Nano-Terra appears to have taken in its largest round of financing in the five-year history of the nanotechnology development firm. The Cambridge, MA-based startup has raised $17.2 million in an equity and rights funding round, according to an SEC filing. (CB Insights previously posted this news on its blog.)
Nano-Terra‘s CEO, Myer Berlow, and its vice chairman, Carmichael Roberts, did not immediately reply to an e-mail this morning about the financing. In April 2009, Berlow, a former America Online executive, told Xconomy that most of the $3 million that had been invested in the firm had come from Berlow and Harvard chemist George Whitesides, the co-founder and chairman of the company, whose inventions have been licensed to the firm. Roberts, who is also a co-founder of the firm, is a partner at North Bridge Venture Partners in Waltham, MA, yet the venture firm does not list Nano-Terra among its portfolio companies on its website (for what it’s worth).
The company, founded in 2005, has been working on developing micro- and nano-tech innovations for industry partners—but Berlow has said that the company has considered developing products of its own. Thus far, the firm has revealed development deals with Exide Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:XIDE]]), a battery and energy storage device maker, the German chemical and pharmaceutical firm Merck KGaA, the pet products division of Swiss consumer products giant Nestle, and Pentair (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PNR]]), the industrial equipment provider.
We’ll update this story once we learn more details of Nano-Terra’s latest funding round.