SirenOpt raises $6.6m to develop materials measurement tech
US startup SirenOpt has closed a seed round that will enable it to refine its platform, which transforms materials manufacturing blind spots into real-time insights using cold atmospheric plasma.
SirenOpt was spun out of UC Berkeley's Chemical Engineering Department in 2022 with a vision to create a tech that evaluates material quality and improves industrial efficiency across battery, aerospace, semiconductor, electronics, and other advanced manufacturing industries.
Its solution addresses a problem surrounding the use of advanced coatings, thin films and nano-scale materials in manufacturing. These production processes involve depositing thin layers of material onto a substrate at up to 100 metres per minute. But most manufacturers rely on trial-and-error as they set-up, optimise and monitor factory lines. This can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of undesirable manufacturing costs for a single factory. SirenOpt tackles this by collecting electrical, thermal and electrochemical data to quantify manufacturing variability in real-time.
Jared O’Leary, Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, said in a press announcement: “As manufacturing processes become more complex, performance and yield depend more heavily on quality control, which today often relies on time-consuming, destructive and/or limited measurement technologies. Our platform creates a uniquely distinctive, multifaceted material fingerprint in real-time. This enables AI-based decision-making and multi-dimensional quality control to maximise manufacturing performance and yield. Empowering our customers to simultaneously evaluate material quality and improve industrial efficiency is a win-win and will enable a new wave of sustainable and smart manufacturing processes. We are grateful to our internationally-positioned investors for sharing our vision and helping enable us to address these important manufacturing challenges on a global scale.”
The seed funding round was led by Voyager Ventures and TOMORROW (part of Visionaries Club), with participation from Union Labs, Berkeley Skydeck Fund, Wireframe Ventures, Access Industries, Climate Club, and Climate Capital. Other existing investors include Impact Science Ventures and Courtyard Ventures.
