Nanostart Asia Pacific invests in chemical company

Nanostart Asia Pacific has acquired a stake in Singapore-based Stella Specialty Chemicals Pte Ltd via Nanostart Singapore Early Stage Venture Fund I. Stella offers a wide range of speciality chemical products for surface treatment of metals and plastics.
The fund has initially acquired around 10% of the shares in Stella. There are plans to increase the stake to around 23% at the beginning of 2013.
Dr Yin Xi Jiang, founder and director of Stella, said: "This investment fund will accelerate the growth of Stella Specialty Chemicals. It is able to help Stella to continuously validate products and innovations to meet the needs of customers.”
Bernd Dautel, director of Nanostart Asia Pacific, said: "For a start-up company, Stella already has an extremely wide product range with new technologies for coating metallic and non-metallic surfaces.”
With years of experience in nanotechnology and green chemistry research, Stella originated from the Advanced Material Technology Centre at Singapore Polytechnic. The company has developed its own procedure for applying self-assembling monolayers (SAM) to metal surfaces.