Apple, Amazon … Sigma: Small Santa Fe software firm joins NASDAQ
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Courtesy - Sigma executives at the NASDAQ market exchange to ring the opening bell on March 2
By Bruce Krasnow
The New Mexican | Updated 5 hours ago
Mark J. Cola will never be as well known as tech executives Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook.
But as president and chief executive of a small company in Santa Fe, Cola’s Sigma Labs can now share something with Amazon and Apple — the stock of his company is now part of the same New York-based exchange as the biggest, most-profitable companies in the world.
For Sigma, a software and 3-D manufacturing firm with 12 employees housed at the Santa Fe Business Incubator off Airport Road, the transformation into a higher-profile firm with a global footprint has taken just six years.
Since 2010, Sigma had been a small public company with a few hundred shareholders trading on an over-the-counter platform. Moving its shares to the NASDAQ gives it a whole new range of exposure that can now be considered by institutional investors, mutual funds that have policies that restrict its equity holdings to large exchanges such as NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. Such exchanges offer instant pricing and more liquidity to buy and sell company shares with more transparency.
“It opens Sigma to much broader exposure,” Cola said.
The only other company based in New Mexico with stock listed on a major exchange is PNM Resources, the electric utility with $1.4 billion in revenue that provides services to some 510,000 customers in Texas and New Mexico.
Before the listing, Sigma also raised $5.8 million in new money that will be used for product expansion.
He hopes that exposure and new capital will bring more affirmation with what Sigma is able to do with its specialized software that offers continuous feedback of 3-D manufacturing, ensuring a higher level of design with fewer faults, Cola said.
Citing industry data in its annual report, filed March 31, Sigma said the sale of additive manufacturing products and services is expected to grow from $8.8 billion worldwide in 2017 to $26.5 billion in 2021.
Sigma already has agreements in countries known for precision manufacturing, such as the Netherlands and Germany, but he see his greatest growth potential in the United States. Cola sees Sigma well positioned to take advantage of recent political trends from a new administration in Washington, D.C., that seeks to boost spending in defense and offer more incentives to grow manufacturing jobs in the United States.
But firms competing for those contracts will have to deliver with less cost and better efficiency.
The word is slowly getting out.
Since the end of 2016, Sigma announced agreement with Aerojet Rocketdyne, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney as well as two smaller firms — Jaguar of Albuquerque, which specializes in advanced manufacturing for components in aerospace and defense, and Morf3D, a California company that specializes in additive engineering and manufacturing with metals that works on products in the aircraft, space, medical and automotive industries.
Cola added Sigma has refocused on three core missions.
First, Sigma offers proprietary software that manages 3-D manufacturing. It can be tooled to operate in new machines that are now being sold around the world. The code embedded in the software feeds data from the manufacturing into a monitoring loop.
In describing the process for an article in 2015, Cola said, “You can make it and inspect it at the same time. We have sensors in place monitoring the process on a layer-by-layer basis. It’s those algorithms that bring precision to parts that have to be perfect.”
Second, Sigma is offering to retrofit existing machines with its sensors and software, and believes a lot of legacy machinery can be reformulated for better 3-D work with its software and support services.
Finally, the company manufactures its own products on-site in Santa Fe by using raw metal materials such as nickel, alloy, cobalt, titanium and laser 3-D manufacturing to weld and mold parts such as those needed for airplanes, automobiles or machines.
Increasingly, Sigma is working directly with engineers from their customers to refine and build better parts, such as a new kind of engine mount for a satellite. It can also isolate a part to determine areas of stress and offer alternative designs.
The concept is called topology optimization and can result in newly designed parts that are both lighter and stronger. “The light-weighting is real important for any type of aerospace or defense product,” Cola said.
Both Cola and his founding partner, Vivek Dave, have a background in metallurgy, industrial welding, math and engineering with the national labs as well as research facilities.
Despite the company’s growth, Cola does not see moving from New Mexico. He said the state offers “tremendous advantages” over California and other places in terms of cost of living and operating expenses such as office space.
“I still think New Mexico is a great place to do manufacturing,” he said.
Sigma is considered a startup company and held its first public earnings call after the NASDAQ listing last week. It showed a continuing operating loss.
Revenue for the year that ended Dec. 31 was approximately $1 million versus $1.2 million for 2015. The company reported a higher net loss for the year of approximately $2.2 million, or 35 cents a share.
“We have incurred losses in every reporting period since we commenced business operations in 2010 and expect to continue to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future,” the company states in its required filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Contact Bruce Krasnow at brucek@sfnewmexican.com.
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