Pragmatic appoints Erik Langaker as Chair of the Board to support increasing scale of business
Plus over £13 million additional funding to fuel continued expansion towards Pragmatic’s vision of a trillion connected objects
PragmatIC, a world leader in flexible electronics, has appointed Erik Langaker as independent Chair to complement its existing strong Board of Directors. This appointment comes alongside additional funding of over £13 million to support ongoing production ramp-up, accelerate manufacturing optimisation and drive continued product innovation.
Erik Langaker has an extensive background of developing and commercialising technology businesses, with 30 years’ international experience in private equity and entrepreneurial ventures. He has been an active investor and Chair, or Board Director, in 25 companies. Many are in complementary sectors to PragmatIC, such as his current Chair position at Kezzler AS whose patented item-level serialisation technology helps brands combat counterfeit goods, eliminate unauthorised distribution, and improve consumer engagement. As Chair of CMR Surgical Ltd, he helped raise more than £250 million, leading them to an increase in valuation from £30 million to well over £1 billion while the number of employees increased from around 40 to nearly 500. He brings extensive experience in chairing public companies, most recently as Chair of European R&D engineering company Data Respons ASA which was sold to AKKA Technologies SE.
Mr Langaker will also invest his own funds in the Company’s current funding round.
Scott White, CEO of PragmatIC, commented: “We are delighted to welcome Erik to the Board. He brings us valuable experience alongside market-relevant knowledge at a pivotal time, as we scale the business towards our vision of a trillion flexible integrated circuits.”
Erik Langaker said: “I am honoured to join PragmatIC and its talented team of innovators at such an exciting time as they are poised to disrupt the electronics industry as well as the supply side of many consumer goods industries. With an increasing focus on and need for a circular economy and transparent supply chains, PragmatIC is ‘just in time’ in bringing a cost effective and highly scalable solution to the market. Opportunities in RFID alone have the potential to exceed a trillion units, and I can see immediate possibilities across healthcare, logistics and retail just from within my own network of contacts.”
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About Pragmatic Semiconductor
Pragmatic Semiconductor is a leader in semiconductor innovation, creating ultra low cost, ultra thin, flexible integrated circuits (‘electronic chips’).
Pragmatic’s chip is produced without silicon, using thin-film semiconductors to create flexible integrated circuits that are thinner than a human hair, and are significantly cheaper and faster to produce than silicon chips. This provides a compelling alternative for many mainstream electronics applications, as well as enabling new applications not possible with silicon.
Pragmatic’s chips can be embedded into almost anything, bringing connectivity and intelligence to everyday objects. Example applications include radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communications (NFC) giving objects unique digital identities as well as enabling objects to interact with their environment. This has benefits across the entire product lifecycle, including inventory reduction, traceability, counterfeit detection, proof of provenance, and customer interaction. Pragmatic’s technology can also be used to help reduce food waste, improve the return and recycling of singleuse packaging, and enable item-level traceability within a universal system for recapture, sorting, cleaning, and return.
Our foundry service uniquely allows agile hardware design, exponentially accelerating solution development and time-to-market. Examples include proprietary RFID protocols, time/temperature indicators, fingerprint sensors, wearable smart patches for healthcare, flexible display drivers, and novel microprocessor architectures.
We also offer a Fab-as-a-Service model that enables secure, dependable, localised semiconductor supply through manufacturing directly on a customer’s site. This highly scalable distributed production allows cost effective, high-volume fabrication of flexible integrated circuits.
Pragmatic is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with our first fab operating in Sedgefield, and a second fab under construction at our new 15-acre Pragmatic Park site in Durham.
For more information please contact pr@pragmaticsemi.com