Nov 7 2008
Xtalic today announced that it had raised $10 million in venture-capital financing from two leading venture capital firms, Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, and an investment consortium led by James Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank. The funding will help Xtalic further commercialize and launch its tailored nanostructured metal coatings to industrial and electronics markets.
“Xtalic has built on the groundbreaking work of Professor Chris Schuh, a leading metallurgist at MIT, to create high performance metal and metal coatings with nanostructures optimized for a wide range of applications,” said Tom Clay, CEO of Xtalic. “Our products have radically enhanced properties that deliver improved performance in a wide variety of applications. Our products deliver these advantages with a safety and environmental profile that is significantly better than the existing options in the marketplace.”
Xtalic’s unique control of metal nanostructure has created a new class of performance materials. Xtalic provides chemistry and control software to allow customers to apply these performance coatings in a simple, low cost electroplating process. These new materials help create and support advances in a range of electronics and industrial applications.
"Over the past two years we have successfully moved the technology to product completion and full scale industrial trials,” said Alan Lund, Xtalic’s CTO. “Our team is very excited to be taking our product to launch in a wide range of customer applications.”
"Xtalic's approach brings a completely new tool kit to engineered coatings. This is the first technology we have seen in over forty years in business that has the performance to replace hard chrome,” said Phil Brockman, Chief Technology Officer of Techmetals, a leading user of performance metal coatings.
Hard chrome (or hexavalent chrome) is a widely used metal coating subject to increasing regulation due to worker health risks.
All three investors, Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and the Wolfensohn consortium, participated in the series A investment round in July of 2007. “We are thrilled by the progress we have seen and the widening range of applications for this breakthrough technology,” said Stan Reiss of Matrix Partners, who led this investment round.