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When Jill Becker received a notice last month that the company she founded, Cambridge NanoTech Inc., had not been awarded a government contract that was backed by stimulus funds, she was disappointed. When she saw that Sandia National Laboratories had awarded the contract to a company that is headquartered in Finland, she was stunned.
Cambridge NanoTech makes equipment for performing atomic layer deposition (ALD) – a method of very finely, at a nanoscale level, coating surfaces with a material. Sandia had sent out a request for quotations for ALD equipment, in a proposal titled “ARRA Funded: Atomic Layer Deposition System (ALD).” The equipment purchase for the New Mexico-based lab was being financed by funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The letter Sandia sent on April 9 informed Cambridge NanoTech that the award had gone to Picosun USA LLC, the Michigan-based North American headquarters of Finland’s Picosun Oy. According to the website Recovery.org, the contract was valued at $364,290 and was just a part of an overall $3.6 million equipment upgrade program Sandia is undergoing using ARRA funds.
Becker, CEO of Cambridge NanoTech, said the money isn’t the issue here.
“This isn’t about losing a sale,” she said. “The point is that Sandia had a bid out there that was ARRA-funded and it went to a Finnish company. I reached out to Sandia National Labs and I asked them, seeing how they are a U.S. entity, how they could let this happen. They assured me that they followed to the letter of the law. They may have followed the letter of the law, but they didn’t follow the spirit of the law, and I think that’s unethical if not immoral, especially because several American ALD vendors could have fulfilled the need for the request.”
Cambridge NanoTech was founded in 2003, shortly after Becker received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University. Her doctoral thesis was on atomic layer deposition and she knew that was what she wanted to base a company on. In 2009, Becker was named a Mass High Tech Women to Watch honoree.
Since getting the notice from Sandia, Becker has followed up with the federal research lab by contacting the contracting representative and has begun what she describes as a lengthy bureaucratic process to contest the award. Her company, which has been profitable since it was launched and now employs approximately 30 people, will continue to grow, she said.
“Losing this deal doesn’t kill the company,” Becker said. “We increased revenue last year by 50 percent in a very tough time, because we diversified revenue across a number of product lines. In the last eight weeks, we hired nine people.”
The next step for Becker is to get other parts of the federal government to look into the award of the contract to an American operation of a foreign company. To that end, Cambridge NanoTech officials have drafted a letter to U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano. In it, they state: “Because the RFQ was funded by ARRA and contained a Buy American provision we feel that awarding this RFQ to a foreign competitor is an egregious misuse of American taxpayer funds and ARRA stimulus funds. Picosun has a sales office in Detroit, Mi. However, their systems are manufactured in Finland using Finnish labor and materials.”
Sandia already owns some equipment manufactured by Cambridge NanoTech, Becker said, which she pointed out makes all of their devices here in Cambridge using American workers. Becker said the more people that are aware of the issue, the faster it might get resolved.
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