Nanogram, Solar Dabbler, Sold to Japan's Teijin for $23M

Nanogram, Solar Dabbler, Sold to Japan’s Teijin for $23M

$60 million venture capital in, $23 million out. You do the math.

Eric Wesoff August 10, 2010

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Nanogram, a VC-funded firm that dabbled in photovoltaics, was sold to a Japanese maker of chemicals and pharmaceuticals last week for somewhere in the $23 million range.

Nanogram was an odd company. The company was sort of an IP holding firm which spun out Nanogram Devices, a nano materials firm focused on batteries for medical devices that was in turn sold to Wilson Greatbatch Technologies for $45 million back in 2004. That kind of thing just encourages VCs.

Nanogram also spun out NeoPhotonics, a firm which has its own history: Neophotonics was sort of a vacuum cleaner roll-up for less-than-successful optical component companies back in the great optical networking scare and its ensuing bubble of the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century (that included a company called Lightwave Microsystems for you optical old-timers). In 2006, NeoPhotonics acquired optical firms BeamExpress, LightConnect, Optun, and Paxera, as well. NeoPhotonics threatened to go public earlier this year (see article in Light Reading).

Anyway, Nanogram's solar technologies were based on LRD, Laser Reactive Deposition. We reported on Nanogram back in 2008.

Nanogram's VC investors included (take a deep breath): Bay Partners, Mitsui Ventures, Global Cleantech Capital, Harris and Harris, IVP, Nth Power, Technology Partners, TEL, Yasuda Enterprise Development, ATA Ventures, Masdar, Rockport Capital, SBV Venture Partners and more.

About $60 million in VC went into the firm and about $23 million is coming out through the acquisition by Japan's Teijin, according to Asahi Shimbun.

In 2009, Teijin formed an agreement with NanoGram to work on silicon nanoparticles and inks. Teijin has sintered silicon nanoparticle film on a polycarbonate resin for use in IC, TFT and solar applications.

Teijin wants to use the ink to make thin-film transistors for use in solar cells and LCDs.