Optical inspection tool manufacturer Nanotronics Imaging LLC of Cuyahoga Falls, OH, USA has completed a $7m Series B financing round from San Francisco-based technology investment firm Founders Fund (which has previously backed companies including Palantir, SpaceX, Facebook, ZocDoc and The Climate Corporation).
Nanotronics Imaging was founded in 2010 by CEO Matthew Putman Ph.D., former professor of materials science and engineering at Columbia University, and John Putman, former CEO of automated instrumentation firm Tech Pro, which was sold to Roper Industries in 2008.
“Our company’s customer base is rapidly growing, and this investment will ensure that we will be able to continue to provide and scale best-in-class products and services to the semiconductor industry, as well as to expand our offerings into new domains such as biomedical diagnostics,” says Nanotronics Imaging founder & CEO Matthew Putman, who describes Founders Fund as a “highly regarded and successful venture firm that shares our vision for transformative technology”.
Nanotronics Imaging combines optical microscopy with patented image processing and machine intelligence algorithms to produce inspection tools used in a wide variety of manufacturing environments. The firm’s technology allows the imaging of a very large area of a specimen with nanoscale resolution. Its nSpec tool couples a computer-controlled microscope and stage with fast image processing techniques to enable high-throughput defect classification and localization for semiconductor substrate and IC chip fabricators.
“Nanotronics' fundamental advances in optics will dramatically enhance the production lines of many of the most critical industries of the future… as more industrial processes take advantage of nanoscale structures,” says Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel, who will be joining the Nanotronics’ board of directors.
