NextLeap Ventures – Exciting news about our first exit!

We are excited about the acquisition of one of our portfolio companies - Nanofabrica.

Nanofabrica, which delivers high volume 3D printing at 1 micron resolution, was purchased by Nano Dimension Ltd. (Nasdaq: NNDM), an industry leading provider of intelligent machines for the fabrication of Additively Manufactured Electronics. Following our initial investment 18 months ago, we co-led the Series A round with M12 (Microsoft’s investment arm). The deal not only provides an outstanding return for investors, but also provides a great future for the Nanofabrica team as the resources of Nano Dimension will allow them to fully realize their vision and scale the company. Nano Dimension’s press release is here.

This deal is a strong validation for NextLeap Venture’s investment thesis and rigorous selection process in which we select fewer than 1% of the companies we examine for investment. NextLeap Ventures leverages the network of current and former Intel employees, the largest private employer in Israel, to identify and screen our investments. Like many of our investments, we learned about Nanofabrica through the Intel network and further utilized the network in our due diligence process.

 Here are some of the reasons why we found Nanofabrica so compelling:

·      Team: Co-founders Jon Donner (CEO) and Eyal Shelef (CTO) have excellent domain expertise and are strong leaders and team players that have attracted an outstanding team.

·      Deep technology/Digital disruption: Nanofabrica provides the ability to print at the unheard-of precision of 1 micron and the ability to provide near real time parts that were previously either impossible to manufacture or took months to produce. They have strong IP protection which we used our team’s expertise to validate.

·      Customer need: Nanofabrica has found strong demand in the injection molding space in particular and has many additional use cases in additive manufacturing. We were already seeing significant customer interest at the time of our initial investment.

·      Business potential: Their segment of the 3D printing market is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

The image below is a high strength-to-weight ratio lattice, used for shock absorption. Nanofabrica delivered the part at a print layer of 2 microns.

Post-investment, the NextLeap Ventures partners applied our collective 200+ years of senior-level operating experience to provide hands-on guidance to the Nanofabrica leadership team as part of our “Virtual Accelerator” model. As Jon Donner CEO says, "NextLeap Ventures helped us tremendously. With their vast experience in leading deep tech, they provided us invaluable input on R&D, managing teams, and expertise in building a deep tech company. They used their extensive network many times to connect us to other top tier investors as well as intros to customers. We are very grateful to have had the chance to work with NextLeap Ventures."

Congratulations to the Nanofabrica team! We are confident of your continued success. 

You can find the latest information on NextLeap Ventures at: https://nextleapventures.com/  

or contact us at:  [email protected]

Best,

NextLeap Ventures Team

Yoav, Ronny, Ido, Yosi, Dan, Rami, Richard, Oded