Created in 2002 by Sallin, then a strategy consultant at Bain & Company, after his studies of physics at the the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale at Lausanne, NanoDimension will now invest in nanotech-enabled companies at various development stages.
Sallin aims to focus particularly on early-stage companies, supporting them with not only financial resources but as well with the expertise embedded in the network he built over the five years it took him to establish NanoDimension.
When the internet bubble burst it left venture capital companies raising only a tenth of the funds they managed during the 1990s, so this funding on NanoDimension’s is quite an achievement for a young European entrepreneur with no track record. Venture capital investments in nanotech companies reached $497 million in 2005 and rose to an estimated $650 million last year – but most are US based.
Enter the nanotech specialists
New VC firms focusing solely on nanotech are still uncommon. Most of the investments committed so far have been by general VC firms such as Harris & Harris (13 deals in 2005–2006), Draper Fisher Jurvetson (12) or Kleiner Perkins (5). But recently nanotech specialists have emerged: Lux Capital in the US, Nanostart AG in Germany and Nanoscience Inc in the UK – and the two European funds are publicly listed.
NanoDimension is the first specialised nanotech VC that has been able to lock its investors in a classical limited partnership for 10 years. Also its €45 million fundraising is one of the largest of its kind yet, signalling rising interest from investors.
Sallin is no stranger to that growing awareness of nanotech – in 2003 he launched the Nanotech for Investors conference in the Swiss city of Zurich (and now part of Nanotech 2007 in Santa Clara, California) and has been a regular speaker at high tech conferences in Europe, North America and Asia.
Sallin has gathered around him experienced team members with a solid track record. NanoDimension’s managing director Daniel Richner is former manager of the immunology fund of bank Lombard Odier, which had an annualised performance of more than 40% during his tenure there between 1995 and 2001. Others, such as Luc Bauer (Telmos, nChip, Svision, Intersil and IDT), Tapesh Yadav (CEO of NanoProducts) and Bryan Wood, the founder of Alta Berkeley, are also seasoned serial entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
NanoDimension made its first investment last year, in the French start-up company Crocus Technology SA. A spin-off from the French Atomic Energy Commission in Grenoble, Crocus is developing non-volatile magnetic memory based on spintronics. Crocus is currently implementing its technology at semiconductor foundries in California and is expecting industrial prototypes within a year.
For Sallin, “using quantum effects such as spin is one of the big advantage researchers discover at the nanoscale”. In that sense, Crocus is typical of the investments NanoDimension intends to make. “We will be targeting investments in about 15 companies in North America and Europe,” he says. And he is confident that he will be able to find them.
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