‘We’re on a good path now’: 10 years on, UbiQD emerges as a key player in New Mexico’s tech scene

LOS ALAMOS — After leaving his position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014, Hunter McDaniel was already working to license his new venture, Ubiquitous Quantum Dots.

“From that point on, I wasn’t an employee over there. I didn’t have health insurance or any of that stuff, or a lab space,” McDaniel, CEO and founder of UbiQD, said. “I had to figure out a new lab, a new office and (how to) set up a business. So, it took a while to get the ball rolling.”

A decade later, the company turning nanoscale, three-dimensional structures, known as quantum dots, into solar-harvesting systems, has raised over $36 million and made a footprint in New Mexico’s tech scene.

And McDaniel has no intention of slowing down.

In November, UbiQD announced its $6 million debt financing agreement with Silicon Valley Bank, looking to support the company’s continued growth. That, along with $20 million in investments from a funding round, required the team to hire Chief Financial Officer Tony Beams.

“You need to be pretty buttoned up as far as your accounting, practices, finances,” McDaniel said. “You need to have the right sort of management structure in place for accountability and legal compliance.”

And, in July, UbiQD entered a multi-year agreement with First Solar Inc., a thin-film bifacial photovoltaic solar manufacturer, to implement its quantum-dot technology into its panels. This partnership followed a separate joint development agreement between the companies in 2023, aimed at mass supplying UbiQD products.

Not long after McDaniel began the company in late 2014, he said they quickly outgrew their original space in a research facility just outside of LANL.

“That worked until we got to about three employees, and they said, ‘You’re kind of outgrowing us, you’re going to have to pay a lot more,’” McDaniel recalled.

This would lead the UbiQD team to relocate to its current Los Alamos building in 2016, where it now hosts upward of 40 employees.

Originally only leasing the downstairs area, McDaniel said the company’s rapid growth and significant changes they wanted to make to the space pushed the then-landlord to propose that UbiQD buy the building. Reaching a purchase deal, with help from the county and state, he said the facility has been UbiQD’s official headquarters since 2017.

UbiQD’s headquarters houses its research and development capabilities and has recently “ramped up” its pilot production scale as well, McDaniel said. The company is also eyeing an additional nearby site, he added, to build its first manufacturing facility.

UbiQD’s main commercial product, under the name UbiGro, aims to transform the agriculture industry with its luminescent QD-laminated greenhouse glass. According to a recent study, the technology has been shown to yield significantly enhanced plant growth, nutrient uptake and energy efficiency within a controlled environment without the need for electricity or mechanical input.

The study, which was conducted by the University of California, Davis, also demonstrated that the technology had improved lettuce yield gains by 38%, increased key tissue nutrients like calcium, magnesium and potassium, and saw no shading effects.

UbiQD also owns the trademark to WENDOW, a transparent solar technology that enables the extraction of electricity from “seemingly ordinary windows.” While the product is not yet commercial, McDaniel said the company has completed multiple installations and is working on projects to develop it further.

Candidly, McDaniel said he’s more proud of the UbiQD team’s accomplishments than his own. Reflecting on a decade of growth, surrounded by an office of memorabilia from throughout the years, he almost feels that the company was “in the right place at the right time.”

“You can’t really time the business cycle. Since I started the company, we’ve had at least one recession, we had COVID, there’s been all sorts of ups and downs economically,” McDaniel said. “Companies can easily get wiped out by those sorts of things … I’m grateful for the luck, and I’m proud of how hard the team has worked. We’ve accomplished a lot with limited resources, and we’re on a good path now.”