After 10 years of development and testing, Charlottesville’s BrightSpec Inc. is ready to commercialize a cutting-edge scientific instrument. To that end, the company recently closed an $18.4 million Series C round.
San Francisco’s Genoa Ventures and Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Arboretum Ventures led the round. Existing investors Medvest Capital of Birmingham, Alabama, Charlottesville’s Felton Group LLC and the UVA Seed Fund also participated.
BrightSpec produces molecular rotational resonance spectrometers, a scientific instrument used in molecular testing that was originally developed at the University of Virginia by Brooks Pate, a chemistry professor. The intellectual property was spun out of the university a decade ago and has been mainly used in academia and government research.
“Historically, we have done some custom builds,” said Walter Colsman, BrightSpec's CEO of three years. “For example, [NASA’s] Jet Propulsion Lab wanted to study a certain class of molecule, and they wanted particular bells and whistles.”
Colsman started as an investor in the company and joined the board. He has a background in the scientific instrument industry and saw the potential to create a more mainstream version of the product. He believes a market exists for the product in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. They need to understand the molecular structure of compounds. For the last several years, he and his team have been improving the instrument’s interface, making it easier for industry to utilize the equipment.
“In academia, you are pushing the boundaries, and they have grad students doing a lot of the work,” Colsman said. “They aren’t getting paid anything and the time doesn’t matter as much. They can type lines of code in order to operate the instrument. Johnson & Johnson or Pfizer or some major pharmaceutical company just wants to know the answer. It’s about productivity.”
The machine, he said, can be used across the entire process from product development to quality control during manufacturing. The current equipment within industry that analyzes molecular structure is slow and can take days or weeks to complete the work, Colsman said. With BrightSpec’s equipment, the work is done in a matter of minutes.
The company’s machines have sold for upward of $1 million, but the commercialized version of the product will cost between $250,000 and $500,000. Colsman said separate configurations will be manufactured for research and quality control. The key is creating an interface that is user-friendly and only gives the person operating the machine the necessary information. A quality control person only wants to know if the finished product meets the required specifications.
“They don’t care about the details of the instrument and how it’s performing,” Colsman said. “They want that answer quickly. It’s a different mindset.”
The instrument fits with the regional pharmaceutical cluster centered around the Medicines for All Institute, Phlow Corp. and the work of Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Frank Gupton. Colsman said the instrument can be beneficial in the type of manufacturing being developed by Phlow.
Gupton is an adviser to BrightSpec, and Colsman said Gupton sees a wide array of uses for the product within the pharmaceutical industry.
BrightSpec has 15 employees and expects to grow to 30 by the end of the year. The company’s revenue in the “in the low millions,” Colsman said, but declined to give specifics.
He said investors Genoa Ventures and Arboretum Ventures are two leaders in the scientific instrument industry and will help the company bring the product into industry. Jenny Rooke, of Genoa, and Dan Kidle, of Arboretum, have joined BrightSpec’s board of directors.