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Former VBrick CEO Vince Graziani will become the first CEO of Sand 9 Inc., a startup developing nano-mechanical resonators designed to replace the quartz crystals that regulate critical internal timers in cellular phones and other wireless devices.
Sand 9, founded in 2007, has proven its compressed micro electro-mechanical system (MEMS) oscillator with eight customers, on about $10 million in venture capital, co-founder Matt Crowley said. The oscillator, which can be machined using standard semiconductor fabrication methods, is much more efficient to produce than the quartz crystal oscillators currently used, Crowley said.
Graziani left VBrick Systems Inc. in January to take the Sand 9 position. The Wallingford, Conn.-based maker of network devices replaced him with former USA.net executive Doug Howard. Graziani retains a seat on the board at the company, where revenue has grown from $25 million to $40 million in about three years, he said.
Boston-based Sand 9 is pre-revenue, with 17 employees. The company has so far operated without a chief executive, but co-founder Pritiraj Mohanty said Graziani has been an advisor since the early going when the company first approached him about being CEO.
“It was very, very early and required a lot more R&D,” Graziani recalls. “It felt like a little more of a science project at that time that could go either way, and a company that you didn’t need a CEO. There wouldn’t have been much for me to do.”
Sand 9’s backers include Cambridge-based General Catalyst Partners and California-based Khosla Ventures, and Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners, which led the company’s $8 million Series A round in July 2008. The company was spun off from the research of Mohanty, a Boston University associate professor of physics, with the help of Crowley, a former principal at BU’s Community Technology Fund. The company holds one U.S. patent, with 27 more applications pending.
Graziani said the company will need more capital to get through to profitability but “not a huge amount.”
“We’re fabless,” he said. “We already have our whole supply chain more or less picked out...We don’t need a big place to store inventory, and we don’t need any of our own processing. That’s all outsourced.”
MEMS technology is already widely used in accelerometers and gyroscopes — a technology pioneered by Norwood-based Analog Devices Inc. However, no MEMS device has been able to replace quartz in mobile devices, Crowley and Mohanty said.
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