Lasers for Innovative Solutions LLC was founded in 2012 to commercialize LATscan technology after having been developed and patented at Pennsylvania State University. The company was started by Benjamin Hall and Brian Reinhardt. After participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom while serving in the Navy, Ben attended Penn State and worked at the Applied Research Laboratory performing research in laser-material interactions. This is where he, Dr. Jonathan Lynch, and Dr. Ted Reutzel invented LATscan. The technique was developed to address a bottleneck in phenotyping of maize roots, providing orders of magnitude higher speed while also yielding better quality. Brian was a graduate student in the college of Engineering Science and Mechanics working on transducer design for use in high nuclear radiation environments.