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Gov. Steve Beshear recently announced Louisville-based NaugaNeedles LLC will create seven new high-tech and technical support jobs, paying an average annual salary of more than $62,000, exclusive of benefits.
NaugaNeedles is a supplier of high-performance, cost-efficient custom probes for use in scanning probe microscopy, as well as for nano-force and nano-bio sensors in research and industrial applications. The company was founded in July 2007 to develop and commercialize a platform technology discovered at the University of Louisville’s Electro Optics Research Institute and Nanotechnology Center.
“NaugaNeedles shows how Kentucky’s high-tech companies are making huge impacts in leading-edge science and technologies, including those too small to be seen with the naked eye,” said Gov. Beshear. “The ability of this technology to probe inside objects as small as a single cell will facilitate new advances in areas such as medicine and advanced materials and manufacturing.”
A client of the Louisville Innovation and Commercialization Center, NaugaNeedles received preliminary approval by the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority for up to $100,000 to assist in purchasing high-tech laboratory and nano-fabrication equipment. The company, which currently employs five full-time employees, has developed a variety of patented, specialized probes (NeedleProbes TM) as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. To put that in perspective, the period at the end of this sentence is approximately one million nanometers in diameter. NeedleProbesTM are used for scanning probe microscopy, a technique that forms an image of a specimen by mechanically moving a probe across its surface.
“The early-stage funding we’ve received through Kentucky’s SBIR-STTR Matching Funds Program, and now through the state’s High-Tech Investment Pool, has been crucial to our ability to develop and begin marketing our technology,” said NaugaNeedles CEO Mehdi Yazdanpanah. “Kentucky offers one of the nation’s most comprehensive sets of support programs for high-tech companies like NaugaNeedles, and that is paying off as we continue to grow and create higher paying jobs.”
The project is being funded by the Cabinet for Economic Development’s High-Tech Investment Pool, which is used to support technology-based and research-intensive companies and projects in the Commonwealth. Kentucky’s statewide network of six Innovation and Commercialization Centers (ICCs), including the Louisville ICC, and seven Innovation Centers (ICs), provides locally accessible, business-building consulting and related services to the state’s high-tech entrepreneurs and inventors.
Information on Kentucky’s economic development efforts and programs is available at www.ThinkKentucky.com.
About the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development
The Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development is the primary state agency in Kentucky responsible for creating new jobs and new investment in the state. New business investment in Kentucky in 2009 totaled nearly $ 977 million with the creation of more than 6,600 new jobs. Information on available development sites, workforce training, incentive programs, community profiles, small business development and other resources is available at www.ThinkKentucky.com.
