Recent Runner Up in MIT's $100K Competition Aims to Improve Internal
Combustion Engine Fuel Efficiency by 250%
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 23 /PRNewswire/ -- LiquidPiston today announced
that it closed its first venture capital investment round with Adams
Capital Management and Northwater Capital. The company is developing a new
Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) that exploits heretofore untapped
thermodynamic design space in one of the industrial age's oldest and
largest markets.
A runner up in MIT's 2004 Entrepreneurship Competition, LiquidPiston
has come a long way from its early beginnings in inventor Nik Shkolnik's
garage. Earlier this year, the company announced a $70,000 Phase I grant
from the Army Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The
father-son team led by immigrant physicist Nikolay and his son Alexander
Shkolnik, a graduate student in MIT's department of Electrical Engineering
& Computer Science, will use this latest $1.25 million seed round of
venture capital to build and test a working prototype.
"The potential of this technology is tremendous, and the interest we
are seeing from both the public and private sectors is very encouraging,"
said Dr. Ed Crow, retired senior vice president of Pratt & Whitney and an
advisor to LiquidPiston. "With this latest round of investment,
LiquidPiston is on its way to achieving its goal of revolutionizing the
$250 billion market for internal combustion engines."
With an architecture that is inherently scaleable from lawnmowers to
locomotives and efficiencies that may someday put the 100 mile per gallon
automobile within reach, LiquidPiston hopes to breathe new life into the
ICE business, which is coming under increasing pressure due to both
environmental and energy security concerns. Founder Nik Shkolnik noted,
"Most of this technology could have been manufactured in the 1920's, but
our new engine would have been impossible to design without today's
advanced computer-aided simulation and design tools."
Aside from significant improvements in fuel efficiency, LiquidPiston's
approach to ICE design has the potential to result in a substantially
higher power-to-weight ratio, fewer moving parts leading to higher
reliability and lower maintenance costs, and significantly lower emissions.
The company expects to demonstrate a working prototype in the next 18 to 24
months.
About LiquidPiston
LiquidPiston, Inc. is a seed-stage development company whose
revolutionary new internal combustion engine design has been recognized by
MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, MIT Enterprise Forum Ignite Clean
Energy Competition, and GE's ECOnomics Environmental Business Plan
Challenge. LiquidPiston's patented technology has broad applicability
across numerous markets and applications and can be designed to run on a
wide variety of fuel types, including ethanol, bio-diesel and hydrogen.
For more information, please see http://www.liquidpiston.com.
About Adams Capital
Established in 1994, Adams Capital Management (ACM) is a national
venture capital firm with $807 million under management. ACM is a lead
Series A investor that is noted for its industry and operations expertise
in the information technology, networking infrastructure and semiconductor
industries. ACM's discontinuity-driven investment strategy targets emerging
growth companies with disruptive technologies that yield innovative
products with the potential to define and dominate their product
categories. ACM is a proud sponsor of the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship
Competition. For more information visit http://www.acm.com.
About Northwater Capital
Northwater Capital Inc. is a leading investment management company,
wholly owned by its employees. Northwater manages over US $9.5 billion in
assets, applying innovative investment strategies and sophisticated
proprietary software in assisting major institutions to build optimal
portfolios. In particular, Northwater applies the sciences of advanced
finance and systems engineering toward the objective of delivering highly
diversified market returns plus robust alpha.
For more information please see http://www.northwatercapital.com.
SOURCE LiquidPiston, Inc.
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Related links:
http://www.liquidpiston.com
http://www.acm.com http://www.northwatercapital.com
CONTACT:
Sarah Mees of KMC Partners Public Relations,
+1-617-682-3759, sarah@kmcpartners.com, for LiquidPiston, Inc.
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