Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

New Plastic Logic CEO, Richard Archuleta

The company placed finding a world-class CEO as top priority when it raised £51.4m in January – and has named 25-year industry veteran, Richard Archuleta as that man.

Archuleta’s quarter-of-a-century experience in the technology industry at Hewlett-Packard, most recently included a role as senior vice-president.

He has led multiple businesses through significant business transformations, rapid growth and international expansion in the areas of mobile computing, servers and e-commerce.

He was also named ‘Mobile Industry Person of the Year’ in 1998 by Mobile Computing Magazine in recognition of his leadership in the notebook PC business. 

Chairman Tony Illsley said: “Plastic Logic is an incredibly ambitious company. With his high industry profile and impressive track record, Richard is a leader of a calibre that matches that ambition.”

Archuleta added: “The first application of the company’s core plastic electronics technology in revolutionary flexible displays has very exciting market potential. Plastic Logic has made amazing progress and has the backing of a first class investor base.”

Plastic Logic started 2007 with a bang raising $100m – one of the largest financings in the history of European venture capital – to commercialise what it describes as the first “take anywhere, read anywhere” electronic reader products. And that was only a first closing!

The funding is helping to pay for the company’s first factory – based in Dresden – to commercialise flexible e-paper displays. 

The facility will exploit the company’s unique technology to produce more than a million 10 inch  displays a year. The process removes the need for a fragile glass active-matrix backplane in the display and is scalable to larger sizes. 

The resulting display is thin, light and shatterproof and therefore much more like paper than any other display technology.  

Now Plastic Logic, whose R & D base is in Cambridge, intends to open an office in the San Francisco Bay Area within the next few weeks to drive e-paper products utilising the company’s display technology. 

The company plans to grow rapidly in all three of its global locations to attract world-class talent across its activities from process development to product design.

This enables radical new product concepts in a wide range of applications including flexible displays and sensors. Independent experts from IDTechEx forecast plastic electronics will be a $30bn industry by 2015, and could reach as much as $250bn by 2025.

Plastic Logic has a team of more than 90 employees in Cambridge and Dresden.