Things continue to move quickly. Since I last posted we’ve closed a number of seed round investments and are now in good shape to operate this year. We (finally!) closed the technology licensing deal with North Dakota State University (NDSU). This is an exclusive license to the technology that my co-founder’s team developed at NDSU which allows for the low-cost assembly of ultra-thin or ultra-small ICs onto flexible substrates. We also continue to get strong interest from established companies. While these larger companies aren’t generally moving as quickly as I’d like, they offer the potential for technical collaboration, effective market channels, and additional funding. What makes a few of them especially interesting is that their interest extends beyond just RFID to the more general vision we have at Uniqarta of embedding all sorts of electronics into all sorts of materials. Lastly, we’re even a bit optimistic about the government grants we are pursuing. It is early and these are extremely competitive, but we’re finding that there is a strong and growing interest in flexible hybrid electronics (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/pnz7cq7 or http://tinyurl.com/oj8paam) with very few companies focusing on the chip assembly aspect of that technology.
At a personal level, it is gratifying to see our vision of ubiquitous, unobtrusive electronics being shared (and to an extent validated) by these other parties. My focus is now shifting from raising seed money to furthering our technology and business development to the point that we can execute a Series A funding round later this year that allows us to get that NDSU-licensed technology into production.