Adama Innovations Ltd, an early stage company focused on deploying nanotechnology to common manufacturing processes, has secured €750,000 in seed-funding. The investment will enable Adama to scale up production of their first product, a nano-scale probe fabricated from diamond, used in atomic force microscopy (AFM), which images, measures, and manipulates matter at the nanoscale.
Owing to their fabrication in solid diamond, Adama’s industry leading probes have advantages for many applications, uniquely combining the highest levels of performance and durability. The company says they will be instrumental in solving current and future challenges in high-tech manufacturing, allowing industry to understand better the surfaces of their materials at the nanoscale, to improve their products and prevent defects.
Adama Innovations was spun out from AMBER, the Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research Centre at Trinity College, in 2013 by co-founder Prof Graham Cross and is based in Dublin. The investment syndicate included Enterprise Ireland, NDRC VentureLab and Irrus Investments.
Dr. Brian O’Neill, Manager High Potential Start-Ups, Industrial & Lifesciences from Enterprise Ireland said,
“Adama Innovations has shown great progress since being established in 2013. We are delighted to fund a company at this early stage, with plans to exceed €2 million in revenue and create 10 high-tech manufacturing jobs in the next 3 years. Their offering is a remarkable one, as their diamond probes will provide a greater understanding of materials, both man made and biological. This has innovative uses such as giving insight into how antibiotics or other drugs interact with cells in the body.”
This is the second large scale investment the company has received in the past twelve months, having been selected last year to receive almost €400,000 in funding from the European Commission’s FP7 FaBiMed project, which aims to fund nanoscience research to develop advanced manufacturing techniques for medical devices. As part of FaBimed, Adama Innovations is examining how this micro-patterning could be used in moulds and coatings for the fabrication of medical devices, increasing their capability and reducing the cost of manufacture.
Declan Scanlan, Managing Director of Adama Innovations Ltd, said,
“This investment is great news for Adama Innovations. Our team brings together expertise in materials science, high-tech fabrication, and business growth in order to deliver the highest quality product. Almost anything that is solid can be analysed by an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), this includes cancer cells, viruses, plastic composites, metals, ceramics and biological surfaces. The AFM allows researchers, scientists and engineers to look at the surface of objects at the atomic level, which offers benefits to the medical devices and pharmaceutical industries, and cancer research, among others.
“The first benefit of our AFM probes is that they offer the maximum level of atomic resolution, uniquely combining this with a longer lasting, hard diamond tip which ultimately provides cost savings for industry. Other advantages are that they enable significantly faster scanning of samples and at a much higher accuracy and precision than what has been possible to date, and with highly conductive diamond, they allow electrical AFM scanning, which is a rapidly growing application.”
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