Cambrios Technologies is announcing today that it has hired John LeMoncheck as its new chief executive and raised $5 million in a fourth round of funding from strategic investor Samsung Venture Investment.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based company uses nanotechnology to create a thin transparent film that can conduct electricity. The film turns out to be ideal for adding touchscreen capability to any kind of display, from a smartphone to a big flat-panel TV. It has the dual benefit of being able to conduct well and be transparent at the same time.

LeMoncheck (pictured) said in an interview that his jobs is to help the company develop the sales and marketing chops to sell its solution across a variety of industries.

Michael Knapp, founding president and CEO of Cambrios, will become chairman. The goal of both investment and the new CEO is to accelerate product introductions and commercial growth in the consumer electronics markets. LeMoncheck was previously CEO of SiBEAM, a pioneer in 60-gigahertz wireless networking chips. He sold that company to Silicon Image last year for $25 million. That wasn’t the highest price, but it was the right destination company for the technology and it underscored how tough it is to get new semiconductor companies off the ground, LeMoncheck said.

By contrast, LeMoncheck believes that Cambrios has a unique opportunity to capitalize on its transparent conductor technology in touch, display, solar, and lighting markets.

The technology has interesting roots. It was born from a collaboration of Angela Belcher, a chemistry researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Evelyn Hu of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Belcher saw how abalone and other sea creatures used proteins to build orderly, inorganic films based on calcium and silicon. She found proteins that would do the same with inorganic materials that had industrial applications. They found materials that would self-assemble themselves into thin layers of film.

In 2002, Hu and Belcher created Cambrios and got their first round of funding, $1.8 million, in 2003. They recruited Knapp and raised a second round of $12 million in 2005. The investors included In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“John’s successful track record of collaborating with customers and developing essential industry-wide partnerships makes him the ideal candidate to lead and help cultivate new relationships for Cambrios,” said Leighton Read, current board member and a partner at Alloy Ventures, an investor in Cambrios.

The Samsung investment will help the company launch the ClearOhm materials, which include a silver-like material that can be sprayed like an ink onto a clear film, creating a web of microscopic wires on the film that can be used to conduct electricity and thereby form the basis for a touchscreen. The coating of ClearOhm works a lot better than the existing solution of indium tin oxide, Lemoncheck said. It results in a much more transparent display that is good at conducting electricity; normally, there’s a trade-off between conductivity and transparency.

Dong Su Kim, investmet director at Samsung Ventures America, said that Cambrios leads the market with the development of this kind of material using nanotechnology.

“We started out with a film, but we did that to seed the market,” LeMoncheck said. “Now we are increasingly selling the ink for that film.”

The ink business is a lot less capital-intensive than the film business, he said.

The first device to use the new displays were a smartphone from China’s Huawei Technologies last year. That device proved the technology and sold in the hundreds of thousands. Synaptics partnered with Cambrios on the technology.The technology can also be used for electro-magnetic shielding for displays, helping them handle touch operations more accurately.

The indium tin oxide market was about $2.5 billion last year, according to LeMoncheck. Cambrios has 43 employees. The film is sold by the square meter and the ink is sold by the bucket, LeMoncheck said.

Argonne biophysicist John Bahns said in a press release that the research could be used to build cathodes with large surface areas, which could then be turned into high-energy batteries. His colleague Liaohai Chen said the technology could also be  used to create miniscule imaging probes in biological systems, which would be useful for studying bioenergy applications.

Researchers used a low-powered laser, similar in intensity to the ones used for slideshow presentations, to guide gold and carbon particles into a continuous filament. The technique is known as “optically directed assembly” or ODA, but the scientists casually refer to the new process as a “magic wand” because of the way the particles follow the laser.

Apparently, the discovery was made by accident. The researchers were studying carbon particles in soil and added gold particles to boost the laser signals. They found that carbon and gold particle chains would form wherever they moved the laser.

[Image courtesy Argonne National Laboratory]

Wholesale power company NRG Energy will buy renewable energy provider Green Mountain Energy in a $350 million cash deal. Green Mountain provides renewable energy to markets such as Texas and Oregon. The acquisition will boost NRG’s green energy holdings, with Green Mountain continuing to act as its own business. The deal should close in November.

