Venus Optics

Venus Optics (Anhui ChangGeng Optics Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese manufacturer of photographic lenses, specialized in the design of innovative macro and wide angle lenses. Headquarters and production site are in Hefei, sales and marketing are located in Hongkong and the USA.
Company.
Venus Optics was founded in 2013. Founder, managing director and chief developer is Dayong Li who graduated in opto-electronic engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology.
The company develops and produces innovative
 photographic lenses under the brand name Laowa ('old frog').
Lenses.
The first lens was the 60 mm f/2.8 2 x Ultra Macro, a full frame lens with a magnification factor of 2:1 that could also be focused to infinity which is unique. In the same year, Venus Optics released the widest angle macro lens to offer a 1:1 magnification ratio, the 15 mm f/4 Wide Angle Macro. The small focal length allows to include the background details (e.g., where and how the subject lives) in the photo. Due to physical reasons, the working distance in the macro range is rather short (at 1:1, focusing distance is 12.2 cm resulting in a working distance of only 4.7 mm). In the meantime, Venus Optics have released unique lenses mainly in the fields of ultra macro and rectilinear and/or fast ultra wide angle lenses for full frame, APS-C, MFT, and Fujifilm G-Mount (see table).
Most Laowa lenses (an exception is e.g., the 100 mm f/2,8 2x Ultra Macro APO) are purely manual lenses. There is no communication between the camera body and the lens, hence, no transfer of Exif data, no autofocus function, no lens-based image stabilization (OIS), and no automatic aperture control. However, autofocus plays a minor role in macro and wide angle photography. Auto focus bracketing is not possible with manual lenses. The company does not exclude the development of more lenses with electronics in them.