Mobius Materials sees a huge opportunity in the secondary electronics market, but the company must first fix a problem — onboarding new listings.
Mobius is a two-way marketplace for semiconductor chips and other parts used to make circuit boards. Founder and CEO Margaret Upshur started the company two years ago in San Francisco and launched the platform earlier this year.
On the platform, companies list a variety of parts. Upshur said each product listing must have 50 data points, including the price, before it can be publicly available. Right now, that process is done manually. Mobius recently received a $75,000 Commonwealth Commercialization Fund grant to fix the problem. Upshur is planning to hire engineers to create an automated process solistings can become available more quickly.
“Right now, we are actually turning away business, because we can’t get parts listed fast enough,” Upshur said.
She moved the company to Richmond a few months ago. Upshur is from the area and wanted to be closer to family. She had planned to only stay a short time but has since decided to reside permanently in Richmond.
Upshur said the pandemic has reduced the need for a startup to be in the Bay Area. Access to capital and engineering talent were the main reasons to build a company in San Francisco, but now everything is done virtually. She can connect with people anywhere, and the cost of operating a company is much less in Richmond.
When she returned here, she connected with Startup Virginia. The organization gave her a three-month scholarship within its coworking space, and she started to network across the Richmond startup community. She was also connected with the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., which administers the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund. She had raised some money with friends and family but need access to more capital. VIPC officials encouraged her to apply for a grant.
“[Mobius] has been super bootstrapped,” Upshur said. “I did most of it myself.”
She declined to give specific revenue numbers but said most transactions are around $5,000. Mobius charges the seller a percentage on each transaction. Upshur said she has been pleased with the growth, which has averaged about 40% per month since the marketplace launched in February.
“We are pretty happy with the growth rate,” Upshur said. “We are just trying to build out a lot of operations and automations that can support that over time.”
She expects the onboarding project with the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund grant will take around six months. After that, she is hoping to start a seed round. Her goal is to hire a full-time engineer and a full-time operations person next year. That will free her up to focus on strategy and direction.
Upshur got the idea for the company while working for an Internet of Things startup in San Francisco. The company created hardware that is used in IoT equipment and launched a new product. Upshur tried to sell the old electronic pieces and said she could only garner offers of a couple thousand dollars for items valued at considerably more. She said the problem is the lack of transparency on the secondary market. A lot of counterfeit equipment is sold there, and Upshur saw the need to create a marketplace where the buyers and sellers trust each other.
Large manufacturing companies are the main buyer for the products listed on Mobius. For example, a large automotive parts supplier recently purchased electronic parts off the marketplace. Upshur said a lot of these electronic parts are in production for 20 years and have value within organizations.
“When something is obsolete for one customer, that does not mean it’s obsolete on the market,” Upshur said.