CENTENNIAL, Colo. – April 21, 2023 – NUBURU, Inc. (“NUBURU” or the “Company”) (NYSE American: BURU), a leading innovator in high-power and high-brightness industrial blue laser technology, today announced that it has received additional patents that expand its intellectual property portfolio, broadly covering blue lasers for use in welding and other applications.

NUBURU’s blue lasers aim to solve the key manufacturing challenges in metal joining for megatrend markets like e-mobility and consumer electronics: low yield and slow processing.

The overwhelming customer demand is to replace slow, high cost of operations methods like Ultrasonic and Resistance welding which represent multibillion-dollar equipment spends today. While they have been in production for decades, the transition to mass production is driving customer demand for a faster, non-contact process that does not suffer from low utilization and high maintenance costs. Infrared lasers removed the contact and speed limitation; however, they are highly inefficient due to the infrared color of the light which results in part damage and ultimately is not usable for some battery welds.

The NUBURU blue laser addresses the need for a non-contact, high speed process with low-to-no defect for manufacturing batteries and electric vehicles. The megatrend ramp of the e-mobility market cannot absorb low yields. Yield directly corresponds to cost in the short term and post-production, warranty exposure and customer-safety (battery fires), NUBURU addresses the customer pain.

In one of its other main market segments, consumer electronics, the NUBURU blue laser portfolio has made significant penetration progress. Driven by 5G, mobile phone manufacturers approached us looking for solutions to overcome the problems of existing manufacturing techniques such as press-fitting, welding, and other mechanical techniques. They needed to solve low-efficiency, time-consuming processes, which created serious throughput and productivity limitations.

After a 12 to 18-month application and technical qualification process, NUBURU’s AO lasers have now been used in the production of cell phone vapor chambers for over a year. The process involves soldering <200 microns of thin copper, a fraction of the size of a mobile phone, consistently and very quickly. By comparison, the customer was frustrated with infrared lasers. Although traditional infrared fiber lasers offered a non-contact approach, they simply cut the material instead of welding it due to the low absorption at the infrared wavelength.

Blue lasers offer the ideal solution for the customer: a non-contact strategy, with a successful, repeatable, high-speed solution which is ten to a hundred times faster than the original approach. Now, combined with scanners, the NUBURU BL launched in January, further increases customer value with faster speed, more precise welding geometries and improved cost of ownership.