Everyone knows that sinking feeling: running out of storage space.
It turns out that rapidly growing volumes of digital data are causing the same problem globally, and Dana Biechele-Speziale, armed with an Ivy League doctorate in chemistry, is planning to fix it.
Her company, AtomICs, is storing data and information on small molecules rather than on traditional transistors or magnetic-based features such as those in hard drives.
“We were the first and only company in small-molecule data storage,” Biechele-Speziale told the Business Journal two days after receiving a Business Journal Innovator of the Year Award Sept. 10.
She says the two traditional data storage methods are reaching their capacity limit.
Biechele-Speziale’s early-stage startup has already hauled in $2.6 million in financing, including $1.9 million in small business funds from a U.S. Army competition.
‘Spun Out’ from Brown University
Biechele-Speziale has a PhD in chemistry from Brown University, where the company was established in 2022 and “spun out” a year later. She founded AtomICs with fellow Brown chemistry PhD Selahaddin Gumus, who is now the company’s CTO.
The startup is located at UCI Research Park, 5270 California Ave. in Irvine, and has captured various awards, including $50,000 from a Baylor University competition.
“I couldn’t have predicted that this is how it would be going just three years later,” the CEO said. “It’s fun to look back and see the progress.”
The CEO foresees three stages for her molecule-based system, starting with data-filled molecular labels and eventually holding huge troves of data:
– Short-term: anti-counterfeiting, being able to label items such as identifying documents and pharmaceuticals with information that doesn’t need to be tied to an electronic device.
– Medium term: labeling for advanced logistics and supply chain.
– Long-term vision: business-scale data storage.
‘Entire Digital Universe’
Solving data storage challenges for the long term would be game-changing.
The small molecules “could allow us to one day take the entire digital universe, that currently occupies thousands of acres of land in data centers worldwide, and condense it into the size of a small room,” according to Brown University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship.
For those who have forgotten their high school chemistry, a molecule is a group of two or more tiny atoms, which are the building blocks of all matter.
The company seeks “to revolutionize the way digital data is stored through small molecules,” according to the Brown center.
Biechele-Speziale and Gumus co-founded the company with Brown professors Brenda Rubenstein and Jacob Rosenstein.
AtomICs says it can store data at room temperature, a far cry from today’s water- and electricity-guzzling data centers that need to be kept cool at all times and at all costs.
Edible Molecules
“Because we can use molecules that are edible, we can directly label pill formulations with our molecular tags so we can be sure that they’re not counterfeit,” according to the CEO.
Molecular information can also be invisible to the human eye and can be printed onto any object or surface.
“Things like clothing, plastics, metals, you name, we can deposit molecular information on that,” according to Biechele-Speziale. “The information does not have to live online in a database, but it can if you want to link it to digital solutions as well. But the information travels on the object itself.”
That provides its usefulness for anti-counterfeiting for example.
