Business Weekly

HOME

Liquavista glides to production on back of €8m funding round

Written by Lautaro Vargas

Monday, 17 March 2008

Cambridge fabless display manufacturer, Liquavista, says it has everything in place to introduce its first commercial products this year following completion of an €8 million (£6.3m) Series B fund raising round. “Responding to the strong demand of our lead customers, Liquavista is on track to achieve volume production of displays in 2008,” said Mark Gostick, Liquavista’s CEO. The funding round, comprising equity and debt, was led by existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, GIMV and New Venture Partners (NVP) and coincides with the recruitment of former Plastic Logic employee – another Amadeus backed company – Simon Jones as vice president marketing and sales. Liquavista’s electrowetting displays provide world-leading brightness at low power and offer the potential for clear viewing in all lighting conditions, from a dimly lit office environment to bright sunlight. Applications range from watches, mobile phones and digital cameras to notebook computers. “Thanks to the continued support of our investors, we now have everything we need to achieve the first commercial introduction of ColorMatch-based products this year and to maintain our rapid progress in the development of active-matrix displays,” added Gostick. Amadeus director and Liquavista board member, Hermann Hauser, believes the technology has the potential to completely transform the displays industry. “There really is no limit to its potential,” said Hauser. “Liquavista’s electrowetting technology provides a light shutter that is fundamentally more efficient than LCD and ultimately simpler and less costly to make.” Liquavista BV is headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and has a third office in Hong Kong. It spun out of Philips Research two years ago following a partnership deal between Philips and NVP to identify and create spin-off businesses based on technology from Philips Research’s global network of laboratories. Rob Rosenberg, Liquavista board member and Partner at NVP, said: “The technology is tailor-made for mobile multimedia devices, where users really care about long battery life and daylight viewability.” The ColorMatch FreeStyle platform combines more than twice the brightness of LCD displays with a range of colour combinations. This has the advantage of giving designers the ability to translate their product vision without compromise. Jones has more than 20 years of new technology commercialisation experience, 10 years of which have been in senior management positions. He started his career in semiconductor applications and marketing at Texas Instruments and later moved on to develop business lines in product design services and IP licensing at Symbionics and subsequently Cadence Design Systems. Before joining Liquavista, he was VP business development at Plastic Logic where he was instrumental in winning the company’s first customer contracts and raising $100m to manufacture flexible active-matrix displays using printed electronics. “We are ramping-up our marketing and sales capability significantly to ensure that users of Liquavista’s displays will be effectively served and supported when bringing products based on our displays to market,” said Gostick. “I am delighted that Simon will be leading this process, his in-depth experience of consumer electronics and emerging display technologies is an ideal fit for Liquavista and for our customers.” Set as favorite Bookmark Email This Hits: 615 Trackback(0) TrackBack URI for this entry Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.

 

< Prev		Next >

Have you visited Business Weekly's financial bookshop ?