Friday, May 30, 2008

Clark U. startup goes with $2M flow

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Earlier this year, a secretive company founded out of Clark University in Worcester was granted a patent for a new kind of heat pump using rare gases. Last week the company, known as MachFlow Energy Inc., pulled in $2 million in funding to continue its efforts.

The funding came from California VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and others, including local entrepreneur Mukesh Chatter, who founded Nexabit Networks Inc. (sold to Lucent Technologies Inc. for $900 million in 1999) and Burlington-based e-commerce startup NeoSaej Corp.

Chatter provided the company’s first round of funding when it was first incorporated in 2006, though the amount was not disclosed.

Officials are quiet regarding the details of the firm’s technology, but a patent assigned in February to MachFlow founders Arthur Williams and Charles Agosta addresses the use of rare gases (like neon, krypton and xenon) in certain kinds of heat pumps. Using such gases can reduce friction and thus reduce power consumption. Heat pumps move heat from one place to another carried in liquids or gases and have become commonplace in everyday applications such as refrigerators, freezers and air conditioning systems.

According to Agosta, chairman of the physics department at Clark, the technology “will save energy and is intrinsically green,” and will be applied to different products. He did not offer details.

Williams, the company’s other founder, is a Harvard University-trained theoretical physicist who spent 30 years working on, and leading, the computational physics program at IBM Corp.