PragmatIC Printing, an electronics firm based in Cambridge, has raised £5.4m from chip maker ARM and Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), as it looks to boost its presence in the Internet of Things space.
The company, which bought the printed electronics business of Nano ePrint in 2010, makes microcircuits for plastic, paper, card and other packaging, which are designed to be low-cost, flexible and ultra-thin.
The funding will be used to hire more staff and to increase production capacity to 100 million flexible integrated circuits a month.
It will also allow PragmatIC to broaden its circuit design activities, including applications such as sensors, processors and wireless communications for the IoT space.
"We have become accustomed to silicon chips being incorporated into high-value documents such as passports and credit cards, but there are limitations to how robustly and cost-effectively this can be done," PragmatIC’s CEO Scott White said.
"Our technology platform creates a microcircuit thinner than a human hair that can be easily embedded in any flexible surface."
ARM’s CTO Mike Muller added: "We are supporting PragmatIC as they have the potential to dramatically extend the range of form factors and economics of embedded intelligence. We see particularly compelling possibilities to embed connectivity and computational power in everyday objects at extremely low cost."
White added: "We are hugely excited by both the additional resources and the strategic contribution that will result from this investment by CIC and ARM. We look forward to further developing our world-leading technology platform and blue-chip customer base through the course of 2015."
Last week, ARM teamed up with the University College London (UCL) to provide a new education kit for students that aims to improve their technical skills for the IoT.
