When Mo AlGermozi and Marciel Gaier manned their booth at the recent Atlantic Venture Forum, they handed all visitors a three-inch piece of black, plastic-like material and challenged them to break it.

It was graphene, a revolutionary new material that the two entrepreneurs are now producing in commercial quantities at their lab at Dalhousie University. They have discovered a new, economical way of producing graphene, and that’s the basis of their company, Graphite Innovation & Technologies Inc.

“We found a way to produce graphene 10 times cheaper than what’s out there,” said AlGermozi, a graduate of Dal who originally hails from Yemen.

The company began earlier this year when the two material engineers needed some graphene for a research project. Graphene is an unusual pattern of carbon atoms aligned in hexagonal hives to produce a light, durable material. It is 200 times stronger than steel and efficiently conducts heat and electricity. It was only identified and isolated in the past decade or so, so the commercial applications of graphene are in their infancy.

It’s also in high demand, so AlGermozi and Gaier experimented to see if they could make their own graphene for their project. They ended up discovering a way to produce high-quality graphene economically, and decided to spin this process into a new company.

Their production process is an environmentally friendly method that will allows mass production of graphene. Once they made the discovery, they set up a rudimentary production facility so that every day they produce about 50-70 grams of the substance. It’s enough to sell to a few customers and bring in some revenue, but the duo has bigger plans.

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They hope to expand production to produce larger amounts of the material — they’re now thinking of a kilogram a day, or more than 14 times their current production. They believe their process will lower the cost of graphene, which in turn could lead to new commercial applications as industry finds it economical to use graphene in everyday products. In fact, they want to develop their own graphene-based products.

“We are doing research and development on three products — a coating to prevent corrosion, a composite material and semi-conductors,” said Gaier, a native of Brazil.

Having launched their company only in the past few months, AlGermozi and Gaier are now working on the financial and structural side of the firm. The learning curve has been steep and they are working on several key variables in planning their business, like how to set up and finance a production facility, and what is the best product to get to the market quickly.

They have revenue from their daily graphene production, and they are participating in Dalhousie’s summer LaunchPad program, which provides participants with $10,000 each in development costs. They are also speaking to various funding organizations about tapping programs.

“It’s all happened so quickly,” said Gaier. “We’re in the exploration process. We’ve learned so, so much in the past two months, and we think that it two or three months we’ll have a decent idea of where we’re going to be going.”