CoolLED 2025 Roundup: A Year of Progress, People and Practical Innovation
As 2025 comes to a close, it feels like a good moment to look back at all of the fantastic things that have happened across CoolLED this year. It has been a busy period with steady growth, new ideas, and plenty of time spent talking to researchers, engineers, distributors and the broader microscopy community.
Product and Technical Highlights
Product development and technical support continued throughout 2025, with several useful milestones.
One of the biggest announcements was the preview of our new optogenetics light source, which sits within the pE-300 Series. The prototype was shown at the Society for Neuroscience conference and featured an interchangeable fibre adaptor designed to suit different experimental setups. It was clear that optogenetics users were looking for something simple, stable and easily integrated with their existing workflows, and the early feedback has been encouraging.
We also published a new white paper on custom LED illumination design. This resource is aimed at OEMs, microscopy manufacturers and engineering teams who want a more detailed look at how LED systems are built and how to approach illumination design for their own products.
Software compatibility was another area of progress, particularly with pE-400max control now supported through Evident cellSens. This makes life easier for labs that rely on smooth integration between their imaging software and hardware.
Taken together, these developments show a steady year of practical work rather than grand announcements, which is usually the kind of progress that makes the biggest difference to day-to-day lab use.
People, Team Growth and Company News
One of the clearest themes this year has been growth across our teams. Several new colleagues joined CoolLED in 2025, each bringing specialist knowledge that strengthens our engineering and commercial capabilities. We welcomed Tom Sykes into Engineering, followed by mechanical specialist Chin-Ching Pang, and later in the year Sean Peng joined the core technology team. On the commercial side, we were pleased to welcome Avik Bhattacharjee as our new Key Account Manager, as well as Gary Marney in our Admin department. Monika Filova and Michael Riley helped bolster our production team too. Each addition reflects the steady increase in demand for our systems and the need for more technical breadth across the company.
Alongside new starters, we also celebrated long-service milestones. A number of the team reached the ten-year mark, which says a lot about the working culture here. Many of the people building, testing and developing our systems have been doing so for years, and their consistency is a major reason CoolLED products retain such reliability.
Another highlight was CoolLED winning the Judges Scientific Company of the Year Award for 2024, announced earlier this year. It was a good reminder that the work happening inside the company is noticed within the wider group.
Events, Exhibitions and International Travel
If 2025 had a recurring theme, it was airports. The CoolLED team travelled widely this year, meeting researchers and resellers across Europe, Asia and the United States.
In April, we headed to Taipei for FOM 2025, where we met a wide range of microscopy users and gave demonstrations of our latest systems. Soon after, we attended ELMI 2025 at EMBL Heidelberg, which continues to be a strong event for facility managers and imaging specialists.
In the UK, MMC 2025 in Manchester was a major date in the calendar, bringing together the full range of microscopy users from across the country. Later in the year we travelled to Florence for ECP2025 to speak with digital pathology users.
We recently exhibited at SfN 2025 in San Diego, which was one of the busiest events of the year. This was also the first public outing of our optogenetics prototype, which helped spark a lot of good technical conversations.
Alongside these core science exhibitions, our OEM Illumination team spent much of the year supporting events that focus on industrial inspection, semiconductor metrology and advanced manufacturing. This included Photonics West and BiOS in San Francisco, as well as Semicon Taiwan 2025 where the demand for high-stability, high-uniformity LED illumination continues to grow for inspection systems and automated imaging platforms.
Reseller and Partner Spotlights
2025 was also a strong year for our global partners. We ran several reseller spotlight articles that highlighted the work happening across different regions and the people who help bring CoolLED systems into so many labs.
This year we featured DSS Imagetech in India, Izasa Scientific in Spain and Portugal, MICRO MÉCANIQUE in France, ClearOptics in the Netherlands, Optoprim Italy, as well as Atlantic Imaging, and Aurox in the UK. Each spotlight focused on what these companies offer locally and why they are trusted points of contact for microscopy equipment and technical support.
We also worked with GT Vision to create a complete, entry-level microscope and light source package – an affordable fluorescence workhorse.
A major collaboration highlight came through the CoolLED OEM Network. In September, we hosted a joint live webinar with Prior Scientific, Teledyne Photometrics and Crest Optics. The goal was simple: give engineers, integrators and system designers a clear view of how different components can work together in complete imaging and inspection platforms. We also worked with Oxford Instruments/Andor to highlight how our light sources deliver precision photon management from source to sensor.
We also held our very first ‘Reseller Training Day‘ which brought together a host of different UK-based resellers for a day of product training, marketing discussions, and an acted as a forum for some brilliant technical questions and answer sessions. We hope to do this again in 2026 and expand it to include more resellers across the globe.
Community, Education and Social Responsibility
Alongside all the technical activity, we also spent time supporting community and education events. Our visit to the John Hanson Community School careers fair was a relaxed opportunity to talk to students about engineering, microscopy and the wide range of roles involved in designing scientific equipment. We also once again attended the Get Inspired event in Basingstoke, which is always a fantastic chance to promote STEM careers and hopefully inspire some eager scientific minds!
We also held our annual Macmillan Coffee Morning, which remains a simple but meaningful way for the team to support a good cause. These events may seem ‘small’ compared to product launches or global exhibitions, but they add to the overall picture of CoolLED as a workplace which values people, and building a sustainable future, as much as technology and profit.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we move towards 2026, several themes stand out. The development and full launch of the pE-300opto light source will continue, bringing the pE-300 Series into new applications. Our engineering team is growing, which will help speed up development across both standard and custom illumination, and we have several new products due for launch next year too. We plan to expand our technical resources, improve our reseller tools and continue producing more application-focused content for neuroscience, digital pathology and other imaging areas.
There is also the ongoing importance of sustainability and the move away from mercury-based illumination, as the looming global ban in February 2027 draws nearer. This remains a steady focus for us, and 2026 will see further work in this area.
2025 has been a full and productive year. The progress came from consistent, practical work across every team, and the highlights above are only a fraction of what has been happening behind the scenes. Thank you to everyone who has supported us this year: resellers, researchers, engineers and all the people who keep the world of microscopy moving. We look forward to everything that comes next!
