crystallizing

Company’s eorts to produce diamond materials crystallizing

BYTOM HENDERSON

Great Lakes Crystal Technologies Inc., a company launched in August 2019 to create a domestic commer cial source of ultra-high-performance diamond materials, is about to graduate from the Michigan State University’s VanCamp Incubator east of campus. e company grew out of more than 25 years of research at MSU and a collaboration with the Fraunhofer USA Center for Coatings and Dia mond Technologies, a facility located on campus and part of Plymouth-based Fraunhofer USA Inc., a nonprot research and development organization founded in 1994 to form research partnerships with universi ties, industry and state and federal governments. It is aliated with the Fraunhofer Society, a large research organization based in Munich, Ger many. ese kinds of synthetic diamond crystals go far beyond traditional markets for synthetic diamonds such as jewelry and grinding materials for the factory oor. ey are used in the latest, most sophisticated sensors to detect ele mentary particles like molecules and their ions when studying objects in

BYTOM HENDERSON

e backstory of ARUtility LLC, a 2018 startup that just graduated from the Conquer Accelerator program at Michigan State University, is one of how a boss found how one of his hires talked to his cat so interesting he decided to go into business with him.

Alando Chappell became Joseph Eastman’s boss at the Lansing Board of Power and Light in 2014. “I was looking to hire an engineer. I inter viewed him, I loved him and brought him on board,” he said. “He was an excellent engineer.”

One Monday in 2017, Chappell asked Eastman what he had done over the weekend.

“He said, ‘I was bored, so I created an app that speaks to my cat,’” re counted Chappell.

With the app he created, while he was on vacation Eastman could call home and talk to his cat through a toy robot.

Chappell thought there was a more practical thing to be accomplished than talking to cats and got Eastman to write some code that would help them with a fantasy football league, which became a kind of beta version for the next software Eastman would write for the company they would launch. e “AR” in ARUtility stands for augmented reality, and the compa space and to learn more about the sun’s corona and magnetic elds and the atmospheric composition of planetary objects. ey will also be crucial to making optical elements for next-generation spectrometers, beam splitters, syn chrotrons and something called x-ray free-electron lasers. e company has licensed ve is sued and one pending patent from MSU. It plans to license future MSU patents, to le its own patents, and to pursue joint patents involving feder ally funded research and development contracts.

Great Lakes’ co-founders are MSU Professor Timothy Grotjohn and in dustry veteran Keith Evans. e company has signed a nonbinding letter of intent to move into a manufacturing facility in the Lansing area and is looking at six more.

“We know one thing for sure, we’ll have our own building in the next month,” he said. “Five thousand square feet will do it for a few years; we’ll want to have expansion space near by.”

Great Lakes hopes to nish raising a seed funding round of $2 million by the end of this year to establish its rst diamond manufacturing line and plans to raise a Series A round of ny’s technology allows those doing utility work in the eld to download a 3D image to a smart phone or tablet of the various buried cables, gas lines or water pipes below where they are about to work, preventing dangerous and expensive accidents during ex cavation.

“e idea for the company came from being out in the eld on a proj ect with a natural gas pipeline that was hit by an excavator,” said Eastman, the company’s president and CEO. He got his civil engineering degree from the University of Michigan and is a licensed engineer with 14 years of experience inspecting gas, water, sewer and electric lines. One role at the Board of Water and Light included being project manager for the program that replaced lead ser vice lines in the city, and he previously worked as an engineer for the Holland Board of Public Works and the Michigan Public Service Commission.

One day, he was performing an on-site inspection for a water-main installation. Markings on the ground had been inadvertently removed, and the contractor struck an under ground gas line, which spewed natural gas over the site, caused the evacuation of nearby residents and cost project delays and tens of thousands of dollars.

“We just saw the need. You’d see the same issues all over the state,” $20 million next year to equip its manufacturing center, which it wants fully functional by 2022. It has al ready bought its rst machine from a supplier in North Carolina.

ARUtility technology helps prevent costly, dangerous excavation accidents

App shows 3D image of underground cables, gas lines, pipes

Giving it credence in its fundrais said Eastman.

“Being a manager, you look at the number of injuries, the number of accidents, the number of delays. We knew if we took a known problem and created a process to reduce acci dents, we’d have something amazing,” said Chappell, the COO, who has more than 20 years of experience in the eld and a bachelor’s degree in organizational management.

