The Holy Grail of Switch Tech: Piva Bets on Menlo Micro to Power Industry 4.0
At Piva, we look to back the companies that will define the new era of industrial activity. At the heart of this is the electronic switch — one of those ubiquitous and forgotten components that underpins all electrical systems. Yet today’s switches are far from ideal in powering the modern or future world, forcing the industry to accept trade-offs between size, efficiency, reliability and cost.
This is precisely why we’ve placed our bets on Menlo Microsystems, Inc. (Menlo Micro), who has just announced their $44M Series B round to provide a game-changer to those who design electronic systems. As we learned more about their Ideal SwitchTM technology, we realized that Menlo Micro has completely reinvented one of the most fundamental building blocks of all electronic systems.
As the world races to electrify everything and orchestrate the physical economy through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Menlo Micro’s technology will be at the heart of the revolution. It has the potential to serve multiple industries, including Industry 4.0, 5G networks, home-automation and medical instrumentation with a market opportunity of more than $5 billion.
Electronic Switches — The Outdated Technology Quietly Making the World Go Round
Switches are everywhere — they manage our homes’ lighting, heating and cooling systems and enable circuit breakers to keep us safe. They are fundamental to our computers and servers, control the data zipping around the world to our smart phones, unlock our car doors and start their engines, and control the electricity flowing from power plants through the grid to consumers.
Today the main switching technologies used across these applications are electromechanical (EM) relays, invented in 1835, and solid-state / semi-conductor (SS) “chips”, developed in the 1960s and 70s. Each type has its strengths and weaknesses, and it’s safe to say that we’re long overdue for innovation in the switching space.
For example, EM switches can handle high amounts of power, and because they contain metal contacts that are either touching and conducting electricity, or separated, enabling a true “off” state, they are efficient. However, EM switches tend to be relatively large and unreliable due to their moving parts, as well as expensive.
SS switches, on the other hand, can be small, lightweight and cheap, but without moving contacts, and by definition as semi-conductors, there are losses in the on-mode and leakage in the off-mode. This drives inefficiency and requires large heatsinks to be integrated into the switching systems to regulate temperature and avoid disruption in operations.
For decades the industry has been waiting for a reliable switch that can combine the strengths of both EM and SS switches while mitigating their weaknesses. This “Ideal Switch” would be a Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) switch — a small switch mass-produced inexpensively at scale using semi-conductor fabrication processes, like an SS switch, but containing tiny physical components that move metal contacts between true “off” and “on” positions, stemming inefficiency.
Menlo Micro — The “Holy Grail” Of Switch Technology
Many efforts have been aimed at the “holy grail” of the MEMS switch over the past 50 years, including pioneering work from industrial giants such as IBM, Analog Devices, Raytheon and Rockwell Science. In 2004, General Electric (GE) took up the challenge to develop a MEMS switch to improve performance in pieces of their Power Generation and Medical Equipment businesses. Work continued through 2016, and as success on the horizon became clearer, GE realized the market for this technology would be far greater than the products it produced internally, and so in 2016 the company was spun out as an independent startup — Menlo Micro.
At the end of 2019, Menlo Micro cleared the last key technical hurdle to commercialize its revolutionary MEMS switch, and customers are beating down their doors. The company’s products can be 99% smaller and lighter, 99% more energy-efficient, and up to 1000x faster and longer-lasting than what they are replacing. These eye-popping improvements are usually seen only in the digital world and finding such a breakthrough within the electrical world is extremely rare and exciting. Think of LEDs replacing incandescent lights, but orders of magnitude more improvement.
Piva is thrilled to be co-investing into the company’s Series B with a global cast of incredible deep tech investors including Tony Fadell — renowned engineer and investor largely known for being the “father of the iPod” — who has been following this technology since he wished he could source it as a co-founder of Nest Labs.
“Bennett and the Piva team understand the complexities and technical challenges companies face taking new technology to market,” said Russ Garcia, CEO at Menlo Micro. “Their industry knowledge and network are invaluable resources as we set out to impact the electrification of everything.”
We are looking forward to working with the entire team at Menlo Micro and it will be a true pleasure to watch this breakthrough technology flow into and improve our industrial world.
