Advanced materials company UbiQD has raised $20 million in Series B funding to scale its quantum dot technology across agriculture and solar industries. This could, in turn, help to make both industries more efficient and bring costs down.
Phoenix Venture Partners led the round with participation from Builders VC, Builders Vision, New Mexico Vintage Fund, and several other investors.
Quantum dots are nanoparticles that transport electrons. When exposed to UV light, these particles emit lights of various colors depending on their size. Smaller particles give out cooler wavelengths (e.g., blue light) while larger ones emit warmer lengths (such as red lights).
“In the simplest terms, it’s a platform for optimizing light,” Hunter McDaniel, founder and CEO of UbiQD, tells AgFunderNews. “With quantum dots, you can make any color continuously by changing the size of the particles.”
Quantum dots have historically been used in a variety of applications, from TVs to cancer cell detection. UbiQD, which McDaniel started in 2014, is probably best known for bringing them to the greenhouse setting.
One of the company’s initial products was UbiGro, a film embedded with quantum dots that hangs inside a greenhouse, below the structure’s existing roof.
In this context, quantum dots illuminated by sunlight can turn shorter wavelengths into longer ones to boost photosynthesis and plant growth.
Hunter says UbiGro has been a very popular product, and the company sells it all over the world now.
UbiQD is also embedding its quantum dot tech into greenhouse roofing material. Every three to four years, greenhouse growers have to replace the polyethylene films because those polymers degrade in the sun over time.
“We’re just dropping into the sales cycle, basically with a product that’s almost the same—it’s polyethylene film, but it just has our material in it,” he notes.
A safer, stabler alternative
Quantum dots have historically been made from materials like cadmium selenide—a toxic, highly regulated compound that’s banned in numerous products.
“It’s a carcinogen that bioaccumulates in the body,” says McDaniel, who adds that its potential to end up in waste streams (from landfills, for example) and contaminate other parts of the supply chain make it “a non-starter.”
UbiQD has developed an alternative to cadmium selenide. “We basically replace cadmium with copper and indium, and then everything else more or less is the same as the legacy materials [in QDs]. There’s a core shell structure [that protections the QD], and that outer shell is zinc sulfide.”
“One of the biggest things you end up with is better stability,” he notes of the alternative material. “We got lucky with this compound that it ended up being more stable than the legacy material, so it can survive longer, like in the sun.”
It’s cheaper, too, in terms of manufacturing costs, which is a major selling point for agricultural applications.
“Farmers don’t have a lot of budget to work with. We have to drop right into their existing budget and not really add much cost to what they’re already paying for their greenhouse roof materials. Cadmium based compounds are more expensive.”
‘Economies of scale’ through solar applications
These days, though, UbiQD is emphasizing its entire platform, rather than a single use case for quantum dots. This was a key narrative for raising the Series B round, says McDaniel.
A major component of that now includes developing downconversion products for the solar industry to improve solar cell efficiency.
In 2023, the company expanded its partnership with leading solar panel manufacturer First Solar to incorporate its tech into advanced solar modules. Earlier this year, UbiQD also acquired Blue Dot Systems, which enhances solar module performance.
“In solar, we’re shifting the spectrum of light using fluorescence. But instead of trying to help out a plant, we’re helping out a solar panel,” says McDaniel. “Therein lies the value of the platform: We can just tune that to optimize [for a specific use case].”
The “economies of scale” to be gained from its work in solar have benefits for UbiQD’s greenhouse applications, too, including the ability to bring overall costs down.
“One of the reasons the UbiGro product sold out so quickly is because we just passed on all the cost savings directly to the grower,” he says. “It’s a sixth the cost for us to manufacture, and we’re selling it at a sixth the cost of what the Gen 1 product was. Those cost savings drove a surprisingly huge wave of demand that we’re still struggling to keep up with.”
The Series B funding will largely go towards scaling up manufacturing. UbiQD currently has a pilot-scale manufacturing facility in use. It has plans to build a much bigger one in the future, though McDaniel notes that a site for that has yet to be selected.
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