Date: Apr 04, 2002 Source: PR Newswire (
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Investment to Fuel Growth of Dip-Pen Nanolithography in the Race to 'get Small'.
NanoInk, Inc., a Chicago-based nanotechnology company, announced today that it has closed a $3 million first- round of financing led by venture capital firms, Galway Partners, LLC and Lurie Investment Fund, LLC.
Nanotechnology is the process of building or manipulating structures at dimensions of less than 100 nanometers or billionths of a meter. It would take more than 120,000 nanometers to span the diameter of a human hair.
NanoInk, Inc. provides a bridge for companies and researchers to enter the nanoscopic world, where products are smaller, faster, cheaper and smarter. The company will sell an automated suite of tools that enables customers and partners to routinely and quickly build structures that are smaller than 10 nanometers. NanoInk's systems provide the only method capable of using virtually any material, from metals to DNA, to build at this small scale. This is achieved by literally drawing molecules onto a surface through a patent-pending process called Dip Pen Nanolithography(TM) ("DPN"), developed by NanoInk cofounder, Professor Chad Mirkin, Director of the Northwestern University Nanotechnology Institute.
"NanoInk will help companies participate in the nanotechnology revolution, enabling them to create new products that will fundamentally change much of our economy and our lives," said Dr. Chris Anzalone, NanoInk CEO. "NanoInk will provide the tools and research collaborations that will lead to advances in diverse areas, from speeding drug discovery to building new types of electronics that are smaller and more powerful than those available today."
With this initial round of venture funding, NanoInk is poised to exploit the commercial opportunities presented by DPN. NanoInk is currently developing the tools necessary to leverage DPN as an industrial process, capable of building nano-scale devices with novel materials in a high throughput manner. In addition to its use as a research tool, DPN will be a viable manufacturing tool that enables building nano-scale structures by printing them, in much the same way a dot-matrix printer builds patterns on paper.
