Portrait No. 001
Cara Beasley
Founder, CEO
Pyrois Nanotechnology Inc
Carbon nanotubes have failed spectacularly many times both in startups and big companies, yet they remain the best material for enabling a number of semiconductor applications including truly monolithic 3D integrated devices. Their failures can be tracked back to a lack of commercially available material that is suitable for nano electronic applications. Current growths fail to provide the purity, quality, and aligned density required for advanced devices. This is where Pyrois Nanotechnology comes in, I have been fascinated and passionate about growing carbon nanotubes since an undergrad class in 2005 and through graduate school. I have built a lab in my garage to explore the fundamentals of carbon nanotube growth and reactor design. Between my carbon nanotube growth knowledge and my semiconductor equipment experience I am uniquely suited to crack the code on carbon nanotube growth and provide high quality nanotubes at industrially relevant scales for the semiconductor industry.
In her words
“Between my carbon nanotube growth knowledge and my semiconductor equipment experience I am uniquely suited to crack the code on carbon nanotube growth and provide high quality nanotubes at industrially relevant scales for the semiconductor industry.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
The toughest challenge I have faced as a founder is figuring out how I fit in the ecosystem. I love lab work, but I need the freedom to drive and manage my own projects. An academic role holds no appeal to me, but that is where some say my work is best suited. Big companies were also not a good fit. Getting into the Activate fellowship with my first startup was game changing. The fellowship teaches scientists to be entrepreneurs and helps them become good company executives. One of the things I learned during this program is that I don’t enjoy being a traditional startup executive, my passion and excellence is in making magic happen in the lab. This was particularly clear when founder drama lead to me leaving my Activate company and starting over with a lab in my garage. Building a new CVD system allowed me to start from scratch and design a system based on the best practices I had learned at Applied Materials and through gas flow simulations, rather than just copying what had been done previously in academic labs. It also allowed me to develop tools to monitor growth conditions in real time to provide better control and reproducibility. Building my new CVD system reignited my passion for carbon nanotube growth and being a founder. Now it is time to figure out how I fit in the startup space while doing what I love and continuing to balance life, work, and being a mom.
Chapter II
Your vision.
Carbon nanotubes are the material of the future and will continue to be a just a hope for the future until there is a reliable commercial supply of high quality, high purity semiconductor relevant carbon nanotubes. Many applications for high quality carbon nanotubes have been proposed including enabling new chip architectures, flexible electronics, biosensors, and radiation hard devices, but none have yet been realized. In order to reliably produce device quality carbon nanotubes at an industrially relevant scale you must fundamentally understand carbon nanotube growth and the factors that impact and control it. By focusing on understanding and consistently controlling carbon nanotube growth Pyrois Nanotechnology will enable a step change in nano electronic devices, flexible electronics, and applications that have not yet been imagined. Carbon nanotubes will finally be able to start fulfilling their decades of promise and enable better technology for people around the world.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I hope that my work on the Activate selection committee to help ensure that women applicants are not unfairly excluded helps achieve a future where it is no longer surprising to see women in science, as founders, or as executives. I hope to demonstrate that not only can women succeed in these fields but that there are many paths to success. Cracking the code and making carbon nanotubes devices a reality will not only improve technology and lives but it will also demonstrate that problems that have been deemed too hard or impossible are achievable with perseverance and creativity.