Company

# Built by founders. Validated by specialists.

Nanoshape Holdings, Inc. is four co-founders in Columbus, Ohio, building Proteus with advisors who check the work in defense, engineering and materials.

Co-founders

## Four co-founders, one body of work.

### Chris Vogt

Co-Founder

Government channel and defense relationships.

Two-time founder.

### Nick Saris

Co-Founder

Capital, the STTR and NSF pipeline, and commercialization.

Two-time founder.

### Anthony Bacopoulos

Co-Founder

Control software and the CAD-to-shape pipeline.

Founder with a background in programming and AI.

### Abdulai Gassama

Co-Founder

Materials physics, mechanism design, and experimental validation.

Brown Physics PhD student. Experimental condensed matter and materials research.

Advisors

## Specialists who check the work.

### Dennis Bartow

Defense Advisor

Defense.

Former Director, DoD Office of Small Business Programs.

### Sam Smith

Engineering Advisor

Engineering.

Mechanical engineer. CTO of Origami Space. Techstars alum with SBIR experience.

### Dr. Sisira Gamage

MEMS and Materials Advisor

MEMS and materials.

Microelectromechanical-systems scientist. Former MEMS engineer at GE. PhD, University of Cincinnati.

Columbus

## Columbus, Ohio.

Nanoshape is based in Columbus, in a region that designs, machines and inspects physical parts for a living. It is a good place to build something that has to earn its place on a shop floor.

Discipline

## What Nanoshape is not claiming.

A new kind of material invites big claims. We would rather be specific. These are the lines we hold, on this site and in every conversation.

**No measured results yet:** Every performance statement on this site is a design target or an architecture description, and is labelled where it appears.

**No hardware photographs:** Every image is a concept render or geometry generated by the Shape Compiler visualisation.

**Inverse design is open:** Finding the best state map for a target shape at large cell counts is unsolved. It is one of the things the program is built to answer.

**Later tiers are research:** R2 and R3 are where the architecture leads. They are not solved and not funded.

**Prior art is not ours:** Shape displays, compliant mechanisms and multistable materials came before us. We cite them below.

**Partners are named when they are engaged:** We do not list organisations we are only talking to.

Prior art

## The work we build on.

1. Actuated pin arrays that render shape from software were demonstrated as shape displays.  
   Follmer, Leithinger, Olwal, Hogge, Ishii. “inFORM: Dynamic Physical Affordances and Constraints through Shape and Object Actuation.” UIST 2013.
2. Compliant and bistable mechanisms, which move through elastic deformation rather than joints, are an established field.  
   Howell, L. L. Compliant Mechanisms. Wiley, 2001.
3. Architected materials built from multistable unit cells can be reconfigured between stable shapes.  
   Haghpanah, Salari-Sharif, Pourrajab, Hopkins, Valdevit. “Multistable Shape-Reconfigurable Architected Materials.” Advanced Materials 28 (2016).
4. Bistable architected materials can trap elastic strain energy between stable states.  
   Shan, Kang, Raney, Wang, Fang, Candido, Lewis, Bertoldi. “Multistable Architected Materials for Trapping Elastic Strain Energy.” Advanced Materials 27 (2015).
5. Pneumatic pin-array supports and modular fixture kits are sold commercially for board support and inspection today.  
   Commercial product category (electronics assembly board support; CMM modular fixturing).

> **Architecture:** Cited for context. None of this work is Nanoshape’s.

Questions

## Short answers.

### Who are Nanoshape’s co-founders, and where is it based?

Nanoshape’s four co-founders are Chris Vogt, Nick Saris, Anthony Bacopoulos and Abdulai Gassama, and Nanoshape is based in Columbus, Ohio. Chris Vogt owns the government channel and defense relationships, Nick Saris capital and commercialization, Anthony Bacopoulos control software, and Abdulai Gassama materials physics and mechanism design. Advisors Dennis Bartow, Sam Smith and Dr. Sisira Gamage check the work.

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Canonical: https://www.nanoshape.ai/company  
Last updated: 2026-10-06

Figures on this site are design targets or architecture descriptions, not measured results. Inverse design at large cell counts is an open problem. No image on the site is a photograph of hardware. All pages: https://www.nanoshape.ai/llms.txt