Utility industry estimates that acci dents involving damage to buried utilities cost more than $1.5 billion globally and cause more than 400 deaths.

Before the two launched ARUtility, Eastman, as he did with the app for his cat, wrote all the software code. “We needed a minimally viable prod uct, which took a lot of hours,” said Eastman. Since then, he has written four or ve upgraded versions.

Soon after they launched, they presented their business plan at e Hatching, a pitch competition for startups hosted by the Lansing Eco nomic Area Partnership, the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the Lansing SmartZone. ARUtility won the event and the grand prize of $2,000. at also led to an award of $3,200 from the MEDC’s Business Acceleration Fund, which they used to buy pop-up banners and rent booths at trade shows and to pay for a video they could send to potential customers.

ing is an impressive list of four Phase I Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer grants it got in its rst year, a total of $590,000 from the U.S. De partment of Energy, the U.S. Air

e company has applied for a patent on its technology, whose app pulls information from a utility’s geo graphic information system as well as other industry data bases.

In August 2019, ARUtility was hon ored with the Vendor To Watch Award at the annual Smart Water Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz., which drew 56 smart-tech vendors vying for awards in three categories. ARUtility won its award in a vote of more than 100 utility executives in attendance. e company was chosen to par ticipate this summer in the fth annual Conquer Accelerator program, an intensive 10-week program for ve startups that helps ne tune their Force, the Navy and NASA. Each project targets the development of advanced applications using highperformance diamond materials. (See related story, Page 11.)

Currently, the company must buy

business plan and marketing, pro vides mentoring and other support and working space. Twenty-nine companies applied for the program, which is run by Spartan Innovations, a subsidiary of the MSU Foundation. e program also came with an in vestment of $20,000 from Red Cedar Ventures, the foundation’s investment arm.

“I really like the experience of the founders. Both have worked in the utility space for years. It’s a unique technology, a disruptive technology that is already getting traction in the market,” said Je Wesley, Red Cedar’s executive director.

ARUtility graduated from the ac -

Paul Quayle, director of diamond synthesis (left); Timothy Grotjohn, co-founder and technical adviser; and co-founder Keith Evans outside the

VanCamp incubator in East Lansing. | GREATS LAKES CRYSTAL TECHNOLOGIES

Alando Chappell (left) and Joe Eastman,

co-founders of ARUtility. | ARUTILITY

“THE IDEA FOR THE COMPANY CAME FROM BEING OUT IN THE FIELD ON A PROJECT WITH A NATURAL GAS PIPELINE THAT WAS HIT BY AN EXCAVATOR.” —Joe Eastman, president and CEO, ARUtility

the diamond crystals used in its SBIR and STTR projects from suppliers in Japan, Russia and Europe. It will make its own diamond crystals as well as become a supplier to other companies now buying them from abroad.

It has also booked an additional $400,000 in federal contracts and was approved in late August for a Phase II SBIR grant by the Air Force, the terms of which are still being negotiated.

Depending on results of its Phase I contracts, the company could get up to $5.6 million in Phase II awards over the next two years.

Great Lakes Crystal has also received a Michigan Business Accelerator Fund grant of $13,500, $75,000 from the Michigan Emerging Technologies Fund and $60,000 from Red Cedar Ventures, the investment arm of Spartan Innovations, which runs the VanCamp Incubator. Spartan Innovations is a subsidiary of the MSU Foundation.

“What I love about Great Lakes Crystal is it is leveraging core competencies of the university and Dr. Grotjohn’s e orts. and obviously the diamond market has great opportunities,” said Je Wesley.

In July, Evans made a Zoom pitch for investment capital to the Grand Rapids-based Grand Angels and its a liated angel groups around the state, the Michigan Capital Network, and has other pitch meetings scheduled.  e company’s business plan calls for it to begin generating revenue from commercial sales in 2022, to hit $50 million in revenue in 2025 and celerator in August, and Eastman and Chappell decided to remain at the VanCamp Accelerator in East Lansing, east of campus and part of the University Corporate Research Park, another subsidiary of the MSU Foundation.

Having graduated from the accelerator program and having put together a strong pitch desk, Eastman and Chappell are arranging upcoming pitches for equity funding with such organizations as the Grand Rapids-based Grand Angels, Invest Detroit and Ann Arbor-based Augment Ventures.

