OrganicID Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Tech Startup of the Month - Company Profile

Where: Colorado Springs

www.organicid.com

Founded: December 2003

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

While working in 2002 for ITU Ventures, a Los Angeles-based VC fund specializing in technology transfer, Jon Barad began discussing a radio frequency identification (RFID) venture with Colorado Springs-based entrepreneur Klaus Dimmler. "Together we came up with the concept of developing a fully printable RFID tag," said Barad. "It wasn't a new concept, but what was new was our commercializing the concept."

Dimmler and Barad found Dr. Ananth Dodabalapur of University of Texas at Austin, an organic technology guru, and discussed their ideas. "We determined the materials were mature and the technology was ripe for commercialization," said Barad.

Now the company's VP of business development, Barad left ITU in December 2003 to launch OrganicID with Dimmler (president) and Dodabalapur (chief scientist), securing a funding round from his former employer in the process. The 10-employee company's headquarters and design lab is in Colorado Springs, and it also has an Austin office.

IN A NUTSHELL

"RFID's been around for quite some time," said Barad. "It's being used in security applications, toll-booth applications, key cards." But the market will boom once retailers like Wal-Mart implement it to streamline their supply chain. "Being able to track items in the supply chain, pallets and cases, is certainly useful for creating more efficiency," explained Barad. "Wal-Mart has taken notice of this, and put a mandate on its top 100 suppliers to start using RFID technology to track pallets."

An RFID network with tags on every last product in a supermarket would revolutionize the checkout line with item-level tracking, Barad said. RFID also provides a great upside as a theft deterrent.

The hitch: Silicone RFID tags cost between 25 cents and 50 cents a pop, a price Barad termed "a burden" on manufacturers. "To make a business case, the price of the tag is becoming a barrier to creating an RFID network to manage the supply chain," he explained. "Twenty-five cents is just not going to cut it in the long run.

"You're starting to be able to bring down the cost ... but you're still never going to get down to price points that are cheap enough to allow for item-level tracking," he...