Los Alamos-based UbiQD announced Monday that it landed a new contract with NASA that will help the New Mexico startup expand its greenhouse roofing technology into a commercial product.
This is the third contract that UbiQD has landed with NASA. The first two were awarded in 2018 and 2020.
However, this latest small business technology transfer contract had a bit of a wrinkle. It required UbiQD to match government funding with private investment of its own.
UbiQD matched $375,000 in funding from NASA with over $500,000 in private investments to reach nearly $1 million in new money, said Hunter McDaniel, Ph.D., UbiQD's founder and CEO. He said that the private investment came from existing investors, led by Austin, Texas-based Scout Ventures LLC.
The new money will help UbiQD create a commercial product out of the fluorescent greenhouse roofing technology that it's developed thanks to earlier NASA contracts, McDaniel said. The new product is called UbiGro Cover. It uses a quantum dot polymer system to improve fluorescent sunlight durability to help greenhouses grow crops more efficiently, according to a news release from the company.
"We're aiming for full-scale deployment of this technology into the greenhouse industry," McDaniel said. "It's a generation two product, generation one being our retrofit film (UbiGro Inner) and generation two being the full cover (UbiGro Cover). [The] film is something that should be able to slot right in with almost all greenhouses and at a lower cost price point that could be accessible to more growers.
"It's a lower cost and much more normal type of material being put into greenhouse roofing," McDaniel continued, describing the UbiGro Cover product. "It's not an add-on, it's not hanging. It's just like the roof itself."
UbiQD worked with NASA and the University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agriculture Center to study the uses of quantum dot technology for improving crop growth on space missions. These studies helped lead UbiQD to get a patent for the quantum dot greenhouse technology that goes into the UbiGro Inner and UbiGro Cover products approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, McDaniel said.
The company has other pending patents in the field of greenhouse glass optimization, according to the release.
McDaniel said there are over 54 billion square feet of greenhouses on the planet that mostly use plastic film roofs. That's a use that the UbiGro Cover product aims to apply to. This means that there's a lot of market potential for the UbiGro Cover product, McDaniel said, but he couldn't give any future estimates right now.
The company's news release notes that UbiGro Cover is "launching for pilot projects in early 2023." UbiQD is taking sign-ups for the pilot project now, McDaniel said. He added that there could be a discount or subsidy for using the UbiGro Cover product through the pilot program.
Greenhouse technology isn't the only area UbiQD is working in. It expanded a partnership with Switzerland-based SICPA SA this fall to commercialize a technology that uses quantum dots in anti-counterfeit security inks, an area McDaniel said is a growing part of UbiQD's business.
The company employs 25 people full-time and projects revenue of around $3.5 million in 2022, according to previous Business First reporting.
