Z. Parlak
Qatch Technologies, LLC,
United States
Keywords: quartz, acoustics, viscosity, entrepreneurship, innovation
Summary:
The idea behind QATCH started as an experiment: if we place solid microfluidics on quartz in different orientations, can we merge flow and acoustics into one sensing platform. At first it was academic curiosity, an attempt to prove the physics. What followed was less a straight line than a decade-long lesson in persistence. The proof-of-concept was easy compared to what came next: finding who truly needed it, surviving funding droughts, developing a scalable manufacturing process, and learning how to turn a working chip into something customers could trust. Founded in 2016 after a spark of realization that this small device could change how biologics are developed, QATCH evolved through countless pivots and conversations with scientists who were struggling to test viscosity early, when only milligrams of material exist. Despite having many instruments and techniques addressing it, viscosity had become a bottleneck in drug discovery and development due to small material availability early on and needed accelerated testing due to time pressure at later steps. To solve these and make sure better drugs can be developed faster had become QATCH's mission. Today, nanovisQ measures full-shear-range viscosity using just 4 µL of sample rapidly, giving scientists manufacturability and injectability insight at the very beginning of drug discovery. What started as a single experiment has grown into a product line of different instruments and an AI extension that predicts viscosity from limited data. Curiosity was the spark that built the foundation, but our persistence made it real.