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Thorlabs Inc. is an American privately held optical equipment company headquartered in Newton, New Jersey. The company was founded in 1989 by Alex Cable, who is currently its president and CEO. In addition to several US offices, the company has subsidiaries in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden and the UK. The nomenclature includes about 20,000 different products.

The history of the company begins when Alex Cable worked at Bell Labs and bought a milling machine, which he used in his spare time to design and manufacture optomechanical parts. After a while, he developed the business to such an extent that in November 1989 he could afford to leave Bell Labs and take up a new business full-time. Alex Cable named the company after his black Labrador Retriever named Thor.

Thorlabs develops and manufactures products in the fields of fiber optics, lasers, optical instruments, optomechanics, photonics and vibration isolation, and, in addition, pays great attention to innovation and the creation of new products. So in May 2007, the company received the Laser Focus World - Phast Innovation Award for the development of ASOM (Adaptive Scanning Optical Microscope).

Approximately 90% of the products are produced in-house. Approximately 30% of products were created in response to customer requests or inspired by them. And 25% of Thorlabs' annual turnover comes from new technologies.