Southampton, UK, December 3, 2012: Bac2, the polymer materials company, has secured a further £312,500 investment in an over-subscribed funding round led by Fair-Lead Partners. The capital raised will support fast-growing demand for the company’s award-winning CSR family of latent acid catalysts. Existing private investors provided most of the new money.
The investment comes after Bac2 successfully re-directed its product and market strategy in 2011, moving away from producing components for emerging fuel cell applications and focusing instead on the development of latent acid catalysts that deliver benefits in established, high volume manufacturing sectors.
The patent-pending CSR catalysts were originally created to improve productivity in Bac2’s own polymer manufacturing processes but it soon became clear that they had global market appeal in a wide variety of manufacturing processes including those for wood products, abrasives and sheet or bulk moulded composites (SMC and BMC).
CSR catalysts extend the storage life of pre-polymeric mixes from minutes or hours to several months, simplifying storage, transportation and materials handling. They activate at up to 30°C lower temperatures than other catalysts, delivering significant energy savings, and process efficiency improvements of over 100% have been demonstrated in pultrusion. The catalysts also enable the manufacture of inherently flame-retardant mouldings by facilitating the production of stable phenolic and furan-based pre-polymeric mixes.
Commenting on the success of the funding round, Bac2’s CEO, Mike Stannard, said, “The confidence that our investors and directors have shown in our business has been inspired by the accelerating demand for CSR catalysts across the world. We now have customers in Asia, Europe and North and South America and the substantial process improvements that they can realise by using our products will ensure that we build strong commercial success upon the technical innovations we are now delivering to the market.”
