The following interview is a conversation we had with Patrick Heissler, CEO of Scrona, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15.5M Raised to Transform High-Precision Manufacturing with Next-Gen Printing Technology
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode.
Brett
Hey everyone and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Patrick Heissler, CEO of Scrona, a high resolution printing platform that’s raised 15.5 million in funding. Patrick, how are you?
Patrick Heissler
I’m great, thank you for having me, Brett.
Brett
No problem. Super, super excited to have you here. Let’s go ahead and jump right in. So as were talking about at the start of this conversation in the pre interview there, you did not found the company, but you are CEO today as we just said. So talk to us about this opportunity. What was it about this company that made you say, yep, that’s it, I’m going to go join a CEO and I’m going to go lead this company into the future?
Patrick Heissler
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m in the tech world since many years, bringing innovation to the market in different settings. And in around February of this year I met one of the investors of Scrona and we talked about the company and the challenges they have, the situation they’re in, the majority of the technology. And I was pretty excited about what they can achieve with the printing technology they developed at that stage. So I had a look, we had some conversations, we had some touch points over the next few months and it was very clear that this is a great opportunity we have in our hands here. But we need to get it into an industrial package.
Patrick Heissler
Going from more academic, research driven development, scale, feasibility, type of studies and products into an industrial scale product that can really be used by let’s say operators, non PhD operators in a fabric. That was kind of the situation that I found the company in with a technology that had an amazing promise for semiconductor technology, for display technology, for all kinds of manufacturing challenges we’re facing these days in the micrometer range and we need to get that out on the street. We needed to put that into a package that was really attractive to industrial customers.
Brett
What’s the key to commercializing technology like this or just technology in general? Obviously, as I’m sure you know, there’s just a lot of great technology that never makes it out of the lab, it never gets into the commercialization scale, you know, never makes it out of R and D. What’s the key to making that jump to commercialized technology?
Patrick Heissler
I think first you need a lot of luck. You need a lot of luck and you need to be at the right spot at the right time, having the right contacts to make it work. It’s not so much about your technology, maybe then just having the right contacts, being in the right place at the right time. This is number one. Number two is the ecosystem. So for a startup to push a technology into a market is pretty difficult, especially if it’s a platform technology, because you can do everything and nothing at the same time. So you need to have a compelling package that you can put on a table where, let’s say a hero customer, like an end market champion, can directly jump onto it, understands the opportunity he has there, and helps you to pull it through the whole supply chain.
Patrick Heissler
Because converting a supply chain with a new technology, you’re seeing a lot of resistance. You will face a lot of, say, mindset problems where people will have some kind of transition costs, they might bear it. They would need to take some risks to get your technology into production lines, into their product. But if you have an end market champion, if you can convince, really one of these big corporates at the very end that they will have a value out of your technology, they will pull you through.
Brett
You have another podcast called Unicorn Builders. We interview founders who built billion dollar companies. And we had the Founder of Carbon, another 3D printing company that came on and he was talking about very similar to what you just described. You know, there’s endless use cases, endless possibilities for what he could do with that technology. But their key to success, as you just said, was, you know, to really narrow that down. And I believe it was the bowling pin analogy that he used as he was describing that. And I think for them, their first, you know, kind of big one was shoes, and they found a market in shoes for you. What are you thinking in terms of markets that you’re going to invest time, energy and resources into here?
Patrick Heissler
So for us, it was quite clear that this technology enables a lot of value for customers in the semiconductor space, also in the display space, which are maybe the two markets and industries that we’re closest to, because we are coming out of this kind of semiconductor, like we as a team are coming out of this semiconductor ecosystem. So we know these companies, we know these supply chains, we have a lot of contacts, and this makes it quite easy for us to Attract it. But as a platform technology, we also are looking at life science application, for example, microfluidic applications, lab on a chip applications we’re looking at now consumer tech applications, printing antenna structures, for example. On variables where substrates are getting more complex or more sensitive, where you have topography like curved substrates. So we’re looking at all of these things.
Patrick Heissler
The point is, again, we have endless opportunities with our technology. The major point that we have to tackle now is solve a problem for a customer, create value for a customer, because that will facilitate the adoption of our technology into this supply chain.
Brett
So you just join in, you know, what do you do next? Where do you begin?
Patrick Heissler
So the first thing we did is we clearly defined a product roadmap. So I joined the company in May as a consultant, then in June as a full time CEO, then also as an investor in a couple of weeks later. The first thing we did is really fix the roadmap and get a product out. So we had the rollout of our generation 3 gen 3 8, which we call it, which is an 8 nozzle printhead, an off the shelf version of this product. We had it available in July and we rolled it out at Semicon west in San Francisco with a data sheet with something that people can take, have a look at, see the facts and can start implementing it. So this was the very first thing.
Patrick Heissler
And then have a roadmap towards higher nozzle counts, have a roadmap towards an integration pack that people can directly take and integrate into a bigger tool to use our printheads. So just defining this kind of product roadmap and timelines that help our customers really making use of the product.
Brett
Let’s talk about the marketing strategy. When it comes to technology like this, how do you go about building a marketing strategy and what does that marketing strategy look like today?
