Magnalytix Achieves Breakthrough With Rose-Hulman Ventures’ Support

“We went from a crazy idea that people told us would never work—to proof that it works,” says Bobby Glidwell, systems architect for Magnalytix, a Tennessee-based specialist in electronics manufacturing and reliability. Helping make that happen was Rose-Hulman Ventures.

A partner company had been a Rose-Hulman Ventures client, Glidwell recalls. The team at Magnalytix realized they had a number of projects that could potentially be a good fit for Rose-Hulman Ventures. “We have software developers and hardware engineers on staff, but nobody who does specific board design. It was great to be able to reach out for help with the engineering design piece.”

In one situation, Magnalytix was working on some experimental R&D hardware and wanted to test specific circuitry that was difficult to breadboard. “We needed to build a board so that we could test it fully and make sure it was going to work within the tolerances we set,” Glidwell says. “The Rose-Hulman Ventures team was able to put it together for us.”

Working with Rose-Hulman Ventures provides a breadth of expertise that isn’t always easy for some companies to staff. In the case of the Magnalytix project, “we needed four or five disciplines to run this around. What was amazing about Rose Hulman Ventures was simply how combined all that was.”

Wrapping a diversity of work into one scope, budget and quote simplifies the process significantly, he says. “That is usually the hardest part when it comes to R&D.” The process was also much faster than it might have been, with significant time savings working from R&D development toward production.

Glidwell was pleased with the logistics of working with the Rose-Hulman Ventures team. “Communication was fantastic, and that was a big part of what I was worried about,” he says. “Typically, when I’ve dealt with outside contracting firms on hardware development, there are a lot of lulls.”

With Rose-Hulman Ventures, he says, “we had a scheduled standing weekly meeting and they did a fantastic job of summarizing everything they worked on, which also helped us keep track of budget numbers. That made my job as systems architect really easy—they were spoiling me by doing my work for me.”