The story of Spacetek

At Swisscom Ventures, we prioritize partnering with innovative companies at the forefront of technological advancements. One such company is Spacetek Technology AG, a leader in bringing space technology to industrial applications. In this interview, we speak with Maximilian Rothenberger, the CEO of Spacetek Technology AG, about the journey of his company, their groundbreaking products, and the impact of their partnership with Swisscom Ventures.

Maximilian shares insights into their focus on semiconductor manufacturing, the unique story behind Spacetek, and their vision for the future.

What is Spacetek Technology AG?

We leverage our expertise to design and build time-of-flight mass spectrometers (TOF-MS) bringing space technology to Earth. Our instruments are compact, and robust in hazardous environments and get the leading edge to industrial process analyses. 

Our focus lies on semiconductor manufacturing and the issues of process engineers at end-users (foundries) and OEMs (wafer fab equipment). Our products redefine real-time analysis of gases and enable higher process efficiency with lower scrap rates and therefore better overall yields.

Even though Spacetek Technology only exists since 2018, the core team brings decades of experience in creating instruments for space missions such as Rosina/Rosetta, IBEX, BELA or JUICE (where the team built a special instrument which was part of the particle environment package). Spacetek’s founder, Jürg Jost, received a special award of recognition from ESA for our work.

Due to the long-standing experience in this field, Spacetek Technology is still active today by working on two upcoming space missions that will explore the moon’s surface.

What’s the mission of Spacetek? 

We want to be the leading provider of in-situ process analytics to semiconductor manufacturing. We aim to support our customers to avoid production waste and to increase manufacturing efficiency. In my opinion, this aligns very nicely with the values and aspirations of our founding team. All of us are very proud of the technology leadership we developed over decades, bringing mass spectrometry to the masses fulfills each one of us with great satisfaction. Finally, our products are designed and assembled in Gümligen, so we also carry a part of Switzerland and its values to the world.

What’s the gap in the market you aim to address? 

We aim to provide our customers transparency and the ability to make fast decisions in their production processes. Due to the real-time insights from our sensor and analytics platform into different manufacturing steps, we support our customers in reducing costly and unnecessary production waste. This helps not only to improve their profitability but also helps to lower their environmental footprint as they use fewer materials for the same output. Competitive solutions today all fail to provide these production insights comprehensively, meaning that you might be able to gain insights offline (often taking hours or days to provide actionable results) or due to new manufacturing technologies you couldn’t obtain any reliable signal at all.

From the idea to the project:

On Selecting the right partners to found the company;

Our company was founded by a rather large initial group from the university ecosystem in Berne. The team members combine a wide range of disciplines centered around physics and electrical engineering. Most prominently, the core members are Jürg Jost, Dr. Lukas Hofer, and Prof. Dr. Peter Wurz. If we want to be bold, we could say that Spacetek is for mass spectrometry what SpaceX is for commercial space travel. We took an established measurement principle and redesigned the instrument to be the most compact and robust, ready to scale in an industrial environment.

How was the initial idea of the company conceived?

We are proud to be a part of the Swiss ecosystem and of the University of Bern spin-off projects. Within the Institute of Space Research and Planetary Sciences, the founding team met and ultimately started the company as it is today. In the beginning, the playing field was very wide as the team knew that they wanted to commercialize the world’s most compact and robust mass spectrometer. The experience in space was a big advantage for that. From early concepts which were focusing on the analysis of liquids, the team ultimately hit its sweet spot in analysis residual gases in industrial processes.

Regarding the early stages of the company, how was the process of creating the first prototype and securing initial funding?

The initial launch of the company aimed to complete the transition from academia to business operations. Furthermore, a key challenge in the early days was certainly to find the right market niche to tackle first. The market in general terms for compact and robust mass spectrometers goes way beyond semiconductor manufacturing. Building a serious market presence in several markets at once would have required too much capital. Once the team identified and agreed on semiconductor manufacturing it was a key milestone to complete the product design for our initial prototype. Until the end of last year when we were able to close our seed-round together with leading institutional investors such as Swisscom Ventures, it ultimately ended our short-term funding challenges and allowed the team to work more structured towards a business plan.

What impact has your company had on its industry?

If we are talking about innovation impact, I would say we can already report that we successfully raised interest with globally leading manufacturing companies. It seems that our core vision addresses a substantial pain point of our customers. Of course, as a young company, we must earn the trust of our partners and hence we are still heavily working on the commercial impact. I would suggest we follow up on our conversation today in about 12 to 24 months and see where we stand.

On the importance of having a value creation partner as an investor:

We are incredibly happy to have met Pär Lange and Victoria Lietha from Swisscom Ventures. They are the ones that helped our company professionalize our governance structures, provide us with a vast network of contacts, and are extremely helpful in giving Spacetek the capital strength we need to scale up our operations.

Right now, we are early in our growth spurt which comes with the first larger commercial contracts, but it certainly becomes visible what “scaling” a business means in terms of speed, structure, and capital. We believe that due to our partners at Swisscom Ventures and the Moonshot Fund of Spectrum Value Management, we have the right team to tackle this challenge together.

How does the future look for Spacetek?

We are fully focused on completing our key pilot installations in Asia. Each of these projects have taught us fundamental details which we are integrating in our product as we speak. Over the course of this year, we aim to double our team in size by extending capacity with our development teams as well as growing our field resources locally in Korea and Taiwan. Finally, I believe that we are looking to raise our Series A towards the beginning of next year.

Max’s insights provide a captivating look into Spacetek Technology AG’s journey from academic roots to becoming a leader in industrial process analytics. By pushing the boundaries with their groundbreaking mass spectrometers, and focusing on enhancing efficiency and sustainability in semiconductor manufacturing, Spacetek is poised to make significant impacts across the industry. We eagerly anticipate their continued progress and future innovations.