Created just a year ago, Primo 1D, one of the E-thread® technology, pioneers have just closed a €3 million round, led by Sofimac Partners and Rhone Alpes Creation (R2V) with a consortium of Angels and other institutional funds participating. Primo 1D, who grew out of Grenoble-based digital innovation lab and hub LETI and were also an exhibitor at our Connected Conference in June, plan to leverage this investment to more quickly develop and broaden the industrial application of their technology, expand the market reach of E-Thread®, and develop technology to respond to the increasing demand for decoration by LED. As their President and CEO Emmanuel Arène puts it, “Primo 1D are now armed for rapid development and growth.”
Primo 1D’s E-Thread® technology is an innovation which enables the discrete incorporation of electronics in textile or moulded plastics. E-Thread® can be use like traditional threading, but due to its ultra microscopic size incorporates information into the very core of material and objects, which remains with the object or material throughout its life.
How E-Thread® technology works is that it enables direct connection of a chip to a set of two conductors behaving as an antenna, a power and/or a data bus. It’s superior to the standard solutions in which the connection to an external conductor is made in two stages: an internal connection to a housing (“bonding”), and a connection of the housing to the outer conductors. The big benefit of their technology is its significant size advantage which is 10X smaller and, as a result, leads to a reduction in assembly time and reliability.
It’s evident that Primo 1D, with their E-Thread® technology, will be well positioned to be a big enabler of the fast-growing, increasingly ubiquitous connected objects space.