On Sept. 10, Eastman and Chappell did a Zoom pitch for capital to Plug and Play Ventures, a highly respected VC  rm in Sunnyvale, Calif. that focuses on seed- and early-stage funding for tech companies. Typically, the VC  rm invests $150,000 in winning companies at its pitch events, which also includes a 10-week stint at its accelerator in Sunnyvale.  e next day, Eastman and Chappell got the word that they had been accepted into the accelerator, which starts at the end of the month, for what will be a virtual accelerator this year because of COVID-19.  ey have not been told, yet, about the size of an investment.

ARUtility was one of 200 companies invited to start the Plug and Play process, with 20 making the cut for an in-depth pitch.

On Sept. 15, the company was one of six early-stage companies pitching for funding at a virtual event hosted by Red Cedar Ventures and the Grand Rapids SmartZone.

ARUtility generates revenue through the software-as-a-service model, charging customers either per local meter for electric compamore than $250 million in 2028.  e 2025 forecast includes $40 million in commercial sales and $10 million in federal R&D contracts.

According to Evans, the lack of domestic manufacturing of high-performance diamond materials has created pent-up demand in the market, with a wide variety of applications, including advanced photon optics, high energy particle detection, next-generation electronics and diamond-based materials that will enable what is expected to be the huge market of quantum computing.

“We estimate the addressable market for high-performance diamond materials to be $600 million today with strong potential to surpass $4 billion over the long term,” said Evans. “People say, ‘You’re targeting too many markets, you should focus.’  ese are big markets and we like them and we think we can sell to all of them.”

He said prospective customers include the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York; Lockheed-Martin; Los Alamos National Lab; Micro-LAM Inc., a maker of advanced cutting tools in Kalamazoo; and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in Menlo Park, Calif.

Evans joined Spartan Innovations in June 2019 as an entrepreneur-in-residence to mentor startup companies. He didn’t just want to mentor Great Lakes Crystals; he

See DIAMOND on Page 12 nies or per customer for other utilities.  e company has three pilot programs currently, with the Lansing Board of Water and Light and in Zeeland and Plain eld, and Eastman says he is in discussions for pilots in the UK, Australia and Canada.

ARUtility has one major customer in South Melbourne, Australia,  eldGO Pty. Ltd. , which provides companies to monitor in real time projects in the  eld. It has some 300 customers globally, and they can choose to use ARUtility’s technology, too. If they do, ARUtility gets paid a fee.

Eastman said the company is looking to hire two full-time developers. He and Chappell are currently the only two employees.

A big part of ARUtility’s pitch for funding is a key partnership with Redlands, Calif.-based Esri, a global leader in cloud-based location intelligence and mapping. ARUtility has been named as an emerging business partner in the company’s startup program.

Founded in 1969, Esri’s software is deployed in more than 350,000 organizations, including 90 of the Fortune 100 companies and all 50 state governments.

Its startup program allows promising emerging tech companies to incorporate its location analytics into their services and solutions for free for up to three years.  e program is open to companies with less than $1 million in annual revenue.

ARUtility projects revenue this year of $147,000, $2.2 million next year, $9.8 million in 2022 and $22.2 million in 2023.

See if you’re ready for the science of diamonds

In its  rst year, Crystal Lake Technologies Inc. won four Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer grants, from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Navy, the Air Force and NASA.

Reading some of the wording of the solicitations by those federal entities that the company responded to o ers a window into how complex the world of science-grade diamond crystals can be.

FROM THE NASA SOLICITATION:

“ is subtopic solicits development of advanced in-situ instrument technologies and components suitable for deployment on heliophysics missions. Advanced sensors for the detection of elementary particles (atoms, molecules and their ions) and electric and magnetic  elds in space and associated instrument technologies are often critical for enabling transformational science from the study of the sun’s outer corona, to the solar wind, to the trapped radiation in Earth’s and other planetary magnetic  elds, and to the atmospheric composition of the planets and their moons.”

FROM THE NAVY:

“Objective: Develop an electrically driven, sub-nanosecond, semiconductor pulse sharpener to improve the performance of high-power microwave pulse generators by reducing/sharpening the rise time of a driving pulse, preserving the trailing edge of the pulse and increasing the bandwidth of the output.”

