Wes Davis, 60, chief executive of Sionex Corp. in Bedford, in the company's product testing area, said its chemical sensor chip's uses are unlimited in detecting chemicals for security and medical purposes, among others.
(BILL POLO/GLOBE STAFF)
Business
From security to diagnoses, sensor chip pays off
Bedford start-up bullish on product
Wes Davis, 60, chief executive of Sionex Corp. in Bedford, in the company's product testing area, said its chemical sensor chip's uses are unlimited in detecting chemicals for security and medical purposes, among others.
(BILL POLO/GLOBE STAFF)
Employees are not tripping over themselves in Sionex Corp.'s spacious, 20,000-square-foot quarters, but they may well be in the next few years if the Bedford start-up's chemical sensor chip technology pays off in a big way, chief executive Wes Davis suggested.
"We think our technology has enough promise for us to generate annual sales of $50 million in five years," Davis, 60, said during an interview last week.
Sionex, which was founded in 2001 and now has 24 employees, has recorded revenues of $3 million to $5 million for each of the last three years, he said. "Now things are starting to accelerate as more products are going into production."
Applications run the gamut from uses in the private sector, such as the natural gas industry, to the military and medicine.
The sensor chips of the privately held firm are produced by several Boston area contract manufacturers, Davis said, and then are sold for undisclosed amounts to original equipment manufacturers such as Varian Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based maker of analytical instruments.
The heart of the patented technology, licensed from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, is what's called a tunable ion filter. "This filters out all the chemicals except the one of interest," Davis explained. "The process is highly selective and sensitive, based on ionization chemistry."
For example, in one of its products for the natural gas industry, Varian uses the Sionex chip technology "for the low-level detection of sulphur," said Bob Belair, a Varian product marketing manager.
Several other applications are undergoing further research by companies, institutions, and government agencies worldwide, said Davis, a Wellesley resident who has been involved in a number of other technology ventures.
Among the research projects are:
Earlier, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of Waltham piggybacked on the Sionex sensor technology to develop "the next-generation explosives detector for airport security," Davis said, adding that the product is now being used primarily in Europe. Medical diagnostics and therapeutics should be particularly viable fields for Sionex sensors, said Eric Kirleis, 41, vice president of sales and marketing.
"Breath analyses could be used, for instance, to detect tuberculosis, which is still a killer, particularly in Third World countries," said Kirleis, who lives in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.
The founder of Sionex, Raanan Miller, 39, said he is also bullish about any number of products that can be fashioned from the company's sensors.
"The potential applications are unlimited - from security to medical diagnostics."
Miller, who is pursuing a master's of business administration degree as a Sloan fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had developed the technology while working at Draper Laboratory.
"After getting lots of inquiries about the technology, I saw the potential for a business that would focus on the technology," said Miller, a Boston resident, in a phone interview.
He said he may return to Sionex after receiving his MBA next June "or explore other entrepreneurial and venture capital opportunities." He is a member of the company's board of directors.
So far, Sionex has raised $25 million, said Davis, the chief executive. Primary investors are Navigator Technology Ventures of Cambridge; Rho Ventures of New York City; Morgenthaler Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif.; and In-Q-Tel of Arlington, Va.
Larry Kaufman, 66, of Waltham was the Sionex CEO from 2001 to 2004, when Davis, a former top executive of MicroTouch Systems Inc. of Methuen, took over. Kaufman remains on the board of directors.
"I'm a serial entrepreneur who had been involved with seven other small companies," Kaufman said. "When Draper formed its venture group, Navigator Technology, I realized that a company could be formed that would utilize a novel technology, offering many different applications, that is protected by patents.
"I put in a lot of sweat equity at the start, helping to put a business plan in place and recruiting Wes Davis, who had built up a few small companies," Kaufman added.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