Applied Nanotech has received $1.6 million from the Department of Energy to create a pilot production facility for its proprietary inks, which are used to make thin silicon solar cells. The company acknowledges there’s plenty of competition in the metallic inks and metallic conductors business – DuPont and Ferro among them – but says their competition could also become their customers or licensees. Applied Nanotech’s technology allows for non-contact printing, which in turn could allow “the next generation of thin-silicon cells” be mass-produced. The plant is expected to be up and running within three to four months.

Portland General Electric is in talks to buy a 500-megawatt wind project in north Oregon. The company has exclusive rights until year-end to purchase the project, which is planned for development by RES Americas. The wind farm could span 68,000 acres and would begin construction as early as 2013. PG&E, incidentally, contracts with Green Mountain Energy for renewable energy.

The Waltons — heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — have sold 280,000 shares of First Solar at $140 to $142 per share, reports The Street. The transaction happened last night and follows a move earlier this week in which the family sold 30,000 shares of the solar company. As the article notes, the move could influence solar investors who have grown reluctant to invest further in the solar industry, though the Waltons’ sale could simply be a divestiture, or “normal trading course of action,” due to the family’s large stake in First Solar.

• Gelesis draws in $16M for obesity treatments (release)
• Tempo Pharma raises $8B for nanoparticle drugs (release)
• Calistoga Pharma receives additional $5M for cancer and inflammation drugs (release)
• Montreux Equity Partners closes $250M life-sciences fund (release)
• MTS Health Partners names Andrew Weisenfeld, Mark Epstein managing directors (release)
• T2 Biosystems names John McDonough as CEO (release)

Gelesis draws in $16M for obesity treatments — Gelesis, a stealthy Boston company working on “novel” obesity treatments, raised $16 million in a first funding round. Investors included Orbimed Advisors and existing investors.

According to this Boston Globe story, Gelesis is developing a capsule containing an undefined “substance” that would expand in the stomach once swallowed, creating a temporary sense of fullness. The substance, whatever it is, would later pass out of the body.

Tempo Pharma raises $8B for nanoparticle drugs — Cambridge, Mass.-based Tempo Pharmaceuticals, a biotech developing “nanoparticle” formulations for new and existing drugs, raised $8 million in a second funding round. Investors included Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock, Lux Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Alexandria Real Estate Equities and William Rastetter, the former chairman of Biogen Idec.

The funding is Tempo’s second in just seven months; last May, it raised $12.1 million in a first round. (See our coverage here.) Tempo says the round reflects a “significantly increased valuation.”

Like other nanoparticle-drug companies, Tempo aims to improve the safety and efficacy of existing drugs — here by packaging them together in tiny capsules that release two drugs sequentially, presumably maximizing their effectiveness while minimizing side effects. Other nanoparticle-based companies we’ve covered recently include Carigent Therapeutics (here) and Bind Biosciences (here).

Calistoga Pharma receives additional $5M for cancer and inflammation drugs — Seattle’s Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, a biotech focused on new cancer and inflammation drugs, raised an additional $5.2 million in its first funding round. That brings the total round to $26.2 million.

Current investors provided the new funds. Previous investors in the round included Frazier Healthcare Ventures, Alta Partners, Three Arch Partners, Amgen Ventures and Eli Lilly, according to this Fierce Biotech story.

Calistoga, which was spun out of Icos after its acquisition by Lilly, is developing drugs against a class of biochemical-signaling molecules known as phosphoinositide-3 kinase. It currently has two drug candidates in preclinical studies.

Montreux Equity Partners closes $250M life-sciences fund — The Menlo Park, Calif.-based VC firm Montreux Equity Partners closed a $250 million life-sciences fund. The firm said the fund exceeded a $200 million target.

Montreux said the fund has already invested in several pharmaceutical and medical-device startups, including Glaukos, Avantis Medical, Tobira Therapeutics and Sequel Pharmaceuticals. We previously noted their fundraising efforts here.

NanoBioDesign is focused on a class of liver enzymes known as cytochrome P450, which play an important role in metabolism. Various forms of these enzymes can greatly impact the effectiveness of drugs, depending on how quickly they break down the drugs and clear them from the bloodstream. The company’s approach immobilizes these enzymes on an electrode that can then measure an electric disturbance if the enzyme is activated, allowing a precise readout of the extent to which different P450 variants react with a drug.

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Venrock and Polaris Venture Partners led the round, joined by Lux Capital and William Rastetter, former chairman of Biogen Idec. The company’s release is here; VentureWire has more here (subscription required).