June - 2009 issue > VC Chakra

By si Team

Subodh Toprani led ZettaCore, a developer of molecular materials and technology for current and next-generation semiconductor products, has raised $21 million in a series C financing. During the funding, new investors Globis Capital Partners, Itochu Technology Ventures, Yasuda Enterprise Development, Epic Ventures, and Panasonic Ventures joined all previous investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radius Ventures, Oxford Biosciences, Access Ventures, Garrett Capital, and Stanford University.

Founded in 2001, the company is soldiering on with a technique for using nanotechnology to create memory chips with ultra-tiny storage cells that can be packed densely. "ZettaCore's molecular technology has the potential for broad use in the electronics industry. The technology is able to further scale system level interconnect, enable high energy or power density storage in electronics and to advance Moore's law in semiconductor memory," said Satoshi Kabasawa, Councilor in the Technology Strategy Group of the Corporate R&D Strategy Office of Panasonic Corporation.

If the Englewood-based company succeeds in shrinking storage down to a microscopic scale, then society as a whole could look forward to all sorts of advances in portable electronics, which could store far more data than they can today. The company is working with molecule-size materials — multi porphyrin nanostructures, where each molecule can serve as a capacitor, which stores an electrical charge. While conventional memory chips become more flaky the more you shrink them, these structures remain stable even though they’re just a few nanometers, or 100,000 times smaller than a human hair, in length. With its 31 employees, ZettaCore believes it can make memory chips with the technology.

Subodh Toprani, CEO, ZettaCore said, "With the new funds we will be expanding internationally, creating new product offerings and ramping commercial production of our technology."

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