Innovative electronics company, Nanusens, again successfully overfunds with Crowdcube

Clear message of solving sensor production problem results in overfunding of 300% and raises £604,680 of crowd funding via Crowdcube

Innovative electronics company, Nanusens, has closed a highly successful round of crowd funding via Crowdcube. £604,680 was raised in just from 750 investors. This was 300% overfunding as the target was £200,000. This brings the total raised via Crowdcube rounds to £1,805,950 or around two million Euros.

Ivan Hoo, Senior Equity Campaign Manager at Crowdcube, commented: “Nanusens is one of the first electronic component manufacturers to use Crowdcube for fund raising. A business like this could have issues in translating the technical complexities to our investors but the management team at Nanusens have done an excellent job in communicating the intricacies of their business plan. As a result, the campaign has received tremendous support from retail investors as well as sophisticated investors.”

The problem that Nanusens solves is that the demand for sensors is exceeding the current production capabilities. This is a problem that is getting worse as more and more devices are being designed with a range of sensors to provide awareness and make them smart, with smartphones being one of the examples that has helped the sensor market grow to billions of units a year.

The bottleneck is caused by current production methods requiring specialist techniques that makes it hard to ramp up production. Nanusens has developed a way to use the same standard techniques used in the giant production facilities that make most of the world’s electronic chips. This means that there is no limit to the number of sensor chips that Nanusens can make as they can be made in any of these facilities. Nanusens predicts that it could increase the size of the sensor market from billions of units to trillions of units by solving this production bottleneck.

“The Internet of Things has been forecast to need trillions of sensors,” explained Dr Josep Montanyà, Nanusens CEO, “but current sensor production methods cannot support such numbers. We will be able to and at the right price for the market. This will finally enable the IoT to grow as predicted.”

The first target market on this journey is earbuds. These need a number of ultra-small sensors to provide an enhanced user experience. Nanusens’ breakthrough technology enables it to make sensors that are less than a quarter of the size of current designs. This frees up space inside the earbud design for larger batteries for a longer operational life or more sensors for additional features.  

Simon Forrest, Principal Technology Analyst, Futuresource Consulting, said in the 2019 Futuresource Hearables Market Report – Worldwide: “Space is always at a premium within hearables; similarly so is battery life. Adding more sensors to create ‘smart’ hearable products is therefore challenging. The answer may come from advances in MEMS manufacturing. European start-up, Nanusens, have developed methods to create MEMS sensors within standardised CMOS manufacturing processes. This enables sensors to be placed on the same silicon as the control logic, making them up to ten times smaller and freeing space for other components or larger batteries.”