“We have entered the most challenging phase, ready to take on the market.”
MCD (Micro Channel Devices) has officially entered the “Early Growth” phase. A passage that coincides, also symbolically, with a relay between LIFTT and Equiter, investor & advisor in the infrastructure, research and innovation sector that will support this phase of MCD with a total investment of 1.5 million euros, which will complete the investments in technological assets and the commercial team. 500,000 euros in particular will be allocated to the testing, this fall, of the beating heart of the project, the HIP (Hot Isostatic Pressing) furnace.
LIFTT had entered MCD in 2019 as a lead investor and then involved other realities raising a total of two million euros until the start of production and the current entry of Equiter.
This is an operation entirely “made in Turin”: Equiter, like LIFTT, is an investor active mainly in the Northwest and is the expression of the three major Piedmontese Banking Foundations (Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT and Fondazione CRC) supported by the solidity of the leading banking group in Italy, Intesa Sanpaolo.
Micro Channel Devices (MCD) is a manufacturing company that is also an expression of the Piedmont territory and has often been a guest of our newsetter, where we have followed the growth path that led it to identify Factory 4. 0 where to produce and develop their PCHE (Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger), micro-channeled devices for the energy market, in Settimo Torinese, in the area renamed by that municipality to “High productivity”, because it is crossed by the High Speed line and because there are concentrated realities such as L’Oreal, Google, TIM, Pirelli.
A former disused industrial area that is reborn to new life, and that confirms LIFTT’s intuition on the intrinsic potential of territories (and people) whose ability to reinvent themselves is historically demonstrated and that once again finds confirmation in the history of this start-up.Micro Channel Devices has officially entered the “Early Growth” phase.
Everything comes from the intuition and perseverance of its founder, Alessandro Vaiarelli. MCD is also an iconic representation of the potential of synergies between the various actors involved in the economic and technological development of the Piedmont territory. From the development of the Proof of Concept, which became a research project within the Piedmontese Innovation Pole MESAP, to the involvement of the Polytechnic of Turin and the use of funds made available by the region through Finpiemonte for R&D activities, up to becoming an SME.
MCD is a spin-off of STV Italia, parent company of 5 companies that have been operating for over 40 years in the industrial photoengraving sector with production sites in Italy, France, Hungary, Romania and Brazil. Vaiarelli’s idea was to transfuse STV’s know-how into a proprietary technology for the realization of large size heat exchangers able to break a de facto monopoly in the reference market, the global one of Oil&Gas, Power Generation, Chemical processing and Industrial gases markets.
But this is not the only target: in fact, there are interesting prospects for application in the hydrogen sector, as well as the possibility of using micro-channeled devices in areas related to the ecological transition such as “carbon capture” or in applications in the field of waveguide antennas.
Alessandro Vaiarelli commented on the umpteenth progress of his business idea: “We have entered the most challenging phase, ready to face the market, thanks to the extraordinary support that has accompanied our journey so far from institutions, research organizations and investors. We are a manufacturing start-up, but with a strongly technological soul. The result of skills and expertise that are part of the history of our territory”.