FROM DOE:

“Grant applications are sought for the development of growing large di raction-grade diamond crystals for the manufacturing of X-ray optical elements for monochromators, beam-splitters, spectrometers, phase plates used at present and next generation synchrotron and FEL X-ray facilities, as well as future quantum computing implementations. Requirements for these crystals include: 1. Di raction quality: for various Bragg re ections including Miller indices (111), (220) and (400), near perfect re ectivity with bandwidth deviations from the ideal Darwin curve to within < 1%; peak re-  ectivity > 99%. 2. Topographical quality: for various Bragg re ections including Miller indices (111), (220) and (400), spatial variations in the Bragg angle from the ideal direction to within 200 nrad over a 5x5 mm2 area. 3.  ermal conductivity: > 1800 W/m K.

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Lily Werbin in the banjo showroom of Elderly Instruments. | ELDERLY INSTRUMENTS

ELDERLY

From Page 8

High-end banjos and guitars on display are typically several thousand dollars, though it isn’t unusual to pick one up with a price tag of $5,000 or more.

“We keep our really special gui tars and banjos and one-os in the vault,” she said.

How special do they get?

Last December, a rare Gibson Les Paul on consignment sold for $225,000. Paul made just a few gui tars with a sunburst nish from 1958- 60, built expressly for that new kind of music called rock’n’ roll, and they are, obviously, in extreme demand.

Now, the store has a Gibson F-5 mandolin designed and made by an iconic craftsman named Lloyd Loar, who dated it and signed it on March 31, 1924. One of only 326 made signed by Loar, it is listed at $120,000.

Michael Gay is a business growth consultant with the Michigan Small Business Development Center in Lansing, and has been helping Lily grow her business skills for the last four and a half years as she has tak en more and more control of the business.

“I’ve watched her drink from the proverbial rehose as she’s worked with her father to learn and master one aspect of the business after an other,” he said. “She has exceptional people skills and, like all good leaders, invariably puts the good of the team and the business ahead of her personal needs. She’s thoughtful, humble and more than willing to lis ten to new ideas, criticisms and insights, and to act on them when it’s appropriate to do so.

“Elderly has been a Michigan landmark for 50 years. ey were my rst road-trip destination when I got my driver’s license in the mid-1970s and made the trip to Lansing from Flint to purchase a Gibson Les Paul, and I have little doubt that Lillian will help ensure that Elderly contin ues to serve musicians for another 50 years,” he said.

“We want to make sure musicians get instruments that have been tak en care of,” said Lily. “A lot of our reputation was built on our personality, almost whimsical but not quite. To be whimsical in the 2000s isn’t easy.”

In the last two years, Elderly, which has had a strong online pres ence for more than 20 years, has sold instruments to customers in 50 states and in 67 countries, ranging from Andorra to Bosnia and Herze govina to the Faroe Islands to Vatican City to New Caledonia to Oman and Sri Lanka.

Stan said it never entered his mind in the early days that one day the business would be almost ve decades old and be selling instru ments around the world.

“My partner and I had just nished college and we thought, ‘What are we going to do?’ I’d played guitar and banjo, and I thought we could search through consignment stores and antique shops and nd old in struments we could sell for a prot. It was just something that might make a little money and we’d have fun doing it,” he said.

He said Lily’s passion for the busi ness has also been a pleasant surprise. “Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed she’d ever be interested in running the business. She gets it and gets it way, way better than I did when I was her age.”

DIAMOND

From Page 10

wanted to help run it. He became president and CEO when the company was founded. Grotjohn is the lead tech nical adviser and continues as a professor at MSU and chair of electrical and computer engineering.

Evans, who got his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Purdue University, pre viously was president and CEO at Kyma Technologies Inc., a supplier of semiconductor materials for next generation lighting and electronics applications. Before that, he was an executive at several technology companies and from 1984-1996 was a group leader at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

In August, the DOE announced an award of $12.4 million to establish an Energy Frontier Research Center at Ari zona State University to investigate next-generation materials and reinvent the electrical grid. Several researchers at other universities are part of the ASU project, including Grotjohn.

According to Grotjohn’s bio at the university, “a strong focus of his work is the use of models, including electro magnetic, plasma dynamic, and plasma chemistry models for the design and control of microwave plasma reactors used for materials processing. Specic processes studied have included diamond chemical vapor deposition, amorphous carbon deposition, semi conductor etching and microwave-generated plasma discharges operated as ion and radical sources.”

