Using SciArt’s software makes the process easier and faster and results in a higher-quality part, Rai-Marchant said.
Launching the business
The software was developed in the lab of UW-Madison professor Krishnan Suresh, who would co-found the company with Praveen Yadav, a doctoral student at the time.
Instead of searching for a job to research the same kind of technology when he graduated, Yadav signed on to launch the company.
“It seemed like a good opportunity to venture into entrepreneurship and see if there’s a market for the technology that we developed,” Yadav said. “We saw a gap in the solutions, we built the technology at university, and then we started up a business to commercialize the technology.”
High-profile organizations have seen some promise in SciArt. The company was awarded about $223,000 from the National Science Foundation through the federal Small Business Innovation Research program. It also received $75K in matching funds from Wisconsin’s SBIR Advance program.
In 2019, the company joined the first cohort of Techstar’s Starburst Space Accelerator, which led to a contract with Mitre, a nonprofit that manages federally funded research and development centers in the U.S.