Exosens

Exosens sells the components that let other people's systems see in the dark, and the group is best known under the Photonis name it carried until September 2023. The company is headquartered at Merignac near Bordeaux, was taken over by the French investment house HLD in 2021, and listed on compartment A of Euronext Paris in 2024 under the ticker EXENS. It now sits in the SBF 120 and the Euronext Tech Leaders segment. Four acquired businesses have been folded into the single Exosens brand: the Belgian shortwave infrared camera maker Xenics, the Finnish graphene detector developer Emberion, the Israeli detector house El-Mul, and the wavefront sensing specialist Phasics, with the cooled infrared line from Noxant sold alongside them.

The group reports two segments. Amplification covers image intensifier tubes and the night vision built around them, and it produces most of the revenue. The family runs from the XR5 tube, with its integrated auto-gated power supply, through the commercial ECHO grades to the 4G and 4G+ standards that represent the current top end for detection range in very low light. Photonis remains the brand on the night vision products, and Photonis Defense in the United States picked up its first delivery order under the US Army binocular night vision device programme in August 2026, an early return on the group's American expansion. Detection and Imaging is the second segment and it reaches well outside defence. Xenics-derived shortwave infrared cameras are sold as Bobcat for industrial area-scan work, Lynx and Manx for line-scan inspection, Wildcat for high resolution and Cheetah for high-speed capture, while MicroNoxCore is a compact midwave infrared core aimed at size, weight and power constrained surveillance, and the Radia line covers thermal imaging. Hyperspectral and multispectral cameras extend the same business into material analysis.

The rest of the catalogue is physics instrumentation, sold into the markets Exosens calls Life Sciences and Environment, Industrial Control and Nuclear. It builds electron and ion detectors for mass spectrometry and semiconductor electron beam inspection, photomultiplier and channel electron multiplier style detectors, miniature gamma ionization chambers, energy compensated Geiger-Muller tubes for low dose gamma measurement, and neutron and gamma detection assemblies used in nuclear plants and radiation monitoring. Wavefront metrology arrives through the SID4 sensors in ultraviolet, shortwave infrared and high resolution shortwave infrared versions, supported by the PhaseStudio software platform and the Kaleo optical test kit, with deformable mirrors and spatial light modulators sold for adaptive optics. Manufacturing and research sit in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Defence demand has been pulling hard on that capacity, and the company raised its full-year guidance in September 2026 on the back of a faster than expected production ramp.