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1. Founders Fund Backs Nanotronics Imaging
Nanotronics Imaging, a leading developer of optical inspection tools for the semiconductor
industry, announces it has completed a $7M Series B financing round from Founders Fund, a San
Francisco-based technology investment firm that has backed companies including Palantir,
SpaceX, Facebook, ZocDoc and The Climate Corporation.
“We at Nanotronics are thrilled to be partnering with this highly regarded and successful venture
firm that shares our vision for transformative technology,” says Nanotronics Imaging Founder
and CEO Matthew Putman. “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.”
Nanotronics Imaging combines state-of-the-art optical microscopy with patented image
processing and machine intelligence algorithms to produce inspection tools used in a wide variety
of manufacturing environments. Nanotronics technology allows for the imaging of a very large
area of a specimen with nanoscale resolution. Their 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.
Founders Fund Partner Peter Thiel, who will be joining the Nanotronics Board of Directors, says
"Four centuries ago, Galileo’s mastery of optics revolutionized our understanding of the universe.
Today, Nanotronics has brought us to the cusp of a new revolution on the other end of the scale,
as more industrial processes take advantage of nanoscale structures. Nanotronics’ fundamental
advances in optics will dramatically enhance the production lines of many of the most critical
industries of the future."
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 the
automated instrumentation company Tech Pro, which was sold to Roper Industries in 2008.