Funding leads Fluence Analytics to new phase

NEW ORLEANS—Back in May, Fluence Analytics said it had raised a Series A round of funding led by Energy Innovation Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in growing companies in energy innovation.

That effort signifies an overall growth period for the spin-off, which until earlier this year was known as Advanced Polymer Monitoring Technologies.

Alex Reed, Wayne Reed, Bill Bottoms and Michael Drenski founded the company as a Tulane University startup. The co-founders were employees of Tulane-PolyRMC, a research and development center active in fundamental and applied polymer research, with the exception of Bottoms, who was a Tulane board member.

As an outcome of that center, APMT originally focused on synthetic rubber applications, as well as several other types of polymers, and evolved over the years to become a manufacturer of industrial and laboratory monitoring solutions that produce continuous data streams.

The technology is cutting edge, according to CEO Alex Reed. New Orleans-based Fluence Analytics offers two product lines, ACOMP and ARGEN.

ACOMP is a smart manufacturing system that continuously analyzes polymers during production, and ARGEN is a light scattering instrument that continuously measures the pharmaceutical stability of therapeutic proteins and quality of natural and synthetic polymers under controlled stressor conditions.

Combined with proprietary analytical tools, the confluence of data from Fluence's measurements enable real-time optimization leading to improved process control and faster R&D for polymer and biopharmaceutical manufacturers. The firm claimed these products help users optimize efficiency, cost and quality of manufacturing and research and development processes.

Analysis of the real-time data generated by the company's products allows customers to produce materials at the lowest cost with the highest quality and yield, all while minimizing environmental footprint. That is exactly the type of innovation that helped to attract the Series A funding that will help the company's growth efforts, Alex Reed said.

Alex is the son of Wayne Reed, and he chuckles when reminded of the fact that there is a bit of a family element to the growing business.

Wayne Reed is quick to credit Bottoms, a former electrical engineering faculty member at Princeton University, and Drenski, who is both the company's chairman and chief technology officer.

But Alex Reed admits that being in management for a business along with his father is rewarding, especially because he began "working" in his father's laboratories on campus when he was 12 years old.

"It is special to have this opportunity together to turn ideas into reality, said Alex Reed, a Tulane graduate.

Rebranding effort

When Fluence Analytics spun off in 2012, and eventually evolved in recent years, it focused on industrial and laboratory monitoring solutions for the biopharmaceutical and polymer fields, two areas that remain the company's target markets today. The company focused on expanding its R&D capabilities once technologies were validated and vetted, Alex Reed said.

The company rebranded from APMT to Fluence Analytics earlier this year to emphasize its focus on continuous process analytics and to better reflect its vision for the future of polymer and biopharmaceutical manufacturing, he added.

"It is important that we match up with what our customers need our solutions to be," Alex Reed said. "We have been focusing on commercial exposure."

Given that the technology is still new and unknown to many in the marketplace, he said it can be a longer sales process because of the product education involved in the sale. His team understands that it offers new technology and a different approach that appeals to those prospects in the two targeted industries that appreciate the innovative nature of the solutions and the available optimization they offer.

Given that the chemical industry in particular is "conservative," Alex Reed and his team expect many questions from prospects before a sale is made.

"We look at the data that (prospects) will present to us and attempt to optimize it so they can see the value," Alex Reed said. "Both are industries where the decision makers have to check a lot of boxes before they agree to try something new and different."

Whatever the company is doing is working. While Alex Reed declined to provide details on company revenue or the amount of Series A funding raised, he said the company has roughly doubled its work force and seen revenues rise by about 300 percent since 2014.

And he still considers Fluence Analytics to be in a start-up phase as the company looks to expand its reach into data and analytics, utilizing the data to optimize polymer properties and creating a number of new measurements and analyses.

The Series A funding round also included participation from other investors. Fluence Analytics has 36 issued and pending patents, and its products and services were developed with more than $20 million in competitive grants and funding from investors and customers. The new funding will support a new level of R&D and partnerships with customers in a range of applications.

"We have a very good technology road map that we are executing," Alex Reed said. "It includes adding elements of visualization and correlating process data to critical parameters."