Interview with MIMSI Materials

To introduce another company within our portfolio, here is a short interview with MIMSI Materials!

MIMSI Materials AB (MIMSI) is a deeptech startup which has developed a new class of transparent thin film materials with novel properties that exceed the limits of modern physics.

When and where was MIMSI founded??

MIMSI was founded by Sankara Pillay and Kostas Sarakinos in December, 2013 as a holding company for IP — to support a university project funded by Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Electric — when they both worked at Link?ping University in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM). After the Sumitomo project ended in early 2017, the company’s journey into the architectural glass market began. Kostas, in his role as a professor in Nanoscale Engineering, contributed a deep scientific understanding to the venture, while Sankara was driven by the vision to bring a deeptech innovation from the lab to the real world where it could benefit society. After 5 years of hard work, we’ll soon launch our first product ever — a material called Alumenate?.?

What difference will your innovation make and what motivates you to work on it??Many of the technologies we take for granted today are enabled by transparent thin films, e.g., energy-saving windows, touchscreens, and highly efficient solar cells, to name a few. However, existing solutions cannot meet climate change goals due to insufficient energy performance or reliance on rare earth materials, which are environmentally taxing and expensive to source. Our breakthrough innovation is a new class of high-performance transparent materials based on precision silver alloys, which address the limitations of current solutions. Our first product Alumenate??is a material specifically nano-engineered for energy-saving window coatings, where it enables improved daylight performance without trade-offs to the energy/environmental performance. What inspired us to create our first product, and motivates us to create new materials for other high-end applications is the tremendous contribution our solutions can have towards a sustainable energy future.?

What exactly is deeptech and what is special about the journey of deeptech companies?

Deeptech describes innovations based on advancements founded in core research into biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, i.e., it’s about leveraging science to create fundamentally new technology platforms. “Shallow” tech combines existing technologies in new ways or applies them to new markets; however, these innovations are often based on past deeptech innovations (e.g., semiconductors enabling modern computers, which allow companies to design a myriad of software applications for all imaginable markets).??

The time to market for deeptech companies is usually considerably longer and is not so much characterized by whether the market wants the innovation, but much rather by whether the fundamentally new technology will work as expected when it is scaled to an industrial level. To further elaborate, the challenge encountered by most tech companies is market risk, i.e., will the innovation be adopted on a commercial basis. In contrast, the challenge for deeptech isn’t about finding the right market but reaching technological viability. If the deeptech innovation works, it’s highly likely that there will be a multitude of lucrative market use cases (some known and others to discover).?

Who is part of MIMSI??

Today, we are an international team of 5 nanotechnology experts and sustainability-minded business professionals and plan to accelerate the growth of the team in the near future.

Kostas Sarakinos (Chief Scientific Officer and founder): Today he is a professor at the University of Helsinki and the bridge to the academic world.

Sankara Pillay (CEO and founder): He has a background in engineering, economics and material science, has spent many years working with financial derivatives and is now the driving force to bring MIMSI’s nanomaterial innovation to the market.

Viktor Elofsson (CTO and co-founder): He has spent years researching the foundations of MIMSI’s innovation and today unites the understanding of the scientific world as well as the technology in industrial practice.

Tabea Schroth (CMO): She has a background in business and sustainability and works with communicating MIMSI’s complex innovation to different audiences.?

Rickard Gunnarsson (R&D Engineer): He has a PhD in materials science and runs MIMSI’s lab.

What’s the next goal for MIMSI Materials?

Our immediate goal is to bring Alumenate?,?to market, enabling a step change in the architectural glass industry. Our next pursuit will be to create a new transparent material to facilitate the re-establishment of Europe as a global leader in the manufacture of next-gen photovoltaic (PV) modules; the defining benefit of deploying our key enabling technology is the dramatic reduction of critical rare earth and precious materials used in the PV device.

Are you interested to know more? Please, enter MIMSI Material's website at https://mimsimaterials.com/