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Armed with a new round of funding, short-wavelength lighting developer Energetiq Inc. is hoping to shed a new light on life sciences research — literally.
Founded in 2004 by a team of plasma engineers and physicists from MIT and Wilmington’s Applied Science and Technology Inc. after it was acquired by Andover’s MKS Instruments Inc., Woburn-based Energetiq has grown from six people to 30 and closed three rounds of funding for building tiny, plasma-based light sources for tiny applications.
Last summer, the firm released a short-wavelength light source using lasers and has since landed a handful of unnamed customers in the semiconductor industry. Now, with a $3.2 million third round of funding, according to federal documents, the firm is looking to bring its new source of light to the life sciences industry, perhaps in applications such as cell-level analysis and diagnosis.
“Many of the life sciences lighting technologies haven’t been improved in 100 years,” said CEO Paul Blackborow, who co-founded the company with president Donald Smith, both formerly of Applied Science and Technology. “We are looking to bring some real innovation to the research lighting industry.”
Viewing, printing on (lithography), or analyzing objects on a nanometer scale requires very short wavelength lighting sources, such as ultraviolet light, deep ultraviolet light or “soft” X-rays. Energetiq has been building a business using plasmas to generate such light without using an electrode, and is well known in the semiconductor lithography and laboratory research areas.
Its new product, using lasers, presents a new opportunity to increase the intensity of such lighting, up to a factor of 10, while also reducing the wavelength, making it possible to see even smaller objects, said officials.
Just as companies such as Burlington-based Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, formerly known as Color Kinetics, is changing the way common lighting is delivered using light-emitting diodes (LED), Energetiq hopes to change the way nanometer-scale lighting is done.
The company’s recent funding is not only a source of cash, but an endorsement of its potential from multiple tech sectors. Aside from traditional venture capital firm Shea Ventures of California, Energetiq also counts as investors semiconductor giant Intel Capital and Japan’s Ushio Inc., one of the largest industrial light and laser companies in the world.
Blackborow and his team are confident that use of the firm’s high-intensity, short-wavelength laser light in the research space could have a ripple effect. “The lighting could enable a new class of instruments to be developed because it would allow them to be smaller and more efficient and take advantage of the increase in brightness,” he said.
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