Patrick Heissler
That’s a very good question. Because I think with a very small team like ours, a marketing strategy like a full blown up marketing strategy with multiplatform advertisement of your product doesn’t necessarily make sense. We have to clearly define a couple of say value inflection points or value inflecting projects that bring us forward. I don’t necessarily need a huge project pipeline. Like it’s great if I have a lot of interest, it’s great if I have a lot of people coming in. But I want to be very selective on what we’re working on to have the highest impact on a company. And then what is important for me is also to use that and build up an ecosystem so that I can say, okay, I have these huge projects.
Patrick Heissler
We’re working on customized print heads, we’re working on customized optimize product for our customers, for the big customers. But then I don’t want to like send people away if they’re interested in the technology. So we have a strong partner with notion system that enables like smaller scale systems directly for customers that might not require this kind of immense R and D work. So I’m freeing up time at my team to really focus on value creation for our company and at the same time enable an ecosystem partner to also generate growth and value on their side with like targeted system, say smaller prototyping and small volume production opportunities or projects.
Brett
When you think about the competitive landscape, what does that competitive landscape look like?
Patrick Heissler
Today we have a couple of companies that go into the same direction as we are, but with a different approach. Meaning that our printhead is based on a semiconductor platform which is highly scalable. So we have this great MEMS platform where we can put hundreds of nozzles on the same die so it’s easily scalable right away. Our competitors that use similar technology, they typically use mechanical built glass nozzles with a much lower degree of accuracy from nozzle to nozzle and less scalability into high volume manufacturing. This is the direct competitive landscape. But I think for a company like us which really wants to change the way that manufacturing is done on a micrometer scale, we are competing more against incumbent technologies like lithography, direct laser writing, screen printing, inkjet technology.
Patrick Heissler
And we have to show people the opportunity that they have with our technology, how this is actually creating a competitive advantage for their production lines, how they can offer much more performative products to their customers.
Brett
The market category, if we think about this in terms of a line item that customers are buying. Do you want customers and do you expect customers at some point to say, oh yes, I need a high resolution printing platform that becomes a line item? You know, everyone’s going to be trying to fill that line item? Or how are you thinking about the category?
Patrick Heissler
I think high resolution printing platform fits quite well, although we might go a little bit broader and name it high accuracy printing platform since it’s not just about the resolution we have, but also the control over how much material is really put into a certain location. So we don’t necessarily need to stick with this high lateral X and Y, maybe also set resolution, but it can come down to high accuracy printing platform.
Brett
As you think ahead to 2025, which somehow it’s almost here. I feel like I don’t know about you, but for me 2024 has absolutely flowed by. As you think about 2025, what’s your top one, two, maybe three objectives that you’re going to be trying to achieve throughout the year?
Patrick Heissler
So that’s a good question. We had an all hands meeting this morning and were also looking at the calendar and like, oh, there’s so many items to tick, so many checkboxes to fill for the last five weeks of this year. So yes, 2025 is almost here for us. 2025 is a very important year. So we will have the Generation 3 platform with a hundred plus nozzles out there in Q1 of 2025. That’s our goal right now, to have that out there, including an integration pack which you can easily take and put it into a machine and directly start printing. So this is a huge step forward for the company, also for the technology itself, because we’re going to R and D and prototyping work into really volume manufacturing capable technology.
Patrick Heissler
We have a couple of relatively big projects and very big projects on our hands which will move into a qualification phase relatively soon, which will also have a huge impact on how we work with customers, the intensity we work with customers. And then we’re going through a funding round right now, which we want to close in Q1, 2025, which will again accelerate the adoption rate of the technology, but also will help us to accelerate the development of our next generation printing platform, which then will have 1000 and more nozzles on a single printhead, which will require completely new software architecture because we will need some machine learning or AI capabilities on the software to autocorrelate all of these nozzles and make sure that they print well. So it will be a huge year for Scrona.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like? You know, what will the impact be three to five years from today?
Patrick Heissler
Yeah. With the typical qualification timelines in the semiconductor industry, we’re looking at two year qualification timelines. That means starting late 2026, early 2027, we will see mass adoption of that technology in various applications in various production lines. So this will help us to actually internationalize the company and also help us to diversify into new fields. As I said at the beginning, we’re not stopping at semiconductor or display industry. We’re looking at life science applications and many more applications, automotive, consumer electronics. And that’s just starting right now. And we will see that three to five years from now, we will see a much larger platform company, a real platform company. On the way up still.
Brett
And before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders, if there’s any builders that are listening in and they just want to follow along with this journey, where should we send them? Where should they go?
Patrick Heissler
I mean, always reach out through LinkedIn. Patrick Heissler just my LinkedIn page. Reach out there. I think that building an ecosystem, building a network where you can reach out from Founder to Founder, but also throughout the industry and leverage the network is really important in getting things to the market quicker, getting also input on your product, on your developments faster. So feel free to reach out, leverage my network. I’m happy to help jump on a call and have a discussion.
Brett
Amazing. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time and look forward to having you back on in a couple of years to talk about all the success and all the traction that you’ve had.
Patrick Heissler
Thanks, Brett. It was a pleasure being here.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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