In 2012 at drupa, I was introduced to IMPIKA (Imprinted with Picoliters for Thousands of Applications), a French company that had been fully investigating and exploiting the manufacturing and marketing of printing and material jetting solutions since 1990 prior to the founding of IMPIKA in 2003. As I had been looking at the potential of production inkjet since the mid 1980s, this unique company caught my attention. So, it was not a surprise when they were subsequently acquired by Xerox in 2013 to help fast track Xerox into the production inkjet press race which was already heating up. The fruits of that acquisition started to become evident in 2015 with the introduction of the Rialto, and subsequently during drupa 2016 with the introduction of the Trivor and Brenva. It peaked with the introduction of the Baltoro and High Fusion Ink which allowed printing on offset coated paper without any pretreatment in 2019.

After the Icahn-led “reorganization” of Xerox in 2018, in addition to the dissolution of an almost 60-year FujiXerox (FX) partnership, Xerox walked away from the IMPIKA acquisition in 2019. As a result, they also walked away from an impressive inkjet development team led by Paul Morgavi, the founder of IMPIKA. Considering the 30-year history and high level of expertise of the team, it wasn’t long before the word got out, interest rose, and NIXKA was founded.

The name tells the story; New Inkjet targeting (X) thousands (K) of Applications. Led by Paul Morgavi, the founding team includes eight experienced professionals along with “currently” about 25 additional inkjet experts from the former organization that have hit the ground running. As of today, they already have a number of ongoing projects in textile, flexible packaging, and very-high-resolution printing, with a few more projects in the pipeline and lots of additional interest as the word has been getting out.