SST Gets $6.18 In Second Financing Round
"The financial backing of a premier investment group such as Beacon, and the strong support of a local VC group such as Venture Investors, validates SST's technology and market entry strategy with the Dynamic Sag Corrector (DySC- pronounced ‘disk') product", declared Dr. Deepak Divan, SST's Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
SST's DySC product has won rave reviews from end-users and experts alike, and has established a new benchmark in power quality protection. The DySC protects industrial equipment and processes from downtime that occurs as a result of poor power quality. The DySC also provides a proven platform to meet the power conditioning needs of distributed resource applications such as fuel cells and microturbines.
The DySC is protecting machinery and processes in some of the most demanding industry sectors including utility, automotive, plastics, semiconductor, food processing, industrial automation, communication, steel, and paper. DySC customers include Ford, GM, Square D, Lucent, Fort James, Applied Materials, International Rectifier, FSI, KLA Tencor, M&M Mars, Engines Inc., OTI, and LTV Copperweld.
"This round of funding will help us ‘scale-up' our manufacturing and sales operations to meet our customers' needs and to maintain our market leadership position. It will allow us to further add to our prestigious channel partners, currently Square D and Grainger, and will allow us to realize even wider product distribution," said Deepak Divan.
"SST is very clearly positioned for high growth," says John MacWilliams, a founding partner of Beacon. "As the industrial economy transitions to a digital economy based on networks, computers, and sophisticated industrial process equipment, SST's product pipeline and proprietary technology provides the power quality solutions needed by customers to protect processes from the poor power quality of the electric grid and to enhance productivity and profitability."
A study by the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs estimates annual productivity losses due to power quality problems in the US alone at over $150 billion per year. SST's proprietary DySC products specifically target this vast and essentially unserved market. Based on the market credibility and penetration that SST has achieved with severely limited resources, the company is confident that this round of funding will help to significantly accelerate its growth and will propel it into a market leadership position.
The expansion financing concludes a significant year for SST's DySC product family. A spin-off from University Wisconsin Madison's WEMPEC industrial consortium, SST began its first DySC shipments in April 1999. Recently, the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers honored SST's DySC product with a Governor's New Product Award, as part of the 31st Annual Award program. The firm took top honors among Wisconsin companies cited in 2000 for new product development.
Edited by Stephen Heiser