It is the process known as chemical vapor deposition that Great Lakes Crys

NIOWAVE

From Page 9

In 2005, when Niowave was founded, the business model was to be a contractor for the U.S. Dept. of Energy and to build accelerator components and do consulting for various DOE labs and research universities. e plan was to eventually become a man ufacturer of radioisotopes.

Grimm had left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join MSU in 1994. MSU had become a world lead er in nuclear physics in the 1960s when it build the rst superconducting cyclotron in the world. at cyclotron had been replaced by more powerful units over the years, and by 2005, MSU was in negotiations with the Department of Energy over how to fund and build the world’s largest linear particle accelerator.

“I saw that whether it got built or not, there was a future in this technol ogy. I said, ‘I’m going to spin out a company and make isotopes,’” said Grimm. To make isotopes, he had to build his own particle accelerator, and Niowave also began making accelera tor components and selling them to labs around the world.

MSU began building that linear particle accelerator in 2014. What be came known as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams is expected to be fully on line next year or, more likely, in 2022. e cost of the nuclear research facility grew to $765 million, with the DOE contributing $635.5 million to the project, the state contributing $94.5 million and MSU $35 million.

Its particle accelerator will create rare isotopes not normally found on earth, with potential applications for medicine, homeland security and in dustry. tals will use to grow its diamonds.

“e compelling properties and potential importance of crystalline diamonds have been well understood for more than a century, but producing diamond crystals is not easy,” said Evans. “Michigan State University researchers understood early on that the chemical vapor deposition approach has the most promise in terms of cost, quality and scalability.”

MSU began eorts at making dia mond crystals through chemical vapor deposition in 1985. Grotjohn joined MSU in 1987, and Fraunhofer began its partnership with the school in 2003.

“WE GET PINGED ABOUT ONCE A WEEK FROM SOME PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY THAT WANTS OUR ISOTOPES. WE SHIP ISOTOPES ALL OVER THE WORLD.” —Mike Zamiara, president and CFO, Niowave

Meanwhile, from 2005-2015, more than half of Niowave’s revenue came from selling accelerator parts to the CERN lab in Switzerland and other European labs, DOE labs and research universities. Over time, larger vol umes of isotopes were produced and that line of revenue increased.

Grimm said that accelerator parts account for less than 20 percent of revenue today.

“We get pinged about once a week from some pharmaceutical company that wants our isotopes,” said Zami ara. “We ship isotopes all over the world.”

Another use of last year’s grant is to go from small-batch to large-batch production of its isotopes by increas ing the size of the production facility near the Lansing airport, currently a 14,000-square-foot facility opened in 2014. e company plans to break ground on an expansion there next year and hopes to add up to another 100,000 square feet that will be fully operational by 2023.

The right setting

Joining Great Lakes Crystal in June as director of crystal growth and principal investigator on the various federal grants was Paul Quayle, who got his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. For the last two years, he had been a post-doc in Grotjohn’s group at MSU.

“If we’re successful and build a nice materials company, there are a lot of companies who will want to buy us,” said Evans, who said potential buyers could include an IT company pursuing quantum computing, a defense con tractor developing quantum sensors,

at nearly the speed of light to make cancer-killing isotopes. It is a former school building, Walnut Elementary, built in 1937 as a federal public works project during the Depression, just north of the capital in a part of Lan sing now known as Old Town.

It also served as the home of the Lansing Board of Education, so it has extra nice architectural touches, in cluding a large boardroom that serves Niowave nicely.

When Niowave bought the building in 2006, it had been out of operation for a year. “When we bought it, the neighbors loved it. ere had been so many schools closed in Lansing, and everyone was worried about what was going to happen to this building,” said Grimm.

An added bonus, which resonated with him as the CEO of a company hoping to help cure cancer, was when he found out what the wooden rails were that lined the school halls, and what the steel rods were that were mounted in classrooms. e rails were to help students who had con tracted polio navigate their way around in a building that opened nearly 20 years before Jonas Salk in vented the polio vaccine.

Blankets were heated and hung on the steel rods for those same kids if they were feeling chilled.

“When we were told that, it made it special,” said Grimm. ey continue to remind him of how far science has come since the building was built, and as inspiration for how far Niowave wants to take it.

An example of Niowave taking the building on a scientic journey? e old gymnasium has been retrotted with a Class 100 clean room.