www.thestreet.com/_tscs/tech/kevinkelleher/10254174.html
.... Nanosys may have had a dozen Ph.D.s on staff and more than 400 patents in hand, but its prospectus warned that its first product wouldn't be "commercially available for at least several years, if at all." Beneath the paranoid tone that shades all language concering risk factors, there was a cold reality that violated the simple, harsh rule of thumb that Wall Street is sticking to these days: No products, no revenue. No revenue, no profits. No profits, no IPO.
"It looks like a very risky bet to me," says Tim Harper, CEO of Cientifica, a market research firm focusing on nanotechnology. "Nanosys doesn't seem to be in any different position to where they were before last year's aborted IPO. If they were, then they would have tried again."
It's not entirely fair to say that Nanosys has no revenue whatsoever. Its prospectus last year showed $3 million in revenue and a loss of $9.2 million and 2004 Q1 revenue of $1.2 million and a loss of $4 million. Most of that money came from development contracts from Uncle Sam and others. Since then, Nanosys has announced more than $10 million in myriad federal contracts, but no viable products to market. Nanosys is working on a lot of potential applications that could find demand once they reach the market: fuel cells for laptops, memory for MP3 players, low-cost solar cells, etc. One of the company's founders, Larry Bock, has a stellar track record of investing in or founding biotech startups such as Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Athena Neurosciences and Neurocrine Biosciences.....What Nanosys' latest round of funding, with a broader array of private funds involved, suggests is that nanotech investment appears to be slowly attracting the interest of private investors.