the entrepreneurial journey, founder Zhang Lei said: "There were hesitations, reluctance, hardship, and tears, but all of it was worth it."
Only two years after founding, Preci Laser won an excellence award in the finals of the China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition
Six years later, Preci Laser's performance made all of that even more worthwhile. Becoming a listed company with an issue price higher than "star" enterprises like Unitree is only one sign of the market's high expectations for Preci Laser. Founder Zhang Lei led Preci Laser, and in only eight years it went from nothing to becoming a leading domestic manufacturer of precision lasers.
According to QY Research estimates, in 2024 Preci Laser's share of the global laser market in quantum technology reached 9.21%, while its share of China's laser market in quantum technology reached 16.85%, ranking first among domestic brands by market share. Its products appear at research institutions such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, serving as the light source for the famous "Jiuzhang" quantum computer. They also serve as the light source for superconducting quantum computing systems in the products of industrialization companies such as QuantumCTek and Quantum Precision Instruments, supporting the iteration of the "Zuchongzhi" superconducting quantum computing prototype.
While providing light sources for major national equipment, Preci Laser's technology is also exported overseas in reverse. It provides light sources for Harvard University's neutral-atom quantum computer, and its presence is also behind Caltech, MIT, ETH Zurich, and the ultra-high-precision atomic clocks at the University of Colorado.
In addition to turning the world's top quantum research institutions and companies in China's quantum technology field into its customers, Preci Laser has also entered the supply chain of domestic semiconductor equipment. Its lasers for wafer fabrication light sources, wafer metrology and inspection, and wafer stealth dicing have broken the long-standing market monopoly of overseas giants from the United States, Japan, and elsewhere.
All of this begins with a decision made by a scientist. Preci Laser founder Zhang Lei is extremely low-profile in life. In public reports, apart from knowing that he was born in 1986, went straight from undergraduate study to graduate school and then a doctorate after university, and earned an engineering doctorate from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014, almost no other personal information is available. But that has not stopped him from being highly visible in scientific research.
During his doctoral studies, his research ability was already evident. In 2014, his research topic won the Chinese Academy of Sciences President's Special Award, and in 2016 his doctoral dissertation was selected as one of China's first national outstanding doctoral dissertations in optical engineering. After earning his doctorate, Zhang Lei stayed at the institute and became an associate researcher, focusing mainly on new fiber lasers for special applications. During that period, he published multiple papers in domestic and international journals and led or participated in projects such as the Youth Science Fund, the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, and the National 863 Program.
At that time, China's frontier research projects were accelerating, but the light source, the heart of high-end scientific research equipment, remained firmly controlled by overseas giants. Lasers priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars often had delivery cycles of at least six months. Domestic research institutes had no bargaining power at all; even when equipment broke down, they had to wait for overseas engineers to repair it remotely. During his time doing research at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, he saw teachers from the institute travel abroad on business. Nominally it was for academic exchange, but the real main task was to buy every foreign company's laser on a list. "If only there were domestic substitutes," Zhang Lei thought. That idea took root in his mind.
But changing this situation from within the system of a research institution was very difficult. One option was to keep one's head down doing research inside a scientific institution. Another was to transfer the technology to a relevant company, but given the complexity of lasers, few companies could do it. The third was to go out and start a business oneself, which could succeed or fail. Zhang Lei stood at this crossroads and found it hard to choose. On one side, his request to leadership for unpaid leave or a leave of absence to start a business was rejected. On the other side, the products he had developed were constantly gaining market recognition. In the end, Zhang Lei decided to resign from the stable position of associate researcher and do something more valuable and meaningful for the industry and the country.
At the end of 2017, he brought together three colleagues with the same idea and prepared to start a business. In a factory building in Jiading, Shanghai, they set up their first-generation optical experiment platform. The PhD team, with an average age of 30, founded Preci Laser. The research topics at the institute became the technical starting point for Zhang Lei's entrepreneurship and also shaped the direction of the technical path he chose. When Zhang Lei was preparing to start the company, the hottest track on the market was industrial lasers, with abundant financing and a lower technical threshold. But he realized that although the cake was large, there were also many people dividing it. By contrast, in precision lasers and fine processing, advanced lasers were dominated by foreign companies, while precision lasers were an important tool and component for quantum research, and also his own research direction. He wanted to do something no one in China had done before.
