In my last post I wrote about how Uniqarta’s technology development was ahead of our market development. By this I meant that we have demonstrated our technology with functional prototypes, established a vision of where we want to take our technology, and defined the required steps to get there. This could not be said, to the same extent, on the market development side relative to market focus, customer validation, and product definition.
In the past month that gap has narrowed. We have focused our market exploration on the logistics/inventory management segment I wrote about last time. We have engaged with three well-establish companies in this segment who see value in our technology and are working to define, validate, and select specific application areas in which to focus. A key question ahead of us is the extent to which the targeted application areas (and the required solutions) across these three companies align. We may end up having to focus on a subset of these companies if their needs and interests are dissimilar.
It remains to be seen where, exactly, within the logistics/inventory management area we decide to focus. This is a broad area encompassing diverse applications such as retail items, healthcare, factory automation, and others. These have similar technology needs but the specific product we provide and how we position it could likely vary.
Changing topics, I spent a lot of time in October on our fundraising efforts. I’ve received sufficient investor feedback to determine that I’ll end up somewhere in the middle of my targeted $0.5 to $1.0 million range. This should be sufficient for Uniqarta to meet its 2015 goals although having a bit of a larger buffer would certainly be nice! I’’ll be closing most of this round in November and December and then look to complete it with a few remaining investors in January.