Kateeva @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Kateeva™ is the inspiration of five MIT researchers who came together to turn a revolutionary invention into a revolutionary business. In early 2008, Dr. Conor Madigan and fellow co-founders Dr. Valerie Leblanc, Dr. Gerry Chen, Prof. Vladimir Bulovic, and Prof. Martin Schmidt decided to form a company to commercialize a new technology that could radically change the manufacturing of flat panel television. After making a strategic decision to base the company in California's Silicon Valley, they joined forces with final co-founder, Dr. Sass Somekh, former President of Novellus Systems and legendary Silicon Valley semiconductor equipment executive, to get the idea off the ground. With his help, the Kateeva™ concept quickly captured the imagination of top tier venture capitalists, and by June, Kateeva™ had secured a first round of funding from two venture capital firms, Sigma Partners and Spark Capital, and a strategic investor, Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates.

Today, Kateeva™ is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, and is actively developing ground-breaking manufacturing equipment for the flat panel display industry. By leveraging both their proprietary printing technology, exclusively licensed from MIT, and their world class team of display and semiconductor manufacturing experts, Kateeva™ is building equipment that will enable manufacturers to make displays that are thinner, brighter, lighter, more vivid, more power efficient, and most importantly, less expensive than what is possible today.