Once a licensing play based on a broad array of potential applications of breakthrough polymer semiconductor materials, Plastic Logic Ltd. is moving full-speed ahead on manufacturing and marketing its own digital reader consumer electronics products.
The U.K.- and Silicon Valley-based company turned to existing investors Oak Investment Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners as lead investors in a new $50 million investment
round that follows a January 2007
round of $100 million that kicked off its internal product strategy, and brings total investment to more than $200 million.
Hermann Hauser, a founding partner of Amadeus, says the long-term strategy on additional applications remains up in the air because the company is focusing on becoming dominant in the e-book field by exploiting what it believes is entirely new technology for flexible paper-like electronic displays. "This is the most fundamental development in semiconductors in 50 years," he says. "It's the first time a polymer material has been put in production for semiconductors, and the focus right now is the introduction of what we consider the most attractive e-reader, and to transform reading from the last medium that we still consume in analog form."
Plastic Logic was founded in December 2000 based on patents developed at the University of Cambridge for printing active-matrix electronic display panels on thin, flexible plastic substrates. The company's proprietary technology is a combination of protected materials and processes that use existing semiconductor equipment for manufacturing scalable displays in high volume and at potentially large area sizes.
The company is currently completing construction of a own manufacturing plant featuring its proprietary process technology in Dresden, Germany to churn out its reading devices, but future applications of is materials could include other types of panel displays, as well as all manner of applications including flexible logic circuits for bar codes and radio frequency identification.
While Oak and Amadeus are the only named investors in the current round, thedeal includes other previous investors, among them, BASF Venture Capital of Germany; Intel Capital of Santa Clara, Calif.; Morningside Technology Ventures of Hong Kong; Quest for Growth NV of Belgium; Amadeus Capital Partners Ltd. of the U.K.; Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp.; Dow Chemical Co. of Midland Mich.; Nanotech Partners Ltd. of Japan; PolyTechnos Venture-Partners GmbH of Germany; Siemens AG of Germany; and Yasuda Enterprise Development Co. of Japan.
-- Clifford CarlsenSee 2007 post from Tech ConfidentialSee Aug. 4 press release from Plastic Logic Ltd. See Plastic Logic's demo on YouTube
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