Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Launch Pad – Squink”.
All right guys, uh, my name is nicholas van snake and i’m the ceo and co-founder of bot factory coming all the way from new york city where believe it or not, it’s warmer. So we i’m here to present squink our desktop electronic circuit factory. I’M sure you all know, but electronic circuits are everywhere they’re in your car radio, they’re in your phone they’re in my fitbit, but there’s still something that’s slowing down innovation when it comes to when it comes down to electronic circuits, they’re long, hard and expensive to make And the reason for that is because the manufacturers are, you know, equipped towards making large volumes and when it comes to prototyping they’re, not very equip they’re ill-equipped to do this, and so just imagine if every time you wanted to make a change to your website or Your app you had to wait for two weeks and pay 250 dollars and that’s a challenge that the entire electronics industry is facing. Plus, you usually need multiple iterations, you might have made mistakes, and you know if, for example, you want to make a board a flexible board, even something just as small as the size of my thumb, you’re looking at paying at least a thousand dollars.
So my co-founder and i decided to try to do something about the status quo. That’S been lasting for more than 40 years, and this is when we came up with squink. Squink, sits on your desk and works in three steps to make a complete.
The first step uses an inkjet cartridge to inkjet print conductive ink on top of a substrate. The next step is an extruder that will place tiny dots of conductive glue on the pads where the components are going to be placed. And finally, the third step uses computer vision to and will pick up components from a tray, rotate them and then place them on the glue dots. To finish the circuit, you have a complete circuit in 30 minutes for only five dollars. Now there are multiple advantages of using our technology compared to the regular process when it comes to prototyping, for example, the time reduction and the cost. That’S one thing, but you’re also able to print on many different substances, for example, glass, capped on paper and so forth. But the hardware is really a small part of what we’ve been working on for the past two years. We have designed a graphic user interface that really walks you through the entire process and that design is integrated with an online database. It’S a web server, so it automatically connects if you, if you want it to our database, where you can just browse for circuits online and then download and print them. Our intention is to disrupt the existing chain between the manufa, the designer with this computer and a manufacturer cranking out boards.
Now is there any money to be made in this business? Well, thanks to a couple of friends of ours, we were able to access some market studies that show that the electronics industry is huge. It’S a 75 billion dollar worldwide, but what’s very interesting, is that creating the board is only really a tiny portion of that and 77 of the electronics industry is actually assembling them and the whole market, for that is a 450 billion dollars where what we want to Focus on is prototyping first now who is going to use something like that? Well, thanks to the maker faire and a couple of you know, big events like printed electronics in berlin, we’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of our customers, and some of them are professional engineers. They want to use our machine to test out small parts of their very complex system before integrating it into the bigger picture and also makers, and that’s the reason why we’re here makers, you know like to use it in order to have cheap boards faster, but also In order to be able to print on different materials, and finally, schools want to use those machines in order to teach kids and students how to make a product from the design to the complete finished product. And this is where my co-founder and i started.
This is the pain that we had when we went through college and missed a couple of deadlines. Now we have a two-pronged approach to our business model. The first part is pretty obvious: we’re selling the hardware also the ink and the glue, but the second part, thanks to that integrated database, is that you know we have several revenue streams that can stem out of that and, for example, promoting specific brands to our customers Or recommending local and global pcb manufacturers when our customers want to scale up, and our ultimate goal is to be able to use this machine in the industry and in order to do that, we designed a road map that is going to bring us there during the Summer last year we were at the alpha. We were on kickstarter, where we managed to raise a hundred thousand dollars in order to make this dream a reality right now, in on the 22nd of may, we will be at squink we’re about to deliver our first machines to our users and already starting to take Pre-Orders, so let me give you a quick overview of our kick-ass team, so i’m myself, a robotics engineer and where i designed a couple of eeg systems and brain implant devices before so carlos.
My co-founder is from colombia where he started two companies over there. He started two companies in the u.s, generating over 10 million dollars in revenue. Michael knox is in charge of the innovation and starting to find new materials has founded a vc back company in 2001.. Andrew is our designer he’s developed the entire graphic user interface and was working at ibm before? Finally, george, our ceo has was the leader of the nyu architecture lab and has joined us now to create our entire inventory system tracking down every part coming to our hq.
All the way to the final product now the reason i’m here is for the competition, but also because i’m looking for help, we have a passionate team that can make stuff happen and if you have any idea on how to help us, would you like a machine? Do you think you can advise us anything please come find us also as we’re uh we’re raising a round where we have we’re looking to raise 1.6 million and have eight hundred thousand dollars committed and finally, as we’re trying to build a community, please follow us on Twitter and facebook, and in order to help us revolutionize the electronics industry. Thank you very much. Thank you, nicholas factory. Now it’s our last chance we’re going to get some questions from our judges and we’re going to we’re going to wrap this thing up.
Judges, hey any roadmap plans to do multi-layer boards, just like to be like single layer only right yes, so it is single layer only uh we have uh. We intend to develop the multi-layering system in the next six months after we do we ship out the first printers. How do you handle like actual component sourcing problems, because i find that, like yeah, you can make a board in 30 minutes, but if you don’t have the components that doesn’t mean anything? Well, i’m not sure about that in the sense that uh, actually placing those tiny, smt components is not something extremely easy.
You need expertise, you need good eye, you need to have you know tweezers and a steady hand, yeah, i’m not denying that. I’M just saying like: where do you get the components because surface mount stuff? You don’t just get anywhere. You know uh, so, basically, right now we’re actually targeting mainly people who know how to make boards, so they will source their own components.
What we would like to do, ultimately, is to we have a removable tray so that the user can just place his own tray in there, and a machine will know exactly where the components are already. So it’s a pre-made tray. I don’t want to show my own ignorance here, but what about the soldering component so we’re actually uh the the second step is placing tiny dots of conductive glue, so we’re not soldering we’re actually gluing the components onto the board. Is that weird so like smt? Is a pretty well understood: technology in manufacturing does glue of any sort of reliability, long term sort of manufacturability yeah. The the glue has already been used in the industry. Uh, it’s been used for making some rfid tags and some other applications like that are the limits with that with like high sample rate microprocessors, and things like that, like you, can you actually handle it with glue so um the glue is actually not the problem when It comes to really high frequencies, it’s more about the ink itself, so you wouldn’t use it for high power or high frequency uh circuits, but for logic circuits it works perfectly okay, and this is something that you know we’re obviously trying to partner with ink manufacturers in Order to improve that capability, anything cool on the computer vision side.
You mentioned you had some pretty interesting sort of pick-and-place like capabilities, yeah orientation, you know yeah, so there are problems there. Actually, interestingly enough uh, i have if we can go all the way there. So these are a couple of examples of circuits. We’Ve made this the resistance.
Actually, we have a design company coming to see us in new york city, where they designed in 24 hours, a reactive t-shirt that was blinking according to the background music, that’s making makey, they were on kickstarter, and so you printing on that. So this is the computer vision as it was during the kickstarter campaign. So it’s it’s improved uh. You know farther than that, but the idea is that you know we’re really using now we’re using an led system to really take out the part find out the outline and the center so that we can orient it the right way.
Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. Satisfied i’m happy too.
Thank you again. Thank you very much. .