They said it was a mature market.
Innovation had plateaued. Handheld
analyzers didn't measure carbon. Yet
through our determination, innovation, and
expertise, SciAps is climbing mountains
the industry giants didn't even know
existed.
We are SciAps, founded in 2013 by Don
Sackett, Dave Day, and Gary Lortie. In only
five years we have created three
best-in-class handheld analytical
instruments for elements minerals and
compounds. The founders of this company
have been doing this for 20-plus years.
We started this company about almost five
years ago and in less than five years,
we've taken the technology leadership
position on all three key technologies:
X-ray for elemental analysis, LIBS for
elemental analysis, Raman for chemicals
and minerals and molecular analysis. The
target market for SciAps is over six
hundred million dollars and growing, with
global sales and distribution
substantially in place. Our sales ...
they double every year, and they've been
doing that for years.
The performance of the company has been
terrific, but we're not gonna sit back
and say, oh, this has been great. We've
got this great product. Our sales are
doubling. Let's, you know, let's all take
time off. We're already working on
the next generation of X-ray, the next
generation of laser, the next generation
of Raman.
We're going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to innovate products.
Customers are looking for the clear performance leader in the portable analytical markets for
chemicals, minerals, and elements. Only one
company has the best in class in all
three areas: SciAps. First of all, we have
by far, the world's best handheld LIBS
system. It's the only handheld in the
world that does carbon
analysis. You say carbon. Why carbon? Well
carbon is a critical alloying element in
stainless steels and in carbon steels, so
we have the only handheld in the world
that will quantitatively analyze carbon
and other elements in those metals. So
think about that.
Instead of sending that piece to a lab,
or dragging around a large bulky spark
optical emission system, you've now got a
handheld to do that. Now let's switch
gears. Let's go over to mining. What is
the world's most high demand element?
It's lithium, lithium batteries. Think
about it: solar, phones, computers,
everything... Lithium's everywhere. Well
there is no handheld technology, except
for ours, that can analyze lithium in the
field, lithium in soil, lithium in
brines.
So the whole mineral mining exploration
and mining and ore enrichment,
now they have a tool, instead of having
to send a material to lab and wait three
weeks for an answer, they can get it in a
few seconds. There's plenty of handheld
X-ray devices out there. What makes ours
unique? Our distributors. They come to us
and they say we have a specialty problem.
We need to analyze this and that. We need
to do aluminum alloys ten times faster
than anybody else. We need to measure
rare earth elements in soil because
certain rare earth elements are so
critical to modern electronics. We take
the analyzer, we figure out how to do it,
we write the software, and we supply it.
The other companies doing X-ray devices...
they don't do that. Why? Because for them,
X-ray is a flat market. They've been
doing it for a while. They sell them. They
service them, but it's a flat market for
them. It's not worth investing in all
these new applications. For us it's a
rapidly growing market because we've
come in with a better X-ray device.
People are switching to it. We're seeing
50 percent or 100 percent year-over-year
growth in X-rays sales, so for us,
going after all these new applications, like environmental and electronics
and other things, makes perfect sense.
Think about safety and security. We are
now introducing a whole new generation
of handheld RAMAN devices that are
great for explosives, precursors,
narcotics like opioids, heroin, cocaine, so
now with the RAMAN, we could go expand
into the whole
safety, security, government, military
defense. So you think about it with our
product portfolio, it's every
major industry. It's minerals, metals,
transportation, aerospace, pharmaceutical,
military, law enforcement... It's really
every significant market we now have one
or more products for. They said there was
no room for another player in a mature
industry.
SciAps took a new approach and redefined
the marketplace. How is SciAps out-
performing the industry giants? Three keys to this: First one is, we spend a far greater
percent of our sales on R&D than any of
our competitors. We do that because we
know we have to keep our technology at
the leading edge. Second thing is our
distribution channels. So we work very
closely with our distributors all over
the world. We don't know what their
customers need. We don't speak their
language. So we rely on those
distribution partners to say, if I had
this, I could sell this many of that, and
we deliver that for them. So because of
that approach, we've been able to really
grab the best sales channels globally.
Our sales channel in China is by far the
best distributor you'd ever find in
China. Now I would say the third thing,
which I think isn't really appreciated
as much, is based around writing apps.
Not only are we saying, okay here's
the device that will test your alloys,
your mineral samples, or your
whatever... We now have customers writing
apps so people around the world using
their devices can download those apps. So
we've sort of leveraged the whole app
culture that you see in smartphones.
Currently SciAps is headquartered in the
Boston area and has 85 employees
including territory managers in Hong
Kong, Australia, Moscow, and Holland. The
second location in the US is a
manufacturing and service facility fully
ISO certified in Laramie, Wyoming. We
started this business to be the best
handheld technology
in what I call the three pillars of
portable instrumentation: RAMAN, X-ray,
LIBS. That's what we started, and in less
than five years, we've achieved the
technology leadership in all three of
those. We see what others don't. We do what
others won't.
