Key takeaways ▼
Eric Tsai is Co-Founder and CEO of Mivium, Inc., a US-based materials technology company in Fremont, California developing submicron gallium nitride powder and related wide bandgap materials. He co-founded Mivium in 2022 after a career building and scaling consumer businesses, most recently as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Joybird, acquired by La-Z-Boy in 2018. He leads Mivium’s strategy, partnerships and commercial development.
Tell us about your company?
Mivium makes the starting material for GaN. Most of the GaN conversation is about devices, fabs and who wins in power and RF. We work one step upstream. Our team in Fremont, California produces phase-pure, submicron gallium nitride powder on a proprietary and protected platform, and we just published independently characterized results. We are US-based and have raised more than $10.5 million. The same platform extends to other wide bandgap materials, including gallium oxide and boron nitride.
Why powder, and why now?
Every GaN wafer, film and device starts from a source material, and that part of the chain gets very little attention. Demand from AI power, EVs and RF is pulling hard on everything upstream. A controlled, repeatable GaN feedstock with real data behind it is useful to teams working on crystal growth, substrates and thin films. Powder is the product we can talk about today. Everything downstream is R&D.
What problems are you solving?
Particle size, phase purity and consistency, at a scale that matters. Our announced material is phase-pure hexagonal wurtzite GaN in a 300 to 500 nanometer range, with uniform distribution and faceted morphology. Independent third-party characterization using SEM, EDS, XRD, XPS, GDMS and ICP-MS confirms it. Our CTO, Chandra Deshpandey, an emeritus professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA, frames it this way. Submicron size alone is not the point. Getting there with phase purity and uniformity that meet semiconductor-grade requirements is. The process is designed for industrial volumes.
What application areas are your strongest?
Crystal growth, substrate development and thin-film work, where a team wants a well-characterized GaN source material to evaluate in its own process. We are not a wafer or device company, and we do not assume our powder drops into every epitaxy flow. Fit is application-specific. The fastest way to find out is to put material and data in front of the people who run those processes.
What keeps the teams you talk to up at night?
Repeatability and supply. A datasheet is not enough in materials work. Teams want to know how the material behaves batch to batch and whether they can count on it when they scale. They also want data from labs they trust, not just from the vendor. That is why we led with independent characterization before we said much publicly.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The useful comparison is not with device makers. It is with whatever source material a team uses today, measured in their own workflow. What we bring is specific. Phase-pure wurtzite GaN, submicron and uniform, with third-party data available, and a process built for volume. The platform also reaches beyond GaN, which matters to teams already thinking about gallium oxide and boron nitride.
What new technology are you working on?
Thin films. We have completed initial GaN deposition work in-house, derived from the powder platform. It is early-stage R&D and we describe it that way. It extends the roadmap from feedstock toward potential semiconductor and photonics applications, and it gives us a tight loop between what the powder is and how it behaves in a film.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
It starts with a technical question. What material do you need, at what scale, and how will you evaluate it. Qualified crystal-growth, epitaxy and materials teams can request characterization data and discuss evaluation samples at mivium.com/gan-powder or partners@mivium.com. We are a small team, so you talk directly to the people who make the material.
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