Today, our portfolio company Canatu and Lifeline SPAC I have announced a share exchange agreement to form a combined, publicly listed company. This milestone opens up new applications of Canatu’s carbon nanotube technology.
Sami Lampinen is a founding Partner at Inventure and has worked closely with Canatu as both its chairman and a board member since 2010. Read more in Canatu’s press release.
A day like today is a good reason to dig up 14-year-old pitch decks and investment decisions and let’s be honest: we definitely identified an amazing carbon nanotube IP & technology stack developed by Professor Esko Kauppinen and his team at Aalto University. But the initial investment hypothesis of commercializing the Canatu tech was off the mark.
When we invested in 2010, Canatu seemed poised to revolutionize the display industry. It was three years after the iPhone launched and we were big believers that a flat slab was the first form factor, and we would soon see much more innovative display interfaces entering the market. I remember looking at Canatu’s technology and thinking we’d soon see rollable phone displays, maybe wrap-around-your-wrist displays, and even taking advantage of curved surfaces in cars. But that adoption has been surprisingly slow.
However, in deep tech or venture capital, being wrong with the right technology doesn’t mean failure — it means learning and adapting. And that’s what the story has been with Canatu over the past 14 years.
On the product side, we had challenges in getting the product quality to an acceptable level, which was crucial for market adoption. The key was finding the optimal combination of transparency and conductivity to compete with existing solutions like ITO and PEDOT in displays and touch sensors. This balance wasn’t easy to achieve and was something that we kept developing every year. While this extended timeline wasn’t in our original plan, it drilled in the importance of persistence. Each year brought improvements, and eventually, we reached a level where our films could truly compete in the market.
And on being opportunistic, while our initial vision didn’t pan out as expected, new doors opened. We were very happy when Faurecia joined as an investor and pushed Canatu towards display technologies in the automotive sector, and when Denso worked heavily with Canatu on autonomous driving tech stacks. Then, one of the leading product categories for Canatu emerged: the pellicles and semiconductor filters. Those were not in the business plan in the early days, but that opportunity started five years ago. Now, Canatu, led by en excellent & proven management team, is delivering to global leaders in tech.
As we look at Canatu becoming public, we’re all more excited than ever about Canatu’s potential. Canatu’s CNB technology is widely validated and commercialized. With a substantial war chest to fuel further innovation and growth, Canatu’s CNBs can potentially go into a variety of different industries in the years to come. That’s where I’m probably the most excited — this exit isn’t an endpoint, it’s a new beginning of a long-term story. Canatu has all the potential to be there for 2040 and beyond to take a portfolio of new material innovations forward.
At Inventure, we’re more committed than ever to backing visionary deep tech founders early, with companies like HederaDx, ReOrbit, or Algortihmiq as just the latest examples. Our experiences prove that investing into breakthrough technologies requires patience. With the right team and investor support we can build extraordinary tech companies with proven business models and very attractive future growth opportunities.
