By Kristopher Benke
Raymond Weitekamp tells us the story behind how he founded his 3D printing company, polySpectra. He originally came to the Foundry uncertain if he could turn an idea he had in grad school into a full-fledged company. In the process of figuring that out, he started thinking like an entrepreneur with a “company-focused” rather than a “research-focused” mindset. Now, polySpectra makes strong, durable photopolymers that clients can use with 3D printers they already have in their facilities.
Tell me more about your company and what originally sparked the idea to found it.
The non-technical version of what polySpectra does is that we make really strong materials for resin 3D printing. The technical version is that we were the first company that commercialized a photopolymer resin based on olefin metathesis.
Back when I was at Caltech for grad school, I invented a light-activated version of the Grubbs catalyst–the ruthenium catalyst my advisor won the Nobel Prize for in 2005–and this became our key innovation at polySpectra.
When we started thinking about the business, we decided, hey, 3D printing is this exciting opportunity. It’s this fast growing market. It’s both young enough that it hasn’t consolidated but old enough that the very, very first people to do it are all off-patent, and now there’s this new generation of 3D printing companies that are diversifying the market.
So you knew you wanted to turn this idea into a company. What did you need to do to make that happen?
The key thing that I wanted to solve before we decided to get investor money and be a venture-backed startup was how to use our chemistry to 3D print a part. And even if it was ugly, slow, or really expensive, then at least we had eliminated the true scientific risk of “can you activate this chemistry with this light source or this kind of hardware?” That was really the question we came to the Foundry to answer. And the answer was yes, so we decided to make the company out of it. At Berkeley Lab and in part at the Foundry, we took it from 2D lithography to 3D.
What did you need to know to 3D print using your new photopolymer?
One really simple way of explaining it is that in semiconductor lithography, the light sources are really bright, and you’re exposing very thin films to a lot of light, and typically very broadband light. So, you have really high energy going into a really thin area, and you can do a lot of different chemistry with that much energy.
With 3D printers, and especially more affordable 3D printers that are open and you can put different materials into, the light sources are really weak, and they tend to be much lower energy wavelengths. That’s because people are adapting technologies that were developed for TV and movie projectors.
Basically, we had invented this photocatalyst, and just because it worked at super high energy UV light in a clean room didn’t mean it was going to work for a blue-ray LED 3D printer that cost a few thousand dollars. That was one of the fundamental risks or questions we had: can this photocatalyst be activated with this amount of energy? That was important because we didn’t want to try to invent a new printer just to make the chemistry work.
What was it about the Foundry that helped you answer these questions?
The special thing about the Foundry is having the ability to hop between disciplines. My degree is in chemistry, but I was co-advised by Harry Atwater in applied physics. On top of that, we invented something that involves both inorganic and organometallic chemistry, but also polymer chemistry. However, our customers would be more in applied physics for photolithography, and some of the markets we were looking at were more like biology, like for microfluidics.
One day, you’re going into the Foundry’s clean room to use some light source down there. The next day, you’re doing polymer synthesis on the sixth floor. The day after that, you’re trying to do high-throughput Raman spectroscopy on the fourth floor. When the Foundry was founded, the original focus was on nanoscience but with the recognition that nanoscience itself didn’t fit into any one department.
That’s why there are resources for computational biology and organic and inorganic chemistry on all these different floors, but in the same building. The tools and capabilities and interdisciplinary approach of having all that under one roof was a really amazing resource to have, and I don’t know how we would have done it without that.
Maybe we would need a DSC to make some materials measurement once, right? There’s one on the sixth floor. And if you are just a startup trying to do it all, you’d be paying third party test companies to try to do a measurement, but most of them are really horrible and don’t understand what they’re actually doing or send you good data. Or you’re buying 10 million dollars of equipment only to realize you only needed like one million of it.
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How did having access to all these tools and equipment shape the early growth of your company?
The resources at the Foundry were pretty critical to us doing the early technical de-risking of taking what was my PhD thesis and turning it into the company polySpectra. The whole point of the Cyclotron Road fellowship that I had is that for two years, it’s this midway point between lab and full-on company mode.
You have this idea, and it can have this impact on the world, but how do you choose which things to de-risk first? Some of those things might be market risk, scientific risk, or more of an engineering risk.
The really key thing that I was interested in working on at the Foundry was eliminating what I would call the true scientific risk for the business. So maybe it’s a little bit philosophical, but people talk about engineering risk at a company, and then what I would call engineering risk is like, you might be wrong about the timeline or the budget, but you know you can build the thing. Say you’re going to build a tunnel or a bridge. You might be wrong by like a billion dollars or five years, but you know people know how to build tunnels or bridges.
There are similar things in hardware or software. You might have thought it would take this many people hours, and it ended up taking you longer, but there was no question about whether the thing was possible or not.
So you’re saying by figuring out the scientific risk at the Foundry, you’re just leaving yourself the engineering risk?
Yes, what I mean by scientific risk instead is that for true scientific risk, there is no amount of money that you can throw at the problem that would give you the answer you want. A popular example where people didn’t fully appreciate that is Theranos. It didn’t matter that they had a billion dollars, they couldn’t solve the scientific risk that they kept getting out over their skis on.
What was very important to me was that I didn’t want to take any outside investment into the company until I felt like we had removed the fundamental scientific risk. What that was for us was, could we get this chemistry to work on a 3D printer?
How did working with the staff at the Foundry influence the success of your project?
What was cool was that because it’s so interdisciplinary, we were surrounded by people with all types of expertise. I also really appreciated the aspect of the Foundry of having everything under one roof, especially since we were transitioning from being research-focused to being company-focused. You really have to be able to explore a lot of different things, and it was a really great community for my team to learn from, too.
It was one of those things where peripheral learning, tangential learning, expertise, and the support of being embedded within the Foundry were pretty key for the folks who ended up working for me. Because I was just coming out of grad school, I was still learning how to manage people and all that kind of stuff.
The counter-factual version is the classic three-person startup in a garage somewhere. And we could have done that, and we would have had just those three or four people interacting with each other all day. But the ability to go to group meetings, seminars, and then all that stuff was also pretty important for educating the team.
What is the lasting impact that your experience at the Foundry had on you and your company?
I started acting like an entrepreneur at a startup when I moved up for the Cyclotron Road Fellowship. My job at Berkeley lab was essentially to go start a company later. During the two years that I was in the fellowship, we were hiring the very first people and thinking about different markets. Then I was learning how to be a manager, learning how to start thinking about business and different markets.
Basically, at the end of two years, we managed to raise a little bit of money and spin out the first few people to be officially incorporated. Around January 2017 was when we flipped over into officially being polySpectra, and since then we raised about 14 million dollars, had probably 15 or so people, and launched a handful of different products to put them out there into the market.
