When Stephen Farias earned his PhD in materials science and engineering in 2014, following a brief postdoc stint at Hopkins, he was eager to hit the “real world.”
“I enjoyed my time in an academic environment but became an engineer because I wanted to build stuff, not because I wanted to write papers,” Farias said. “I’m motivated by getting my hands on something that is going to be a product in the world.”
Today, that thing that he built is Materic, a Baltimore-based company that provides customized materials for industry and has been making news on the local scene. Last summer, it won a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to create a new kind of 3D-printed packaging for electronics, and announced it was adding a 28,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in the city’s Pigtown community. In September, Baltimore Business Journal named Farias, Materic’s founder and chief science officer, to its 2022 “Top 40 Under 40” list representing “the very best of the next generation of up-and-coming leaders in the region’s business scene.”
When he graduated in 2014 though, Farias couldn’t have anticipated the road to Materic’s current “up-and-coming” status.
Farias went straight from his postdoc to forming his first company through Johns Hopkins Technology Venture’s Fast Forward U program. “We were one of the first four companies when FastForward was founded so it was kind of cool to see it grow to how large it has grown,” said Farias. This company was called Nanodirect and was a team of two—co-founded the late Robert C. Cammarata, a professor of materials science and engineering and Farias’s former advisor.
The company got off the ground in 2015 and just as it landed its first big customer a few months later, the team of two became a team of one when Cammarata died in January 2016.
“Suddenly our nanoparticle company with a team of two people became one person who didn’t really know what he was doing and needed a lot of support, both business-wise and mentally and personally so I didn’t have to shoulder all of this at one time. We were close: He was my advisor in grad school, and we founded a company together and I wanted to grieve him but also keep our company alive,” Farias said.
Farias turned to his network at Johns Hopkins for help. JHTV connected him with Kelli Booth and Ken Malone who were at that moment setting up Early Charm Ventures, LLC. Early Charm’s business model specializes in converting promising scientific ideas into businesses. “They had technologies in the materials space that they needed technical expertise on, and I needed business expertise and support. So, we partnered and started doing much better as a team,” Farias explained.
Eventually, Early Charm rolled up its advanced materials companies into one entity, Materic, to include Nanodirect, Farias and Cammarata’s company.
Materic doesn’t invest in the traditional venture capital sense, rarely putting cash into a company but, instead, investing by providing the infrastructure crucial to a company’s success.
“We invest with personnel, people, and expertise that Materic brings to that product,” said Farias. “We have 20 people on staff across different disciplines from materials science to biology, physics, chemical engineering, and so on. Having all of this people-structure creates revenue for our clients while allowing them to keep their day jobs and having the support system that lets scientists be scientists.”
Indeed, that type of infrastructure is a valuable resource. Farias recalls the beginning of his own journey: not knowing where to start, trying to figure out how to do taxes for a sales license or how payroll worked, and suffering from every inefficiency and stumbling point in his path. His goal is to minimize that for his customers. “We’re going to get our client’s product in front of a customer as soon as a customer is able to hold it and make the process as smooth as possible.”
Since then, that company of two now comprises 50 employees and its leadership plans to keep growing in the city they love.
“Growing this company in Baltimore and bringing these materials and innovation to the real world in this city is really rewarding and something we care about a lot. We are hoping to continue to create meaningful economic development and more jobs for all levels of education in Baltimore,” said Farias, who also wants to emphasize commercialization of technologies that push for energy independence and carbon neutral or carbon negative processes.
Farias has not been able to stay very far away from Hopkins, returning to teach in the Engineering for Professionals program in the department of materials science and engineering as well as an undergraduate course in chemical and biomolecular engineering when he’s not focusing on the future of his company, a future that will be one to follow.
“We’ve got a lot of big dreams and big plans,” he said.