By Allan Maurer
EXCLUSIVE REPORT RALEIGH, NC—Six-year-old Protochips, a profitable Raleigh-based firm selling advanced holders, stages and specimen supports for electron microscopy, has closed on the first of two tranches of an early stage round originally targeted at $685,000. It expects to wrap up paperwork on the second tranche of the oversubscribed funding soon, says Michael Zapata, executive chair.
Investors in the first tranche include the Piedmont Angel Network, Charlottesville-based Jefferson Corner Network, Zapata, who is a serial entrepreneur, and other individual investors.
Second tranche investors include the Wilmington Investor Network and Florida-based Emergent Growth Fund.
According to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company closed on just over $435,000 of the original $685,000 target. Zapata tells TechJournal South the second tranche of the round has been completed except for some remaining paperwork.
Funds going to growth
Protochips, he says, “Has been profitable and never took investment funding previously. We’ll use this funding for growth and strategic opportunities.” Those include launching two new products this summer, opening a brand new market for the company, and increasing marketing and sales.
Zapata says the company sells to three different customer bases, academic researchers, government researchers and corporate researchers.
So far, he says, when spending from one set of customers goes down, spending from another has gone up, so the company has continued profitable operations. “We’re not spending any of the new funds on operations,” Zapata says. “We have that covered.”
Clean energy research driving business
The company’s technology allows researchers to take electron microscopy to places it has never been before. Although the company’s technology has applications in a number of fields, including biotech, Protochips is seeing the most traction from materials science, for coatings, catalysts, aircraft engines and particularly in the energy field.
Protochips CEO David Nackashi explains that electron microscopes, once tools in the back corners of National Laboratories, are becoming ubiquitous and some even sit on a bench top. “They’re used to see things much too small to be seen with an optical light microscope,” he says.
That’s important in energy research because many of the new materials being developed to improve solar and other alternative energy systems are nanoscale, far too small to be seen with ordinary microscopes.
A drawback to electron microscopy, however, is that they are still primarily used as cameras, explains Nackashi. “Researchers are just taking pictures after they do something to a sample. It’s like a crime scene investigation. You’re doing things post mortem.”
From a snapshot to a movie
To really understand what is going on in an experiment, Nackashi says, “You often need to work with these materials in real time, studying what happens in reaction to pressure, temperature, or a gas,” he says. “Our product allows you to change it [the electron microscope] from a camera to a working laboratory.”
Zapata says, “It’s like going from taking snapshots to a movie.”
Nackashi adds, “And you’re doing something to the sample while you’re taking the movie.”
The Protochips system, which includes a semiconductor enhanced slide, sample holder, and software, allows experiments at temperatures up to 1200 degrees Centigrade and can rapidly cycle temperature up and down at a ramp rate of a million degrees a second.
That, Zapata notes, is important in materials research for such things as turbine engines which experience rapid temperature changes.
Both Zapata and Nackashi point out that much of the company’s traction is coming from clean energy research, which is exploding.
Zapata notes that the Obama administration’s stimulus package, which is funding much new research in the field, is having a noticeable effect and “indirectly creating jobs in the Triangle.”
The company was founded by Nackashi, John Damiano and Stephen Mick, all PhDs.
Online: www.protochips.com
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