GVD Corporation

HILTON PRYCE LEWIS: My name is Hilton Pryce Lewis. And I'm the President of GVD Corporation. GVD corporation is a company that was founded on MIT technology. I was a student at MIT, graduated with my PhD in 2001 from the Department of Chemical Engineering. I worked with Dr. Gleason in the department. And together, we started the company shortly before I graduated.

We started the company because Karen had developed what I thought was a very interesting and commercially practical process for producing polymer coatings. Polymer's a very widely used class of materials that's used in all applications ranging from very fine nylon fibers to bulletproof Kevlar. And the process that she had developed was a way of making extremely thin coatings of polymers using a method called vapor deposition.

Vapor deposition is essentially forming a solid coating from a gas phase using typically chemical reactions. But most of the materials that were deposited by this process were inorganics, that is metals, oxides, ceramics. What we did was to adapt the process and tweak the process in order to produce polymer coatings. So that was a unique embodiment of an existing process.

The key advantages of a process like vapor deposition are it's a highly controlled process. It's a way of making very pure, very thin, very controllable materials on a micron or even a nanometer scale. And that contrasted sharply with the typical processes used to produce polymer coatings. Polymers are traditionally manufactured in bulk chemical synthesis routes. And these are typically wet approaches that involve gallons of material. And one thing you need to do is control very carefully the chemical reaction.

Unfortunately, on the flip side, when you want to try to produce a coating from such a material, most of the processes that were in use when we started were traditional what we call spray and bake processes. That means you would take that bulk material that you had manufactured. And you would, essentially, dissolve it or mix it into a solution, spray it on, and then bake the resulting coating to form your final product.

And that in itself is a fairly crude process. Many of the coatings produced that way need to be baked at a very high temperature, which creates a potential degradation opportunity for the parts that you are trying to coat. And also, even if you are able to produce a nice uniform coating, controlling the thickness and controlling the finish on the product is very difficult.

So what we really did was to combine the method of vapor deposition that was currently in use to produce metals, oxides, and ceramics with the necessary chemistry and changes to the process to produce polymer coatings. And this involved, essentially, increasing the level of chemistry that was done using the right kind of precursors, and most importantly, using gentle process conditions when we made the coatings. And so part of one of the many meanings of the company GVD is gentle vapor deposition, a way of making polymer coatings that subverts the traditional methods of vapor deposition.

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HILTON PRYCE LEWIS: One of the key benefits of our process is the ability to coat things that you could otherwise not coat before. So, for instance, rubbers and plastics and organic pots that you would like to produce a coating on, traditionally, very difficult to coat, either with conventional vapor deposition, which uses high temperatures, high powers, or with your traditional polymer coating approach, which uses high-curing temperatures.

And so what we've been able to do is open up a whole universe of things that you would otherwise struggle to coat with a polymer coating. Things like textiles, paper, rubbers, particularly rubbers used in seals and gaskets and items like that, sensors that would otherwise-- the function would be diminished by exposure. We have a principal product, and the first product that we developed and have profitably commercialized, is basically a fluoropolymer coating. The official name is polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, but it's very widely known by its DuPont trademark of Teflon.

So this is a product that we've spent, now, a decade and a half developing, and has commercial applications. And we run a service business where we provide coatings in certain applications. And that has really gotten us up as a company. That's generated a nice commercial base for the company. Most importantly, that's demonstrated the commercial value and the commercial applicability.

Some of the things that we're working on, right now, are additional coating functionalities that really go significantly beyond the basic product. One example is a coating that's able to, we believe, solve a long-standing problem in downhill drilling and oil and gas exploration, which is that seals that are used in those types of applications, when they go down to the distances and the temperatures and the pressures that are customary, you get a breakdown of the seal due to the infusion of gases.

And the same problem, by the way, plagues of the issue of fuel cells, where hydrogen distribution stations, it's very challenging to keep a seal for the long term. They tend to break down. And nobody wants hydrogen spilling out everywhere, all over the United States.

So we have developed a coating that has some barrier capability. And the idea is to use this on seals and gaskets. By necessity, it needs to be flexible, so a polymer is the right type of application space. And the idea is to coat the seals and gaskets and prevent that kind of infusion of gases.

We have another very interesting area of exploration that we've been looking at for years, which is in conducting polymer coatings. So these are polymer coatings that intrinsically conduct electricity. So they're not filled with anything, but they conduct electricity. And there's a tremendous number of applications for these types of coatings.

You've got all the way from solar cells through to sensing-- a variety of different sensing capabilities. You have the ability to produce dynamic heating by putting current through the materials. And so I think that's a space where we've only just scratched the surface of the opportunity in the applications. And that's a very interesting area that runs, in many ways, contrary to the types of coatings that we've developed before. So it gives us a nice diversity of function and performance.

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HILTON PRYCE LEWIS: I think one of the successes that I'm most proud of with the company is the closeness with which we've worked with industry partners right from the outset. So MIT and its ecosystem, the faculty, the students, the mentors, the entrepreneurs, all of the facets of MIT that make it the unique place that it is, we tried to capitalize on as much as possible. And one of those was the industry contacts that are available, both through various research programs in Dr. Gleason's lab and other labs and through organizations like the ILP.

And for us, it was very important to work directly with industry partners right from the outset. Part of the reason for that was that we've had a very, very organically grown company. So the company is not funded by a typical venture capital. We've essentially grown off of R&D funding provided largely by the federal government but a significant portion of which provided by industry partners. So industry partners have brought to us something that is tremendously valuable and goes beyond just funding and investment. And that is the validation within the market, validation of the market need.

When you have a platform technology like ours, one of the biggest challenges is trying to identify the application or the trajectory that you should be focusing on. And by having our industry partners be open and clear with us about what their needs are and then dedicating resources to testing our coatings, qualifying our coatings, giving us fairly open and honest advice about their expectation of manufacturing and quality standards, we've been able to build basically a very credible business case right from the outset.

And if the application wasn't a good fit, then we were able to identify that and save ourselves lots of time, effort, and frustration. So I think we would not be and would not have been in the position we were to capitalize on that if we weren't coming out from this milieu of industry academic entrepreneurial activity. I think that that was, not only was that a beneficial in tangible terms connecting us with the people we needed to meet, but I think the overall philosophy that that allowed us to engage in with the company was also important.

MIT is a place, MIT and its surrounding ecosystem is a place that expects you to keep learning, expects you to seek new frontiers, and, frankly, take risks. And that's something that we could do comfortably within that ecosystem. So just being guided by that philosophy, I think, was really helpful in allowing us to set out on our own in the way that we did and attempt, essentially, a kind of Darwinian evaluation of the applications that were available to us. We didn't pick something necessarily upfront. We allowed our industry partners to help us to pick that.

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