With the direction set, Zhang Lei also refused to compromise on the choice of technical route. At the time, the mainstream technical routes were semiconductor lasers and titanium-sapphire lasers. An ordinary entrepreneur might have chosen to follow a mature technical route or simply imitate foreign competing products. But Preci Laser chose a more difficult, longer-development-cycle new technical route. This new precision laser technology route fundamentally broke through the physical limitations of traditional lasers, could meet the diverse needs of fields such as quantum technology and semiconductors, and more importantly, gave the entire technology chain independent controllability.
On August 18, Preci Laser listed on the STAR Market, taking only more than eight years from founding to listing
Zhang Lei's "adventurous" choice perhaps came more from confidence in technology. Fortunately, through technological innovation, Preci Laser encountered its own "seed customer." At the time, a quantum research team at the University of Science and Technology of China was looking for a product that could solve a bottleneck problem, and it placed an order for a 1,064-nanometer laser with Preci Laser, even prepaying most of the amount. Along with trust came pressure for Preci Laser. Zhang Lei still remembers the team's excitement when receiving the order. At that time the company had only a dozen or so people, and even basic R&D equipment was bought with pooled money, but everyone was full of drive. Zhang Lei led the team in tackling the problem relentlessly. Over more than two years, they iterated from the first prototype to the sixth, finding problems in each one and improving each one. Zhang Lei never thought it would fail, because he knew the direction was right and the only remaining issue was time. When the customer received the finished product, the evaluation was four words: worthy of expectations. Those four words let the whole team finally breathe a sigh of relief.
With one battle, Preci Laser made its name and opened up the market. In the following years, its products iterated rapidly, and Preci Laser took the leading position in precision lasers in China's quantum technology field. Once the domestic market was secure, doors abroad also opened. Even the world's most demanding customers came forward to endorse Preci Laser's technology. At the 2024 Shanghai Science and Technology Awards ceremony, Zhang Lei became the youngest of the 10 recipients of the Shanghai Youth Science and Technology Outstanding Contribution Award.
Zhang Lei received the Shanghai Youth Science and Technology Outstanding Contribution Award
During the selection process, a recommendation letter from Professor Ye Jun of the University of Colorado in the United States attracted attention. The professor is recognized as a top scientist in the field of global quantum precision measurement and is regarded as a hot candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the letter he wrote: "I am very confident in stating that Preci Laser's high-quality products have played a key role in advancing research in advanced fields..." The reason for this recommendation letter was that the University of Colorado is itself a customer of Preci Laser. A top American scientist rarely provides a technical endorsement for a Chinese private company.
In fact, after being purchased by Harvard University in 2022, Preci Laser's products became known to more and more research teams through academic exchange. Harvard University, MIT, and Caltech, these top laboratories in the world, now all use Preci Laser products. After securing a place in quantum technology, Zhang Lei turned his attention to advanced-process semiconductors, another bottlenecked industry. Moving from quantum to semiconductors, Preci Laser hardly had to start from zero, because when he pioneered the new technical route, Zhang Lei had already mastered core component technology across the entire chain. These underlying principles applied equally in semiconductors, and the switch took an unexpectedly short time.
Preci Laser developed rapidly after entering the semiconductor field. Chart: Zui Business
On August 18, 2026, Preci Laser landed on the STAR Market and became the listed company with the highest issue price this year. Based on valuation and his shareholding ratio, Zhang Lei's net worth reached more than 20 billion yuan at its peak. The real reason capital favored Preci Laser so strongly is its key role in domestic substitution in quantum technology and advanced-process semiconductors. This is a bet on whether China can break through in these fields in the future.
For a long time, the venture capital community has shared a consensus that "scientist entrepreneurship is difficult." Many teams can produce stunning samples in the lab, but find it hard to cross the "valley of death" from sample to product. Today, however, more and more stories of successful "hardcore" entrepreneurship like Zhang Lei's are appearing before people. A new methodology has even formed in venture circles: from PI to IP to IPO. That is, first find a principal investigator (PI), select one of the research achievements to develop into a startup project (IP), and then take that project public (IPO).
Scientists with hardcore technology are entering entrepreneurship and growing and breaking through in one niche field after another. These scattered breakthroughs ultimately converge into the overall progress of Chinese technology. However, listing is not the finish line. For Preci Laser, the story is only half told. With demand in quantum technology not yet truly scaled and overseas giants unlikely to sit by while losing share, whether a company with a global market share of 9.21% can keep pushing that number higher will still be left to time.