This Kovio is not a tribe in Papua New Guinea nor a beach town in Greece, but a stealthy printed electronics company starting to come out into the light.
The start-up scored $19.5 million in funds last week, in a Series D round led by Pinnacle Ventures along with nine other funders. This brings Kovio's total funding haul to $34 million since 2001. Earlier this year, Amir Mashkouri was wooed away from his exec VP gig at Spansion, taking over the CEO reins at the Sunnyvale-based concern.
At this point, don't waste your time visiting the Kovio Website, since there's only a map to their HQ and a jobs link (unless, of course, you are seeking gainful employment). A little digging reveals that the company is working to perfect high-resolution printing techniques on large-area, flexible substrates, with a secret sauce of silicon nanoparticle inks. Initial product applications seem to be in the very-low-cost RFID space for manufacturing, logistics, retail, health-care and other markets, with future potential in the display sector.
The company originally spun out of the MIT Media Lab as the curiously named NanoTectonica. Kovio's all-inorganic, liquid silicon deposition approach supposedly approaches the resolution of high-end lithographic techniques. If true, this would make Kovio's technology something of real merit, maybe even revolutionary, since other solution-based printed electronics can't hold a candle to advanced optical, direct-write, or nanoimprint lithography in terms of ultimate resolution.
Further Google-powered data mining reveals that these nanocrystalline inks, when printed, are sintered at low temperatures to form uniform thin films. Viable synthesis techniques have been found to reproduce the soluble nanoparticle simply and in gram quantities. I also found Kovio among the customers listed on Cambridge NanoTech's site, suggesting there's an atomic-layer deposition system residing in the printed electronics' company's development facility.
But Kovio won't go on the record about any of this quite yet. I cold-called the company last month and actually got Amir on the phone. (How many CEOs do you know who just pick up a call without screening? Except, of course, at an early-stage company.) He listened to my journalistic pitch but told me politely they weren't ready to talk. He took my name and info, and said they'd be back in touch when the time was right.
That time is fast approaching, as Kovio will roll out into more public view in mid-November during the upcoming IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA 2007 show. Amir has one of the prime keynote slots on Tuesday, November 13, with a talk entited "A New Semiconductor Technology Paradigm," during which the company's achievements as well as its applications roadmap will be revealed.
In a year where the likes of Polymer Vision, Nanoident, Plastic Logic, Konarka, Soligie, Innos, Thin Film Electronics, and other flexible/printed/organic electronics concerns have started to gain manufacturing and commercial traction, Kovio's coming-out party should be a most intriguing affair.
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