Delft-based VSParticle (VSP), a company that supplies nanoparticle printing tools, announced on Tuesday that it has secured €14.5M in funding to accelerate material development and unlock innovation at scale.
According to the Dutch company, the funds will be utilised to expand its operations and commercial teams, and scale up the manufacturing of VSP’s products and services.
Aaike van der Vugt, co-founder and CEO of VSParticle, says, “Scientists spend decades of their life on discovering new materials, which means that it takes generations to unlock the innovation we need as a society.”
“We’ve only been able to unlock about 1 per cent to enable technological innovation so far, but with our technology, we will unlock the other 99 per cent in the next two decades. From the climate crisis to preventative healthcare, the implications of accelerating materials development are huge,” adds Vugt.
VSParticle: Everything you need to know
Founded in 2014 by Aaike van der Vugt, Prof Andreas Schmidt-Ott, Tobias Pfeiffer, and Tobias Coppejans, VSParticle helps scientists to speed up material development in order to identify the materials that will support future sustainable technologies.
With the help of its technology, materials can be reduced to nanoscale size and manufactured “at the push of a button”. This enables university researchers and corporate R&D teams to explore and develop novel materials that serve as the foundation for ground-breaking technologies.
By reorganising global material development efforts, VSP says it will be able to unlock a century of innovation in the next 10 years and address pressing global concerns such as climate change, energy transition, and healthcare innovation.
The company’s technology is used by university researchers, commercial R&D teams, and soon, industrial production facilities in Europe, China, India, and the US to produce next-generation gas sensors and Catalyst Coated Membranes (CCMs) for green hydrogen.
Investors supporting VSP
The round was led by Plural, an investment platform set up for the unemployables. Plural’s aim is to use technology to boost European GDP growth. It also collaborates with bold founders from everywhere who are addressing the global opportunity gap or systemic dangers.
The round also saw participation from BlueYard Capital and a €3.5M grant from NXTGEN HIGHTECH, bringing the total raised by VSP to €17M.
Sten Tamkivi, who led the investment round at Plural Platform, says, “To solve some of the biggest global challenges, such as decarbonising society in the next generation, manipulating physical matter smartly is required.”
“We need to be able to break molecules down to the nano-level and experiment with them to find new optimised material structures. VSParticle is the only company I’ve come across that can enable experimentation and discovery with software-defined materials at scale,” adds Tamkivi.
Material innovation for a century
VSP says, the capacity to create new materials has had a significant influence on society, but it can now take up to 10 years to do so in a lab setting and another five years to test and scale a new discovery to mass production. This is inhibiting innovation globally.
The company’s technology cuts the total period of material discovery from 15 years to only one by speeding up each stage of material creation. VSP contributed to cutting the manufacturing and discovery cycle from months to only an hour in a peer-reviewed research paper.
This is because it is the only technology capable of being immediately transferred and scaled through all three stages of the material innovation cycle, from experimentation in the lab through manufacturing process optimisation to scaling up for mass production.
For example, VSP’s tech is at the forefront of assisting in the decarbonisation of society through the mass manufacture of CCMs.
These membranes are a key component in electrolysers, a technology required for the production of green hydrogen, which is used to decarbonise industries such as shipping, generate renewable electricity for transportation and heating, and enable the conversion of CO2 into valuable chemicals such as Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF).
Europe alone plans to create 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030, resulting in a large need for highly efficient catalysts.
Currently, the process is dependent on the use of rare and costly metals like platinum and iridium.
However, with an anticipated 10x savings in precious metals, VSP’s technology will assist teams in creating novel material combinations to make it more inexpensive to scale the manufacture of CCMs and deliver new products faster and cheaper than before.
The company has already established connections with companies in the CCM and precious metal sectors, such as Germany-based Heraeus Precious Metals, to launch its first production tools.
Additionally, VSP’s technology will also accelerate and simplify the production of new gas sensors, which are used to detect particular molecules.
It will be feasible to create sensors that, for example, can detect air pollutants in buildings and the environment or even identify early indicators of sickness from human breath to enhance healthcare results.
VSP is already developing sensors for the chemical, food, and agricultural industries as well as for daily gadgets in collaboration with business partners and top research institutions like MCL.
These two industrial markets are only two of the many that VSP will concentrate on in the upcoming years.
To help the University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium’s attempts to create an automated lab for CCM manufacturing, VSP’s technology can also be paired with robots and advanced data processing to allow automated labs.
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