Philadelphia, PA - Feb 9, 2023
Are you interested in hearing our CEO & Co-founder, Thomas Castner, speak on The
Deep Tech show? He shares insights about building FlashPCB, future plans for the
company, and the career transitions that led him here.
Watch now:
FlashPCB Awarded Competitive Grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation
R&D funding accelerates the translation of results to impact
Philadelphia, PA - Oct 28, 2022
FlashPCB has been awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Small
Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $256,000 to conduct research and
development (R&D) work on improvements to the current printed circuit board
assembly (PCBA) prototyping process through an AI-powered component selection
algorithm. The PCBA prototyping market has barriers, including long lead times
and high costs which can limit the number of iterations of a design. Our service
addresses each barrier, creating a domestic, economical prototyping service that
delivers high quality boards and enables faster and more frequent iteration on
designs. This will increase economic competitiveness and foster innovation in
the United States.
“FlashPCB’s service has the opportunity to revolutionize the way engineers
approach prototyping and designing PCBs. We aim to make releasing boards for
manufacturing as easy as saving your CAD files. The NSF’s SBIR program allows
us to take deep risks in our research and development process,” says CEO
Thomas Castner, “these risks allow us to take a novel approach to
manufacturing in an industry that is critical to high tech, national security
and healthcare sectors of our economy.”
All proposals submitted to the NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s
Seed Fund powered by NSF, undergo a rigorous merit-based review process. Once a
small business is awarded a Phase I grant, it becomes eligible to apply for
Phase II funding and additional supplements totaling up to $1.7 million. To get
started, startups or entrepreneurs submit a written Project Pitch to see if
their technology idea could be a good fit for the program. To learn more about
America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit:
https://seedfund.nsf.gov/.
NSF has several programs that help accelerate the translation of research
results to practice and provide pathways for researchers, startups and aspiring
entrepreneurs to move their ideas from the laboratory to the market and society.
To learn more about how NSF helps unlock future technologies for national and
societal impact, visit:
https://beta.nsf.gov/tip/latest.
About the U.S. National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs:
America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards more than $200 million annually to
startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products
and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost
all areas of science and technology can receive up to $2 million to support
research and development, helping de-risk technology for commercial success.
America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business
Innovation Research program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a
budget of about $8.8 billion that supports fundamental research and education
across all fields of science and engineering.
Philadelphia, PA - Oct 19, 2022
Did you miss our CEO & Co-founder, Thomas Castner, at the Hardware Meetup at
NextFab? He will walk you through the story of the board that inspired the
creation of FlashPCB.
Watch now: